((Corrected Version)) [Backsim] JP Lt Alex Storm and LtJg Roy Bancroft - You've Got Someone Now - Part I
Karen Morris
(( Engineering Room, USS Karnack – Callis I ))
(Beginning of Act III)
The others were converging. MacKenzie calling out to Munro. Cole’s voice sharp with relief. Movement everywhere.
Alex stood stiffly off to the side by a dead console, fingertips sitting on its smooth edge. She heard the conversation and orders, but she didn’t really listen to them. She couldn’t even raise her eyes … to have her fears confirmed. Fears were planted because she had tried in vain to touch his mind when fire had seared into her back. Her forefinger drew a figure eight in time. But a name interrupted her thoughts … Bancroft. Her eyes flicked up to Munro quickly.
Alex replayed Munro’s words in her mind. oO Take Bancroft and Storm with you. Oo
Her eyes searched the room. She saw, a tuft of red hair and held her breath.
Was it?
She choked. No, It was Jaran, but as they shifted to the side, someone moved the opposite direction.
Her eyes caught Roy, his curly mop of hair leaned in, and he wrapped Cole in his arms. Her mouth opened, her eyes blinked and fell. She forced breath into her lungs, slow and deep. Raising her eyes again, she watched … her friend.
But as she did, their eyes met.
Her forefinger stopped midstroke and her fingers wrapped around the edge of the console, gripping it tightly. Something in his look cemented her feet to the deck plating. Her hand pushed forward in his direction as he walked over toward her. Her eyes crinkled, and the corners of her mouth tilted upward as her eyes searched for any sign of an injury. But unless matted hair and grime constituted trauma, he appeared to be whole and in one piece.
The world narrowed so abruptly it was almost dizzying.
He saw recognition hit her too – quick, assessing, searching.
The distance between them shortened as the teams folded together.
When he finally reached her, he stopped close enough that he could smell smoke and blood on her uniform. And something else – burned skin?
He didn’t remember lifting his hand. He only realized he had when he saw his fingers hovering inches from her forearm.
Alex’s eyes fell to those fingers hanging in mid air, so close to her. She mentally urged them to come closer. To bridge the small gap. To settle on her shoulder, or her arm, or … She blinked away the next thought.
He had meant to check her. That’s what he told himself. Just to confirm she was solid. Okay. Real. His hand trembled – barely perceptible.
He stopped it. Lowered it.
And as it fell, Alex’s eyes lost a little of their glisten. Instead, she took a hiccupping breath in, looking up and away for a moment.
Be professional.
The urge to touch her – to anchor himself to the fact that she existed – startled him more than anything he’d yet to experience in his twenty-seven years of life.
What is wrong with me?
Bancroft: Alex ::quietly:: … you injured?
The words scraped on the way out.
Too blunt. Too small.
He heard them land and hated how clinical they sounded – as if she were any other patient, as if the question weren’t carrying nearly two weeks of suspended breath behind it.
It was the only sentence his brain would permit.
His vision blurred suddenly, just at the edges. He blinked once, sharply, as if clearing smoke from his eyes. The sting lingered anyway, the moisture blinked away to mix with the rivulets of sweat that already streaked his grime-covered face.
Roy’s words pulled her attention back to the present. This time her eyes took in his face, his thick but scraggly beard. Gone was the fen worm, it had morphed into a glorious mane. His hair hung close to his piercing blue eyes, almost hiding them, but not quite.
Is that sweat or …. Surely not.
Her fingers twitched, wanting to rise and touch the lines of perspiration or something else that eked along his face disappearing into his beard to assure herself that she wasn't imagining things.
He was real. Alive. Intact - at least she thought he was. That should be enough. She needed it to be enough, pleaded for it to satisfy her, but she wanted … something more? Why? What was it about this man standing so frustratingly close to her that both calmed and centered her and knocked her off-kilter at the very same time.
But he had asked a question…. Was she hurt? Yes… No… without consciously opening her mouth, words slipped out.
Storm: I tried to reach out to you. I couldn’t touch your mind.
It wasn’t the question he asked, exactly. But that pain was just as real, more real, than that of the burn - even when it happened. The burn was secondary.
That was real?
Bancroft: ::stunned:: I… I felt it. Like something brushed past the inside of my head. I kept trying to catch it again...
He fought back a sudden surge of nausea.
Bancroft: ::voice thick:: When I couldn’t, I thought– well. I had a theory I didn’t much care for. So I convinced myself it was just stress.
He felt it? Alex recalled their trip to Ferenginar, how when he touched her - she didn't only hear him, but he heard her. Did he have any Betazoid blood of which she was unaware? But…
Storm: I found you once, but I tried once more … when …
Alex swallowed hard and forced a hollow chuckle.
Storm: When I needed someone.
The words had fallen from her mouth before she could call them back. Had she needed someone or him?
Roy’s expression softened almost imperceptibly, the muscles around his eyes easing while his brows drew together in a faint crease of concern.
Needed someone?
That particular phrase did not comfortably coexist with the mental portrait he carried of Alex Storm.
The Alex Storm he knew did not require people – with the exception of her daughter, Cassie – the way ordinary mortals required oxygen. She moved through life with the composed self-sufficiency of a creature evolved in vacuum. Even the night on Betazed – high on that impossible cliff above the dark velvet sweep of the countryside – she had not needed anyone.
Certainly not him, and yet… Here she was.
Standing in the wreckage of a dead starship with soot on her cheek and something fragile hovering in the air between them like a glass instrument nobody had yet dared to touch.
Roy cleared his throat quietly.
Bancroft: Well… you’ve got someone, now. ::beat:: It just took me a bit to get here.
She inhaled through her nose, and her eyes squinted against the rain that threatened to fall. But emotions rarely obeyed rational commands, and a few errant drops escaped along with a dismissive chuckle.
Storm: I’m glad you made it.
Lt Alex Storm
Tactical Officer
USS Artemis
O240103SK2
Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft
Medical Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240205RB1