Posted by Lieutenant Commander Zef Rollo (Counselor) in Counsellor’s Office- Calloway’s Eval

Posted by Lieutenant Faye Calloway (Mission Specialist) in Counsellor’s Office- Calloway’s Eval

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Zef Rollo (Counselor) in Counsellor’s Office- Calloway’s Eval
Posted by… suppressed (1) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snips)

There went her eyes again, misting over. Faye’s hands flew to her mouth as she realized that there was a similitude between their two stories and that it revealed something she wasn’t sure she wanted to deal with. “Chameleons…” she said. “Your… whatever term you want to use. Him, and Nevol. Chameleons. I don’t know why he was that way towards you, and I do know that Nevol was coerced into getting close to me, to save his family. Am I just fool for wanting to believe that he actually cared, that he might have actually loved me?” That tension in her stomach was back but this time it held a different edge- one that cut deeply with all the anger she had been wrestling with. “I mean he was willing to drag me back to the Tal Shair and let them carry on their…” She gestured with a hand, not intending to go down that path. “He would have handed me over and let them destroy me bit by bit until there was nothing left of me. And I want to hate him for it, especially since he killed himself and left me to clean up his mess! But if he was just using me, if he didn’t love me, then the whole of it was a ruse, then I’ve never been…” She furiously wiped at the tears, her mind cursing their presence.

~Faye Calloway, Data Specialist

Zef sat forward and balanced on the edge of the couch, knowing comfort needed to be offered but she was of the mind that touching was out of the question. Some people wanted a physical touch when they were sad, but Calloway was different. She’d lived her life cut off from that kind of affection mostly, so to do it now, while she was so vulnerable, would likely shock her enough to halt the progress she was currently making. So, the counselor just leaned forward a bit to lessen the distance between them.

“Then you’ve never been…what?”

—Rollo, CNS

The word she needed rolled around in her head, but it seemed resistant to reaching her lips, as if it were an active participant in the conversation (or rather a recalcitrant one in this case). Faye managed to resist turning her head away but she purposefully avoided Rollo’s gaze. “Loved,” she said as a painful sensation spread in her stomach.

“I know my parents did,” Faye said quietly. “But they’ve both been gone a long time now and every relationship since then has been… a disaster. I just want to know what it’s like. Just once!” Actual love. Healthy love. Was Faye even capable of it? She had no idea.

~Faye Calloway, Data Specialist

To hear Calloway admit her deepest hurt, that she’d never been loved, hurt the counselor’s heart. It couldn’t actually be true, could it? Surely somewhere in the woman’s life, someone had loved her…

“Faye, have you told everyone you’ve ever loved in your life how you felt about them? Most people don’t. You’ve heard the saying, ‘I loved him from afar…’ There are many reasons that people hold back confessing their feelings for someone—you’re actually experiencing it yourself, right now, with the man you’ve been talking about.” Zef took a deep breath, hoping the woman across from her would take her next words seriously. “What I’m saying is…its possible you’ve been loved several times already, but your admirers kept silent for one reason or another.”

—Rollo, CNS

A bitter laughed was her initial response. “Please, I did a really good job of keeping people away for a long time, and the first person that got through turned on me the moment he learned I had been Maquis. Haver you ever had anyone hate you so much in moment that they looked like they could kill you where you stood? Well I have, and if he had loved me before that point those feeling vanished rather quickly! And then there was the… I can’t actually tell you his story, but suffice to say he didn’t experience emotions the same way. He wasn’t raised by anyone so he didn’t even have the metric of parental love. We sought comfort from each other, but even that was a new experience for him. If he loved me I highly doubt he would even have known us.” Her eyes became a dark storm as her mind shifted to the one that made all this so much more difficult. “And then there’s Nevol, my Romulan Underground lover I just told you about. Who I actually said those words, ‘I love you’ to and who subsequently betrayed me. We can argue whether he had good reasons for it or not, but it’s because of him that I spent nine months in a Tal Shiar prison and there will never be forgiveness for that.” The venom in her voice surprised her but at the same time Faye could recognize that she (for once) wasn’t excusing his behaviour.

Calloway leaned forward, anger etched into her features. “So you tell me Counsellor. That’s the only evidence I have and it’s a pretty pathetic picture! I fall for people I can’t have, or can’t or won’t love me back. So where does that leave me?”

~Faye Calloway, Data Specialist