[JP] Mikali sh'Shar & Commander Valen Carys - There Is No Coming to Consciousness Without Pain (Part IV)
Quinn Reynolds
((Counselling Suite, Iana Station))
Mikali reached up and tugged on a bit of her hair. Carys watched, her expression painted with hues of kindness and sympathy, holding back on prompting for now. Mikali wasn’t a patient reticent to share, her thoughts often spilling out like a waterfall with only the slightest nudge. Sometimes silence was the best nudge of all.
sh’Shar: So... what should I do? I want to do something to help make this right. ::She hesitated, now unsure of herself.:: That’s... the right thing to do, isn’t it?
Valen: Before we can figure out the answer to that, we really need to understand what you’re hoping to do. What exactly are you trying to make right?
Mikali thought about her answer for a moment, clasping her hands together on top of her PADD, eyes half-narrowing.
sh’Shar: It’s always been easy for me to diminish personal responsibility for the things that I’ve done. And I’m not just talking about the battle-site incident. If I was late to a shift, it was because there was something that made me late, even when the truth is that everyone else managed to get to their shifts on time, and I should have left my quarters sooner because, you know, disruptions happen. If someone broke up with me, it was because they were a stupid asshole, not because I was the stupid asshole. If I messed up, it was everyone’s fault but mine. It’s been a constant trend. A trend that must change.
Mikali took another long pause, gathering her thoughts, making sure she was precise and accurate.
sh’Shar: I’ve always been able to diminish my own responsibility with this action too. And there’s a lot to use. I was just a minor, I wasn’t the Captain only a minor part of the crew, I didn’t decide to loot a battle site and I didn’t even know what we were doing before we arrived, or that if I had decided to refuse that order, well... let’s just say that I would have joined the bodies there too, and nobody would have stood up for me or asked any questions about what happened to me. I told myself for decades I had no choice. I told myself that I did the best thing I could have done at the time, which was to insist on a proper burial for the people who died there, and that nothing more could be reasonably expected of me. On and on and on.
sh’Shar’s composure weakened again, fingers trembling as they clutched each other, interwoven on her PADD.
sh’Shar: And yet every excuse in the known galaxy doesn’t change the fact that I still did it. I complied with my orders, granted under protest, but I did anyway. The people who died at that battle site didn’t get the honourable burial they deserved. They’re probably listed as “Missing, Presumed Dead” which is an undeserving fate for our honoured dead decades after the fact. And they’re listed that way because of my actions. Yes, DaiMon Xhard is primarily responsible but the fact remains I am not him. I can’t make him see what he did was wrong and take responsibility for it, because the only person whose actions I can control is my own.
Mikali took a couple of slow, deep breaths just to bring her nerves back to a manageable level.
sh’Shar: I want to rejoin Starfleet. I think I can rejoin Starfleet. But these years I’ve had on my own, wandering the galaxy pointlessly and doing nothing, really have made me think about things differently. Even setting aside what those people deserve, and focusing entirely on myself... the first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth. If I keep this secret, it is radical, undeniable proof that I haven’t changed as a person. It’s not about what drugs I took or when, it’s not about the Avandar or the Independence or prison or anything else, it’s about this. It’s about this and how I dealt with this. It’s about changing a pattern of behaviour that’s been going on my whole life. It’s about making sure the next time that I have a problem in front of me, I need to make sure that I know I have the courage to do what is right and-and not be a filthy c-c-coward who hides behind excuses.
Mikali had taken a lot from various cultures due to her mixed upbringing, but the Andorian version of the C-word, coward, was spat out in her ethnic tongue, giving it a bitter, vile inflection that required the original to truly communicate how bad it was. The more correct translation might be “traitor”, “honourless dog”, or “scum”, but it carried connotations of all four; the worst kind of person, the kind of person who would betray their closest friends for a slip of latinum. A truly “not work safe” word reserved for the worst kind of person. The kind of person who was a person only in the technical sense.
sh’Shar: I feel that if I can’t bring myself to address this... then I don’t deserve to wear that uniform ever again. Maybe I never did. I don’t know that, but I know this: if I can’t find a way to atone for this, to show to myself and nobody else that I did my best to fix this mistake, then-then I should give up trying to appeal my discharge, and Benna is better off without me. ::She hung her head.:: So I need to find a way. Talk to Veteran’s Affairs and tell them what I know, go wandering around the galaxy trying to find the grave site, hunt down Xhard and kick him in the head until he tells me what planet it was... I don’t know what it will take to satisfy my conscience, but I need to do something.
The Andorian’s eyes closed a moment and she shook her head, chasing away another unwanted thought. The Bajoran opposite her raised her eyebrows for a second, relaxing her expression, pushing her shoulders down and out of the tight hunch they’d gathered into.
sh’Shar: Otherwise everything I’m doing right now is a lie. Otherwise I haven’t really changed positively, I never really healed and improved... I’ve changed sideways, not upward. Otherwise I’m still a shitty person, I’ve just hidden the shittiness under a whole new set of maladaptive coping mechanisms. And that’s unacceptable. For a mother, for a Starfleet officer, and most importantly for myself. ::She took a deep breath, her antenna quivering.:: What do you think?
Carys sat back in her seat, listening without interruption. Her fingers occasionally flashed over her PADD, making a note of something Mikali said or a thought her words prompted. It was striking how often the Andorian slipped into formal, technical terms, able to analyse herself with remarkable clarity—and yet at the same time, get so much wrong.
In so many ways, Mikali was trapped in amber, unable to view the world in anything but the simplest, most childish terms. Black and white, right and wrong, good or bad. Heroes wore uniforms emblazoned with the Starfleet logo, villains crept along in the shadows and shied away from truth and justice.
The universe wasn’t black and white. Mikali’s was a complex situation. She had been a minor at the time, and her background did mitigate the situation a great deal. Any child of the Occupation could talk about how impossible it felt to leave that life behind; when all you’d known was hardship and brutality, it was hard to imagine anything better even existed, let alone believe you could escape to it. Abused where she should have been safe, pulled into a criminal underworld and hooked on ketracel, Mikali hadn’t really had a chance.
But while a bad childhood might explain a lot of behaviour, it didn’t excuse it. There was an old proverb; "the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth", and Mikali had spent her life burning down everyone else’s villages. Drawing a map to one set of ruins didn’t make amends for the fires.
Valen: I can understand how this is a pivotal event for you. It represents everything you dislike about yourself, but it’s also a source of hope and strength. In an impossible situation, you took some control and rebelled against the darkness.
She smiled, shifting in her seat, her movements stiff. Pausing to consider her next words, she touched the silver chains of her earring, as if drawing strength from it.
Valen: So what I think is there’s a lot of value in you wanting to make amends for what happened there, and I believe it could help you grow and heal. But tackling it will likely come at the cost of your ambitions, and you need to make sure that you recognise it is just one event in your life. Your recovery, your identity, your future—none of them are defined by how you deal with this one thing. It’s one piece of your puzzle. A big piece, but one of many.
It was hard for Mikali to even understand such a thing. The event had been pivotal to her; a foundational memory, something that had shaped who she was as an adult. To think of it as just another brick in the wall was... challenging.
But maybe that was the solution. Maybe the best thing to do was to simply leave the past as the past. She couldn’t un-loot the site, she couldn’t bring the people involved back to life. She hadn’t had any part in their deaths.
Thoughts for another time.
TBC
--
Mikali sh'Shar
Civilian
ReachOut Project
O238704AT0
&
Commander Valen Carys
Anthropologist and Clinical Psychologist
USS Gorkon
T238401QR0