Editing The Sevant Murders (section)

===The Second Meeting, Into the Nexus and the Past===


'''Stardate: 2406.03.16.'''

''(Nimitz - Counselor's Quarters - Couns Winters - 1800)''

"Computer where is Commander Sevant?"  

Vanyssa listened to the reply and headed off to the Holodeck.  



''(Nimitz - Holodeck 2 - Couns Winters/Lt Cmdr Sevant - 1815)''

Vanyssa arrived, and found it locked.    She over-rode the lock and
walked into the deck and found..a  tropical paradise. 

~Sevant?  Where are you?~  She sent to him, and again, not hearing an
answer, she walked into the program.   She saw him standing by a
waterfall and made her way over to it. 

Caladryll, his hands clasped behind his back and his robe's top fluttering in the breeze, made no immediate move to show that he had noticed someone's presence. Truly, he almost hadn't, so caught up in his memories as he was. This was where his children had grown up, and for ten years he had made a home with his wife. Almost all of his better memories were in this place, or rather the 'real' nexus, out there somewhere. 

He had briefly entertained the thought of going to find it, but it had been short lived. Even the Nexus couldn't fill the void in his mind, and such a glowing reminder would have been the end of the fantasy before it had even begun. He had driven himself half mad the night before, instinctively reaching out to find his soul mate and finding absolutely nothing in return. He had listened all night for the laughs of either of his children, and been rewarded only with the sound of his own sobs. 

Sevant half turned on his heel, putting his back to the wind and letting the robe whip around him in the breeze. He simply stood there, hands behind him, looking at the counselor. 

"You realize that I could sense you a ship away, right?"  she asked softly.  Not hearing a reply she went on.  "What is this place? Will you tell me about it? Please?"  She asked, putting all the gentle love that she could into those words and resisting the urge to empathically project safeness.  He would know that particular trick, and unless she missed her guess, he would be very pissed. 

He considered her for many moments, then turned back to the waterfall without saying anything. Only the scrape of sand on his bare feet made a sound, and that hardly at all. He kept staring, willing his loss to be washed away as the water down the stream. Rather, he found his life still uprooted, much like the cat-tails that were washed away near the base of the falls. 

Finally, in a voice just loud enough to be heard over the gentle pouring of the falls, he said "My control is not what it should be." 

It was the most he was readily willing to admit for the moment. 

"It's understandable that it isn't. Can I do anything to help?"  She asked, coming up behind him and not touching him.  If he wanted to know anything about her, all he had to do was reach out, and she was doing her best not to sense things about him. to make it fair. 

"Besides the impossible?" He turned his head and looked over at the beach. "Walk with me, I will show you a place we once called home."

Without another word of explanation he turned and stepped up onto a rock outcropping that lead strait to the sea. He walked surefooted on the bare rock, comforted by the path he had taken thousands of times when he just felt like wandering. It wasn't perfect, but he had placed many hours of brain sweat into it, trying to get it as close to perfect as he could remember. 

He paused where the trees surrounding them gave way to a stretch of perfect white sand, then stepped off the rock. Slowly he moved his way closer to the sea, his eyes set on a distant point of land, a small hand of the island that reached out defiantly into the crystal blue waters. 

Vanyssa followed discretely behind.  "Is this the place that Jayne wanted to get back to?"  She asked, admiring the beautiful area that they were walking through. "I can certainly see why."  She spoke softly.
"How did you get here?"  She asked, curiously. "Did anyone figure out why?"

Sevant hunched down, picked up a small pile of sand and let it slowly run through his fingers as his memories ran rampant. "Yess..." he said, somewhat far away as the grains slipped through his fingers. "All of us wanted to come back, we didn't really want to leave. But the children couldn't have had a life here, on chance to find others their own age, to marry and have kids themselves." He dropped the sand, and looked out at the ocean again. "This place provided everything, but others. We found it purely by accident, on our way back to the Boudicca after my soul was reattached to my body on Vulcan. I couldn't have imagined a better place to recuperate."

He snorted, "But it had it's faults. It didn't want us to leave, all thoughts of the outside world faded to what happened there. But the children, they loved it..." His face contorted as he watched a dolphin jump from the water. "Especially Jayne," he whispered.

Vanyssa watched the emotions play over the Vulcans face, and sighed softly before continuing.  "Is that a dolphin?"  She asked. "Jayne talked a lot about dolphins, as did T'Loren.  Jennah asked me once what a dolphin was, and I didn't know..they aren't native to Betazed."
Vanyssa replied.

"So how long did you spend here?"

Sevant seemed to mentally shake himself, then looked up at her for a moment. Finally he looked back down to the sand at his feet, and ran a finger through it slowly. "Ten years, give or take." he said slowly, "Ten of our best years."

He stood back up suddenly, and tossed a handful of the sand with it.
"And if we had still been here, there would have been no motivation at all for my family to have been murdered." he spat with sudden hate. "I wouldn't have been in a pile of ruins, my family wouldn't have had their throats slit while they lay prone and defenseless."

His jaw clenched, as he struggled to get his temper back under control.
"None of this, not a bit, would have happened." he said through clenched teeth.

"Why did you leave this paradise, Sevant?  You left because your daughters needed to have a life, correct?  This is not the real world, and for better or for worse, your daughters needed companionship.  You left to give them a life. If you wanted them to be perfectly safe, you would have went back to Betazoid or earth. Why come back to a starship?"

He choked slightly, and his anger left, only to be replaced with the darkest depression and self recrimination. "Because I knew no other way, life on Vulcan would not have suited them. And... I... needed to be with them. All three, They are...were ... my life."

Vanyssa felt the emotions going through Sevant and wanted more than anything to reach out and fix them, but she couldn't without his permission. "Sevant? A Betazoid with that kind of bond would need help in dealing with the fragments."  Vanyssa realized in horror.  "Do Vulcans?"

Sevant covered his face with his hands for many silent moments, thinking, thinking. He took a breath, and finally said "If I were on Vulcan, one of the High Priests would already have severed what was left. This bond wasn't removed a layer at a time, it was sliced without warning."

Vanyssa stood back a few paces, horror etched on her face.  "Are you saying that you have pieces of Vicki and your children left in your soul?" Vanyssa's thoughts spun in circles thinking about what this meant, and realized that if he had a betazoid's passion running part of his life, it was no wonder that his hard-earned Vulcan control couldn't keep up.  "What can I do to help?  Could T'Pol do it?  Does she have the training? Do I need to go tell Aragorn that we have to have a Vulcan high priestess aboard?"  Vanyssa asked, prepared to do battle with Aragorn if needed.  If her suspicions were at all correct, then he needed help, and badly.  And probably more help than she herself could provide. 

"NO!" he suddenly bellowed, "I don't need any pure-blood Vulcan running around in my head, I have enough problems!"

He suddenly stopped, and fought the sudden panic and anger that rose. "I am a lot of things counselor, and hardly any of those principles are looked upon favorably by any of my race. Seeing my more intimate moments is one of the very last things I would ever want."

Vanyssa shook off the anger that poured over her and tried to remain calm. "Sevant?  If you were on Vulcan, wouldn't a high priestess have already taken care of it? You can't go on like this." she hoped that her rational tone would break through this irrationality.  "Sevant, if you can't get help, I will have no choice but to tell the Captain that you are unable to function.  And she will demand that you get help.  You are not in a fit state to make any kind of decisions, much less command ones."  She spoke evenly.  With anyone else, she would have handled this differently.  The Sevant that she knew cared about his career, and would see reason.  She hoped. 

His eyebrow raised a precise half notch, "I'm quite aware of this fact, Counselor." he said shortly. "But quite simply, there is no single telepath on this ship trained to deal with my particular set of problems. If you want to spend a day or two of hard labor learning the very basics, feel free."  He looked at her, "We are too far from Vulcan to do any good, so baring a miracle there isn't exactly a choice in how I decide to cope."

A small frown curled his lips, "If you call this coping, anyhow." His gaze returned to the sea, and its cerulean waters. "My driving will died a bloody death, at the hands of a fool." he said, almost too softly to hear.

Vanyssa stared at him then spoke softly "Could I learn?  I won't ever betray you, Caladryll.  Am I a good enough telepath to learn?"

His lips curled again, this time with about the most amusement he had felt in a long time. "Ah, that's a painful road to travel counselor. Not only do you have to learn about matrimonial mind links, but you have to have strength sufficient enough to deal with a Vulcans emotional state unmasked, completely unshielded by ethics or other considerations.
Anger, hate, love, lust, pure unalloyed desire and the deepest sadness..." He took a breath, "Grief and loss."

He paused for many moments, then began again tentatively. " High Priests train for years, many off-worlders have simply lost themselves, when in such a deep mind meld with a lost Vulcan."

"Well, the choices seem to be either packing you off to Vulcan, which you don't want to do, or me and Kestra, and I think that I am the stronger telepath of the two... Well, I suppose Katie could do it, but it really ought to be one of the two counselors. We are bound to secrecy."  She sat down on a rock and looked into the waves, feeling at peace for the first time since walking into the Holodeck. "I want you to make me a promise, though. One, that if this gets to be too difficult, or impossible, or whatever, that you get help from a Vulcan that is trained to do this.  And, two..."  She stared off into the waves, her red hair blowing around her shoulders. "That you won't tell anyone what you sense from me, no matter how bad."  She wrapped her arms around her legs, suddenly cold.

Caladryll said nothing for several silent minutes. "I will consider it,"
he said finally. "Ill send you what I can for reading material, and let you decide if you wish to proceed after reading."

"What will you do in the mean time?" Vanyssa asked him. "Can you continue functioning the way you are?"

"I will live, I've naught else I can do."

Vanyssa looked up at him in puzzlement. "Would it help if I ordered a leave of absence from your duty station?" She asked, wondering if there was anything that she could do at this point in time. "I'm trusting that the Sevant that I know  would never put the crew in danger."

He frowned, once again suppressing anger. "I'm already on Administrative Leave. Removing me from duty completely would do nothing, I can only be called to the bridge in an Emergency as things stand now."

She looked up at him as the anger washed over him. "Then, if I may take my leave of you, I will return once I've finished my reading with my answer."  She stood up, brushing the sand off of her uniform, despising it for a second. 

Sevant watched her leave, and took a deep breath as another gust of ocean breeze washed over him and pulled at his robe. He closed his eyes and turned his face into the wind, as he tried to clear his mind for just once of all the thoughts running through it.