Scene 6

            “Jean-Luc, we need to talk.”

            Picard examined for a long moment his red-haired friend and colleague. Her face was pale, her eyes bright, and her mouth set in that way he knew meant she felt strongly about something and wasn’t going to back down from it. “What’s the matter, Beverly?”

            “Jean-Luc, you know you have to let Jarod finish his mission.”

            “Beverly, you know that’s impossible. He is not a Starfleet officer and can’t be allowed to act as if Starfleet vessels are his own private playground.”

            “Playground? Do you call it playing to dedicate your life and risk your safety to save children from slavery?”

            “Do you believe that is what he was really trying to do, Beverly?”

            “Yes!” She took a deep breath and sat down. “Jean-Luc, let me tell you some things about Jarod you don’t know. He’s from the same planet as his friend Angelo. I don’t know what planet or where, and I don’t care. Those two young men were brought up together in precisely the same circumstances as the ones he is now trying to eradicate. They held him like a slave, and they still consider him their property. When he speaks of the children he wants to rescue, he is speaking as one who has been where those children are now, kidnapped and terrified.”

            Picard listened gravely. It was not the face of a doctor or a Starfleet officer across the desk from him but the face of a mother, and that was something not even a starship captain wanted to cross.

            “Beverly, I believe you. I liked the man, and I believed implicitly in what he was doing. From Doctor V’Lan’s mindmeld with Nurse Onatah, it looks like he really was trying to do precisely what he said he was. But the case against him stands. He impersonated a Starfleet officer, forged documents, and engaged a starship in a falsified mission. He used us—”

            “Yes, he used us!” Beverly was standing, leaning on his desk with both hands, and glaring at him as only a red-headed woman and a mother can glare. “He used us to do our work for us! This is a Federation problem, Jean-Luc! Why isn’t the Federation doing something about it? Why does it take an outside problem-solver to do our work for us? This is our work, Jean-Luc. We Federation officers who have sworn to uphold the tenets this Federation stands by. In this case we’ve had some outside help, a stranger whose actions must compel us to action. But we can’t leave him out of it. It’s his case now, as much as it is ours. If we turn him over to Starfleet, we will be committing an act of injustice against those children, against him, and against the Federation.”

            “Beverly—”

            “Jean-Luc—!”

            “Doctor.” Now he was a starship captain again, not a friend and confidant. “I understand you, and I will take what you say into consideration.”

            And Beverly was an officer again, who obeyed her captain. “Yes, Captain. Thank you.”

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Scene 7

            Riker was about to restore the forcefield, but Deanna’s hand forestalled him. “Will, wait.”

            With a sigh, he stood aside. She entered the cell and let him activate the field behind her.

            Jarod sat on the edge of his bunk and watched her, his eyes smouldering and his mouth drawn into a tight line.

            “Jarod, you deceived me.”

            “Yes,” he said. “I did. About everything except what was in my heart.”

            She shook her head. “You used Angelo to confuse me.”

            “No! I didn’t know that was going to happen. I wanted to help Angelo, not hurt you. Deanna, I have never wanted to hurt anyone! I wanted to help them! It’s what I have given my life to.”

            “And you do it by masquerading?”

            “Pretending. It’s the only thing I know how to do. I can’t be me. I don’t know who I am.”

            Deanna stared at him, and her face was stony. “I don’t like being lied to, Jarod.”

            “Deanna!” he cried. “I am not lying to you! Stop putting up walls! Feel me! Feel everything I am feeling and then tell me I’ve been lying to you!”

            It wasn’t every day that someone laid himself bare instead of covering up everything inside. With a sigh, she sat down next to him and began demolishing her shields. It had taken a long time to learn to put them up so that every passing person didn’t invade her, and it wasn’t often she allowed them all to come down. Now she remembered why. Feeling the deepest intensity of another person’s emotions could be crippling.

            “Deanna?” Will said from the doorway. “Are you alright?”

            She put up her shaking hand and nodded wordlessly, sobbing. How could he bear this, day by day? Such loneliness—such need that went unfulfilled and hopes continually dashed. Helpless rage and aching pain, fear of the past, guilt and confusion. And also—compassion as deep as the pain, a thirst for justice, a need to make things right. And love that she could hardly understand—how could he find these things in himself, amidst the pain?

            He could bear it because he fought. His pain gave him purpose. How many other people could say that? The more he hurt, the more he strove to help others who hurt.

            While Deanna cried his tears, Jarod sat with an oddly calm look on his face. A look perhaps of peace. When her sobbing had stilled, he said, “You understand.”

            Still unable to speak, she set her hand over his heart. He curled his hand around it with a smile that, for the moment at least, had no pain in it.

            “You understand.”

            Riker said gently, “Deanna.”

            She got up, withdrew her hand, and left the cell. As she passed the cell of Jarod’s three pursuers, Sydney said, “Counselor.”

            She stopped and looked at them. Broots looked shaken. Even the Klingon woman, the hard, harsh, angry, frightened, hurt, desperate woman, was pale and gentle of eyes. And Sydney—he said, almost in a whisper, “Please help him, Deanna.”

            She looked him in the eyes and nodded.

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Scene 8

            Riker went out and found a chair, brought it up to Jarod’s forcefield, and sat down. “Westmore,” he said, “tell me your story.”

            Jarod looked up at him slowly. Then he got up and came to sit on the floor across the forcefield from him. “In the first place, my name is not Westmore. It’s Jarod. I don’t know the rest.”

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Scene 9

            Picard rose from his desk. “Deanna? Are you alright?”

            “No, Captain, I’m not. Captain, I have to ask you to release Jarod and let him finish what he started.”

            Picard sat down again and stared at her. Had his entire medical division run suddenly mad? “Counselor, what has happened?”

            “I’ve been him, Captain. That’s what he does. He becomes people inside and out and knows them better than they know themselves. But he doesn’t know who he is. Sometimes it seems as though it’ll kill him, but it only makes his determination stronger. He could easily use his talents to his own advantage, sell them to the highest bidder, be more successful than the Ferengi, more learned than the Vulcans. But instead he spends his life finding people who need help and helping them. It’s his passion., what gives him a reason for living. He is the Federation, Captain! Everything we were meant to be. But there’s more. I can’t—I can’t explain in words all he holds inside himself. Except that it’s necessary for him to do this. If you have any compassion at all, you’ll let him do it. If you don’t, you might as well just tell him that the pain and horrors he has gone through don’t matter—to us or to the Federation! And we’re better than that, Captain! We are the kind of people he believes us to be, the exact opposite of the people who have hurt him so deeply. Please, Captain, let’s prove it to him. Let’s not hurt him anymore. Oh, Captain, if you could feel him as I have—”

            “Deanna,” Picard said softly. “You told me in the beginning I could trust him, didn’t you?”

            “Yes, Captain, and it’s more true now than ever.”

            “Counselor, do you know you have stood here and told me exactly what Doctor Crusher told me not half an hour ago?”

            Deanna’s mouth opened, then closed. “No, Captain, I didn’t know.”

            “Well, I’ll tell you what I told her. I have heard you, and I understand your viewpoint. I will make my decision soon.”

            Deanna took a few deep breaths. “Yes, Captain.”

            When she had gone, Picard steepled his fingers and stared over the top of them at his fish tank. Livingstone went round in circles. Two faces, Deanna’s and Beverly’s, floated before him, the same indignant passion lighting them. Then another came into view, a round face crowned with bushy reddish hair, the eyes dull until suddenly alight with something like the same passion. When Picard had gone down to Sickbay to investigate the strange empath Jarod had brought aboard, the man had touched him and spoken to him in his slow, heavy voice.

            “Jean-Luc…is a good captain. Jean-Luc…is a good man. Jean-Luc…does good. Jarod does good. Jean-Luc…help Jarod.”

            A good man, the empath called him, as if seeing him at his core. And what if good required him to go against Starfleet regulations, which required him to turn in a fraud?
            With a sigh he tapped his communicator. “Doctor V’Lan, please come to my ready room. I have another project for you.”