What Dreams May Come

Avon looked through the dissolving alien figure to see Cally leaning against the wall, exhaustion and tears smudging her face. He took a step forward, and the figure fragmented into wisps of air, swept away by the breeze of his passing as he strode through it to take Cally's arm.

She sagged against him. "It's gone...it's gone." Her voice was low, shattered.

"It's gone." He steadied her as she turned, but she managed only a step before he had to brace his arm around her. She was trembling with weariness and reaction as he walked with her toward her cabin. Behind him, he heard and dismissed the sound of the others, getting grumpily to their feet.

Cally's cabin was almost as bare as his, and starkly neat, except for the rumpled couch where she had slept and, sleeping, fought. Once inside she straightened a bit, and he let her go to walk unsupported to the chair across from the door and lower herself painfully into it. He leaned a hip against the low table, trying to block the tiredness from his own mind.

"Are you all right?"

"No. But I will be." She took a deep breath, and another. "She knew what I wanted, so deep inside that I didn't know it myself...that's very frightening. And dangerous."

"Telepathic communion. Someone to talk to."

She nodded. "I didn't know how much I'd missed it. Not that I don't like you all, Avon, it's not that. But without another of my kind, in a way I'm blind, or deaf. And the last thing I heard...is not a pleasant memory."

Dayna had caught her, then, when she fainted with the trauma of her twin's death. Had carried her unconscious from the teleport. So strange, that Cally who was so sharp-edged, with such anger in her, should be so limp, so absent from her body.

"And is this memory any more pleasant?"

"Yes. Because I won. And I am not-- I prefer the silence of friends, Avon, to the mindtouch of a being like that."

The silence of friends. Yes. Friends should know when to be silent, not be forever nagging and pushing. Like--like some. He preferred silence.

"Avon, you look drained. Are you all right?"

"I will be. If it was drawing on your strength, Cally, you must have a great deal." His head had begun to throb, he didn't know when. His fingers whitened on the edge of the table, and he shut his eyes.

She was beside him, light fingertips against his temple, slick with sweat. "Avon, sit down. Before you fall down. Come on, over here." She led him to the couch and he sat, but when she would have pushed him down he resisted, back stiff.

"I had better go, Cally."

She let her hand fall and stood up roughly. Her eyes were darker than they had ever seemed before, and the curls of her hair ragged with dried sweat. "Must you?"

"I think I must." He looked down at his hands, and used them to lever himself upright again. "I need rest, Cally. We both do."

"I need..." she said sadly, and with a little bitterness. "I need not to be alone, Avon." Her fingers twisted against each other; she rubbed at the bare place where the ring had been.

And he needed to be alone. He had opened up so much on the flight deck, too much, because they were all about to die so what did it matter? But they hadn't died, somehow; that part had gone wrong. Wrong? He shut the thought off.

"In the end we are always alone, Cally."

"Oh, no, Avon!" Shocked, she touched his arm lightly. "No, that isn't so. Zelda was not alone; I was with her until the end, until she kissed me and said goodbye. It only hit me so hard because there were no others in the link; it's not supposed to be like that." She folded her hands before her, looking down at them. "Lini fell from the rocks, climbing, when we were eighteen. All of us held her hand and stayed with her as she died. Companions for her death."

He looked up at that, sharply, and she saw the movement. "It meant something different for me, on Saurian Major," she acknowledged quietly. "I was half-mad then, I think, with being alone. It isn't natural."

He hardly heard the last words, involved in his own tentative horror. To share someone's death, to be with them so closely, at such a moment...he felt, again, Anna's face growing cold against his cheek. He had flinched from her then, flinched from her even as he held her, as he had when she touched him, kissed him. As he flinched now from Cally and her soft, intrusive presence.

"But you could have had it," he said harshly. "You could have let that alien in, and not been alone. You could have shared our deaths," he added cruelly.

She let the barb pass. "No, Avon. I can never share that with you."

Good, he thought. That was as it should be. "Then I had better go."

She was between him and the door. "Avon, haven't you heard what I've been saying? I need to--to talk with you, for a little. I don't even know what's been happening on the ship the past few hours; only dreams and confusion and fear. What happened?"

"You don't remember?" Since he couldn't reach the door, he turned toward the chair she had sagged into, before, and put his hand on its narrow back, covertly supporting himself. It was an awkward stance; he shifted to lean against the wall.

"Bits and...dreams."

He wiped a hand across his face, wishing he could go and clean up, try to sleep. "It took your shape, offered us a deal. We were to serve it, on its journey back to whatever planet it came from. In return, it would refrain from killing us--superfluously."

She smiled slightly. "I can imagine Tarrant's response to that."

"No doubt. Its psi power was dependent on a mechanical aid; I destroyed it."

"How?"

How could he answer that? She was still between him and the door, but at least she was no longer pressing close. He had gambled wildly, blindly, that Cally could prevent the thing from killing him. Had known that the outcome hardly mattered; he would die or not, and he didn't much care. But he had forced himself upon that monstrosity that had stolen Cally's image, perverted her form. Proving to it, to himself, that it was not her.

"I forced its hand. You prevented it from killing me."

Her eyes were distant, recalling something only half-seen. "I felt...it wanted to kill you. I was afraid that it would. I--the fight pulled me, physically drew me to the flight deck...I could see your face, you--" She broke off, suddenly, paling. "I heard some of what you said. You were goading it to kill you! Avon, did you want to die?"

The question hung for a moment, too long, between them "Want to die?" he repeated finally, and straightened stiffly against the wall. "No. But it hardly matters any more." He looked down, away from the shock in her face. "Let me go, Cally. I'm tired."

She was before him again, her body too close. "Avon, you mustn't. Nothing in life is so hopeless." She took his hand and resignedly he allowed it, looking down at his blunt fingers between hers. "Even humans need not be alone."

"I'm tired, Cally."

"So am I," she said a little bitterly, and let go his hand. It fell limply at his side, the muscles of his arm utterly unable to support it. "I'm tired, and lonely, and it seems I must care for you as well as myself."

That stung. "I don't ask for your care. I don't want it." His head throbbed.

"I know. But don't you ever want a moment of human touch, a little comfort, need it as I need it now?"

Some questions were unaskable. He let the pain in his temples drown her voice, turned his head away. "Cally, please..."

They stood for a moment like that, not touching but so near that he seemed to feel the warmth coming off her skin. Her eyes were dark; bruised smudges under her lids made them enormous, so close. He lifted his face a little, not wanting to breathe the air that hung about her. The back of his head touched the wall.

Then she moved slowly away, and was no longer between him and the door. The pressure of the wall at his back decreased, and he managed a step away from it. A shower, that was what he needed, a long hot shower with his head buried in the water, and then a dark room with a chosen emptiness. Sleep.

"Good night, Avon," Cally said.

He would not let himself stumble. "Good night, Cally." The door was at the end of a long tunnel of diminished vision, but he reached it, put a hand to the wall. The door opened with hissing finality.

"Sleep well," said Cally behind him.

What salve could he put to the raw edge of those words? Nothing. "Good night, Cally." He moved from her room into the corridor, and the door slid shut like a knife.