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A New Dawn: Part 1

Posted on Sat Mar 7th, 2015 @ 8:51pm by Lieutenant Commander Rosaleen O'Donnell & Commander Andrew Matheson

Mission: Bloodpath
Location: USS Bettina

Her senses were assaulted from all directions, from the light that blinded her eyes, to the vivid sensations that attacked her bare skin from head to toe. A moment of panic was all she allowed herself...she then began the process of identifying each assailant and bringing it under control. Slowly the sensations began to work their way to something resembling a normal state. As her vision began to clear, she sat upright on the bed and swung her legs off the side, the sheet that covered her falling to the floor allowing a new onslaught of sensations to cover her momentarily. But she quickly brought this down to a normal level once again.

As she stood in the cool room, her mind tried to start to make sense of both where she was and how she had come to be there. So many images flooded her mind that it was impossible to make sense of them, so for the moment she blocked them out and concentrated on her immediate surroundings. As she looked around the room, she noticed a small office opposite what she assumed was the exit to the bay. The door to the office was open, and she could see a figure on the couch sleeping. She sensed familiarity, so she decided that no danger existed. As she walked to the doorway, the cold air flowed uncomfortably against her bare skin yet again. This time, however, she analyzed the sensation and adjusted for it, warming herself a few degrees to compensate. Entering the room, she looked down at the person asleep on the couch, recognizing him at a glance.

"Andrew...wake up, please." She gently shook him as she spoke.

Andrew's eyes opened slowly, and it took a moment for things to come into focus. The hypo he'd had earlier, coupled with the unsettling dream he had just been woken out of, were really playing hell with his thought processes. He squinted at the figure in front of him who was silhouetted by the light. After a moment, he was able to make out the face. "Rosaleen. Good to see you up and about. We were worried about you."

"What...what happened? We were down by the lake, and then..." She looked around the room frantically. "...and then I was...no, wait. There's more...a path. A clearing. Another lake..."

He sat up. "Calm down. You're safe, and I know it's confusing with everything that's happened." Looking around, he was certain he was being monitored in some way; as such, talking about Rosaleen's abilities was probably not a great idea. He put a hand on her shoulder. At this point he registered her state of attire and quickly moved to offer her his blanket.

The hell with it, the captain can just be annoyed at me. He reached out to Rosaleen mentally. ~If you can hear me, I am willing to share what I think I know about what happened. But a lot of it involves abilities and events that I don't think you, the commodore, or I want to have made public just yet.~

Rosaleen took the blanket, but just held it at her side. While the temperature no longer bothered her, she was not sure about the blanket's material. Her senses were still functioning at a hyper-enhanced state, although she was working on putting her shields into place. Andrew's touch had sent an almost electric current running through her entire body. And as for modesty...it was the very last thing on her mind at the moment.

~I don't understand what you mean. Please elaborate.~

~When we went for the walk by the lake, we were attacked by a sniper. You detected them before I did and knocked me into the lake. Kathleen and I believe that you were trying to slow yourself down into a moment when the sniper fired and put a shot into your chest. Arianna tried to save you, but there was a point where I heard someone say "Farewell". At that point, your vitals flatlined and you were eventually placed into stasis.~

He took a deep breath. Reliving these events with his empathic capabilities impaired was making things a little rough around the edges. He got himself under control and went on. ~The next day, Kathleen got here. After taking care of some issues and talking with the sniper, they were trying to figure out why the stasis equipment kept thinking you were comatose rather than... Anyhow, in the midst of that, someone asked me "Why will you not leave me alone?" I thought it was Kathleen, but then your body disappeared. She figured that you had continued taking your body out of phase while unconscious, and she asked me to help her look for you.~

Another deep breath. The worst part of the memory was over, but it was still difficult going through all of this again. ~I kept trying to maintain telepathic contact with you and Kathleen while Kathleen went out of phase to try and find you. Kathleen started perceiving a pond with butterflies and honeysuckle, you were perceiving a path coming out of a forest, and I was trying to guide the two perceptions together. I think you were in different places of whatever temporal plane your essences were inhabiting, and I just kept trying to nudge you together. An elderly woman asked me what I thought I was doing and told me that I didn't belong in your world. I hung on, but the contact started getting harder to maintain.~

At this point, his subconscious took the opportunity to make it known exactly how hard he had pushed himself since he had so callously ignored it the first time around. He kept on with the story. ~At this point, another pair of consciousnesses made contact with me and tried to convince me to leave because I didn't belong there. You intervened between me and them but didn't seem to recognize me or remember Kathleen. At this point, Kathleen came back to this temporal plane... and probably saved my life since I had stretched so far trying to reach you two. I didn't see the end of what happened between you and the woman at the pond, but suddenly you were back in the stasis chamber and the captain had all she could do to finish putting you back together again. After that, I was out of your head until this conversation started.~ He took a few deep breaths, trying to get his biosigns to calm down before his monitors went off and attracted some rather unwelcome attention. ~As I said, I'll try to help piece things together from there.~

Rosaleen sat in shocked silence for a moment. None of what Andrew was telling her made any sense. "Wait..." She spoke aloud this time as she looked down at her nude body. "...I was shot...and operated on you say. That makes no sense. Look at me." She moved to position herself directly in front of Andrew. "Look at me, Andrew. No marks...no scars...nothing. If I had been shot and underwent surgery, shouldn't there be...something?"

Andrew was in that instant convinced that the universe had a sadistic streak a mile wide with his name embossed all over it. "That question is probably far better addressed to your physician than to me, Rosaleen. I was out cold before your care was finished, so I can't speak to the entirety of that." ~For all I know, your body has a subconscious healing mechanism that shifted you forward in time to accelerate your healing. Any other speculations I have are probably orders of magnitude less likely than that one. But it's definitely part of the reason I'm not broadcasting this more openly at the moment.~

Rosaleen's eyes turned crystal blue, and she suddenly looked like she was a thousand light years away. At the same time, Andrew started to feel a chill..

~I don't understand...what...what is it I am to do?~ The question was broadcast, but the intended recipient was not immediately apparent.

Andrew felt the chill and started to wonder what was going on. ~As far as I know, there's nothing you need to do right now except recover from recent events, Rosaleen. Stay here with us and let the commodore and I try to help sort everything out.~

The air warmed again, and Rosaleen inched forward a bit, wrapping her arms around Andrew's neck. Her eyes glistened in a way he had never seen before. "You came for me...I remember now. You risked everything to bring me home." She unexpectedly leaned down and kissed him briefly. "Thank you for my life. A truer friend could not be asked for."

Completely dumbfounded, Andrew thought he was having another out-of-body experience as Rosaleen kissed him. His brain tried to process this through multiple different experiential filters, ultimately coming up with nothing useful. As he doggedly tried to stay inside his own mind lest his wife charter a shuttle to come here and throttle him, he managed to say "I'm happy I was able to return the favor. I wouldn't have had a life to risk if you hadn't decided to take a bullet for me."

With that, his mind started racing, going through all the possibilities that decision entailed. Unbeknownst to him, his thought processes started to show faint signs of temporal divergence as he traced the possibilities.

It was such an innocent and simple gesture, yet the outcome was both unexpected and unsettling. Rosaleen reached out with one hand and placed it on Andrew's cheek. At the moment of contact, the room that they occupied disappeared, and they were standing in what looked like the ruins of a burned out city. The smell of death and decay was almost overpowering.

"If you were to have passed from this realm at that moment by the lake, this is the future of this planet, and others as well. Your story has much left to tell. The hopes of many lay with you."

She then removed her hand, and the room spun back to normal. She turned and walked to the opposite side of the room, before turning to face him once again. She then sat cross-legged on the floor and clasped her hands together across her abdomen. Her eyes were now like dark pools of fire. "Never doubt again." With that, she closed her eyes and became completely still, her body resembling a statue in appearance, so pale her skin had become.

Andrew's head kept spinning through and after the contact. He had seen places like this during his time working on the treaty with the Cardassians, but he knew that the place he was being shown was none of those places even before Rosaleen spoke.

There were clearly several things going on here that he didn't know, and he was tired of being in the dark about them. Once he could convince the captain to release him from sickbay, or convince the Commodore to pull rank and do it, he was going to burn up some subspace connections and get some answers.

Knowing that getting out of bed would set off more alarms than he really wanted to deal with, he sat himself up and mirrored Rosaleen's pose, albeit clothed. Betazoid heritage or not, he didn't want to give his wife any more reasons to murder him. He took a moment to make sure he was centered before his thoughts wandered to alternate possibilities, again unaware of the temporal readings his brain was firing off.

'......and the Vulcan ambassador has been recalled as well. That makes a total of seven members now.' The voice firmed up slowly as a new reality wove it's way into his mind. He found himself seated in a conference room, surrounded by many of his peers.

"This is escalating too fast to keep up with." The Bolean snorted. "How can the President not see where this course of action is taking us. Decades of work...all crumbling away now." He turned to face Andrew. "Commander, you were there on the front lines. How did things go this far? Where did we go wrong....."

The room faded out to be replaced by another reality...this of a field filled with tents and shelters. There were thousands of people there. Tens of thousands. They looked as if they had just escaped hell. To his left, he heard the sounds of a ship landing...

It was Starfleet alright...Titan Class. But the markings were most definitely not. They were Vulcan. As the ship touched down, people started to swarm towards it. He found himself running towards it as well. Only one thought flowed through his mind.

Food.

Then as suddenly as it had appeared, the reality faded once again to be replaced by the medical bay. Rosaleen was staring at him, her eyes resembling black crystals.

Andres shook his head as if to clear away a fog. "Did you just see a vision of a Vulcan transport ship, or was that my own personal hallucination?" He was aware of being hungry, but the sensation was receding into the background.

Storm clouds churned in her eyes. "You did not see...you were." Was her somewhat cryptic answer. Suddenly she was on the bed with him. She coiled herself around him tightly, taking his head into her hands to hold her gaze. Her body was like a firestorm...her eyes like a black maelstrom.

"There is a darkness that is spreading. This is the moment of definition. What shall be will be decided soon." She then leaned in even closer. Her arms wrapped around his head as she moved her lips to Andrew's right ear. Her breasts crushed into him like a pair of electrically charged orbs, and her breath was hot as it caressed his ear. "She is almost here."

Andrew drew on his inner reserves of self control, trying to keep his heart rate and other related biosigns down at levels that wouldn't call the night staff in. "Who is the she that you're talking about, Rosaleen? There's a lot here I don't understand."

His subconscious reached out, looking for this 'she' and also looking around to make sure this was Rosaleen. This evening was heading straight into the proverbial rabbit hole, and answers would do him a world of good at the moment.

He would not have thought it possible, but it was as if she held him even tighter. "The Phoenix arrives on the breath of dawn. When she summons you, the path will diverge. Only one leads to sanctuary."

"Speaking of breath, Rose, you're a good ways along towards strangling me here." He tried to keep his voice light, but he was feeling lightheaded for (he suspected) a multitude of reasons. Keep breathing, stupid. This is not the hardest thing you've had to do today by a long shot.

Her grip loosened somewhat, but she did not release him. "Only one." Then in a blink, she stood before him, inches away but no longer in physical contact. "You have seen a glimpse of what will be...what may be. You must proceed with logic, and leave all emotion behind, for your feelings will betray you. They will make you fail."

He nodded, looking her in the eyes once some distance had been established. "Logic, not emotion. I'll remember that." Inside his head, emotion had logic in a full suplex at the moment as he tried to pull all of this together into a framework that made any kind of sense. His brain was starting to ache in the same way it had at the end of the rescue operation, which was probably going to get him yelled at in the morning.

"You must not react in any manner, no matter what occurs. If you follow your feeling, you will fail all of us." As she spoke, she errantly moved her right hand to first toy with her hair, then slowly move downward, caressing first her shoulder, then her breast, then her abdomen. She watched as his eyes trailed her hand movement. "That will not suffice. You must concentrate."

"I have to admit, it would be easier to concentrate if I wasn't working towards being scared out of my mind at the moment." He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and worked on trying to find his center again. Come on Andy, you knew things had the potential to get strange when you went out into fringe space. No need to let the pressure get to you...

~Fear is not an option.~ She started to move around the room as she 'spoke', her movements catlike...sensual. "You are stronger than this. I have seen it." She stopped for a moment and looked at him over her shoulder. "You need to get your shit together now. You are out of time." She resumed her saunter around the room. "You must internalize everything that you feel. It is the only option"

"By definition, everything that I feel is internalized since it has to be inside my head for me to feel it. Getting my priorities straight and aligned with the instant situation is a different discussion." His eyes remained closed as he went through his mind, shunting his emotions down to somewhere that they would do less damage.

"She will read you as she speaks. She will analyze and interpret every reaction. Every physical response. You must be as stone." She turned upon him once again. "No matter what occurs, you cannot react."

"Being stoned right now sounds like a decided improvement." He took a couple of deep breaths and focused. Responding to her wasn't helping, no matter how much he wanted to on so many different levels. Be as the stone in the rainstorm. The rain hits and flows away, but the stone remains.

"The rain may flow away, but the deluge can reshape mountains." She made her way to stand in front of him again as she spoke. "Just as a single tear can destroy a planet. And..." She reached out to hold his right hand. "...I'm sorry that our first moments back together must be spent in this way. But you must be prepared. I have seen what will happen if you are not."

His eyes remained closed. "Does her analysis stop at the physical, or do I have to worry about a mental interrogation as well?" He twitched as their hands touched. "And I'll admit this was not how I expected to spend a night in sickbay."

"From what I have seen, she does not have the ability to mentally interrogate you. But don't let that fool you...that last reaction might as well have been a scream in a dark room." She moved forward a bit, bringing the hand she held to her chest, still clasping it. "I make you nervous." Her mannerisms had changed. "Why is that? I'm still the same person you met on the station."

"The way your eyes were flashing earlier, I wasn't completely prepared to swear to that fact." Quit being a coward. "Cards on the table, my emotional control is shot to hell at the moment because I was focusing the entirety of my psyche through my affection for you and my hope that I could get you to come back to us..." Coward.

"To..."

COWARD.

He sighed. "To me. I wasn't letting the universe take you away from me after getting to know you."

Her touch warmed a few degrees. "I don't understand. You risked more than you even know to effect my return. For what reason? Kathleen has reason to...we have a bond since our early childhood. We are...well, you know what we are." She released his hand and moved a few steps away, her back now facing him. "We don't have time for this. My feeling have no place in this equation." As she spoke, a breeze stirred through the room. "I understood the definition of our relationship...I mean, our friendship from the beginning." The breeze stiffened a bit more, and the temperature took a noticeable dip.

He sighed. "At least one of us did. And you told me I had to internalize everything I feel. That means I have to KNOW everything I feel so I can be aware of it and address it. I'm sorry if the timing is inconvenient, but yes, we can address it later if you prefer." He went back to focusing on his psyche, dealing with the flares of emotion that his admission had stirred - and the flares that her apparent rejection had stoked.

The air calmed, and she turned back to face him, keeping her distance. "Andrew, you have a life. A family. I would only be a...complication. But..." she moved back to within inches of Andrew once more, and took his right hand again. She placed it palm down on the upper part of her left breast...the exact spot that the projectile had exited her body. Her skin was once again warm to the touch. "...never doubt what I am willing to sacrifice for you. That should tell you everything you need to know."

"I'm past doubt at this point." True enough, as he was methodically working on shredding his emotional center into individual neurons so that they couldn't fire off and cause him any more inconvenience. Nothing else seemed to be doing the trick.

As he sat with his hand on her chest, once again his surroundings morphed around him. He found himself standing in the doorway of the cockpit of a ship. It appeared to be an Arrow Class transport, with Eliana Masters at the controls. But the uniform she wore...it was all wrong.

"Those Starfleet fighters have disappeared for the moment, but...we took a couple of strong hits back there. I'm afraid the shields can't take much more punishment though. I've contacted home...they are sending us some friends from the Balnar Prime station."

"They won't be back. They know we are too close to our defense network now. Whatever their ship was, it must not be fast enough to press the attack." He did not recognize the co-pilot, who turned to Andrew. "I hope you got what you came for. We won't be coming back this way for a while."

In what possible reality would Masters be needing to shoot at Starfleet fighters from a Starfleet ship? Andrew kicked that idea around for a moment and didn't like what he came up with. Assuming that everything he was being shown stemmed from the same timeline...

"You're trying to tell me that our team's recommendation about Taranok IV membership, which in the largest part will be determined by my efforts here, has the chance to lead to a reality that sunders the Federation?"

Worst. Day. Ever. He reached up and started rubbing his temples with his free hand. This newfound precognition was threatening to become a most royal pain in the ass.

~ That which is in motion cannot be stopped. ~ The Runabout's cockpit faded out to be replaced once again by the Bettina's medical bay. Rosaleen had broken contact again and moved away a few feet.

"Your actions will affect the lives of millions. That is your task...to protect them. To protect all of us." She closed her eyes and was silent for a moment. When she looked at Andrew again, they resembled ice crystals. "This is the gift that has been given unto us. A chance."

To be continued...

-----------------------------

Lt Commander Rosaleen O'Donnell
Commodores Assistant
Starbase 80

Lt Cmdr Andrew Matheson
Chief Diplomatic Officer
Starbase 80

 

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