All That Remains

Posted on 02 May 2022 @ 1:51pm by Commander Calliope Zahn & Lieutenant Commander Lance Quinn (*)
Edited on on 02 May 2022 @ 1:54pm

Mission: M3 - Into the Deep
Location: Quinn & Zahn Quarters
Timeline: backpost following "People at the End of the Day"
3476 words - 7 OF Standard Post Measure

Lance arrived back at his quarters feeling marginally more alert than he had the last few times he had entered. It had that strange feeling, the sort of sense one got from returning home from a long holiday, where everything felt cold but familiar. Had he been lost in his project that long? It was hard to say. Time, as a construct, sometimes evaded him in that way.

He ordered a cold water from the replicator and took a moment to sprawl a little in their living space. As he put the tumbler down, he spotted something unusual: a paper envelope with his name hand-written on the front. Very old-fashioned. The sort of thing he would have expected to see sitting on the desk in his father's study at home. The Quinn seniors were always rather...vintage...in their tastes. It was possibly a miracle he was a technical genius.

Since the note was addressed to him by name, logically that meant he was supposed to see it and open it. He took a quick sip of the water and carefully prised the envelope open. He wasn't sure why he took such care over things; again, probably a hangover from his childhood upbringing.

The letter inside was handwritten too. Or rather...letters? There were several pages.

Dear Lance,
Fifteen years ago, when we married, I gave you a broken flower.

A yellow petal slipped from between the folds. He stooped to pick it up, brushing it gently with his thumb and forefinger. Memories returned of times long since passed.

I’ve been trying to think of an anniversary gift, but I can’t think of anything that doesn’t feel trite or incidental.

Fifteen years ago. Was it their anniversary already? Had he forgotten, amid all the self-destruction and isolation?

So I’ve decided it’s time I give you what I’ve always tried to keep from you...

He didn't make it much further as the sound of the door opening pulled his eyes away from the paper. Lance turned quickly - too quickly - and sent the two-thirds full glass of water splashing everywhere. It covered the envelope, but thankfully not the papers in his hand. He stammered a curse and an apology together as he finally caught sight of Calliope in the doorway.

"Oh-" he stopped, stuck halfway between figuring out how to clean up the mess and greet her at the same time.

"You're home." Calliope observed the water dripping to the floor... the pages in Lance's hand. Carefully, she stepped further inside, brushing her own hair back as she came to the opposite side of the counter. Other than once or twice, they had so rarely shared their living room. She wove her fingers together anxiously. "You found my letter."

"Oh. Yes. Oh!" He processed around three or four thoughts in the same phrase. "I...well, I started it..." he said sheepishly.

That was even more awkward, Calliope thought. When she had left it, she had imagined he would read it and have the chance to process. A wisp of inner desperation said she could still manage this shipwreck, if she just took it away and distracted him with some passionate kissing, and could be rid of the blighted pages quietly. She gulped against the urge and looked down at the empty glass, righting it. "I'll let you finish it." she said quietly.

He lifted it to do just that. Then he paused. Then he looked at her. She looked very much like she had something to say. Perhaps this was one of those social cues he was so often guilty of ignoring; that he needed to do the opposite of what she said. It was never clear, particularly when it came to relationships. Sometimes he wished people would just say what they wanted without having to put all these conventions in place.

"It can wait," he said finally, folding it over and putting it back on top of the open envelope.

Calliope bit her lip and considered him across the counter. "But it's a letter, to you, from me..." She almost laughed at the absurdity. "I don't think I could keep myself reading a letter from you." Still dressed nicely from her attempt at getting out for a bit to distract herself, she untied her band from her head and it let the poof of her regrown hair fall to either side. She looked at the band in her hands, stretching it back and forth. "There are a lot of things in there that I should have said to you, a long, long time ago. Maybe everything now would have been different if I would have really given you all of it, too. I was just scared."

Lance cast an eye back at the folded letter. He could pick it up and read it, of course. But communication was more than words; it was tone, and gesture, and intent. Reading them on a page was often ineffective in putting across true meaning.

He took a few steps towards her, taking her hand in his. Feeling the band tightening around both of their fingers. Squeezing them together.

"You were not the only one," he admitted. "The instinct for fight or flight can be manifested in many ways. Perhaps it can be found in the bottom of a bottle. Or strewn across the floor of a cargo bay. Either way..." he touched her chin with his other hand, lifting her head slightly. "In many ways, fear keeps us safe from the things that would do us harm."

"It does." Calliope gave a sad smile as Lance made such intentional eye contact and admitted his escapism from the problems she'd brought into their lives. At the same time he seemed to impart a kind of olive branch of understanding. He wasn't... mad, or ashamed as he'd been when it had all first broken apart that first week aboard the station. He hadn't been ready to hear her out then, just as she hadn't been able to do much more than excuse her own efforts at self-preservation. She looked down for a moment at how he was winding his long fingers with hers in the loop of elastic. She clutched his hand in both of hers and brought it over her heart. "On my part, it did for years. At least in a lot of ways. But I... I should have told *you* from the very beginning. "

"Honestly, dear. You could have told me just about anything and it's unlikely I would have fully understood." It was self-depreciation, but it was also a somewhat realistic assessment of his emotional intelligence. People weren't like machines. Not really.

"I... I let you think the hormone medication was just a convenience," Calliope confessed while resting her forehead on his shoulder. "It was such a relief that you never wondered about it. It felt easier to tell myself that... what had happened, the things I had done and had suffered, they were a part of my life you never had to think about. A part that not even *I* had to think about. I didn't want to live as a victim, or even as a survivor. I didn't want any of it at all. I had created a whole cordoned off part of my own psyche where it seemed to me some other girl's terrors and mistakes were excised from my life. It was how I moved on and lived again. I didn't want to bring it out into the light and subject you to it."

"And perhaps I allowed you to do that as well," he admitted philosophically. "Ignoring a problem is as bad as hiding one." He lowered himself down to perch so they were at eye level, making sure he still held on to her hands. "Perhaps we need to stop ignoring the important things and work out how to deal with them? I don't think either of us has ever quite worked out how we do that in partnership. Goodness knows I'm not very good at sharing..."

Calliope had never thought of him as being willfully ignorant of anything, but their long-distance lifestyle had facilitated a kind of selective blindness. She opened her mouth to try to deny any of it being his fault, but the sincerity of his claim and the insistence in his eyes made her pause. She felt Lance was stretching it to assume as much blame as her, but she also felt a huge relief at the gesture and chose to let him make the claim, even knowing the lion's share was her doing. The drowning was hers, and his reach was welcome. And it was true as far as it went. It felt as if she were standing in the deconstruction zone of everything they'd established; the entire working model the marriage had run on had flown apart, the fault in the design long ignored as long as it had served its purpose.

"I think you're right. The model we were working with had a flaw. We made too many allowances and the loss is untenable." Since he was making every effort at speaking her language, she returned the favor, trying to keep back relieved tears but not doing a very good job of it. "What do you propose?" She asked, as if there were some new theory to present.

"An agreement, perhaps? Honesty? Accountability?" he suggested. "I just would rather not ignore any of our problems any more."

With a whole-hearted nod, Calliope agreed. "I don't want anything left to hide," she whispered.

He held her head against his chest for a moment, relieved as much as anything that the honesty of their conversation had worked. "Nor I," he agreed. "Though I must admit, I'm not entirely sure how we go about doing it," he said with a faint smile. "I was rather hoping that you might have some ideas."

“I think I can start, while you fix us some tea.” She unwound herself from Lance to let him get to the replicator and thought about the half a cup of tea she’d left on the admiral’s desk that same morning. She needed to tell Lance that everything he’d left behind in the Sol system might have been for nothing. If Sepandiyar came to the conclusion she feared she most deserved, she might be demoted or reassigned… or discharged. She wasn’t sure. But somehow she was certain Lance was determined to stick it through with her, and it seemed to be the buoy holding her head above water right then.

"See how you know me so well..." he mused quietly as he prepared them a cup of tea each. In the traditional style, not directly through the replicator.

Calliope felt herself floundering. Where to begin? With which part of the lies, or what aspect of the truth? Where did it all begin and end? Her eyes settled on the letter on the end of the counter, addressed to Lance. She picked up her letter and unfolded it as he brought back the teacups. “Dear Lance,” she started, “Fifteen years ago, when we married, I gave you a broken flower…”

He stopped in his tracks as she read, the two steaming cups in his hands.

"You were trying to think of an anniversary gift," he said, recalling the opening paragraph. "Did you decide what that was?"

"Yes..." She paused, regarding Lance, who seemed re-centered by the familiar ritual of tea making. Something told her that he hadn't fully pieced the obvious together. Setting down the unfolded letter again on the counter, she took up one of the cups from him and held it close, looking into the brew. "Yes, I did. Although it's not really the nicest gift, and I'll understand if you don't want it."

"My mother always used to insist that the quality of a gift was best measured by the thought and effort, rather than monetary value," he remarked. "Knowing you, I suspect that you've rather undervalued it."

With a breath of agreement, Calliope reflected into the tea cup at the layers of meaning in that and wondered if Lance even knew what he was speaking into. Likely not. "Your mother said that?" Calliope was a little surprised. Her mother-in-law could be rather severe and judgemental, hardly sentimental or heartfelt upfront, which often made it difficult to know what she actually felt about anything.

"She is somewhat cynical most of the time, but she can have her moments," he agreed.

That was true. Calliope mused for a long quiet moment, watching the gently rising steam of each of their cups while considering how much Lance cared for his mother. Honest as to her nature but defensive... a loyal son. The woman's harshness that Calliope took personally seemed to the son the water the duck just swam in. Maybe more people would understand Lance if they had that insight into his growing up, she thought. It was likely true of most people— knowing where they were coming from lent a kind of insight to who they were now...

"The gift is in the letter." Calliope explained. "It's the rest of my story. The parts I never told you."

Lance sat down opposite her again. "Then maybe we should read it together."

Ever since penning it and tucking it away, Calliope had tortured herself with considering the outcomes of Lance knowing the sordid details of the worst chapter in her young life. She'd imagined doing what she should have instead and having this conversation fifteen years ago. How he might have taken the knowledge when they were younger— would he have recoiled? Distrusted her? Or quite the opposite and been overly protective? But it was no sense wondering what might have been when it wasn't. While mostly looking down to read the beginning of the account to him, she occasionally stole a glance up to his face, to see how he was taking the lead up to the worst of it.

Lance sat, calmly and earnestly, to listen. His hands cupped the hot drink in his hands, the warmth just that little too hot to touch but warming his fingers and keeping him focused on her words. He promised himself that no judgement would come out of his mouth until she had finished. The whole story.

When she came to the most difficult portion of the retelling, her eyes were blurred over, not so much with tears as with the heat of shame; as she turned over one of the pages to try to start the next, she found she had no voice.

His hand touched the back of hers. Firmly, but a touch filled with care.

"Fear keeps us safe from the things that would do us harm," he murmured softly, repeating his mantra from earlier in the conversation. "But sometimes so does love."

At the touch, Calliope grasped his hand back. She let go of the letter and the rest of the story seemed to just pour out of her, how everything had come to a head after months of being taken advantage of, being shamed into lying about it and covering up for her abusers until a particularly brutal encounter left it impossible to hide from her mother; how at last all of the lies all flushed out and the authorities came to be involved, then the lawyers, then the counselors... and the drugs to help her manage her pheromones. She told him how she'd chosen resilience and a fresh start and learned to think of her worst mistakes and the abuse those errors had led to as the story of "Not Calliope".

"If I'd had never been one to suffer the side effects, I probably never would have told you." She admitted. "I never wanted you to have to hear any of that. I was so determined to never be or experience it again that I didn't care about any of the warnings on the Vamiraxil prescription. I didn't care when they had new studies. To my mind... there was no other option." While she gripped his hand she covered her face with the other in shame. "When it became impossible to get the prescription conventionally any longer.. I made other ways."

"Other ways. That sounds deliberately vague," he noted.

"Sometimes I leveraged influence, or used gray channels to unapproved sources. Sometimes I favored a time table or a delivery over another. Sometimes I made an introduction from my extensive contacts. Or re-appropriated something meant for reclamation. There were a lot of arrangements. None of it was harmful, but some of it wasn't strictly ethical either." Holding her head in her palm she looked down at their hands, afraid to look Lance in the eyes. He'd always seemed to expect her to have the right answers behaviorally, and she'd been a fraud for so long.

He stared intently at her for a long time. For most of their life together, even back to the academy, he had been the one most likely to be described as 'morally grey'. Calliope was the good one, which was part of why she had gone down the command track and he had specialised. For her to admit to these things...they were more than cutting corners, even in the brightest possible light.

"I'm so sick of lying. So sick..." She repeated. "I told Admiral Sepandiyar earlier today, about the ethical lapses. I gave him the most complete account I could. I'm not sure what he's going to decide. I asked him for another chance. But I just don't know. I don't know if there's anything left to save."

"Calliope Zahn." He tutted, shaking his head disapprovingly. "That's the Orion in you speaking. The part of you that people see - the skin-deep aspect; the brigands, the liars, the slavers, the pirates...whatever you want to call them." They'd spoken about it before, in quiet moments. The way people saw her kind, and the way they expected her to behave - like some sultry sex slave. Orions came with an undeniable reputation.

"But I am Orion!" Calliope protested. No matter how hard she'd worked against it, no matter how much she hated it, the fault-line of her absent father seemed to have sheared a track right through the bedrock of her life. "How else am I meant to speak?"

"Or," he continued, "Did you forget that you're also half-human? We humans are a terribly complicated folk, you know. Full of contradictions and flaws. However, when the chips are down there is one thing that is inexplicably human: when things are at their toughest, humans have the greatest capacity for perseverance and hope. How do the Andorians put it - Never push the pinkskins towards the thin ice." His eye twinkled. "So, my dear, what do you think? Slavery or hope?"

"I've been running out of the strength to hope," she confided.

Leaving his seat, Lance approached her and dropped to one knee so he could look upwards into her bowed face.

"That's not the Calliope Zahn I married," he said softly.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand and almost laughed in a kind of release of pent up emotion. The worst of her fears— that he would discount their entire relationship as something predicated on her coverup hadn't come true. it had been a fear given credence by his initial response just to her hiding her medical results for a few days and she'd extrapolated from there to decide there was a possibility he would find their entire relationship a sham when she'd told him the truth. For weeks she'd been nursing the possibility of heartbreak she wasn't sure she could ever come back from. That it hadn't materialized that way at all when she'd given him all of her broken parts left her with a speechless relief.

"We complicated, hopeful humans tend to fare better when we do things together. Trust me - I've spent the last few weeks trying to do it on my own and failing spectacularly. So, how about we forget all about that and do it together for once?"

She pulled her self into his arms and closed her eyes. If Lance was all she had left, Calliope wasn't sure anyone was so lucky as she was. "I love you."

He was mildly startled by her sudden embrace, but relaxed into it after a second. He even allowed himself a smile. "I love you too, dear." It was comforting to hear, and likely just as comforting to say out loud. Maybe this was the turning over of a new leaf in their relationship. At the very least, it felt like their paths were starting to realign.