A Different Persepctive On Ideals

Although she left him to himself to heal for the first couple of days, Nika checked in on Joshua regularly. It wasn't until he was released from medbay and up and about, albeit slowly, that she made a point of cornering him in the lounge. She handed him one of the two cups of coffee in her hands and lowered herself down on the other end of the couch from him. Sipping from her own cup, she asked simply, "How're you feeling?"

"Physically, the shoulder constantly aches, but it's healing." Joshua moved his left arm slightly to demonstrate his slightly increased range of motion as he took a sip of his coffee with his other hand. "Mentally?" He did a half shrug with his right shoulder. He hadn't realized how much he used his shoulder until he couldn't use it anymore.

Nika nodded slowly, resting her head back along the back edge of the couch and her cup on her leg. Her slacks and blouse were in better shape -- she was wearing some of the new stuff, which she'd washed into softer submission already so that they looked comfortably worn. Looking like you had too much new stuff was a good way to draw attention, along with spending too much money. Which they'd already done. Her braid was still left to hang to its full length, though, looser than she usually pinned it. She was apparently relaxing, though her blue eyes on him were thoughtful and shuttered.

"I'm sorry it didn't come out the way you wanted it to," Nika finally said quietly.

Joshua shook his head. "Cost myself two hundred credits. Cost myself the use of my shoulder for who knows how long. Cost a bunch of people their lives." It sounded clinical when he said it like that, as if he was reading off of his financial ledgers. But it was so much worse than that.

"I stepped in it, Nika. Stepped in it good," he said disparagingly. "I killed those people just as if I had walked up to them and pulled the trigger myself. All because I was trying to be a do-gooding Sa Gwa."

She was silent as he spoke, her expression not giving away surprise at the fact that he was flagellating himself in this fashion. In fact, she let the silence drag out before she spoke again. And when she did, it was probably not what he expected to hear. "You cost yourself 100 credits. The rest will come out of the ship fund this one time. We've used ship funds for bribes before, and we've all stepped in it before. It was for the right reasons, so you won't be losing your entire payout for trying to do the right thing." It was a declaration of a final decision not an invitation to debate the matter, and her tone was matter-of-fact.

It wasn't until her next words that her tone softened at all. "Sometimes decisions made with the best of intentions still go south, Joshua. Sometimes you do what you think is right with the information you have at hand and it turns out to be the wrong thing altogether." Nika spoke from experience. "Up to this point, you have lived in a world where they erased whatever you did, for good or for bad. You never had the chance to learn from those experiences. Normal people have to live with the consequences whether we like 'em or not. The only thing you can do is keep moving forward. Incorporate what you know, use it to assess future situations."

"Rina would say I need to be less of a gorram idealist, live more in the real world...stop trying to be the ship's moral compass." Ideals were supposed to be the bulwark against reality's harsh water. If he constantly pushed it back, before long he'd be drowning. But then again, the unforgiving ocean always wins in the end, doesn't it?

"Then Rina'd be wrong," Nika said calmly. Her blue eyes on him were steady. "One of the things you do best is remind us that the right thing is not always looking out just for ourselves but looking out for other people where we can. We're not a bunch of mercenaries, but it's awful damn easy to fall into that trap. Or conversely to fall into the trap of being constantly in a state of fighting the system." Nika shrugged. "There's middle ground. Sometimes it's hard to see, but it's there. And of all of us, you're probably one of the only ones who can still see it."

Nika smiled a little, more in sympathy than because she was amused. "You made a choice, Joshua. I can't say whether it was right or wrong, but ... the rest of us weighed in and decided that your arguments made sense enough that going in to try was the right thing." She shrugged a little. "It went to monkey feces, yes. But some people might also say that at least we *tried* -- and that maybe they're better off with this result than continuing as they were. Don't know as I'd agree -- alive seems better'n dead any day. But I'll tell you this much.... if I'd been in their shoes, if it'd been me that got shot while you were trying to get me free? I'd be gorram grateful."

"Thanks, Nika. I'm having a hard time separating what I wanted to do with what I actually did." He thought back - why had he grabbed that woman? Why hadn't he just walked away? He hadn't come up with a satisfying answer yet. His best guess was he had been so tied up in the idea of cleaning up after Jackson, making sure that the end result of that borrowing came out right, that he couldn't bear to let go and walk away.

"How do I keep moving forward, Nika? How *do* I learn to live with what I did?" He looked at her, a frown on his face. "Learning from it, yeah, I can do that. But how do I keep it from being all I think about every time I'm alone with myself?"

She was silent for a few minutes, sorting through her thoughts as she sipped the warm coffee. "After I shot that guy in the head rescuing Carter, I spent a lot of time in my own head," Nika said quietly. "Wondering what kind of a monster I was. He wasn't a threat to us. I could have just knocked him out. The option certainly existed. But in the heat of that moment, I retreated into a place where it was me and mine or them. And I was bound and gorram determined it was going to be me and mine."

She paused again, her gaze looking faraway and unfocused. "It took me a long time to realize that you never really let go of your mistakes. You just... try not to make 'em again. And I've swung back and forth on the pendulum of decision-making a lot because of that one. Trying to play it too safe in some instances, not playing it safe enough in others."

"The only real healer is time, though," Nika admitted softly. "Acceptance of what you did, whether it was the right thing for the wrong reasons, the right thing that went south, or even the wrong thing for all the right reasons... you just have to find it in yourself to accept that you're going to make mistakes. Things are not always going to go the way you intended, the way you planned for, or even the way you hoped for. And forgive yourself for not being perfect."

"That's the hard part. The forgiving," he said quietly. He still hadn't really forgiven himself for the things he had done (and didn't know he had done) for Blue Sun and he had some excuse for those. Now he was directly responsible. No excuses, only the finger of blame pointing back at himself. But the first step towards forgiving himself was forgiveness from the ones he had hurt. He needed to apologize to them, at least the ones capable of hearing his apology.

He put his cup down next to him and reached over with his right hand and grabbed Nika's. He wanted human contact for this. "Nika...Captain...I'm sorry for what I did. I'm not sorry for why, but what I did and how I did it were screw-ups of monumental proportions. I'll do my best to never let that happen again."

Nika smiled faintly and held his hand tightly. "I know you will," she told him. "And I don't think you *should* be sorry for why. I think we should *all* be sorry for the how -- we didn't think it through, we didn't plan it, and it went bad-wrong. I'm just as sorry as you are for the consequences, Joshua." She squeezed his hand tightly. "But I also know that you'll learn from it. And maybe next time we opt to go on a rescue run, we'll opt for something a little stealthier than just walkin' right on in, hmm?"

"Next time I'll just walk away if we get to that point." He used his right arm to push off to standing, and then picked up his cup of coffee, his left arm still being mostly useless. He took a long sip of his coffee. He was still tired all the time, but the caffeine would help. He had a job to do, after all.

She eyed him and smiled to herself. Joshua wouldn't ever walk away from someone in need. Whether he might tell himself differently, well.... he'd work through it. "I'm around if you wanna talk," Nika said simply. "Can't promise I'll have the answers, but I've got two good ears, Joshua. Use 'em whenever you need 'em." This was not something he was going to just get over in a day's time.

Go to Joshua's Crew Page or to Nika's Crew Page
Go to CREW or to Timeline Season Four, April 2521 to Dec 2521
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