"The Robber of Sentience"
-a first person dribble-
rated PG-13
by: qdestinyy@aol.com

I took a lover when I took First Officer of the Enterprise.

I imagined it was one of the things a newly minted XO should do. But if I'd truly looked at it from an analytical perspective -- the way 'she' would have done -- I might also have realized that I'd taken a new lover at almost every major turning point in my career.

When I slept with her -- my lover -- I remember it struck me that her eyes were very dark. I remember thinking she might have passed for a Betazoid. I remember berating myself for that thought.

It didn't matter that she wasn't Betazoid. Or that our ship's Counselor was. I didn't matter that I felt guilty -- for the first time in years. Even so, I remember thinking ... it was always those eyes.

Deanna would have called it transference. She later said that even though our relationship had ended years ago -- hers and mine -- I hadn't let go of all the little psychological details that haunted a person's dreams at night. And maybe she was right. Maybe I hadn't let those details go. But I knew for a fact that she hadn't either.

Letting go was forever. Pushing back wasn't. And I had tried to push the whole damn thing away so hard, I didn't even want to care. Deanna and I hadn't been together in a very long time.

So I took a few lovers. I had a good time. Lived every moment of every day as though it could be my last. I slept with whomever I wanted to, whenever I wanted to, and I shrugged off any aspect of my personal life that didn't bolster my career. It was like that when I was a kid barely out of the Academy, and it was like that all the while I clawed my way through the ranks to Commander.

A friend of my father's once told me I'd given up up a lot for the chance at a chair I'd never sat in before. But he didn't understand the way it was. And he sure as hell didn't understand me.

In a way, it's almost an irony. Because I think Deanna did understand. I think she knew exactly who I was. She'd sized me up in the first thirty-seconds of our introduction. She put her delicate hands on a pair of lovely hips and told me in no uncertain terms that I could take ... whatever eager portion of my anatomy I'd been thinking with, and relocate us both to the delta quadrant. Of course she hadn't known it would turn out to be a bad joke, at the time.

Oops.

I still smile when I remember that day. I smile when I recall the way she shoved me into the bulkhead of a transport on the Betazed Consulate the first time I ever tried to kiss her. But I can't smile when it dawns on me that the first time we made love -- in the heat, in the damp darkness of the Jalara Jungle; with our bodies and our minds wound up so tight I'd never felt anything like it in the whole of my naive lifetime -- she spent the better part of the rest of that night crying silent tears.

I never knew why.

I'd always figured that, by the time I was thirty-five, I'd have everything I ever wanted. And there'd be plenty of time left after that for other things. That was my credo.

My doom.

Until one day I took a break on the observation deck of the Enterprise. It must have been ... about a year after we'd set out. Comfortable crew, comfortable lifestyle, friendships ... new memories to replace the ones that filled the cloudy spots in our dreams.

I stood on the edge of a portal that looked out over forever and I took in the enormity of it all. The better part of me was so caught up in some intangible that I didn't even hear her when she approached.

The space behind my back got warm. That was the way I knew she was there, and at first, it may sound absurd, but I almost turned on my heel and pulled her body all the way to mine.

It was that kind of a moment. Out of time and out of synch with the greater portion of reality. I'd almost forgotten she wasn't there to slide her arms around my waist and lay the side of her face on my back -- the way she once had.

When I turned around, I took the stars with me.

For a moment I was breathless. I felt like I'd been punched in the gut and there was no way I could even pretend I had a clue what was going on.

In that brilliant, starlit moment, Deanna Troi was both finite and boundless. With her eyes and her face and the slight confused tip of her head at the center of my ill-fated universe.

Nothing happened, of course. I think I stood there and I realized she'd put her hand on my arm. There was concern in her eyes, but it was the kind of concern that a person had for a good friend. And that's what we were to each other.

My first revelation. She wasn't mine, I wasn't hers, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about that. Even if I'd wanted to.

I didn't.

There were more of those kinds of moments. Later on. Revelations that reminded me of my place -- a somewhat humbler purpose than I'd been used to -- in the grand scheme of things. I no longer believed I was invincible. But damn it, I still wanted that chair.

Someday.

That was that last time I took a lover for nearly six months. I didn't talk about it, and no one really asked. Things seemed to go on just as they always had, and now and then I'd check in on my reputation -- if only to make sure it wasn't totally lapsed. I still had an ego, after all.

But I spent a great deal of time thinking.

I'd once admonished Deanna for 'over intellectualizing'. I used to tease her about the way she thought about whether or not she thought. When we were together, she seemed to have an endless supply of tolerant looks for those moments. The kind that made me forget what I was saying; made me grab her, turn her over and.... well, I did a lot of thinking in those six months, and maybe I'd leave it at that.

Deanna seemed to know there was an answer for everything. She lived her life with the kind of trust in fate that I could never embrace. But there was one instance I felt hurt by her. Betrayed, perhaps. I look back on it now and I wonder whether I was jealous or just prideful. Or maybe it was just a little bit of both. I remember the instance particularly. Because she took a lover, named Devononi Raal.

At first I really didn't care -- after all, we'd both taken other lovers before. But then things started to change. We were working on negotiations at the time and Raal just happened to be my opposition. Until that moment, my faithful confidant on board the Enterprise had forever been Deanna. I told her everything -- well, everything that had to do with our careers. We shared a friendship that felt as though it would last forever; not to mention a lot of responsibility as senior officers.

But in that time, one fateful evening, Deanna came to me and she told me that we couldn't talk about the politics of the mission any longer; that it put her in an awkward place ... with him.

I couldn't believe she'd said it. That a casual lover could possibly come between the relationship we had.

And then it hit me.

Some day, she was going to fall in love. Some day, she was going to be with someone who mattered -- and what would she say of our late night dinners and our midnight conversations 'as friends' after that?

I hated Devononi Raal.

But he was the only man Deanna took to her bed that I despised as such. He was the only man I'd felt threatened by. But as it turned out, I needn't have been. Because as it turned out ... it wasn't Deanna that fell in love.

It was me.

Ah, the unpredictability of fate. I'd spent so much time considering what it might be like when Deanna finally found someone. Someone who wasn't me. And then one day I met Soren. And all of a sudden, I stopped worrying -- about Deanna's love life.

Soren was as different from Deanna as I might ever have imagined. Except that they were both gentle, and thoughtful, Soren was a J'naii. A race of people who frowned on gender. As such there was little of any physical sensuality to her being. But she was warm and loving. And she was ... everything I'd never known I wanted.

I fell hard and I fell fast. Looking back, I think that everyone who knew me at the time must have thought I was crazy. They'd probably been right. Deanna once patiently explained to me that love ... is not the most rational of emotions. 'The robber of sentience', she'd called it. As though I'd needed a primer. I felt patronized at the time, but I don't think I recalled that I had also been crazy like that ... once before.

Nothing else mattered.

I took off after Soren like a love-struck teenager. I'd probably have waged a single-handed war on a whole planet if it meant I could have her back again.

But that wasn't to be. And it was Deanna I turned to when the broken pieces of my heart refused to fit together again. Irony, it seemed, really did have a sense of humor.

I don't think Deanna ever mentioned how or whether my coming to her had felt. She was simply there. She'd let me go with little more than a sad smile, but when it fell apart, she never spoke. She wrapped her arms and her thoughts around my battered, bruised spirit. And somehow in the days and months that followed, ever onward in the aftermath, it slowly stopped hurting.

Somehow.

We picked up where we left off -- as friends. We took the daily countenance of our lives with stoic gratitude, and though we would never forget, we would always have the power of our friendship to fall back on. We did that a lot.

Until Thomas.

Complications as they stood seemed inadequate for Deanna and I. At least, that's the only way I've ever been able to rationalize the twist that happened next. Or the day the hand of fate saw fit to introduce my brother. Myself -- when I was little more than I had been on the day I took First Officer of the Enterprise.

Ambitious. Proud. Unstoppable. In love with Deanna Troi.

She fell for him within moments, and in a way, I really did feel flattered. When I wasn't so damn jealous that I paced my cabin late at night putting holes in the wall.

Before he left the Enterprise, Tom pulled me aside and told me not to pretend I was sorry. Or to say I wasn't pleased in some secret way, that it was him 'down there' on Nervalla and not me. His life that was set indefinitely on hold and now took second 'fiddle' to mine.

The truth was, he was right. Between his persual of Deanna and the old ghosts he brought back with him; ghosts that I'd already burned and buried ... I hadn't wasted a great deal of pity on him.

But since he'd chosen to confront me in Ten Forward, less than thirty-seconds after Deanna had stood up from a chair across from my own -- and headed straight for HIS quarters -- I don't think I tried very hard to argue with Tom's rationale.

But I do remember feeling that first stab of pity.

Deanna would never leave with him. If nothing else had happened, in that moment, Tom had given me back everything I'd feared he might manage to appropriate. Deanna would never be his. And I found that I could almost smile again.

Ambitious. Proud. Unstoppable. Maybe I hadn't changed all that much, myself. After all, I was still Will Riker. And which of the two of us could continue to lay claim to *that*?

Deanna once told me that I was my own worst enemy. That I berated myself a hundred times harder than any commanding officer ever could. I think that I argued with her at the time; said something brilliant to the effect that my 'stubborn sense of pride' had gotten me where I was today.

She had offered another of those tolerant smiles. Why she didn't press the issue, I never knew at the time. I'd always considered myself a smart man, but I realized some time ago that I was never really wise.

Knowledge, I understand, is what we know. Wisdom, Deanna taught me, is what we do about what we know. I was never wise about my feelings.

I suppose I could claim a battered childhood or a disjointed youth. I suppose I might still hate my father or blame my mother for dying when I was only a child, but I don't. There was a time I might have refused to discuss it at all. But that was before the Enterprise.

Things changed. People changed. I had changed. And so had she. Which was why it came as more of a painful reminder than any true sense of shock ... when she started seeing Worf.

Worf had grown to be among the small, elite circle of close friends I'd ever formed for myself. As a Klingon and a Starfleet officer, his sense of honour was constantly at war over the Federation's far more human ideals and his own fierce sense of a warrior's ethics.

I knew that each day was a struggle, and that it couldn't have been easy on him. Still, like every other well-won battle-scar he'd ever incurred, Worf bore his conflict with eternal stoicism. And I respected him for it. We all respected him for it. I even counted him among my most trusted comrades.

Until Deanna fell for him.

Of course I told myself it didn't matter; that Deanna and I had already made our decisions. Our bed ... so to speak. It wasn't together.

It's an historical fact that the love of a woman has caused the baser instincts in the prideful hearts of men to wage war on countless worlds; in countless incarnations. I tried to be bigger than that. Bigger than history and destiny and every hand that fate might choose to deal out.

I wasn't.

When their relationship began, I found myself bitterly wondering whether Deanna could possibly have found a more honourable substitute for romance. After all, he was a Klingon! And she ... she was a beautiful, delicate, sensual and loving woman who... wasn't mine.

She loved Worf.

And in the whole of his own, decidedly Klingon way, Worf had declared that he had deep and abiding feelings for her as well. Those feelings, coupled with the look I saw in Deanna's eyes every time she talked about their relationship, scared the hell out of me.

Honour! What the hell did that mean?

There was a moment, when the Captain claimed he'd been sent forward into the future -- if only for a glimpse. What he told us about that instant is something I've never been able to shake from my thoughts.

That Deanna might die. That Worf and I might have gone on to become bitter, angry adversaries, and that I might never have told Deanna...

...what I'm about to tell her in the present.

Less than a week after our return home from the Briar Patch, I'm ready for a confession. I'm hoping that she is as well.

Years pass, time changes us, purposes begin and run their course, and maybe I'm still not wise. I'd be a fool if I claimed I knew the first thing about forever. But I do know about now

Right now, I'm standing at a portal in the observation lounge. Looking out at forever. It seems impossible that I could ever really take in the enormity of it all. But the better part of me is so caught up in some intangible that I almost miss the sound of her footfalls as she approaches.

The space behind my back grows warm. And I know that she's there. At first, it may sound absurd, but I feel as though I should turn on my heel and pull her body all the way to mine.

It's just that kind of a moment. Out of time and out of synch with the greater portion of reality.

Her small hand carries with it a kind of energy I've never been able to explain, but when she reaches out, bridging the distance between us; when her fingers flatten out at the edge of my spine, I'm frozen in time.

The warm wonder of her smile reaches all the way through space and galaxy to touch me in a way I can't describe. I never see it, but I feel her delicate arms around my waist and the side of her cheek when she presses it; a gentle nudge in the muscles on my back.

When I turn around, I feel as though the stars are with me. For a moment, I'm breathless with the wonder of it. No way to pretend that I've ever had the slightest clue how to analyze what it is that's happening between us.

In that brilliant, starlit moment, Deanna Troi is both finite and boundless. With her eyes and her face and the slight smile that tips the corners of her lips, she's the center of my blessed universe.

And maybe that's what we are to each other.

What happens after that, of course, is the kind of thing that Worf once declared .. a man of honour would never discuss.

-[end]-