Lily Sloan NC-17

A break from TOS and a little about my other favorite captain of the Enterprise.

Disclaimer: Paramount owns the characters. Creative content, plot and original characters belong to me.

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Contact: frokitt@yahoo.com

Lily Sloan NC-17

Summary: Picard needs the kind of vacation that perhaps only Q can give him.

~Chapter 1

Lily Sloan sighed, scrubbed a hand over her face and dragged her fingers through her hair. She’d been growing her hair out over the past year in an effort to look a little younger but its length only served to highlight the thick streak of silver that was coming in on the left side. She glanced at her reflection in the monitor. She sat so long without action, her screen went dark.

She sighed again and tapped the monitor with her stylus. Her screen winked on. A rusted iron butterfly bounced slowly from one edge to the other. She frowned, irritated that she’d let Cochrane load the program. The butterfly looked stiff and heavy and archaic—the way she felt.

It was a dozen years since First Contact, and the Vulcans were slowly insinuating their influence on Terran society. There was still some resistance to their presence but despite that she sometimes thought them pedantic, Lily found their calm soothing and their intense intellect refreshing. The Vulcans had taken as a temporary embassy the battered Palace of Fine Arts and Exploratorium. Lily would sometimes sit on a stone bench by the rotunda and watch them go about their quiet business. They were also quite beautiful. Of the hundred or so that lived at the embassy, she had yet to meet an unattractive Vulcan.

She admired the Vulcans. And she shared their reluctance to move Earth too quickly into warp technology and all that it implied. She and Cochrane had fought about it. As usual, he was the visionary and she the voice of reason. Their last argument was bitter. He accused her of turning the Vulcans against him and she fired back that his alcoholism and his growing xenophobia had done that job for her. She instantly regretted her words and tried to take them back but he refused to speak to her for weeks. It was a good thing in its way. It gave her the perspective she needed. She was weary of defending Cochrane and making excuses for him. He was a genius but he got nowhere without her dogged determination, discipline and practicality. Warp drive was chicken scratchings on a chalkboard when she became his student and would have remained there if Lily had not wrapped it in a warp core. She practically mined the titanium for the Phoenix’s nacelles herself.

She was convinced—admittedly irrationally—that her gray patch of hair was a result of her radiation poisoning from her defense of the Phoenix during the Borg attack. Where was Cochrane then? She didn’t know and he changed the subject when asked the one time.

For the last two nights, he had drunkenly serenaded her from the street in front of her flat. She was tired of him. Perhaps it was time to move on. That Archer kid was brilliant and level-headed. Let him deal with Zefram Cochrane.

She gazed at a dusty wine bottle that sat on a sideboard. It was a 2045 cabernet sauvignon that Soval found on one of his diplomatic missions to Europe. “Picard” was written in small plain calligraphy beneath a simple sketch of a French countryside. The simplicity of the label belied what was expensive before the war, and what was priceless now. Wealth was another thing that Vulcans did not discuss--and certainly not their own. She kept the bottle hidden here in her office at Stanford, away from Cochran.

The new world government was building a space academy at the Presidio and at at Soval’s insistence, was naming a building for her. Everything else was named after Cochrane. Lily didn’t mind. She detested publicity and was content to work behind the scenes as head engineer, building the space fleet.

Lily walked to her sideboard and stroked her fingers across the label of the wine bottle. The dedication of her building was this evening.

“I need to get out of here,” she muttered.


~~Chapter 2

Picard raised his arms and pressed his palms against the warm wall of the shower stall.

He was tired.

More and more he found himself like this after missions, exhausted from the top of his head to the soles of his feet, every muscle, tendon and joint sore, tender, hot. Just a few days of sitting around a conference table during diplomatic negotiations and he sometimes ached this way.

He leaned forward and rested his forehead against the wall. The low hum of the sonic wave generator lulled him. The hair on his body rose and his skin tingled; he fancied that he could see it ripple with tiny waves in time with the cleansing sonic pulse as each hair was stripped of its mites, dirt and oil. His testicles grew warm and heavy and his penis thickened from the ghostly stimulation. He could come this way—intense, shuddering orgasms that left his knees weak.

But he thought that he was too tired for even that.

“Computer. End sonic, begin hydro, 25 degrees, massage pressure, level four,” he said quietly.

Hot streams burst from three holes in the wall in front of him and one from the ceiling. He lowered his head to let the water pound his shoulders. He bent one knee and shifted his hips to avoid the direct contact of a stream to his genitals. The water beat against his flank.

"Computer. 30 degrees," he said.

The water cascaded down his body and he relaxed into the luxury of the heat on his aching bones.

“Old bones”, he muttered, regretting his rejection of an analgesic hypospray.

A hot shower, a bowl of soup and then to bed, he thought. He rolled his shoulders and turned to face away from the wall. The jet at his hip shot a bull’s-eye of steaming, pressurized water right to his anus. Picard let out a yelp and reflexively turned back toward the stream, only to have it unerringly blast the head of his penis.

“Aahh! Computer, hydro off!”

He stood for a moment, eyes closed and jaws clenched, with one hand pressed flat against the center of his buttocks and the other cupping his sex.

“Fuck!” he said through his teeth.

This was not going well. He would have laughed, were it not so painful.

He carefully inspected his foreskin for tears but other than a tender redness, the head of his penis seemed undamaged. He stepped from the shower, dried himself and walked naked into his sleeping area. He removed a pair of gray, loose-fitting pajama pants from a drawer and pulled them on, gingerly maneuvering the elastic waistband over his penis. He strode to the replicator.

“Riker’s Mulligatawny soup, hot, medium-spicy. Tea, earl grey, hot—decaffeinated,” he added with some regret. “Computer, lights 40 percent. Play any Mozart and Berlioz, shuffle. 20% volume.”

Picard took the tray from the replicator and went to his desk to eat. He caught sight of his reflection in the glass of the viewport and stopped. He was scowling; his jaw was clenched, the muscles in his arms bulging. He made a detour and sat at his small dining table instead.

Q taunted him about his inability to just enjoy life’s simplest pleasures, telling him that he lived a life of planned deprivation, almost obsessively isolated and monastic. Picard had to admit that the life was getting to him. This ship and the ones before were his life. That was not good.

“I’m getting too old for this,” he murmured into his bowl of soup.

He’d just returned from a debriefing and ceremony at Starfleet Headquarters. There were speeches and medals and more speeches--and a quiet sidebar from Janeway with a futile plea for him to join the Admiralty. He’d slipped out of the auditorium and took a long walk around the Presidio. He stood in the dark of a tree with his head down for nearly half an hour before breaking regulation and beaming up to the ship from where he stood in front of the Sloan building.

Lily Sloan.

In their brief, intense interaction, they forged a connection that he thought wasn’t just his wishful thinking. They seemed to share a kind telepathic link from almost the first moment they met. He had looked into her huge, frightened eyes and said, “Jean-Luc. My name is Jean-Luc Picard.”

And even before that, she stood, terrified and swaying with radiation sickness, still defiant, protecting the Phoenix with her body and an empty machine gun. Cochrane did the math but Lily built the ship, loved it and risked her life to protect it. She had the brave heart of a true explorer; her intense curiosity even transcended her fear of the Borg. She and Picard were kindred spirits and she flayed him to the bone with her dead-on assessment of his motives. He had others in his history who claimed to give him their honest opinion when he asked, but he often wondered if they held back because he was the Captain. Guinan was probably the most honest with him but she was often too enigmatic in her analysis. And he had to admit that he wasn’t always completely forthcoming with counselor Troi.

Picard was tired of talking. He was tired of this life, this ship and he was tired of being alone.

“Oh, Lily,” he sighed.

“Your wish is my command, Mon Capitan.”

Jean-Luc didn’t blink. He sipped from his tea and swallowed.

“Q,” he said.

“You rang, Baba Sadhu?” said Q. “Finally tired of the self-flagellation, the barren, ascetic--.”

“Shut up.”

“How rude. You called me!”

“I did no such thing.”

“Didn’t you, Jean Luc? You finally make a wish and it is for the impossible? A wish that only I can grant?” Q fell onto the chaise with the back of his wrist pressed against his forehead. “Some foolish, hopeless romance?” He propped himself up on his elbows. “I can bring her to you, you know.”

“Get out, Q.”

Q gazed at him with narrowed eyes. “Or, I can take you to her.”

Picard glanced at him sharply.

“Aha!” said Q, pointing a finger at Picard. “That’s it, isn’t it? You want to go there.”

“No.”

Q clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Nothing like a little time travel to take your mind off things. Better than taking your only pleasure from a sonic shower, eh?”

“I don’t need you for that,” snapped Picard.

“Perhaps not. To be or not to be? That is the question.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Q?”

Q swung his legs over the side of the chaise and stood. “Going back in time would be breaking the rules. And you do need me for that,” he said.


End Chapter 2

girl6
6/09