“Pelori, darlin’,” Del asked, gently breaking the silence at long last. “What are you, cher?”

The blue ghost sighed deeply. Well, at the risk of sounding like a point-earred fuck, the logical answer is that I’m a xenoneurophene-enhanced memory, she said, giving the reply he feared to hear because it made too much sense. Although you didn’t know me long, you knew me well. You are intelligent and creative enough to ventriloquize my voice and personality as long as you wish to. I am, in short, a drug-fueled stress reaction.

Del blew out a long breath. “Trust you to come up wit' a romantic answer, girl.”

It’s why I don’t really know anything more than you do, she continued. I just articulate it differently.

They fell into another silence.

“I not know th' song,” Del said suddenly.

What song?

“The song your daddy used to sing to your mama ‘bout the wonderful roses.”

The blue ghost shrugged apologetically. It’s an old song. You know a lot of songs. There’s really no way to verify that it has anything to do with my family.

“Sweet Mary, I almos' forgot what an optimist you are,” he grumbled.

As plausible as it was, Del’s mind shied away from her explanation. He had to admit to himself that he was afraid that if he examined her reasoning too carefully she’d just disappear.

It doesn’t look like I’m going anywhere, she said, her insubstantial form juxtaposing oddly against her usual clear-eyed rationalism.

He looked through the misty blue of her body to the more substantial lines of identical blue running up and down his own arm. Damned xenoneurophene… If only it was good for something other than making trouble….

Del… Following his thought, Pelori sat up uneasily. What are you thinking of doing?

“Not bein' a sheep.” He grinned as an audacious plan began to take shape in his mind. “Standin' on my two feet so my friends not hafta help me.’

You can’t heal yourself, she said flatly.

“Why not? If th' Antaris can do it, it can’t be that hard,” he replied with mock seriousness, as he continued to let his scheme take shape in his mind. “Bunch of folks that don’t have no more ambition than to sit around nekkid in a tree all day.”

Del, you can’t…

“All pleased wit' theyselves when one of 'em managed to get up th' gumption t' invent th' kite one day…”

Del, Pelori warned. You can’t use xenoneurophene to replicate what they do.

“You don’t know that,” he said, showing her the truth of his statement in her own thoughts. “No one ever tried it.”

Because it’s crazy! she burst out.

“I done had the market cornered on crazy fo' a long time, cher,” he assured her. “I t'ink I know how what they do works. I watched healin' an' been healed…”

Pelori shook her head dismissively. So have I, but…

“Then you can help me,” he said.

That stopped her in her tracks for a moment. He could feel the glimmer of excitement as she began to turn the scheme over in her mind too. Del, she said, shaking her head stubbornly. You’re not Antari…

“No,” he acknowledged. “I an engineer. An' from what I seen, a healin' is a controlled implosion o' psychic energy…”

That’s one way of looking at it, she admitted grudgingly.

“Controlled implosions are my bread an' butter, darlin’,” he said turning his idea around and around in his mind so she could see it from all angles. “I get up ever' mornin', have two cups o' coffee, an' work on controlled implosions powerful enough t' warp space itself all day. It jus' a matter of gettin' the intermix right.”

Del… Pelori was still shaking her head. When a healing goes wrong, it immolates the healer…

“Fail to correctly align your warp coil an' you can blow up yourself an' a planet,” he countered easily.

Despite herself, she was starting to be drawn to his plan. You may have xenoneurophene in your system, but you don’t have matter and antimatter in your head, she pointed out. What do you intend to intermix?

“Dark an' light psychic force,” he said, revealing this portion to her as it clarified in his mind. “Xenoneurphene is jus' th' rocket fuel to accelerate the' whole mess up to th' boilin' point.”

And you need me to stabilize and control the flow so you can concentrate on bringing light and dark together at just the right moment, she said, correctly identifying and even further clarifying her place on his mental model.

“Will ya’ help me, cher?” he requested, then paused to grin. “Even if you' jus' a figment o' my imagination, I do get some points fo' askin’ for help, non?”

It’s a start, she conceded, then sighed resignedly. I’m not going to talk you out of this, am I?

The bright promise of his plan dimmed a little in Del’s mind as one particular potential began to work itself out. "There is a danger…”

If we use xenoneurophene as an accelerant, Pelori said, following him. And I am made of xenoneurophene…

“We could burn you up.” Without even a sigh, Del began to dismantle his model.

Well, xenoneurophene is pretty tough stuff. Pelori stopped him and began to replace and strengthen the ideas he was on the verge of discarding. It doesn’t destroy easily.

He grinned. “And neither do you, huh, Lil’ Mac?”

Del, she said turning to him. The not-so-subtle message of my visit here is that I’m always with you. Spectral blue hands cupped his face lovingly. Hallucination, ghost, figment of your imagination, psychic projection from Beyond, wayward chemistry, or memory. I’m always here. I’m always part of you now.

“I know, cher.” He drew her to him as tightly as he could and wished for the strongest ropes in the universe to bind them together. “Some times t'ings get hard an' it gets too easy to forget, but I know you part o' me forever.”

Well, she said, mentally dusting herself off after a moment. Are we going to do this thing, or not?

“I ain’t exactly figured out how to start,” he admitted.

How about this?

Following her ghostly gesture, He put both palms together over his chest. Pure blue power circulated in a warm circuit spanning his chest and arms.

Pelori’s shape lost the form of a woman and came to hover over him.

I love you, Del, she thought to him once more as her mists began to swirl.

"I love you, too, cher,” he breathed as the flow of blue inside him became swift and bright.

The energy that was his lover clarified in to a spinning diamond. Let go, Pelori’s voice urged him. Find the halves!

Although his resolve was strong as he slowly began to pull his hands apart, there was still a moment of fear and hesitation as his fingers finally broke contact. Bright bands of blue still joined them, flowing at the lighting speed of the blue diamond over him.

Find the halves, his lover prompted. Dark and Light…

That much was easier than he’d thought it would be. His arms drew the forces apart until the Virgin Mary stood on his right side and Satan on his left. His love for his mother filled his right hand and his hatred of his father filled his left.

Intermix! Pelori ordered.

This, he realized, was probably how the Antaris ended up without the energy to get haircuts or put on clothes. The weight of two worlds weighed on either of his hands. Once separated, re-integration seemed like a foolish impossibility.

Intermix! Pelori repeated, her essence spinning so swiftly now it was a bright glowing ball.

“Just pull myself together, huh?” he said, gritting his teeth against the increasing pressure generated by the opposing forces that threatened to break him in half.

You can do it. Pelori’s words were strong and calm as the blue ball pulled upwards, stretching the spinning blue circuit through his chest and urging his arms back together. Believe in yourself.

Gratefully supplementing his strength with hers, he took in a deep breath and pulled the energy towards the core of his being, bringing his hands up slowly at first, but quickly gaining momentum. Mother/Father, good/evil, Heaven/Hell, dark/light rushed together in a tremendous thunderclap as he brought his hands together.

Lightning struck. Stark blue-white. Hitting him on the fingertips. Traveling swifter than thought down his arm. Striking pure and hard straight to his heart. The world blazed sliver-blue before fading to featureless black.

“Del?” A cool slender hand shook his shoulder gently. “Del, if you’ll wake up for one minute, I promise to let you go right back to sleep.”

Something cold and slimy was being mopped over his eyes.

“What kinda piss-poor promise is that?” he asked groggily. It took him a minute of pulling to figure out that his arms and hands were once more secured by his sides.

“It’s a doctor promise,” Lian Rendell answered. “Annoying, but therapeutic.”

“What happened?” he asked, his brain too exhausted and sluggish to register her as anything other than a dull glow.

“We’ve had your eyes packed in medicated gel for the past twenty-four hours,” She informed him, running a whirring device near his ear. “Nurse Blake is removing the last of that dressing right now.”

Blake’s gloved fingers glowed green inside his mind as she gently daubed at his eyes.

“I have repaired your eyelids and restored function to them,” Rendell continued to explain, in her cool, efficient manner. “While we were trying to regenerate some tissue, I also interrupted normal saline flow to the eyes so it wouldn’t wash away the medicine. Right now I need you to blink for me about a hundred times to get blood and moisture flowing the way it’s supposed to.”

When Blake’s fingers were finally out of the way, Del opened his eyes expectantly.

The world was no longer black.

Instead it was a dim, murky, heart-breakingly disappointing brown.

“It didn’t work,” he said, crushed to his soul.

“What didn’t work?” Rendell retorted a little indignantly. “Those are some nice looking-eyelids. Wouldn’t you say, Nurse Blake?”

“I’d kill for the lashes alone,” her subordinate replied cheerfully.

“Blink, blink, blink,” Rendell ordered. “Keep blinking.”

Searching himself, Del could find no sign of the blue energy that had been Pelori. He let his non-functioning eyes flutter closed. “What’s the fuckin' use?”

“Well, I didn’t want to get your hopes up unnecessarily, but you seem like a man in desperate need of some good news.”

“What good news?”

“Over the past 12 hours, your chances of full recovery have almost tripled,” Rendell announced proudly. “There is now nearly a sevety-five percent chance the procedure they’ll do at Starbase 14 will be successful.”

“Then it did work,” Del said, amazed. “I did it….”

“Not to put too fine a point on the thing, Mr. DelMonde,” the Haven retorted. “But I think I did it.”

“I thought you said there weren’t not'ing you could do.”

“No.” Rendell carefully swabbed a final bit of gel from his face. “Blink, please. We didn’t talk about your condition in any detail because that would have involve more medical mumbo-jumbo than you could stand, remember?”

“I jus' wanted th' odds,” Del recalled.

“Don’t stop blinking,” she ordered. “The reason the odds were so bad was because there was damage not to your optic nerve but to the chemical receptors in the portion of the brain that processes sight. The damage would be difficult to correct in an average person. It is particularly difficult to treat in you because – as you well know since you are in part responsible for it – your brain chemistry is no longer normal.

“'Cause of the xenoneurophene,” Del said, missing a mass of that substance so badly it made his soul ache.

“And the sapphire and all the types of psychotropic drugs you’ve taken – particularly those originally designed to work on a non-human nervous system. Not good for you, you know….”

“Don’t let the Monolems hear you talkin' like that,” he chided wryly.

“More blinking please,” she prompted. “While you were still unconscious, I started a program of treatment designed to stabilize and rebalance your brain chemistry in hopes of creating a better environment for healing.”

“To get rid of the xenoneurophene,” he posited sadly.

“Can’t get rid of that. Just trying to redistribute it so that instead of working against your body’s natural chemistry it would work with it...”

“To stabilize and focus the flow,” he said, hearing the echo of his words to Pelori.

“…Of biochemical energy to the damaged areas of your brain in way that would re-energize the damaged neural pathways.”

Del cursed himself for the bright and creative fuck he’d turned out to be. All the pieces fit. Pelori had been right. Not that there had really been a Pelori. It had just been a drug-induced hallucination -- His fucked-up overactive brain overcompensating for the stress.

“Four more blinks and you can stop,” Rendell instructed.

He let his weary eyes fall shut and wished for blackness and silence.

“Hmmmm…” He felt the Haven put an hypo to his face.

“I want you to take in a deep breath,” she said.

“What are you doing?” he asked, not really able to care.

“Like I said, during my initial surgery, I paralyzed your tear ducts and interrupted normal saline flow because it would have interfered with the medication I was using to regenerate damaged tissue in your eyes. Natural moisture flow still seems to be a little constricted, so I’m going to have to jumpstart the process a little to get it back on line.” Rendell paused and smiled wryly. “Sorry, Mr. DelMonde, but I’m going to have to make you cry…”

What will grow quickly, that you can't make straight
It's the price you gotta pay
Do yourself a favour and pack you bags
Buy a ticket and get on the train
Buy a ticket and get on the train

Be your black swan, black swan
I'm for spare parts, broken up

“Who’s Douglas MacEntyre?”

It was a day later, the Drake was only a few hours away from Starbase 14. Odds of Del’s recovery had gotten good enough to convince Sulu to cancel his call to Ruth.

The engineer couldn’t be very happy about much of that though. Being happy about anything just seemed like a waste of time. He put most of his energy into figuring out ways to convince Rendell to up his dosage of sedatives.

“Jus' turn that off, cher,” he ordered the nurse wearily. Another damned waste of time…

“You can deactivate with voice command,” Rajana Blake reminded him as she crossed to the computer on the desk at the foot of his bed.

“I lost my sight,” he growled. “Not my fuckin' memory.”

“Poor guy…” Del could see sympathy fill the nurse as she paused by the monitor. “Both his wife and daughter…”

“Turn it off, Blake,” he ordered, his grief putting a hard edge on his voice.

The nurse didn’t move. “Oh, how sweet. He donated to a children’s hospital in both their names.”

“Computer, off!”

“Sorry, Del.” The nurse moved to his side, chastened.

He silently endured her continued presence as she sprayed ointment on his hands and face, then changed the bandages over his eyes. Although Blake was not a Sensitive, he could see her aura bending and reshaping in response to his silent anger. As much as he felt sorry for her, he couldn’t help being furious that she’d caught him being such a damned fool… again.

“It was a beautiful inscription,” the nurse apologized.

Del turned to her out of force of habit. It didn’t make the very interesting thing in her mind any more or less clear than it had been before. “Inscription?”

The computer could read off reams of data, but it didn’t have a real brain, so it was hard to catch it when it skipped over something – something like the words on a picture of a plaque in a children’s hospital far, far away.

Blake nodded. “In Memory of my darling Elora…”

“There was love all around, but I never heard it singing,” Del read from her mind and his aching soul. “No, I never heard it at all, ‘til there was you…”

The nurse smiled. “The computer read it for you?”

The engineer shook his head amazed and humbled. “No, it jus' describe pictures.”

“Then how did you know?”

“Because th' universe is a strange place, my dear,” Del said, putting his hand over the afterglow of warmth in his heart. “And wondrous t'ings happen here.”

The End