[Ensign Ic Arbrell — Colony Beach, Kerelia]

“And you don’t think a little insight is helpful?”

“That’s what you want to call it, Mom? Insight? People died!”

“People are always dying in Starfleet, baby bird. People die all the time everywhere no m—”

“Not like this. Not people I love. Not trapped and suffering and because of a thing with my name, our name, that I couldn’t get us out of, and you told me go for!”

“You were always already going to have gone. It already happened, and was always going to happen. You know how these things work. And having finally seen for yourself, maybe you can make better choices with the time this you has. Baby, I know you, you’re—”

“You have no idea, Mom. I don’t even know why I—”

Yvadnna Arbrell handed her son a bag of the vacation essentials he claimed to have come to borrow for his vacation, and Ic left the house without a thank-you, soured by the color of her smugness, having made her point.

Nothing changed on the other side of the door. And why did he think it would? She was as clear in his mind as all his new-old memories still were, but it was here, recalling them, that that flavor of her pride sunk like sickness to the bottom of his stomach. He remembered all too well now what it had been like to miss her. He remembered remembering only the good things in spite of (and to spite) the veins of bitterness that persisted across the years and into now about doing as she said. She was supposed to be able to tell the future, wasn’t she? He was pretty sure it was impossible, but he kept believing (always) that she could.

But what did it matter if nothing changed? What did it mean if everything did?

He tried his best to shut her out of his conscious mind, though he never could, it seemed, not at all. She felt after him all the time, in silk waves of longing and apology. For a moment in desperate delusion of a desire to be apart from everyone, if only for the briefest chance to think, he had a fleeting thought that he’d finally just experienced himself. That sensation was so constant and so saturated in every memory of being, he wondered both ways— it might have been the feeling was never her at all, or that he was little more than someone else’s echo. The latter seemed truer the more he thought about it, drenching it, suspended, in so much orange.

Ic did then what he often did in need of distraction from the excesses of his own feeling, and turned to the thoughts of someone else. The usual ideas played the loudest, and the most familiar tones were clear. He expected to find his uncle’s there in one of his folkish melodies about imagined meals, but closer than that, and not in proximity, was a sea-gray swoon of loneliness, and the subtle scorch of time, louder than he’d ever noticed it had been. Beneath the bulk of Cerjess’s solitude, Ic was certain he registered his un-former-lover’s sensation of sand.

Of course, it would be the beach. They’d talked about returning here, he thought, about going properly to the beach below the overlook, where they’d once been to catch a probe, but that was some fifty years ago. But they hadn’t talked about it at all. Because Ic was still afraid of water now, and they weren’t what they weren’t anymore. He knew these sensations from Cerjess so much differently, but he knew them. At least there was time to get himself together on the walk out there. At least once he got there, they would both be in the company of someone who understood. He put his mother’s sunglasses on, as if it made any difference to the presence of the deep, or all the reasons to be here.

Longing and apology said nothing until it came to sit beside the Trill on the other side of the icebox.

“...you know, you gotta have a lot of grit to enjoy this much sand.”

---

Jovireh Velal

[Ensign Ic Arbrell — Colony Beach, Kerelia]

Matching the grin in its path and its shape, Ic was satisfied with momentarily breaking the gloom. He offered the Trill a hum in gratitude for the invitation, and fished in the cooler for something he found palatable. Brandy seemed the best bet of the batch for its relative sweetness, but the choice was forced to contend with the bitter acknowledgment he’d only ever tasted it on a pair of teal lips.

And speak of the devil, in a weird sort of way, as plain as a voice in his ear, he caught the thought that tailed an innocuous question. He couldn’t pretend it didn’t sting. A pang in the side, against where the rib had broken— a sour heat down the throat, but not from the brandy. Ic looked down at his feet, the toes of his boots sticking up in a V, and dug his heel a little further into the sand. Yeah, he thought to himself, he probably was. And it probably wasn’t any of either of their business with what. It was better that it wasn’t, but Ic didn’t dare mention the issue, whether or not his fragile defense could have assuaged Cerjess’s mood.

“I had a fight with my mom,” he admitted in a rare form of humble honesty. It felt strange to say exactly this in place of raising a dozen different veils and shields in front of a polished version of half the truth. But then, everything felt a little strange now, too. He’d been honest with Cerjess before, with fingers intertwined. Although neither of them in this iteration had ever done so, Ic Arbrell had never been one to betray memory, whether or not they were wholly his own. “And I didn’t want to feel or think what she made me feel or think, so I looked for someone else to think about and feel. And I found you. Misery loves company and all that.”

A lingering left by a psychic gaze (eyes still studying the foxing of his shoe) seemed to intone what did not make it in words: If that’s okay with you.

---

Syl O'Connell

[Ensign Ic Arbrell — Blue Beta, Promenade]

He had a feeling he’d heard this story before, but couldn’t discern if Cerjess had told it out loud or if Ic had just caught impressions on the passing of a memory, years and years ago. One thing he did know was that his familiarity with the Trill’s sentiment didn’t go any further than what he’d just said. It might have been diluted last time with more to drink than was in Ic right now, or maybe it was deja vu; either way, he didn’t understand.

“I don’t know a whole lot about the experience; joined Trill are kind of difficult to interpret,” he murmured against the mouth of a bottle of brandy, which echoed the sentiment like a second layer of reflection. He hadn't met a ton of them, but they'd all felt like the same sort of reverberation, a sound superimposed over color, similar enough to be recognized as the same, and different enough as to feel uncanny in the blur of offset tones.

Ic had a very difficult time imagining how he might have handled joining, if it would be better or worse than being everyone’s head all the time, to just be part of one other’s, but he still held it some ersatz regard. His Academy roommate had been Trill, and dead-set on being joined despite having been automatically eliminated from candidacy by an illness. She was full of her dreams about it, a greater romance than love, and he still felt her fantasies in his skin when he thought about it. The concept of selection, though, never sat right with him.

“I think you’d be great for it. If you wanted to. Why don’t you want to, did you say?”

He had learned recently that all experiences were worth knowing.

---

Syl O'Connell

[Ensign Ic Arbrell — Colony Beach, Kerelia]

Several lifetimes worth of other people’s memories, Cerjess said, and all too well, Ic understood. It had been enough to receive one over the course of a few hours, even if it was only his own. There were fragments of others’, too, that he’d overheard in thought and feeling as Alpha Team did what they were meant to do, but the snippets of moments they might have recalled as they worked were too vague to understand in most cases: junk data. What he’d gotten from himself, however, was as deliberately passed as any symbiont. It wasn’t the same at all, but it was close enough to make sense of why anyone wouldn’t want to go through it.

He’d thought being in other people’s minds all the time was bad enough. Did that make him more like a symbiont, he wondered? Did he have more in common with a worm than—

Nope. Drink. Not gonna go there. One existential crisis a month was enough.

“See, I don’t agree with that part, though, for what it’s worth,” he said, tilting the bottle toward Cerjess when he suggested again he wasn’t enough. “If a symbiont wanted the full experience of living life outside a pool, it wouldn’t get it by being in top-tier hosts only. You have valuable emotions that ‘Well-Rounded’ candidates,” finger quotes were used here, for emphasis, “probably wouldn’t feel. There’s dignity in living, not in elitism. And I know, I know, I’m not Trill and I don’t get to have these opinions, but it’s hurt people I’ve cared about and apparently I'm basically half worm, too, so I have opinions anyway. Regardless. You deserve to be happy.”

---

Syl O'Connell

[Ensign Ic Arbrell — Colony Beach, Kerelia]

It might have been the brandy, or maybe the sun, or it might have been what Cerjess said. Ic took it as a compliment, because he didn’t know how else to feel, apart from sadness that this unsolicited opinion was some bright spot in the Trill’s lonely mind, or anger that it had taken this long for anyone to understand him, or grief that he didn’t know what else to say after that. Ic wasn’t exactly the wisest person on the crew, nor even the most wounded; he didn’t deserve the sentiment for what seemed to him a simple truth.

It might have been how Cerjess felt about this all himself, but it prickled Ic’s skin like a thousand hot needles, each too kindly to burn.

The tone turned like tide on the subject of social lives, and Ic cradled his bottle while his companion drank, quiet as he felt for both of them. It was clear that it was a subject Cerjess wanted to avoid, but the Betazoid didn’t see any harm if he only talked about himself. (He didn’t know sometimes when to leave well enough alone.)

“I wouldn’t have had an answer for you anyway,” he admitted dryly. “I never had friends until I came to the Front Ear. And I have like four friends now, which includes you, by the way, and a plant, and I’m really, really good at avoiding them all. Except the plant. Because Unique doesn’t have obligations, and doesn’t really have expectations either. We have lunch all the time while I’m avoiding everyone else because it can’t know that I’m a pain in the ass. I just feel weird eating even replicated salad next to it, you know?”

---

Syl O'Connell