Electrophoresis

Posted on 26 Jan 2013 @ 2:05pm by Lieutenant Lilou Zaren
Edited on on 26 Jan 2013 @ 3:56pm

4,458 words; about a 22 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo: Deck 4, Jefferies tubes
Timeline: MD02: 1500 hrs

[ON]

Lilou collapsed in the tight crawlspace, pressing her feet against one side and her hands against the other in a face down fetal position. She was still shaking from the stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid panic attack and she couldn't get it to stop. Awful. But the pressure of trying to force her small body to press at the thick, sturdy walls was helping to relieve some of the pressure. It was something to do, in any case, even if it was futile. Something to focus on, aside from her own shame and fear.

She'd been doing so much better. So much better. She'd been breathing. She'd been holding it in. Managing. And so what if she'd managed to pull herself back this time before she'd gone and done something truly stupid like warding Kiwosk off at laser point just because he was who he was and had done what he'd done. But wasn't that what they were all like? Every one of them, pushing and snarling and grabbing her. Calloused hands, gritty with dirt and sweat, wrapping around her, pulling her apart like so much scrap. See what's inside. How it works. Make it scream. Pitiful scream. Make it louder. She gritted her teeth together, giving up on the sides of the crawlspace in favor of pressing her hands hard against her chest. She could remember the feel of her rib, her arm, her nose; taste the crunching sound, the shattering in her teeth.

Cold water. Dripping into a still, cool lake of-

Blood rushing out of her nose into her mouth, spitting it out with teeth and how awful had that been, the taste of that, feeling her wisdom teeth floating in the coppery fluid in her mouth, tapping against her palate, almost rolling down her throat as she scrambled, thin nails breaking, need more calcium, run, run, run, run-

Stop. Stop. Stop.

He'd tell. Of course he would. He'd go to the nearest marine and laugh about how scared the pathetic little engineer was. How she didn't deserve to be chief. How could she. She couldn't handle a tap on the shoulder? A simple conversation? Idiot. Idiot. She pressed her head against the wall and pushed. Pressure helped. It always helped. There was safety in the walls, in the tubes, in the crawlspaces and air ducts. Her space. Better than anywhere else. Safe. She knew it. Knew how to get from point A to point B faster than a turbo lift. Safe.

Spirits, her head ached. Her eyes hurt from the horrid tears wreaking havoc, hot and thick and salty. Just stop. Just breathe. Please. She shut her eyes hard, but the tears wouldn't stop. Cold water. Cave breeze. Dark water. Ripples. She shook, dissolving into silent, shuddering tears-

Pressure. Not the good kind. A canister about to combust, the shrieking, clawing sounds it made as though something inside were stuck and screaming to get out. Begging, for one tiny pinprick. One small incision amidst the beating chaos to let everything within burst, shatter outward, shards of glass and pain and terror trapped. Eit'jae du sarlah nash-veh, ha-kel. One voice. There might be a hand. Gripping. Liyar whirled around and caught phantoms. Var-tor skann t'nash-veh, two voices, three voices, ashau au nash-veh kwon-sum dungi! Var-tor au! A thousand voices. Sseu nouhha, dhat! A hundred thousand. Arhem dhat orhae diam. A million. Hwi dhat orhae arhva.

Pressure. The hallways are empty. Empty. Liyar took a deep breath and sat down straight in the middle of the hallway. This was not happening. This was not happening. He could not go back to Ka'veya. Something was wrong. Something - Structure, logic, foundation, control. A structure cannot stand without a foundation. Logic is the foundation of function. Function is the essence of control... (Step one. The shield exists within. The shield exists without. The shield must repel it back. Faevren's voice speaks softly. He's always soft. Find the turmoil. Turn it to mist. Condense it in a ball. Find the crack, carefully. Careful now. Wide open, fling it away. The roaring winds take it out, out into the beating heart of Feeling.)

Eneh vikra hwi? Liyar pressed his hands to his neck as if feeling for a pressure point, hunched over in the middle of the hallway. It could not, could not turn into that - Sa-mekh! Au'tra dash-tor m'aih! It's dark. Lights flickering. Blue-white light, the creak and groan of a ship swerving violently under an onslaught - NO. Liyar struggled to his feet. The pressure was turning into crumbling blocks. The halls fell away, and he ducked unconsciously to avoid the great columns falling before him. Buildings. Structures. Huge sheets of metal and stone and brick. The sky is blood red, fire, hot, everywhere is crumbling. Careening, a siren sound of blood. Green, spattered. Iron. Steel. Screaming. Hwi irea hre vastam, iurrhi meraere iy'tassiudh, theah! Idh euhre haenither! Mhrah dhat sien. Arhem hlun, idh euhre haenither! HNAHN, HNAHN, HNAHN!

Liyar was crawling now. (Thank god for duty shifts, but he hasn't the frame of mind to be grateful). Hands and knees, like an infant, blinking hard and trying not to get caught - get killed - the planet's swallowing itself whole - it's falling apart around him. But there's something in the distance. A beacon. Light. Energy. Pulsating. Life. Life, life, life, he breathed and felt like he was about to let out a sound of relief. Life. He needed it. It would get him out of here, out of this place, he had to get out of here. He crawled toward it, unseeing. He pushed past the rubble, the bodies, crawled forward until he could fasten his hands onto the latch - latch? Liyar shuddered, he was almost there. He pulled the repair juncture hatch of the Galileo off as if it were paper, ripping it clean off of its hinges and throwing it aside. He couldn't see Lilou below, only knew he had to get to her. It. Life. He reached down, grabbing her instantly on the shoulder. Tor du kup, traveksu. C'thia-- she crumples, purple explosions. He spread his fingers out and wrapped them around her arm, and did the only thing he could do in the state they were both in.

LIFE. It was a burst of bright light, like dying, finally. White, calm, releasing the pressure entirely into a strange golden rain, bringing them both back, an odd-space of wonder and breathing. No more panic. No more fear. The light-notes of music, like a snowglobe, only there was no sound. The snow was effortless and fell warm, ethereally.

Liyar blinked his eyes open, breathing calmly. He was halfway in a Jefferies tube. Holding a girl. He let out a breath. And then another. He dropped her arm, blinking down at her. "You were -" he was blinking harshly, and breathed. Again. "I should -" He didn't know what to do. "You were hurting." He didn't make a habit of doing that. He was not Sekhet. He did not take away the pain. But he had to stop it, didn't he? Had to stop - had to stop it. "Recep -" he swallowed, the only sign aside from the blinking and the staring and the farawayness that he was emotionally affected at all. "Receptive telepathy." Breathe. In. Out. "I am a receptive telepath. You -" He was rambling. He had to stop rambling. Had to leave the girl alone. But it wasn't that simple. Her pain had bled through. Her pain was the catalyst. Pushing and pulsing and beating and grimey, dirt, filth, it was her panic, just as well. How could he leave it? "You are sad." No she wasn't. Maybe she was but that wasn't - it didn't encapsulate it all. "You are hurting." That was better. "I tried -" No. Wrong. He needed words. Eloquent, graceful words. He knew words. Could speak. "I did not intend to take it away, it reacted -" No it didn't! he raged inside. "My mind reacted," he corrected himself, "Poorly. It was instinctive."

Lilou gasped as though coming up for air, which... she was. Surfacing. Not only surfacing; surfacing into something she hadn't felt in years. Actual, real calm. Thick as Talarian honey. She didn't notice the arms around her. She didn't feel them leave. She just lolled, blinking slowly, as the sudden gleam of gold resonated and began to fade. Words. She blinked again, trying to focus... and she could. Miraculous. He was speaking in fits and starts. Her forehead felt light. Bright. As though she might just float upwards because of it. "Thank you," she whispered. She could have cried again, not from fear, just from pure gratitude. Her words weren't enough. He'd taken away the moment, the memory, the pain, the fear, the awfulness. He'd taken it and blown it away like sand from the palm of his hand.

Liyar started to shake his head. No, he wanted to say. He made sure not to think it. No, that was all wrong. This was all wrong. He should not have done that. He ran through some of the things he remembered Faevren telling him. Panic wasn't good. Panic attacks were not productive. Isn't that what they said? They even had pills for it. Even did some of the same with him. Emotions, pain, experiences. They could only be dealt with through calm, wasn't it? Wasn't that the foundation of Vulcan meditation? Yet, he still could not help but feel like he'd somehow deprived her of an essential experience. Her essential experience of pain. He didn't want to be the one to make her realize that it could be taken away, easy as pushing a button. It did not do well to heal that way. But he couldn't - looking down at her, at the calm itself, at the change in her face from sobbing to something Other - couldn't bring himself to complete the thought. He didn't know what to say. The Tarinol was gone, now. The fuzziness turned into bright perception, bright as it always was. The numbers were golden and tangible. He could reach them, now. Touch them with mental grabby-fingers.

"Calm," he said, the one word he'd been focused on. The thing he hadn't transposed to himself, still stilted and disorganized as always. "I did not mean to change you. Your experience." He remembered a memory from Sekhet. From K'Rath, the rival boy in Sekhet's childhood. Sekhet with fingers outstretched, features mangled in rage. Give me your pain! and the boy had crumpled, completely devoted, obedient, wonderfully content to obey Sekhet's every word, and Sekhet had commanded him to go within and never come out again. It was a dangerous thing. Liyar inhaled again, steadily this time. "The pyllora," he repeated the foreign word without translation, "They tell me that pain is separate from panic. You, I recall that you had asked," he was starting to get a better semblance of his bearings now, his words returning to their usual rhythmic lilt, "You had asked how one would go about ridding one's self of pain. I cannot offer you this. I do not think any person can. But, perhaps, I could help you learn to calm yourself. To be rid of panic. In the proper way. A way that you can use independently."

It didn't seem to occur to him that he was offering life-changing revelations to a girl down in a Jefferies tube.

Lilou smiled. She didn't grin or beam or smirk. She just smiled, and it was beatific. She had peace and gold in her eyes and there was a Vulcan in her safe, safe, safe jefferies tubes who could easily have been shining or glowing from within. He could have sprouted wings. She felt as though she might. Light and peace. Peace and light. Thank every merciful spirit above, below, and around. It wasn't that she was in a daze. She wasn't. And she understood in a simple, pure sort of way that he was telling her this feeling wasn't going to last on its own. But he could show her how. He could make this something she could call upon. If she learned. If she could. She laughed, a quiet hiccup. Of course she could. She was smart; she was very, very smart and there wasn't anything in the way of her brain right now. Nothing she needed to hold and clamp and fight to keep at bay. Just... she breathed deep. In. Out. Easy. "Yes," she murmured. "That would be very kind."

Liyar knelt down, resting one of his arms against the outside of the hatch and simply sitting there. He knew it wouldn't last forever, that she would come crashing back to reality and truly understand the weight of his words. So he sat, and allowed the moments to pass, as she readjusted herself to her reality. She hadn't seen him crawling through the halls, fighting off invisible brick walls and dying families. So she couldn't have really known his motivation for ripping out the hatch and suddenly thrusting this state upon her. Yet, he wasn't sure how to go about explaining, either. They each had their own experiences. He'd seen enough of the turmoil in her mind to know that calling her young and innocent would be an insult.

He looked down and over to the side, still in Thinky Thoughts mode. He couldn't truly know the pain of torture, or - whatever he had seen. He only knew the pain of bodies disintegrating, of being slammed with a rain of twisted junk and metal, debris, feeling them through his hands. Lungs. Head. Chest. Stomach. Watching while his family died over and over again. Not his, yet his, there as he was. In a second. Grief and pain, and real agony through dying. Knowing that your family was dying, and that you were dying, and your whole world was coming to an end. And then it started again. Another family. Another person. Another friend. Another co-worker. Another military supervisor. Another and another and a billion. Liyar had to keep breathing. It had been two years since he'd had to deal with this, but it still lived in him. He spoke only when he could see the light of normalcy begin to return to her eyes, the sense of reality and awareness of true cogency.

"We all have our pain, Ensign Peers." How foolish it was, to condense a billion lifetimes into one sentence. "When I felt you, in the hallway, it resonated within me. As a receptive telepath, I feel and experience the things that others around me feel and experience. At times, it intensifies my own experiences, and memories. The hayal-estuhl was an instinctive response for me. The," he rose his hand, trying to explain. "The things, that you feel now. To try and stop that experience, for the both of us. What you would learn would be more akin to physiological retraining. Meditation, neuropressure. If you wish to learn, I will teach you, but it is not the same as the hayal-estuhl. And I am no pyllora."

As the gold continued to fade, Lilou began to take stock. She was lying on the floor. In the Jefferies tubes. Crammed in, basically. Still twisted at an odd angle, but that was fine. She was flexible. Nothing hurt. Not yet anyway. And she watched him, her gaze flicking back and forth between his eyes. Well, obviously he was a receptive telepath. Athlen had said that just the day before, as though it hadn't been obvious from the fact that he was picking thoughts from her head like grapes from a bowl. But she'd never had any kind of telepath chase her into the tubes because they felt what she felt. Saw what she saw.

What? she wondered. What did he see? How much? Enough to know what happened? What happened after? Who they were? How absolutely necessary it is for no one to know? Then her sight cleared with a jolt - no one should have to experience that, see that, no one but her. Had she done that? She wasn't psionic, she didn't have any kind of... anything. She'd had plenty of tests. Excellent isoboramine levels, but nothing doing when it came to motivating her brain to do anything other than sit there and wait indefinitely to be joined with. But he'd felt her. She'd bled that horror onto someone else. She would never have wished it on anyone, not anyone, not ever. Not that. And she'd somehow... whammied him with it?

"I don't speak Vulcan," she whispered. "But anything is better than... that." Were there words to apologize? There had to be. How did one apologize for beating an unsuspecting victim about the telepathic brain with memories she herself could barely deal with?

Liyar blinked. He didn't realize he'd been lapsing. "The hayal-estuhl, the calming-touch." He gestured with his hands a little. "And the pyllora, a counselor. I did see, and experience, some of what occurred to you, yes. What happened as you say." He wasn't fully himself yet, not enough to differentiate the spoken from the thought. Not at this point in his life, when he was barely learning to get a grip on this P11 thing in the first place. Not when he could still hear the slam and crash of monuments driving into the ground, the sky and earth opening up and swallowing everything. Somehow, some way, he had to force himself to hide it in his eyes. But he couldn't. Not all the way. It was still there, a haunting shadow. But he spoke clearly, concisely. Logically. It would have to do. "Enough that I offer my sincerest empathy. I can promise you that I will not compromise your privacy. The experiences," he said, looking up as if he had somehow stored what he'd been discussing above his head, but he changed tacks at the last second. "The brain has a way of giving an individual an associative chain reaction. That is, when you see one thing, you immediately associate it with another thing." He decided at this point his best bet was honesty, even if he didn't feel like divulging something this personal to a complete stranger. As a Vulcan, admitting such a thing was completely unorthodox and highly unusual, but he did not know what else he could do. He had came over to her, interrupted her, and practically thrust his mental presence into her head completely unbidden. And it did not also change the fact that he too had seen something very personal of hers. Accidental or not. He did not have much tact, did not understand emotions or those who expressed them, but he knew in some instinctive way that he had to level with her. Honestly. "The resonating experiences I referred to, specifically, were my own. In my own life. You were highly agitated and broadcasting. Fear, anger, distress. Panic. This triggered a similar, but different response within myself, based on my own associations. There is no necessity for apology, Ensign Peers. You should not feel you need to reign in your responses simply on my account. As I have stated, however, I would not be averse to helping you cope with some of your panic and fear. I do have some experience with the phenomenon."

Her brows lifted slightly as he spoke. Empathy. She knew quite well about chain reactions and the way the mind could skip easily from a current event to a past one. That particular chain was one of the banes of her existence. But whether he thought the apology necessary or not, she was responsible. She'd lapsed, lost control, and because of that weakness, she'd dragged him into his own version of hell. Not to mention coupled it with her own. No, apology was definitely... or if not apology, then something. There had to be some means of making it up to him. She'd cast him into mental torture and he'd saved her from hers. She was in his debt now. And until she figured out how to repay it, she'd remain there. Kindnesses were too few and far between for her to let one go unnoted. "I'd be grateful," she answered. More debts. But worth it. "And... I thank you. For... pulling me out. And for your discretion."

No debt, his mind rebelled, but he kept it contained. As a Vulcan, he understood the concept well. Understood and could even condone it. But he found that it was a difficult position, to be the one owed. What did she owe him for? He could not think to ask. No one could be naive enough to assume he'd done it out of the purity of his good heart, yet, he hadn't done it in expectation, either. It had been Vulcan. An instinctive response. One wasn't simply one. It was the one part of the Kir'shara, the one thing out of all of it. All the analects, all the dialogues, all the back-and-forth arguments, all the asinine scholars convinced that one man brought about logic and not simply centuries of thinking beings learning and growing (although, he supposes, it's rational to attribute it to one person. Rational. It fits in a box. Logic started HERE with giant latinum arrows pointed at it) - the one thing to always stand out the purest, simplest mathematics he knew. The spear in the other's heart is the spear in your own. How could a debt be applied to something he'd strove to live by for his entire life? He wasn't perfect. He failed a lot. Many people thought he was unkind and often times he was. He had been an overbearing father and a poor husband. He had hurt many people. As many as any other living being could. He remembered his words to Maenad. It is repugnant that we as sentient beings can find no other repast than to engineer various ways of hurting each other. And he wasn't exempt. But he did try. When you could feel the pain of another as surely as you felt your own pain, it did well to at least try. But as a Vulcan, he could also understand her reaction. He had been in debt before. A debt of honor, of gratitude. There never really was a solution to such things cast. He could not just tell her, debt dissolved. It was something she would have to feel for herself. When the time was right. He nodded. "You are welcome, Ensign Peers." He shorted up his mental shields and then extended a hand down to her. "If you would like, there is tea in my office. If you still require some time to assimilate the experience of what has happened."

"I appreciate that," she said and, for the first time in a long time, accepted an offered hand without argument and took to her feet. "I appreciate that," she said again, "but this is a moment of clarity. A rare one. I owe it to you. But I owe a little clarity to a friend who's... been handling my non-clarity for a while now." She was nearly an inch taller, just by standing up straight, her shoulders relaxed and down where they hardly ever were. "Raincheck?"

He looked around the halls and over his shoulders. And then he looked up at the ceiling. "I do not see any rain, Ensign Peers," he told her with the utmost of sincerity.

Lilou grinned, quick and easy, "Oh well." She shrugged, eyes gleaming innocently. "Always good to check. Maybe next time." She looked at the hatch door down the hall, then peered back at the torn hinges. "Huh." She looked at him. Looked at the hatch door. "Huh." She tugged her ear. "Tell you what. I'm glad you're on my side."

Liyar blinked over at the slightly mangled hatch door, and followed her gaze back to the hinges. "I was, perhaps, overeager," he admitted Not At All Sheepishly. He walked over and picked it up just as easy. "I shall repair it," he told her decisively, balancing it in his hands. He would have to replicate new material, but it had been his fault, after all. "While you attend to your rain-check." He arched his eyebrows.

She shook her head, "I've got a Crewman Apprentice who is positively longing for jobs. This'll be a good one for him." She bit her lip, "You're a prince, you know that? I won't forget. You need anything, ever, I'm at your disposal." She bounced a little, "Now I'm going to run before this whatever it is wears off."

Watching her... skip... down the hallway, Liyar leaned over, the hatch still in his hand. "Vulcan does not have royalty!" he called after her. Why did everyone think he was a prince? The correct terminology was clan leader, he groused to himself, shaking his head down at the hatch as though it could understand his troubles. The Hatch gave him a very consoling expression. At least, for a hatch.

[OFF]

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

Ensign Lilou Peers
Chief Engineer, SCE
USS Galileo

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