High Drama Blogfest: Echoes

This is my entry for DL Hammons' High Drama Blogfest (set to auto-post while I am offline due to family matters- but please do feel free to comment if you like I will do my best to visit your blogs and comment too asap).

I've said on this blog lots of times that the writing that I have done that I love the most is for a character that will never be marketable- well here's your chance to see some.

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"Keiran, open your eyes."

"Maggie?" O'Sullivan felt a hand grasp his arm and stirred. "Turn on the lights, willya eh? I can't see a bloody thing."

"Your eyes are still closed. Open them!"

"Margaret Mary O'Sullivan, what are you blathering about? Turn on the damned lights!" Keiran tried again to see what was around him, without success.

"Open your eyes, Keiran, You're still asleep," she insisted.

Another nightmare. He forced his eyes open at last and found he was in a dimly lit room.

"The date." He pleaded frantically as he rolled over in bed, unable to remember where, or worse, when he was. "Maggie, what is the date?"

Out of the corner of his eye he saw his wife. Her head of unruly dark hair shimmered in ringlets against her shoulders as she moved toward the door. She was wrapped in a plaid woolen shawl and had a suitcase in one hand. Her back was turned and she didn't answer.

"Today's stardate!" he demanded once more. "What is it?"

"Does it really matter?" she whispered, pausing as she reached for the doorknob and speaking without turning back to face him. "No matter how much time goes by, nothing ever changes for you, does it? Whatever the date, wherever you go, you're still there."

There, he thought. At the front slaughtering Jem'Hadar, before they could slaughter us.

Keiran sighed, and banged his head back against the hand-carved, wooden headboard his grandfather had given his grandmother as a wedding gift. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

As his lungs expanded, he winced. He felt a searing pain in his chest. He looked down, and suddenly instead of lying in the bedroom of his home in County Cork as he had been just a moment ago, he was laying on his back, on the battlefield, a gaping hole blasted through his uniform tunic.

Through his chest.

He began to pant, horrified at the sight and nauseous from the pain. He heard the sound of phaser fire, of explosions all around him. On the ground beside him lay bodies pooled in the blood of the dead; his ears rang with the shattering screams of the dying.

"Maggie?" He gasped as he tried again to speak. "Wake me up. Please, wake me up!"

A female form appeared beside him and knelt down. Her hair obscured her face, and only when she turned did he see that it was not the woman he'd been married to.

"For you it will always be 2374, won't it Keiran?" The woman's eyes shone, threatening tears as she looked away from him, off toward the sky.
Her lovely face darkened with sorrow as she gazed down at him again, gently caressing his cheek. Even so it was a beautiful, welcome sight, especially if it were to be his last.

His head lolled back, his eyes slipped shut. She started to shake him by the shoulders. "Keiran, wake up!"

In his disorientation he didn't understand how she could be with him now, but he didn't care, either. She was here, nothing else mattered. He spoke her name aloud at last. "Liis."

O'Sullivan reached up and tried to touch her, catching the Captain off guard as she stood beside his bed in Sickbay. She instinctively moved a step back as his weakened arm lurched forward, allowing only the tips of his rough-hewn fingers to brush against her face.

Liis was dumbfounded by his use of her given name. He had never, and would never, take the liberty of calling her by it under any ordinary circumstances. In his heavily medicated state, his reality appeared to be very different from the one in which they truly existed.

Still unaware of this he tried to sit up, which was a big mistake. He immediately put stress on his wound, causing a fresh wave of pain to drag him under. His eyelids fluttered rapidly, eyes rolling up and back as he passed out cold.

Zanh scowled. "Can't you give him anything more?"

"Anything more, Captain, and he won't ever feel pain again. He'll be dead." The doctor spoke coldly, clinically, taking note of his vital signs and then moving away. "If you'll excuse me, I need to gather the instruments required for his next series of treatments."

Zanh Liis nodded mutely as she continued staring at her Chief of Security. Her hand reached up unconsciously and touched her cheek at the point where his fingers had grazed her.

Whatever had happened to him in the past, she thought, it was doing its damnedest to hold onto him.

She knew he'd been a Jumper too, with the Timeline Control Division of Temporal Investigations just as she had. Moreover, it had come up in conversation that also like her, his memory resequencing sessions had been, to put it mildly, less than completely successful.

He'd been quite disappointed by this, he confided. The main reason he had agreed to go into service of Temporal was that they promised him if he did, he wouldn't have the nightmares anymore.

His memories of the Dominion War were to have been washed away, leaving his mind a clean slate with which he could begin again. Things just hadn't worked out that way.

"The best laid plans," Zanh whispered sadly, closing her eyes. She thought about a brief conversation they'd had before leaving to board the Gauntlet, and couldn't help but feel responsible for his current condition. "I'm so sorry, Keiran. I should have listened to you. I hope you can forgive me."

The man was a mystery but by this point, she knew one thing for certain about him.

Whatever it was that he saw when he looked at her, it was something entirely different than anyone else she had ever known.
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Explanation (in case you're curious...)

Keiran O'Sullivan is a character I created to fill a position temporarily in an online series that I work on with a few close friends- only he became so real and vibrant I had to hold onto him. Those of you who are Star Trek fans (or even just Star Trek aware) will likely recognize the Department of Temporal Investigations.

Keiran was a time-traveling agent for them- a Jumper (a term I coined along with many others, including the invention of the "Timeline Control Division" and a slew of fun gadgets for them to use--some written as early as a decade ago for another character I've written that long- the Captain in this post.)

This chapter gave the first real inkling that he may have known the Captain before he was currently assigned to her ship, and his memories were beginning to return.

I hear there's actually a real TI based novel in the works now and I will be very curious to see how it comes out given there is so little to go on cannonically. I have been writing TI lore with various groups (four different groups at different times, I think, by last count) for more than eleven years now.

So that's why Keiran will never be marketable- but I love him anyway.

Thanks for reading!