Posted by James Sinclair in Event Horizon- Amongst the Stars

Posted by Lieutenant Faye Calloway (Mission Specialist) in Event Horizon- Amongst the Stars

Posted by James Sinclair in Event Horizon- Amongst the Stars
Posted by… suppressed (1) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snip)

Faye nodded and drained the rest of her unique mineral water. “It’s okay, we can talk about it,” she said softly, though she ate her last piece of orange and finished swallowing before she continued. “Luke, first off… he’s moved on to another assignment, and while we never got to sort things out between us properly, I’m… okay with that. You help,” she said with a warm smile.

When she continued, her eyes shifted, and though they were distant, she was still present. It was more like she was working through a puzzle. Finally she shook her head. “When he first came aboard, he discovered that I had my lab and it was locked… for reasons obvious to those in the know. But he couldn’t stand that, Dag. Oh my God the very fact that I had stuff going on that no one decided he got to know?” She chuckled. ” He kicked my lab door! He wanted in and couldn’t get in. And I very calmly came to the door and explained who I was and that my work was restricted knowledge and he wasn’t on the list and he could take it up with the captain if he wanted. And that was how we met.” Of course there was more, but Dag understood her well enough that no only did she would suffer no fools, but that antagonism was the old usual. She had left that behind when she had arrive don the Manhattan.

“We had other interactions and they were… mixed. It wasn’t that we hated each other or anything but we rubbed each other the wrong way while at the same time there were… moments.” Faye sighed and looked up at Daggum. “How much do you actually want to know?” She didn’t want to hurt him after all, but Luke was complex and at the end of the day had been one of her symptoms and triggers.

~Faye Calloway

Dag smiled and took her hand and poured some water in the glass. “Leave a little in it. And we have four minutes. And I want to know everything about it. I think we both know that neither if us is going to be either one’s first… when we decide to take that step. I’m a big boy, Faye. And I’m Orion. I can handle sex talk.” and he squeezed her hand. “You know a bit about the woman I spent time with on the Athena, and I’ll tell you anything yiu want to know. But I think this Luke guy was an event for you. Not the sex… I mean if it was kudos… but I think, after hearing you talk about… I think that experience shifted something significant in you… for the better. So I want to know all about it. Whatever you feel comfortable telling me, that is.”

Daggum

Squeezing his hand, Faye took a moment to sip heavily from the water. “I can tell you anything,” she said matter-of-factly. And it was true! She had known it that first call when his appearance simply burst open the well and she had laid it all out for him to see. And Daggum had held all those intense emotions so carefully. Faye trusted him without a doubt. So, one hand on her water glass and the other hand in Dag’s Faye let herself delve deeply.

“Okay, so, Luke is a piece of a mish-mash of things. He wasn’t a singular event, though I think what happened between us tipped me over the edge,” she said slowly and carefully, measuring her words to make sure she was being as honest with herself as she was with him. “Everything with Mr. Fake Handler and the brig just brought up all the old stuff from not just the Romulans but that sense of being trapped and someone controlling my life that I felt the entire time I was with Kodell. But no one knew about Kodell, not… really. I had mentioned being a slave in passing but I couldn’t touch those experiences. I think I’ve known for a long time that I wasn’t ready to, because to touch them would be really hard and I wasn’t strong enough emotionally yet. But this ship, Dag. Oh Gods, these people here, including you, found their way through the cracks that had formed on the Curie when I admitted being Maquis and then everything went the Hell and I found myself in San Francisco in an inpatient centre.

Another sip of water. “Like back then, I spiralled. Badly. That first conversation of ours was so wonderful, but at the same time I knew you had feelings for me, and mine were inaccessible. Everything was such a jumble in my head and I… turned to whiskey. My longtime foe. Luke showed up to check on me after getting out of the brig and I was already very drunk. I invited him in and he drank with me while we chatted. It felt like there was equilibrium between us. Because there had been this moment in the brig that I couldn’t explain. Attraction, yes, but something else. So… very, very drunk, I made a move. And he almost took me up on it. Dag, for me sex has been an escape. It’s something physical that distracts me from other things. Not always, but often. A momentary safe haven. And there’s nothing wrong with that… unless you have BPD and are prone to risky behaviour. Then, if I don’t check myself, I can be… destructive. That night, Luke turned me down and I made him leave and promptly dissociated. And I don’t know how long I stood there but afterwards I had this massive wave of pain and anxiety hit me. And I got very scared. The last time I was in that place was the same one that landed me at Santa Clara… so I stumbled my way to the counsellor’s quarters. A part of me knew I needed to be somewhere safe for my own well being, so that is where I ended up and where, after a bit of a jumbled conversation I only partly remember, I confessed all these confusing feelings for you, and Luke and…” She smirked. “Alex.” Faye shook her head. “I wanted someone to make the pain stop and Luke rejecting me under those circumstances cut deep. And so I spiralled.

Faye drank heavily from her glass, leaving only a little bit left, her other hand never leaving the safety of Daggum’s. “Cut ahead to a week out of the brig and having made it safety through not only that night but also learning about Leroy and that triggering a very painful mind dump as well as an argument with a friend, and we get to the awards ceremony. I had been feeling so terrible that to then stand with Alex in front of everyone and tell them that I had done these things to help and that I wasn’t the traitor we made them believe I was…”-she shook her head-“everything flipped Dag. Suddenly I was on this massive high and it felt soooo good after feeling sooo terrible that I wanted anything and everything to keep that feeling going. After reconciling my feelings with Alex and talking it out with him, I walked away from his ready room knowing I actually gained a friend, rather than having lost a potential relationship. I went back to the Garden and ran into Luke.” She stopped there and downed the rest of her water, letting Dag process what she had said so far.

~Faye Calloway

Dag held her hand and let her process, talk, pause, process, talk… whatever she needed. Because he needed it too. He needed to know the path she took to get there… with him… at that moment. Did he want to hear about her sharing herself with someone else? No. Even an Orion has lines they try not to cross when it comes to intimate physical relationships. And Daggum loved Faye immensely… more than anything. But this wasn’t about her sleeping with Luke… it was about her coming to him. And that journey was bound to have obstacles along the way.

Daggum

This part was harder but at the same time, she had been honest that Luke having left the ship was okay. Everything was okay now. “We took a walk together and were talking, and again there was that connection. He asked to see my favourite tree, and I was taking him up to the bench with the dew-drop tree I took you to, Dag, and I went to show him the view…” She paused, feeling that strange pain of being so misunderstood in what was supposed to be a poignant moment. “He made a joke about whether this was where I killed him. As if standing there with a medal of valour was nothing. Such a casual joke but he might as well have stabbed me with a knife. I yelled and stormed off. He followed and we argued. A lot. And then something shifted, Dag. Earlier in Alex’s ready room, he explained exactly why he thought I’d make a good commanding officer. And I felt that. So I stood there and for the first time ever I thought, ‘What would Captain Calloway do in this moment? How would she handle this?’ And I knew that she’d take a moment, think through the options and find a compromise. So I told him to give me thirty minutes and meet me in my lab. If he showed up, we could talk more, if he didn’t, that was that.

I went and he showed up. It was the first time he’d been in my lab and I explained the crux of my work, about the experimental side to protect agains the virus. I could tell he wasn’t fully following just how grave the situation was and how complicated my project was, but he did seem to understand when I explained how my brain works, and that all the multiple thought trains going on at once and how that means the wrong one can surface at the wrong time. Very rarely am I trying to be hurtful. It just happens and I’m often mystified myself when it does. Long story short, the part of me that wanted to feel good wanted to put the argument in the garden behind. Pretend it didn’t happen. So I made a move again and this time he didn’t turn me down. But Dag… you have to know that my decision making there was entirely cerebral. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about Luke, but I was in crisis. And when someone like me is in crisis their own emotions are buried under everything else. Being with him didn’t make me feel better, but it also didn’t make me feel worse. And that’s how I know being here with you is different, they we are different. Because I feel everything here with you at the same time as I’m thinking through it all. It’s not one or the other but both. That’s how I know what we have is different from everything else that’s come before.

Blowing out a breath, Faye braced herself for the hard part of the story. “Long story a tiny bit shorter, I had dinner with Alex and Luke came up, and oh Dag… when he explained his perspective on the whole thing”-tears began to blur her vision-“aside from Kodell and how Dez made me feel, I have never felt quite so ashamed. I didn’t know what to do with it all, but I knew I had to tread carefully with Luke. That I had already made a big mistake and I couldn’t take it back. Luke had a similar sort of moment with Alex and they had had a massive an argument over it all. And when we met up in the garden the next day I ended the causal agreement with I had with when he told me we could make each other happy. He wanted to damn everyone else and just do our own thing. I had explained about my BPD to him but he didn’t get it. I couldn’t have a relationship with him but Alex was right, he had already put us in one. And Luke was sooo angry with me when I said I wasn’t sure under the circumstances of we could even be friends. We were too dangerous to each other. I was right then, even if it could have gone back to friendship once I was out of the weeds.” She squeezed his hand firmly. “Luke stormed off and the next thing I know I’m on the holodeck with my Mom and Alex in my Muir Beach program. I can’t fully explain just how terrifying it is to have no memory of how you got from one place to another. And that’s where it happened. The counsellor was called and we went there and I finally brought up Kodell. Because it was the answer to my mom’s unspoken question about what happened to the people we loved on Tracken and what happened to me after. I disappeared, Dag. She couldn’t find me alive after Voyager got back to the Alpha Quadrant because I was on Orion, a non-person.” Faye exhaled audibly. “I went to bed that night with a sedative after a lot of talking because Kodell was going to invade my dreams. I knew that. I could already feel him touching me and it was two decade ago! The next day I told the story to Alex. All of it. All the details, including how mixed up I was about you. And that’s when he told me to tell you, that night. So I planted the Glow-orbs and went and called you. And here we are,” she said through shining eyes.

~Faye Calloway