(Chapter 4)
by
Jocelyn Stewart
No cold wind blows
Where my babe sleeps
No storm cloud flies
No shadow creeps
Fair bright blue skies
Your small heart keeps
For my babe never cries
Sail on, sail on
Into the night
Dream on, dream on
’Till you catch sight
Of bright cool dawn
I’ll hold you tight
For my babe never cries
Joyanne woke to the soft sounds of a barely remembered lullaby and someone brushing her hair. She smiled.
“Hello again, Joya.”
Memory crashed over her like storm surge. “Ree?” Joyanne tried to sit up. The room did a majestic 360º rotation and threatened to somersault.
“Why don’t you stay put.”
Joyanne looked up into a face that she hadn’t seen in nearly of two decades. The eyes weren’t as huge as she remembered them but they were the same bright blue. “What happened to your curls?”
“They straightened out as I got older.” Rielle smiled down at her.
Joyanne stared up at Rielle. Rielle! All the pain of a loss that had never healed clawed at her heart. “Where did you go?” A sob tore at her throat but did not escape.
“Trin Oren.” Rielle continued to brush Joyanne’s jet black hair.
“You’ve been at Trin Oren for all these years? Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me think you had died?!” Tears were streaming down the sides of her face running into her ears and hair.
“I didn’t want to hurt you any more Joya. When Peter and Jorden took you I never thought I would see you again. I truly thought the reason they hadn’t taken me was because I was like the others. I thought I was going to die screaming.” A shudder rippled through her as she remembered the terror of that day. “I wanted you to be happy. ”
“But the letter –” Joyanne fingered the gold chain she still wore.
“For a year after that I just kept waiting to die. They kept telling me that I wouldn’t but I didn’t believe them. When I sent you the letter I had decided to go on and get it over with. If someone hadn’t found me I would have died that day. I had taken a good deal of poison and I was going to sleep forever.” She smiled to herself. “Trin Oren employs some rather unorthodox healing methods. I awoke to find myself not only alive but stabilized.”
At that instant Peter burst into the bedroom, of the Deferment Suite. “Little girl you are gonna be the death of me yet!” He stopped mid step when he saw Rielle.
“Hello, Peter,” Rielle smiled at him. There was no trace of anger or recrimination in her smile. She seemed genuinely happy to see him.
“I know you.” A gulf of years separated him from the last time he had seen her but he knew who she was. He couldn’t remember her name but he would never forget those eyes. The last time he had looked into them they had been filled with desperation and fear.
“Rielle,” she supplied simply.
“Rielle.” Peter’s heart flip-flopped once as the old guilt seized it and just as suddenly let go. They had done the best for her that they could. Rielle had been far less stable than Joyanne. It had been a near thing but since they could only manage one of them Rielle’s instability had been a large factor in the choice. Peter shook his head slightly it hadn’t really been close at all. He had fallen in love with Joyanne the first time he had laid eyes on her, the same way he had fallen in love with Anisia and her brother Devon.
“Peter.” Joyanne looked up at him.
He smiled down at his oldest daughter, he never let on but that was how he thought of her. Joyanne reminded him of his younger sister Petra. “Please excuse me, Rielle.” Peter grabbed Joyanne up in his usual bear hug. She looked awful. The light had faded from her sea green eyes and there were dark half-circles under them. She was obviously pale under her dark superficial pigment. “Little girl, little girl, what am I going to do with you?”
Joyanne waited for the room to start spinning again when Peter had nearly lifted her off the bed in one of his signature bear hugs. To her great surprise and relief the walls and the floor stayed where they were supposed to be. Her usual, ‘Put me down, Peter’ had almost escaped her lips before her heart made her cling to him like a lost child. He was the only father she could remember even if he was only twelve years older. In his arms she gave into her heart and cried without thought or regard to his Tecton standard uniform getting very soggy in the service. And like that same lost child she cried herself to sleep.
***
Joyanne awoke to find herself alone again, feeling sick and dizzy all of the time now. Ydara hadn’t been in to take her field down in two days and the excess selyn was ravaging her cells. Proximity to channels no longer made any difference. Oh, be careful what you wish for... Death was coming for her this time with a certainty. “Soon,” she told her burning flesh, “soon.”
She lay there in her bed too burned out to move. But life does have its little ironies, she really had to go to the bathroom! Closing her eyes against the spontaneous wave like motions of the floor and the wavering ripples of the walls around her, she lurched toward the bathroom. “When did they move the shenned bathroom to the other end of the suite?!” It never occurred to her to use the call button on the table to ask for help.
It took her fifteen minutes to crawl, she had fallen after her second step, across the eight feet separating her bed from the bathroom. Just as she reached her objective, the bedroom door opened to admit Ydara and Rielle.
“Joyanne!!” both the channel and Donor yelled in perfect unison, Ydara’s voice a full octave higher than Rielle’s.
Ydara got to Joyanne first but Rielle was there at nearly the same instant.
“What happened!” Ydara was zlinning Joyanne to see if she had injured herself in any way. Rielle was maintaining a tight focus on Ydara that let her zlin but kept her separated from the effects of Joyanne’s condition. With Joyanne’s field raging out of control it would have been foolhardy for Yadar to enter the room unprotected.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Joyanne said as she inched forward again.
“Why didn’t you call someone?!” Ydara’s exasperation was spilling over into her voice.
“I didn’t think to,” was Joyanne’s honest answer. She was still inching forward.
“Stop that!” Ydara picked the Gen up off the floor and took her into the bathroom. Rielle followed still keeping a tight focus on the channel.
Ydara dropped to hypoconsciousness which abated most of the effect of Joyanne’s vertigo so that she could let Rielle go deal with the bedding. Joyanne’s body was Sime hot and she was sweating buckets. Ydara sat the Joyanne on the toilet and stripped off Joyanne’s clothes as she took care of one necessity. Then Ydara stripped off her own clothes. She managed to get Joyanne showered and redressed in about five minutes. Ydara had turned the water down as cool as she could stand it in an effort to lower the Gen’s temperature. It had worked, for now.
When all Joyanne’s physical necessities had been taken care of, to Joyanne’s complete embarrassment, Ydara placed her in a freshly changed bed.
Tears were running down her face by the time everyone had settled into chairs next to the bed. In all her adult life she had never asked anyone for a single thing, at least not since she had lost Rielle. The one thing that she had wanted with all her heart had been denied. She had stopped asking after that. She had given freely to everyone around her but she never asked anything in return.
“Why are you crying Joya?” Rielle took her hand and rubbed the back of it gently. Joyanne remembered the gesture. She had comforted Rielle in that same manner many years ago.
“I’m so tired Ree,” was all she could say.
“I remember being that tired once. Tired of fighting, tired of trying, tired of living.”
Joyanne looked into Rielle’s brilliant blue eyes and saw that old tiredness in them. It existed there as a shadow that never left them even though she seemed quite happy now. “How do you find rest short of death?”
Rielle looked straight into her friends shadowed green eyes, “You stop fighting,” was all she said.
“Stop fighting what? Stop fighting death? I stopped that already.” Joyanne’s tears were choking her as they escaped down her throat there were too many for her eyes to shed.
“No, Joya, stop fighting life.”
Joyanne looked away form the too familiar shadow in her friend’s eyes. She sobbed once and made herself look back into those so strange and yet so familiar eyes. “I... I don’t know how!” She hadn’t meant to wail but...
“Let us help you Joyanne,” Ydara moved closer to the bed. With Joyanne’s fever down, for the time being, her vertigo had abated.
“Help? How do you propose to help?” She was convinced that the end was so close no one could pull her back from the long fall into endless night.
“Like it or not, Joy, you are going to have to have First Order transfers from now on.” Ydara’s words were spoken gently but they were completely adamant.
Joyanne’s heart constricted at the very thought of allowing such a thing. Could she allow any First to touch her in that manner; to touch her at all? She looked up to see Ydara smiling that annoying, knowing smile of hers. Ydara had just touched her everywhere, impersonally as if she had been currying Stamp. Why did she always forget that Ydara was a First?
“You are the only First I’ve ever trusted.” Joyanne looked down to find Ydara holding her other hand her tentacles emulating Rielle’s fingers rubbing the back of her hand gently. It felt strange and strangely comforting.
“You need First Order transfer. Your body has been trying to tell you that for a long time, Joy.”
Joyanne looked at Ydara, what did she mean by that? “Trying to tell me? How?”
“Remember what you feel at termination of a Third Order transfer?” Ydara had turned the full force to her moonlit gaze upon Joyanne this time. Joyanne felt as if she were looking into mirrors and she didn’t like the reflections that greeted her. What she saw there was a drawn, haggard woman frail, failing and too near death to care. Perhaps it was this which had always bothered her about Ydara’s eyes; they held her up to herself and made her see what she didn’t want to.
Looking away from the truth she would not face Joyanne answered, “I’m not normal why should I have a normal reaction to transfer? A question for a question.
Ydara gently turned Joyanne’s face back to hers with her free hand. “You have never given a transfer in your life Joy. What you’ve been doing is really only direct donation. Your body is screaming to be allowed to do what you were born to do. You’ve kept it on a tight lead and hobbled it but it still yearns to run!”
“And if I refuse to run, will you take the whip to me?” Under other circumstance Joyanne would have been amused by all the equestrian metaphors but right now her sense of humor was disconnected.
“No, she won’t -- but I will.” Joyanne had almost forgotten that Rielle was in the room. The dead seriousness of her voice was a shock. Joyanne looked from the mirrored gaze of Ydara to find that the brilliant blue of Rielle’s eyes had acquired a sapphire hardness.
Rielle had spent seventeen years believing that Joyanne was happy and healthy. When Ydara had called her to Broken Promise she had come with trepidation and guilt. The lies she had given herself to justify her never communicating with Joyanne had been shattered. The survivor’s guilt that had shadowed her regarding the rest of the Hamlin Gens now included Joyanne. Yes, Joyanne had also survived but she was far from happy or healthy. The wasted body that lay in the bed before her becoming warmer with each passing moment was a direct result of her long silence. Forbidding her guilt to touch her and holding back her own tears at the sight of what her friend had become, Rielle began to do what must be done.
“I was wrong. I never should have assumed that you were all right. I should have checked on you I should have let you know where I was. I was wrong.” The sapphire glinted even harder. “It is time I corrected my mistake.”
Ydara nodded once, patted the back of Joyanne’s hand with a tentacle, got up and left the bedroom closing the door behind her.
Joyanne stared at the closed door. The feel of Rielle still rubbing the back of her hand made Joyanne look at her again. The sapphire had left them but there was still an old shadow there in Rielle’s eyes.
Joyanne needed to change the subject she didn’t want to deal with whatever Rielle had in mind for her. Seventeen years separated them. Joyanne mustered her curiosity. “Do you have children?”
Rielle’s startled reaction made Joyanne smile. There, she had gotten a bit of her own back from her old friend.
“One. A little girl, her name is Joyanne.”
This time Rielle smiled as she watched surprise and consternation warring for possession of Joyanne’s face.
“How old is she?” It seemed the right thing to ask as she struggled to regain her mental equilibrium.
“Five going on twenty.” Rielle said this with the same exasperation and pride as all mothers of precocious children. “Would you like to meet her?”
“You brought her with you?” Joyanne cringed internally. But... “Yes.”
Rielle rose and went to the bedroom door, she opened it and stuck her head into the main room of the suite. She held the door open to admit a nearly identical copy of herself in miniature. Joyanne watched as Rielle picked up the little girl, brought her over to the chair, sat down and placed the child on her lap.
“Joyanne I would like you to meet Joyanne.” Rielle smiled at both of them.
“Annie, mommy.” Joyanne laughed in spite of herself. This child knew her own mind.
Annie turned to look at Joyanne with hazel eyes that were exactly the size and shape of her mother’s. She tilted her curly blonde head to the side in a gesture that called up long buried memories. “You don’t look so good.”
“I don’t feel so good.” Joyanne found herself smiling at the very self willed child.
“Oh.” She turned to her mother and asked, “Will she come back to Trin Oren with us so we can make her better?”
“I don’t know sweetie. Joya hasn’t decided yet.”
Joyanne was holding back tears, “May I have a hug, Annie?”
Annie smiled at Joyanne but looked back at her mother for permission. Rielle nodded and Annie climbed onto the bed and put her arms around Joyanne’s neck.
Gently Joyanne hugged her namesake as tears wet her bright gold curls.
“Don’t cry Joyanne.” Then Annie giggled and pulled back to look at Joyanne. “I never met a another Joyanne before.”
Joyanne smiled. “Neither have I.”
“Annie, why don’t you go see what Aunty Kyla is up to?” Rielle scooped up her daughter and deposited her on the floor.
The corners of little Annie’s mouth pulled downward slightly, “Do I have to? She wants me to take a nap. She always wants me to take a nap.”
“Annie, I’m the one who requires a nap, actually.” Joyanne smiled at her.
“Oh, okay.” Annie skipped to the door and opened it. Turning before she went out she smiled at Joyanne. “Nice to meet you.”
Joyanne smiled at the child, “Nice to meet you too.”
“Bye, bye.” The door closed and Annie was gone.
“She is absolutely adorable, Ree.” Joyanne smiled at Rielle.
Rielle turned from the door with a smile. “Thanks, Joya. She’s a handful, into everything and I’m so glad she’s mine. She would never have been if I had succeeded in taking my own life.”
“Where did you learn the lullaby you were singing?” Joyanne needed to find some less painful ground for a moment.
Rielle smiled at her and shook here head. “I learned it from you.”
“But...” Joyanne hadn’t remembered the song at all except as snatches of melody and certainly not the words. “I didn’t remember it until I heard you singing it.”
“Joya, you used to sing it to me at night when the others were...” Rielle trailed off, Joyanne could see the same pain in her friends eyes that she always felt whenever she remembered those awful nights and the screaming of children dying.
“I don’t remember it.” Tears were welling in her eyes again. She looked up at Rielle. “We're the only ones left. Just us two.”
“And that is why you have to live, Joya. We’ve each carried this burden alone long enough. Carry it with me, help me please!”
“Ree, I can’t. If I do what you ask then that worthless bastard wins. I can’t let him win. They will try it again I know they will.”
“Not if we’re there to stop them. If we aren’t here to stop them then he wins.”
“I – I – can’t. What you ask is impossible. I can’t work with Firsts.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t trust them.” Having said it Joyanne realized, at last, what had been broken so many years ago. Trust.
“Any of them?” Rielle sat not in the chair this time but on the bed in the same place she had occupied when Joyanne had first awakened to find Rielle brushing her hair.
Joyanne looked up at Rielle. She had come a long way from that frightened little girl. Rielle would never be tall but she gave the impression of an earth solid strength that made Joyanne’s heart glad. No, Rielle no longer required her protection. But then Joyanne had none to give.
“Ydara. I trust Ydara.” Joyanne knew that she couldn’t have transfer with Ydara but that was the answer to the question.
“No other?” Rielle’s eyes held a slight desperation as she asked this question. There was no way Evender was going to give up Ydara again. Rielle had been dealing with his bad temper for the past two months and she had no desire to do it again. Edrian Gens just didn’t cope well with holes in their transfer schedule.
“No, there is no other.”
Rielle looked at her old friend for a moment then nodded to herslef. “Joya, there is someone I want you to talk to.”
~*~*~*~*~*~
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