Wherever You Go, There You Are

Posted on 30 Oct 2016 @ 4:59pm by Lieutenant Mariah Grayson M.D., Ph.D.

Mission: Prelude; Breakfast at Curmudgeon's
Location: Location: USS Arizona, Corridor outside Doctor Grayson’s Quarters
Timeline: MD -2: 11:30 hrs

Mom wouldn’t be pleased. The thought passed through the thinker’s mind quickly but carried the emotional impact of a long buried memory. Doctor Mariah Grayson was so caught off guard by the unbidden thought she actually had to stop in the middle of her new ship’s corridor to center herself.

Where the hell did that come from?

The 38-year-old emergency medic and psychiatrist tried not to think about her mother too much, not simply because she wanted to avoid the woman herself, but because she wanted to avoid any associated memories thoughts of her mother would inevitably bring up. After all, Grayson had had over 30 years to make sense of her complicated relationship with her mother and still, the best she’d been able to do was to figure out how to establish appropriate limits for their relationship, so Mariah wouldn’t get pulled down by Natalie’s insanity along with her.

To adult Mariah, she would always be Natalie, if she was thought of at all. To the universe, or more accurately, at least to London, she would be Doctor Natalie Tolliver-Grayson, renowned psychiatrist and associate professor. And to her father? Mariah wasn’t sure exactly how Federation diplomat Edward Grayson III saw his troubled wife, as for the sake of their father-daughter relationship, Mariah had had to limit their discussions about her.

That decision in itself hadn’t come easy, though she wouldn’t have blamed anyone who knew her when she was growing up if they thought it had. Mariah was the center of her parents’ worlds and given everything she would ever need or even want. In return, even Mariah had come to believe it was her responsibility to be the person they expected her to be. She was their second chance, not just at parenthood, but at living.

How could Mariah ever convince any one of her parents’ friends the price for her parents’ love and the idyllic life they offered was to live in the shadow of a sibling she had never met and likely never would?
To this day, even Mariah felt complicit in who her mother was. Those feelings were impossible to avoid considering Mariah found herself half on and half off the path the elder Grayson had been expected to walk.

That was, the path she would’ve been expected to walk if she’d never been presumed dead in the first place.

How did one compete with a ghost? What part of her choices were Mariah’s own?

Starfleet had seemed like her best way out. Mariah genuinely loved being a healer of minds and bodies, and she believed it was pointless to question or analyze that love. Instead, she chose to travel the stars and be her own Doctor Grayson, doing whatever was personally meaningful to her. Until recently, that had meant serving aboard medical vessels, or most recently, using her medical and psychiatric expertise to help people find justice with Starfleet JAG.

However, as she walked the corridors of the expansive USS Arizona, not even the butterflies in her stomach and the scent of newness could distract her from the single unexpected thought.

There was a time when displeasing her mother was so abhorrent to her that she wouldn’t have ever considered it. The reality of being the child that survived was that one was not supposed to be anything but grateful for it. To be anything less was to cause pain to those who had been deemed to have suffered enough.

But hadn’t she gotten past trying to please her parents at this point in her life?

Making her way to her quarters with greater focus and determination, Mariah decided that was a question for another day and time altogether. She had a new path to forge.