A Rekindling of Old Flames...

Posted on 28 Oct 2016 @ 7:25pm by Captain Nathan Cowell MD

Mission: Episode One: Back on the Highway to Hell
Location: Captain's Quarters, Deck 2
Timeline: MD 3: 2235 hours

Captain Nathan Cowell sat at his deck in his Ready Room, eyes beginning to blur as he struggled to read the letters on the pages of the book he held in his hand. He’d read the thing more than a thousand times already; it was simply something familiar that he could fall back on when he felt less than sure about things. He’d spoken to the man in charge of the Delta Quadrant forces and his conversation was unsavory at best. The revelation that the Borg had been responsible for the sudden scuttling of the Federation’s transwarp conduit system had shaken Nathan a bit more than he knew it should have. The Borg weren’t exactly new in this particular neck of the woods, nor did they leave people to their own devices when it suited their expansionist tendencies.

“Computer… what time is it?” Nathan asked as he tossed his book onto the desk.

“It is 2235 hours,” the computer replied in the usual monotone voice that was standard throughout the Federation.

The Old Man let out a breath and pushed himself back in his chair. He’d been up about as long as he cared to be and he decided his quarters were the best place to get some actual sleep. Nathan rose from his chair and trudged toward the door, tugging at his uniform slightly as the doors swooshed open to allow him to exit. The bridge was already dimmed for night operations, which meant that Nathan was the last member of the Senior Staff to depart the Bridge. The Old Man stole a glance around the room as he passed by his empty chair and noticed that Lieutenant Akron was the senior most man on the watch, every other station was occupied by either an enlisted crewman or a very young Ensign.

“Akron!” Nathan barked, already behind the First Officer’s console on his way to the turbolift.

“Yes, sir?” the young pilot said, turning to face Nathan’s back.

“You’ve got the Bridge,” Cowell said as the turbolift doors parted to allow him inside.

“I’ll keep her together for you, Captain,” Paul said with a grin.

The Captain grunted, “See that you do.”

When the doors finally slid closed, Nathan allowed himself a bit of a grin. It had taken him a good few years to do it, but Akron finally started to show signs of being a worthwhile officer. “Deck Two,” the Captain barked. He could have just as easily walked down the stairs that flanked the bridge module and gotten to his destination, but it just didn’t have the same effect... that and Nathan wasn’t really in the mood for stairs. When the doors to the lift hissed open, the Captain stepped out and made the very brief walk that separated him from his quarters.

Nathan’s quarters were atypical of those found on most ships. Given his advanced years and personal preference for aesthetics, rather than the more ‘modern’ look that every other living compartment had, the residence Cowell was provided looked like something out of an old 1950’s movie. His furniture was styled in the same manner as any ancient Earth residence of the period, complete with muted pastels and metal tables and dining chairs. He also had a complete kitchen from the period, even if he also had a replicator. The bathroom even came fully furnished with a shower and bathtub, one of the few items that no other room aboard the Arizona came standard with. It was one of the perks of being in charge of a ship, and possibly the only one that didn’t come with strings and conditions.

The Old Man tapped his access code into the small panel that sat off to the left of the door and waited for the computer to let him in. When the doors parted, the view Nathan was greeted with was not the one he expected to see… in fact, he didn’t really ever expect to see the face that greeted him ever again…

“What the hell are you doing in here?” Nathan bellowed at the figure of a woman he hadn’t seen in just shy of 450 years.

“Is that any way to say hello to your wife, Nathan?” the woman retorted with her hands firmly planted on her hips in disappointment.

The Old Man stormed into the room and walked past her on the way to his refrigerator, pulling out a jug of his favorite beverage, sweet tea. He poured himself a glass and put the jug back into the fridge before turning to regard the woman that had just decided after four and a half centuries to show back up in his life.

“You’re still here?” he growled at her.

The woman folded her arms across her chest and frowned at Nathan, “The least you could do is say hello to me, you know…”

“Why? You fucked off half a millennium ago without so much as a goodbye. I figure you deserve nothing but a fuck you at this point,” the Old Man retorted.

The woman standing before Nathan let out an exasperated sigh, “I suppose, in the grand scheme of things, I deserve that. I did leave you back on Earth without so much as a word…”

“And you lied to me too,” Nathan reminded her, “Told me you were human… told me a lot of other shit that ended up being a lie too…”

“Oh?” the woman asked, her eyebrow perking up slightly at the accusation.

Once again, Nathan brushed by the woman and sank into his recliner, “Yeah… you told me you loved me.”

Out of all the things Nathan could have said, that irked the woman most of all. Yes, she had lied about her race, yes she had left him without so much as a word… but she had never once lied when she told him that she’d love him. Out of all the many emotions she hadn’t bothered to feel in her lifetime as a Q, her love for Nathan had been the most earnest and real.

“That hurts, Nathan…” the woman frowned, “I loved you more than any other person I’ve ever met…”

“Bullshit!” came the angry rebuttal, “If you’d have loved me like you say, you wouldn’t have lied and you wouldn’t have left. And don’t give me that shit about the Continuum not wanting us to be together, or you had other shit to do. They didn’t stop you from getting hitched in the first place and you damn sure didn’t seem to be all that busy for twenty years of our marriage.”

“Things changed, Nathan…” the woman offered up rather pathetically.

“Dammit, Elizabeth, I don’t want to hear your excuses! Just tell me to my face you didn’t want to be with me and that you used me like you bastard Q use everyone and get the hell out of my life! I’ve got enough shit to worry about without you sticking your damn nose into my affairs this damn long after you abandoned me,” Cowell roared from his chair.

Elizabeth? He actually called her by the name he’d known her by back on Earth. The woman was somewhat shaken to hear it. She was sure he would have just called her Q and spit on both the name and the race. If he was still calling her that…

She walked over and sank down onto the armrest of the chair Nathan was sitting in, which was greeted rather grumpily by him jerking his arm away from her. But he didn’t shove her off…

“I’m sorry, Nathan…” she said in almost a whisper, “I really am… But I can’t change what happened… we both know that. I’m not trying to come back into your life to hurt you again…”

“Then why the hell are you here?” the Old Man growled up at the face of the woman he’d once loved dearly.

The woman he called Elizabeth hung her head for a moment, as if unsure how best to reply to his question. The silence was palpable as the woman formulated her reply. Nathan had spent the better part of his long life forgetting about the woman and everything she had done, and was finding it extremely hard to not strangle her… even if it wouldn’t actually do anything.

“Two reasons, really… the first is purely… dictated,” she finally admitted, looking back up, “The Continuum knows about your sojourn to the future. While we don’t like the fact that one of our Guardians took it upon itself to do what it did… the damage is done and the path it set you on is the temporally correct one. The trouble is, you didn’t leave that time with all the information you’ll need to fix it as you are supposed to…”

“So you’re here to clean up your little toy’s mess… typical…” Nathan groused unhappily, “So what didn’t we learn that we should have?”

“The fact that you only have a few months to stop the trigger event. That you need to be proactive in finding your answers even while you attend to the other things handed down to you. And, that if you don’t… you will be allowing that particular history to play out all over again and you won’t be able to do anything but ride the wave if you fail,” Elizabeth answered his question.

“Well that’s about as vague as you can get…” the Old Man remarked flatly.

“You’re lucky I was allowed to say even that, Nathan. And I had to plead with the Continuum to be the one to come here and say it. I could just see how well received it would have been had another Q come here instead. They wouldn’t have gotten out three words before you drove them off,” the woman explained.

“So why did you beg them to let you do it… it isn’t like you’re all that welcome here either,” Cowell frowned.

“If you had wanted me gone, Nathan, you would have forced me to leave the minute you saw me. I’ve seen firsthand how easily you can pressure a Q into leaving. Our past, for better or for worse, gave me at least a fighting chance to stay here long enough to give you that warning,” Elizabeth stated in a matter of fact manner.

The Old Man shifted in his chair uncomfortably for a moment before muttering, “What was the other reason?”

“Hmm?” the woman said as if she hadn’t heard him.

“You said there were two reasons… what’s the second?”

The woman reached out and placed a hand on Nathan’s forearm, “Because I wanted to see you… Even if just for a little while. I really did miss you, Nathan… And I never stopped loving you.”

Nathan Cowell grabbed the woman’s hand and for a moment thought to pull it away, to throw the woman off his chair and onto her ass like she deserved. But there was that tiny piece of him that had genuinely missed her too. Even after 450 years apart, he still hoped in the back of his mind that she wasn’t truly gone from his life. In the span of a moment, he let a good deal of his anger at her go and he just squeezed the hand that rested on his arm. It was a familiar sensation from a distant past. It was almost as if time hadn’t moved a day since their last morning together…

“I guess you’re going to go back to your cozy little Continuum here shortly,” Cowell grumbled.

Elizabeth gave his arm a squeeze, “No… I hadn’t planned on it.”

“I thought you’d be chomping at the bit to blink back off to that paradise and leave me behind…”

“I’m not a horse, Nathan…” the woman frowned.

The man gave the woman an appraising glance, “Could have fooled me, the way you always nagged at my ass…”

Elizabeth huffed and took a swing at Nathan with her free hand, only to lose her balance on the armrest she was perched on and crumple into his lap. The both of them started to laugh at the ridiculousness of the whole exchange, and the when the laughter subsided, Elizabeth made no move to get up and Nathan didn’t make any attempts to remove her. For the first time in a very long time, they shared the companionable silence that had been rather dominant throughout their marriage.

“Are you still yelling at people to stay out of your chair?” Elizabeth asked after a long while.

Nathan grunted, “Damn straight…”

The woman laughed, “I remember when you started that… you yelled at me to get out of your recliner after you’d come home from a particularly bad day at the clinic.”

“I wanted my damn chair and your ass was in the one place it didn’t need to be right then and there…” the Old Man made no attempt to apologize.

“You’re still an ass…” Elizabeth said before planting a kiss on Nathan’s cheek, “But you’re my ass, even after all these years.”

Nathan glared at the woman, “How do you figure?”

The woman smiled knowingly before pushing herself off Nathan’s lap, disappearing into his bedroom. She knew exactly what she was looking for and knew exactly where to find it. When she returned, she reached for Nathan’s hand and stood patiently until he relented. She took his wrist and placed something in his hand before letting him go. When Nathan opened it up, he found his wedding ring sitting in his palm.

“You wouldn’t have that in the same place you put it every night before you went to bed when we were married if you weren’t still, deep down, my husband. And let’s not forget the 450 years you went without sleeping with a single other woman,” Elizabeth declared.

“Maybe I just haven’t been all that horny…” Cowell grumbled as he leaned back into his recliner again.

The woman frowned at the very flimsy excuse, “I seem to remember having to fight you off me after three or four rounds…”

“I was only 200 back then, still had plenty of energy. 400 years takes a lot out of a man…” Nathan remarked sardonically.

“Right…” Elizabeth said skeptically.

Nathan rocked in his recliner lazily, “I think I’m going to get some sleep… how about you turn the lights off before you leave.”

The woman shook her head and grabbed Nathan by the hand, “Oh no… you’re not going to sleep in that chair tonight. Now bring your grumpy ass to bed.”

“I happen to like my chair just fine. Besides, that bed in there is too big and too damn empty,” the Old Man protested.

“Not tonight it won’t be,” Elizabeth said as she pulled Nathan effortlessly out of his chair.

“That’s cheating…” Nathan grumbled at her sudden use of her powers to uproot him.

The woman shrugged, “If it gets you out of the chair and into bed with me where you belong, I’ll cheat.”

“I’m still pissed at you…”

Elizabeth gave the Old Man a soft kiss, “I know.”

“And I haven’t forgiven you yet either,” Nathan proclaimed as he followed her into his bedroom.

“I didn’t expect you to,” Elizabeth said as she stopped at the foot of the bed and pushed her husband onto it roughly.

“What the hell are you doing, woman?” Nathan protested the unceremonious treatment he’d just received.

“I’m getting us both naked, and then I’m going to fuck you in half. It has been a while and… well… we could both use it,” the woman replied before snapping her fingers and making every article of clothing both of them had on disappear.

“I see that…” Nathan remarked as he watched his wife crawl up the bed. Regardless of how much he might have detested the way the woman had disappeared on him all those years ago, Nathan couldn’t argue the point that he probably did need to be fucked in half…