Disclaimer: Children, what are you doing in here? Get out of here! It features Paris angst, adult imagery and situations. If you don’t like that sort of stuff, or know you are too young for it, I know www.virgin.com has a wonderful website that will lead you to their totally cool online reservation system, which if you choose to employ, will lead you to an absolutely fabulous airline experience. The games on the onflight entertainment system alone are worth it, even in Coach. Oh, and I don’t own any of these characters. I’m just borrowing them for a little storytelling. They are all owned by Paramount and the rest of the people with the money. I don’t have any. I do, however, have an overactive sexual imagination and a good grasp of how to drive a plot home. Oh, dear, that didn’t come out quite right . . . oh, well. The lyrics are respectfully taken from the song “In My Room,” by Martin Page on the album “In the House of Stone and Light.”
Send comments to address above. I welcome constructive criticism. I also relish confrontation; just a friendly warning.
I’m lying in my quarters, pretty much plastered and scared out of my mind. How did I get here? That’s silly, I know how I got here. My mind drifts away...
I was only fourteen. Fourteen years old, and it delighted me to break curfew and all of my father’s other strict rules. I was not an exceptionally bad child, just vibrant and energetic in a household where decorum and calm were supposed to be the order of the day. Breaking curfew was a special pleasure, because at fourteen, my real mother would sit up waiting for me to come home. My real mother, my maman, always covered for me, always greeted me with kisses, and always lied to my father to protect me despite the consequences.
At fourteen, mother still meant ‘home’ and ‘happiness’ and ‘God’ to me.
I was fourteen, and the words the doctors said didn’t mean anything to me then. I tried to ask, will my maman be alright?, only to have my father send me home in irritation. Two security officers drove me home in silence. They couldn’t answer my questions. They wouldn’t disobey the Admiral and let me stay.
Fourteen years old, and I cried myself to sleep in fear and desperate loneliness for the first time in my life. I dreamt of darkness, of pain; I dreamt that I was alone; that I was surrounded by cold white walls and that I was slowly slipping away into a soft velvet blackness.
“Where were you?” were his first words to me. “You were supposed to be home at 2030. Where were you?”
I hadn’t learned to lie to him yet. I could see it, the violence in him tightly wound like a warp coil ready to burst. But I was only fourteen, and I didn’t have my maman to shield me. I confessed that I’d been late, that I’d broken my curfew. Then a torrent of French, which I still consider my native language escaped me: “Where is maman? Is she all right? What’s happened to her?”
It took me a long time to figure out why he hated to hear me speak French around him. Now, I look back and realize how frighteningly alike we could sound, maman and I, when we spoke in our breathy soft Québécois - at fourteen, hearing my voice must have been like hearing a ghost to him. Except that my father doesn’t believe in ghosts.
He hit me, very hard. He yelled, about speaking Standard and not some archaic dialect. About carelessness, about responsibility, about how I should have been at home. Because if I had been at home, perhaps they could have saved her. If they had been called two hours earlier, she would still be alive. I was fourteen, I couldn’t doubt his word. It was years before I thought of what being my shield might have cost my maman.
He didn’t hit me again. I think he wanted to, but perhaps he could hear her soft voice pleading with him to be more gentle, more loving. Everytime he hit me after that, I could feel the guilt wash through his soul. By the time I was sixteen, he had learned to restrict his temper and his abuse to only his words. He only had so many members of his family left to destroy, after all.
But at fourteen, I died with my precious maman and the last shreds of my father’s love. The rest of my life, I spent in varying layers of Hell.
I was sixteen when he remarried, to the perfect Starfleet wife. I never gave her a chance, I freely admit it. But her first act upon moving into the old house was to redecorate the house. She put all the old things that my maman had collected in the attic, like so much worthless trash. She took the pictures down from the wall, and was upset with me for putting them back. They didn’t go with the decor, you see. I let her put the pictures away again. And from that day on, I dedicated myself to proving that she would never be my mother, and that I would never be her son.
My father hated our little scenes. I was the only thing that wasn’t perfect in his life; his own personal sixteen year old nightmare. She would try so hard to be nice, and I would needle her until she broke. Then he would get angry, and she would try to intercede. I never let her. That was my maman’s province, protecting Little Tommy. No one else could do that. If necessary, I would drop into French to make him angry enough to ignore her. Nothing else I did worked so well.
At sixteen, functions of the type my father and his wife thrived on were a deadly bore. I always tried to enliven them if I could. Scenes were my specialty. Sometimes my father would bribe me for good behavior, if it was really important and he absolutely had to bring me, but most of the time they just left me alone at home.
So I was sixteen when my father had to bring me to an ambassadorial function and had bribed me with an extended curfew for the weekend. I was mostly good - polite, but cold, and only my father and his wife realized I was doing a perfect imitation of my stepmother. She hated that. A young diplomatic attaché from some outer system was roped into giving me a tour while my father completed his important status gathering mission.
I don’t remember his name; I was only sixteen after all. I remember being shown all over the grounds of the hotel. I remember looking out of bay windows in the penthouse suite. I remember a gentle touch on the leg that raised no protest from me turning into a bruising grip on my arms and a rougher touch on my crotch. I remember saying ‘stop’ and hearing a voice straight out of hell say, “Who do you think your father will believe, problem child?” I remember being forced down onto the plush carpeted floor; I remember being told I was pretty, as though being pretty were a crime. I remember the ugly feel of his lips on my body, and I remember discovering for the first time, at sixteen, that it didn’t matter if Little Tommy got hurt. I’d just go away, and come back when it was all over. I remember feeling vaguely sorry for Little Tommy, with no one to help him. But he wouldn’t die, after all. It would just hurt a lot, right?
It hurt a lot, in the hotel room. He told my father that I wasn’t feeling well, and offered to take me home. It hurt in the car, too. Does anyone fight when they are sixteen? I’m sure some people do. I didn’t. I just let it hurt. I remember I was crying when we got to my house, and that he wouldn’t let me out of the car until he had cleaned me up a bit. Then he walked me to my front door. The housekeeper said nothing. I took a shower, and went to bed.
I had learned to lie by this time; the last two years had made it a survival skill. I shook my head, and replied that I just wanted to sleep in. He was angry. But he didn’t yell. He just walked out.
I was only sixteen, and I’d been emotionally dead for two years. I never thought about the party or anything that happened there again if I could help it. My nightmares were just as horrifying as they had ever been, filled with images of my maman’s body, lying very still; or my father’s hands, beating all the love and caring out of me; and now, my own body shuddering uncontrollably while someone touched me, licked me, stroked me, and then finally shoved a thick, rough penis into me. My father never took me to any of those functions again, and when I was eighteen, I went to the Academy, just like I was supposed to, and started to destroy myself all over again.
I am no longer sixteen; the nightmares of my past still haunt me, but the company they keep makes them seem like pleasant dreams.
Next Episode: Saving Paris