Disclaimer: I did not create any of the characters in this story. They are the property of the Walt Disney Company. Treasure Planet and all associated characters and settings belong to Disney.

Medicine for Mourning

On again, off again, jabbing and teasing, drifting and falling, that was how sleep came to Amelia for the next three and a half hours. She had returned to her stateroom with every intention of staying awake, but sleep lured her away with temporary solutions to overwhelming problems. She dreamed of running, of home, of mantabirds, naval officers, storms, blackness, and galleons. She had one dream where she was chasing something, one where she was a human marooned on an island somewhere near the Lagoon Nebula, one where she was being pursued across the galaxy by old Procyon enemies. Dozens of dreams, but something was wrong with all of them. In one of the dreams she could fly if she leaped high enough. Mostly asleep, Amelia reprimanded herself for having a pleasant dream when someone somewhere was not dreaming at all. Her mind tumbled from scene to scene, never staying on any one for very long. She saw a strange greenish planet she had never been to before (something missing.) She saw herself swimming in a pond back on her home planet (something not right.) She saw her graduating class at the Interstellar Naval Academy, but none of them had faces (someone missing.) She saw herself and her crew being honored by none other than the queen, herself (he's not there.) Finally, she saw herself standing in the darkness, calling out a name (Mr. Arrow?) Then, still more asleep than awake, she remembered. She remembered more than she would've liked to. He was gone.

Before Amelia's mind could fully retreat to the fleeting shelter of sleep, a timid knock on the door brought her to. Daylight came stabbing at her eyes and she blinked repeatedly.

Doppler was standing outside Amelia's stateroom, balancing a tray with one hand and knocking with the other. He waited in the silence for a few seconds, and then knocked again, quietly.

Amelia pressed her thumb and forefinger on her closed eyes in an attempt to rub away the soreness caused by the sudden onslaught of daylight. She heard a hesitant voice on the other side of the door say "Captain?" It was the doctor. *Go away, Doctor, I'd rather you not see me like this.* Awkward quiet hung about the room for a little while longer, then the door was nudged open just enough to allow Amelia a clear view of the doctor's face.

"Captain... may I... come in, please?" he asked tentatively.

'Doctor, I wish to be left alone, if you don't mind.' was what Amelia set out to say, but there was a sort of sad concern in Doppler's face that changed her words to "Doctor... yes, come in if you like." In saying this, Amelia surprised herself. She didn't want the doctor to take pity on her. She didn't want him to see her red eyes and mussed hair. She especially didn't want him to have to share her burden. But for whatever reason, she had decided to let him come into her stateroom. She placated her mind by telling herself that she was only allowing him in out of a sort of charity, so that he could feel useful.

Doppler entered the room awkwardly, carrying an ornate tea tray on which sat an equally ornate tea set, as well as cakes, scones, jellies, and various other dainties. "I thought you might want something to eat," he said, his tone nearly apologetic. He set the tray on the desk and began to serve Amelia from it. She didn't feel much like eating, but was too tired to put up a fight. She lifted one of the cups from the tray and turned it over in her slender hands.

"This isn't from the galley. Where did you get this?" she asked musingly, though in a voice that sounded thin and stretched.

Doppler blushed a little ", I... brought it with me," he mumbled, passing quickly over the last few syllables, as if Amelia might not notice them if he said them fast enough.

Weary as she was, Amelia found the strength to raise an eyebrow.

"Brought the whole set, actually," Doppler continued ", I, I, I don't know why, really," he stammered, turning redder by the second ", just a bit of sentimentality, I suppose - a little piece of home."

He was now feeling exceedingly foolish. *Just stop talking right now, Delbert* he thought to himself; but the message didn't quite make it from his brain to his mouth. Doppler had discovered early on that when he was faced with a difficult situation, he would do one of two things: he would either say nothing at all for fear of saying the wrong thing, or babble on inanely about some unrelated topic, hoping that the problem might fix itself while he was talking. He was obviously taking the latter approach at the moment.

"Well, it's not the best one I have, of course," he explained ", so I won't miss it too much if it gets lost or damaged. I own twenty-three tea sets, in all. Well, twenty-four, actually, I suppose - counting this one."

Amelia's already arched eyebrow lifted even higher - higher than Doppler thought was physically possible. It seemed to Doppler that the more he tried to explain himself, the more idiotic he sounded.

"All of them are inherited. Family heirlooms, you know. My grandmother was very fond of tea sets; and she left most of them to me. I can't imagine why," he added ", but I just don't know what to do with all of them. I mean, I can't very well get rid of them."

An image of Doppler's home began to form in Amelia's mind. She pictured tabletops that looked suspiciously like tea trays turned upside down, tea cups used as soap dishes and paperweights, tea pots scattered about the place, serving as planters for potted ferns, grouped together and used as candelabras, stuffed full of important papers... A tiny smile tugged lightly at the left corner of her mouth, but exhaustion and despair won out over the silly pictures in her head. Amelia's face set itself into a fairly neutral expression, with just the slightest cast of melancholy about it. She was not showing a tenth of the pain she was feeling that morning.

Doppler had run out of things to say, on the topic of tea sets or otherwise. He cleared his throat and cleaned the lenses of his spectacles on the corner of his vest (even though they weren't dirty.) That uncomfortable silence settled on the room again. His eyes wandered from his perfectly clean spectacles to the floor to the edge of the desk and finally to Amelia. She sat rigidly, with her head tilted slightly downwards, staring deep into the surface of the desk - past it, even. She had long since stopped fiddling with the tea cup and it now sat on the desktop before her. Doppler gingerly lifted the tea pot and filled the cup three- quarters of the way full; he had always believed that problems were best solved over a cup of tea.

"Do you mind if I join you?" he asked, neither expecting nor receiving an answer. He poured a cup of tea for himself, brought an extra chair from the corner of the room, and sat down opposite Amelia. The silence was almost unbearable now. Doppler frantically searched for something he could say that might comfort Amelia, even in some small way. He crafted sentence after sentence in his mind, in phrases ranging anywhere from 'a friend is never really lost, so long as one remembers them' to 'time heals all wounds'. But everything he thought of sounded sappy and clichéd, and nothing he came up with seemed worthy of soothing so great a pain.

Amelia had hardly moved since setting down the tea cup. It was clear that she intended to eat none of the food Doppler had set before her. She watched the steam rise off her tea and wondered what it might've been like for Arrow at the very end. A host of simple - almost childish - questions came to mind. Does it hurt? Is it like going to sleep in one place and waking up in another? Can you remember anything of your old life? Do you get to look back down on the people you knew? Do you get to ask about the great mysteries of life, or do they even matter to you anymore? These were questions she thought she'd left behind a long time ago - questions she'd dismissed as silly and juvenile - but she now saw how desperately important they were. Her eyes were drawn to the large map of the etherium on her wall. *I know every inch of that map - but I don't really know anything about this galaxy or any other.* She had spent far too much time navigating the heavens and far too little time thinking about them.

Things were not going as well as Doppler had hoped. *Well, what did you expect, Delbert - that she'd run crying to your arms and you'd be able to solve all her problems with a few words and some tea?* He felt more inept, more useless, and more of a burden to the captain than ever. Amelia was as intimidating to Doppler sitting there in contemplative silence as she was in her fiercest mood. This woman was an enigma, capable of both accepting and rejecting his care for her in the same word, the same glance. She was by turns stoic and teasing - and always incredibly difficult to read. She was a challenge to him in every sense of the word.

Amelia's eyes were still sore. She had hoped that the faint ache would subside once she had a chance to adjust to the light, but it didn't. Throughout the doctor's rambling, unrehearsed monologue about his tea sets, her eyes had been sore. When he had joined her at the desk, her eyes still pained her. Now the ache was accompanied by a dull throbbing in her head. It was becoming more than a mere irritation. It permeated her reason, eavesdropped on her thoughts, and wrapped her mind in a blurry cocoon. She felt her capacity for logic slowing like a stream in the cold months - not frozen, but hindered. Maybe, maybe if that incessant ache would only leave her she could reason her way out of this entire situation. Perhaps thoughts could stand in for tears, and logic could carry her out of her own despair. *Perhaps... but this blasted throbbing!* Amelia pressed her right hand over her eyes, trying to will the pain out of her head.

When he saw the captain bring a hand to her eyes, Doppler's only thought was that she must be crying silently, and was too proud to allow him to see her tears. He laid his hand on her left wrist. Doppler often used this sort of a gesture when trying to comfort someone; it was something of a default reaction. This was the kind of gesture that would've had Sarah opening up to him like a flower.

Eyes wandering deep into the shadowy cavern created by her palm, Amelia searched for relief, but did not find it. She was soon too far away from her chair, her stateroom, her ship to ever feel the doctor's hand upon her wrist. She was kept well enough occupied stumbling upon thoughts she hadn't even realized she was thinking. In a self-guided tour through the deepest reaches of her psyche she discovered irrational and sometimes frightening things. She found, for instance, one thought that condemned her, yelling that Arrow's blood was on her hands. *You sent him to his death! You lured him away from a promising career in the navy to go gallivanting across the etherium as your first mate, and look how it ends! And wasn't it you who ordered him up into the rigging? And wasn't it you who trusted that Hawkins boy to secure the lifelines?* Another thought, speaking in a saccharine voice that sounded too much like her aunt's, suggested that she take this incident as a sign that she really ought to stop playing captain, and start living as a normal, respectable lady. *You've had your fun, dear, but now you see how dangerous this 'captain' business really is. See, people can get hurt. This is why respectable women don't sail off and pretend that they understand how to command a ship. Now, wouldn't it be nice just to settle down and forget all this 'captain' nonsense?* Yet another thought beckoned to her, offering a persuasive argument as to why and how she should end her own life *...and you float away into the etherium, as easy as that.*

Having heard quite enough from her own mind for the moment, Amelia fought her way through deep-buried notions, bent on returning to the here and now. For a breathless moment, she was afraid that these awful thoughts would overtake her and she wouldn't be able to make it back. She faltered as one about to fall from a ledge, grasping for anything she could lay hold of to pull herself back to the real world. Much to her relief, she found something to latch on to: a hand, a hand that had been touching hers - she now realized - the entire time.

*Of course it's the doctor; who else would it be? Though I had hoped that maybe... Never mind. It was a silly thought anyways.* Doppler's hand was a pleasant weight upon hers. This was a sort of comfort that she was unused to. Arrow had never been one for unnecessary physical contact. On the rare occasion that Amelia needed encouragement, he would offer her a quote from a philosopher or some other bit of wisdom he had accrued in his many years. Doppler's approach was not better than Arrow's, exactly, but very different - simpler. Amelia soon found herself toying with the idea of telling the doctor everything that had been plaguing her mind since the accident, and perhaps even telling what had transpired between her and Mr. Hawkins. *But wouldn't that be all too easy? I've been trained to know how to deal with this sort of thing. I should be able to handle this on my own. I am, after all, the captain. And who is he? Just some pampered, land-locked academic, nothing more.*

Doppler didn't even notice when Amelia made the leap from her mental world back to reality. He had no idea of how she'd been violently churning on the inside - couldn't sense the metaphoric demons in her head. To Doppler, she seemed pretty well in control of herself, all things considered. *She must be hurting, though. A person just doesn't go through something like this without experiencing a tremendous amount of pain.* He hadn't come up with that perfect sentence yet and, doubting that he ever would, decided to offer her what little consolation he could, be it well-phrased or not. "I know it hurts now, but - in time - everything will be alright." He said gently, stroking her hand.

There was something in the doctor's voice that Amelia didn't like. Apart from the fact that the phrase he had chosen was a rather bland cliché, Amelia detected something like pity in his voice. No, it wasn't something like pity, it was pity. How dare he pity her! He who packed tea sets on voyages, who couldn't manage to stand upon his own two feet for more than a few seconds in any sort of rough sailing, who could hardly speak without making a fool of himself! He had the nerve to pity her, and the gall to tell her that everything would be alright! How would he know? Amelia's other hand dropped away from her face. Her green eyes flashed open. The muscles throughout her back and shoulders tensed as if she was some predatory beast and this platitude the doctor had set before her was prey to be pounced upon and rent apart.

"Damn it, Doctor, don't patronize me!" she shouted, slamming a fist down on her desk and causing her tea cup to tremble and quiver before her. "Everything will be alright, will it?!" She sprang to her feet and charged about the room in a tight, but misshapen semicircle. She most likely would've overturned her chair had it not been anchored by a brass pole extending down into the floor. She settled for slashing a bit of the upholstery as she passed. "No! No, it won't be alright! It isn't alright now, and it will never be alright! Do you understand me? Never!"

Fuming, she turned on her heel and pierced the doctor with a scorching glare. "And I'll thank you to stop acting as if your commiseration can fix anything! Oh yes," she continued in a voice steeped in venomous sarcasm ", you can just stride in here and make everything alright. 'There, there' and a little pat on the hand and everything will be fine. And I suppose I should be grateful that an accomplished scholar such as you is taking the time to help a poor, frantic woman like myself."

Amelia was aware all the while that she was hurting the doctor, but rather than stopping her, that knowledge drove her further. The sarcasm now drained away from her voice and left her tone deadly serious, and still smoldering with fury. She had more or less pinned Doppler up against her desk. With each word she continued to advance toward him, forcing him to retreat by gradually climbing backwards onto the desk. "Here it is, plain and simple, Doctor: I don't need your sympathy, I don't need your condolences - I don't need your tea! And I don't need your help! As a matter of fact, since we've started out on this voyage, you've been nothing but --"

Two things happened simultaneously just then: a crash interrupted the captain, and Doppler finished her sentence for her in his head (*...a burden.*) Doppler didn't mind the first of these much. It was more or less an accident, at any rate. In shrinking away from the captain, he had unknowingly nudged his tea set closer and closer to the edge of the desk until it had toppled to the ground and shattered, breaking all but the two cups and saucers and the few small plates he had set aside for the captain and himself. He wasn't too upset about his broken tea set. It was one among many he owned, and its absence would hardly be sorely felt once he returned home. It was the other thing that really troubled him; it was what Amelia had said, and what she had intended to say.

Maybe Doppler had started out on this voyage hoping that he would be an invaluable asset to the captain and crew - not a hero, exactly, but close. Maybe he just wanted to prove himself to the captain because she was so very difficult to please. Whatever the case, his fear that he was merely dead weight to Amelia had been confirmed. He wondered to what degree the captain spoke from pain and blind rage, and to what degree she really meant what she said. Had her fury created hurtful things for her to say, or only revealed her existing opinion of him? He had no way of finding out. Amelia was a door slammed shut in his face; and he wasn't entirely sure that he was brave enough to venture close to her again, even if she would give him the chance.

Doppler had always been quick to forgive, though, and wanted to at least give the captain the benefit of the doubt. After all, she had just lost her closest friend - that must be taken into the equation. He put away his own feelings of hurt and rejection, promising himself that he would address them at a more appropriate time, and focused once again on Amelia. The shattering crash had frozen her where she stood, poised over him. Her eyes were wide and wild, with dilated pupils that lay like black pools of oil in the center of her irises. Her breathing came shallow and quick. She had the look of someone who'd just been shaken out of a nightmare.

A silent and forceful tension pervaded the room; anything beyond an easy breath might break it. But what would happen once the tension was gone was more than the doctor could guess. However, it was a risk that he was willing to take. *Anything but more silence.* Both his and the captain's eyes moved simultaneously to the remnants of his inherited tea set, each person wondering what the other was thinking. *Anything. Anything but silence...* Doppler thought over and over, mustering what little courage he had left. "Well," he said at last in a light, almost careless voice ", I've got twenty-three more at home." He then offered a timid smile to Amelia as a gesture of good will.

Amelia at first looked a little puzzled. She backed away slightly from Doppler, allowing him to climb off of her desk and stand upright. Then her muscles began to relax themselves and a faint smile brushed her lips. That image she'd conjured up of the doctor's home returned now, with fresh vivacity. She began to smirk just a little at the thought. Within a few seconds, the smirk turned to a chuckle, and then to a full-blown laugh.

The laughter rose - now doubling itself, now tripling itself. She laughed harder than she had in a long time. She laughed until tears streamed down her cheeks. *It wasn't that funny, was it?* Doppler thought, a little shocked that his humble quip went over so well with a woman as witty as Amelia. As the laughter continued, however, it began to take on a different colour, sounding more frantic than pleasant.

Somewhere between the end of one peal of laughter and the gasp of breath taken to produce the next one, a mournful cry found a window of opportunity and lost no time in escaping. Shoulders that had hitherto shaken with laughter now heaved with sobs. Amelia bit her lip hard to stifle what she could of the cries, but succeeded only in producing a bead of blood that gleamed red on her lower lip. Embarrassed and angry and broken all at once, she turned to Doppler.

"I want him back!"

Once again, Doppler's words failed him; but he was beginning to realize that words were not what the captain needed at the moment. He was surprised when she didn't pull away. When she leaned the whole of her weight on him, he was surprised by how light she was. Sharp nails dug lightly into his shoulder blades. Amelia let go of everything - everything except the doctor. Tears and a solitary drop of blood stained the front of Doppler's fine burgundy coat. The broken tea set lay quite forgotten by his feet.

Her sobs were high and tight, and sounded something like screams heard from a long way off. Doppler didn't try to say anything. He just smoothed her hair and let her cry, Lord knows, she'd held it back for long enough. Amelia's body twitched with uneven breaths: now a deep gasp of air, now nothing at all, now four or five quick breaths stumbling on top of one another, making her cough. Gradually, gradually, she re-learned how to breathe, and within the space of a few minutes she had found the right rhythm again. She felt lighter now - drained of some vile poison that had been burning away at her throat, her stomach, her lungs for hours, though she had refused to recognize it. For a few moments she felt wonderfully empty.

Pulling away from the doctor at last, Amelia immediately gathered the remnants of her shattered façade and began to piece them together again into a loosely knit veil of haughtiness. In her head, she berated herself for losing her composure. *You, the captain, sniveling like that! And in front of the doctor, too! What would Arrow have thought of you if he could've seen you weep like a child?* She meant it as a rhetorical question, but her mind came back with an answer - one that rather surprised her. Something told Amelia that, as much as Arrow valued decorum and self- control, he would have thought no less of her for crying the way she did. *There are some things that supersede propriety.* Yes, she was almost certain this was what he would say. It was a great comfort to her and she eased off a bit on lecturing herself about proper conduct.

Though Amelia now felt better in one regard, a sort of embarrassment had crept over her. She could hardly look the doctor squarely in the eye. He had been privy to something that very few others had ever seen - maybe as few as two or three, maybe even as few as one. Certainly, he had lost no respect for her because of her outburst of emotion, but Amelia was still too abashed to even look at him. She did a marvelous job of hiding this, as she now had control of herself again, but it still perturbed her. She had no real reason to feel ashamed, but she did all the same. It was illogical; that was what bothered her. In an attempt to nonchalantly avoid Doppler's glance, she stooped to pick up the remnants of his once opulent tea set.

"Sorry about this," she said matter-of-factly.

"It's alright, really. I have too many of them anyways," he answered, crouching down to join her in plucking shards of bone china off the hardwood floor.

"Don't bother, I've got it," she said more sharply than she'd intended to, waving him away with her hand.

Deciding he should choose his battles wisely, Doppler rose obediently to his feet and allowed Amelia to clean up the mess by herself. When the last bits of china had been tossed in the rubbish bin and the cream and tea had been mopped from the floor with four large linen handkerchiefs, Amelia spoke to the doctor as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

"Thank you for breakfast, Doctor - very considerate of you. And I am sorry about your tea set." She spoke in short, dry syllables, never once allowing Doppler to sense the embarrassment that still jabbed at her when she looked his way. She was generally very adept at concealing things like that. "Well, if you'll excuse me now, I do have a ship to run," she continued, all business ", I'm already running a little late this morning, and I want to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in this voyage."

Doppler was baffled by this sudden turnaround. The tears, the gasping, shuddering sobs - did they mean nothing now? How was she able to leap so quickly from being in agony to looking the perfect picture of composure? For some reason, he had the feeling that she hoped he'd forget all that had just occurred as one forgets a dream upon waking, dismissing the once all too real images as mere products of a subconscious granted too much free time. Amelia had confounded him time and time again since he'd met her. When he thought she was going to sit, she stood. When she was walking ahead of him and he was sure that she was going to turn right, she turned left. Now, when he was so certain that this encounter had changed the way she viewed him, she acted as if everything was just the same as it had been since the beginning of the voyage.

"I expect you'll want these," Amelia stated briskly, handing Doppler the few items of his tea set that still remained in tact.

Before Doppler even had the chance to respond, he found himself being escorted - politely but swiftly - to the door. Amelia allowed the doctor to step out of the stateroom first, then followed him, pausing only momentarily to take a breath before she strode across the threshold. She stood straight and tall as ever; had the doctor not seen firsthand the way she'd whimpered, he would never have believed it.

"Captain, are you going to be alright?" Doppler inquired, still puzzling at how quickly she had regained her composure. He had become vaguely concerned by that nearly instantaneous change in her demeanor.

"Yes, Doctor. I will be alright." Her voice had softened almost imperceptibly. She wanted to add one more word to that reply, but couldn't bring herself to do so.

*Yes, Doctor. I will be alright - now.*

Author's Note:

First of all, I have to thank Vic and Team Bonet for helping me through a bout of writer's block. They gave me a lot of good suggestions when I was stuck about three pages into the story. I might not have ever finished my story without their help. Thanks also to Tigrin and Team Bonet, for giving me feedback on title ideas. And an extra-special thanks to Vic, who was the one who suggested I write this story in the first place, and who saw me through all the way to the end.