The Not-So-Secret Life of Cade Foster

Posted on Nov 03, 2015 @ 12:59am by Lieutenant Commander Cade Foster
Edited on on Nov 03, 2015 @ 1:00am

Mission: Civil War

"The Not-So-Secret Life of Cade Foster" (Continued from "Introductions Far From The Home front")

~*~

Location: USS PHOENIX
Stardate: 2.151102.2236
Scene: Sickbay - Morgue

~*~

The point of living and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.
~Peter Ustinov 1921 - 2004

~*~

According to popular rumor Cade Foster was a heartless bastard.

Well, that was partially true. After his heart was damaged on DAGORIN VI, overdosed with a highly addictive narcotic being used by members of the Orion Syndicate to keep nosy people like Starfleet Officers out of their money-making drug racket it was replaced by a biosynthetic heart. So in a way he was literally heartless by the definitions of 'lacking the biological heart one was born with.'

Personality wise it was another story. Though even Cade admitted that the months - even years - following his recovery with an artificial heart and the withdrawal from a narcotic so powerful that it had ensnared him with one exposure were not his best.

Not by a longshot.

It has cost him rank, freedom, and even his commission for the better part of three years. It had been a long, slow slog to get back some semblance of a normal life. He had just started putting the pieces back together when his long time on-again, off-again lover Daisy Davidson forsook him to go run a completely different life away from the dangerous escapades of Starfleet life. In retrospect Cade didn't blame her, though at the time it had cut him pretty deeply. Another nine months of funk were slowly recuperated by getting his commission back and ending up on the front lines of the Dominion war - rooming with his favorite frenemy Aerdan Jos (which was in large part due to an attention getting scheme that Cade had cooked up surrounding the two of them having a homosexual relationship together.) It had been his last-ditch effort to rekindle the romance between himself and Daisy, and she saw right through it. Humorously enough everyone else on the ship was suckered in, making it an uncomfortable tour.

Though from it was born a strange bond with the recalcitrant Andorian, and from that strange tour came Cade Foster's dream team crew. When the Pendragon was relaunched, Cade found himself in his first positive mood in years and surrounded by friends. Aerdan, Montoya, Phia, Suvek, Arjan, Zabrielle, Princeling, Sef. Even Daisy made an appearance, and the others on the ship were people he hadn't quite formed a bond with - but people who didn't drive him nuts either. People he might be able to form a bond with given time.

One of those people was Thomas Varn.

He felt a chill rising in the pit of his stomach as he removed the lifeless body from cryostasis. There was a tiny optimistic glimmer deep in Cade Foster's soul that believed that one day he would make peace with Wingboy, and they might see eye to eye. That was an impossibility now. Cade didn't believe in either afterlife or reincarnation, just a long dark sleep after a long crazy ride. He would never get that talk with Varn. He would never know what was going on in the man's head.

A well of regret bubbled up into his chest. Half of it was prompted by his good, old-fashioned arrogant need to know things and root out the reasons why people did what they did. The other half came from actual human emotion that admitted Cade cared about Varn - or at least tried to care. He had hunted him down in the Jefferies tubes of the Pendragon worried that the man was turning depressive - even suicidal. He had tried to get him into counseling, and he had even tried to coax him to come to sickbay and get his damaged wings checked out. Thomas on the other hand dismissed every attempt Cade made as another instance of Cade seeking to mock the winged man.

"So I made you dress up like the Christmas Angel for the STONEHENGE's party. So fucking what? The kids adored you. You would think some adoration would actually convince you that not everything in the world is terrible and full of 'ha-ha, look at Thomas, he's got wings' bullshit." He glared at peaceful looking corpse, shaking a hand in the air. "I dressed as the Goddamn Grinch and did I complain for months afterwards? No." His eyes narrowed as spittle formed on his lips. "Fuck you, Varn. Fuck you."

The last words lingered in the air of the empty sickbay, and Cade whipped around, giving a paranoid glance to his back to see if anyone was eavesdropping. No? Good. He could be honest with himself, maybe even honest to a dead man who couldn't hear him so long as no one had any evidence to pin on him later.

Turning back to Varn, the older doctor rocked on his feet, shaking his head. He never understood Varn's hang ups. He never understood why wings made him a freak. Hell, Cade would kill to have wings, and there were plenty of alien species in the Federation that had wings or other back protrusions. "Try having a fake heart. See where that gets you. At least with wings you can fly. With a fake heart all you get is pain and no one ever sees it." He took a second to bare his teeth at the stiff. "I almost killed myself making sure you were safe. You remember? You remember the first time the PENDRAGON was flung?"

Well, no, Thomas didn't remember. He was dead. But Cade remembered. He had gone looking for Thomas when they found out that the containment situation on the artifact was critical, because he knew where Thomas holed himself up, and knew that he had taken off his commbadge. Cade had crawled into the Jefferies tubes to tell the science officer that he was in grave danger of being injured unless he got out of these immediately. And what happened? Thomas argued with Cade. Accused him of breaking his brooding reverie, and following him to mock him. So Cade tried to drag the idiot out of harm's way when the shockwave hit.

And what happened? Cade took a critical blow to the chest, spent days in sickbay and months unable to fully repair his biosynthetic heart due to the limitations of being trapped billions of lightyears away from home while Thomas walked away.

Walked away.

Somehow it was funny that Cade had outlasted him in the end. The same kind of funny one feels when watching your dog get hit by a car and smeared across the pavement. Cade wanted to vomit a little, but instead he let out a light string of cusswords as he dumped Thomas' corpse into a cryostatic coffin for transport purposes.

"I never understood you. I never understood why I was always the bad guy and you were the victim. Because by the end nobody was the bad guy and you were too fucking blind to see it." He gritted his teeth. "You had everything. You had the girl, and the career, and friends who gave a shit about you. I even gave a shit about you. And now what does it matter?"

The frozen body slid peacefully into the coffin cradle, as one lone white feather loosed itself from Thomas' wing and floated down to the sickbay floor. Cade flicked the lid of the transport coffin closed before his tired blue eyes noticed the white fluff. He bent down and picked it up, twirling it by its quill. "Who knows, Varn. Maybe it's better this way? Maybe you gave up long ago, and this is finally how you got to rest?" He glanced up, letting his eyes trail off into the darkened sickbay to where Phia's comatose form was ready for transport. "I haven't given up yet. And maybe if we ever meet again, you'll see that."

It was done. All patients and corpses ready for transfer. Cade sighed, feeling curiously hollow, stopping beside Phia's bedside before he headed out. Looking over his shoulder, he made damn sure no one was watching before he dipped down and kissed her cool blue forehead. "Don't give up on me. I haven't given up on you."

She twitched. Muscle spasm, he was sure of it. But he brushed her cheek just in case. "I'm serious, you fight and come back to me, you hear?"

There was a flash behind him and the soft screech of the door opening. Cade straightened to attention a half second before he went soppy, and composed himself to his usual dour countenance before he turned.

"Are the patients ready for transfer?" a gangly medical lieutenant from the JENNER queried in soft tones.

"They are. Take them." Cade muttered back. The quicker they got this over with, the better.

~*~

Scene: CMO's quarters
Time Index: That evening

Traditionally Cade Foster's quarters had been both lonely and empty. Now they were just lonely. As a young man, he had eschewed decoration as sentimental garbage, and anything that didn't help him study medicine or score chicks was viciously cut from the area.

He hadn't scored chicks in a while, and he didn't have the need to study medicine on anything more complicated than a PADD anymore, which left his quarters curiously bare for many years. He keenly remembered sitting on the bed one particularly bitter and empty evening, tossing socks into the recycler and realizing that dirty laundry was quite literally the only thing adorning his room.

And he immediately realized how pitiful that was. Though it took several years for him to accumulate enough things that he felt worthy enough to display and yet were not soppy enough to lose him any 'heartless bastard' points.

He stood by the wall, looking at his tiny collection of holopictures. One of the most notable things of his picture collection is that it featured exactly one relative. One. No photos of mom or dad, no brothers or sisters, just some older guy in a green-collared red military style Starfleet uniform who looked a lot like Cade. If one was drunk or squinted it could be mistaken for Cade in historical costume.

Aerdan, one of the few people who had ever seen Cade's picture collection, had queried about the lack of family photos. Cade's response was a shrug and an offhanded "this is the only family that matters." gesturing to said photo.

It had taken a lot of digging, but some days later Aerdan found that the man in the photo was Lt. Commander Charles Foster, chief medical officer on the USS BONAVENTURE, a constitution class starship. And so he had queried Cade about his family, and why this one man stood apart from the rest.

Cade's narrative, like so much of his explanations about personal matters, was flippant and flimsy. It left Aerdan filling in most of the holes himself. He had already figured out that Charles was Cade's maternal grandfather - something he thought odd until he did a little more digging. It seems that Cade's father, Admiral Greg Foster was born Gregory Dauntin, the same family as Captain Alaric Dauntin, the infamous traitor of Taloka IV. It seems most of the Dauntin lineage was dirty, with ties to the Orion Syndicate and groups that were (ironically enough) precursors to the Essentialists. No wonder he wanted to drop his name. Cade's mother, Lisa Foster, was career minded - a trait instilled in her by her overachieving mother. And his father was more concerned about his own career than any sort of family life. Meaning Cade spent the earliest years of his childhood tossed from nanny to nanny, most of them deciding to placate the child with plenty of meaningless entertainment and sweets. Mom was there - sometimes. But more often than not she was distracted and focused on her duties. But at least Cade knew her, and he felt bad when she passed away. He barely shed a tear at his father's funeral - he could count on one hand the number of times he had met the bastard.

His father's family were a bunch of stuck-up pricks, and his mother's family was split between Grandmother Margaret who remarried a Federation secretary named Ivacovitch, and Grandfather Charles who never remarried. Grandma Margaret was a stiff woman who didn't know how to smile and forced the spoiled, soft young Cade to study or face her wrath; while Charles Foster was the only real fun Cade knew as a child.

Grandpa Charles was crass, and liberal and gave a hang about rules. He was thoroughly unconcerned about what people thought of him, and thoroughly concerned with having as much fun as possible in the strangest ways. And he broke Cade out from his gilded cage and, ran off and let the kid have fun. In turn, Cade picked up Charles Foster's crass humor, his utter lack of respect for rules and an intensive interest in medicine. Charles was Cade's best and only friend and family up until he suffered a fatal brain tumor and passed away when Cade was in his final year of Starfleet academy.

It was one of the few times Cade Foster had let himself cry. In fact he sobbed, for hours, at the loss of the one person in his life that was a foundation of compassion. He had never quite gained that foundation again in his life, though he was working on trying to build something that came close.

As he ran his hands across the pictures on the wall, this time he didn't cry. Tears of regret weren't worth shedding. But he did pause at the holopicture of the crew of the STONEHENGE, all of them huddled around a campfire roasting marshmallows on ELNAPOLDE. Thomas was there. He had his wings outstretched. Everyone was smiling.

Maybe that was the last time the whole crew smiled together.

He tucked the white feather behind the picture, twining it through a blonde lock of Daisy's hair and turned to the darkness.

"Well beat you. Do you hear me, you Essentialist sons of bitches? We'll beat you."

An impotent curse into the darkness; though perhaps more potent than Cade gave it credit for. Aerdan had told him once that wanting to live was as important as being lucky enough to survive. Cade was sick of death and misery. He wanted to live, and he wanted his Federation back the way it should be, without a bunch of murderous racist dickholes running the show.

Because it was his job to be a dickhole. An amusing, mildly offensive, not killing anyone dickhole. A dickhole that saved lives, mixed drinks and irritated stupid people.

Fuck the Essentialists. He wanted life back the way life was supposed to be. Fuck death and murder and betrayal. Turning, Cade stormed out of his quarters, not sure what the future would bring, but damn sure he was going to see it through.

~*~

Jamie LeBlanc
Lt Commander Cade Foster
Chief Medical Officer
USS Phoenix


"Why do we fly? Because we have dreamt of it for so long that we must"

~Julian Beck