Reunited, Conscious This Time

Posted on 20 Jun 2025 @ 12:51am by Lieutenant Commander Joey Geisler & Commodore Harvey Geisler

3,637 words; about a 18 minute read

Mission: Imposters Among Us
Location: In Captivity
Timeline: July 7, 2390 || 1100 hours

NOTICE: This post is meant for mature audiences only as it contains elements of gruesome mental and physical anguish. Reader discretion is advised.

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Harvey had little concept of time, even in his drugged stupor. Feeling slowly returned to his extremities as if needles were seeping into every pore, but the tips were dulled from extensive use. Still, blunt objects were just as painful as sharp ones, especially when multiples were applying pressure.

He groaned as he slowly came to, eyes fluttering in the dim light. His uniform was gone, only a torn shirt and torn pants remained. Decency, it seemed, was still required.

Harvey tried to sit up, but found that many of his muscles did not want to obey his wishes. Instead, he laid his head back and tried to think about the last few days. He recalled all too well what happened with the imposter in the spacecraft that he had believed was Joey. The phaser blast stung him more deeply than just an energy burn, it was a betrayal of the one he confided in and trusted the most. He'd been shot twice in another capacity, also by someone meant to betray him.

He winced, trying to remember the details of the conversation. Trying to remember why Joey would have shot him, betrayed him. What did she call herself? A clone? Harvey shook his head. That couldn't be possible. They'd screened for clones. And they found clones.

Wait...

The report came from Commander Di Pasquale. Was she in on this too? Was the Black Hawk running afoul with clones, and low-level infiltrators were sacrificed in order to protect the powerful ones?

He continued to stir, this time able to move his hands and arms. As he did, he felt something different... Thin strands of something. Some strands were clumped, others loose and frayed. He fumbled with his fingers, toying with... hair? Was this hair? It wasn't his hair, whatever these long strands were that flowed across his chest. His fingers continued to explore, and sure enough, they found the top of a head.

His eyes opened slightly more as curiosity drove his senses to cooperate together, bound by a mission to learn more about who was laying on top of him.

And then the adrenaline hit. While he couldn't see all of the figure, there was enough light that allowed him to identity the person with him. The memory of the phaser blast, the betrayal, and the shock of it all returned. Suddenly, the pain was gone, and only panic remained. He leapt up from whatever surface he'd been laying on and quickly pulled back, removing the familiar head from his torso. "Get away from me!" he shouted.

Joey barely had the strength to react as she somehow managed to get to her feet, the sudden movement sending a fresh wave of pain through her battered body. She caught herself against the wall, breath hitching as the burns across her torso protested the sudden shift. The exhaustion pressing down on her made it hard to think, hard to move, but the raw panic in his voice cut through the haze.

She swallowed hard, forcing herself to stay upright despite the weakness in her limbs. "Harvey," she rasped, her voice barely above a whisper, cracked and uneven. She could hear the terror in his voice—the betrayal, the confusion—but she had nothing left to defend herself with, nothing left to fight. "It's me," she said, though she wasn’t sure it would matter. Every muscle in her body begged her to rest, to give in to the weight of everything, but she couldn't. Not now. Not with him looking at her like she was the enemy.

She shifted slightly, keeping her movements slow, deliberate. "I didn't do this to you," she whispered. "But if you want me gone... I don't have the strength to stop you." Her breath hitched again, the effort of speaking draining what little energy remained. She watched him, waiting, unsure if the next moment would bring understanding—or another fight she wasn’t capable of surviving.

Harvey had inched as close as he could to the opposite corner, almost compacted into a fetal position. His legs were bent so that his shins were the most visible part of his body, blocking nearly all else. His feet, covered in sweat, blood and grime, could barely keep their grip on the floor while Harvey's head stuck out above his knees. "How do I know it's you?" he spat, ignoring her gentle plea. "The last... the last time I saw your... that face... you... it..."

He closed his eyes tight as thoughts flung about in his head like a whirlpool in the sea. Nothing made sense. Not a damn thing made sense.

Joey swallowed, her body aching, but she didn’t retreat. Not that she could. Slowly, deliberately, she shifted into what little light their cell provided, the dim glow casting uneven shadows across her damaged skin. Her fingers trembled as she gripped the edge of her torn shirt, pulling it away just enough to expose the burns streaking across her collarbone and upper chest, healing but still angry, still proof.

"This isn’t something you can fake," she murmured, her voice hoarse, exhausted. The wounds, the weight loss, the hollowed-out look in her eyes—it was all real, just as real as the fear gripping him from across the cell. "I'm sure this isn't the face you saw," she continued, her breath uneven as she forced herself to stay upright, letting the words hang, unspoken but understood.

She inhaled shakily, adjusting how she sat, her body stiff and unwilling after so much time trapped in this place. "I don’t expect you to trust me," she admitted, voice quiet but firm. "But I need you to open your eyes... to see that I’m not—" she exhaled sharply, shaking her head as if searching for the right words. "I’m not whoever it was you saw before."

Then there was silence, thick and suffocating, but she held still, letting the flickering light do the talking. If Harvey still didn’t believe her, she had nothing left to prove. Nothing left at all.

Harvey had to admit, it was difficult for him to produce any sort of rational thought. There were elements of his surroundings that he could register. He knew he was in a dark cell, buried deep within a starship. He knew he'd been tortured endlessly over the last few days. And he knew that Joey, albeit a facsimile of her, had shot him.

Even though she had asked him to open his eyes in a metaphorical sense, Harvey closed his physical eyes as he felt a new pain, what felt like a sharp knife at the base of his skull. If he were somewhat coherent, his medical training would have surmised that it was an after effect of the adrenaline pushing against the various serums coursing through his veins.

She wanted her to trust him, but right now, he couldn't even trust any of his senses. And the only way he could express how he felt was in a deep, guttural wince and whine. "I just... pain... it hurts..." In doing so, he placed his hands on his temples and tried to rub, even though it appeared to be a forceful action that could cause damage if he pressed any harder. "Make it... stop..."

Joey watched him, her own exhaustion weighing heavily against her battered frame, but she kept her voice steady. "Harvey," she said softly, careful not to move too much, not to push him further into panic. "You're hurt. If you keep forcing yourself upright, it's only going to make things worse." She shifted slightly, easing back against the bulkhead until she was sitting again, giving him space, giving him control over whatever came next.

"You don’t have to trust me, but you do need to breathe," she continued, keeping her tone level, calm—anything but demanding. "Slow, deep breaths. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Just try it. It'll help." She didn’t reach for him, didn’t press too hard. The burns across her own skin still radiated heat, a reminder of their shared suffering, but none of that mattered now. He needed something solid to hold onto—something that wouldn't feel like an attack.

"You can sit upright if you need to, but if you lay back down, it might be easier," she offered, not commanding, just suggesting. "Let your body rest. Just focus on your breathing. It helps." Joey kept her eyes on him, letting him take the time he needed, knowing that right now, the only thing keeping this moment from spiraling was patience even if she didn't have much left.

Harvey could hear her, and somehow (he didn't know how) his mind allowed her gentle tone and firm directions take hold. His right hand left his temple and slowly and shakily navigated towards the bulkhead beside him. Harvey slowly leaned into his right arm, allowing his hand to support himself as he slid back down onto the poor excuse of a bed.

And somehow, his rapid and shallow breathing began to deepen, dismantling the hyperventilation that his body had slipped into. Nothing yet made sense to him, not that his mind could see any clearer than his vision. Harvey remained in a fetal position, enough though he was now laying back down, and continued to breathe as a sense of calm began to envelope him. "Jo..." he whispered. "Jo... elle..."

Joey exhaled slowly, the tension in her shoulders easing just a fraction as she watched him settle. He was still curled in on himself, still fighting through the turmoil gripping his mind, but at least his breathing had steadied. At least he wasn’t spiraling further. She shifted slightly, careful not to move too fast, not to disrupt the fragile calm he’d found.

Hearing her name—her full name—caught her off guard, a faint crack threading through the numbness she’d built around herself. She swallowed, dampening the emotions pressing against her chest. "I'm here," she said, voice soft, barely above a whisper. "I'm right here, Harvey."

She didn’t reach for him, didn’t force closeness, but she stayed near, close enough that he wouldn’t feel abandoned, far enough that he wouldn’t feel trapped. The silence stretched between them, thick but no longer suffocating, and Joey let it linger, let him breathe through it. Whatever storm he was caught in, she wasn’t leaving.

And a storm it was. Churning, flashing, reverberating through his mind. Different memories quickly appeared. One moment, he was in a torture chamber. The next, he was in Bora Bora with Joey. Then he was shot by del Rosario, a former security officer aboard the Black Hawk. Sitting in a lab on Starbase 211. Joey standing over him in a dark cell looking worse for wear. Holding Jameson for the first time. Embracing Joey on the dance floor during their wedding night. Hunting for Alison on Betazed. Holding his mother's hand as a young child entering her workplace. Shot by a facsimile of his wife inside an alien spacecraft.

It was all almost too much.

And yet, through the pain, the adrenaline began to wear off, and his senses dulled as they accepted the pain. Harvey slowly became truly aware of his dimly lit surroundings. He moaned ever so softly as this happened and allowed his eyes to truly open. Harvey saw Joey, positioned close to him as he remained in a loose fetal position. He laid there for a moment, examining her form. Every stain, every bit of matted hair, every glisten from the sweat and grime... Even in the dark he could see a faint glint in her brown eyes. Her expression, however, was not one of relief. No, this was a version of his wife he'd never seen before. Someone who'd been broken, someone without hope.

She wasn't the only one. Harvey wasn't sure he had an ounce of hope either. "Where..." he choked out, realizing how dry his mouth was. "Where are we?"

Joey didn’t look at him right away. She kept her gaze fixed on the crumbling seam in the bulkhead just past his shoulder, as if speaking it aloud would anchor them to something real. But at the sound of his voice—hoarse and raw, like someone waking from a dream they couldn’t escape—she finally turned.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, quietly. “Some kind of transport. Old… Starfleet maybe, maybe not. Whatever it is, it’s falling apart.” Her eyes flicked to his face, gauging how much he could take, how much truth to give. “There’s not much in the way of crew—at least, none I’ve seen. Just us. Whoever shoved us in here, and those who are responsible for harvesting the memories.”

Her voice cracked faintly, but she steadied herself and leaned back, wincing at the sharp pull in her side. “You thirsty?” She asked after a beat, reaching behind her for the canister she'd rationed to nearly nothing. “It’s not much, but it’s clean.” There was no comfort she could offer, not really—but if she could give him water, give him truth, maybe that was enough for now. Hope was gone for the moment. But survival? That, at least, was still on the table. For both of them.

"Harvesting memories..." Harvey softly said, meagerly accepting the canister. He attempted the swish the contents around, hoping to gauge its contents. He heard very little and appropriately measured a drop or two into his mouth. "Paradan?" he asked, attempting to learn more about his surroundings.

Then he answered his own question. "No, there's more than Paradan. I remember seeing red faces in the chamber. There's Dosi here." He leaned his head back and looked up where he spotted a black label with gold, alien writing though the lighting was too dim for him to read. "If this is a Starfleet ship, where could they have gotten it? Could this be Kelinor's Saber?"

Joey shifted where she sat, arms loosely folded over her ribs as she followed Harvey’s gaze to the alien script etched into the overhead plating. “Kelinor’s Saber,” she echoed, her voice low, thoughtful—but not convinced. “If that’s what this is, then someone’s gutted her and filled the carcass with ghosts.”

She exhaled shakily, then motioned with her chin toward the flickering forcefield at the far end of the cell. “That thing—whatever tech it's patched with—it’s what did this.” She tugged down the frayed edge of her collar again, revealing the branching red trails of half-healed burns over her face and torso, as if lightning had kissed her skin and clung too long. “It glitches. Every few minutes. I tried to escape, but it surged.”

Her eyes lingered on the flickering light for a moment longer before she looked back at him. “That’s not standard. Hell, it’s not even safe. But whoever's repurposed this ship they don’t care about safety. They care about keeping us guessing. Keeping us afraid.”

She rested her head lightly against the wall, the metal cool against her fevered skin. “Dosi, Paradan, whatever other names might be crawling around this hull… I think we’re sitting in the middle of someone else’s war. And we’re not prisoners. We’re not even collateral. We're pawns who will die when our use has run out.”

Harvey extended the canister back to her as he slowly sit up. He winced as he did so as pins and needles shot up his left leg. When he looked down, he noticed that his pants had been torn along the side, and there were two dried blood trails, starting just below his knee. The puncture wounds looked as if he'd been bitten by a vampire. He could only imagine the vampire's bite would have been favorable considering recent events.

Still, Harvey's eyes met Joey's burns before glancing over to the forcefield. "Resistance is futile," he muttered. His eyes moved back to Joey and slid over to make room on the miserable excuse for a cot. Harvey still wasn't sure that the woman with him was his wife, but if she was going to kill him, she could have done it already. "So they mean to break us, but only after they get what they want."

He sighed, looking her now in the eyes, trying to validate the person with him. "66239."

Joey’s breath caught, the number hanging in the air like a fragile piece of glass between them. 66239. She didn’t need to ask. That stardate was etched into her bones deeper than any scar. Their twins’ first cry, the weight of them in her arms, the way Harvey looked at them—it all came rushing back in a single beat of silence.

Her jaw trembled, but she managed to hold his gaze, tears burning hot behind her eyes. “Alison came first,” she whispered. “By a few minutes. But Jameson made sure everyone knew he’d arrived—started hollering the second he could.” Her voice cracked, but she pressed on. “I haven’t heard their voices in… I don’t know how long. I’ve been counting time by when the lights flicker.”

She didn’t reach for him, didn’t dare, but did move to sit on the cot. Her voice softened with something resembling strength. “That stardate’s not something anyone could fake, Harvey. You know that.” She blinked slowly, forcing the grief back into its box—for now. “You remember what it means. So do I. And whatever this place is… it hasn’t taken that from me.”

There was no air left to say more. Only a stillness between them—and in it, the quiet possibility that something was beginning to mend. Even if just barely. Even if just tonight.

Without hesitation, his left hand reached over to grab her right hand. He gave it a gentle squeeze, but that gentleness turned into a firm reassurance, a true confirmation that he now recognized her, not as a facsimile or an imposter. No, two angels had been reunited in hell. "And yet, Jameson is the one always trying to catch up to Alison," he said with a soft chuckle.

"What's the last thing you remember?" Harvey asked gently. "Before whatever hell this is?"

Joey’s brow furrowed as the question tugged at the fraying threads of memory. She stared at the floor for a long beat, as if the answer had been written there once and smudged away. “Razmena,” she said at last, the word brittle as it left her lips. “It was Razmena.”

Her eyes half-lidded, searched for clarity in the haze. “They asked me to step into the back. I had no reason to believe anything was more than it seemed.” Her fingers twitched absently against his hand. “I didn’t think anything of it. Nothing screamed danger.”

Then her voice dropped, taut and distant. “That’s when someone hit me. I never saw who. Just—noise, a blinding pain, then darkness.” She inhaled sharply through her nose. “And when I woke up... I wasn’t me anymore. Or at least, not the only me.”

She looked toward him again—worn, wary, but steady. “They replaced me with a clone, Harvey. That’s who betrayed you. Not me. Not ever.” Her voice cracked at the edge, but the truth in it rang clear. “I swear on everything we hold dear.” She paused, letting the weight of it settle. “Razmena was the switch. And everything since has been the fallout.”

"Razmena..." Harvey whispered. His eyes closed again, and his head tilted back to rest against the bulkhead. He wasn't sure how long he'd been here, but now he knew that the cloned version of his wife had been aboard his ship for two weeks prior to the nebula. That meant that the woman beside him had absolutely no knowledge of the Gaittithe, Starbase Unity, G90B, his promotion, and so much more.

This was not a time to bring her up to speed. No, their focus needed to be on one thing, and one thing only... survival. "You're not the only one with a clone," he shared, opening his eyes and looking towards her. "There's still a Joey and a Harvey on the Black Hawk. You and I... we've got kids to get back to. Before it's too late."

Joey straightened at his words, the weight of her exhaustion pushed back by something sharper—resolve. It burned through the haze like a flare in deep space, reigniting a fire she thought was long dead. "Then we make it back," she said, firm, no hesitation. "Whatever it takes."

Her fingers curled into his hand, the motion grounding her. “If they think they can just rewrite us—replace us—they clearly didn’t account for the originals fighting their way home.” Her gaze locked with his now, steady and clear, battle-worn but unbroken. “We’re not ghosts. We’re not echoes. We are real. And we’ve got something no clone ever will—memory, scars, each other. And damn it, we’ve got Alison and Jameson.”

She leaned forward slightly, the pain forgotten for a moment. “They don’t get to grow up thinking imposters are their parents. We claw our way out of this wreck, we tear down whatever we're caught in, and we take our lives back.”

There was no bravado in her voice. Just iron. And a promise that wouldn’t break.

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