chanter1944: a Pringles can with the words 'you can't write just one' written across it (drabbles are like pringles)
Chanter ([personal profile] chanter1944) wrote2006-10-22 04:36 am
Entry tags:

fic, wow!

Getting back into writing these. This particular fic has been bugging me off and on for a *long* time, and now it's finally permitted itself to get written. This gave me a headache at certain points, as I was sitting here thinking oh my gods don't let this destroy my OTP! and thinking back over Boobie Trap and Galaxy's Child a *lot* trying to get this and both their personalities right. But in the end it worked itself out, whew! Pairing intact!

And despite what the end of this particular fic implies, Geordi isn't deciding to act on any feelings he might have for Leah, just that he can allow himself to feel. Ethical man, that one. After all, at this point in the story arc she's still married to Richard, and Geordi's no home-wrecker.

Title: the Real thing
Author: Chanter
Series: TNG, a short time post The Drumhead
Rating: PG
Pairings: implied Leah/Richard (her husband), Geordi/Leah
Summary: Geordi has a very important revelation.
868 words


I wasn’t exactly sure, for a while there.

I mean really, who would be after the incident with that giant space baby and everything personal that’d been going on with me at the same time. Not like I shared any of it with Troi during or after, but it doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that a situation like that would throw anybody for a loop. And after what I told Reg about falling in love on the holodeck once... Well, let’s just say I needed a little while to sort out my emotions.

And we’d been sending messages back and forth, when either of us had time--technical stuff, since we’d pretty much been bouncing theories off one another from day one, work-related stuff, but beneath that… we were friends. And she was married. Even though I got the sense that maybe it wasn’t the happiest marriage in the galaxy... but that was none of my business, and definitely not the kind of thing I had any right to stick my nose into. And besides, I wanted to be sure and more than that I needed to be sure. Sure that I wasn’t just interested in that lady from the holodeck still.

If I was going to feel anything for Leah... for Dr. Brahms, and I tried to stop thinking of her as Leah for a while there, tried to force myself to be impartial, then I wanted to be absolutely certain it was for real. It wouldn’t be fair to her otherwise, and probably not to me either.

And it took me a little while, you won’t ever hear me denying that. More than a little while really, a few months at least and that’s just an estimate, seeing as we almost ended up stuck in a Tyken’s rift at one point, and playing host to a witch hunt of a trial for a while and never mind that trip to Sherwood Forest Q took us on. And we’d all earned some pretty serious shoreleave by the time all the conspiracy theories going around had died down. I know I wasn’t the only one with a headache after that was over. We were headed back to Earth anyway, giving Mirasta Yale a chance to get acquainted with our society and clearing up the last of the loose ends from when Admiral Satie was on board. We weren’t going to be in the Terran system for more than a week, but since the opportunity was literally right on our viewscreen, most of us took it.

And I know I must come off as the universe’s biggest workaholic, spending time at a shipyard on my shoreleave but what can I say? Eutopia Planetia was close enough to Earth that distance wasn’t the issue It tended to be most of the time, and I wasn’t going strictly for work. Not really for work at all, even though that particular idea gave me butterflies in my stomach the size of Rigelian bats that wouldn’t leave me alone the entire way there.

We spent most of the afternoon with our noses in schematics, talking up a storm, picking through ideas and debating over details that would’ve bored anyone who wasn’t an engineer straight out of the room. We were so amazingly animated the whole time, just about up to our ears in something we’d both built our lives around, loving every minute of it, talking, laughing and it was right in the middle of everything that it hit me. It stopped me in the middle of a sentence and just about knocked me over when I realized.

Yes, the Enterprise’s computer was notorious for giving only the information that was necessary, not offering anything beyond strictly what was asked for and once, that had caused more trouble than I knew what to do with. But now it was helping me, same fashion, same reason. I’d been worried about having feelings for the lady on the holodeck, but then it hit me... why? This was the lady on the holodeck and so incredibly much more.

Least of all was the fact that she was real.

A computer leaves out nuances, little details, subtleties that even a sophisticated holodeck like the Enterprise’s couldn’t manage. And yes, the Leah Brahms in the simulation was amazing, but computers aren’t perfect. They aren’t human.

And that’s what’s so great about the originals holograms are based off of.

They are.

Yes, I’d loved a holographic woman once and for a while I wasn’t certain if I could feel anything for the real Leah the way I had for her. But then I figured out that sure, the computer had been right on... as far as a computer could be. And yes, the hologram had been incredible but the real woman was infinitely more so.

After all, it wasn’t as if a hologram of anyone could be as exact or as three-dimensional as the actual person. So yes. That was when I stopped being uncertain. I figured out that I could have feelings for Leah Brahms.

The real one, quirks and all.

Because however amazing the hologram was, it didn’t hold a candle to the real her.

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