[[USS GALILEO M2 MD15]]: K'oh-nar

Posted on 01 Dec 2012 @ 10:52pm by

1,102 words; about a 6 minute read

ON:

Liyar sits and stares at the screen in front of him. Personal log. Liyar. Lieutenant Junior Grade. Vulcan Defense Forces. Starfleet Diplomatic Detachment. Diplomatic Officer. USS Galileo. Recording pending. Please commence recording, it repeats impatiently. Liyar doesn't know what to say.

Borgeby gard, Fladie, Sweden, August 12, 1904 is resting in his hands. An old paper book, like the kinds that are stacked up the walls in Maenad's office. Crewman Athlen is, in his opinion, unnecessarily anguished in his choice of recommended readings. Rather than offer a recording, he decides to read a passage that has stuck out to him.

"We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience."

Liyar has never noted it, but his voice enters a lower, more rhythmic cadence as he falls into the patterns of words. So different from his own language, the lilting rise and fall. Federation Standard is lighter, and he has always found it lacking substance, but in this he can almost understand why. It can be deeper, but it must be forged with care. Words themselves are not art, they must be formed and molded. Metaphor, still not in his nature, but it doesn't come to him in abstraction anymore. It's been several hours since his last dose of Lexorin. That must be the problem.

"How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."

He thinks of Raek, ironically. His son, who was so very Vulcan in all the wrong ways, and only ever did he want acceptance into the alcove of peace and logic that Liyar carries with him wherever he goes. And maybe it echoes in himself, in his own mindless cacophony of swirling incendiary wrath. It burns at the core of him. Maybe it burns that way for every Vulcan.

"If a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change."

Raek, had been different. So utterly discomposed, and full of blistering ire at all times. Liyar met his force with the stony wall of silence and pacifism. He did not tell Raek the most important thing of all. Assumed it was there, obvious as another eye in the center of his forehead, winding and sorting through the bonds in their familial link. It should have been obvious! he thinks to himself madly, harshly explosive. Lets out a simple breath instead. Yet, he knows the Fullara is open to him, and refuses to entertain the notion. Why? It would be logical. He would forget. The idea is acid in his mind. He will never give it up. It is blinding, searing, as if the memories themselves are openly rebelling, permanently branding inside him.

"Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you. But whatever errors, wishes, and yearnings of your boyhood are operating in you now are not what you remember and condemn. The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, surrendered to so many influences and at the same time so cut off from all real connection with life that, where a vice enters it, one may not simply call it a vice."

And that's when his eyes slide gracelessly to the empty cartridges of Lexorin still littered through the alcove he has built. Perhaps it's why he resists taking it now. He can't let it be a crutch. But he doesn't know if his mind is going to survive this. It's been two months. It's been two months. Nearly three months. Months of this. Still, above any rational, logical discourse, he wishes she was here. She would know what to do. She would be calm, cordial, pleasant. She would lend it to him.

He doesn't read the last part out loud.

One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often the name of an offense that a life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that life and could have been absorbed by it without any trouble. And the expenditure of energy seems to you so great only because you overvalue victory; it is not the "great thing" that you think you have achieved, although you are right about your feeling; the great thing is that there was already something there which you could replace that deception with, something true and real. Without this even your victory would have been just a moral reaction of no great significance; but in fact it has become a part of your life.

"T'Yron," he breathes quietly.

OFF:

Lieutenant (JG) Liyar
Diplomatic Officer, VDF/SDD
USS Galileo

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