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8: I Left My Heart In San Francisco

Posted on Sun Aug 9th, 2020 @ 4:18pm by Commander Rita Paris
Edited on on Sun Aug 9th, 2020 @ 6:47pm

Mission: The Bulikaya Particle
Location: San Francisco, the Paris family home, Bleeker Streethome
Timeline: 2270

The old Merchant Marine Cemetary Vista Memorial had long ago been appropriated as a Starfleet graveyard, where often markers were placed for bodies that would be drifting as frozen dead voyagers for eons to come. Here, if remains made their way home, they would be interred. For even in 2270, graveyards were for the living to memorialize the dead.

As the flare of the incandescent faded, Rita paris found herself back in San Francisco. Not in the backyard of her father’s home, but facing her own tombstone.

Lt. Rita Paris
2233-2259
Ad Astra Per Aspera

Since she’d appeared here, logically that meant there were material remains here, which likely meant that instead of a warp ghost, she had died here as Sonak would in a few years. A transporter accident that did not turn her to energy and not bring her back, but apparently, this accident brought some of her back. Enough to bury, at any rate, Briefly she considered contacting the local Sonak to warn him, but the only way she could do so was through official channels. If he had personal contact details in this era, she didn’t have them.

Here, she was dead. A nonentity. As he was still on Vulcan, she could just as easily contact Santa Claus.

Reaching out, Rita ran her fingers over the smooth plastic of the headstone, which was porous and designed to catch rainfall and grow moss on the edges, while the surface was smooth. Bowing her head, she sighed. “I’m sorry, Rita. I hope you didn’t suffer.”

Realizing that she would be here for about an hour, Rita began to walk into the city, considering what to do with her time while she was here.


When the doorbell rang, Clifford Paris was surprised. He didn’t expect any couriers, nor deliveries, nor visitors. As he opened the door, the last thing he expected was to find himself face to face with his dead daughter, gone over a decade now. He particularly did not expect her to grab him by the lapels and manhandle him back into the house, slamming the door behind her with a one foot, in a motion she’d practiced for years.

“Long time no see, Commander. I’m the ghost of murdered daughters through sabotage,” she growled, before punching the old man in the face, putting her hip into and giving it a lot more power. While he was struggling and she was not a fighter by nature, in this particular instance, Rita Paris was perhaps not at her best. Bouncing through alternate realities and timelines was damaging her calm, and the encounters themselves were beginning to wear on her. So when the old man began to sputter out a reply, smacking him in the mouth was not exactly the compassionate thing to do.

Right now, Rita Paris was not feeling particularly compassionate.

“Get off me!” Commander Clifford Paris roared, in a voice of command he’d emulated from better men. Which did him absolutely no good, because the crazy woman, while uniformed, was apparently not taking orders from him as she slapped him in the mouth again, much in the manner of an abusive parent.

Much like the many time their roles had been reversed, and Rita had been the one to receive a sharp slap as a rebuke for speaking.

“Does it feel good, Commander?” the angry amazon demanded as she continued slapping the elder Paris, who struggled and fought, but to no avail. The last combat training he’d done was to learn judo at the Academy 40 years ago. His very angry daughter, however, appeared to have brushed up on some more combative techniques in the afterlife, and it appeared that an upbringing consisting of absorbing Clifford's emotional and physical abuse had finally passed the boiling point for the woman. It seemed she had been granted a rare opportunity to act, on what had once only been a dark contemplation in her imagination.

“Did it advance your career, playing the sad father of the dead daughter when nobody knew you orchestrated the accident? Did you ‘use the moment’, Commander?” Again, she slapped him across the face, perhaps with a bit more force than necessary. But revenge tended not to know a gentle hand. “Did you turn the situation to your advantage? Did you manage to shed crocodile tears at my goddamned FUNERAL?”

By this point she had collected his uniform lapels in her hands, and was supporting him, as his legs had sagged beneath him. Looking down, she glowered at him. Looking up with confusion clear on his face, he finally recognized his attacker, and his skin turned ghostly white.

“You.... it can’t be you, you’re dead... the accident...” he muttered in disbelief as the avenging spectre shook him.

“YOU set up the accident, paid the Syndicate boys to make it look that way, when really YOU sabotaged the damn platform. All to convince me to do what YOU wanted, to get me to stay close to home, to pump out babies for you to dote over, as long as they were boys. Instead you killed me, Clifford, you collossal moron!” The hand reared back for another slap, but the dimpling of the chin indicated the waterworks were about to start.

“Hera’s sake, Clifford. I worked so damn hard to be a good officer, to make you proud. But I never could, because I had committed the cardinal sin of being born female. My original sin, for which you would never forgive me. All you ever gave a shit about was the family name, and the tradition.”

“So rather than give me a chance, and actually judge me by my accomplishments instead of my gender, you killed me. How could you, Daddy?” The tears were flowing now, and while she’d had this discussion with her own father before; here, the Rita Paris of this reality would never get that chance. The realization of which filled this Rita Paris with a fury unlike any she had ever known.

“You were always worthless and weak,” Clifford started, but Rita slapped him in the mouth again. As a career bully accustomed to doing his damage with words, if it didn’t involve children to whom he was physically larger and stronger, Clifford Paris was quite unaccustomed to being manhandled like this, and was not taking it well at all.

“Try again. Because I raised Albert after you killed Mom. I put myself through school, I put myself through the Academy despite all your little ‘incentives’ to my classmates to undermine me. So you don’t get to tell me I’m the one who’s worthless and weak, you spineless jellyfish. So try again.” Leaning in close, the brows came down and the angry officer’s eyes narrowed.

“See, Cliff, you might not realize it, but I’m not YOUR Rita. Yeah, I’m still dead here, Father of the Year. I’m actually from another reality, just dropping into this dimension for a few minutes. Know what that means?” Letting the elder Paris go, to fall into a heap on the floor, Rita glowered over him. When she spike, her voice was an angry hiss of menace.

“That means that if I end you tonight, the crime will never be solved, the murderer will never be caught, and the killer will never be brought to justice. Just... like... what... you... did... to... me,” she finished, stepping over to the fireplace to remove a poker from the rack, and heft the iron rod in her hand.

“You’re insane!: Clifford sputtered from the floor, as he crabwalked back away from the spectre of his murdered daughter, returned from a nearby dimension to take her revenge a decade after the fact.

“You know, maybe I am...” Rita grinned, a maniacal gleam in her eye. “Maybe I am insane. Hell, I’ve been through half a dozen dimensions already in the past few hours. But then, that doesn’t make you any less of a cowardly, snivelling, pathetic excuse for a man who murdered his own daughter. Admit it, Clifford Paris! Confess your sin, you murdering bastard. Admit you paid the saboteurs to rig the transporter on the Constitution and that’s what killed me. ADMIT IT!”

“All right! I admit it! Yes, I paid those idiots, but they screwed it up! It was only supposed to short out and scare you, Rita! It wasn’t supposed to kill you!” The old man sobbed, climbing to his knees to plead with the infuriated spirit of vengeance, his crime made flesh and blood and rage. “I never wanted you dead, Rita, I swear...”

The expression of disgust on the woman’s face was pure and contemptuous, as she dropped the fireplace poked on the hardwood flooring with a clang and a clatter. Shaking her head, she sighed. “Why, Daddy? Just answer me this... after all these years, maybe now you can finally answer me. Why was I never good enough? Every turd Albert made was golden, and no matter what I did all you had was contempt for me. Why? What was so wrong with me that you couldn’t love me, father?”

As Clifford Paris began to realize his dead daughter was likely not going to murder him in revenge tonight, he regained a bit of his composure. “Pshaw. I was only hard on you-” he got out, before a finger was swiftly in his face, pointing- another favorite trick of his own, of which he was unaccustomed to being on the receiving end.

“If you try to bullshit me with ‘I was hard on you to make you tougher’ or better or any other adjective, I swear I will spend the rest of the time I have in this reality insuring your babymakers never work again,” Rita pointed down to the man’s crotch, and he swallowed hard. Clifford Paris was a master liar, after all, and he could always sniff one out.

This wasn’t a lie.

She wasn’t bluffing.

He swallowed hard again.

“So don’t con me, Clifford. I’ve known you too long, and trust me, this is NOT the first time we’ve had this conversation,” she said cryptically. But then, your decade dead daughter likely had a few surprises up her sleeve when she burst into your home to attack you. “It’s just the first time I have a shot at getting an actual honest answer, since I am currently responsibility free. That whole ‘perfect crime’ thing. So really Commander.... just once, in your miserable, misbegotten life, tell me the truth.”

It was clear there was a debate raging behind the eyes of Clifford Paris, as he considered the words of the woman who was, and yet, was clearly NOT his daughter, His own daughter had been anxious and neurotic, perenially unsure of herself and a people pleaser. This woman was strident, confident, and while still emotional, clearly she knew exactly what she was doing, and he believed that she did not lack the will to kill him- she was instead wrestling with her conscience, to see if she could live with it.

In the end, Clifford Paris knew his daughter, in this reality or any other. So he knew that, deep down, despite all she may have grown and changed, Rita Paris was no cold-blooded murderess, and she would not commit patricide simply because the opportunity presented itself. She was far too moral for such a course, and in realizing that, he stepped away from his fear, and took a bold step. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough.

“I killed your mother because she was going to leave me, you know?” he began, looking up at those blue eyes he never expected to see again. “She’d had enough and she was going to leave, take you and Albert and head to Stalingrad where her family lived, then probably on to Mars or who knows where. I tried to talk her into just taking you, but she thought I’d ruin Albert, and she planned to take him too. I wouldn’t allow that, so she ‘tripped’ and fell down the stairs, so tragic.”

“Then I had you. You’re right, I made you raise Albert- that’s women’s work. That’s what you were good for, though you never realized it. Now here you are... ten years later, and there’s still a version of you gallivanting around the galaxy. Taking a job a MAN ought to be doing,” Clifford Paris said, his voice dripping with scorn and contempt. “Holding an officer’s position that should be held by a calm, rational man, not some woman who has to figure out how she feels before she makes an order. Women don’t belong in Starfleet- I said it then, I still believe it, and you’re proving it right now.”

“You want to know why I couldn’t stand you, Rita? It’s quite simple. Because you were determined to follow me into the Fleet. Because you wanted to take the post of some deserving man, because you think women are just as good as men. If you had just been content to be a damn girl, then you would have been fine. But no, look at you. Boy’s haircut, fat, lost in the universe... you’re a mess. Can’t even find a man.”

At that, a funny little smile settled onto the face of the Lost Navigator, here in her childhood home, finally hearing the truth from her father. “So all those years, spending time around the boy’s club, learning everything I could... to be like you... was what made you hate me? All that work I did for your approval, just hoping that someday you might see my value... all of that just made you hate me more?”

“Basically,” the elder Paris chortled, as his daughter sighed and shook her head.

“You’re a cockroach, Clifford, and I’m glad I live in a universe where Albert’s grandson is the closest thing I have to a blood relative.” With that said, she pulled a communicator off the back of her uniform, then flipped it open, although it did not chirrup. “So you get all that?” she said into the communicator, and the voice from the other end was choked with emotion.

“Y-yeah... yeah, I heard it... Rita,” came the voice of her brother Albert, who at that moment walked in the front door. His face was pale, and his expression one of ultimate heartbreak. “She had me on mute, but.... the channel was open. I heard everything, Dad. How.... how could you?!?”

In that moment, Rita’s heart went out to her little brother. He was a pig and a moron, and a terrible officer, just like his father. But it was a devastating thing to learn that your father was responsible for the death of your mother AND your sister. Discovering it because your sister who’s been dead for 11 years calls you out of the blue definitely didn’t make it any easier. But at least the truth was out there, now.

It was a truth that even the dense Albert Paris could no longer pretend he hadn’t wondered about, in his darkest thoughts over the past decade. In that moment, he could no longer allow himself the luxury of the preferred reality he had let himself believe, drowning his lingering doubts in drink and the false praise he enjoyed in his unearned career.

It seemed that for his part, Clifford Paris was in shock. As he’d never planed for his only son to ever hear anything he’d just said, even now his mind worked how to turn this situation to his advantage..

“Albert?” Rita asked, and her brother took a long few seconds to look her over, weighing the options in his mind. This could not be his sister- he’d seen the photos of what rematerialized on the transporter pad, and it still gave him nightmares. Hell, it made him squeamish about taking transporters at all. It had taken him a few minutes to shuttle across town to get here, in fact.

It can’t be her. he thought. In the few minutes since she had contacted him, telling him things that ONLY his sister cold have known, he had wrestled with the unbelievable truth. But when he heard her voice in person, and saw those deep blue eyes, he couldn’t pretend to not recognize the girl who had always picked him up off the ground when he fell and scraped a knee. The girl who made sure he studied as a child, was fed and cared for. For all the physical differences between this woman and his memory of the big sister he had eventually learned to resent, just as his father had wanted, he couldn’t help but recognize the unconditional love he felt from her.

In the end, whether this was really his sister or not didn’t matter to him. Hearing his father’s confession had been a bit too much for him, and right now, what he really needed was a hug from his long lost sibling. As he stepped toward her, she opened her arms and embraced him.

“Hey little brother... sorry I can’t stay- it’s complicated. But you know the truth, now. What you do with it is up to you, but your comm call was recorded. It’s inadmissible as evidence, given that it’s coerced. But it’s enough to get a board of inquiry started. It’s enough to get people talking about it. And it’s enough to make sure he never gets the chance to do this to anyone else, ever again.” Stepping back, the eyes of Rita Paris sought those of her brother, whom she had now seen twice in one day- quite the feat for the time traveler who lived 127 years into the future.

“I leave it in your hands, Albert,” Rita said softly, cupping his cheek with her hand. “You decide what happens to him, because this was just a visit... I’m leaving now, and I won’t be back. But... do what’s right, Albert. Don’t be another Clifford- be your own man. Be better, Albert Paris... I love you, little brother.”

With that said, she was simply gone- vanished as if she never was.

As the silence took hold of the room once more, Clifford Paris rubbed his sore jaw where the ghost of daughters past had belted him a few times. Groaning as he tried to get up, he realized his rather angry offspring might have cracked a few ribs in her enthusiasm. Reaching out, he held his hand out to his son.

“Albert, that was a crazy woman, and I don’t want you to believe a word you heard. I was playing along to keep her talking while I tried to get to the security panel. Now help me up- I need to go to Starfleet Medical.”

The expression of contempt that the father received from his son was one that looked oddly familiar to Clifford Paris, as it was one he himself often employed. As the corners of his mouth turned down, Albert Paris’ eyes narrowed.

“What was it you always said?” Albert replied, his voice cracking with emotion. “Oh, right. Get up yourself. Stand on your own two feet. Nobody likes a quitter.” After which, Albert turned on his heel, and marched back out of the house.

He kept marching until he reached the JAG office, in fact. Resolve emboldened with each step, the words of his impossible sister ringing in his memory: “Be better, Albert Paris.

“I’d like to start an inquiry into a wrongful death,” he explained. “I have a confession...”

 

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