This Dream That was a God (Star Trek XI) Part Two
Title: This Dream That was a God, Part Two
Summary: Gaila doesn't have good dreams. Then she meets Jim Kirk, and maybe that's good enough.
<< Previous
Gaila wakes up and expects to see the shuttle she’d fallen asleep him. She’s tired. They’ve been nearly out of water and nearly out of air for so long that she doesn’t have the energy to worry about it anymore. Dying is an eventuality, she just supposes that eventually will be coming for her sooner rather than later. The young Terran who’s been in the shuttle with her long ago fell asleep, and Gaila can’t move any more to see if she’s even still alive. Gaila hopes that she is. Her name sounded like poetry when she said it.
Once the Terran stopped talking, and before Gaila had fallen asleep, Gaila had started talking to Jim. Strange, because he wasn’t there, and it’s something that only Terrans do. She’s almost embarrassed about it, but there’s been no one here to listen to her except for the potentially dead girl with poetry for a name. She tells Jim all the things she’s never been able to tell him before, about the word slave, and the word hello, and all the things that she tries so hard to process about this new life. She’s embraced all the good and the bad parts of it, because what else is there to do?
But when she opens her eyes she sees silver and white, and no infinite inky darkness waiting to swallow her whole. She turns her head to the side, just a little bit, and sees Leonard McCoy. The lines of his shoulders are so familiar. If she were standing, her knees would give out. Gaila closes her eyes again and wonders what kind of dream this is.
She hears a loud snore and feels the warmth of a hand around her wrist.
And there is Jim Kirk, who she’d prayed to, and talked to, and laughed at in that shuttle. Jim Kirk who has saved her again, even when she’d been sure that his role in her life should be long over. “Jim,” she says reflexively, and his whole body jumps.
Somewhere behind her someone says, “Doctor! She’s awake!” too loudly, and Jim lifts his head. There’s a clatter, someone dropping something, and Gaila watches the awareness come into his eyes.
“Good morning, Jim Kirk,” she says and thinks that this is the best nightmare she’s ever had.
She remembers that she is supposed to be angry and hurt, but in this dream its all right to let it go. She smiles at him, and he looks astonished. She wants to see him smile, though, because this is her dream, and she deserves to see him smile.
“Gaila.”
His voice is raw and frayed, raspy from sleep and from something else. “Jim,” she mimics, and her voice sounds the same as his, and her eyes are watering. His hand drops her wrist and his palm covers the back of her hand. She grins at him and turns her palm up, lacing their fingers together. Her body aches, but she thinks she can move it, so she sits up and kisses him.
All around them, machines beep and lights flash. Gaila appreciates the dramatic flare of her subconscious.
When Jim breaks the kiss, his forehead presses against hers, and somehow he’s in the biobed with her, straddling her hips. The alarms are still going off, and behind them she hears, “Dammit Jim! Get out of that bed!” but Jim doesn’t move except to lift his hands and frame her face.
“You’re alive.”
He says it in Orion, and she laughs, sliding her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck. “No,” she says quietly, “I’m dreaming.”
Her body still aches, and she is tired, which isn’t fair. Jim lowers her back down onto the biobed and stands up. He holds her hand and her gaze as her eyes blink shut. Behind him, she sees Leonard cuff Jim on the back of the head, and then he leans their foreheads together, his hand pressed lightly to the back of Jim’s neck. Leonard says something to Jim, and Gaila can’t hear the words, but she hears the tone and thinks love. The thought makes her smile.
The world blurs at the edges and fades to black.
Later, in the fuzzy grayness of sleep, she realizes that it wasn’t a dream-Gaila has never had a dream before, and it was nothing like a nightmare.
~
The second time Gaila wakes up, Nyota is there. She looks happy, and tired, and Gaila can’t help but smile at her roommate and friend. She is crying, Gaila realizes, but she looks happy. “I could kiss you,” Gaila says thoughtfully. “Jim seemed to feel that was an appropriate response.”
Nyota hugs her, and she smells wonderful and familiar, and like home. Gaila lets herself be hugged and gets lost in her skin and warmth. Nyota keeps crying, which is strange and unnerving. More lucid now, Gaila remembers that Nyota doesn’t cry often, and so Gaila rubs her back, like Nyota had done for her once or twice before.
“You could kiss her. I’d watch that.”
Nyota lets her go then, and Gaila turns slowly. It’s Jim, she’d known that when he walked in. The smell of him is almost as familiar as Nyota. He looks handsome in his uniform. She tries to remember if he was wearing it the last time her eyes had opened up. “I like your pants,” she says, letting her eyes run over his body. His ears and cheeks turn red, and its a small victory, but one that she likes winning. “Where is the doctor?” she asks. “Should he be yelling at you? Are you being inappropriate?”
The word makes Jim smile. Too many times the pair of them have sat through one of Leonard’s lectures on appropriateness.
Nyota moves, and Gaila looks away from Jim, and back at her. Nyota kisses Gaila’s forehead, a gesture of affection, and not a sexual advance (that particular lesson is one of Nyota’s favorite stories to tell on those rare nights she drinks just a little too much, and she tells it wonderfully. Gaila loves to listen to Nyota tell stories, especially ones that explain their friendship, their closeness). Gaila cups Nyota’s cheek for a second, and then Nyota is gone. She leaves too soon, without enough time to talk. Gaila has so many questions, the kind of questions that Nyota had welcomed from the start. Gaila had turned to her in those first days in San Francisco, still baffled by her new freedom.
Gaila is alone with Jim, and now she knows that this is not a dream. “I should have known,” she says softly.
“You’re safe,” Jim says, like its a promise.
“You no longer have the right to make those promises to me!” she says, and its vicious. Her anger surprises her.
Jim’s face falls, one of those Terran expressions she had struggled with, but now as she sees Jim’s face do just that, she understands it completely. “Gaila,” Jim answers.
“No!” she says loudly, because he always says her name like no one else can. From the first time he’d ever said it to this moment now, it’s become a communication. He has trouble saying so much, but when he uses her name, she can always hear what he means. This time, he uses it to say sorry. “My name is not for you to use as a code word. It is mine. You shouldn’t say it again.”
“I lost a lot of rights,” Jim announces. It’s childish, almost petulant, and he pouts at her. Gaila shakes her head, angrier now, although she hadn’t know she could be. She wonders if he thinks this is a joke, some funny little story he can tell his friends. The Orion girl he tricked-no, betrayed. He betrayed her. No one will have the chance to do so again. It’s all his fault. She won’t ever fit in now because of him. That thought is irrational, but if her time among humans has taught her anything, it’s how to be irrational.
“I am going to rest now. Please leave.”
“Gaila-”
“Get out!”
She doesn’t yell often. Especially with Terrans, tone of voice says more than volume, but she yells at Jim now. She scream at him until her voice cracks. It’s only when Leonard leans over her bed and rests a hand on her shoulder that she realizes Jim is gone. She hadn’t heard the hiss of the door over the pounding in her ears.
Gaila cries then, and Leonard sits with her but doesn’t touch her. She appreciates the company.
~
Once upon a time, when Gaila first came to San Francisco-young and new-she had stood in front of one of the tallest buildings on campus and stared up at it. That had been in her first few hours, when she still felt tired and skittish. She had stared up at it and made herself a promise, and then she had taken the whole damn place by storm. She’d taken their expectations and smashed them to the ground and rebuilt them to fit her expectations. But that day, for a second, just for a second, she’d imagined something steadier for her life.
She hadn’t had the opportunity to daydream before, really, and she’d relished the chance. Her past is still a blur of things she wants to and should not forget, but the memories smell like sweat and taste like blood. They feel like too much skin too close together. She doesn’t think about them often-she doesn’t forget, but she does try to move on.
Her present had been about to start that day, and standing in front of the building she had felt like her life was on pause. So she’d taken the time to look at the smooth glass door and imagine a world in which she was ordinary.
Gaila sleeps as she recovers. She assumes she’s sleeping, anyway. Most of the time she closes her eyes, and when she opens them again too much time has passed.
~
In the same spot she had watched him go on trial for cheating, Gaila watches Jim officially become a Captain. On the day of the first trial, Nyota had explained that Gaila could turn Jim in and expose what he had done, but Gaila hadn’t been able to. She’d sat there with her back ramrod straight and her arms crossed, and she had breathed measured, careful breaths, and let no one know how hurt she’d been.
She forgets to breathe now as she watches him. He looks proud, and happy, but there’s a tightness to his shoulders that maybe only she and Leonard see. Pavel is standing next to her, and Gaila likes his accent and the smooth paleness of his face just as much as she had the first time she’d met him. He leans against her shoulder, just enough so that Gaila can feel the warmth, and when their eyes meet, they both smile.
She is still smiling when Jim looks at her, picking her out of the crowd. She swallows hard and holds his gaze.
“There is future in forgiveness,” Pavel says, nodding his head.
“You are too young to be so wise,” she teases him, wrapping an arm around his waist and squeezing.
Later though, as she stands next to Nyota in a bar just this side of too empty, she remembers what he said. After all they have lost, don’t they deserve a future?
~
Terrans dance, but they don’t dance like Orions, and she’d never really considered the Terran dance disciplines as something that she wanted to study. She’d never really considered them at all. The weeks following the Enterprise’s return to starfleet were miserable ones-dark and damp and cold, not always in the literal sense of the weather. Nyota had shown her ballet, and much to her surprise, Gaila had loved the shapes her roommate could make with her body, the curve of her as she bent forward or backward. The light in her eyes when the angle of her face was bathed just right in sun beams.
As soon as Gaila was able, and her body was healthy enough, the private shows had become lessons. To the surprise of no one, Gaila was a natural. The spins and leaps made her laugh and her body felt stronger with each new move she learned. Nyota always wore her hair up when she danced, but Gaila let her curls spill down her back and dance with her, sometimes hiding her face, sometimes flowing with the subtle shifts of her body.
Both girls tried not to cry, they were tired of tears, but sometimes when they laced their fingers together and spun the world would get blurry and they blamed it on the motion.
Today, Gaila is alone. She twirls high on one foot, the other leg held out and her arms curved away from her sides. Her body is nearly whole again, and the slight strain that ballet puts on her muscles is grounding. The motion is exhilarating, and Gaila revels in the feeling of dancing again. Campus is too quiet these days, and there are still so many questions to be answered. Each one is a blow: to the face, stomach, neck, and she is bled dry of answers. Still, the admirals ask her again, “Could Captain Kirk have done anything different?” they want to know. “Did your own Captain react appropriately?”
Gaila wants to tell them about the sudden flashes of light that were the only warning, the chunks of ships and cadets that floated past the windows, the ten seconds-the last ten seconds-of air when nobody remembered to breathe, and then the air was gone and it was impossible to breathe. She wants to tell them those things, but she doesn’t. She tries once, but they don’t want to hear them, and so now she spins.
The door to the room is quiet when it opens, but loud when it shuts-too loud. She slows her spinning enough to see him there. The form is familiar, as dark as the room is, and he’s silhouetted in the faint light that she’s programmed into the very edges of the space. Gaila doesn’t stop spinning, she makes him wait until she’s too dizzy to keep going, until her equilibrium pushes her almost to wobbling. Finally, she stills and her feet fall flat against the floor. Real. Reality.
“I have been through so much,” she says. “And I understand that. But I won’t let it stop me,” she falls quiet again, and then Jim is there, in front of her suddenly. She braces herself against his chest, looks at the green of her fingers against his shirt, and they look too bright and wrong, as though her green is the artificial color. “I have lived in nightmares. I do not have good dreams. A good night for me is when I do not dream-in the days I must be happy. I am happy, for my waking life is-is better than I ever could have dreamed it would be. Perhaps that is why I am never afraid to open my eyes.”
His eyes are so blue. Perhaps that is why she opens her eyes.
“You love your doctor,” she continues, her hands framing his face. “I understand that.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice is honest, but not broken. He has grown so much. She wonders if she has stayed too small. Her hands slide down from his cheek, over his neck and shoulders, down to his arms. She is startled when she can no longer see his edges.
“I am happy for you,” she means it.
“They’re giving me the Enterprise,” he tells her. “I want you on it. There’s this guy, Scotty, in engineering. He’s a genius. You’d be one hell of a team.”
Nyota had once explained to her the concept of ‘coy’ although it was not a word anyone would ever use to describe Gaila or Nyota. She thinks of it now. She thinks of saying no.
“I would be honored,” she says.
~
On the Enterprise, Gaila has her first good dream. She is pleased, however, when she wakes up and reality is even better.
Summary: Gaila doesn't have good dreams. Then she meets Jim Kirk, and maybe that's good enough.
<< Previous
Gaila wakes up and expects to see the shuttle she’d fallen asleep him. She’s tired. They’ve been nearly out of water and nearly out of air for so long that she doesn’t have the energy to worry about it anymore. Dying is an eventuality, she just supposes that eventually will be coming for her sooner rather than later. The young Terran who’s been in the shuttle with her long ago fell asleep, and Gaila can’t move any more to see if she’s even still alive. Gaila hopes that she is. Her name sounded like poetry when she said it.
Once the Terran stopped talking, and before Gaila had fallen asleep, Gaila had started talking to Jim. Strange, because he wasn’t there, and it’s something that only Terrans do. She’s almost embarrassed about it, but there’s been no one here to listen to her except for the potentially dead girl with poetry for a name. She tells Jim all the things she’s never been able to tell him before, about the word slave, and the word hello, and all the things that she tries so hard to process about this new life. She’s embraced all the good and the bad parts of it, because what else is there to do?
But when she opens her eyes she sees silver and white, and no infinite inky darkness waiting to swallow her whole. She turns her head to the side, just a little bit, and sees Leonard McCoy. The lines of his shoulders are so familiar. If she were standing, her knees would give out. Gaila closes her eyes again and wonders what kind of dream this is.
She hears a loud snore and feels the warmth of a hand around her wrist.
And there is Jim Kirk, who she’d prayed to, and talked to, and laughed at in that shuttle. Jim Kirk who has saved her again, even when she’d been sure that his role in her life should be long over. “Jim,” she says reflexively, and his whole body jumps.
Somewhere behind her someone says, “Doctor! She’s awake!” too loudly, and Jim lifts his head. There’s a clatter, someone dropping something, and Gaila watches the awareness come into his eyes.
“Good morning, Jim Kirk,” she says and thinks that this is the best nightmare she’s ever had.
She remembers that she is supposed to be angry and hurt, but in this dream its all right to let it go. She smiles at him, and he looks astonished. She wants to see him smile, though, because this is her dream, and she deserves to see him smile.
“Gaila.”
His voice is raw and frayed, raspy from sleep and from something else. “Jim,” she mimics, and her voice sounds the same as his, and her eyes are watering. His hand drops her wrist and his palm covers the back of her hand. She grins at him and turns her palm up, lacing their fingers together. Her body aches, but she thinks she can move it, so she sits up and kisses him.
All around them, machines beep and lights flash. Gaila appreciates the dramatic flare of her subconscious.
When Jim breaks the kiss, his forehead presses against hers, and somehow he’s in the biobed with her, straddling her hips. The alarms are still going off, and behind them she hears, “Dammit Jim! Get out of that bed!” but Jim doesn’t move except to lift his hands and frame her face.
“You’re alive.”
He says it in Orion, and she laughs, sliding her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck. “No,” she says quietly, “I’m dreaming.”
Her body still aches, and she is tired, which isn’t fair. Jim lowers her back down onto the biobed and stands up. He holds her hand and her gaze as her eyes blink shut. Behind him, she sees Leonard cuff Jim on the back of the head, and then he leans their foreheads together, his hand pressed lightly to the back of Jim’s neck. Leonard says something to Jim, and Gaila can’t hear the words, but she hears the tone and thinks love. The thought makes her smile.
The world blurs at the edges and fades to black.
Later, in the fuzzy grayness of sleep, she realizes that it wasn’t a dream-Gaila has never had a dream before, and it was nothing like a nightmare.
~
The second time Gaila wakes up, Nyota is there. She looks happy, and tired, and Gaila can’t help but smile at her roommate and friend. She is crying, Gaila realizes, but she looks happy. “I could kiss you,” Gaila says thoughtfully. “Jim seemed to feel that was an appropriate response.”
Nyota hugs her, and she smells wonderful and familiar, and like home. Gaila lets herself be hugged and gets lost in her skin and warmth. Nyota keeps crying, which is strange and unnerving. More lucid now, Gaila remembers that Nyota doesn’t cry often, and so Gaila rubs her back, like Nyota had done for her once or twice before.
“You could kiss her. I’d watch that.”
Nyota lets her go then, and Gaila turns slowly. It’s Jim, she’d known that when he walked in. The smell of him is almost as familiar as Nyota. He looks handsome in his uniform. She tries to remember if he was wearing it the last time her eyes had opened up. “I like your pants,” she says, letting her eyes run over his body. His ears and cheeks turn red, and its a small victory, but one that she likes winning. “Where is the doctor?” she asks. “Should he be yelling at you? Are you being inappropriate?”
The word makes Jim smile. Too many times the pair of them have sat through one of Leonard’s lectures on appropriateness.
Nyota moves, and Gaila looks away from Jim, and back at her. Nyota kisses Gaila’s forehead, a gesture of affection, and not a sexual advance (that particular lesson is one of Nyota’s favorite stories to tell on those rare nights she drinks just a little too much, and she tells it wonderfully. Gaila loves to listen to Nyota tell stories, especially ones that explain their friendship, their closeness). Gaila cups Nyota’s cheek for a second, and then Nyota is gone. She leaves too soon, without enough time to talk. Gaila has so many questions, the kind of questions that Nyota had welcomed from the start. Gaila had turned to her in those first days in San Francisco, still baffled by her new freedom.
Gaila is alone with Jim, and now she knows that this is not a dream. “I should have known,” she says softly.
“You’re safe,” Jim says, like its a promise.
“You no longer have the right to make those promises to me!” she says, and its vicious. Her anger surprises her.
Jim’s face falls, one of those Terran expressions she had struggled with, but now as she sees Jim’s face do just that, she understands it completely. “Gaila,” Jim answers.
“No!” she says loudly, because he always says her name like no one else can. From the first time he’d ever said it to this moment now, it’s become a communication. He has trouble saying so much, but when he uses her name, she can always hear what he means. This time, he uses it to say sorry. “My name is not for you to use as a code word. It is mine. You shouldn’t say it again.”
“I lost a lot of rights,” Jim announces. It’s childish, almost petulant, and he pouts at her. Gaila shakes her head, angrier now, although she hadn’t know she could be. She wonders if he thinks this is a joke, some funny little story he can tell his friends. The Orion girl he tricked-no, betrayed. He betrayed her. No one will have the chance to do so again. It’s all his fault. She won’t ever fit in now because of him. That thought is irrational, but if her time among humans has taught her anything, it’s how to be irrational.
“I am going to rest now. Please leave.”
“Gaila-”
“Get out!”
She doesn’t yell often. Especially with Terrans, tone of voice says more than volume, but she yells at Jim now. She scream at him until her voice cracks. It’s only when Leonard leans over her bed and rests a hand on her shoulder that she realizes Jim is gone. She hadn’t heard the hiss of the door over the pounding in her ears.
Gaila cries then, and Leonard sits with her but doesn’t touch her. She appreciates the company.
~
Once upon a time, when Gaila first came to San Francisco-young and new-she had stood in front of one of the tallest buildings on campus and stared up at it. That had been in her first few hours, when she still felt tired and skittish. She had stared up at it and made herself a promise, and then she had taken the whole damn place by storm. She’d taken their expectations and smashed them to the ground and rebuilt them to fit her expectations. But that day, for a second, just for a second, she’d imagined something steadier for her life.
She hadn’t had the opportunity to daydream before, really, and she’d relished the chance. Her past is still a blur of things she wants to and should not forget, but the memories smell like sweat and taste like blood. They feel like too much skin too close together. She doesn’t think about them often-she doesn’t forget, but she does try to move on.
Her present had been about to start that day, and standing in front of the building she had felt like her life was on pause. So she’d taken the time to look at the smooth glass door and imagine a world in which she was ordinary.
Gaila sleeps as she recovers. She assumes she’s sleeping, anyway. Most of the time she closes her eyes, and when she opens them again too much time has passed.
~
In the same spot she had watched him go on trial for cheating, Gaila watches Jim officially become a Captain. On the day of the first trial, Nyota had explained that Gaila could turn Jim in and expose what he had done, but Gaila hadn’t been able to. She’d sat there with her back ramrod straight and her arms crossed, and she had breathed measured, careful breaths, and let no one know how hurt she’d been.
She forgets to breathe now as she watches him. He looks proud, and happy, but there’s a tightness to his shoulders that maybe only she and Leonard see. Pavel is standing next to her, and Gaila likes his accent and the smooth paleness of his face just as much as she had the first time she’d met him. He leans against her shoulder, just enough so that Gaila can feel the warmth, and when their eyes meet, they both smile.
She is still smiling when Jim looks at her, picking her out of the crowd. She swallows hard and holds his gaze.
“There is future in forgiveness,” Pavel says, nodding his head.
“You are too young to be so wise,” she teases him, wrapping an arm around his waist and squeezing.
Later though, as she stands next to Nyota in a bar just this side of too empty, she remembers what he said. After all they have lost, don’t they deserve a future?
~
Terrans dance, but they don’t dance like Orions, and she’d never really considered the Terran dance disciplines as something that she wanted to study. She’d never really considered them at all. The weeks following the Enterprise’s return to starfleet were miserable ones-dark and damp and cold, not always in the literal sense of the weather. Nyota had shown her ballet, and much to her surprise, Gaila had loved the shapes her roommate could make with her body, the curve of her as she bent forward or backward. The light in her eyes when the angle of her face was bathed just right in sun beams.
As soon as Gaila was able, and her body was healthy enough, the private shows had become lessons. To the surprise of no one, Gaila was a natural. The spins and leaps made her laugh and her body felt stronger with each new move she learned. Nyota always wore her hair up when she danced, but Gaila let her curls spill down her back and dance with her, sometimes hiding her face, sometimes flowing with the subtle shifts of her body.
Both girls tried not to cry, they were tired of tears, but sometimes when they laced their fingers together and spun the world would get blurry and they blamed it on the motion.
Today, Gaila is alone. She twirls high on one foot, the other leg held out and her arms curved away from her sides. Her body is nearly whole again, and the slight strain that ballet puts on her muscles is grounding. The motion is exhilarating, and Gaila revels in the feeling of dancing again. Campus is too quiet these days, and there are still so many questions to be answered. Each one is a blow: to the face, stomach, neck, and she is bled dry of answers. Still, the admirals ask her again, “Could Captain Kirk have done anything different?” they want to know. “Did your own Captain react appropriately?”
Gaila wants to tell them about the sudden flashes of light that were the only warning, the chunks of ships and cadets that floated past the windows, the ten seconds-the last ten seconds-of air when nobody remembered to breathe, and then the air was gone and it was impossible to breathe. She wants to tell them those things, but she doesn’t. She tries once, but they don’t want to hear them, and so now she spins.
The door to the room is quiet when it opens, but loud when it shuts-too loud. She slows her spinning enough to see him there. The form is familiar, as dark as the room is, and he’s silhouetted in the faint light that she’s programmed into the very edges of the space. Gaila doesn’t stop spinning, she makes him wait until she’s too dizzy to keep going, until her equilibrium pushes her almost to wobbling. Finally, she stills and her feet fall flat against the floor. Real. Reality.
“I have been through so much,” she says. “And I understand that. But I won’t let it stop me,” she falls quiet again, and then Jim is there, in front of her suddenly. She braces herself against his chest, looks at the green of her fingers against his shirt, and they look too bright and wrong, as though her green is the artificial color. “I have lived in nightmares. I do not have good dreams. A good night for me is when I do not dream-in the days I must be happy. I am happy, for my waking life is-is better than I ever could have dreamed it would be. Perhaps that is why I am never afraid to open my eyes.”
His eyes are so blue. Perhaps that is why she opens her eyes.
“You love your doctor,” she continues, her hands framing his face. “I understand that.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice is honest, but not broken. He has grown so much. She wonders if she has stayed too small. Her hands slide down from his cheek, over his neck and shoulders, down to his arms. She is startled when she can no longer see his edges.
“I am happy for you,” she means it.
“They’re giving me the Enterprise,” he tells her. “I want you on it. There’s this guy, Scotty, in engineering. He’s a genius. You’d be one hell of a team.”
Nyota had once explained to her the concept of ‘coy’ although it was not a word anyone would ever use to describe Gaila or Nyota. She thinks of it now. She thinks of saying no.
“I would be honored,” she says.
~
On the Enterprise, Gaila has her first good dream. She is pleased, however, when she wakes up and reality is even better.