fic for Ben
May. 4th, 2006 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanter1944Written for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jben in response to the song titles challenge. I just saw this episode today and it rattled me, so instead of writing the paper I have to present tomorrow I wrote this instead. It helped, anyway. I can write the paper tonight and not be thinking about the ep the whole time. Whew. Ben's title suggestion by the way was Mexican Wine by Fountains of Wayne. That'd be the reference to Jose Cuervo, or the 24th century version of it anyway. Beware all, it's dark! fic.
Title: Long Term Memory
Author: Chanter
Series: TNG, post The Mind’s Eye
Rating: PG13 for mild language and suggestions of past violence
Characters/pairings: Geordi/Leah
Summary: In the midst of his confusion immediately post The Mind’s Eye, Geordi does realize one thing.
Major spoilers for the episode, you have been warned.
820 words
“I’m just… not sure. About anything.”
And I wasn’t, not all that day. It was only in my quarters after about an hour and a half with Counselor Troi that I started to make sense of any of it. And then I was only sure of the little things, like how Troi had acted like some kind of mother figure through the whole session, or how replicated spaghetti tasted a hell of a lot worse than the real thing, or how maybe I didn’t want to remember everything that had happened to me.
Not exactly.
Bits and pieces were coming back to me somewhere between the spaghetti dish going into the recycler and the first sip of coffee. And I knew it. But I was staring into the half-empty mug way before I realized I didn’t want to admit the little I was remembering to Troi. I don’t know if it was her mothering side or how obvious she made the psychiatrist part of her or the fact that she couldn’t seem to make up her mind whether she was helping me sort out my experiences with torture or grief or a little of both that made me so reluctant. The whole thing bothered me when I had a minute to stop and think about it. That wasn’t the sort of environment I wanted to be remembering things in.
And sure, I understood that it’d take time for me to remember everything and yeah, there were most likely going to be some god awful memories in there. Why the hell I’d even think about aiming a phaser at somebody in anything beyond self-defense was one thing, and even that idea made me flinch. But reconstructing whatever it was that lead to my purposefully firing first... there had to be some damn awful memories in there. I knew that.
But the more I had time to think about it, the more I realized that as much as I liked Troi as a person and thought she was a great officer and sure, I could tell her about the little things going on in my life or even the not so little ones if it came right down to it, I didn’t want that motherly, leading by the hand psychiatrist side of her being what helped me figure out just what the hell the Romulans had done to me. Well-meant or not, I didn’t want to get everything back with her intruding on my thoughts like that.
I didn’t want to remember it all. Not with her.
If I had my choice--hell if I had my choice I’d actually have made it to Risa and forget the warbird part of the experience altogether. But if I had my choice, I’d remember it in bits and pieces but not in a counselor’s office. I’d have it come back to me over time, standing in the shower, cooking breakfast, writing something down on a random morning running diagnostics on a shuttlecraft just returned from who knows where. Maybe I’d get parts of it back while I was half drunk on some tropical wine, whole minutes at a stretch coming back while I was staring down the bottom of a glass on some rare shore leave night on Earth.
And she was doing the same thing in the seat beside me.
Maybe I’d get the most back then, talking and laughing and remembering little by little with her right next to me and who knew, maybe she had memories of her own to sort out. And at the end of the night she’d know I had a reason to be crying in my drink, the same way I’d know she had a reason to be crying in hers. I’d be able to tell her whatever I came up with, little by little and maybe it’d take years but she wouldn’t be prodding me for the information. And even if it was hell reliving some of the things Tomolak did, I’d have somebody I was willing to let see me going through hell right there the whole time. I didn’t want to remember everything with Troi.
It took the last swallow in that coffee mug to make me realize completely that I really wanted to remember everything with Leah.
Troi didn’t need to know she wasn’t the one I was turning to on instinct. If her Betazoid senses didn’t tell her I sure wasn’t going to. And if I had anything to do with it, she’d never see the letter I sat down to write just after that coffee cup went into the recycler. The letter that had Leah’s name in the first line and was completely different from anything we’d sent over subspace since her visit to the Enterprise and never mind how those letters were getting more frequent with time.
The one that maybe someday I’d get the courage to show her.
Maybe.
jben in response to the song titles challenge. I just saw this episode today and it rattled me, so instead of writing the paper I have to present tomorrow I wrote this instead. It helped, anyway. I can write the paper tonight and not be thinking about the ep the whole time. Whew. Ben's title suggestion by the way was Mexican Wine by Fountains of Wayne. That'd be the reference to Jose Cuervo, or the 24th century version of it anyway. Beware all, it's dark! fic. Title: Long Term Memory
Author: Chanter
Series: TNG, post The Mind’s Eye
Rating: PG13 for mild language and suggestions of past violence
Characters/pairings: Geordi/Leah
Summary: In the midst of his confusion immediately post The Mind’s Eye, Geordi does realize one thing.
Major spoilers for the episode, you have been warned.
820 words
“I’m just… not sure. About anything.”
And I wasn’t, not all that day. It was only in my quarters after about an hour and a half with Counselor Troi that I started to make sense of any of it. And then I was only sure of the little things, like how Troi had acted like some kind of mother figure through the whole session, or how replicated spaghetti tasted a hell of a lot worse than the real thing, or how maybe I didn’t want to remember everything that had happened to me.
Not exactly.
Bits and pieces were coming back to me somewhere between the spaghetti dish going into the recycler and the first sip of coffee. And I knew it. But I was staring into the half-empty mug way before I realized I didn’t want to admit the little I was remembering to Troi. I don’t know if it was her mothering side or how obvious she made the psychiatrist part of her or the fact that she couldn’t seem to make up her mind whether she was helping me sort out my experiences with torture or grief or a little of both that made me so reluctant. The whole thing bothered me when I had a minute to stop and think about it. That wasn’t the sort of environment I wanted to be remembering things in.
And sure, I understood that it’d take time for me to remember everything and yeah, there were most likely going to be some god awful memories in there. Why the hell I’d even think about aiming a phaser at somebody in anything beyond self-defense was one thing, and even that idea made me flinch. But reconstructing whatever it was that lead to my purposefully firing first... there had to be some damn awful memories in there. I knew that.
But the more I had time to think about it, the more I realized that as much as I liked Troi as a person and thought she was a great officer and sure, I could tell her about the little things going on in my life or even the not so little ones if it came right down to it, I didn’t want that motherly, leading by the hand psychiatrist side of her being what helped me figure out just what the hell the Romulans had done to me. Well-meant or not, I didn’t want to get everything back with her intruding on my thoughts like that.
I didn’t want to remember it all. Not with her.
If I had my choice--hell if I had my choice I’d actually have made it to Risa and forget the warbird part of the experience altogether. But if I had my choice, I’d remember it in bits and pieces but not in a counselor’s office. I’d have it come back to me over time, standing in the shower, cooking breakfast, writing something down on a random morning running diagnostics on a shuttlecraft just returned from who knows where. Maybe I’d get parts of it back while I was half drunk on some tropical wine, whole minutes at a stretch coming back while I was staring down the bottom of a glass on some rare shore leave night on Earth.
And she was doing the same thing in the seat beside me.
Maybe I’d get the most back then, talking and laughing and remembering little by little with her right next to me and who knew, maybe she had memories of her own to sort out. And at the end of the night she’d know I had a reason to be crying in my drink, the same way I’d know she had a reason to be crying in hers. I’d be able to tell her whatever I came up with, little by little and maybe it’d take years but she wouldn’t be prodding me for the information. And even if it was hell reliving some of the things Tomolak did, I’d have somebody I was willing to let see me going through hell right there the whole time. I didn’t want to remember everything with Troi.
It took the last swallow in that coffee mug to make me realize completely that I really wanted to remember everything with Leah.
Troi didn’t need to know she wasn’t the one I was turning to on instinct. If her Betazoid senses didn’t tell her I sure wasn’t going to. And if I had anything to do with it, she’d never see the letter I sat down to write just after that coffee cup went into the recycler. The letter that had Leah’s name in the first line and was completely different from anything we’d sent over subspace since her visit to the Enterprise and never mind how those letters were getting more frequent with time.
The one that maybe someday I’d get the courage to show her.
Maybe.
