Title: Things She Needs to Know
Author: Lori
Series: TNG - Kerzoinky AU
Rating: [PG]
Date: 3/16/00

Summary: Companion/sequel to Decisions of the Heart. Gwaheer is attempting to make sense of the aftermath of his brother's untimely proposal.

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I understand humanity. My brothers view my curiosity about that particular species with tolerant amusement; they say there must have been some genetic glitch that only I inherited from our father. I think having Deanna around has changed their minds somewhat.

Strictly speaking, she's more Betazoid than human, granted. But they're similar in more ways than they're different. Ka'zor in particular seems to have developed a respect for Deanna that's becoming friendship. Amazing. He's always the most skeptical, perhaps because he's older than the rest of us and has seen more of the fickle ways of people in general. I've sometimes accused him of prejudice. He claims it isn't that he disrespects other species, it's more that he reserves judgement longer with them. When a person is of another culture, too many unknowns can create misunderstandings.

Since Deanna has become my kahli I have wondered if that isn't something I should believe even of her, even though I know her so very well.

I would never abandon her because of a misunderstanding. Even if we were not bondmates, even if she were as untalented as Zakhad, if it had come about that she became my kahli in the absence of the bond, I would cherish her as much. I have told her this, and she says that the comparison cannot be made and I have no way of knowing this.

It's tempting to go into lecture mode and explain exactly why I know it's true, but I doubt she would understand it even then. It took Sakhara turning into a hormone-crazed idiot for her to finally comprehend zel and zin, and I still don't believe she completely understands that, either.

She uses words like bisexual and heterosexual. I understand these terms. I may even understand what it means from a human perspective; sometimes I find myself thinking in Standard and using old human idioms while functioning in Ryxi environs. Identifying with humanity for so long has done that to me. Sometimes I think that Deanna would not have chosen me if not for that aberration of my personality. It seems to be the buffer between things Ryxian and things Deanna.

But she thinks of me as bisexual, now. Explanations of why that isn't true don't seem to matter to her; she reassures me that she doesn't love me any less than before. She tells me that 'some of my friends on Betazed are bisexual' -- I recognize that phrasing. Humans use it when trying to reassure and cover over their discomfort with some trait they've discovered in a loved one.

I may have taken a zizen in my youth, but it was not what she thinks. I fear I've misled her somehow to believe that such an act means my sexual preferences are different than she'd originally thought. She takes any attempt I make at explaining the truth as reassurance to ease her discomfort, which it is not, and the very act of denying this seems to make her believe it more.

Jadan was a mistake.

I allowed myself to make it, for the same reason Sakhara allowed himself to approach Deanna -- I was overwhelmed by lust. Jadan was beautiful in those days, graceful as a *goris* and slender and smelling of spice and pleasure. Probably as beautiful as Riker was to Deanna, years ago, when she saw the world through the eyes of trusting youth, believing in the romance and passion and eternal, unbreakable bonds of imzadi.

But Jadan was older, and more experienced than I. He used me, and I allowed him to even after I suspected it. Why we damage ourselves in such ways mystifies me.

It was difficult to like Worf. At times I wonder if that single connection wasn't the most compelling thing about Deanna. She doesn't look upon Will as a mistake, in the same way I do Jadan, but she sees her attempt at lasting happiness with Worf as one. I see her experience with Worf as similar to mine with Jadan, in many ways.

I remember Jadan and see elements of that relationship in Deanna's life, in her affairs with Will, Devonin Ral, and others about whom she has revealed bits of her regret. Some of them could have damaged her career. She, like so many other Betazoids, is ruled by her emotions, but over time she's come to recognize the importance of mind over heart, at least until one is more certain the heart will not be damaged in pursuit of love.

Worf was an unusual case. She counted him as a friend. Giving in to lust with him was easy for her on that basis alone. Trying to love him was the mistake. Love, as she desired it -- love, as her parents experienced, as her grandparents had, as so many of her friends found -- is a very different thing than love as a Klingon would have provided. That he was raised among humans may have helped him mask that from her, but in the end, he is still Klingon. We must respect differences as much as we accept them. Not to do so can be fatal.

It may also be different than what she has from me. The bond helps, but she still does not understand. I don't know if she will. I don't know if that matters.

She looks back over her life too much. I caught her staring out the window yesterday. Her feelings were so mixed that it worried me. She shook herself out of it and smiled, and began to flirt. She knows how to distract me too well.

I cannot allow it to continue. She is denying there is unease, and when she denies, she eventually begins to hurt herself. When she hurts, I hurt. I already feel pain at the thought of it.

Deanna, my love. My heart. You must understand that my past is long gone, that yours helped make you the delightful person you are today. I have spoken as if to someone else, to say the words that will not come when we are in the same room, and the lovely scent of you turns my thoughts to songs of love and beauty. I had given up hope of finding another kahli. I had almost persuaded myself that you would not wish to stay with me, that the passion we felt for each other was not equal.

I confess that when you speak of the lovers you have had, my eyes burn and I cannot breathe -- not because I begrudge them the opportunity to indulge in your softness and sensuousness, but because it reminds me that you have gone from passion to passion, lover to lover, and I fear that I will be inadequate. I fear that today you believe in forever, and tomorrow you will not. I fear becoming one of the lovers of whom you speak in varying degrees of sadness, guilt or pleasure.

I am not Will Riker. I am not Worf. I am not any of the others, who you call 'flings.' I am not really what you call imzadi, though you have at times said that I must be. There are so many things that I am not. I can only hope that you see me for what I am.

More than anything, I am zel -- the unity of parts. The focal point of our family. You and Zakhad are planets to my sun, but without you there would be no life. If there were ten kahli, if there were zin, if there were half a dozen children, it would be thus. There is no superiority implicit in this function I serve. Ryxi do not think in hierarchies -- we spiral, circle, orbit each other, in work and play and family. Linear arrangements do not suit us. We adapt to them, certainly, when it is necessary; it is sometimes best to fly in a straight line, after all, but spirals are our way.

A solar system is a poor metaphor. In truth, zel orbits kahli as much as kahli orbits zel -- remember when we went to Feast of Winds and saw the sky dancing displays? Remember how the dancers ended the presentation with something called the Endless Gyre? It was that constant spiraling motion, with half the dancers ascending and the others descending, that should be the metaphor we use here. The dancers were all so mindful of each other, constantly reorienting themselves in reference to each other.

It's how we live together here, you and I and Zakhad. Zerin has only begun to orbit. Ke'stri will join our dance shortly; her birth cannot be far off. On these days when you are gone to appointments, and Zakhad is off birthing babies and healing the sick, and I am here at home with our son playing predator in the dooryard with dead leaves in the wind as prey, my thoughts are full of you. Working at home guarantees that I will accomplish nearly nothing. I have thrown open all the windows and doors, trying to clear out the scents of my beloved kahli so I can focus.

I continually remind you that terms such as 'husband,' 'wife,' and 'marriage' really don't match Ryxi customs. Using them is a concession to the differences in cultural concepts that still exist between us. But we are in our second year together, as zel and kahli, and you have weathered the paradigm shifts forced upon you by Sakhara's untimely nonsense with such strength and love for your family. In spite of your doubts and your occasional melancholy, which you attribute to pregnancy but is unrelated to that, you are choosing to remain here with us.

I have refused the appellation 'husband,' to this point, when we are among Ryxi at home. I will not correct you on this any longer. You look at me this way, so it is what I will be to you, if that is what brings you joy.

There is one other thing that I am. I am, more than I was in the beginning, utterly infatuated with you. I love you. I would be devastated if I lost you. I hunger for you, I would do anything for the next taste of you, I desire the touch of your skin and the sensation of your body against mine.

Deanna. I want to kill my own brother, for causing this rift between us.

Although I recognize that humans consider it laudable to be open about one's past with one's spouse, if only to avoid complications should an old lover meet the couple by chance one day, I would not have told you about Jadan. It would have served no purpose. I have had over a century of becoming someone else -- I have no desire to take a zin. These things are a matter of individual choice, as I have explained, and my own choice was made long ago. Attractions to any person, male or female, are frequent and transitory -- the attraction is not enough for me. I am like most Ryxi. We mature over the years to recognize that reacting to scent alone, to a moment's passion based only on the physical pull of body to body, is easily denied when one keeps family in the forefront of one's mind. We call it the hierarchy of needs. You know of this, but you do not understand, I think, the fullness of the concept.

Bisexual, heterosexual -- this is a matter of choice. Ryxi do not discriminate based on these things. That I have chosen to be heterosexual does not bother Ka'zor, nor does his arrangement bother me. He and I are brothers and our feelings for one another have not changed appreciably since I became an adult and his friend. That he has zin does not cause me discomfort.

Why have I chosen as I have? Because Jadan cured me of desire for male lovers. You will likely point out that this is similar to the difficulty our Mr. Riker seemed to have with committing to Shehady, the aversion to making that final decision because of prior failed relationships. That may be so. But neither zizen nor zin would get me children, and I have no desire to complicate my life that much simply for the pleasures of the flesh -- I have two wives, and refuse to surrender the pleasures of their bodies to another man. I refuse to subject you to that. You and Zakhad provide me with all that I need. I do not need to have this lack of desire for zizen cured. It is neither aberration nor sickness -- it is but a choice.

Does it really matter so much to you that this body of mine once enjoyed the same sort of pleasures which you receive? In technical terms, it is no longer the same body. All the cells have long since been replaced, many times over. I am, physically and mentally, another person. A saner one in most respects. You asked me once how it is I tolerate Tormal's nonsense so well. Perhaps it is because I was worse. That was why Father entrusted the little tail-kinker to me in the first place -- a subtle form of revenge, I suspect, but also because he knew Tormal would be a problem child. My father knew, within six years, that his final kahli had not given him an easy child to raise. He knew that I had a patience that Ka'zor did not, and that Sakhara was newly married and likely to suffer familial turmoil if he took Tormal. I had been with Rehia and Zakhad for some time, so there was some stability in my family.

But I digress once again into more comfortable topics.

I want to kill Sakhara.

It is only the enormity of my passion for you and Zakhad that engenders this primal response to what my brother has done. In his moment of weakness, of which I would never have suspected he might be capable, he has necessitated the explanations of things that I did not deem necessary to your realm of knowledge at the present time. Not that I was entirely correct in avoiding the subject. I should have explained in detail. I should have given you the knowledge necessary to repel such advances from anyone, including Sakhara. This has been as much my fault as Sakhara's.

I shared a crib with him. That's unusual for Ryxi. Normally, siblings are years apart. My father taking two kahli almost simultaneously accounts for it. Sakhara and I were so close all our lives, and one stupid decision on his part has nearly made a shambles of our families. I thought Roilan would leave him, over this. Her pride took a serious blow when it became obvious that Sakhara's blindness to your innocence in the entire matter was at fault.

It is best that I do not see him. These months apart will heal us, both of us, and give us the chance to repair what has been damaged.

Deanna -- do not turn away from me. Do not leave me. Your private thoughts frighten me. I sense your moods and know nothing you do not tell me.

I fear, in this quiet, quiet house --

I fear the silences that fall between us. I fear the look on your face and Zakhad's sudden realization that she has missed something, that some small communication necessary to the restoration of complete harmony in our home has gone astray, and her trepidation tastes sour on my tongue.

I can only hope this is temporary. Your distraction is like a knife between the ribs. I cannot breathe. You have become as necessary to my survival as the veins and arteries circulating oxygen to my body -- I need your happiness, your passion, your eyes going soft with amusement and love over the dinner table when we would tease one another.

Your joy, Zakhad's joy -- it is the air I breathe, the wind I fly upon. Without you all else means nothing.

And so I want to kill my brother, for he is killing me. For his single, stupid mistake, which created this splinter of doubt invading your regard of me. For the doubt in your face that causes concern in Zakhad's. For the fear invading my days. For the inability on all our parts to discuss it.

Someday I will not want to kill my brother. But not today.

You asked me what I felt, this morning, before you left. The words would not come, not even in song. They have been slow in coming to me now. But they must be said, and you must hear them, even if second-hand, even if while you are listening to this I am flying spirals, trying to purge the anger and frustration in the chilly heights of cloud-ridden reaches of the sky.

You must know that beyond all else, I do love you.

Inadequate words! But they have led me to a song. Deanna, my love. . . teach me to sing happily again.

Your questioning eyes are sad. They seek to know my meaning
as the moon would fathom the sea.
I have bared my life before your eyes from end to end, with
nothing hidden or held back. That is why you know me not.
If it were only a gem, I could break it into a hundred pieces
and string them into a chain to put on your neck.
If it were only a flower, round and small and sweet, I could pluck it
from its stem and set it in your hair.

But it is a heart, my beloved. Where are its shores and its bottom?
You know not the limits of this kingdom, still you are its queen.
If it were only a moment of pleasure it would flower in an easy smile,
and you could see it and read it in a moment.
If it were merely a pain it would melt in limpid tears, reflecting its
inmost secret without a word.
But it is love, my beloved.
Its pleasure and pain are boundless, and endless its wants and wealth.
It is as near to you as your life, but you can never wholly know it

Love, my heart longs day and night for the meeting with you
-- for the meeting that is all-devouring death.
Sweep me away like a storm; take everything I have;
break open my sleep and plunder my dreams. Rob me of my world.
In that devastation, in the utter nakedness of spirit, let us become one in beauty.
Alas for my vain desire! Where is this hope for union except in thee?

Speak to me, my love! Tell me in words what you sang.
The night is dark. The stars are lost in clouds. The
wind is sighing through the leaves.
I will let loose my hair. My blue cloak will cling round me like night. I
will clasp your head to my bosom; and there in the sweet loneliness murmur
on your heart. I will shut my eyes and listen. I will not look in your face.
When your words are ended, we will sit still and silent.

Only the trees will whisper
in the dark.
The night will pale. The day will dawn.

We shall look at each other's eyes and go
on our different paths.
Speak to me, my love!

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Something Else She Should Know