Tough Love

Posted on Mon Apr 24th, 2023 @ 1:04am by Petty Officer, 2nd Class Vithi D'Kiva & Vasha

0 words; about a 1 minute read

Mission: Mission 3: The Peace Ship
Location: USS Midway - various locations
Timeline: Just after the crash

Whatever the hell they'd done up there on the bridge: those fancy over-educated officers with their impressive braid, they'd wrecked a good part of the interior of the ship. Vast swathes of the craft's interior were untouched, people had just felt a jolt and were now tidying up spilt drinks, equipment and other objects. Other sections, like the one she was picking through at the moment, were wrecks.

She flipped the hand-held communicator.

"Chief. D'Kiva. Yeah, I'm in the psychiatry section now, er... Doctor T'Mora's Office apparently. I got a lot of fallen containers and a collapsed internal bulkhead partitioning wall..." she knelt down in the mess by a supine figure in blue and another in red. A woman and a man. She scanned for signs of life.

"I got a dead Vulcan woman and a dead human male... oh geez, it's Sowande, Chief. Yeah, Sowande bought it. That's... oh... wait a minute, I'm getting life signs from under a pile of debris..." she flipped the communicator and stumbled over the fallen metal and wood and plastic and hefted up a an old fashioned bookcase which had once lent the room an intellectual ambience.

The first effort defeated her, but she braced her muscular legs and readied her hands under the shelf and took a big breath and gave a shout like a weightlifter as she managed to pull the heavy item up and off... off what? what was this creature?

She knelt, green fingers brushed plaster and dust from an strange face and felt along the neck of where a human, or an Orion's, carotid artery would be. The tough security woman felt something there at least. Some beat of some outlandish alien heart.

She flipped her communicator again.

"I got a... a civilian down here, hurt pretty bad, I need a med team with an anti grav stretcher now! What? Er, geez... I don't know... I don't know what race or species, chief. But she's a woman... she's definitely a woman."

The first thing she saw when the smallest, faintest sliver of consciousness re-entered Vasha's brain was the burning sensation she felt all over her body. She'd broken stuff, her brain thought dimly. What exactly she might've broken she couldn't recall, not when she felt so weak that merely pulling herself to a sitting position sent fire through her lungs and felt like fighting the gravity of a black hole. "Rrrrgh. Mrrr..." God, she couldn't even form words, her throat felt like she'd just drank liquid fire, it was so dry and parched.

Wait. Was someone standing over her? She could barely make out the outline of a long, shapely leg with green skin stuffed into black Starfleet boots inches from her head. "Hhh. Who- who are you?" She managed.

The strange alien woman was stirring, D'Kiva quickly knelt down beside her and tried to stop her moving around too much.

"Shhh, hey sweetheart, easy. Don't try and move now, y'hear?" the Orion woman cooed. It sounded odd to her own ears. She wasn't used to cooing! "I'm here to help you. I'm..." Nobody called her by her first name, including herself, but it came out now: "... Vithi. There's been an accident. The ship is OK, but a few people have been hurt: you're one of them. Now... no, no, shhhhh, just you lie still now, OK?"

The creature was clearly distressed, physically and emotionally. He world had just collapsed and fallen down on top of her, literally.

Her words came out all wibbly and scratchy, like she'd not drank water in days. "Whhh. T- T'Mora- where..." She would've turned her head around to look, had it not felt like it weighed a billion pounds. At least help had come, right? She assumed this green-skinned person was her help, at least, and she hoped dimly that she wasn't entirely wrong.

"Shhhh, you lie still now, honey." D'Kiva said calmingly, stealing a glance at the dead Sowande and T'Mora. "She's been a little bit hurt, but my friend's with her, all right?"

Maybe she should have moved on, searching the rest of the rooms, but she elected to stay with the odd alien female: somehow she thought she might die if she were left alone, as if just the redskirt's presence was sustaining her. She was glad her tough colleagues, amongst whom she considered herself one of the toughest, couldn't see her now: stroking the lanky oddly-skinned woman's bald head and face, shushing her when she tried to speak, talking her back down when she fitfully tried to get up or look around.

After an age, the blue-clad med team arrived and expertly lifted Vasha onto the anti-grav stretcher, which was a little too short for her, an extension had to be employed. The time came to let go of Vasha's hand. "All right, sweetheart, you're in good hands now." she bade her farewell, before looking at the medic who would take the Kelpien off to the by now exhausted doctors in Sickbay,

"Hey, make sure she sees Slattery!" D'Kiva barked. "Guy's kind of a dick, but he knows his shit when it comes to Xenos." she demanded.

+++++

When Vee next came to, she was no longer in the wreckage of T'Mora's office. Rather, she now lay on what she recognized to be a sickbay biobed, beeping and whirring as it monitored her continuously. Her body no longer hurt at least, feeling more soft and tender than achy, and she'd mysteriously changed into a hospital gown at some point. Not that she was exactly complaining, mind. "Ghhh. How-" A slow, painful turn of her head to the side revealed that she had someone sitting next to her - a well-endowed Orion woman in red Operations uniform. "Whhh- Where's doctor T'Mora?" She managed, weakly.

D'Kiva gave the kind of sad weary smile which is so often a harbinger of bad news. She cut to the chase, she knew no other way.

"Vasha, I'm sorry, but Doctor T'Mora didn't make it. There was a ship-wide accident and I'm afraid she died." the security woman, who looked half dead with fatigue and covered in dust herself, held out a hand and squeezed that of the Kelpien woman.

"Dead?" Vasha's large blue eyes grew misty. "No. No, no, no, it can't be, no... we were just helping mister Sowande, we..." Her throat choked up with emotion, and she began to weep softly. "Please. You're kidding, right? Right?"

She was dog-tired and needed to hit the sack, but she would be there for as long as the woman she had rescued for as long as she needed to be.

Vee forced her breathing to still and wiped her eyes dry - not without quite some effort and a lot of pain. Every part of her body still felt soft.

At least now she was audible and coherent, and her throat felt less dry. "How did I get here?"

"The office you were in collapsed and they brought you out of there on an anti-grav stretcher..." she didn't mention her part in the operation "... Doctor Slattery's been working on you for an hour, patching you up; you were in pretty bad shape." She knew enough about losing friends in combat and dangerous operations like landing parties to know the pain of 'survivor's guilt'. Somehow that never felt quite as bad if you had at least taken a hit yourself, if not a fatal one.

"Can I get you anything? A drink?" she asked "Nurses pretty much have their hands full." she jerked a thumb at a blueskirt hurrying past holding a bedpan.

Collapsed. Accident. Patching you up. So she had gotten pretty badly injured. That explained the tenderness she felt over her entire body, anyway, and honestly it felt crappy. Just plainly crappy. Vasha hated feeling powerless and unable to help, but as things stood, well, she was going to have to do just that for now. "Water will do." She croaked. "My throat feels dry. I don't know if that's from crying or... or... something else." She squeezed the Orion's hand, grateful for the moment for the contact of someone who'd at least bothered to make sure she was alright. "If you please."

She watched the Orion putter off, leaving her alone for the moment. It was then that the tears came, ugly and heaving, and she buried her face in her hands lest the medical staff see. What was she supposed to tell her university now? That her mentor had died and she was now left hanging? They'd call her back immediately, or find someone new and transfer her back to where she and T'Mora first met. And she'd hated that place the moment she set hoof in it. Please, god, anywhere but there.

The Orion girl returned with two cups of water, which was nice. Showed she was willing to stick around if the tall Kelpien wanted to talk, or just to have someone there with her.

"Here ya go." she said as she put the vessel on Vasha's side-stand.

"I'll get the doctor to come and see you when I sport him. Tell you what's been done." she promised, but that would be a while, they were so over-run. The securitywoman picked a safe area of conversation, or so she hoped.

"So you civilian or fleet" she asked, not commenting on Vasha's recently shed tears.

"I'm not with Starfleet. I was doctor T'Mora's aide." Vasha murmured between sniffles as she sipped from her glass of water. She appreciated this Orion for staying with her, even in spite of not knowing her from before today... was it today or now tomorrow, she wondered. Regardless, her being here made her evening; she'd have to repay her somehow one day, she reckoned.

"I'm a psychology student in her final year. I'd finish my internship with the doctor and graduate. Guess that's not happening for a while." Vasha's voice was wibbly with emotion, mostly grief, as she spoke.

D'Kiva tried to give her a reassuring smile but wasn't entirely convinced it would have that effect. She reached out her hand again. "Hey, there's all the time in the worlds to think about that... you're not going to decide that tonight. You've been badly hurt, suffered a massive shock... any decision you make tonight isn't worth a snap. So try not to think about it. Just get better."

She patted her long bony hand.

"Will you promise me that? Just for tonight, if I promise to stay?" the exhausted redskirt asked.

"Yeah," For the briefest moment a tinge of annoyance flashed across the Kelpien's craggy features; what exactly had this Orion thought she was going to do in her current state of mind? Hurl herself out the airlock just because her supervisor, sorry, mentor, had just died? Pssh, no. She may have been grieving but she wasn't fool enough to do that!

"You look like someone put you through a wringer or... or... something. You look tired. Rest if you're tired, okay? But... thanks for being here. Vasha's voice trailed off, and soon she was sound asleep, face streaked with the paths of tears.

D'Kiva wasn't exactly emotionally intelligent and was. perhaps, a little too imbued in a mindset of 'toughing it out' redolent in her role as a security woman. Either way, she left the recumbent alien creature feeling slightly miffed and put out; like she'd been summarily dismissed. Maybe she was just tired, but she didn't think she'd go out of her way to look up the lanky xeno again.

 

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