sixthiterationlogs | Reason says I should have died three years ago...

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Reason says I should have died three years ago... | OTA

WHO: Sam Moon
WHERE: The Inn's kitchen
WHEN: January 8 (Sam's birthday)
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: Language, rumination on violence and death

When you didn't get older, birthdays kind of felt like a joke. At least, that had always been Sam's feeling on the matter. She wasn't really sure where she stood right now, considering the situation. But all she really wanted was to spend the entirety of her birthday in a blanket fort, watching all three of the original Space Wars movies on her iPad. Unfortunately, as so often seemed to be the case, the fates were conspiring against her. Actually, she had pretty much come to the conclusion that it was somehow her own fucking fault she'd been abducted and tossed into this Skinner Box, but Sam had a habit of passing off blame when she could. So it was obviously the fucking fates.

And Karen, of course. She loved blaming Karen for things. And visions of the night they met--her "other birthday," as Karen euphemistically called it--kept going through her head.

She rolled onto her back. The slight motion made her feel unreasonably sick. She narrowed her eyes, trying to make sense of the whirling colors above her, but she couldn't focus. It was like the whole world had been smudged with Vaseline. And something wet was starting to seep into her hair and the cotton of her tee shirt. Sam tried to lift a hand to touch her forehead, but she couldn't.

More sounds rang out above her, like a symphony of violence. But a face suddenly filled her vision, coming into sharp focus. It was the woman who she'd briefly made eye contact with, the one with the short hair. "Samantha?" Her voice echoed. "Samantha, can you hear me?"

"What's going on?" Sam mumbled, not entirely sure she'd actually spoken out loud.

"An excuse to air past grudges," the woman said. She brisky swept Sam's wig off of her head, freezing momentarily at the sight of her red hair beneath. Whatever surprised her, she shook it off quickly, probing at the damage to her forehead. Sam let out a yelp of pain as blackness flashed across her eyes. "Your cranium has been shattered," the woman said. "You're going to bleed into your brain."

To banish the thoughts--really, all of her thoughts, Sam wandered into the kitchen. In the last few weeks she'd become increasingly obsessed with trying to figure out how to build a still. They had potatoes after all. Potato vodka couldn't be that hard. Applied chemistry wasn't her area of expertise, but she figured the challenge would only help keep her mind off of...things.

So her birthday would be spent in the kitchen. Quietly humming It's My Party by Leslie Gore under her breath, she experimented with whatever glasses, tubes, and burners she could rig up. In between each attempt, she would pause to write up a full debrief in the little notebook Jude had given her. Occasionally, birthday cakes and balloons would sneak into the margins of her notes.

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"It was a big deal, back in the day," she said. Her junior high music teacher had had a weird thing for the 1960s. And because Sam was Sam, she'd retained a surprising amount of the trivia. "People were so sad about how it ended that they wrote letter after letter to Leslie Gore until she finally wrote a second song to undo it. Which was neither catchy nor all that memorable."

Even Sam didn't know it. Other than something about 'Judy's turn to cry.'

But that may have been the title.

Given that he's spent a not insignificant amount of familiarizing himself with the works of Shakespeare, he can't really blame Sam for having retained the particular details of this bit of trivia. Or any trivia, to be perfectly honest. It might not be anything that he would have expected, perhaps, but there's hardly any harm in it either - and he can't deny that it is interesting besides. Especially given that he hasn't spent a lot of time looking into the finer details of that particular era of music.

"I'm not surprised. Especially if the ending it was undoing was a more bittersweet one."

To say nothing of the fact that he can't imagine that a song someone wrote simply to appease the people who wanted to have the ending of the previous song undone would have had quite the same emotional depth as the first, even if all the people involved in the song's creation had put in as much effort as they could without it seeming over the top.

"Well, life doesn't work that way."

It was a bit of a downer thing to say on her birthday, but that didn't make it any less true. The more distressing part of it all was how much Sam was letting her bitterness get to her.

And Claudette wasn't even here to be the cause of her misery. She had only herself--her horrible, useless, wasted self--to blame.

She cleared her throat, gesturing to the bowl at the end of the table. There was a murky, clear-ish liquid dripping into it. About a pint so far. "You're welcome to sample the product if you like," she said. "But I should warn you that the last batch was pretty much good for nothing except cleaning the tarnish off of silverware..."

"It doesn't," he agrees, with a somber nod of his own. "I can't blame people for wishing that it did, sometimes, but even in the best of times there are always things that people regret. Things that people wish could be undone and can't. And those losses, those regrets, stick with you, regardless of how long it's been."

Even he has things he regrets. True, he does his best to not dwell on them in the course of his daily life (which is, admittedly, helped by the fact that his daily life is so busy), but that doesn't mean that those losses and regrets are still with him years after they've happened. That whatever failures - or presumed failures - should still be haunting Sam doesn't strike him as the least bit surprising. Nor is it anything that he's going to suggest shouldn't be the case.

"I'm afraid I wouldn't be the best judge of success, if that's what you were looking for? My experience in such things is primarily with the creation of wine, as opposed other sorts of alcohol."

Plus he'd been more interested in the process itself rather than the actual results.

"And even that is something that could be useful? I doubt the Observers would be particularly inclined to replace the silverware in the Inn simply because it had gotten a little tarnished."

Sure, it might not be what Sam had been going for. But that doesn't mean that it might not still be useful.

She honestly couldn't decide if Baldy was making a joke or not. Old people were so hard to read. And in her experience, either they a deeply hidden sense of humor, or no sense of humor at all. The corner of her lips turned up just a little bit. But she decided not to press the issue.

Anyway, after a moment's thought, she snapped her fingers and pointed at him. "Picard. That is a wine. I thought there was something kind of familiar about your name. Your family must go back a ways."

They had to. If the booze existed in her time.

He's not entirely without a sense of humor, at least. True, it tends to be relatively hidden at the best of times, but it is there all the same. Still, he's hardly about to bring it up. It's neither the time nor the place, and besides, Sam has brought up a more immediately relevant topic.

"Quite a ways, yes. I could recite the finer details if you were interested, but there's... quite a great deal. Still, the vineyards and their products are the primary business of the family."

And never mind the fact that he's decided to travel the stars instead.

"Cool," she said.

That was genuinely high praise, coming from Sam.

The thing was, she always had a mild fascination with things like family businesses and legacies. Probably because most of her life she hadn't had one. No background. No history. No roots.

Of course, now she had all those things and hated them. But that was a different story.

"So, do you like have vineyards on Mars or anything?"

"The family vineyards are in France. As are a number of the rest of Earth's vineyards - it can be hard to find other planets that are well-suited to the optimal growing conditions for Terran plants."

And in general, the Federation doesn't much go in for terraforming. It's not entirely unknown, perhaps. But it's still generally considered to be better to leave other planets as they are, especially when there's indigenous life present. But he figures that's a point that he can address later, if it should happen to come up.

"However, there are other cultures - other species - that make wine. It's just not necessarily made from grapes. Klingon bloodwine is likely the most well-known, although there are others as well."

"Bloodwine?" she repeated, making no attempt whatsoever to hide her dueling disgust and fascination. "Please tell me that isn't made from what I think it's made from."

She was fairly sure there was no way to ferment blood. If there were, some Kindred would have figured it out hundreds--if not thousands--of years ago.

Then again, she supposed, alien blood might have different proteins in it.

Her scientific curiosity bubbled up like water in a fountain.

"I'm afraid I can't say whether it is or not. The Klingons are the only ones who know for certain, and they aren't inclined to share. But I can tell you that it's a good deal more potent than most Earth-based alcohols, if that helps any?"

Which doesn't say anything particularly conclusive about its composition, unfortunately. But it's an interesting point all the same, even if the only way to tell for certain whether or not it happens to be made of blood would be to hope that the Observers would happen to be kind enough to send some. And then that the limited equipment they do have would be enough to say for certain one way or another.

Which, to be perfectly honest, he rather doubts. But it's not entirely impossible, at the very least.

Sam shook her head. "Probably for the best if I don't know." She was reasonably sure she wasn't about to go mad scientist like her parents. But if it ever were to happen, the last thing she needed to know was about fermenting wine.

No good could come of that.

Of course, that was assuming that she'd ever make it home. Or return to being Kindred again. And she had a feeling she couldn't really do one without the other.

Something to tuck away into a dark corner of her brain and try not to think--or feel--about too much.

Sam's comment prompts a raised eyebrow from Picard, but he doesn't ask for any further details. There's no denying that it does speak to some sort of story, but he's hardly owed any specific insight into her past. Even if not asking does close off that particular line of conversation.

"It's likely a moot point anyway. So far the Observers don't seem to be terribly inclined to bring in anyone who would know, much less someone who might be willing to explain."

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Reason says I should have died three years ago... | OTA

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