One More Time

Everyone's looking for something.  Sometimes you don't know what you're looking for.  All you see is darkness.  Sometimes darkness finds you.  You don't know why you went looking for darkness, but it finds you.  Somehow, somewhere, in this crazy mixed-up galaxy, it's always there.  Out there, between the stars.  The universe was born in darkness.  Natural.  Primeval.  It was the light that messed it up.

It's in the back alleys of the Romulan underworld.  It's in their black hair.  In their dark eyes.  Gray is the Romulan heart, green the blood, but black veins pump it.  It's there, in the pretty hand whose long delicate fingers I know so well.  In the tip of the phaser pointed at my head.

Green arteries flinch behind jade-tinted knuckles.  High slender cheekbones spring out of soft skin, the complexion of green apples.  Miratu.  She's Miratu, but more severe.  Angry.  At me.  Or herself.  Dark eyes flash, behind the phaser.  Beautiful black diamonds, and just as hard.

Those dark beautiful eyes.  That dark beautiful mane.  That voluptuous Romulan figure, crisp and fierce in a severe black suit.

I thought I knew her.  Thought I knew what I was doing.

She's supposed to be dead.

"You shouldn't have come here, Jordan.  You're not supposed to be here."

Sterling was right.  I should have listened.  I don't know where he is.  The other three are out there, somewhere in the Romulan capital – Sterling, Rhoan, Kitana – waiting for my signal.  But it's not going to come.  D'Artagnan, meet thy maker.

"I love you."  The words come out weak; I don't even mean to say them.  Somehow some part of me thinks that's all that matters, that should be enough.  Romulans are passionate people, I remember saying, a few days ago – to Rhoan, or Sterling, I can't remember.  I couldn't help myself.  Then, or now.

"Romulans don't love.  It's not our way.  I never could make you understand."

Passion: Not the same as love.  I guess it's the same stubbornness that brought me, pushed me here.  But I don't wish I had learned.  I don't wish I'd listened when I could have.  What else is there now?  I can handle dying.  I died for her.  Would have died for her.  I was dead before I showed up.  But then, so was she.  Supposedly.

Now, of course, it all makes sense.  The kids, my sister... Uval... It's all been downloaded to the PADD in my pocket.  The details of the Beta Rykhis operation.  I tried to transmit it to the Federation Embassy, but this facility's been shielded.

"I can't believe you made me love you."

"I did no such thing.  Humans need love... need to love.  You did it to yourself."

"So, what you waiting for?"  Why is she yapping?  She's got me point-blank.  Gloating was never her style.  "Do us both a favor.  Pull the trigger.  Finish the job.  That's all it ever was for you, right?  A job.  A mission.  Vor'ana... Romulan intelligence officer.  Agent of the Tal Shiar."  I lace the last words with every loathing ounce of contempt I feel.  Not for her.  For me.

"I will," she says, somewhat kindly.  Her voice is never bitter.  "When I am ready.  But we're alone.  There is nowhere you can go.  You can't get out.  You came to find me.  You've found me.  Why hurry?  You said it yourself: You're already dead.  Let's stop the clock.  Just for now.  Let this end stretch out for as long as we wish."

For how long?  Another year?  Five years?  Another life made up for me?  I ask her none of these things.

"What do you want?"

"To know what it feels like.  Really feels like."  She pulls close, presses herself up.  "You were always good to me, Jordan.  I never hated a moment of it."  The phaser lowers.  Fingertips brush the red stud on the hilt, nails painted black.  Fingerprint sensors.  DNA-activated.  She slides the phaser into a hip-holster, cradling her butt cheek.  Her nails scratch my throat.  Her smile is voltage.  It's that posture, that look, that feeling I know too well.  Could never forget.  Long black diamond eyes, glittering, sly.  "Come, Jordan.  You and I.  For real, this time.  One last time... for old times' sake."

I could never resist.  That was my weakness, I suppose.

"Do you know what you've done?!  Do you know what you've done to me?  Do you!?"

Electrodes are hooked to my head; straps bind me to the table.  They're decompiling my brain.  It's the same thing they did to me a year ago.  She did.

It was never real.  Never real.  Only what I wanted to be real, what my mind could never let go.  I remember that counselor, on the ship afterwards, trying to help me, trying to tell me that it was all an illusion.  An induced, neuro-interactive illusion.  Years of fantasy.  Vanessa, my sister, the counselor tells me, was a coping mechanism.  I invented her, to create that bridge, when they tried to separate me.  From her.  From my beautiful Vor'ana.  My wife.  Mother of my children.

Beta Rykhis.  On the edge of Federation space, where two worlds meet, at the tip of Romulan reach.  They tried to expand that reach, annex Beta Rykhis.  Before the peace, before the Republic – when tensions still ran high, when the alliance was fragile, waning as the war which forged it receded into the past.  My ship was sent to investigate.  I headed the away team.  They captured me.  Stuck their mind probes in my skull, rummaged through its contents.  They wanted to know what I knew about their operation.  Wasn't much.  They refused to believe it.  I was holding out; somehow I conditioned myself to resist their probes.  They had to dig deeper, break my defenses.  They created a world where I could relax.  Be opened up, transformed.  A new set of memories.  Vor'ana, my interrogator.  The love of my life.  And it worked.  She broke me.  I loved her more than I thought humanly possible to love.  A Starfleet officer, in love with a Romulan.  Too hard to imagine?

I knew nothing.  They wiped me, separated me, sent me back for my ship to find me.  No trace of their little 'operation' existed.

Except when they tried to separate me... when she tried, going back to stop us from ever having a life together.  We had a fight, a crimp in our engagement.  The marriage was off.  I needed help.  I used my sister.  Vanessa.  Made her convince me to give Vor'ana another chance.  My excuse for my weakness.  My need to love.  An entire imaginary life, as imaginary as my son and my daughter, rewritten in a mental heartbeat, revised and abridged like a novel on a computer screen.  Vanessa was not Vor'ana's idea.  Vor'ana let me go.  I never returned the favor.

We both should have did a better job.

I liked Romulans.  Thought they were great.  I was the fool.

And now they're at it again.  I'm on the table.  Helpless.  Vor'ana, in my mind.

Except there's no more information to find.  The Cadre, Alpha Kyriakis, Uval, Singfors, Miratu, everything that's happened since... They got that from me.  A year of depression makes you very cooperative.

No more information to find, and still she's here.  Kissing me.  Holding me.  Loving me.

Torturing me.

No worse than before.

At climax I strike.  The gap is bridged... the channel, open.  Like Vulcans in a mind meld, this Romulan version emulating their racial cousins, separated by evolution's centuries.  Our minds are linked.  Our minds are one.  She knows what I know... and now what she knows, I know.

We're completely open.  Directly honest, for the first time in our lives.  Time for the rage, the pain, the payback.

She screams, in her body's jerking throes.

And now she's huddled on the floor, crumpled against the console.  Eyes staring into nothing.  Empty black diamonds.  Behind her the computer works, lights and readouts flashing, obediently displaying the contents of my mind in numeric strings of data.  Unaware and uncaring of its master's end.  Sad, that it had to end like this.  It was over a long time ago.

Romulan security arrives.  The rest of the Cadre with them.  Somehow they found me.  They release me.

I'm kneeling beside her.  She whispers, mumbles, staring blankly.  I lean close.

"One more time... one more time..."

I found a song once in Starfleet databanks.  Old song – twentieth century, Earth.  'Do that to me, one more time... I can never get enough... of a man like you...'  She said she liked it.  Played it endlessly, for a while.  Sang it around the house.  About when she conceived my son.

"We should go, Jordan."

Sterling and Kitana wait behind her.  Surrounded by Romulan security, waiting, not patiently, for the offworlders to leave.

In the cell, behind the glass, Vor'ana rocks sadly, whimpering... "One more time... one more time..."

Ships hover outside the starbase viewport.  Stars burn sharp and bright.  Fitz's voice is tender, heartfelt.  Genuinely sympathetic.

I reach out, touch the glass, feel its cold.

"You don't owe me an apology, Admiral."

"I sent you on the mission.  If I had only known..."

"We did what we went to do.  We exposed them."  The Tal Shiar cockroaches are scurrying, searching for darkness.  There's a foot made of light, coming down on top of them.  Too late.  Stomped.  The galaxy, once again safe from evil.

"Yes.  You did."  His voice is different.  "I'm putting your team on hiatus."  I don't ask him to explain.  "You need time to recuperate.  Your whole team needs a break, after a mission like that."

I don't argue.  I don't really care.

"Jordan... some personal advice, from me to you: Go home.  Take some time off."

I scoot forward on the mat, slide my arms around her.  Gently, I pull her close.  Her head nods on my shoulder.

It wasn't real.

It was real.  A marriage, of free will and consent, for all the wrong reasons.  Nothing's changed.  It was all in my mind.  Still is.  I could never forget... and I never will.  She was my wife.

She still is.