Title: RASCAL
Author: R.Schultz (cousindream@aol.com)
Series: TNG
Code: Crusher/Ro Laren
Rating: PG-13. Situations might be disturbing.
Spoilers: Set during the "Rascals" episode, Sixth Season TNG.
Disclaimer: The Trekiverse belongs to Paramount/ViaBorgCom. No money is made here. I'm playing with the Trekiverse and I'll be put your characters back good as new. The story is mine by common-law copyright. Written Feb. 2001. Apx. 1700 words long.
Summary: Doctor Crusher has a visit from a young child. And doesn't know how to handle it. Stardate 93626.8.
Warning: Love and sex between (fictional) adult consenting women is mentioned, though not graphically. Some other possibilities are suggested. If womyn to womyn love fails to heat your coffee, why don't you go elsewhere?
Posted to round II of the Femme_Fuh-q_Fest, later to the ASCEM.
May archive, but please notify.
Comments to: cousindream@aol.com
by R.Schultz
[[[Forward: At the beginning of the "Rascals" episode, set in the sixth season of TNG, four passengers returning to the ENTERPRISE on a shuttle encounter ... trouble. The shuttle disintegrates, but the passengers are transported safely aboard before that occurs.
There is one small problem. Instead of saving four adults, they saved four children. Captain Picard, Keiko O'Brien, Guinan and Ro Laren are dressed as before the shuttle accident. Their minds are intact, with all the foibles and prejudices and strengths they had before. But physically they are now children. During discussions about the resultant transporter malfunction the Bridge officers use the term "twelve-year-old's". It is plainly visible, however, that each person so changed is older or younger than twelve.
Captain Picard looks thirteen, Keiko looks eleven or twelve, Guinan eleven, and Ro Laren maybe ten to eleven. In the episode a solution is eventually discovered. At the beginning of the story, however, adjustments must be made regarding the newly made-young. ]]]
---Stardate 93626.8: Chief Medical Officer's Personal Log-----
I was sitting in the office, doing my split-personality trick again. Trying to find some clue as to what happened in the Transporter THIS time. It's no wonder Barclay is scared spitless by them. Things happen when you're disassembled down to molecules and free particles, and then re-assembled. Not all of them pleasant or expected.
Jean-Luc and the others were expecting another triple-damned miracle from me. Some nice handy improbable miraculous solution that would return the inhabitants of that unfortunate shuttle to us as adults. The ENTERPRISE demanded nothing short of perfection from me.
Do I look like a goddamned Q?
Just give the disaster to good ol' Doctor Beverly. She'll kiss it and make all the pain go away.
The other part of me was wringing it's hands and trying not to face a number of disliked personal futures.
Without even looking up, I knew who had entered my office. Even now she smelled of her wildflowers scent, her Terran "Movilla" perfume. And I knew her hair would carry a linger of Lilly. It had always amazed me that this most masculine, bitchy, butchy -- and brittle -- of women should feel a need to carry about herself an aroma of soft feminine glades.
I stopped thinking about my databases, my displays of riboflavin's and peptides. Willing myself to raise my head and look my lover in her eyes. I couldn't. I couldn't. I couldn't.
She walked to me with all the confidence of a goat approaching a large and hungry predator. Her small perfect child's hand touched me on my sleeve and my soul chilled to one-Kelvin. I had to stare at that small hand. A child's hand. My lover's hand. My guts wanting to vomit, my heart deadly unmoving.
I could say nothing, I could do nothing, the universe had dwindled to the two of us. My lover and me. The flames of hell licked the walls about me as I saw that tender little hand rub my sleeve, asking things of me merely by being there.
"I love you."
It was all she said. Or needed to say.
Suddenly she was in my arms, her child's arms trying to reach around me. I had lifted her to me, holding her tight to me, somehow shedding no tears. It hurt too much, the pain was too great. Then her fragile arms were pushing against my chest, and I let her lean back in my arms.
She told me once more that she loved me. At the very least I knew she needed me at this moment.
She leaned forward to kiss me, this child. This small female of some twenty-five kilos weight and less than half a meter of height. My lover of some months.
My Ro Laren over-topped me, my Ro Laren chuckled in my ear when we began a night's dance of sex. My Ro Laren groaned and bit her lips hard enough to bring blood when she gave her body to my loving mouth. My Ro Laren had breasts that grew hard knots of nipple twice the size of my Comm badge when we played our games of lust. My Ro Laren.
I looked down at her. The black hair I adored. The nose ridges and her brow's V of hardness that she loved for me to lick. Even the slight hesitancy, the small uncertainties she dared to show me in our private moments.
This smaller Laren worked herself to me, her small tongue touching the line of cheek, finding my lips. Kissing me. Her tiny hands finding the lines and hollows of my throat and neck. Her kisses following suit. Her shivering making my heart race, for I knew that shivering from our many meetings of flesh and love.
Her child's hands found my nipples through my bra, her tongue found the hollow of my throat. I spiked and moaned and knew I was probably already primed for sex, if not a romantic hour. I groaned again as her head dipped to take a nipple in her soft mouth. Ignoring the impediments of jacket and bra. My hands traced the planes of her back, the flows of her bones.
The small rounds of her hard child's ass.
"NO! No! No! no nonononono...."
At least I did not throw her from me. She was a child, she was my lover, I went white just at the thought of hurting her.
She was a child.
I could not hold her, I could not love her. Not in that way, at least.
It broke my heart to see her eyes accusing me. Not saying to me in words but accusing. Asking why, if I loved her, I could not accept her as she was.
Not an hour ago she had been naked on one of the BioBeds out in the SickBay. Not an hour ago I had looked down at a child of maybe eleven years, maybe ten, maybe who knows?
Her flawless chest bore two dark spots without breasts or nipples. Not a trace of body hair, not a trace of mature physiology. A child, and not a very big one at that.
Ro Laren, yes, but still a child.
"I'm still Ro Laren," she accused. "Inside me, inside my head, I'm still me. Only me. I still love you. Doesn't any of that count?"
It counted, and with a sorrowful moan I held her close to me again. I let her kiss me, but I could not respond. I felt her touch as she caressed me, ran her fingers through my hair, kissed my ear, my cheek. I had no doubt but that if we were naked together, her caresses would find me. Love me. Even eventually arouse me.
I could not caress her back. I could only hug and hold and croon vague sounds in her ear. She was in an agony and I could not respond to her. Not to a child. Not in that way.
"Darling, my sweet dear," Laren began, "I am still in love with you. I am no virgin, your examination proved that. We could still be lovers ... if you're willing to accept me as I am. Don't you still want me in your bed?
"DAMMIT, I AM STILL RO LAREN!!!" Then a whisper against my ear. "please....."
Ro Laren was my lover, but I could not allow myself to be convinced that this ... My Laren was taller than I, stronger than I, built of curves and hollows and pleasures and softness and heat. Not this Laren.
She knew my confusion and pain, even with her own. She leaned back, one hand continuing to caress my mouth. I could not use the word "Love" to a child, not that sort of love at any rate. Laren knew I could not give her promises or lust. Not even the caresses she needed whenever we were together. Last week her touchings were a scandal to some eyes on this ship. Last week her kisses, her rubbings of her body against mine, they brought fire to my belly.
This wasn't her, and I couldn't convince myself it was.
She almost twisted away from me, anger and hurt in her guts. I held on, and she looked up at me again.
I finally kissed her. As one lover to another. Soft. Hard. Tongues touching. It was all I could give. That and the holding and rubbings of her back which any adult might give a child.
Later, she sighed and lowered herself from my grasp. later she stood before me, willing me to give her one more last passionate kiss. Again she said that she loved me.
Even with my eyes closed, I could feel it was a child's lips I kissed. But at least I could give Laren something.
I stared at the space where she had been, realizing that this time we had parted without words of love or promises on our lips. She had gone and I had never said to her that I loved her.
She was alone when she came to the ENTERPRISE and she knew she was alone again.
I had failed her, and the cancer in my stomach told me things would never be the same between us. Never again.
She would --- hopefully -- be restored to her proper age. Maybe in an hour or a day's time. But I dared tell myself that I might have now lost her. I felt so empty inside, so cold. So vicious, so uncaring to the one who needed me most of all.
I returned to my extrapolations and my theories, but it was a way of shouldering aside my personal failure. The ENTERPRISE will hopefully recover all four. Unfortunately, a tiny shrill voice in my head was already castigating me for my foolishness. Saying we could have even lived as lovers. Yelling that I had driven away a child. Or the one being who could keep my bed warm with sex and love.
I listened to it and did not ignore it. I had other things to do, but I listened carefully to my inner voice as it reminded me of what evil I had done to my love.
It would remind me for many years, I knew. Many.
END