round 7 Captain Blueheart - Red Revisited

[Blueheart]

((Captain’s Ready Room, USS Atlantis))

::When he looked up through tear-stained eyes, he saw the red coat draped over one arm of a wooden chair in the corner behind his desk. Blinking back rogue tears, he stared at it for the longest time, his mind spiraling back to a time almost long forgotten.. ::

((Flashback – stardate 239109.21))

((Dungeon, Castle of Horrors – DS26))

::By the time the four of them stepped off the last step of the slimy and cold stone spiral staircase that led them below into the bowels of the castle, Raj felt different. A shiver ran down his spine and he hugged himself – at that instant noticing that he had on a thick warm coat. Instinctively, without even pausing to ponder where the coat came from, he reached behind his neck and drew a hood over his frozen face. As he passed a mirror on the wall, just as the others before him had done, he gazed into it and saw, in the reflection, a vulnerable and hesitant man who had a scarlet coat on him, the hood drawn over his head. The coat was long and heavy; its edges skirting the rough wet stones on the floor. Strange. That was the sense that floated into his mind. The face that stared back at him, it was familiar yet unfamiliar. It was himself yet not quite so. His eyes, his mouth, his skin.. they were all the same, but in the reflection, his irises portrayed a hue of fear, his bloodless lips delicately parted with overwhelming uncertainty, his pale skin a white flag of naiveté. A message, an instruction, a warning draped itself over his suggestible mind.::

WALTAS: Trust your heart, Raj. Not orders, not regulations, not others’ opinions and definitely not an enemy you know in your heart is an enemy. Trust in yourself and your family. You’ll never go wrong.

::Raj looked at the others before him, cautiously inspecting the grimy and rank dungeon. They had morphed into fantastical characters. Characters who were awfully familiar to him, at the tip of his memory’s tongue yet just out of reach. He wondered who he himself was. All he saw in the splintered mirror was a reluctant leader plagued with a resurgence of self-doubt. Another shiver ran down his spine and pulled the hood lower over his face. A dark shadow concealed the upper half of his face so only the bridge of his nose, his mouth and his chin were seen. His eyes lurked in the dark. His cheeks appeared contoured and geometric and hollowed out in the spellbinding interplay of moonlight and shadow. He turned away from the reflection, more ashamed than revolted.::

((End flashback))

::He knew.

He finally knew! The red riding-hood. The reluctant hero led astray. But she outwitted the big bad wolf in the end, didn’t she? If they had all been transformed into characters borne of the deep dark recesses of their psyche, then this was who he was, who he IS.

He began to see that everything, catastrophic or sublime, happened for a reason. Nothing was truly random in this universe.

And quite suddenly, Life didn’t seem so terrible after all.::

TBC

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Captain Raj Blueheart

Commanding Officer

USS Atlantis

NCC-74682