Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [72]
“You sure don’t talk like a man who did the heroic deed and got awarded the Medal of Valor” Travis observed. “What a dismal example for all those punks out there who’re shooting for the braids and brass, know that? They want glory”
“Not all it’s cracked up to be.” Stiles sipped his hot chocolate again and breathed into the steam. “I didn’t get the MV for any deeds. I got it for sitting on my bruised ass for four years and not dying quite fast enough.”
Leaning sideways, Travis lounged on an elbow and huffed disapprovingly. “What’s Romulan for ‘crappola’?” “I think it’s ‘enushi.’ ‘Enushmi.’” “Figures you’d know.”
Allowing himself a little smile, Stiles drew a deep breath and sighed also. “I washed my hands of Red Sector nine years ago, Travvy, when I was finally sure the message about Zevon had gotten all the way back to his family. It took me a year to get the message through, and another year to make sure there hadn’t been any snags and that his immediate family and the empress definitely knew he was there. He was sure they’d come get him. I made sure he got back home, and now I find out it might have been his death sentence.”
“You acted above and beyond the call,” Travis tried to confirm, obviously relieved they’d broken through to the real reason he’d come in here. “It’s not even in the widest perimeter of imagination your fault, and you flipping well know it.”
Stiles nodded. “In my three rational brain cells, I know it. But in the rest of them… he’s dying because I made sure he got home.” “That’s nutty.”
Taking a long draw on the hot chocolate, Stiles gazed with growing sentiment into the thick warm drink and saw in there all the wonders of freedom. The foam turned like ebb tide, the swirling dark cream like clouds and wind. “You ever been a prisoner of war?”
His question moved softly between them as if made of music. Travis had no reason to supply an answer. Stiles watched the foam bubbles pop in his mug.
“You live together in a way that no two other people ever do. You mop the other guy’s blood and bind his wounds, listen to his dreams and watch his hopes decay… you can’t get away from the smells, the sweat, the fears crawling on you like cancer… after a while you run out of words to hold each other’s brains inside, so you just stop talking. You start communicating without words. Just a look, or a touch… or you just sit there together. The intimacy can’t be described. You see each other so raw, so demolished… more than you ever wanted anybody to see you. Weak, sick, scared, sobbing… crushed by loneliness like a plague, till you finally turn to each other and pray the other guy’s lonely too.”
He raised his eyes. Deeply moving to the point of sorrow was the expression on Travis’s face, a shivering guilt that threaded its way from the distant past and prevented forgetting.
“I survived because of two forces moving in my life” Stiles continued softly. “One was the ghost of Ambassador Spock in my mind, telling me I could survive, I could rise above all this, that he’d be proud of me if I did… I heard his voice every night for the whole four years, narrating the plan for how I would behave and what he expected of me. I don’t have any idea if it was all in my mind and I was making it up in some kind of hero-worship fantasy, but Travis, I swear to eternity it kept me alive. Just knowing what he expected of me and hearing his voice from the other side of the snow… calling me by my first name… he kept me alive by making me believe it was my duty and that I could prevail. The other force,” he added softly, “was Zevon. Whenever the ambassador