Deanna Troi had begun tuning out Dr. Ree"s voice the moment he said, "I"m sorry."
He was still talking, but she was only half listening to him now, as she sank into a black pit of grief and fury. Not again, she raged inside. I can"t go through this again. Not now.
Will Riker-her Imzadi, her husband, her friend-stood beside her and gripped her left hand in both of his as she sat on the edge of the biobed. She shut her eyes against the cold light of sickbay while Dr. Ree continued delivering bad news.
"I ran the test several times," he said. "There was no mistake." He bowed his long, reptilian head and looked at the padd in his clawed, scaly hand. "The genetic abnormalities are irreparable. And I fear they will only become worse."
It was so unfair. Burning tears welled in Troi"s eyes, and her throat seized shut on a knot of sorrow and anger. A suffocating tightness in her chest made it hard to breathe.
Will, sensing that she was unable to speak for herself, asked the Pahkwa-thanh physician, "Do you know why it happened? Can you tell us if it"ll happen again?"
"Not yet," said the dinosaur-like doctor. Troi fixed him with a sullen glower. It didn"t seem to faze him. "I need to make a detailed a.n.a.lysis before I can offer a prognosis."
Troi"s empathic senses felt protective indignation pulsing in waves from her Imzadi before he snapped at Dr. Ree, "Why didn"t you do that the last time, five months ago?"
"Because a first miscarriage in a humanoid normally isn"t cause for long-term concern," Ree said. "The likelihood of a miscarriage for a woman who has already had one is the same as for a woman who hasn"t. But a second event greatly increases the risk of future complications." Once again he spoke to Troi instead of to Will. "Betazoid women your age often have successful pregnancies, but your half-human ancestry introduces some hormonal factors that muddy the picture a bit. That"s why I need to run more tests. With your permission."
Numb, torn between a desire to scream and the impulse to retreat to someplace dark and quiet and simply hide for weeks on end, all Troi could muster in response was a tiny nod of her chin. Then she cast her forlorn gaze at the floor, desperate to be done with this hideous day. The doctor finished entering his notes on the padd, looked up, and said, "Unless you have more questions, we should probably get you prepped."
Will turned his body in a way that interposed his shoulder between Troi and the doctor. "Prepped? For what?"
"To remove the fetus," he said.
Troi covered her abdomen with her right arm, and her response was sharp and instantaneous. "Absolutely not."
A rasp rattled behind Ree"s fangs before he said, "Commander, please-I"m recommending this procedure because it"s in your best interest medically."
"I don"t agree," Troi said, sliding forward off the biobed and onto her feet. She inched closer to Will.
Ree sidestepped to block Will and Troi"s path, leaving them cornered between two biobeds. "My dear counselor, forgive me for being blunt, but your fetus will not survive to term. It will die in utero-and unlike your last miscarriage, this one poses a serious risk to your own health, and perhaps your life."
He had made a logical, reasonable argument, but Troi didn"t care. Her child, however flawed, was bound to her by slender threads of breath and blood, depended upon her for everything from food to antibodies. So tiny, so defenseless, her fragile scion was an innocent vessel, one in which she and Will had invested all their hopes and dreams. She couldn"t bring herself to do what Dr. Ree asked, not even to save herself.
She hardened her resolve. "The answer is no, Doctor."
"As the chief medical officer, I could insist," Ree said. To Will, he added, "As I"m sure you well know, Captain."
Ree"s challenge made Will bristle with anger. "My wife said the answer is no, Doctor. I"d advise you to think twice before you try to force the issue." He stretched one arm across Troi"s shoulders and nudged her forward toward Ree, who held his ground. Will glared at him. "We"re leaving now, Doctor."
The hulking Pahkwa-thanh, Troi knew, could easily snap off both their heads with a casual bite of his ma.s.sive jaws. His frustration and irritation were radiant to Troi"s empathic mind, and even more vibrant than her Imzadi"s fearless resolve. She expected Ree, as a predator by nature, to relish confrontation. Instead, he turned away and plodded toward his office, his mood a leaden shadow of resentful disappointment.
Will guided her out of sickbay. In the corridor he took her hand, and they walked together in mournful silence toward their quarters. As always, he wore a brave face and played the part of the stoic, but his heartbreak was as palpable to her as her own. She sensed a deeper unease in him, one that he refused to expressa profound inner conflict mixed with fear. There had been undertones of this in his emotions in sickbay, as well. Probing his thoughts, she realized he had strongly disagreed with her decision to refuse Dr. Ree"s advice, yet he had backed her choice without hesitation.
As his wife, she was grateful that he had supported her wishes over his own. As a mother, she hated him for being willing to sacrifice their child in her name.
It had been several months since their initial attempt at having a child had ended in tragedy. Her first miscarriage had occurred with no warning, just a surge of pain in the night. Until that moment, they had thought that conception alone would be their greatest hurdle.
They had both been subjected to lengthy, invasive fertility treatments to overcome what Dr. Ree had politely described as "genetic incompatibilities" in their DNA. Several failed attempts at conception had strained her relationship with Will to a degree they"d never endured before, and the hormonal changes she had undergone for the fertility enhancements had weakened her psionic defenses, causing her to project her emotions on others in unexpected and sometimes dangerous ways.
Everything had seemed so much easier when they"d thought that the only things their family-to-be had to fear were "out there," far away and unnamed. Now the greatest threat to their dreams lay within themselves-a flaw, some monstrous defect that had rendered them unfit for the roles they most desired.
Their second attempt at conceiving a child had been an act of hope, a refusal to succ.u.mb to despair. Through all of Troi"s nights of bitter tears and black moods, Will had never faltered, never given up hope that they would persevere. "I have faith in you," he"d said one night, months earlier. "Faith in us. I have to believe that we"ll get through this. I have to believe that."
Until tonight, he had.
Something in Will had changed when Dr. Ree had delivered his diagnosis. She had felt it, an icy resignation in his mind. It lasted only a moment, but it had happened: He"d lost hope.
Lost in her thoughts, she didn"t notice that they had been in a turbolift until they stepped out onto the deck where their quarters were located. A few paces into the corridor, she stopped. Will continued for a step until he felt the resistance in her hand, and he turned back, concerned and solicitous. "What"s wrong?"
"I don"t know," she lied. "I"m just feeling a need to walk for a while. Maybe in the holodeck."
He nodded. "All right. Anywhere you want."
As he started back toward the turbolift, she let go of his hand. "I meant...that I"m feeling a need to walk by myself."
His face slackened and paled, and he lowered his chin. "I see," he said in a voice of quiet defeat.
Troi didn"t need empathy to know how deeply she had wounded him. All his body language signaled his withdrawal, and his anguish was overwhelming, too intense for her to tune out. She was desperate to comfort him, but her thoughts were awash in her own toxic brew of dark emotions. Twice in less than half a year, their hope of starting a family had turned to ashes, and she didn"t know why. She couldn"t accept it.
"I"m sorry," she said. "It"s just...I..."
"I understand," he said, and she knew it was true, he did. He was her Imzadi, and their emotional bond, normally a comfort, now was an amplifier of their shared grief. It was too much.
"I"m sorry," she said again. Then she walked away, knowing how badly Will wanted to stop her, and hoping that he wouldn"t. She hated herself for abandoning him, and she both loved him and hated him for letting her go.
She stepped into a turbolift, and the doors closed behind her. "Holodeck One," she said, and the lift hummed as it accelerated away, circuiting the primary hull.
As the turbolift sped her through the ship, she thought of her older sister, Kestra, who had drowned at the age of seven, shortly after Troi had been born. Their mother, Lwaxana, had caused herself severe psychological trauma by repressing all her memories of Kestra for decades, until the submerged grief all but destroyed her from within.
At the time, Troi had felt sympathy for her mother, even though she had been horrified that Lwaxana could erase her own child from her memory. Now, faced with her own, imminent second miscarriage, Troi no longer felt revulsion at the thought of her mother"s self-inflicted amnesia. She felt envy.
Captain William Riker crossed from the turbolift to his ready room in quick strides, making only fleeting eye contact with his first officer, Christine Vale, who had command of the bridge during beta shift. He made a brief nod as she got up from the center seat. "As you were," Riker said, and he kept walking, trying to raise as minor a wake with his pa.s.sage as possible. As soon as the ready room"s door closed behind him, he slowed his pace and moved in heavy, tired steps to his desk.
Circling behind it to his chair felt like too much effort, so he turned and perched himself on its edge. His head drooped with fatigue. For Deanna"s sake he had maintained a facade of placid control, but his emotions felt like a storm battering the empty sh.o.r.es of his psyche. Depression, anger, guilt, and denial followed one another in crushing waves.
Removing himself from Deanna was only an illusion, he knew. The bond he shared with his Imzadi transcended distance and physical barriers. Their emotions were so tangible to each other, so present, that when one of them was in the throes of a powerful experience, both of them felt it. Ever since they had first fallen in love, their bond had been so strong that they sometimes were able to communicate telepathically. Such moments were rare, but they had made him feel so connected to her.
And now she felt so distant.
His door chime sounded. He pushed himself up from the desk to a standing posture, turned, and tugged the front of his uniform smooth before he said, "Come in."
The portal slid aside, briefly admitting the ambient sounds of the bridge. Christine Vale stepped inside his ready room and stopped just outside the range of the door"s sensor. It shut behind her. Her gaze was level and concerned. "Sir."
"Chris," he said with a forced nonchalance, and he circled behind his desk. "What can I do for you?"
She flashed a weary smile. "I was gonna ask you the same thing." Turning a bit more serious, she asked, "Are you all right? You haven"t seemed like yourself for a while now."
He pulled out his chair. "Define "a while.""
All traces of jocularity left her tone. "A few months, at least," she said. "Don"t get me wrong, you mask it well. But something"s changed. You just seem...disengaged."
Riker sat down with a tired sigh. "How so?"
"Can we drop the ranks and speak freely, sir?"
Her accusatory tone caught Riker off guard. "Of course," he said. "Always, you know that."
"Will," she said, "what"s wrong?"
Instinct impelled him to denial. "Nothing. I"m fine."
"No, Will, you"re not." She stepped to his desk and sat down across from him. The concern in her voice grew more p.r.o.nounced as she continued, "You and I served through some rough times on the Enterprise, and I"ve been your XO for almost a year. And I have never seen you act like this. Please talk to me. What"s going on?"
He reclined his chair and pulled his hand over his face. It was a reflexive action; he thought he"d done it to ma.s.sage the fatigue from his head and neck. Only as he prolonged the gesture did he admit to himself that it was a delaying tactic, a way to avoid eye contact and postpone his reply. He hated feeling so exposed, so easily read. Denial was no longer an option, but he still found himself reluctant to confide in her. Finally, he lowered his hand and said, "It"s complicated."
"Simplify it," Vale replied.
A heavy breath did nothing to relax him. "I could invoke rank and tell you to leave this alone."
Vale nodded. "Is that what you want to do?"
"What, are you a counselor, now?" He swiveled his chair away from her, showing her his profile. "Sometimes, captains have to keep barriers between themselves and their crews."
"And that"s fine, up to a point," Vale said. "But right now it seems like your ability to do your job is being impaired by whatever it is you"re going through. And seeing as it"s my job to make sure this ship and its crew are kept in a state of full readiness, that makes your problem my problem."
Riker frowned. "I"m still not sure I-"
"Especially since it involves your wife, who"s also part of the command staff," Vale added.
He swiveled back to face her, his temper aroused. "How did you know that?"
Vale hesitated before answering, and then she spoke with tact. "Will, I know that you and Deanna had problems conceiving a child. She told me all about it on Orisha. The treatments, the strain it put on the two of you. I noticed you having the same kind of problems then that I"m seeing now. But for a while, the two of you seemed happy, so I"m wondering what"s happened."
Denying the obvious was tiring, and he felt his guard slipping; he wondered if it might be a relief to let it down entirely. "You understand," he said, "that what we talk about stays in here. You don"t discuss it with anyone-not the crew, not the counselors.... Especially not the counselors."
"Of course," Vale said.
Riker took another deep breath and let it go slowly as he composed his thoughts and steeled his resolve. "The past few months have been hard for me and Deanna," he confided. "You know that we were working with Dr. Ree on fertility treatments-"
"All too well," Vale said, referring to the effect that Troi"s empathic projections had had on her personally.
"We thought we"d succeeded," Riker said. He found it difficult to go on. "It hasn"t gone as we"d hoped."
As he"d feared, a grim silence fell between himself and Vale, whose expression softened. She leaned forward and folded her hands atop his desk. "How bad is it?"
He couldn"t name it. "Bad."
Vale asked in an apprehensive whisper, "A miscarriage?"
Hearing the words spoken in sympathy, rather than in Dr. Ree"s cold and clinical rasp, was even more terrible than Riker had imagined. Grief surged upward inside his chest, and he barely nodded his confirmation before tears overflowed his eyes. He covered his mouth for a moment and struggled to contain the sorrow he had been swallowing for so long. "I"ve been carrying this for months," he said, fighting to talk through halting gasps for air. "Piling one thing on another. Feeling like I"d failed Deanna."
"You didn"t fail her," Vale said. "I know you didn"t."
"Maybe not, but I feel like I did." He palmed the tears from one cheek and then the other. "She"s part Betazoid, so it"s hard to know where my desires end and hers begin. It makes me wonder if maybe her wish to have kids was really mine, and I led her into this." He got up from his chair, turned away from Vale, and walked to the window behind his desk. "We just found out it"s happening again. We"re losing another pregnancy. And this time, if she doesn"t do something about it...it could kill her."
"I"m sure Dr. Ree could-"
"He offered," Riker said. "He almost insisted, actually. Deanna won"t have it. She knows she"s in danger, and she just won"t do it. And instead of arguing with her, I let her refuse treatment and walked her out of sickbay."
Vale"s reflection was semitransparent against the backdrop of drifting starlight. "Even so," she said, "that doesn"t make any of this your fault."
"It doesn"t really matter," Riker said. "It"s starting to feel like the damage is done, either way."
He watched Vale"s mirror image as she stood and circled behind his desk to stand with him. "What damage?"
"That barrier I was talking about," he said, "the one between me and the crew? It"s starting to feel like it"s between me and Deanna. We can hear each other"s thoughts, but it feels like we don"t know how to talk about this." Now he regarded his own ragged reflection in the window. "It"s never been easy being such a visible couple on a starship. Even harder now that I"m the captain and this crew is so small, compared to what I was used to on the Enterprise."
"I know what you mean," Vale said. Her own muted grief reminded Riker of the loss of Jaza Najem just months earlier.
"Yeah," Riker said. "I guess you do." He turned to face her. "After the first..." The word was so hard for him to say. "After the first miscarriage, I did everything I could to keep Deanna"s spirits up. The odds were on our side, Ree told us. But I could tell Deanna wasn"t ready to try again, so I waited. I know that losing the baby had to be worse for her. For me it was an idea, but for her it was part of her body-it was physical. There"s no way I can understand how that feels for her."
"But it"s good that you know where the difference is," Vale said, trying to rea.s.sure him. "That you know why her experience is different from yours."
More tears burned Riker"s eyes. "But I still don"t know how to help her," he admitted. "She"s in so much pain, and I feel cut off, and I don"t know what to do." Now that he had opened the gates to his grief, he didn"t know how to close them again.
Vale pulled him to her, and she closed her arms around him in a sisterly embrace. He hesitated to return the gesture, and then he reluctantly surrendered to it. "It"ll be okay, Will," she said, her voice breaking slightly, echoing his sorrow. "You"ll be okay, and so will Deanna. You"re not alone."
Riker felt embarra.s.sed to have shown such vulnerability to his first officer. Captain Picard would never have bared his feelings like this, he thought. He reminded himself that Vale was not just his first officer; she was his friend. Maybe a captain more obsessed with strict protocol and formality would have been stalwart in hiding his feelings, but Riker didn"t subscribe to such emotionally stunted ideals of manhood. He didn"t believe that expressing emotions made him weak, and he was grateful that he had chosen a first officer who seemed to feel the same way.
As he lingered in Vale"s embrace, Riker brooded over the emotional wedge that he felt had been driven between him and Deanna by their recent tragedies. At a time when he most needed comfort, Deanna seemed to recoil from his touch. Her rejection and abandonment of him in the corridor made him all the more grateful now for Vale"s compa.s.sion.
That was when he began to wonder if perhaps this moment was continuing a shade too long. Vale"s head was resting against his chest, her hair color du jour a rich auburn that contrasted with his predominantly black uniform. Riker eased Vale away from him, and as she lifted her face to look at him, he thought he caught a glimpse of a less than platonic emotion in her eyes.
Then they both pushed away from each other and averted their eyes as they composed themselves. "Anyway," Vale said as she backpedaled and smoothed her uniform jacket, "if you need me, or if there"s anything I can do to help, just let me know."
"I will," Riker said, and he sat down at his desk and tapped a few keys on his computer"s interface. "Thank you, Chris."
"My pleasure, Captain," Vale said, continuing to back away to the other side of Riker"s desk. Her hands seemed to be in constant motion-waving, clenching, opening, weaving together at the fingers and flexing. "If there"s nothing else?"
"No, thank you," Riker said, pretending to be engrossed in whatever it was on his computer monitor. "Dismissed."
"Aye, sir." She turned and walked quickly out the door, back to duty on the bridge.
Riker watched the door close behind her, and then he ran a hand through his thatch of graying hair. Did I just imagine that? he wondered. Am I wrong, or was that kind of... awkward?
Suddenly, being emotionally unavailable to his crew didn"t seem like such a bad idea after all.
"You"re obviously looking for someone to blame," said Pral glasch Haaj. "The question is, would you rather it be you or your husband?"