Lieutenant Ras El'Heem - Thief of Destiny

[Ras El'Heem]

((Deck 6, Isolation Room Three, Sickbay, USS Khitomer))

 

He saw it move across Tori’s face like a shadow undecided on its final shape. Like something fragile and unguarded that didn’t belong in a place full of medical instruments and sterile light. Not remorse, exactly, but remorse’s smaller, meeker cousin. The kind that children wear when they’ve broken something they can’t fix. It lingered at the corners of her mouth and in the way her eyes refused to meet his. An admission without words. It reminded him of Amelia in those rare moments when intellect gave way to something softer and almost innocent. The resemblance was much stronger than he wanted to admit.

 

Tori: :: Softly. :: I'm sorry...  That wasn't supposed to happen.

 

Ras felt it first in the gut, not as pain but as a quiet distortion. A vibration perhaps, beneath the normal rhythms of thought. A hiccup. It was the kind of feeling that didn’t announce itself so much as seep through the cracks between facts, settling somewhere deep and irrational. The mind could reason its way out of fear, but the body always knew better. It was as though his organs had drawn their own conclusions, whispering to one another in a dialect older than logic. He couldn’t yet name what was coming, but the thought alone unsettled him.

 

El’Heem: ::Seriously and slowly:: What ::beat:: do ::beat:: you ::beat:: mean?

 

His eyes stayed fixed on her, though his mind was sent reeling and his thoughts fractured under the weight of the implication. The notion crawled beneath his skin and almost itched. His loss. His sacrifice was somehow tether to them. Like it was their fault. Her fault. The logic unraveled and reknit itself in uneven patterns, each thread pulling tighter until it hurt to think. Without a doubt, their interference had warped causality and nudged the sequence that carried him to that moment, but it had been his choice to step out into that nebula, to walk willingly into the swirls of color, to sacrifice himself for his ship. That had been his will. Right?

 

And yet, hearing her speak it aloud, he felt a hear rise from his center, like a slow primal beat of a drum. Unsure of which rhythm it was going to take. It filled his chest and throat until the air itself seemed thick with it, and the furrow in his brow etched that inner spark into the map of his face.

Tori: I mean...  :: Hesitating. :: Whether we like it or not, there's already been consequences.  :: Beat :: We needed a Hobart Hole big enough to transit, so I found a way to make sure y'all made one.  Somehow, a little nudge must've been enough to change things in other ways... :: A grimace :: Like a hand.

 

The wrinkles around his eyes went soft and he looked past her for a moment. No. Her guilt was misplaced, he decided. She was guilty of putting them in harm’s way, but she could no more have forced him to take the runabout to the probe without permission than she could stop her future from coming to pass on her own. Their fates were inexplicably linked.

 

Matthews: :: Hand going to massage the bridge of his nose :: Okay so, am I hearing that you reached back through time using a smaller hole - I’m not calling it that! Another hole in space, time? And manipulated us into doing things. :: He glanced at Ras :: I think I would have preferred a phone call from the future. 

 

He felt a movement in her face and when he focused on her again, she was looking back at him. A bravery he knew she had in her.

 

Tori: I'm sorry.  I knew what we were risking for ourselves with this scheme, but you didn't even know there was a scheme.  We -- I never meant to hurt you - I don't know how to make you believe that, but it's the truth.  If you want to blame me... Fine. :: head falling, then sullen muttering :: My actions, my consequences.

 

A long, festering silence stretched between them, heavy and raw. Their eyes held, neither willing to flinch, and inside him the tension wound itself into something near breaking. It felt like a rope pulled taut within his chest, tugging at both ends. One end hissing that he’d still have his hand if not for her, the other spitting back that he was the master of his own fate. That no unborn child could strip him of the choice that made him who he was in that moment. That his agency was not affected by the meddling of time. The strain built until it gave way with an almost physical snap. The fight left his body in a deep inhale and a slow exhale. His face softened as the wrinkles around his eyes dissolved and his focus cleared. His eyes dropped and then traced back up her frail body to meet her gaze once more, finally really seeing her for the first time. She wasn’t the ghost of blame, but a frightened girl standing in the wreckage of what neither of them could undo. At least not yet.

 

El'Heem: You… ::faultering:: I… ::regaining composure:: Blame would be too easy. You can’t put a bow around it, nice and neat. You reached into time and placed your finger on the scale. You didn’t see what it would take from you ::beat:: from any of us. Desperation never results in what you think it will. ::long pause:: now here we are ::lifted prosthetic hand, palm open then squeezing it shut dramatically:: both still bleeding from the same wound.

 

Tori: Response

 

His hand fell, returning to rest on the edge of the bed. Whatever courage he’d scraped together to face his actions one final time dissolved. That day, those choices, the cost, were all etched into the tablet of time. Irreversible even for the travelers. He let out a long breath from deep in his belly that signified surrender more than relief then turned to Richard, wordlessly inviting him to thaw the room back into motion.

 

Matthews: Meh, you’ll do a better job of beating yourself up over this than we could. :: He shrugged :: Course if you want to do that trick and nudge a younger me to make better choices on prom night. I’ll absolve you of any guilt. 

 

He glanced back at Tori, his expression taking on a more sheepish visage. The weight in his had shifted, lightened, if only slightly and left him feeling strangely hollow but unburdened. When he finally answered Richard, his words carried an easy surface calm, but beneath them ran a quiet undercurrent meant only for her.

 

El'Heem: This is as far as they go. They won’t need to travel back any further after this.

Matthews: Worth a try, hey if that changed I might not even be here now and would be safe Ras. Imagine a world you never met me, so quiet, so peaceful. 

 

Tori: Response

 

El'Heem: Time is strange that way. You can almost never avoid a paradox.

 

Matthews: Then again, if you go meddling with my timeline, who knows what happens to a few planets I had a hand in saving, or at least whole populations. There was that dinosaur and Earth’s distant past when I had to deal with time travel too. :: He glanced at Tori and shrugged :: So much to take into consideration when you go changing people’s lives. But what do I know, right? 

 

It was often that Richard was off in his own world, unable to parse subtext or read a room. He marched to the beat of his own drum and that was never going to change. It was in that moment, the incredulous disruption of the temporal bond the two were having, that Ras softened on his stance of the trio. Whether he agreed with their actions or not, he still wasn’t convinced they could change anything significant enough to make a difference. That wasn’t going to stop him from trying.

 

El'Heem: ::tightening his jaw:: let’s forget pre…err…postmeditation assassination is on the table at all. What other plans have you worked over to stop the Lattice Alliance from succeeding.

 

Tori: Response

Matthews: ::  Giving his tricorder a little wave :: I get the feeling that those of us that didn’t make it. And aren’t close family friends in the future. Might not get much consideration in your planning. Here’s a little advice, your actions are going to impact more than you and your immediate family, keep that in mind.  Now, if you excuse me. I’m just going to take a step back and take notes while you two talk, and make so many contingency plans, it makes Batman look reasonable. 

 

Ras felt it before she even said anything. She already knew. The stretch of time between her past (his future) had begun to color her anger, or at least that’s how it registered to him. Time had its ways of manipulating everything. Events, namely, but also memory and the sharpness of emotions that were tied to them.

 

Tori: Response

 

El'Heem: Why don’t we just start from how you arrived at your baby Hitler being the critical point of no return? Why not make a Hobart Hole further in the past? Stop the Sheliak and Tholians from ever joining forces?

 

Richard moved away to find a more comfortable vantage point and began muttering to himself. What notes he took were going to be up to his own interpretation and Ras wasn’t sure how useful that’d be for an interview as such, but the man had a way of still doing his job despite his unorthodoxy.

 

((OOC: Removing Richard’s dialogue here as I assume he was talking to himself under his breath and Ras and Tori would not hear him.))

 

Tori: Response

 

Matthews: Oh, wait, question. How many attempts at time travel did you make? Sorry, just clicked that made it sound like you had to take a few cracks at it. If you were, why the heck did you settle for using the deadly radiation method? 

Tori: Response

 

((OOC: Not going to push this any further so Max can catch up. Again, my apologies for the delay!))

 

TAGS/TBC

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Lieutenant Ras El’Heem

Science Officer

USS Khitomer (NCC-62400)

K240106RE3