Christine Chapel, RN (chapelrn) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2013-05-08 20:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, barbara gordon / oracle (birds of prey), christine chapel |
Who: Christine Chapel and Barbara Gordon
When: March 28 (terribly backdated)
Where: Barbara's apartment
What: Having dinner and getting to know each other
Rating: Low
Barbara was glad that Christine had agreed to trying to get together again, especially after Barbara had canceled last minute a few weeks before. She ordered in (she seemed to be doing that quite a lot lately) some thai, being in the mood for curry, on her way home from Stark Tower. It was only after she set aside her backpack and her tablet that the doorbell rang and she had a bag of food that smelled so good that Barbara didn't want to wait for Christine. She set the bag on the counter and went to change out of her slacks and sweater, into something more comfortable. She had just started to settled into a routine, with Helena back as her roommate, seeing Dick, everything, when things had changed. She was thankful that she had Christopher, with whatever they were, but that wasn't enough. (Well, Barbara could debate that, but …) She was both thankful and hopeful that she'd get along with Christine Chapel, and when the knock came at her door, she wheeled herself over to open it, smiling. "Christine," she greeted, looking up at her. "It's wonderful to finally meet you. I ordered in Thai. I hope you like curry, but I did get some pad thai as well, if you prefer that." Barbara wheeled back a bit to let the other woman in. Christine was a little anxious about meeting Barbara. She’d heard a great deal about her from Pike and she liked what she knew and what she’d seen written on the network. Meeting someone in person though was a different matter. When she got back to her place after work on Tuesday afternoon, she changed into some jeans and a sweater and headed to Barbara’s apartment. Knocking on the door, she didn’t have to wait long until it was opened and she smiled. “Hey Barbara,” she said. “I actually do like curry. I rediscovered my love of it after I got here. I used to eat it all the time when I was at Starfleet in San Francisco but being on the ship and eating it from a replicator is not the same.” Christine laughed and stepped inside. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person. I’ve heard a lot about you.” A faint blush crossed Barbara's face. "Only good things, I hope," she said, and she closed the door and wheeled toward the kitchen. "Make yourself comfortable," she continued. "Can I get you something to drink? I ordered two thai ice teas, if you like them, or I have water, coffee, tea, or beer." “Only good things, I promise.” Christine followed her inside and sat down on the sofa. “Ice tea sounds really good, thanks.” She couldn’t help but watch Barbara as she moved about the apartment, obviously comfortable with her surroundings and navigating in her wheelchair. “If you don’t mind my asking, what happened? I knew that you were in a wheelchair but I didn’t know why. And I don’t mean to sound nosey, it’s just a nurse thing. I more or less assess everyone without even realizing I’m doing it.” Barbara nodded and pulled the two thai ice teas out of the fridge then settled them in her lap as she returned to the table and offered Christine a seat. "I don't mind," she said, mostly because she was expecting the question. Not everyone asked about it, but she figured that Christine, being a nurse, would ask. And luckily, or thankfully, it had been long enough that Barbara could talk about it -- vaguely -- whenever asked. Only she didn't like reliving that night at all. "To make a complicated story short, I used to be something of a vigilante. I worked under Batman, in Gotham, where I'm from, and we took to the streets to fight the -- " She shook her head. "God it all sounds so melodramatic, but we fought the dark underbelly of the city because believe me, there was a lot of bad stuff happening there. I did that for several years and both of us made a lot of enemies. One of them --" She busied herself with arranging the food and getting out plates and the like for the two of them to eat off of instead of from the takeout containers. "One of them set a very destructive plan in motion that caused several things to happen, one of them being that I was shot." Christine was familiar with Batman but she hadn’t known that Barbara came from Gotham. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly and picked up her tea. “It sounds like you were a victim of a madman’s revenge not unlike Admiral Pike.” Christine made a face. “I have a hard time calling him Christopher or thinking of him that way. He was my commanding officer and even though now we’re friends, it’s hard to think of him on a first name basis.” In fact most of the time, she didn’t address him as anything when they were together, it was just easier that way even if she did slip and call him sir from time to time. Well, Barbara wouldn't really consider herself a victim, per see -- the word didn't have great connotations for her, but she nodded a bit. "Something like that," she said, "but it was a long time ago." At least, it felt like a long time ago. "And I've moved on." She maneuvered so that she was at the table, and she doled out the food. "I'm sure. It would be like me calling Bruce Bruce to his face. It always took a lot to muster up the okay with doing that, so I understand." “It’s good that you’ve been able to do that,” Christine replied as she took the plate from her. “What did you call him? Mr. Wayne? Batman? I’m familiar with the story, at least the basic parts of the Batman stories. They’re still around in my time. I forget sometimes that there are things here that I don’t know anything about. By the same token though some things do still appear in our media and things like that.” "Batman mostly," she said with a shrug. "I knew him as that a long time before I ever knew who he was. It really wasn't until Helena came to live with me that I discovered who he was. But that," she said, "is a long complicated story for another time." Barbara looked up at her. "I want to know about you." “What do you want to know?” Christine laughed. “I’m not all that interesting really. I grew up in New Orleans. Studied bio-research and medical archaeology at Starfleet Academy which is where I met Roger. We were engaged and he went on a deep space mission where he disappeared. Starfleet lost all contact with him. I was determined to find him so I went to nursing school and joined Starfleet Medical which is how I started working with Doctor McCoy. As soon as I could I signed on for space missions and when Pike took over the Enterprise he chose McCoy and myself for the medical team. I was the head nurse and he was the CMO.” Christine paused for a minute to take a bit of her food and gather herself. “I never found out what happened to Roger. He might still be out there somewhere but it’s been over five years in my time without any sort of contact so it’s far more likely that he’s dead. I loved being in space though which I hadn’t expected and I was very happy on the Enterprise. Until the Narada incident which was horrific. I know it’s part of a movie here, that people actually paid to see it but after living through it I have no desire to see it, to relive it.” Barbara listened, frowning deeply. Was it a trend here, in this world, that the people who come in through the Tesseract have all had many difficulties and tragedies in their lives. "I'm so sorry," she said when she was through. "And yes, it's part of a movie -- I find that the most fascinating though. That everyone coming in through the Tesseract has come from a fictional account, and many are heavily laden with tragedy and drama. Yours, mine …" She shook her head, echoing her previous thoughts. "I'm not sure I understand the purpose of it all. “I hadn’t thought of that,” Christine said. “It’s true though. It does seem that a lot of people have been through something intensely dramatic and that it’s fictional. That was the hardest thing for me to accept when I first came here. That other people knew about me and what had happened but it wasn’t real to them while I lived it.” She took a bite of her food and chewed for a moment as she thought about what she wanted to say next. “I had dreams when I first arrived, about coming through the Tesseract. I don’t know if they were unique to me or not. I just know that I didn’t sleep very much for the first week and they eventually got better.” Except that she still had the occasional nightmare but nothing like what she’d had that first week. Barbara nodded. "It's been an adjustment to all of us. I've been considering more and more of it lately, mostly based on that idea of drama and fiction. I guess I look at the fiction I read and the TV shows and movies I watched, back home and not here, and some are accounted for her and some aren't. But don't we read those and watch those to be entertained? Or to see parts of life that we aren't living? It almost makes sense that the drama scale is through the roof. But it makes it difficult, I think, for those of us here now, where the drama scale is practically at zero. Are we so used to so much happening in our lives that we don't know how to live here?" Or, she thought, was it more than that. “It is rather quiet when you think about it, isn’t it?” Christine said. “We’re used to so much going on and here we’re just....living. That’s something I guess I’ve forgotten how to do, live without a million things going on around me.” Life on the Enterprise was constantly busy, what down time she had was spent sleeping and here she actually had free time which was something she hadn’t really had in a long time. “I’ve been reading some of the literature from this era and the 20th century as well. It helps me understand the way things are here. For me so much of this is ancient history, I studied it in school so seeing it first hand is interesting.” "You can probably look at this whole thing as some extended away mission, right?" Barbara joked. But if was half a joke because they both knew that any moment one or both of them could go back to where they came from. "Is it helpful to have so many of your crewmates here?" she asked. “It is,” Christine replied with a nod. “except that we aren’t as close here. Which I guess is to be expected. On the ship we’re in much closer quarters so we see more of each other. I miss that. It’s like being part of a family.” She shook her head. “Here we’re in the same space but we might go days without seeing each other. But I’ve gotten to know Pike better since we’ve been here and I’m very grateful for that. I knew him only slightly on the Enterprise because he was my commanding officer and not being part of the bridge crew, knowing him personally was a bit harder. I don’t have to tell you that he’s a wonderful man. I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he’s been through, how hard he’s fought to get to where he is. I was there when he came back from the Narada, we weren’t sure he would make it but he did.” Barbara felt her cheeks burn a bit. She knew as well that Christopher was a wonderful man, if more than a little stubborn and difficult. He was set in his ways and her in hers, and they came to a head a lot because of that. "I'm glad he made it, and that you and Dr. McCoy could save him," Barbara said sincerely. "I know more than a little about those sort of touch and go moments, and I'm thankful things are different here." She smiled. "Though if I'm being honest, Christopher still seems to be a difficult man to really get to know, as I'm sure you can tell as well." “He is, I won’t deny that,” Christine smiled. “He doesn’t let people in easily which you know but he’s let you in. I’m glad. He might not believe that he needs anyone to help him get through all this but he does. I might not say that to his face but it’s true.” "I'd like to help him," Barbara admitted, "and while I'm used to dealing with difficult men, he's worse than any others. I can't get through to him no matter how I try. And it's true that not many people can understand what he's going through, but he doesn't seem to understand that I can understand." She knew Barbara was right. Having been through her own trauma and being in a wheelchair herself, she understood much more than Christine could some of the things Pike was feeling. “I don’t know why he can’t let himself see that,” she said. “You’ve probably felt some of the same things yourself. He’s frustrating and quite frankly I would love to hit him over the head with a baseball bat sometimes for not seeing what is right in front of him.” Barbara laughed and shook her head. "Somehow I don't think even that would knock sense into him unfortunately." She really liked Christopher, and she hoped that she wouldn't mess things up or he wouldn't pull away. There were no guarantees, of course, but she hoped. "Is there anything you can tell me about him that you think I should know?" Christine took a bite of food and chewed thoughtfully. What could she tell Barbara? Naturally a lot of the things she knew were confidential and she couldn’t share them but there was one thing she could say. “Starfleet is his life. It’s a huge part of who he is and he’s having a hard time coming to grips with that. I’m sure you know that already though. He feels responsible for the people under his command and even though he made a huge sacrifice to save the Enterprise, he doesn’t see it that way.” She paused for a moment, trying to decide what to say next. “Trying to convince him of that doesn’t work either, I’ve tried. I guess the best advice I can give you is to keep fighting. If you care about him, you’re going to have to fight to make him see that you do and he’s worth fighting for. I’m not sure he believes that.” Barbara nodded a bit. She did know all of that, and that was the problem. Well, one of several. "Thank you," she said after a moment. "I do know all that. On a slightly related note, how are you adjusting to being in this world? I'm at an advantage because I've been here longer than many, had more time to come to terms with it, but the fact is: we are all here. That's one thing that's frustrating about Christopher -- I want him to understand that while I truly get his hold on Starfleet and his dedication to it -- I have the same aches about my former life -- it just frankly doesn't exist here. And it won't." “I’m adjusting much better than I was at first,” she said. “the first few weeks were hard for me but I gradually came to the same conclusion as you. I’m here and will be for the forseeable future so I have to accept that. There will always be things I miss about my own time, I miss the stars for example but there are things here that I’m finding that I really enjoy. I’ve made some friends that I would never have met had I not come here and even if I go back and don’t remember being here, I truly believe that somewhere deep down inside the memories stay with you.” Christine’s thoughts turned to Mulder as she spoke, they’d had this conversation before and she was intrigued by what he had said about emotional memory and actual memory. “and I met someone that I’ve come to care about. I don’t know where that will lead but I’m not going to shut myself off from it because I’m afraid of the future. Even if we were in our own times, there’s no guarantee of the future.” Barbara nodded, smiling at everything that Christine was saying. "There's no guarantee of much of anything in any reality," she pointed out. If that made her a pessimist, then so be it, but really, it was true. She only had to take a look at everything that happened in her life to know that nothing was guaranteed. "I think that's a good outlook to have. We have to make the best out of what's happening to us here, now, because this is where we are." “I wish there was a way to make Pike understand that,” she said with a sigh. “I get where he’s coming from, I do but there doesn’t appear to be anything that any of us can do about the Tesseract and its whims. We’re here until or if it chooses to send us back. I think for those of us from the future it’s hard because this is like living in a history book. There are things that haven’t happened yet that I’ve studied and sometimes I have to remember that there is a chance I might completely change the future with something I do or say. Then again some people don’t believe that. Honestly I’m not sure what I believe. I just try to make the best of every day I have here and some days are better than others.” Barbara shook her head. "I don't think there's any possibility of changing our futures, especially when you take a look at the people who have been here then left and yet returned again. There's not recognition and no recollection, not to mention that nothing is changing in the original source material, right?" “That’s true,” Christine replied. “When I got here I found out that Kirk, McCoy, Spock and Uhura were here and had been here for some time. I didn’t notice them missing at all so you’re right. Nothing in our source material is changing. Which would explain why people who leave and come back here don’t remember.” Although she still believed that the memories were there, just not easily accessed. “I just know that for the first few weeks all I wanted was to go home but now I don’t feel that so much. There are still questions I’d like answered about what is happening in my world but that’s a good way to drive myself crazy so I try my best not to think about it.: Barbara agreed. "I think we'll always want to go home or always have questions about what's happening where we left from. Though your advantage is that you have a movie coming out. My source material ended years ago." “Well if it’s anything like the other movie, I’m not actually in it.” Christine sighed. “I was there of course, McCoy called for me in sick bay but I wasn’t seen and from what I’ve seen of the trailers, I’m not in them. So I have no idea what is happening to me in my own universe. It’s a little frightening to be honest. That’s a big reason why I’m trying my best to make a life here. There may be nothing for me to go back to.” "To a point though, it's better, isn't it? You're not going to be able to regret what's happening that you're missing or you don't know that something happened to you. Or you can't watch it all happen to you from an outside perspective." Her throat tightened. That's what had happened when she'd watched just a bit of her source material. The opening credits of every episode, practically, made her relive the moment the Joker burst into her home and shot her. “I never thought of it like that,” she admitted. “but you’re right. The others are having a hard time. McCoy refuses to have anything to do with it either the movie from four years ago or the one that’s coming out in a few weeks. Kirk has a morbid curiosity to know what’s going to happen while Chekov has been watching everything that’s out there. I guess I’m somewhere in between. I want to know what happened to my fiance but I haven’t had the courage to seek out that answer. It’s there in some of the original source material, I know it is but I’m not sure I want to know.” "I didn't watch much past about an hour, only because everything out there for me is what I've already lived through," Barbara said. "I don't need to relive it. And anything about my counterparts is a life I didn't live and never will." She sipped her water. "I don't know. It all takes some getting used to, and like you said, everyone's dealing with it differently." “For me it’s the fact that we’re from a completely different timeline from the other Starfleet people here. An alternate universe. There are a lot of differences and it’s tough to wrap your mind around it. Even if I watched the original source material who’s to say that it’s anything like what is happening in my own world right now?” Christine had given it a lot of thought and she still didn’t know what was the best course of action. For now she was just going to try and get through the next few weeks until the new movie came out. If she was in it and if she died then so be it. She would simply enjoy living here while she could and then...well at least she wouldn’t know that she knew she was going to die. Barbara understood that as well. "It's the same way for me. Jason, Dick when he was here, Steph -- they know me but not me. Another version of me." She shrugged. "I don't know how many of us here come from splintered versions of the same source material, but it only complicated matters more." “I have a rather unique situation when it comes to that,” she said with a laugh. “My original counterpart was a bit obsessed with Spock. She was convinced she was in love with him. I of course am not in love with Spock and both Spocks are here. It gets even better. The original Spock is the roommate of the man I’m seeing. Which is pretty awkward since he’s a little bit unsure of me given that my counterpart pretty much mooned around after him.” Christine shook her head. “We haven’t met face to fact yet, we’ve exchanged a few words on the network and he knows the difference of course but it’s still odd.” Barbara wasn't sure what to make of that, but she couldn't help but laugh. "That sounds pretty complicated," she said. "But amusingly so. At least you seem to be making the best of it." “I am,” she said. “it’s just strange knowing that there are two completely different timelines. Although I shouldn’t be surprised, it’s not uncommon in my world but still it’s not something you think about that much.” It wasn't common in hers either, though some of her contemporaries talked about it being common in the comics source material. She liked what little stability she had, even if it had been disrupted by ending up here. "No, I wouldn't know who would think about it regularly." “It’s a little confusing at first but I think we’ve all learned to live with it. I know that I’ve become close friends with Kathryn Janeway who is actually a captain on a starship but from the alternate timeline and from a good deal further in the future than me. We’ve talked a good bit and some things aren’t different but there are some really big ones that are.” Like the fact that Christine had been on the Enterprise when Vulcan was destroyed, something that hadn’t happened in Kathryn’s timeline. She nodded. "Yes, when Dick was still here, I learned all sorts of things that happened in his timeline, and with the Barbara he knew. But those things didn't happen to me. All I can think now is that it's just important that we make lives here for ourselves, right? Some would call it a fresh start, but that implies a total reboot. I just think it means making the most of what we know and can do here." The more Christine talked to Barbara the more she liked her. She couldn’t help but nod as she listened to the other woman speak. “That’s what my friend Kathryn has said. We’re here and we can’t sit around waiting to be sent back. We have to make the most of this. There’s no way of knowing how long it will last. For all we know we might be here for the rest of our lives.” Barbara smiled. She had already given a lot of thought to the idea that they might be there the rest of their lives, and yet she'd already seen firsthand a few times how devastating it was to have someone leave on her. "I know. One day at a time, I think." “That’s all we can do really. One day at a time.” She sighed and looked at her watch. “I should get going. Thanks so much for dinner. It was great! Let me help you clean up though before I leave. I don’t feel right leaving you with a mess.” "Don't even worry about it," Barbara said. "I can take care of it. I'm glad you could come by and we could start to get to know each other." She smiled. "I hope we can do it again soon." |