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Posted by Lieutenant Casela Synthi-er (Counsellor / RTF) in Holodeck - A Captain, a Counselor and a Campfire

Posted by Captain Zachariah Cobb (Commanding Officer) in Holodeck - A Captain, a Counselor and a Campfire

The explosion, something so small as a near finished bottle of alcohol bringing back the memories. “I was assigned to a special task force at the time. I was pulled out suddenly for a special assignment. Those are words you never want to hear. Special assignment always means someone is going to die.

Never a truer word…wasn’t that the saying. Zachariah simply nodded, silently.

I was assigned to go with a team as the interrogator. The governor of Makoa III was suspected of treason to the Federation. All initial intel supported that idea. I had learned at this point though, to never, ever, take the information I was given to be true. So when we got there, we started our own information gathering. It very quickly became evident that treason was the cleanest name for what this man was doing.” Casela returns to pick up the knife and begin cutting the end into a narrower point. Then she began to draw in the dirt. It would look like a diagram, a schematic of a building.

Cobb rose from his seat and moved towards her, settling into a crouch at the side of Cas’s chair to more closely study her diagram.

The diagram was extremely detailed. More details added as the more she talks. x’s, o’s, triangles, marking locations of her team, the governor, his ‘friends’. Lines and arrows detailing movement. Locations were marked and detailed for every sin the governor had committed and looked the other way for.

“The man was helping an alien invasion force gain footholds in exchange for powerful favors. His wife, and older children were in on it as well. He was allowing these aliens to do unspeakable things to the people he was sworn to protect as governor. We captured him, and I interrogated him. He was…resistant to normal techniques.” Casela looks away. She hated herself now for the things she did in those situations. It was for the protection of the Federation, so they said. It didn’t ease the guilt now. It wasn’t required to be so brutal, but she was unable to control her gift that way. She’d never learned, not even to this day. “HQ suggested I use my greatest weapon to get the information, and I did.” She tapped her head, “He was guilty, no doubt about it. But the problem with that technique is I also knew why he did it. And I can’t say that I don’t understand why. At first. Then he turned greedy, he had a way out to make it right, but he wanted more.”

More was added to her drawing. A chart of the star system, adding locations of bases and alien encampments, numbers, weapons, terrain, it was all there in the dirt.

“The information I got from him. We were able to destroy all four bases of the alien force. And Adam Trenton and his family were sentenced to death. All of them,” She pauses here, swallowing hard. “He had a 12 year old daughter. She was to be executed with the rest of the family. I…I couldn’t do it. The rest of the team had their orders though. She had absolutely no idea what was going on though. She was innocent, we knew that. HQ knew it too. They didn’t care.”

Twelve. The age of his son when Cobb had first joined the Outpost. Not that he could make any claim to being the boy’s father. But still, even his blackened soul flinched at the thought of a child being thrown to the wolves.

She pointed, this time not making the evidence appear on diagram, to the route, how she did it. How she framed Trenton for the escape.

Casela continues to draw in the dirt with the sharpened branch. “I made it look like Adam Trenton helped her escape the night before. We didn’t have the time to track so young a child, we had the 4 outposts to take care of and then get ourselves out. The rest of the mission, legitimized murder, went off without a hitch.” She looks over at the alcohol Cobb is nursing, and a part of her really wants the drink. But that little girl deserves better than Casela drowning in a bottle. “They were all glutenous. Smoking and drinking to excess all day and all night. After they were…executed it was easy to make an accident. A lit cigar dropped into the high proof alcohol created an explosion like you’ve never seen.” And that would explain how she knew the sound of expanding and cracking glass, “I went back, after our extraction. After, on my own to find her. She really had disappeared. I only had 24 hours to look. I had to report back to my other team. I couldn’t risk staying longer, HQ would find out what I had done. I had to leave her to whatever fate she’d found for herself. And I had condemned that little girl to live a hell unlike anything you or I could fathom, Zachariah.”
Lt Synthi-er, CNS

At her side, his hand came to rest upon her knee, while the other sought to dismiss the agonizing truth etched into the dust.
“No. Casela. You saved her.”

She shakes her head silently, watching as Zachariah erases the evidence. Evidence of what, if Cobb choose to tell, would be considered treason on her part.

He sighed deeply and reached for the bottle, dragging it along the ground to rest once more at his side.
“What you gave her…was a chance. A chance to suffer? I’d be the last to deny that as the most probable outcome. But if I’ve learned anything from my time in your company, Counselor, it’s that hope is the most stubborn of all barnacles on the arse of the sunken wreck that is life.”

• Captain Zachariah Cobb

“Saved her for what? The life I condemned her to, wasn’t a gift. There was no hope there. I abandoned her. I’d already defied orders, what would have been 1 more day? She was SO close and I didn’t even know it! The darkest demons I faced to get these old wounds, that Doc Fey is so worried about, are nothing compared to the plight of that little girl. I did that to her.” The firelight glints off her face, that is now damp, and to Zachariah’s dismay, she’s crying.

Moving onto his knees before her, Cobb took firm hold of Casela’s shoulders in an attempt to channel some measure of reassurance and strength.
“It is not for you to decide where hope lingers for another,” he whispered on an exhale of whiskey-laden breath. “Sometimes the only thing left to offer is existence itself, as torturous and accursed as that might be. You may think the seeds crushed to dust beneath your boots but still find them blossom into a fruit-laden tree. And while with every bite that fruit will be ash upon your tongue, still who is to say it has less worth than no fruit at all?”

There is a type of rage, that starts deep, in the soul. Where the soul connects to the other souls around it. Once ignited that rage draws to itself the rage of all the other lost souls in existence, and those long gone. It builds and smolders in the nether waiting to be tapped, waiting to be let out when one unsuspecting soul reaches it’s breaking point. And once let loose, there is no locking it back up. Like a wild fire, almost out, and then one gentle breath of fresh air sends it roaring into an inferno that kills everything within reach and begins to spread.

He could sense it then, in the barely-perceptible tremor of her body, the almost undetectable quickening of breath. On this beach the seas were receding, a final measure of sinister calm before the seismic flood of her rage. One single word or thought upon this scale and all parity would be lost. And freed from its containment, even Zachariah Cobb would find himself powerless against the beast buried deeply within her.

That type of rage turns on itself. The pain of the initial rage burns and needs fuel. And it finds that fuel in the tumultuous memories, regrets, and recriminations of the self.
One regret, feeds to the next and the next, until all one can do is see every choice, every motive, every event as feeding the monster, until there is no salvation left for the one who never asked for it, but is in such great need of it. In the flames of the fire, Casela can see the demon she’s become, the monster. A Balrog, a fiery demon that can only destroy everything in it’s path. It does not matter how many lives she’s saved, how many innocents protected, or Star Fleet officers. In that moment, the demon feeding on that rage convinces her none of it matters compared to what she did to the little girl. “Four years later, the section found that little girl,” her voice is harsh as if she’s breathed in too much smoke, raw and forced as if her vocal cords have never been used.

And then the rage erupts, finding an outlet in her voice as she unleashes it towards the fake heavens of the holodeck. The rage so hot that the moisture of the body escapes as tears down her face.
Casela Synthi-er

Immediately he pulled her close, strong arms locking around her both for comfort and for restraint. For in that moment they had reached a familiar precipice, crumbling tightrope between the light and the void. And for the first time that evening, Zachariah found himself doubting his strength. Not strength to pull her away from the dark, but strength not to pull her towards it.

“Shhh,” he attempted to soothe her, his own voice carrying a desperation he had no more desire to hide. “It’s okay, lass. You’re safe here. Safe from yourself.”

He expected a physical rebuke and would accept it without protest. For while his care and concern for Casela were true, so too was the thought echoing like a torment around the cavern of his own blackened soul - that some small, perverted part of him was eager to welcome the carnage head on. And the end it would bring for them both.

• Captain Zachariah Cobb