Tuesday, August 29, 2006

The Last Kiss: story for Save Hiatus Fanfic Contest

If you haven't heard about it already, check out the Save Hiatus page that Chris Bridges has created. Loyal Hiatians, unite!

On to the story: this story is set during an interlude during one of everyone's favorite episodes, "But Where Was the Other Shoe?" (near the end of Season 1.) It follows the scene when the beautiful Sergeant Lanya Peters has kissed the geeky but adorable Dr. Langdon Ciafalo after a huge fight, then stormed out on him. We look a little deeper into Dr. Ciafalo's back story than we have before, and learn of why he always has that adorable sad longing in his eyes. In the spirit of fanficishness, I will not be editing once I finish the story. Enjoy!

The Last Kiss

The spaceship Venture made its way across the void, traveling through Warp Space as the colors of the twisted space-time continuum swirled outside the windows.

Dr. Ciafalo stood gazing out at the colors that were nothing and yet everything to him, to his life, as he thought about Sergeant Peters' last words to him before she stormed out.

"That's the last kiss you'll be getting for a while once I tell all the girls on this ship what a kreff you are-- and probably the first you've ever had, now that I think of it!"

Ah, Lanya, how little she understood.

Langdon wasn't pursuing any of the women onboard the Venture. He wasn't pursuing women, period. (And no, he wasn't into Rllrians or anything like that. Get your mind out of the gutter!)

It wasn't his fault that he was handsome in his geeky way and so totally sweet to everyone that women onboard and off fell for him right and left. That's just the way he was. And the reason nothing had ever come of their advances wasn't because he wasn't so inclined, or because he was too sweetly naive to know what they were getting at (as some of them supposed.)

Similarly, he hadn't meant that remark about Lanya's butt in a sexual way. He had just been making an observation! It wasn't his fault she had unresolved issues stemming from her teenage years in a military boarding school on Vontius Prime.

Langdon wasn't interested in a relationship because the love of his life had been kidnapped by Rllrians seven years previously.

"Alas, Sarveh!" he thought with a mournful sigh.

Sarveh had been the beautiful daughter of the largest manufacturer of snack foods on his home planet of Sindur. She was far above his station, but she noticed the up-and-coming scientist's work at the university her father was on the board of, anyway.

They fell in love and, despite her father's hostility, were married just 8 years ago. They moved to an outlying world where they hoped to make a life for themselves, he taking a job at the chemical plant, she working at a nursery school.

Alas, only three days after she cooked him a special dinner and told him that she was pregnant with their first child, he heard the sirens warning of an incoming Rllrian raid. He was told later that Sarveh had acted heroically, hunting for a lost child and tossing him to safety in the arms of one of the other workers just seconds before the Rllrian beams swept through to take prisoners. She didn't make it to the underground shelter in time and they had to close the door without her.

Knowing that his wife died a hero didn't ease the pain of knowing that she had been captured. The ones that were captured suffered torture beyond imagining; the Rllrians fed off of fear and pain, and humans were their favorite dish.

And so Dr. Langdon Ciaflo joined the Intergalactic Star Command, vowing to use his scientific prowess to help rid the galaxy of the Rllrians, not because he was brave, not for glory or for kicks, but for his one love-- Sarveh.

He shook his head again, remembering the sweetness of her lips the last time she kissed him goodbye, as they parted on their separate ways to work. "No, Lanya, that was not my first kiss. But you're right about one thing-- it may well have been my last."

Dr. Langdon Ciaflo moved away from the window and put his cup in the recycler, then headed back to his duties.

The spaceship Venture made its way across the void, traveling through Warp Space as the colors of the twisted space-time continuum swirled outside the windows.

No comments: