Splish Splash
Posted on 01 Feb 2024 @ 8:20pm by Chief Petty Officer Ibis Xeri
Mission:
M4 - Falling Out
Timeline: concurrent with "Permanence"
1718 words - 3.4 OF Standard Post Measure
The bathwater was a regular activity, more than a bathing routine alone. Ibis could always count on Ikemba splashing and enjoying the many little floating toys and colorful scoops, able to entertain himself for a long time. He was growing more healthy, Ibis thought, his belly the right shape, his arms and legs growing strong, and his misshapen baby teeth straightened and fixed with the palette shaping treatments. It had been difficult to get him to put in the temporary stretchers at night, but Ibis noticed that Wallace had more success at convincing him. He didn’t yell or command it. It just seemed like Ikemba wanted him to be proud of him, and every time there was a little success at it, Ikemba decided he wanted to wear them too. Once she had peeked in and seen Wallace popping his own nighttime appliance out to show Ikemba. They were retainer pals.
Ibis worked patiently through the dense dark curls of hair. Ikemba was always plastering them with dried food. While she and Wallace had cut their own hair when they had come home– it was strange but she had come now to think of this place as home– both of the kids had kept their hair just as before. Ikemba because she couldn’t bear to trim his never-before-cut baby locks, and Olivia because who was going to tell her what to do with her look?
Ikemba’s new little boats had faces on them, and he was making gabby sounds for them talking before crashing them together. Sometimes she felt like she could make out a word from the nonsense. Even if he wasn’t talking, he was at least imitating language, compared to how he was once silent almost as a rule on Korix. Now she adored hearing his voice! Ibis wasn’t an early educator or anything, but she felt like the nonsense talk was probably part of the process. He was hearing more language now, going out to the park, playing with other children, having dinners and brunches with the Captain or the Admiral and his family. Soon, she thought, any day now, Ikemba would start to tell her what he was thinking.
The chime of the door rang and Ibis was suddenly uncertain. You didn’t leave kids in tubs. But Ikemba wasn’t exactly a stranger to water either.
“Computer, identify visitor?”
*For Altha’s sake* She heard her mother swear telepathically as the computer announced one Jalaine Xeri.
“Computer, open the front door,” Ibis ordered. She wasn’t sure what her mother was going to have to say, but the last few visits with her had been tense and mixed. Ibis had tried to meet her outside of time with the rest of the family. She knew her mother made Wallace uncomfortable. After all, she was hardly trying to hide her displeasure with him.
*Why should he be uncomfortable around me? What unpleasantness is he keeping from you?*
“Hi, Mom!” Ibis called, clearing her throat and struggling to shout over a hoarse stage whisper level. “I’m in the back here!”
*I know where you are.* Her mother huffed and Ibis could hear the exhale in the next room as she approached. *What I don’t know is where your father has gone, but I can tell you’ve seen him.*
“Well, I don’t know where he’s gone, but he was here briefly.”
“Really!” Jalaine declared out loud as she appeared in the open door of the family bathroom, her hands propped on her hips. “The nerve! He told me that he was just going out for a walk on the promenade!” She concentrated for a moment, but Irwin was well practiced at blanking his mind from her, making him blend in when there were this many people to try and sense him between.
“Maybe he changed his plans. He did bring a few gifts from the promenade. But he didn’t stay long.” Ibis smiled thinking of her Dad’s glee in his gift giving, “Didn’t even take off his hat.”
“Oh well.” Jalaine sighed. “What good is having money in one's old age without the chance to spoil others with it?” She watched the child splashing in the tub, her daughter dripping with soapy water as she scrubbed him. Jalaine shook her head. Here Ibis was playing the mother and the nanny. She was still such a child, even at nearly forty. Easily led around by her passions. It used to be her taking a shine to different boys in uniforms. Always seeking their attention. Now she wanted a family, like a girl with her dollhouse, and here she could play at having this one. “Did he say where he might be found?”
“No. Just that there was another gift he wanted to pick up on the Promenade for Olivia. Wallace went with them. They've been gone for a while. I guess they probably stopped for lunch.”
If it wasn’t for her telepathic sense, and a good dose of lipreading, Jalaine knew she wouldn’t have been able to make out Ibis’ hoarse voice over the water splashing. This was altogether the wrong environment for Ibis’ recovery.
“Have you heard anything back?” asked Jalaine, “From all of those scans?”
Ibis shook her head. Her doctors would get back to them whenever they had something new to say. She didn’t see the point in following up every single day. “I’ll tell you if I do.”
Jalaine wasn’t entirely certain her daughter would really tell her if she heard back. She could tell that Ibis was trying to be nice and to include her, to spare her feelings, and not really because she cared to share any further news on her diagnoses or treatments. “You’re just going to let him thrash about like that?”
“The floor drains can handle it,” Ibis said. “I'll mop up after.”
“Well, I never washed your brothers once they could stand on their own. That was your father’s task. Or the after school nanny saw to it they cleaned themselves up before dinner.”
“I don’t mind, Mom. It’s nice to see him having fun.”
“You shouldn’t do all of this childcare.”
“I don’t.” Ibis poured a cup of water over Ikemba’s head, shielding his eyes with her hand, and his shampoo laden hair flattened as he squealed. “Wallace does most of it. I’ve been working.”
“You work and take care of these children—”
“Our children. I work and I help with our children, Mom.”
“—All while in your condition?”
Ibis knelt by the tub, splashing Ikemba under his arms and down his back to try to rinse the spots he wasn’t already getting in the churning of the water play.
*Clearly you know I’m right. You haven’t an answer for being taken for granted here. I didn’t raise you to role play in some human patriarchal domesticated fantasy.*
Ibis’ face was flushing with a bitter retort she held back. She didn’t feel her mother had raised her at all.
*I heard that!*
Ibis flashed her a look that said good, she meant it. Dad had been the one who raised her. She pulled Ikemba out of the bath and started to wrap him in a towel and dry off his hair.
*I gave you the best of every opportunity society had to offer! And you threw them all in my face! You were ungrateful!*
“I didn’t want all of that stuff, Mom. I just wanted to be part of something real. All of those programs and societies and clubs, they were all fake. Pretentious. I found a kind of family on the Nimitz. And on the Sunrise, too. People who brought me in and believed in me. They brought out the best in me, just by including me. Not trying to remake me into their own image.”
Jalaine stood with her mouth agape. Had that been what Ibis thought she was doing?
Ibis hugged the freshly washed boy and scooped him up, towel and all, in her arms. Her mother stood in the doorway still barring the exit, but simply frozen in shock as if she had been slapped.
Ibis felt maybe she had gone too far. She bit her lip and put one of the boats back in Ikemba’s hand. “Look, Mom,” she rasped. “I’m sorry Dad’s not here right now. But when they get back, I’m going to go look at wedding gowns. Do you want to come?”
It was the last thing Jalaine wanted to help her daughter buy. For more than one reason, even aside from the choice of groom. “You’re not going to have a traditional wedding?”
Ibis smiled at her mother’s surprise; of all the reasons she could have refused gown shopping, it was amusing to Ibis that her passing on the scandalous traditional Betazoid wedding ceremony in the nude would be her mother's primary objection. “No, I want my guests to wear clothes. I want to wear clothes. Hopefully Olivia will wear more clothes, but we’ll see.”
Jalaine’s arms fell to her side, looking at her daughter with the boy she treasured on her hip. It was delusional, the way she was living. But she knew if she said it out loud, she might not be allowed back into the apartment. Ibis was offering to spend the afternoon with her, and Jalaine knew she had to find other ways of pressing the issue. While she didn’t want to show approval by helping choose the dress, she remembered what Ara had suggested. Stall the matter and help Ibis to see it for herself.
“I’ll go along." Jaliane sighed. "Not that you’re likely to find a proper seamstress this far out on the border!”
“It doesn’t have to be haute-couture, Mom,” Ibis said, pressing past her mother to dress Ikemba in the bedroom. “Porter already thinks I’m pretty wearing just seaweed.”
Jalaine’s eyes narrowed. Ara had warned her of this. Major Wallace had base instincts and Ibis was mistaking his lust for love. “I’m sure that he does,” she muttered.
