The Opposite of Want

Rachel

I'm a canon girl. Since I don't know what Season 3 has in store, I'll end this here. I'm not going to speculate on what might happen, although I may write some episode tags based on previous episodes.

One thing that has not been established in the series is who Michael is, exactly. I'm not going to assume that he's Rachel's boyfriend, although it certainly appears that's what he is. Who knows? He might be Rachel's brother. For the purposes of my "Last Ship" universe, I'm leaving that story a little open-ended.

But here's Rachel's side of this particular story. You asked for it. . .

She'd never done well with people.

Not that there weren't a great many people for whom she had a tremendous amount of respect and admiration - Dr. Hunter, for example, and Dr. Tophet. Many other professors and scientists she'd worked with over the years filled places in her head and, if she really considered it, her heart. She could recite names, degrees, positions, and the advances they'd made that were greatly beneficial in her own work, and therefore in her life. Their losses stung, still. Even after Quincy's betrayal, she missed him.

Admittedly, however, people in general confounded her. Their propensities, their proclivities, their worries and their needs. Their obsessions with the small, and the inane. She'd tried watching a popular television show once recommended by one of her lab assistants - something about famous people dancing in a contest. She hadn't recognized a single name, and although the art of the dance itself had been admirable, she'd lost interest before the first commercial break. She simply couldn't see the appeal in something so mindless.

Long, long ago, a shrink had informed her that she had an issue with forming meaningful relationships. She'd silently glared at the psychiatrist from her customary spot on his sofa.

"Do you have any close friends?"

"My colleagues and I are very close."

"Not colleagues. I'm talking friends. People with whom you spend time outside of work."

Rachel had smiled, sardonically, she knew. Condescendingly. "You're assuming that I do things other than work."

"And that's part of your problem."

Rachel had leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "How is that a problem? My work is essential to the world. What I do saves lives."

"But, in the end, what's it good for?" The doctor had settled back further into his reproduction Queen Anne chair. "When you won't have anyone to share your own life with once all the other lives have been saved?"

She'd had no answer for that, and she hadn't returned for her next appointment, nor the one after that. And then Ebola had been reported in the Congo and she'd packed up and left all of those ridiculous questions behind.

It was the disease that she was fascinated with - the people harboring the disease had always been secondary. Rachel couldn't explain it in any other way. Curing the disease, figuring the symptoms, ridding the world of another deadly pathogen had been her fulfillment.

Helping the people? Well, she'd already established that there had been problems there. People failed her. People left. People betrayed. People died.

People turned into ghosts, and ghosts became her demons.

And she was bloody tired of demons.

She shifted against the wall of the ballroom. They'd settled on-shore in a hotel near the St. Louis Arch. They'd all been surprised when one of the people in the crowd asking for a curative dose had turned out to be a Federal judge. The President's swearing-in had seemed gratuitous and superfluous, but it had been the right thing to do. Even Rachel could see the burgeoning enthusiasm that the attendees had found at the prospect of moving forward.

Honestly, she'd wanted to skip the ball. The Judge's daughter had insisted, however. Rachel had returned from scouting possible lab locations in the city to find the dress hanging from her doorknob, along with a small bag containing styling products and a pair of coordinating shoes. It would have seemed churlish not to acquiesce. Still. She had felt out of place in the crowd, and so had taken herself out of it.

"Tired of dancing?"

Rachel allowed a quiet smile as she turned to greet Tex. He'd cleaned up for the occasion, trimmed his beard, combed his unruly hair back behind his ears. He'd even drummed up a suit from somewhere. In a casual way, he was a handsome man - made more so by his boundless bravado and easy smile. She wished that she could be attracted to him in the way he'd wanted. It would have been simple to have fallen for him.

If not for him.

"I haven't danced, actually." Rachel reached up and pushed her hair behind her ear. "I'm not really much for this sort of thing."

"Now, that, I can believe." Tex leaned against the wall next to her, on one shoulder, his body turned towards her. "Although, if I'm allowed to say so, it's a damned shame."

She let her expression ask the question for her.

"You need to let loose a little, Doctor Scott." His beard twitched as he grinned. "And since you're the most beautiful woman here, you're depriving the party of its greatest decoration."

"Is that how you see me, Tex?" She looked down at the sandals on her feet. They were a little large, but better than her boots. "As nothing more than a bauble? As a streamer, or a disco ball?"

He shook his head slowly, his grin fading a little. "You know I don't, Rachel."

"Tex - I - "

"I'm going to stick close to Kathleen." He nodded towards the crowd, where his girl was doing an awkward, laughing two-step with Miller. "She needs me now. Wants me around for the first time in ages."

"You're her father. She's a lucky girl."

"She seems happy now." Tex smiled, watching his girl. "She'll be fine."

"She will. You'll keep her safe."

"Kinda wish I'd found her sooner. Before the business with her mom." He straightened, then turned, shoving his hands down into his pockets. "Girl that age needs a mother."

Suddenly uncomfortable, Rachel closed her eyes, pressing her lips together. After that moment in the hallway at Avocet, she'd actually considered it - had felt in his kiss how he'd wanted things to be - had briefly wondered if she could feel the same way.

But another kiss had been in the way. More desperate, more potent - just more. Given in the heat of the moment, bloody and dirty and raw, on that damned Russian ship. Despite the danger and the uncertainty and the fear that had lain like a brick in her gut, she'd found her traitorous body responding to his touch, his taste. The power he constrained. Even handcuffed and wounded, he'd seemed invincible.

She'd never felt that before. Never been certain that she'd be willing to die for someone else. Not even with Michael.

Especially not with Michael. Who hadn't valued her enough to try to live.

"I'm sorry, Tex." Her words emerged in a near-whisper. She looked up at him, catching his perceptive gaze. "I'm so sorry. But I think that you know what I mean when I say that you deserve more."

"Ah, now, Doctor Scott." He shook his head, rocking backwards on his heels. "You and I both know that it doesn't get much 'more' than you."

"You're so sweet, Tex. I appreciate you more than I can say. She touched his arm. I don't know how I could have done any of this without you."

He regarded her for a moment. "So, you're leaving, then?"

"I'm needed to establish labs and teach protocols in some other locations. Deal with some isolated outbreaks." She inhaled deeply. "To do my job."

His easy smile faded a bit, his look turning speculative. "Remember down South? When the Captain went after the sub and sent us on shore?"

Knowing where he was taking the conversation, she simply nodded.

"Don't leave things unsaid again."

She looked down at her own hands, clasped at her waist. "He's not ready to hear them."

"He will be." Those sharp blue eyes narrowed, and he turned towards her, grasping her shoulders. "He's grieving, still. It's a confusing process, and he's not a simple guy."

"No, no he's not."

"Anyhow." He smiled again, his hands dropping a little, chafing at the lace on her upper arms. "Keep in touch, and all that."

She couldn't help it. Stepping closer, she leaned up, smoothing her palm against his beard and pressing a chaste kiss to his mouth. Drawing back, she smiled at him, a little sadly. "I'll miss you, my friend."

He blinked a few times, grinning as he nodded towards the dance floor, where Kathleen had transitioned into a line dance of sorts between Bertrise and a younger sailor. "I've got a dance to cut in on."

Rachel watched him go, smiling as he offered a gallant arm to his daughter. A tiny stab pricked her soul, as she remembered her own father, for whom dancing was a threat, a wife's life was a trial of faith, and the thought of traipsing the length of a continent to find his daughter would have been more of a burden than a mission. Reverend Scott, in fact, hadn't even looked for her when Rachel had escaped to Maputo and from there made her way to America. She hadn't seen him since the day she'd left him, and still didn't know exactly when he'd died.

People. Ghosts. Demons.

The crowd on the dance floor writhed like a school of fish, a beautiful chaos of color and darkness, young and old, the cured and the newly-made safe. Rachel watched them without really seeing them, surprised when the music stopped and the crowd suddenly dispersed to reveal him sitting across the room from her. Watching her.

She'd never been afraid of Captain Chandler. Not in the beginning, when he'd threatened to throw her samples overboard in the wake of the Russian attack. Not when he'd returned, bloody and blood-thirsty, from the monkey hunt in Nicaragua. Not even when he'd confronted her about Niels, his morality battling with her skewed sense of justice. He was a study in self-control, a man whose currents ran deeper than the oceans he sailed. She'd prodded and poked and threatened. Demanded, provoked, and denied. He'd risen to her baiting once - maybe twice - shouted at her, disapproved of her, denied her.

Still, she'd never been afraid of him.

She'd been exhilarated by him. In turns been fascinated, enraged, challenged, and soothed. Thrilled, encouraged, hell - even stimulated. Reassured. Enthralled.

Made safe.

That realization was new. Rachel was accustomed to fighting and confrontation. Her entire life, since escaping the wilds of Mozambique and arriving in Maputo, had been clawing her way towards her goals, forging paths for herself rather than expecting them to be opened for her. She'd never once been taken care of by someone else. At least, not until she'd stepped onto the Nathan James and found herself under his watchful eyes.

The same eyes that had just captured hers from across the ballroom. Ice blue and intense. Too intelligent by half. A gaze which managed to unnerve her even as it threatened to set her soul on fire.

He sat apart from the rest of the crowd, his back towards a corner, one elbow leaning casually on the table next to him. Slowly, his fingers slid along the smart edge of his hat's brim, back and forth, as if he were caressing a lover's skin. He was watching her - not being particularly secretive about it, either. And damned if his mouth weren't tilting upwards slightly, as if he were enjoying the view.

And damned if she didn't shiver in response. That mouth - that look, those fingers, with their controlled strokes, all of it reminded her of when she'd felt those lips against hers, his body hot and powerful beneath her palms. Rachel felt her body rise in response, an ache forming deep within her core. Regardless of what that idiot shrink had said so many years before, she could form attachments with people. She obviously just hadn't met the right ones before now.

She broke eye contact before she could betray more than she wanted, before she could humiliate herself. Because, in all honesty, it wasn't just the Captain that she was going to miss, it was the family he'd forged from the rough amalgam of his crew. She'd known men with resounding charisma, men who could hold a crowd in the palm of their hands and convince them all of their divinity. Men of charm and style and smooth manners with whom she'd stolen a night, or a week, or a year. Yet, she'd never known a man like this. A man who led by example and by the sheer force of his spirit. True to his word, his strength begotten because he was so sure of his mission, because he knew with absolute certainty who and why he was. A man for whom his sailors would walk through Hell merely because they believed that he'd go there, too.

She'd never been afraid of him. But she'd been terrified for him. Rachel wasn't conceited enough to believe that she could have found and concocted the cure without Tom Chandler standing near, quietly protecting her. He was a weapon, pure and simple. Lethal and beautiful and not to be handled indiscriminately.

And she wanted him. Wanted to know what it would feel like to be free of the conflict that raged between them and surrender to the currents that surged beneath. She ached to know the feeling of his hands against her, to know if it would be as powerful as that moment after she'd found the cure, when he'd gathered her close and practically inhaled her into himself, his face nestled in the crook of her neck, his breath hot against her throat.

Wrenching herself back to the present, Rachel chanced a look up at him, surprised, yet oddly gratified, that he was still watching her. Broad shoulders relaxed against the back of his chair, long legs crossed casually, those fingers still moving along that brim. Above the starched edge of his Service dress collar, she could see his pulse thrum steadily in his throat. She'd never wanted anything in her life more than to press her mouth to that steady beat, to see if she could drink it in.

Nonsensical fancy, she knew. Because even if he desired her, he didn't want to desire her. And even if he stood right now, crossed the room, took her hand, and led her to his bed, another woman would lie between them, holding his heart.

People into ghosts. Ghosts into demons.

"Damn." Rachel breathed the word, forcing herself to look away. Suddenly, she felt stupid, and ostentatious, and overblown in this damned dress and these damned shoes with her hair in its damned curls. She wanted to flee - to run back to her room and scrub her face clean, climb into Michael's old t-shirt and burrow beneath the covers and forget that tomorrow all of this would be gone. She'd be leaving St. Louis and he'd be staying, and she wouldn't have him watching out for her anymore.

And then she damned herself for a fool for craving him. For wanting this problematic, formidable, conflicted man at her side when shed never needed anyone at all.

Sounds blared through the halls and walls from the bar next door. A sailor's shanty, sung raucously. She recognized Tex's voice, the ringleader, as usual. She couldn't help but sigh.

Why couldn't it have been Tex for whom she ached?

Footsteps. Slow, steady. Direct. They neared, and she hazarded a look up. He'd tucked his hat in the crook of his arm, and somehow she knew that his attention had never wavered from her. He'd focused in on her like an objective; a goal. He slowed as he drew close, and she could smell him - the combination of man and starch and strength that never failed to make her quiver.

"Doctor Scott." He nodded, pausing. "You didn't dance."

She had to clear her throat to answer. "Neither did you."

"No." That slow shake of his head - mesmerizing. "It wasn't right, yet."

"Maybe next time, then."

That smile again, why did it seem more like a promise? He canted his head to one side, his eyes making a slow, deliberate study of her features. "Perhaps."

"Then it's settled."

He raised a brow with a hint of a nod. "I suppose it is."

But there was more in his expression. Pain. Grief. Desire. Guilt.

And Rachel wished that she'd never met this man, never known his touch, his appeal. Because of all of the demons haunting her, he was the one she couldn't exorcise.

"Your crew seems to be enjoying themselves." She indicated the bar with a tilt of her chin. "Aren't you going to join them?"

He shrugged. "Probably not. The last thing they need is for me to spoil their fun."

She smiled, understanding his meaning immediately. "You're the cat."

"Excuse me?"

"'While the cat's away - " She lifted a brow, leading him to the phrase's conclusion.

"The mice are, indeed, playing." His smile was rueful. "So, I'll leave them be."

"I'll see you tomorrow then." And then I'll say goodbye. I'll say goodbye and then I'll go on with my life and try to purge you from my being. And I will fail, but I'll still try.

His voice grated across the slight distance towards her, a near whisper. "Tomorrow."

"Good night, Tom."

"Good night, Rachel." He made one more sweeping perusal of her and then stepped past her into the hall.

She'd never done well with people.

People became ghosts, and ghosts became demons.