A Beautiful Mess

Posted on 02 Mar 2014 @ 1:56am by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ellsworth Hudson

997 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Episode 05 - Solstice
Location: San Francisco
Timeline: MD 23 - 2300 hrs

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Ellsworth left the holodeck feeling depressed. He'd made an absolute fool out of himself in front of the young Cardassian and quite possibly scared off a potential friend. If their positions had been reversed, he'd probably go out of his way to avoid someone as unstable as he'd seemed.

More to the point, he'd discovered that joining Starfleet hadn't been the cure-all he thought it would be. If anything, it had been a brief reprieve from the things that had haunted him from as early as he'd been able to remember. How long could you be angry at people you didn't even remember for dying in a war that had very little to do with them? He'd never even been able to get over the fact that he was angry long enough to address why he was angry with his parents as opposed to the Dominion soldiers that had likely killed them. He assumed. Even that was an open-ended question: how exactly had Denin and Ladana Elren died? Did they perish in the first wave of orbital bombardment? Pick up arms and attempt to defend their home? Or merely get gunned down in the street by an overzealous squadron of Jem'Hadar sent not just to secure a strategic planet but to strike fear into the heart of the Federation with their brutality?

Other war orphans had found happy homes in the welcoming arms of an open, warm society that moved swiftly to rebuild; Ellsworth had ended up being the exception to post-conflict reconstruction. Maybe if his grief had been less complex, less a part of his identity, he may have found a happy home and embarked on a well-adjusted life on Betazed. Instead, he was angry, quarrelsome and resentful of anyone and everyone trying to step into a helpful or familial role. And the fact that everyone on Betazed always knew what you were thinking never worked to his favor - if anything, it only served to heighten his status as a social pariah. Few were willing to take on that level of emotional disturbance, and the resources of the state were stretched thin enough to make rehabilitative services difficult to obtain.

He'd slipped through the cracks as a veritable wild child in constant rebellion. Even his flight to Risa was an act of defiance, a move to "prove" himself to the state officials threatening that his attitude and behavior were bordering on the need for more serious intervention. And it was there that sex had come to the forefront as the single most effective coping mechanism for all the feeling that raged on inside of him. Sex was a soothing salve to raw emotional trauma; the flood of endorphins served to push the emotional flotsam and detriment that accumulated in his mind back out to sea, though the predictability of the tide guaranteed its eventual return. At least in the interim he had a sense of control over himself and his circumstances; its brief and fleeting nature never seemed to concern him, though, as there was never any shortage of opportunity for a pretty face on a pleasure planet.

Even he knew Risa couldn't go on forever, so the busy life of a member of Starfleet seemed like as good an alternative as any. But his first meeting with a Starfleet counselor had been a damning encounter as the young Betazoid lieutenant pronounced Ellsworth a victim of "self-harm," an individual with "low self-esteem, difficulty asserting his own emotional needs, trouble being alone, and suffering from a sense of being bad or defective." He told the young man that his sexual promiscuity might be considered merely an expression of his biological and cultural inclinations if one were to ignore his long, troubled history. Instead, it was a means of asserting control. Ellsworth hated him for having the audacity to voice the things he already knew in a private corner of his mind; the only thing that kept him in counseling sessions was its mandatory nature and his fear of failing at yet another thing by washing out of Starfleet. After that first encounter, he'd been careful to keep conversation light and superficial with counselors and to avoid the Betazoids; as if sensing the same things as the people of Betazed, all his successive counselors avoided the obvious problems as much as he did.

Ellsworth stopped on the sidewalk and looked around, suddenly aware that he'd been walking on autopilot. He had no idea where he was - still within the city of San Francisco, evidently a residential neighborhood, but not one with which he was familiar. He felt lost, which seemed appropriate for his mood. He was always lost. He'd come a long way from his adolescence - no more was he taking on a new "client" every night - but it was clear he'd gained very little headway in addressing the core issues afflicting him. Given the opportunity, the right stimuli to trigger the right memories, he would apparently fall apart as quickly as he'd ever done.

How long could one remain willfully ignorant, purposefully lost, drifting? There had to come a turning point at some time where enough became enough and he finally decided to face his problems head-on once and for all. He couldn't drift for his entire life, floating from one personal and social disaster to the next. Standing under the impersonal glow of a streetlight, he felt firmly resolved to never have a repeat of the holodeck experience from earlier in the evening. It wouldn't benefit him personally, and it didn't wouldn't help his career.

He turned around on the sidewalk and began his trek back to the Presidio. For the first time in his life, he realized there was one thing that promised to anchor him in place, one thing that offered at least the prospect of hope in addressing all that haunted him. There was K'os.

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PO3 Ellsworth Hudson
Quartermaster
USS Galileo

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