A Garden of Thorns
Posted on Fri Aug 29th, 2025 @ 2:42am by Lieutenant Ezra Van Wijnbergen
Edited on on Fri Sep 12th, 2025 @ 4:55am
1,382 words; about a 7 minute read
Mission:
Episode 2 - The Sins of History
Location: The Sidebar Lounge - Deck 5 - USS Artemis
Timeline: MD015, 1930 Hours
"Some words carry more weight than others. You can feel them in your chest before your eyes even finish reading them."
Ezra sat alone at a corner table in the Sidebar Lounge, where it felt quieter than usual. It never seemed loud since here, though this was only the second time visiting as a patron. Tonight, there was just a trickle of people. A muted laugh from the bar, the hiss of a drink being poured. He sat at a table for two with a stange of lager that was conspicuously untouched. The head had long-since collapsed into a think lace against the glass. His data PADD lay propped in his palm, the words jumping off the screen.
His mother--Polys--never wasted words, never filled a letter with unnecessary pleasantries. She always wrote as if she were speaking across a small bonfire: points clear, emotions honest, no decoration.
"My son, Ezra,
You will already sense from the shape of my sentences that I am carrying a weight. Jarlin has been accepted for a course of treatment on Andoria. It is experimental--developed with the help of the Aenar, who understand something of his condition.
You know as well as I what Vulnari's Atrophy does. Already his mind is quieter. He can no longer feel me in the way he once did. Sometimes when I reached for him in thought, I find only stone. He is patient, brave, but it frightens me.
Still, there is hope. This gene therapy may slow what we fear. Perhaps even hold it at bay. He wishes you not to worry, but I know you will. I do too. I will remain on Betazed during his absence, tending the gardens and waiting for his return.
Ezra read the lines twice, then a third time, his eyes snagging on stone. The PADD grew heavy in his hand. He set it down on the table with care, as though the words themselves might bruise or break.
He leaned back, staring out through the viewport. Beyond the reflection of his own large frame, Bajor looked like a suspended sphere against the black, its copper-colour in stark contrast to the lounge's ambient light. The sight seemed almost too alive--colourful and glowing--while the words he carried inside his chest felt cold and alarmingly still.
He thought of Jarlin as he had first known him: a tall, deliberate man whose hands were always streaked in dark soil. An ornamental horticulturist, Polys had said, but to Ezra he seemed more like a sculptor who happened to choose flowers instead of stone. At seventeen and full of a violence he couldn't name, Ezra had put his fist through walls and once through the side of a delivery vehicle. And Jarlin had only knelt beside him, palms out. He had never tried to restrain him.
"I won't leave you," he had said, in a voice that always seemed calm as water. "Whatever storm this is, it doesn't scare me."
That had been the beginning. No shouting, no discipline, only a man who stood by waiting for the adolescent angst to subside. Ezra had thought many times over the years, that without him, he would have burned-out, guttered, or simply vanished. Without him, he wouldn't be sitting here in this lounge today. In this uniform. Living this life.
And now Jarlin was fading. His body was still intact--but he was ailing in a deeper way--slipping into a world without touch, without connection, where his wife could not reach him and his son could never follow. That painful thought left Ezra hollowed-out in a way that felt like some ruthless, anticipatory grief.
He pressed a thumb against the rim of the untouched beer, then pushed it aside. What was a glass of lager in the face of that? He wanted to be on Betazed, kneeling in the dirt beside his father, planting a young luminara--its lavender and silver petals glowing softly; pruning a bushy whispering thorn, the indigo leaves producing a musical vibration in the afternoon breeze. Both plants were fragile and bright, but they would only live if cared for. He wanted to speak all the words he had never spoken: gratitude, devotion--his true feelings that Jarlin was not his adoptive father but his father, period.
Ezra stared until the planet blurred. Please let the Aenar be right, he thought. Please, let him come back whole enough for us to love him as deserves to be loved.
The letter lay between his hands. He lifted it once more, not to read again, but to just keep it close--as though touching could do what telepathy was no longer capable of: bridge the distance, carry love across the coldness of of space.
He left the lager where it was, a half-hearted shrine to good intentions. He gathered the PADD into both hands, slid it into his jacket, and rose. The chair legs scuffed the floor softly.
Ezra wasn't thinking of going anywhere in particular--just away from the table, away from the untouched drink. Trigger and Milo would be in their quarters, Milo certain he'd been abandoned to despair, Trigger probably dignified in his certainty that no such thing had happened. Ezra found himself wanting both responses simultaneously: the reassurance and the rebuke.
He stepped through the corridor, past a gaggle of young officers laughing about something innocuous. A young ensign ducked around him, murmuring an apology, and Ezra realized once again how much space he occupied simply by walking.
At the turbolift, he stopped. He could go back to his quarters, but instead directed the lift to take him to the Arboretum.
[Please restate the destination,] the computer's voice droned.
Ezra paused. Certainly, the Artemis has an arboretum...
"Computer," he said, carefully considering his words. "Is there an arboretum or a greenhouse aboard the ship?"
[Negative.]
He sighed and shook his head. "Deck Four."
The turbolift hummed industriously, and Ezra caught his reflection in the bulkhead: a broad-shouldered thing of weariness. Perhaps it was more how unsettled he was feeling and less about the contents of the letter.
After the doors had opened and he'd found his way to the holodecks, Ezra decided a piece of home would be what might help him untie the knot in his chest. Behind the arch of the holodeck hatch waited the only thing he could imagine wanting: a place to set Jarlin back into the world.
"Computer," he said. "Run a new program. Betazed. Region: Darvon Plains. Private residence garden of Polys and Jarlin Koronis. Midmorning light."
The emptiness around him dissolved quickly. In its place: soil dark as loam beneath his feet, an expanse of earth patterned with neat rows of new plantings. A soft and warm breeze carried the just the faintest scents of pollen and wet stone. Overhead, the sky shimmered with the sort of impossible blue that Betazed seemed to hoard for itself.
And there--Ezra could almost see him. Jarlin, stooping over a young luminara, coaxing its roots into the soil, the petals trembling frailly in his breath. His father's hands, always streaked in green or brown, moving with the patience of an artist.
Ezra crouched, palm pressing into the dirt. It wasn't real--no seed, no root, no water in this earth. Just photons and algorithms. But it was enough. More than enough to feel the memory rising through him.
He let his fingers trace the leaves of a whispering thorn. They vibrated faintly under his gentle touch, a low, near-haunting tone like the sound of a cello's bow. He listened and closed his eyes.
"I won't leave you," Jarlin had said once. And he hadn't. Not then and not during those stormy years.
Ezra stayed there, half-kneeling in the holodeck garden, eyes stinging. For the first time since reading the letter, he felt his breath deepen, not quite ease, but simply deepen--as if the plants themselves reminded him that life could be stubborn, that roots could hold even in the poorest soil, that love, once planted, might grow whether the gardener remained.
A Post By
Lieutenant Ezra Van Wijnbergen
Victim Advocate Counselor, USS Artemis
Starfleet Criminal Investigations Unit
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