The Valley of Love

Posted on 27 Jan 2014 @ 9:20am by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ellsworth Hudson

1,174 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Episode 05 - Solstice
Location: Starfleet HQ, Earth
Timeline: MD 22 - 1100 hrs

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Ellsworth closed his eyes and smiled. Though stretched out on his bunk in the heart of the Starfleet campus in San Francisco, he could almost feel the Indonesian sun on his skin, smell the salty air in his nostrils and hear the sound of swaying palm trees in his ears.

Giving into his tugging emotions, as he almost always did, he snapped his eyes open and grabbed his PADD from the side table. He quickly pulled up the photos he'd insisted they take before leaving Nusa Lembongan; most of them were silly and goofy, but his favorite captured the environment and the trip perfectly. K'os stood strong and upright with his dimpled smile while Ellsworth, smaller and shorter, was nestled in the crook of his right arm with one hand on the half-Vulcan's chest. He was smiling up at him with a doe-eyed look of affection.

The trip had induced in him something he'd never felt before; the aftermath had thus far been a very confusing attempt at processing emotions and trying to better understand just what had happened on the island. Initially he'd felt anxiety that nearly brought his daily activity to a halt. It had become debilitating enough that he'd worried he would have to report to Sickbay, but he eventually worked his way through his own concerns. The worry centered on never seeing K'os or experiencing the same feelings again; eventually, he came to realize that K'os had given no indication that the trip had been a one-time affair. If anything he'd seemed open to the possibility of seeing Ellsworth again, even romantically.

And so his feelings had proceeded from anxiety to confusion. If K'os wasn't going anywhere and the opportunity for the experience to be replicated was on the table, then what exactly had the experience been? Initially, he thought the feelings might have been a side-effect of the telepathic connection they forged; the next morning he'd thought they were linked to the sheer physicality of the night's encounter. But as the hours of separation went by Ellsworth suspected it might be something else. The connection alone didn't seem sufficient enough to explain it, even though it had certainly enhanced the experience. The sex had been truly incredible, but none of his previous encounters had engendered anything close to what he was feeling - sex was sex. So instead, he wondered if it was a sort of romance in its infancy and, for him, feelings of budding love and affection for the handsome, kind, joyful half-Vulcan. Maybe.

It was a true guess. A life of perpetual abandonment and neglect on Betazed combined with nothing except loveless (but generally enjoyable) commercial transactions on Risa had left him without a point of reference for the very basic emotion of love. That wasn't to say that he was without empathy or concern for his fellow man - if anything, he was more empathetic than the average person given the lack of control over his telepathic abilities - but the concept of love as a bond between the hearts of two people eluded him. His investigation of his own feelings since Nusa Lembongan had lead him to undertake a philosophical search through the galaxy's Great Works n a bid to understand the concept of love.

Reluctantly he closed out the picture and pulled up one of the documents he'd been reading, a mystical and poetic work by an ancient Persian religious figure:

In this city the heaven of ecstasy is upraised and the world-illuming sun of yearning shineth, and the fire of love is ablaze; and when the fire of love is ablaze, it burneth to ashes the harvest of reason. Now is the traveler unaware of himself, and of aught besides himself. He seeth neither ignorance nor knowledge, neither doubt nor certitude; he knoweth not the morn of guidance from the night of error. He fleeth both from unbelief and faith, and deadly poison is a balm to him.

The steed of this Valley is pain; and if there be no pain this journey will never end. In this station the lover hath no thought save the beloved, and seeketh no refuge save the friend. At every moment he offereth a hundred lives in the path of his loved one, at every step he throweth a thousand heads at the feet of his beloved.

A lover feareth nothing and no harm can come nigh him: Thou seest him chill in the fire and dry in the sea. Love accepteth no existence and wisheth no life: He seeth life in death, and in shame seeketh glory. Love setteth a world aflame at every turn, and he wasteth every land where he carrieth his banner. Being hath no existence in his kingdom; the wise wield no command within his realm. The leviathan of love swalloweth the master of reason and destroyeth the lord of knowledge. He drinketh the seven seas, but his heart's thirst is still unquenched, and he saith, 'Is there yet any more?'

He hath bound a myriad victims in his fetters, wounded a myriad wise men with his arrow. Know that every redness in the world is from his anger, and every paleness in men's cheeks is from his poison. He yieldeth no remedy but death, he walketh not save in the valley of the shadow; yet sweeter than honey is his venom on the lover's lips, and fairer his destruction in the seeker's eyes than a hundred thousand lives.

Ellsworth placed the PADD in his lap and leaned his head back against the bunk's headboard. He crossed his arms and closed his eyes in frustration. Virtually every written work on the concept of love and romance seemed to involve some aspect of tragedy, too. Must love always be tragic? Or, better yet, must the tragedy be viewed in such a depressingly tragic light? He suspected that if K'os were there with him, he might encourage Ellsworth to focus on the beauty of love rather than its potential tragedy.

For a moment, he reflected on the previous passage in light of his own feelings. Assuming his connection to K'os was the beginning of love then he certainly felt the potential for the force of love to become all consuming, to "burneth to ashes the harvest of reason." And if it wasn't? What if all he was feeling was infatuation? How could you even tell the difference between one and the other?

Leaving aside his philosophical ruminations, he sighed and tried to recall K'os's words about embracing the moment. His black eyes opened, and his head rolled to the left so he could see the computer terminal. The need to reach out to K'os had felt - for what seemed like an exaggerated amount of time - like an itch that needed to be scratched. And he seemed to know with absolute certainty the words of that future conversation, a plaintive entreaty:

When can I see you again?

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PO3 Ellsworth Hudson
Quartermaster
USS Galileo

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