Broken Flowers

Posted on 06 Apr 2021 @ 10:34am by Lieutenant Commander Lance Quinn (*) & Commander Calliope Zahn

Mission: M2 - Sanctuary
Location: OC, Recovery Ward, Rm 08
1638 words - 3.3 OF Standard Post Measure

Having got up from the floor due to being curious about the sound of children outside racing in the hallway, Calliope observed the little family drama from her doorway. She left her door open a while, just watching until the children finally left with their Marine “Uncle”. Then she peered across the hall into the open door of her new neighbors in room 09— the Trill couple. The woman was asleep on her husband’s chest while his bank of monitors and machines faithfully hummed and registered every vital they could detect.

It was one small candid snapshot out of so many more she knew she wasn’t privileged to see. Calliope felt the weight of it smothering her heart. Holding this station had cost so much. And besides that, losing it to the void in the first place had already rendered a price tallied in lives.

She stood now, holding the door post and looking into the quiet game room, the sound of the children diminishing in the distance. There in the stack of games on the table Calliope noticed a backgammon set.

Her heart's lament was that she was removed from duty and completely powerless to do anything about any of it. If only she’d listened years ago. If only! If only she hadn’t been so stupid she’d be able to do her job now. She’d be able to help protect the station. To find justice for the lives that had been taken or destroyed. She stumbled back into her room while rubbing her arms repeatedly and hugging herself and humming small notes with each exhale like a wounded woodland creature. Feeling distinctly as though she didn’t even deserve her own pain, Calliope wanted to hide, to be low and small. She shuffled into the bathroom, and settled into the bottom of the tub, twisting her necklace in her fingers and humming her pain in strange notes until she began disassociating from time, from her own body, and from the world around her.

---

That same evening, Lance found her sitting there in the dry bottom of the empty tub. She wore some of her favorite clothes, tailored slacks and a finely spun silk shirt that she had bought from an artisan on Bajor. The outfit was rumpled as if slept in, her hair disordered to match, her feet bare. With one hand, she was fidgeting with her loop of wire necklace pendant. With the other she rubbed her own ankle in a kind of self soothing stroke. She stared into the patterned wall, intoning wordless, melancholy notes and absorbing the acoustic effect of her own composing, her ear inclined to one side listening as if it were someone else's wandering musical sentences, not so much with sorrow on her face as much as uncertainly and a distance in her eyes. So distant was her attention fixed that it didn't register to her that Lance was standing in the open bathroom door.

"Cali?"

He took a moment to make an assessment of the room. Untidy - they were both firmly in the 'neat freak' category, so that was a warning sign to begin with. But her vacant expression and the scattering of articles around the place were another. Obviously the fact that she was sat in the tub fully dressed was something in and of itself.

When she didn't respond, he stepped gingerly over the toppled vase and flowers on the floor in front of him and eased to a knee next to the bath. He put a hand gently on her shoulder. He wasn't sure what to say. Maybe something comforting or helpful. He knew that he shouldn't be accusatory or draw attention to the wrong thing. But what was that? He wasn't clear. Perhaps he had to break the ice first.

"Did you want to take a bath, Cali?"

"What?" At the shoulder touch it was as if she came back from another place. She blinked it away. "No, No, I... I just." Calliope kept twisting her necklace around and around her finger. "I came in here to...." Why had she come in here? She formed all of her words very slowly. "I'm relieved of duty. I'm on report. I think— I think it might be over. Maybe it was over a very long time ago. Maybe I've been fooling myself since the very beginning."

Lance took a deep breath. This really wasn't his area of expertise. In fact it was about as far from anything he knew how to deal with as he could imagine. Calliope was the strong one; the one who kept him grounded and stable. Without her...

"Calliope. You're not well. The doctors said you needed time." He hesitated, not entirely sure what else she might need. Maybe there was an issue with the technology. After all, she was sat in the tub. Fix what you can fix, he recalled from his engineering lessons. Rely on what you know. "If you want some help I can make sure the sonic shower is working at 110% efficiency."

"The shower's not broken, Lance." She stabbed her fingers into her breastbone and said quietly and emphatically, "I'm broken. Time isn't going to fix it. I've always been broken. I'll always be broken." Ashamed of herself, Calliope looked away from him and whispered, "I gave you a broken flower."

"The flower's fine. We'll replicate up a new vase and re-water it. I don't think they die off after a few minutes on the ground..." he said, looking over his shoulder at the fallen plants he'd stepped over a minute ago. It slowly dawned that she wasn't referring to an actual flower. Metaphors...he wasn't particularly fond of them for this reason. Abstract topics were absolutely fine - and even encouraged in theoretical physics - but not so much in relationships. He frowned to himself, trying to process before he came back around to the thing he'd been saying in the first place. "In many ways I suppose they're like us; sure the vase might be broken and we're not sitting in the water, but we're not likely to wilt quite so quickly. Right?" he asked, offering her his hand.

At the invitation to take his hand, Calliope took hold of his whole arm and leaned over the side of the tub to bury her face in Lance's chest. She was drowning internally, he was one firm place to grasp, but she couldn't shake feeling as if she were hurting him while hanging on. "I can't... I never deserved the post here. And I don't deserve you." She insisted while grasping him for dear life. "I don't."

"Well..." He wanted to say something loving and romantic and gentle in response to that. He found himself hesitant. The truth was that the only reason he was in this place was because of her; his career had built to that tenure at the Daystrom Institute. It had been hard to let it go, but he had done because it was right that he and Cali were together. They both had to make sacrifices. "We rarely get what we truly deserve," he said softly. "But we make the best of what we have." He touched her chin, lifting it so he could look her in the eye. "Hard work, hmm?"

Her breathing steadied as she grounded herself in his eyes. Corvus had said it was her mess, and hers alone. But she realized... nothing was hers alone. Everything that was hers was Lance's too. Even her disaster. Especially her disaster. And he wasn't going to look away and leave her to sort herself out before coming back to him on holiday and say all the nice things when she had her act together enough. They had been married nearly fifteen years. But they had never been this kind of married. The kind where he was going to sit on the bathroom floor with her and tell her the truth. The truth was that it was hard work. Maybe she'd never recover her career. Maybe she'd end up back on earth with him returning to Daystrom. Maybe she'd have to reinvent her life. Her entire life's work and self identity gone, except that she was Lance's wife.

She nodded in agreement, wordless, but fully expressing the pain in the torque of the sinews in her face. It wasn't just hard work, it was impossible. It was impossible alone.

"Lance?" she managed to say while he waited beside her so patiently.

He didn't say anything, he just held her gaze for a moment.

"I think I do want a bath. I want to clean up and... and I want to visit the Memorial."

He was surprised at that request. And it almost certainly showed in his face as he broke the eye contact first. She was an emotional mess, and had been for weeks. Hell, she'd had a chemically-induced nervous breakdown. Going to a memorial would only charge her with more emotion, surely. It was a bad idea. But he didn't want to say it was a bad idea because then she would feel like he didn't trust her. "Are you sure?" he asked quietly.

"Yes, I'm sure. Will you take me to see it?"

No. "Sure. We can go." He pushed himself up out of her grasp. "After you've taken a bath and had something to eat. There's really no rush."

She wanted to tell him she wasn't hungry, but she also wasn't stupid. Lance was going to leverage her request in order to get her to eat... because he cared. Calliope began working at the buttons on her blouse. "No." She agreed with a purposed exhale. "There's no rush."