CHAPTER EIGHT
Tammas was living at Gart’s place, but it still didn’t really feel like home. He slept on the bed in the guest room, but hadn’t turn back the covers ever since he had arrived on Betazed. Instead, he used a sleeping bag, as if he were at a camp, and slept on top of the covers. He didn’t even use the mosquito net that was available to him, but then, he really didn’t need it. The local flying, biting insects seemed remarkably uninterested in him, perhaps because of his alien biology. The things in the guest room were alien to him, as were the things in most of the house, and they tended to be fragile things, for decoration not handling. This place was not for kids at his level of curiosity, or children period. He wondered how Chandra could have grown up in this house, for even her room lacked the toys he figured should be typical of childhood.
The one room he liked was the library, full of dusty, smelly old tomes that he couldn’t read. The room carried with it a feeling of high traffic, as if it was the most used room in the house. The books called to him. He wasn’t sure exactly what their appeal was, since the texts were indecipherable. Except for an occasional picture which he could imagine a story for, the importance of the books was exaggerated in his imagination. It reminded him of the books Mrs. Garcia had accumulated in her study, and he imagined that getting ones doctorate meant reading all of these books that spanned from one side of the study to the other, on three walls, from floor to ceiling. He couldn’t imagine ever being able to read all these books, but if that’s what it took to get a doctorate, then that’s what he would do. He would have to make a list of all the books he needed and learn to read them so he could become accepted. He would make it a point to learn everything he could that would come with a certificate or license, and then perhaps Deanna would appreciate him more. He was already up on his amateur subspace radio license. Perhaps he’d focus on a pilot’s license next.
He recognized that his mind was certainly preoccupied with Deanna, but even with her in his life, the reinforced connection, Tammas felt the longing for home with the Garcia’s. He missed looking out into the ocean from his bedroom window. He missed the way the light shimmered on his walls as the wave surged overhead when high tide came in. He missed the dolphins. Especially Star. He knew that his days there were special, and that very few people ever got the opportunity to establish relationships with dolphins the way he had, or to live in a house in the sea. His life was an adventure. Deanna had taken him to the ocean several times, but it just felt different. It tasted different. He wanted to go back home, and yet, he wanted to stay with Deanna at the same time. He wanted the best of both worlds.
After reflecting over this, or more accurately, mourning his loss, for he had given up hope that he would ever be allowed to return, he spoke a letter to Natalia, trying very hard to keep it positive. He was preparing to transmit the letter, including holographic photos of him with Deanna, to the Garcia family when suddenly he was flooded by an overwhelming sense of panic. His heart rate accelerated, his breath caught in his throat, forcing him to take conscious control over his breathing to avoid passing out, and the palms of his hands began to sweat. After all his biofeedback work, he recognized the fight or flight response, but he could not identify any immediate, or nearby threat. He walked around the house, looking for something out of the ordinary, and finding nothing, he started working on his relaxation techniques. He would have better understood this seemingly random fear had it been dark outside, or a fierce thunderstorm had been raging. Or a bomb had gone off.
But outside, it was a beautiful, sunny day, and birds and insects circled and approached the various bird feeders as if controlled by ATC. It was interesting watching the birds, but he wanted more immediate distraction, and so he turned on a computer and tuned into a local channel. The local daily programs he had become accustomed to seeing were being interrupted by a live report of a hostage situation at the museum.
Tammas knew instantly that Deanna was in trouble. He didn’t know how he could help, but he knew he had to do something. The first something was to steal Gart’s hovercraft from the garage. He discovered flying a hovercraft was nothing comparable to driving an antigravity forklift, even though he had watched Deanna do it on several occasions when they had traveled together. On backing it out of the garage he swiped the corner and knocked down a wall, bringing part of the roof down with it. Some of debris landed inside the vehicle, as the convertible roof was down, while other bits of debris lay scattered across the hood until Tammas spun the vehicle too quickly around. Further, he discovered it had a maximum height at which it could hover, one that didn’t quite permit him to clear the fence surrounding Gart’s estate, nor allow him to fly up over houses so that he could go straight to the museum. The final thing he discovered, before crashing it into the side of a building, was that at high speeds it didn’t turn on a dime. Its inertia gave it a wide turning radius, and so the harder he tried to turn it, the faster the hovercraft began to spin, like a helicopter without a tail rotor. Tammas was forced to run the remaining two blocks to the museum, ignoring the shouts from people who were upset about the destruction of their property, or perhaps concerned with his visible injuries.
Scratched, bleeding, battered, and bruised, he was in visible sight of the museum when he was tackled by some unseen force and swept off his feet. That force was none other than the very same William T Riker that he so hated and despised.
William T Riker couldn’t believe his eyes. A kid was running towards the scene of the crime, either oblivious to, or simply ignoring, the ship on top of the museum, or the gathering security forces that were even now surrounding the museum. The ship’s turret guns were swiveling around to target the kid, and without thinking, Will dodged out into the open, swept up the kid, and threw himself to the nearby decorative, brick planter, which just barely towered above his head if he scrunched. And scrunched he did.
Tammas squirmed to get loose of Riker’s tight grip.
“I got to help her…” Tammas insisted. The words he used blurred together as if it were one were word.
“Easy kid,” Riker demanded.
Frustrated that Will wasn’t listening and recognizing that he had lost the ability to speak effectively, Tammas grasped Riker’s hands and tried to link telepathically. Riker got to his feet and ran back to his previous hold, hauling the screaming kid with him.
“Where did he come from?”
“Beats me, Tang. Everyone else ran the other way,” Riker said. “Is Wendy still at our office?”
“Affirmative,” Tang reported.
“Great. Get this kid to her and tell her to sit on him if she has to,” Riker said. “His parents must be inside.”
“You got it boss," said Tang, promptly handing the kid and instructions over to someone else
Wendy soon found that the kid was just too over the top, out of control, and called in reinforcements. Lwaxana Troi beamed in a moment later and took charge of the situation, meaning that her manservant, Homn, had to restrain the child, while she tried to reason with him. She decided to have the four of them beamed back to her place, and there she tried placating him with food and drink, but he wouldn’t have it. When the spider ship, with the single hostage of Deanna Troi, crashed, Tammas went into a fierce rage forcing Homn to lock him in a tight body grip to prevent him from escaping. Lwaxana called for a medic to come have the kid sedated.
“Please, I know where she is, I can find her, please,” Tammas insisted, all the while remaining in verbal communication mode, though his speech was obviously unintelligible. Tam was certain that if Gart were present, they would listen to him, but Gart was on the way to the hospital with his daughter. Rumor hadn’t been confirmed yet, but it appeared that Deanna may have saved her by sacrificing herself. “Don’t you understand? This is not a game!”
A medic arrived with a sedative to help calm the kid down. Tammas saw it, knew what it was for, and knew, no matter what, he mustn’t go unconscious. He stopped his struggling and screaming, and stood absolutely still, barely breathing.
“There now,” Lwaxana said. “This is much more reasonable. Take him into the kitchen and give him the chocolate I promised him. I’m getting too old for all of this, and I must keep my focus on Deanna. What’s the word on the on the hostage situation, Wendy?”
“Apparently, all the hostages have been recovered but one,” Wendy said.
Luxawana nodded. “She’s still alive, I know that much. I really can’t be bothered with that kid any more. If he makes another noise, sedate him,” she said, dismissing the doctor, allowing him to join Homn and Tammas in the kitchen.
“Thank you for your help, Lwaxana Troi,” Wendy said. “I’m so sorry.”
Lwaxana embraced Wendy. “Oh, Wendy,” she said, and started to cry.
Over the next couple of days, Tammas stayed at Lwaxana’s place. Apparently Gart had asked the witch, as Tammas was beginning to refer to her, to keep him while he remained with his daughter. Chandra was going to be fine, but he really didn’t want to be away from her. Lwaxana, of course, understood, and she was too preoccupied by her own worries to notice anything Tammas was doing. And he was doing everything he could to keep his mind simultaneously on Deanna and Riker. He knew exactly where they both were, and had they let him, he could have gone right to them. Instead, he was trying to encourage Riker to move in the right direction. Of course, he couldn’t communicate with Riker like “go right, go left,” but he could send very positive thoughts when he was moving correctly, and withdraw that support when he was heading in the wrong direction. To help concentrate, Tammas wandered through Deanna’s room. He could smell that she slept here. He would smother his face in her pillow, or push his way through the clothes in her closet, breathing in deeply. Her aroma, bits of hair, bits of dried skin, sweat, hormones, and everything a body sheds, her full essence, would always be in this room, no matter how much time went by, and no matter how good or often the room and the items in the room were cleaned.
Riker, of course, had no idea he was getting extra help. He was confident in his ability to track and usually tended to ignore his gut feeling. On this occasion though, he knew that he had a connection with Deanna that he had never had with anyone else, and so when his intuition told him to move in a specific direction, he gave it more reverence than he might have before meeting Deanna. If you asked him, he simply knew that he would find her, that he would be the one to rescue her. That was his destiny. Riker not only found Deanna, but he was rewarded for it with romance, just like in one of Deanna’s westerns.
Tammas let out a shriek that had everyone running up the stairs at full speed to investigate. They found him hitting his head against the wall in Deanna’s room. Lwaxana swept him into her arms.
“Hey, what’s wrong, honey,” Lwaxana asked, unable to reach him even telepathically. “Wendy, go call Gart and tell him I need him.”
It took a moment for Gart to arrive via a transporter. He materialized outside and Homn let him in and showed him up stairs. Tammas was awake, but non responsive. Gart was not use to experiencing frustration, but that’s what he was feeling as he discovered even his greater telepathic abilities couldn’t penetrate through Tam’s defenses and help break him out of the cell he had created for himself. Gart administered a sedative, secretly hoping that Tammas would be normal when he woke up, as if sleep might reset his neural functioning.
“What happened?” Lwaxana asked.
“I suspect the worse,” Gart said, suggesting that he believed Tammas was somehow linked with Deanna telepathically, and that she must have died.
“No,” Lwaxana said, wanting to die herself just at the thought of such a possibility. “I may not be as strong a telepath as you, but I would know if my daughter died, even if she was on the other side of the galaxy. There’s no way this mere child, a human at that, could discern such a thing and I can’t.”
“If it’s not that, I don’t have a clue,” Gart said.
When the sedative wore off, Tammas felt some confusion, then some stirring of memories, then anger, and then he locked down on his thoughts again, blocking everything and everyone out before Gart even had a chance to get a feel for what he was dealing with. He was concerned that Tammas was having a nervous break down, and so he put in a call for Admiral McCoy.
“I’ve done everything I know how to do,” Gart said. “Short of an archaic electro shock therapy, I just don’t have anything for this.”
“My god, man, zapping his brain with electricity isn’t an answer,” McCoy said.
“I know that,” Gart snapped back. He sighed. “It’s just my way of saying I’m at my wits end.”
“I know,” McCoy said. “Hang on a moment.”
Exactly four and a half minutes later, McCoy came back on line. “I’ve arranged for a ship to retrieve Tammas and transport him to Vulcan. They can have him there quicker than I can get out there to you, so I will simply rendezvous with him there.”
“I’m really sorry. I feel like I let you down,” Gart said.
“Oh, Gart, you didn’t let me down. As best as I can tell from these tricorder scans you sent me, my guess is he activated his Vulcan genes for emotion suppression, and, quite frankly, over did it. Highly over did it, judging by the neural cellular stress level,” McCoy said. “Was there some drama there recently?”
Gart sighed and filled him in on all the drama, providing details from his daughter’s injury to the dramatic chase and recovery of Deanna Troi. He explained how he thought Deanna had been killed based on Tam’s behavior. He told him of how close Tammas had gotten to Deanna, and that he was beginning to suspect a bond had formed between them, even though he had taken measures to prevent it.
“What ship should I expect?” Gart finally asked.
“The USS Potemkin,” McCoy said. “She’ll be there in four days.”
Deanna Troi buzzed a third time before the door opened and Gart answered. He looked like a man who had not slept well in over a week. He actually looked like she felt, but she didn’t comment on it.
“I heard you were okay,” Gart said. “But I am relieved to see so in person.”
“Can we talk?” Deanna asked.
It was evident that Deanna had been crying, so he started shifting some of his psychological skills to the forefront of his brain to be employed on Deanna and her problem, letting his personal worries drift away. “Sure, come into the study,” he said, guiding her to a comfortable place to sit. She noticed he had a book out, and had probably been reading it, under a soft light from a hover lamp, positioned so that as Gart sat reading, the light would fall perfectly on the pages of the book. A glass of milk sat on a stand next to his favorite chair.
Gart arranged a chair for her in front of his chair, while saying, “I can’t thank you enough for all you did for Chandra. Sit, talk to me.” He sat down and gave her his full attention.
Deanna sat down and almost immediately started weeping, knowing full well that she was safe to do so. Gart had never judged her harshly, and was kind to everyone she could think of, always very approachable, humble, soft spoken, and so it was very easy to open up to him. Through her tears, pain, and confusion, she managed to talk about her abduction, her rescue, her time with Riker, the confrontation with her mother, then witnessing her mother’s confrontation with Riker, her turning away from him, listening to him call to her, the final words between her and her mother, how she felt when she watched Riker leave from an upstairs window, then her mother’s ultimatum and unreasonable demands on her life, then how she told her mother off, and how she finally left in a fit of rage to go j oin Riker, only to find him in bed with Wendy. She was filled with hurt and uncertainty about her future and upset about her recent past choices as if she could contribute them all to lapses in judgment. Then, very suddenly, she became keenly aware that Gart was suppressing strong emotions of his own. Specifically, anger. Her tears stopped flowing, and she felt a sudden, surreal displacement from her own worries to the very real concerns about Gart’s emotional state. If she had not known him better, she would have suspected that she was in physical danger.
“You’re angry?” Deanna asked Gart, not bothering to wipe her tear stained face.
Gart fumed silently, but he was being generous enough not to broadcast his feelings telepathically. The only trace of his emotions was on his face, and for a telepath to be so angry that it reflected on his face alone, without emanating in psychic waves, was a chilling thing to experience, even for someone like Deanna, with only partial abilities.
“Yes,” Gart said, the words escaping his tight lips.
Deanna blinked, wondering what she had done, but then figured, it wasn’t necessarily something she had done. “Um, why? What’s wrong?”
“Let’s see if you can figure it out,” Gart said.
Oh, dear. If he wants me to work, I must have done something wrong, she thought. “Something I said?”
Gart forced his breath out through his nose, an auditory event that startled Deanna, his chest collapsing before he took another breath in before unleashing on her. “Do you really think, given the number of people that were searching for you, and given the radius of the search area, that it was just a coincident that Riker found you?” Gart snapped.
“Uh?” Deanna asked, a bit taken back. This was not proceeding the way she imagined it. “It was…I really hadn’t thought about it.”
“Obviously. So what was it? Luck? Destiny? Girl, wake up and smell the coffee,” Gart snapped. “There’s no such thing as astrology, magic, fairy tales, and luck. You are not strong enough of a telepath to have guided Riker to you and it certainly wasn’t your mother. Hell, I couldn’t have done it, and my telepathic rating is off the scale! So, you tell me, how might these events have come to pass?”
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Deanna said, her voice shaky.
“An admission of guilt, for starters,” Gart said.
“For what?” Deanna asked, confused.
“I specifically requested that you avoid creating a telepathic bond with Tammas, and you went ahead and did it anyway,” Gart said. “I can see the connection just as plain as day.”
“No, I mean, yes, but,” Deanna stammered. “I just wanted to reassure him.”
“Damn it, Deanna,” Gart said, pounding the small table beside so hard that his glass of milk over turned. It swelled around the book he was reading, streamed, and spilled over the edges to the floor.
Deanna jumped. She also had to resist the compulsion to clean the milk, which wasn’t hard because Gart’s energy was raw and intense, and she was afraid of getting closer to him for fear of being struck. She watched the milk dripping off the table because she couldn’t stand to make eye contact.
Gart pressed on. “You can’t go boosting every client’s psyche with your own emotional strength. Look at you! You can barely support your own emotional weight, and yet you expect to carry your mother’s weight, and Riker’s weight, and Tam’s weight, and no doubt the rest of all Betazed’s on top of that? Your first obligation is to yourself. If you can’t find the moral fortitude to make a decision and stick with it, and own up to the resulting repercussions, then you need to stop begrudging the people who make those decisions for you. Second, if you are going to continue counseling people, you’ve got to trust that somewhere, deep inside the heart of every person is the strength to stand up and face the world, whatever world that may be, and carry on. Whether they find it or not is irrelevant, you have to allow them the opportunity to do it.”
“I thought it was only a crush,” Deanna said, almost whimpering under Gart’s controlled anger. She would have been happier if he had punished her physically, simply slapped her face, or struck her. Only her dad had ever produced such a strong feeling of shame and failure. “I really thought I was helping him.”
“He doesn’t understand it was just a crush,” Gart explained. “He may be a precocious little prodigy, but deep inside, he’s just an eight year old kid. He doesn’t have the coping skills to deal with adult stuff, and certainly not the wisdom and experience to avoid jealousies and anger. Hell, you’re supposedly an adult and look at how you’re handling Riker’s suspected impropriety! Did you ever consider that your rejection, coupled with your mother’s final stand, might be too much for any mere human to tolerate? I don’t know what coping skills Riker has, but I would certainly have drowned my sorrows in bottle of whiskey, and worried about the repercussion on the morrow. You’re just so caught up in you, how you feel and what you’re experiencing mixed with this delusional fantasy, romance novel, hero crap, coupled with this love ever lasting nonsense that you failed to see that we’re all just getting along the best we can. When you rejected Riker, you had no right to expect him to cope in a manner you would find reasonable. That’s what happens when you boost someone. Eventually someone expects a certain outcome yet experiences another and the fall is generally a hard one.”
Deanna was at a loss for words and overwhelmed with thoughts and emotions. She wanted to flee, just as she had from her mother. Just as she had from Riker.
“Right now,” Gart said, lowering his tone, his anger fading. “There is a small boy who believed he had a commitment from you, a belief as strong as any kid who believes in fairy tales. He saved your life by guiding Riker to you, which is an amazing accomplishment in and of itself, and his reward for doing so was betrayal. He didn’t just experience the loss of a love, he experienced a loss of a dream. It’s like telling a kid there is no magic before they’re equipped to deal with it. You have irrevocably changed who he is, and you’ve changed who you are. Before you met Tammas, or Riker for that matter, do you really think you would have gone up against your mother? Do you really think you would be questioning who you are today? Do you think if I had told you a year ago you would be a counselor and were probably going to move off Betazed that you would have believed me? Of course not!”
Deanna was speechless. She felt like an ignorant child, her mouth agape, processing information but not sure how to fix her transgression. She knew there were no words that could make it better, and interrupting Gart with apologies at this moment was inappropriate. In a way, she knew she deserved to be punished, so she simply listened, knowing anything Gart said or did would be less than she deserved.
“Here’s the analogy,” Gart said, wrapping up his impromptu lecture. “Every time someone touches you, you move in a new direction. Maybe the change isn’t much, or noticeable at first, because you’ve got inertia. But you give it enough time and distance, even a mere deflection of one degree can send you light years from where you thought you would end up. And sometimes, as is the case with you and Tammas and Riker, you not only have a complete directional shift, but you evolve into something altogether new.”
Though Deanna wasn’t feeling too good at the moment, she could see more and more of the truth in what Gart had been telling her as she continued to process it. She was indeed no longer her mother’s “little one.” She was Deanna Troi, and her life mattered, and her decisions had repercussions, wide ranging effects that reached out beyond her small world.
“Will Tammas be okay?” Deanna asked, a quiet resolve settling over her.
Gart shrugged. He was all out of words. He sunk into his chair, exhausted by the rage he had allowed to consume him.
“May I see him? Would it help?” Deanna asked.
His first impulse was to say “no, you’ve done enough damage,” but he was older, wiser, and too drained from his emotions to fight. Besides, he thought, it wasn’t his job to punish her, and her mistake wasn’t criminal, or it would have had to have gone to another level beyond him. It was sufficient for him to merely point out the error of her ways and let her learn. Punishment was her job, and if it came by trying to fix things, bringing back some sort of balance, then penance was possible. Gart waved his hands, giving her permission to go up and see Tammas. He remained seated, and watched her until she disappeared up the first spiral of stairs leading to the second floor. He mentally gave her directions to Tam’s room.
The door was open and Deanna went in. She noticed the tiny bottle of sand he had collected from the beach they had visited together. It sat on a little turntable, with three tiny spotlights focused on it so that the tiny sea-star shells sparkled as it spun. Also, the black belt Tammas had been awarded for completing all the tests in Tai Chi was on top of the dresser, with several other mementos. She examined a folded piece of foil, and discovered it contained some gum she had chewed, and she now realized just how obsessed he had become with her. Not that she didn’t collect mementos to remind her of personal encounters. She had no intentions of throwing out the poem Riker had given her, but she couldn’t imagine saving his chewing gum! Thinking of Riker currently caused her some pain, and imagining saving his chewed gum made her laugh and cry. She had thought Tammas had been joking when he said he had wanted a vial of her bath water.
A PADD lying on the nightstand displayed his medical information, which she casually glanced over as she pulled up a chair next to the bed. She leaned in and ran her fingers through his hair.
“Tammas? Tam, honey, can you hear me?” Deanna asked in a soft voice. “I wanted to thank you for saving my life. I know you helped. More than you’ll ever get credit for. Will you talk to me?”
Tammas remained unresponsive. Deanna wanted to cry more, but decided she had shed enough tears to last her a lifetime. It was now time to start being an adult and start being responsible for her life and the decisions she made and will make, regardless of what other people thought, including her mother.
“Well, it was worth the try,” Gart’s said, his words in her head. She wondered if he was cleaning up the spilt milk.
“Tammas,” Deanna said, in a sudden, harsh, loud voice. “Get up this instant! Tammas Parkin Arblaster-Garcia!”
“Deanna, come on back down stairs,” Gart called to her mentally. He felt her frustration, which mirrored his own in dealing with this situation.
Deanna sighed, pushed the chair back and stood. She was guilty of creating an inappropriate bond with a patient and this was the price. Tammas would pay the price for her lack of experience and judgment. It was an extremely sobering lesson. She had not realized she had such power. She saw the sand, the belt, the gum, and a guitar he had played for her. A song. She felt certain she could reach him with a song, but it needed to be something simple. Something that would stick in his head, that reverberated with his OCD. Something annoying, maybe a jingle. Perhaps the Laughing Vulcan and His Dog? Then it came to her. It was one of those childhood songs that her father had sung to her once or twice, but which she had only recently been reminded of because occasionally Tam’s obsessive-compulsive disorder had him humming it. It was one she had obsessed over as a kid. She decided to sing it out loud, turning back to face him.
“Row, row, row your boat,” she sang. “Gently down the stream…”
The medical display began to show mental activity, which in an odd way seem to reflect the pattern of Deanna’s singing. She returned to the side of the bed, and sang softly to him as she caressed his hair. Tam’s head turned towards her. She kept singing, until eventually Tammas began to hum along, and finally began to sing the words. Deanna dropped out and he finished, solo.
Tammas opened his eyes and looked at her, passive. The twinkle in his eyes seemed to be gone. She wanted to see his eyes live with wonder, as they were when he chewed his first piece of gum. But he seemed empty, drained. Though she could not discern any hint of emotion on his face, she didn’t have any compulsion about not displaying the relief she felt on hers.
“Oh, Tammas,” Deanna said, so pleased she kissed him on the cheek.
Tammas looked puzzled. One of her tears dropped to his face, and he noted its warmth. She laughed and wiped it off his face with her thumb.
“Are you alright?” she asked, wiping back her tears.
“The song is a cannon,” Tammas said.
“Uh? Oh. Yes, I think so,” Deanna said, and sniffed. Why did noses have to run when your eyes water, she wondered? And then she wondered if his use of the word cannon was the traditional, musical connotation.
“I thought the words were meaningless,” Tammas said, his voice also seemed to lack an emotional component. He looked up at the ceiling, obviously considering the song.
This was the new Tammas, the one he had evolved into because of her inappropriate actions, she thought. He had learned to speak because of her, and his voice had been over the top with rich emotions and his face had been equally expressive, as if he were an actor that needed to be seen from the back row. Now, it was as if the spark in him had been extinguished, like a cancer patient with only the s