by David Mack
Removing himself from Deanna was only an illusion, he knew. The bond he shared with his Imzadi transcended distance and physical barriers. Their emotions were so tangible to each other, so present, that when one of them was in the throes of a powerful experience, both of them felt it. Ever since they had first fallen in love, their bond had been so strong that they sometimes were able to communicate telepathically. Such moments were rare, but they had made him feel so connected to her.
And now she felt so distant.
His door chime sounded. He pushed himself up from the desk to a standing posture, turned, and tugged the front of his uniform smooth before he said, “Come in.”
The portal slid aside, briefly admitting the ambient sounds of the bridge. Christine Vale stepped inside his ready room and stopped just outside the range of the door’s sensor. It shut behind her. Her gaze was level and concerned. “Sir.”
“Chris,” he said with a forced nonchalance, and he circled behind his desk. “What can I do for you?”
She flashed a weary smile. “I was gonna ask you the same thing.” Turning a bit more serious, she asked, “Are you all right? You haven’t seemed like yourself for a while now.”
He pulled out his chair. “Define ‘a while.’”
All traces of jocularity left her tone. “A few months, at least,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, you mask it well. But something’s changed. You just seem … disengaged.”
Riker sat down with a tired sigh. “How so?”
“Can we drop the ranks and speak freely, sir?”
Her accusatory tone caught Riker off guard. “Of course,” he said. “Always, you know that.”
“Will,” she said, “what’s wrong?”
Instinct impelled him to denial. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
“No, Will, you’re not.” She stepped to his desk and sat down across from him. The concern in her voice grew more pronounced as she continued, “You and I served through some rough times on the Enterprise, and I’ve been your XO for almost a year. And I have never seen you act like this. Please talk to me. What’s going on?”
He reclined his chair and pulled his hand over his face. It was a reflexive action; he thought he’d done it to massage the fatigue from his head and neck. Only as he prolonged the gesture did he admit to himself that it was a delaying tactic, a way to avoid eye contact and postpone his reply. He hated feeling so exposed, so easily read. Denial was no longer an option, but he still found himself reluctant to confide in her. Finally, he lowered his hand and said, “It’s complicated.”
“Simplify it,” Vale replied.
A heavy breath did nothing to relax him. “I could invoke rank and tell you to leave this alone.”
Vale nodded. “Is that what you want to do?”
“What, are you a counselor, now?” He swiveled his chair away from her, showing her his profile. “Sometimes, captains have to keep barriers between themselves and their crews.”
“And that’s fine, up to a point,” Vale said. “But right now it seems like your ability to do your job is being impaired by whatever it is you’re going through. And seeing as it’s my job to make sure this ship and its crew are kept in a state of full readiness, that makes your problem my problem.”
Riker frowned. “I’m still not sure I—”
“Especially since it involves your wife, who’s also part of the command staff,” Vale added.
He swiveled back to face her, his temper aroused. “How did you know that?”
Vale hesitated before answering, and then she spoke with tact. “Will, I know that you and Deanna had problems conceiving a child. She told me all about it on Orisha. The treatments, the strain it put on the two of you. I noticed you having the same kind of problems then that I’m seeing now. But for a while, the two of you seemed happy, so I’m wondering what’s happened.”
Denying the obvious was tiring, and he felt his guard slipping; he wondered if it might be a relief to let it down entirely. “You understand,” he said, “that what we talk about stays in here. You don’t discuss it with anyone—not the crew, not the counselors.… Especially not the counselors.”
“Of course,” Vale said.
Riker took another deep breath and let it go slowly as he composed his thoughts and steeled his resolve. “The past few months have been hard for me and Deanna,” he confided. “You know that we were working with Dr. Ree on fertility treatments—”
“All too well,” Vale said, referring to the effect that Troi’s empathic projections had had on her personally.
“We thought we’d succeeded,” Riker said. He found it difficult to go on. “It hasn’t gone as we’d hoped.”
As he’d feared, a grim silence fell between himself and Vale, whose expression softened. She leaned forward and folded her hands atop his desk. “How bad is it?”
He couldn’t name it. “Bad.”
Vale asked in an apprehensive whisper, “A miscarriage?”
Hearing the words spoken in sympathy, rather than in Dr. Ree’s cold and clinical rasp, was even more terrible than Riker had imagined. Grief surged upward inside his chest, and he barely nodded his confirmation before tears overflowed his eyes. He covered his mouth for a moment and struggled to contain the sorrow he had been swallowing for so long. “I’ve been carrying this for months,” he said, fighting to talk through halting gasps for air. “Piling one thing on another. Feeling like I’d failed Deanna.”
“You didn’t fail her,” Vale said. “I know you didn’t.”
“Maybe not, but I feel like I did.” He palmed the tears from one cheek and then the other. “She’s part Betazoid, so it’s hard to know where my desires end and hers begin. It makes me wonder if maybe her wish to have kids was really mine, and I led her into this.” He got up from his chair, turned away from Vale, and walked to the window behind his desk. “We just found out it’s happening again. We’re losing another pregnancy. And this time, if she doesn’t do something about it … it could kill her.”
“I’m sure Dr. Ree could—”
“He offered,” Riker said. “He almost insisted, actually. Deanna won’t have it. She knows she’s in danger, and she just won’t do it. And instead of arguing with her, I let her refuse treatment and walked her out of sickbay.”
Vale’s reflection was semitransparent against the backdrop of drifting starlight. “Even so,” she said, “that doesn’t make any of this your fault.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” Riker said. “It’s starting to feel like the damage is done, either way.”
He watched Vale’s mirror image as she stood and circled behind his desk to stand with him. “What damage?”
“That barrier I was talking about,” he said, “the one between me and the crew? It’s starting to feel like it’s between me and Deanna. We can hear each other’s thoughts, but it feels like we don’t know how to talk about this.” Now he regarded his own ragged reflection in the window. “It’s never been easy being such a visible couple on a starship. Even harder now that I’m the captain and this crew is so small, compared to what I was used to on the Enterprise.”
“I know what you mean,” Vale said. Her own muted grief reminded Riker of the loss of Jaza Najem just months earlier.
“Yeah,” Riker said. “I guess you do.” He turned to face her. “After the first …” The word was so hard for him to say. “After the first miscarriage, I did everything I could to keep Deanna’s spirits up. The odds were on our side, Ree told us. But I could tell Deanna wasn’t ready to try again, so I waited. I know that losing the baby had to be worse for her. For me it was an idea, but for her it was part of her body—it was physical. There’s no way I can understand how that feels for her.”
“But it’s good that you know where the difference is,” Vale said, trying to reassure him. “That you know why her experience is different from yours.”
More tears burned Riker’s eyes. “But I still don’t know how to help her,” he admitted. “She’s in so much pain, an
d I feel cut off, and I don’t know what to do.” Now that he had opened the gates to his grief, he didn’t know how to close them again.
Vale pulled him to her, and she closed her arms around him in a sisterly embrace. He hesitated to return the gesture, and then he reluctantly surrendered to it. “It’ll be okay, Will,” she said, her voice breaking slightly, echoing his sorrow. “You’ll be okay, and so will Deanna. You’re not alone.”
Riker felt embarrassed to have shown such vulnerability to his first officer. Captain Picard would never have bared his feelings like this, he thought. He reminded himself that Vale was not just his first officer; she was his friend. Maybe a captain more obsessed with strict protocol and formality would have been stalwart in hiding his feelings, but Riker didn’t subscribe to such emotionally stunted ideals of manhood. He didn’t believe that expressing emotions made him weak, and he was grateful that he had chosen a first officer who seemed to feel the same way.
As he lingered in Vale’s embrace, Riker contemplated the emotional wedge that he felt had been driven between him and Deanna by their recent tragedies. At a time when he most needed comfort, Deanna seemed to recoil from his touch. Her rejection and abandonment of him in the corridor made him all the more grateful now for Vale’s compassion.
That was when he began to wonder if perhaps this moment was continuing a shade too long. Vale’s head was resting against his chest, her hair color du jour a rich auburn that contrasted with his predominantly black uniform. Riker eased Vale away from him, and as she lifted her face to look at him, he thought he caught a glimpse of a less than platonic emotion in her eyes.
Then they both pushed away from each other and averted their eyes as they composed themselves. “Anyway,” Vale said as she backpedaled and smoothed her uniform jacket, “if you need me, or if there’s anything I can do to help, just let me know.”
“I will,” Riker said, and he sat down at his desk and tapped a few keys on his computer’s interface. “Thank you, Chris.”
“My pleasure, Captain,” Vale said, continuing to back away to the other side of Riker’s desk. Her hands seemed to be in constant motion—waving, clenching, opening, weaving together at the fingers and flexing. “If there’s nothing else?”
“No, thank you,” Riker said, pretending to be engrossed in whatever it was on his computer monitor. “Dismissed.”
“Aye, sir.” She turned and walked quickly out the door, back to duty on the bridge.
Riker watched the door close behind her, and then he ran a hand through his thatch of graying hair. Did I just imagine that? he wondered. Am I wrong, or was that kind of … awkward?
Suddenly, being emotionally unavailable to his crew didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.
* * *
“You’re obviously looking for someone to blame,” said Pral glasch Haaj. “The question is, would you rather it be you or your husband?”
As usual, the Tellarite counselor had chosen to take the most confrontational possible tack in addressing his patient’s issues, and Deanna Troi, being a trained counselor and his supervising officer, didn’t appreciate it. “This isn’t about blame,” she said, surprised at how defensive her manner seemed.
“Of course not,” he said, his cultured voice tuned to a perfect timbre of derision. “It’s just a coincidence, yes?”
The rank insensitivity of his remarks sparked Troi’s fury, which she found easier to face than the smothering sorrow of sympathy she’d expected from the ship’s other counselor, Dr. Huilan. “We didn’t choose this. It’s not our fault.”
“I see. So it’s random chance and not some defect in your respective biologies that’s put you on a course for your second miscarriage in half a year.”
Troi sprang from the couch, turned her back on the slender Tellarite, and paced toward the far bulkhead of his office. At the wall she turned and began walking back toward him. He watched her with expressionless black eyes, which gave his face a cipherlike quality. “You’re just trying to provoke me,” she said with a note of resentment.
“Provoke you? Into doing what?”
She stopped and glowered at him. “Now you’re trying to make me name my own dysfunction and outline my own needs. Are you this transparent with all your patients?”
“Yes, but most of my patients don’t hold doctorates in psychology.” He snorted. “Tell me what I’ll do next.”
“You’ll try to shock me by saying something rude.”
He shook his head. “I tried that. And I followed it with the echoed remark and the leading question, all of which got me nowhere. So guess what my next trick will be.”
It amazed her that even as he was admitting to the failure of his manipulations, he still sounded smug. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “Reciting old Tellarite parables?”
“No.” Haaj reclined and folded his hands behind his head. “Just an honest question: Why are you wasting my time?”
At first, Troi recoiled from the hostility in his voice. Then she replied, “Is this another example of your patented Tellarite argument therapy?”
“I’m serious, Counselor. You’re my supervising officer, so I’m expected to show you a certain degree of deference, even in a therapeutic setting—but I don’t have time for this. You’re clearly not ready for therapy, and you’re taking away valuable session time from my patients who are.”
She called upon her empathic senses to try and sense whether he was dissembling in order to draw her out. He wore an intense aura of bitter dudgeon. If he was merely pretending to be annoyed with her, he was doing a very convincing job of it, inside and out. “Why do you say I’m not ready for therapy?”
“Are you kidding?” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “All you’ve done since you got here is obstruct the process. You’ve dissected my method instead of answering my questions, and you’d rather criticize me than examine yourself.” He leaned back and folded his hands in his lap. “Therapy only works when the patient is willing to participate.”
All his accusations were true, and Troi was ashamed of herself for indulging her appetite for denial. “You’re right,” she said. “I have been sabotaging the session. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” he said. “Apologize to Crewman Liryok. This was supposed to be his hour.”
Troi stared out a window at the wash of starlight streaking past the ship and felt the subtle vibrations of warp flight in the deck under her feet. “I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble surrendering to the process.”
“Yes, you do,” Haaj said, barely disguising his contempt.
She fixed him with a scathing glare. “No, I don’t.”
“Do.”
He was the most exasperating therapist she’d ever met. “Is this your idea of therapy? Contradiction?”
“You’re critiquing me again, Counselor. Why is that?”
She didn’t mean to shout, but she did anyway. “I told you, I don’t know!”
“And I’m calling you a liar,” he said.
The more she felt herself losing control, the calmer he became. There were a thousand things she wanted to yell at him, and they were slamming together inside her mind, a logjam of epithets. Her face and ears felt hot, and her fists clenched while she struggled to put words to her fury.
Then he asked, “What are you feeling right now?” She stared at him, dumbstruck. He continued, “Would you call it rage?”
“Yes,” she said, paralyzed by her emotions.
His voice took on a calming tenor. “Breathe, Deanna. Clear your mind, just for a few seconds. Remember your training: What’s the difference between anger and rage?”
It was hard for her to pull air into her chest, even harder to hold it there. I’m hyperventilating, she realized. With effort, she did as Haaj asked, and then she closed her eyes.
“Ready?” he said. She nodded. He asked, “What’s anger?”
“An emotional cue that something is wrong, that we have been injured or mistreated,
or that values we consider important are being challenged or disregarded.”
He harrumphed. “I imagine you did very well on the essay portions of your exams.… Now, tell me what rage is.”
“A shame-based expression of anger,” she said. “And a reaction to powerlessness.”
“Powerlessness,” Haaj repeated, tapping his index finger against his upper lip. “Impotence. Helplessness.” He wagged his finger at her. “You don’t like feeling out of control, do you?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t know many people who do.”
“I do,” Haaj said. “There are plenty of folks who like not having to make decisions or take responsibility. They’re happy to go along and believe what they’re told, because it’s easier than thinking for themselves.”
Troi drummed her fingers on her bicep. “And what does that have to do with me?”
“Nothing,” the wiry Tellarite said. “It was just a tangent. Those happen sometimes in conversation.” Feigning embarrassment, he added, “I’m sorry, I forget. What are we talking about?”
“Control,” Troi said, feeling a new tide of rage swell inside her chest.
He clapped his hands. “Ah, yes! Control.” He let the words linger between them for a moment before he added, “You’ve been feeling out of control lately.”
She shook her head. “I don’t recall saying that.”
“But you’ve certainly been at the mercy of events,” Haaj said. “Not much recourse when a tragedy like yours happens.”
“No, there isn’t.”
The Tellarite nodded. “It’s too bad Dr. Ree isn’t skilled enough to correct the problem.”
“It’s not his fault,” Troi said. “Medicine isn’t magic. There’s only so much he can do.”
“True,” Haaj said. “I mean, he can’t be expected to compensate for your husband’s genetic shortcomings. After all, the captain is, as they say, ‘only human.’”