Interlude – What do you mean you knew Nveid?
by Commander Isha t'Vaurek & Colonel James Darson
Post Details
OLD:
“I’m serious Isha,” Darson said, his voice suddenly hard and cold. He sat down on the Plush sofa again and sighed, “It’s a tale of tragedy and treachery, and one that most certainly doesn’t have a happy end. But…” he looked at her determined face and saw so much of what the man whose secrets he held he capitulated, “You’ve earned this I guess. But this is going to take a while. Go make a pot of tea, and I’ll tell you about what I meant. The tale of me and my best friend… your husband, Nveid i-Ihhliae tr’Illialhlae.”
NEW:
He had intimated before that he had known her husband and then too he had somehow avoided giving her the details she asked for, perhaps this time he was really going to tell her.
To give herself a moment to clear her head Isha did as he instructed and returned shortly afterwards with the tea and two cups on a tray. Quite how he would drink it she had no idea, but it would be rude not to make the gesture.
"aye'lyo," white tea, she said as she placed the tray down, "I'm not that fond of it myself as it brings back memories, but I thought it appropriate if we are going to remember my husband."
Then Isha sat, not opposite as she would in a formal interview but on the other end of the same sofa he had taken. Isha tucked her legs up beneath her and rested her head on one arm against the back of the sofa. She blinked, watching him, someone who claimed friendship with the only man she had ever wholly and willingly deferred to.
Darson stared at the pot of tea steaming gently on the table and was all too aware of Isha taking a seat on his side of the table, a far more intimate position than she had occupied previously. He poured himself a cup, the little thing looking weirdly disproportioned when compared to his gigantic armored hands. But he wielded it with all the grace of a gentleman.
He held the cup in front of him and stared down deeply into it. His reflection stared back at him, confirming that he was not infact a vampire. At least he thought that was how that worked. He swished it back and forth, observing the waves that formed in the cup. He brought it to his mask as if to take a sip, but suddenly threw it back like he was taking a shot. He put it down gently on the table a second later, the cup mysteriously devoid of tea. He sighed and without looking at Isha began to speak,
“Where to start? I suppose the beginning is as good a time as any. A long long time ago, in a galaxy…wait…no, sorry that’s something else. Nveid and I met through some mighty odd circumstances. I was a young buck Sergeant, not fresh out of the academy, but not a veteran either. I was attached to a special operations detachment, charged with cracking down on insurrections in outlying worlds.” He was delibertly vague as to the specific details of it, no need to give her any more than she needed to know, despite the fact that she had just bared her whole soul to him. Luckily, she was probably more interested in parts involving her husband than him murdering civilian protestors.
“I was reassigned temporarily to a diplomatic unit for the Embassy on Romulus. Me and my unit were sent under cover, in order to place a bug in the quarters of the Ambassador so we could keep track of who he was speaking to and make sure that he wasn’t violating arms trading embargos. You have to understand Isha,” he said, gesturing with one hand at the empty space in front of him, “It was a different age back then. I’m not sure how much you know about espionage, but back then, that was how the game was played.”
Isha shrugged, "Whatever else you may think I am, I am not a spy, Darson and I never have been," she said softly. "but I am not surprised. I know wht goes on in embassies, indeed you'd be amazed at what we find in the walls every time we sweep this facility," they also left a number of known devices in operation, just enough to appear to have been 'missed' How else could they so easily disemminate disinformation.
“Federation-Romulan relations have always been…tricky. And this was twenty years ago, during the Federation-Cardassian war. Before the Cardassian DMZ even existed We thought at the time that the Romulans might be providing tacit assistance to them,” he raised a hand to forestall complaints from Isha, “Again, long time ago. Things have changed,” he cocked his head to the side, “Though people like Commander Gabriel do certainly take me back.”
"My people learned the hard way not to trust outsiders," Isha said, "It is a lesson we have never forgotten. Trust is something that is not given but must be earned," she explained, saying nothing about his comment on Gabriel.
“In any case…my job was not to plant the bug. That was the job of someone we had inside the embassy, long gone, don’t worry. But what I had to do was distract people who were there. I ended up talking with the chief of security at the Embassy and a member of the great house of the Romulan people. Your husband at the time. Never knew exactly what he was doing there, but that didn’t matter. I did my job. But something happened. While we were talking, we got on the subject of race and relations between our two empires. We didn’t have much in common ideologically of course, but that was only to be expected.”
“What we did have, was a different connection. That of one soldier to another. We shared conviction, the thought that loyalty was the only thing that mattered. I only met him for a couple of hours, but in that time I learned a lot. But the fact of the matter is, we succeeded in planting the bug and getting out successfully. Didn’t learn anything from it though and we sent the self-destruct order to it a year later.”
Isha rolled her lower lip between her teeth as she continued to watch her visitor, "such a meeting can hardly be named a friendship," she observed, "are you sure you are not just using this opportunity to boast about your ability to sneak into secure environments?" she asked, it seemed to Isha that there had to be more.
“…No, I’m not,” Darson said flatly, “I was just providing context. Honestly my dear Isha, is that how you see me? A braggart who will take any opportunity to tell the universe of his amazing past exploits?” he held up a hand, “Stop. Don’t answer that.” He poured himself another cup of tea and downed it in one gulp again.
“Where was I…oh yes, I remember. So, we met a long, long time ago. And after that we didn’t cross paths for years. The next time we met was during a joint operation between the Romulans and the Federation during the Dominion War. SNOW HAMMER is what it was. You saw some of it, I believe, a while ago in my holodecks,” he skirted the details of that little encounter…he had been playing a little game with her at the time and this was not the time to bring that up too much.
“We both didn’t know of the other’s involvement at first. He didn’t recognize me either when we first met, after all, I had changed from what I had been then to…” he gestured at himself, “what you see today. But I knew. I knew from the get go, I never forget a face. We didn’t have time to get reacquainted either, before we were very rudely blasted out of the sky through the combination of a traitor somewhere onboard and a Dominion battle fleet.”
“Contrary to what you saw in the Simulation, we did find the traitor,” Darson said wistfully looking out into the figurative distance, “A human, for what it’s worth. Onboard our ship. He gave them your husband’s ship’s position and when their shields would be down. Went down with us to the surface in lifeboats too.”
Isha bristled at the thought that some Lloann'su vang'radam had had the temerity to endanger her husband's life. "If you knew who it was then why on ch'Rihan did you not leave him to disintegrate as the ship tore itself apart? What were you thinking allowing him to evacuate?"
“He got what he deserved,” Darson said bluntly, “Didn’t last too long either. Right after the escape pod he and a couple of other personnel were in crash landed on the surface of the planet, they were set upon by Dominion patrols. They tried to escape, but he was caught advocating surrender to the Dominion. The senior officer present placed him under arrest for treason, stripped him of his equipment and left him bound in a cave for the Dominion to find. An hour or so later, they were cornered in a box canyon and this little whelp comes out of the Dominion scout ship to try to convince them to surrender, that they would go peacefully. So they surrendered. And were promptly shot, including the traitor. So that was the end of that, justice served. Though I would have done it myself if given the chance.”
“But I’m going off track. That whole operation was the basis for our friendship. We were outmanned, outgunned, outmatched in every way shape and form. And yet, for two weeks we managed to hold our own on that little planet without backup, with only a combined Federation-Romulan force that distrusted each other immensely. But that changed. We fought side by side, shoulder to shoulder. By day digging trenches for ingenious defensive positions, by night running supply raids on Dominion outposts. Your husband and I were the senior officers still alive, and we took control.”
“There was a little friction at first. Trust, all that. Different methods of doing things. But we managed to move past that for the sake of the troops. And on the fourth night, we began to open up. Or, he did at least. I didn’t really have anything to share. But that was the very first time I saw you Isha. He had a holo-picture of you. Carried it around like it was his prized possession. Very sentimental, your husband was.”
"At times," Isha agreed. "When he lost his first wife Nveid had no intention of taking another, though there were no shortage of candidates, nobody matched up to her. When Nveid's brother introduced me to him it was not to make a match, rather to propose me as a bride for himself - if Nveid did not remarry Nniol would have inherited and I would still have been the consort of the Head of the Illialhlae. My mother and her fellow matchmakers thought Nveid a far better prospect than the younger brother, and I, well, I had been raised to make an advantageous marriage - it hardly mattered who." Isha paused, aware of how callous that sounded, but the facts were the facts, it had begun as a dynastic gambit, not a love affair. "I believe that Nveid fell in love with me there and then, though it took me rather longer to reach the same place. It amazes me how patient he was with me. I can be very difficult,” she admitted as though the fact might come as a surprise. “The deal worked!
very well, he got a beautiful and well connected young wife and I was freed from my mother’s tyranny.
“I do regret that I did not realise sooner that I had gained far more than freedom, wealth and status. Those first six months together were quite hellish, I piled outrageous demand on outrageous demand and he fulfilled each and every crazy selfish whim.”
“Is that so?” Darson said curiously. He had received a brief about her life from Loki, but that had been dry and impersonal…devoid of intimate information. This was a good opportunity.
“It was when I fell pregnant with Hexce that I finally admitted my devotion. Nveid had taken a very unusual step immediately after our wedding and given me charge of the day to day affairs of the House, Senate business and whatnot,” she waved a hand dismissing the finer details. “But when I told him about Hexce he took an even greater step.” Isha indicated to the stand that held three blades, “soon after he presented me with that,” she pointed to the middle one, “it’s a very fine modern replica of his own ancestral blade which hangs above it. He held me in such regard that he formally made me his equal … well as much as one can be the equal of the Head of one's House,” Isha bit her lip again. She was not sure why she was telling Darson this, perhaps because he had known her husband, perhaps because she simply needed to talk.
“He gave you control of affairs of the house?” Darson mused, “How…magnanimous of him. In a good way,” he stood and moved over to the blade she pointed out. He didn’t touch it, but did examine it from all angles. It was indeed a fine blade, despite it being a replica.
Without turning around as he still examined the blade he said calmly, “He was a complicated man. But then again,” he turned to face her once more, “So am I. We corresponded, he and I. After we got off that godforsaken rock. Sent subspace messages to each other across the vast reaches of the cosmos. We didn’t know of course where the other was most of the time, but the messages found their way across.”
Darson reached inside his cloak and rummaged around inside. A second later he withdrew his hand, holding an isolinear chip. He turned it over and over and weighed it with his gauntlet covered hand.
“I don’t know how much you know about him,” he said shortly, “But this may answer some questions. Every recording of his correspondence with me. I didn’t know when would be the best time to give this to you…but you know what they say in the temporal mechanics department. There’s no time like the present.”
"We were married for thirty three years," Isha said. Nveid had not known the secret she had kept from him for years until she had told him. Isha had not known that that horrible truth would take him beyond the limits of his indulgence and bring out the harsh side he showed to everyone else but her. Isha had not known that Nveid would give her to the Tal'Shiar for questioning sooner than believe that his own brother had deceived him. Isha had not known that she would be able to forgive Nveid for assuming her to be the liar. "But then how well does one ever know another person?"
He placed the chip on the table and said, “We talked about a great many things. Politics, culture. Military movements were strictly off limits to both of us, but there were other things. It was basically a back channel for intelligence of sort against common enemies, as well as a way to keep in touch. We always played games, for example.”
Isha looked at the chip but she did not reach for it. Everything was a game of sorts, even this and she had no way of knowing if what Darson was telling her was the truth, or of what he hoped to achieve by invoking the ghost of her husband, "Games," she said simply.
“Games. Chess and Kotra, simultaneously. He was a very skilled player, however I am a grand master in both, so he never won. Did pose a challenge though. He sent me a Kotra board and I actually sent him a chess board. A nice one, Latinum plated and covered with Jewels. One of a kind piece, hard to miss...Do you know what happened to it?”
"Do you wish it to be returned?" Isha asked she had not been quite sure why she brought it with her from ch'Rihan but she knew where it was and could have it retrieved from the assay office if necessary.
“…No,” Darson said after a moment of thought, looking off to the side, away from her, “It’s yours. Consider it as another…I mean, as a gift. I imagine that’s what Nevid would have wanted. But…wait there is one more thing that I want to do. I want to play some of these…conversations, if it’s alright with you.
"Very well," Isha said, having no idea of what the recordings might contain.
OFF:
Colonel James Darson
Marine Commanding Officer
Deep Space 5
Ambassador Isha t'Khellian
by Commander Isha t'Vaurek & Colonel James Darson
Post Details
| Title | What do you mean you knew Nveid? | |
| Mission | Interlude | |
| Author(s) | Commander Isha t'Vaurek & Colonel James Darson | |
| Posted | Mon Oct 25, 2010 @ 5:53pm | |
| Location | Romulan Consulate, Ambassador's Office | |
| Timeline | SD29 unspecified |
“I’m serious Isha,” Darson said, his voice suddenly hard and cold. He sat down on the Plush sofa again and sighed, “It’s a tale of tragedy and treachery, and one that most certainly doesn’t have a happy end. But…” he looked at her determined face and saw so much of what the man whose secrets he held he capitulated, “You’ve earned this I guess. But this is going to take a while. Go make a pot of tea, and I’ll tell you about what I meant. The tale of me and my best friend… your husband, Nveid i-Ihhliae tr’Illialhlae.”
NEW:
He had intimated before that he had known her husband and then too he had somehow avoided giving her the details she asked for, perhaps this time he was really going to tell her.
To give herself a moment to clear her head Isha did as he instructed and returned shortly afterwards with the tea and two cups on a tray. Quite how he would drink it she had no idea, but it would be rude not to make the gesture.
"aye'lyo," white tea, she said as she placed the tray down, "I'm not that fond of it myself as it brings back memories, but I thought it appropriate if we are going to remember my husband."
Then Isha sat, not opposite as she would in a formal interview but on the other end of the same sofa he had taken. Isha tucked her legs up beneath her and rested her head on one arm against the back of the sofa. She blinked, watching him, someone who claimed friendship with the only man she had ever wholly and willingly deferred to.
Darson stared at the pot of tea steaming gently on the table and was all too aware of Isha taking a seat on his side of the table, a far more intimate position than she had occupied previously. He poured himself a cup, the little thing looking weirdly disproportioned when compared to his gigantic armored hands. But he wielded it with all the grace of a gentleman.
He held the cup in front of him and stared down deeply into it. His reflection stared back at him, confirming that he was not infact a vampire. At least he thought that was how that worked. He swished it back and forth, observing the waves that formed in the cup. He brought it to his mask as if to take a sip, but suddenly threw it back like he was taking a shot. He put it down gently on the table a second later, the cup mysteriously devoid of tea. He sighed and without looking at Isha began to speak,
“Where to start? I suppose the beginning is as good a time as any. A long long time ago, in a galaxy…wait…no, sorry that’s something else. Nveid and I met through some mighty odd circumstances. I was a young buck Sergeant, not fresh out of the academy, but not a veteran either. I was attached to a special operations detachment, charged with cracking down on insurrections in outlying worlds.” He was delibertly vague as to the specific details of it, no need to give her any more than she needed to know, despite the fact that she had just bared her whole soul to him. Luckily, she was probably more interested in parts involving her husband than him murdering civilian protestors.
“I was reassigned temporarily to a diplomatic unit for the Embassy on Romulus. Me and my unit were sent under cover, in order to place a bug in the quarters of the Ambassador so we could keep track of who he was speaking to and make sure that he wasn’t violating arms trading embargos. You have to understand Isha,” he said, gesturing with one hand at the empty space in front of him, “It was a different age back then. I’m not sure how much you know about espionage, but back then, that was how the game was played.”
Isha shrugged, "Whatever else you may think I am, I am not a spy, Darson and I never have been," she said softly. "but I am not surprised. I know wht goes on in embassies, indeed you'd be amazed at what we find in the walls every time we sweep this facility," they also left a number of known devices in operation, just enough to appear to have been 'missed' How else could they so easily disemminate disinformation.
“Federation-Romulan relations have always been…tricky. And this was twenty years ago, during the Federation-Cardassian war. Before the Cardassian DMZ even existed We thought at the time that the Romulans might be providing tacit assistance to them,” he raised a hand to forestall complaints from Isha, “Again, long time ago. Things have changed,” he cocked his head to the side, “Though people like Commander Gabriel do certainly take me back.”
"My people learned the hard way not to trust outsiders," Isha said, "It is a lesson we have never forgotten. Trust is something that is not given but must be earned," she explained, saying nothing about his comment on Gabriel.
“In any case…my job was not to plant the bug. That was the job of someone we had inside the embassy, long gone, don’t worry. But what I had to do was distract people who were there. I ended up talking with the chief of security at the Embassy and a member of the great house of the Romulan people. Your husband at the time. Never knew exactly what he was doing there, but that didn’t matter. I did my job. But something happened. While we were talking, we got on the subject of race and relations between our two empires. We didn’t have much in common ideologically of course, but that was only to be expected.”
“What we did have, was a different connection. That of one soldier to another. We shared conviction, the thought that loyalty was the only thing that mattered. I only met him for a couple of hours, but in that time I learned a lot. But the fact of the matter is, we succeeded in planting the bug and getting out successfully. Didn’t learn anything from it though and we sent the self-destruct order to it a year later.”
Isha rolled her lower lip between her teeth as she continued to watch her visitor, "such a meeting can hardly be named a friendship," she observed, "are you sure you are not just using this opportunity to boast about your ability to sneak into secure environments?" she asked, it seemed to Isha that there had to be more.
“…No, I’m not,” Darson said flatly, “I was just providing context. Honestly my dear Isha, is that how you see me? A braggart who will take any opportunity to tell the universe of his amazing past exploits?” he held up a hand, “Stop. Don’t answer that.” He poured himself another cup of tea and downed it in one gulp again.
“Where was I…oh yes, I remember. So, we met a long, long time ago. And after that we didn’t cross paths for years. The next time we met was during a joint operation between the Romulans and the Federation during the Dominion War. SNOW HAMMER is what it was. You saw some of it, I believe, a while ago in my holodecks,” he skirted the details of that little encounter…he had been playing a little game with her at the time and this was not the time to bring that up too much.
“We both didn’t know of the other’s involvement at first. He didn’t recognize me either when we first met, after all, I had changed from what I had been then to…” he gestured at himself, “what you see today. But I knew. I knew from the get go, I never forget a face. We didn’t have time to get reacquainted either, before we were very rudely blasted out of the sky through the combination of a traitor somewhere onboard and a Dominion battle fleet.”
“Contrary to what you saw in the Simulation, we did find the traitor,” Darson said wistfully looking out into the figurative distance, “A human, for what it’s worth. Onboard our ship. He gave them your husband’s ship’s position and when their shields would be down. Went down with us to the surface in lifeboats too.”
Isha bristled at the thought that some Lloann'su vang'radam had had the temerity to endanger her husband's life. "If you knew who it was then why on ch'Rihan did you not leave him to disintegrate as the ship tore itself apart? What were you thinking allowing him to evacuate?"
“He got what he deserved,” Darson said bluntly, “Didn’t last too long either. Right after the escape pod he and a couple of other personnel were in crash landed on the surface of the planet, they were set upon by Dominion patrols. They tried to escape, but he was caught advocating surrender to the Dominion. The senior officer present placed him under arrest for treason, stripped him of his equipment and left him bound in a cave for the Dominion to find. An hour or so later, they were cornered in a box canyon and this little whelp comes out of the Dominion scout ship to try to convince them to surrender, that they would go peacefully. So they surrendered. And were promptly shot, including the traitor. So that was the end of that, justice served. Though I would have done it myself if given the chance.”
“But I’m going off track. That whole operation was the basis for our friendship. We were outmanned, outgunned, outmatched in every way shape and form. And yet, for two weeks we managed to hold our own on that little planet without backup, with only a combined Federation-Romulan force that distrusted each other immensely. But that changed. We fought side by side, shoulder to shoulder. By day digging trenches for ingenious defensive positions, by night running supply raids on Dominion outposts. Your husband and I were the senior officers still alive, and we took control.”
“There was a little friction at first. Trust, all that. Different methods of doing things. But we managed to move past that for the sake of the troops. And on the fourth night, we began to open up. Or, he did at least. I didn’t really have anything to share. But that was the very first time I saw you Isha. He had a holo-picture of you. Carried it around like it was his prized possession. Very sentimental, your husband was.”
"At times," Isha agreed. "When he lost his first wife Nveid had no intention of taking another, though there were no shortage of candidates, nobody matched up to her. When Nveid's brother introduced me to him it was not to make a match, rather to propose me as a bride for himself - if Nveid did not remarry Nniol would have inherited and I would still have been the consort of the Head of the Illialhlae. My mother and her fellow matchmakers thought Nveid a far better prospect than the younger brother, and I, well, I had been raised to make an advantageous marriage - it hardly mattered who." Isha paused, aware of how callous that sounded, but the facts were the facts, it had begun as a dynastic gambit, not a love affair. "I believe that Nveid fell in love with me there and then, though it took me rather longer to reach the same place. It amazes me how patient he was with me. I can be very difficult,” she admitted as though the fact might come as a surprise. “The deal worked!
very well, he got a beautiful and well connected young wife and I was freed from my mother’s tyranny.
“I do regret that I did not realise sooner that I had gained far more than freedom, wealth and status. Those first six months together were quite hellish, I piled outrageous demand on outrageous demand and he fulfilled each and every crazy selfish whim.”
“Is that so?” Darson said curiously. He had received a brief about her life from Loki, but that had been dry and impersonal…devoid of intimate information. This was a good opportunity.
“It was when I fell pregnant with Hexce that I finally admitted my devotion. Nveid had taken a very unusual step immediately after our wedding and given me charge of the day to day affairs of the House, Senate business and whatnot,” she waved a hand dismissing the finer details. “But when I told him about Hexce he took an even greater step.” Isha indicated to the stand that held three blades, “soon after he presented me with that,” she pointed to the middle one, “it’s a very fine modern replica of his own ancestral blade which hangs above it. He held me in such regard that he formally made me his equal … well as much as one can be the equal of the Head of one's House,” Isha bit her lip again. She was not sure why she was telling Darson this, perhaps because he had known her husband, perhaps because she simply needed to talk.
“He gave you control of affairs of the house?” Darson mused, “How…magnanimous of him. In a good way,” he stood and moved over to the blade she pointed out. He didn’t touch it, but did examine it from all angles. It was indeed a fine blade, despite it being a replica.
Without turning around as he still examined the blade he said calmly, “He was a complicated man. But then again,” he turned to face her once more, “So am I. We corresponded, he and I. After we got off that godforsaken rock. Sent subspace messages to each other across the vast reaches of the cosmos. We didn’t know of course where the other was most of the time, but the messages found their way across.”
Darson reached inside his cloak and rummaged around inside. A second later he withdrew his hand, holding an isolinear chip. He turned it over and over and weighed it with his gauntlet covered hand.
“I don’t know how much you know about him,” he said shortly, “But this may answer some questions. Every recording of his correspondence with me. I didn’t know when would be the best time to give this to you…but you know what they say in the temporal mechanics department. There’s no time like the present.”
"We were married for thirty three years," Isha said. Nveid had not known the secret she had kept from him for years until she had told him. Isha had not known that that horrible truth would take him beyond the limits of his indulgence and bring out the harsh side he showed to everyone else but her. Isha had not known that Nveid would give her to the Tal'Shiar for questioning sooner than believe that his own brother had deceived him. Isha had not known that she would be able to forgive Nveid for assuming her to be the liar. "But then how well does one ever know another person?"
He placed the chip on the table and said, “We talked about a great many things. Politics, culture. Military movements were strictly off limits to both of us, but there were other things. It was basically a back channel for intelligence of sort against common enemies, as well as a way to keep in touch. We always played games, for example.”
Isha looked at the chip but she did not reach for it. Everything was a game of sorts, even this and she had no way of knowing if what Darson was telling her was the truth, or of what he hoped to achieve by invoking the ghost of her husband, "Games," she said simply.
“Games. Chess and Kotra, simultaneously. He was a very skilled player, however I am a grand master in both, so he never won. Did pose a challenge though. He sent me a Kotra board and I actually sent him a chess board. A nice one, Latinum plated and covered with Jewels. One of a kind piece, hard to miss...Do you know what happened to it?”
"Do you wish it to be returned?" Isha asked she had not been quite sure why she brought it with her from ch'Rihan but she knew where it was and could have it retrieved from the assay office if necessary.
“…No,” Darson said after a moment of thought, looking off to the side, away from her, “It’s yours. Consider it as another…I mean, as a gift. I imagine that’s what Nevid would have wanted. But…wait there is one more thing that I want to do. I want to play some of these…conversations, if it’s alright with you.
"Very well," Isha said, having no idea of what the recordings might contain.
OFF:
Colonel James Darson
Marine Commanding Officer
Deep Space 5
Ambassador Isha t'Khellian