That's what they always say and when I swore it's down

Posted on Mon Jan 31st, 2022 @ 1:50am by Ships Doctor Hiram Maitland M.D. & Evahnae Kohl

Mission: Mission 14: Holoworld
Location: Sickbay
Timeline: Directly following You cut light like you're the knife. MD06 0900
4809 words - 9.6 OF Standard Post Measure

The machine woke first. Chirps, slow and erratic, gradually straightened out as Eva followed into the light. The hyposprays whispered lullabies and Borg drones patched up what they had broken. Nothing made a lot of sense, but the fluorescents filtered in, throwing her body and its fragility into stark relief. Someone was beside her, an electric-eyed boy who found her down in the gallows and put his hands inside her body and commanded her to live.

She almost hadn't.

And then she realized her throat was flexed against something rigid and immovable, and the panic set in. Breathing, I need air- "Try not to move, it's OK," Hiram was on his feet instantly. He brushed her hair over her forehead in a comforting movement and gripped the line of the ventilator at her lips, pulling it out in one long yank. "There you go, I got you. Try to take a few deep breaths. You're OK."

His hand found hers and squeezed gently.

Okay was everything Eva was not.

As the last vestiges of blissful unawareness drifted away, the partial-telepath recalled that she had been dreaming. She was not sure what the dream had been about, only that it had taken place elsewhere and that she had been dead. Which, if you wanted to get right down to it, was a bit of a bummer and not exactly the kindest thing your brain could opt for when you had nothing better to do that bleed everywhere and make machines go brrr. It had been the strange kind of dead where you were still able to move around, but nobody could see you, and there were strangers that you hadn't thought of in years peeking in windows at your corpse, and once in a while one of them would point and say, 'Look at that, she died.' And she'd been angry because she might have been dead but she was still there and there was really no need to point out something so obvious when she couldn't do anything about it.

Somewhere, as her peripheral vision tried to return, a flash of green meant something.

Gagging on a ventilator tube was only marginally worse than having it ripped out, and that tiny amount of very focused discomfort became the catalyst for a much broader understanding that she was on fire. Whatever was floating around in her system was doing a staunch job of controlling the actual pain but the sensation of all the switches being flicked on at once put strain on the fuses that very nearly evoked a second temptation into Dreamland. At least there, she'd only been dead.

Someone started to cough. It was probably her.

In a surprising revelation, Hiram's bedside manner was decent. Distress in these moments was common and he knew what to do to mitigate it; medicine helped, but so did touch-oriented and light, and words, things that she couldn't parse but that she heard nonetheless. And that fuzz from her friend's mind, familiar. He had her hand in his own, the pad of a thumb rubbing across the back of her palm.

Fingertips doing their best to ground her as the Ambizine did its work flushing out those agitated, over-adrenalized nerves. In a surprising revelation, Hiram could be gentle. Because he knew how to be, because for him, it was a skill as much as singing or playing soccer or drumming on-beat. He took readings in-between and encouraged her to breathe against the coughing, deep and into her gut.

Penlight poised, he pulled her eyelids up, shining it to test her pupil response. "Eva, I know this is overwhelming, but I need you to reply to me, OK? Do you know where you are?"

Light in her eyes. The swivel of a head-lamp. Not a lamp though, somehow attached.

Tubes and tubes and more tubes. Mottled skin. Was that her face?

Impact.

Why was she burning?

Trying to wrench her head away probably wasn't any more helpful than screwing her eyes shut but Eva remembered, layers deep, how to be stubborn. Do you know where you are? She wasn't anywhere; she was dead. "Sorry," she croaked, barely a whisper. "I'll get out of the way." And it was gibberish, and she heard it as gibberish, and she squinted once again at the intrusion of light before a tiny barrel of focus pinpointed a target amidst the blur and fuzz of endless bright white. It got her to still, brow furrowed deep, breathes still laboured but conceding, at least, to regulate. Staring at him. The veil of vacancy shifted.

"Die Hard?"

Hiram shifted into focus. He was still in his scrubs, though these ones were clean of Eva's blood. He checked her pressure and pulse manually, smiling down at her. "Yes," he murmured with a small smile. "We were watching Die Hard. Can you tell me your name, and where you are?" he repeated the question patiently, an insistence Hiram typically didn't display, but now it was necessary to gauge her cognitive capacities. She'd been in asystole for five minutes. It was a long code. Soup aside, the concern was legitimate.

Streaks of light through the darkness. She was traveling at warp speed, which was nice. Made things faster. What it didn't do was make it any easier to sift through the random onslaught of images and memories and feelings and perceptions that tried to reassert themselves in a necessary sequence that allowed for no patience. 29 years tried to slam back into place in one hip-and-shoulder and Eva winced, closing her eyes again to wait for it to settle. His questions were simple, they had very simple responses, and somewhere in the quagmire, she was sure that they existed. As her breathing settled into a better rhythm, the disoriented brunette felt the tendrils of a capacity very much under-utilised trickle outwards as one might send search probes as forward reconnaissance; telepathic taps of the cane to check the path ahead. Her mind brushed up against his and the fact that it was so very uncommon didn't matter at all because nothing felt common yet and this, at least, was familiar mush.

"Hiram," she murmured, eyes still closed. "Why am I in Sickbay?"

It was a good sign, at least. Instead of repeating himself, Hiram instead engaged this way, watching her eyes and her face, her muscle tension. "There was an incident on the Holoworld," he replied honestly. Since she had known him he'd not sugarcoated anything for her and even now this was no exception, but he was cognizant of how much she could conceivably process as well. "You were stabbed by one of the holograms. The blade lacerated your liver and we had to perform emergency surgery. Your prognosis looks good, so far. You should make a full recovery." He spoke slow and easy, delivering the information in as bite-size chunks as he could.

Little raindrops of information dripped into the puddle and, as they rippled out, they revealed the details in their immediate vicinity. No actual recollection yet of the specifics of what he was talking about, her mind didn't seem to want to go down that rabbit hole yet. Eva opened her eyes again and, this time far more devoted to trying to make them work, blinked several times at him before nodding faintly. "Okay." Acceptance of the explanation, an indication that she'd understood. There were little fanfares occurring somewhere in the back of her mind but there were too many chemicals vying for control for her to battle through the sluggish, artificial sense of calm to be indignant. Yet. "I feel weird." Closer to a palpable glimpse of familiar personality.

"I know," Hiram told her, dropping his vocal pitch a little lower to convey reassurance. "It is going to feel strange for a bit. You're on some heavy painkillers and anxiolytics. But I promise you that you will be OK. Can you tell me about what you're feeling right now? Any physical discomfort?"

"My head." Which, actually, was a far more frequent symptom than she often let on but Eva had yet to establish the wherewithal to recall how much she didn't talk about that. "It's just a bit loud." It was an accurate description in many ways but not, ultimately, as relevant as, "Hurts, kind of. My stomach." That was less pain and more nausea but she didn't think to draw the distinction. "I'm cold."

Hiram moved to the unit near the back of the partition that looked a little like a fridge with neatly folded blankets in it, withdrawing a warmed one and draping it over Eva carefully, offering her a smile as he did so, setting her arms above it. "You said your head hurts, I've ran some scans and it does look like your psilosynine levels are elevated. I can give you something to help ease that input if you'd like, we have some neutrino blockers aboard. It will assist with the loud." As far as people to tell about the un-tellable, Hiram was the choice one made when they didn't want the person across from them to be fazed. He merely acknowledged what was in front of him, giving it as much due weight as it required, without pity or condescension.

It registered, somewhere, that it was a conversation she was tired of having but it was not the only source of fatigue and Eva chose not to waste energy tracing her reluctance back to its source. Offering nothing more than a nod, she closed her eyes again and tried to assess things objectively. Most of her was probably in pain, though only very low levels were actually breaking through and, even then, she wasn't sure if she was inventing it just because it felt like it should exist. Swallowing was uncomfortable but that was probably just the ventilator's parting gift. Beyond her physical assessment, Eva's mind veered towards the temptation of recollection, a natural curiosity to piece together a perception that filled in the blank between Die Hard and lying here. Fingers crept across the blanket, searching for his hand again. She was...scared.

It took a few moments for Hiram to really catch onto that-but the flash of fear in her eyes registered to him in blaring finality just after he depressed the neutrino blocker into her neck, and he took her hand in both of his, fingers tight and solid. Real. "You will be OK, Eva. You are in my sickbay. That means you will get through this." His eyes crinkled very slightly at their edges, a sigil of significance. Sincerity, the briefest flares. Hiram did not wish for her to be afraid, and he would do what he could do to ameliorate that fear. His eyes met hers, irises flicking back and forth, back and forth, like he was reading invisible words along her face.

"Still say it's more fun as a golf course."

It was something, a spark. Not only a memory that existed further back but a return of the pervasive sense of humour, the relentless pursuit of fun that was far more common than fearful, grasping vulnerability. Her smile was faint and didn't quite work; her eyes were still clouded with fatigue's best efforts to make her cry, but it was heartening to see her try. She'd been zero help when he'd tried to stack away some of the medical supplies they'd grabbed from the crashed ship. Too fixated with trying to hit a bandage into a bedpan...

"Well, I am a doctor. You know that golfing is specifically taught in the fourth year," Hiram joked lightly, leaning into the humor with infinite, fascinating gentleness. Something constructed, artificial, and yet the nature of the impetus to construct it at all pointed to something incongruent with the machine. His eyes flicked back and forth, keeping time.

He folded her fingers up, using her own hand to touch against her heart, and Hiram's touch was-warm, where one might expect coldness from the clinical individual before her. He did not want her to be in pain. Suffering was purposeless, and he had dedicated his life to its ease, in the most inconsequential way as it sometimes turned out to be. You are my friend. You need to be alive. A simple mantra, pulled out of the deep, something that widened his eyes very slightly for its emergence.

Hiram was unaccustomed to the sensation of those links tying him together with another person in such a way. Her death would be a loss, to him, specifically. Evahnae Kohl mattered, she existed in that liminal space that ran its fingertips along the barest surface edges of his ocean and asked want to play? and a curious being as he was, Hiram had jumped inside the pond. Yes, but I don't know how. Will you teach me?

And she had said yes, and threw popcorn at him, and propped her feet up on him, and explained all about old-time aircraft and building construction.

"I don't remember what happened."

Even after his own brush with death, where he'd scared the shit out of her and forced her to dabble in things she normally left well alone, during that meal where he'd first cooked for her and she'd tried her best not to allow her saturated brain to collapse in on itself like a flan in the oven, Eva had not looked brittle. Not like this. She was expressive, that was a given. Outspoken, unapologetic, unperturbed by lack of experience because it wasn't the same as lack of capacity and she had a hell of a time piloting hoppers through unchartered territory. Seemed to thrive on it. It seemed silly to suppose she wasn't capable of a full gamut of emotions because the ones she chose to put on display were so tangible, there had to be more to it, but she didn't seem the type to be overly comfortable with fear. Uncertainty. Her attempts to blink back tears were only marginally successful and she'd be annoyed about that, later, when her normal buoyancy reasserted itself. Right now, the holes in her head were terrifying because if she couldn't remember, how was she supposed to know how much was missing?

"Are we safe here?"

A child's concern. Shadows under the bed. But she couldn't remember and they were parked right next door and something had been coming at them for a long time. She'd felt it. She just hadn't done enough to stop it.

His hand moved to her cheek, cupping his fingers over her lower jaw as he met her eyes. Keeping her afloat amidst the blistering, biting storm. The boat rocked and buoyed, and he did his best to keep them still while the world shone and raged around them. "I don't know, Eva," he murmured. A parent's honesty. "But I will do my very utmost to keep you safe. I promise."

Hiram did not offer promises lightly, because he endeavored to keep his word. That meant promising the tangible, the real. The way statements were phrased, the uncertainty of reality, but the promise existed. That as long as Hiram could maneuver and work, he would work at this. He was a physician, he had promised this. Primum non nocere. Now if I carry out this oath, and break it not, may I gain for ever reputation among all men for my life and for my art ; but if I transgress it and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me.

He was a physician, and Eva was a patient, but beyond that-she was his friend. And this promise was not the promise of a doctor to a patient. It was one being to another, in the dark. The pulses that shivered along in the three pound plate of Jell-O in his mind that said I am a person! I have thoughts! I want to reach out! I want to connect. I want to touch another person and be seen and to see.

It was where they met that they understood the gravity. The distortions, the rippling waves. Small little things at first. He had not been afraid. When it was his turn, he wasn't scared, and Eva knew that. Rael had learned it, too, but it was too great a chasm and he had turned away. Walked in the opposite direction. Hiram had watched him without much feeling at all. His features moved a little, a private smile, the one that she'd come to recognize was distinct to her and her alone.

"I'll teach you how to use the spear," his eyebrows bounced, earnest.

A flash of silver, reflected in the lamp's beam. She'd anticipated it a second too late to do anything about it. His face, mottled flesh, an inch from hers and that single blue eye staring straight through her. Time had held its breath and she'd stared back and mouthed why? and he had not answered and then she was falling. Burning

Her eyes, locked on his, matched his natural metronome. In her case, it was calculation, reconnection, tiny little snippets twisted and turned and shoved back together into images that didn't make any sense. There had been a spear. It had surprised her, twice. Once when it first appeared from a bag that didn't seem big enough to house it, and the second when she had dangled from the end of it, hands clutched around its point of entry as if that would be enough to halt its damage. She had watched him dispatch a man twice his bulk with it and then it had become a symbol of protection, something to rally behind, until it was no long behind but right in front of her, inside of her.

Eva's brow flickered, confusion, an inability to align her mind's eye with what she knew to be true. It had not been him, could not be him. He had nearly died once, and they had brought him back together, and he was different in a way that most others found hard but he did everything right without the constant barrage of psionic noise that usually went along with living one's life. And he had taught her how to cook scrambled eggs and worn a stupid hat, but not a stupid dress, and let her turn his sickbay into a golf course, and he hadn't looked her straight in the eye and stabbed her with the one thing he'd pledged to keep her safe with. He was making promises again and if she was going to believe them, she needed to believe this first.

Not him. Not Hiram. She had no one if not him. How could she explain that feeling of utter loneliness, waiting for him in the darkness? The certainty that, should something have happened to him, she would have eventually perished too because there was nobody else to come for her. Who would have noticed in time? When had she ever established enough predictable routines, or tried hard enough to actually make it seem like she wouldn't mind if people stuck around after last drinks, for people to understand that she was gone until she was truly gone? Somewhere, on a monitor whose job it was to measure such things, Eva's heart-rate increased several notches. No, not him.

"Tell me what happened."

Her voice was a single spider's thread.

He took it slow. "You saw me," he murmured, because that flash of fear had not been random. It was adjacent to the trajectory of her gaze, that which landed on him. A fractured awareness pieced together and spoke to existence, because he believed in facing the world head on. "The simulation manufactured a facsimile of my likeness. It appeared to take the shape of a Borg drone. The holodeck safeties were not engaged and the computer was unresponsive. The projection stabbed you before I was able to dispatch it. I incapacitated the drone moments later and transported you here. We treated you for hypovolemic shock and a hepatic laceration. That means you lost a lot of blood and had an injury to your liver. Due to a severe electrolyte imbalance caused by the blood loss, your heart stopped beating. Myself and Beya worked to resuscitate you and we were successful."

"I died?" A selfish preoccupation perhaps, but for a reason. Of all the information he'd just given her, it was the easiest to process quickly.

"You were in asystole for five minutes," Hiram told her softly. "Whether that qualifies as dead is something subjective even within medical science. My preference is to regard your status as a stage of your injury, that we managed to treat." He paused, recognizing this was somewhat-he shook his head. "What we know of consciousness, and death, we simply cannot be certain."

"So, I died then." She was stubborn and infuriating. Maybe it just helped to think in definitives. The rest of his explanation was a mess in Eva's head. Some of it lined up with what she could recall, the bits and pieces that drifted back down from the ether but fell in no particular order. But there were still things missing and their absence made what she could remember all the more terrifying. She appeared to absorb it, though, eyes still locked on his and completely round. There was nothing remotely non-Betazoid about them now; pitch black orbs that couldn't betray her pupil's dilation. Cosmetic trickery wore off after a while, if you didn't maintain it.

"I remember...it. Stabbing me. I don't remember you though." Eva exhaled slowly, finally a willingness to utilize her own resilience to regulate. "I wish I could. Not being able to remember that you were there too, that you..." Her hand squeeze the heck out of his. "Saved me. Is kind of fucking with me."

"It may come back with time," Hiram said, tightening his fingers carefully in hers, placing his other hand over the top of her palm, a willing touch that didn't often occur with the doctor, but it did now. He tried to reach. "You endured a very traumatic incident. The way our memories splinter in those circumstances is often non-linear, but that does not mean it is lost forever." His head tilted. "Aside from this, I would not-" his hand separated from hers for only a second to gesture idly before returning. "I would not wish that you recall my visage harming you." His lips quirked up, wry. "It is my hope that you know I would never do so under my own volition."

Unfortunately, and she chose not to point out that his remark about the spear had triggered it, being stabbed was about the only recent thing Eva could recall. She was trying not to think about it. Instead, her features relaxed into a smile that was far less impish than she typically favoured and then made up for it by slowly gathering the energy to reach her other arm across her body to flick a nail at the tip of his nose.

"You better not. I know where your off-switch is."

"Indeed so," Hiram's nose scrunched against her finger as he made sure to smile at the entreaty into his personal space, that ever-questing venture into playfulness that sometimes turned him around in little circles. He pressed out the wrinkles of her blanket, checking her vitals once more just to be safe. "I'm going to get you to try and sit up for me," he told her, tugging the old-fashioned stethoscope from around his shoulders and placing the ends in his ears. "Annoying, I know. I will attempt to be expedient." He helped her upright, propped by pillows, and placed the cold metal end under her shirt, along her back where her lungs were. "Deep breath in."

She had to rely on him more than she enjoyed. That was not something to look forward to. Whilst she felt fragile and exhausted, and tender and scared, it was a little easier to just lean into the meekness required for him to bear most of her weight. But the moment the cold diaphragm touched her skin, there was a spark. A promise of things to come.

"Would it kill you to warm that up first?"

Eva breathed in deeply, and shuddered a little as the impulse to cough left her teetering.

"I must keep you on your toes somehow," he returned, fire-wood dry as she remembered.

Notwithstanding that she had been more on her toes of late than any being should be expected. It was a knowing, gentle little twinge. He got her to breathe in a few more times as he assessed her lung function, and adjusted one of the IVs at her side following a consultation of the monitor, and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around her upper arm to tighten slowly before unstrapping it.

"All of your vitals are looking good, Eva. All things considered, you will be convalescent for a little while, but you should recover completely. I am-" his chin tipped up a little, the saccades of his vivid eyes disappearing behind closed lids for a solitary second out of time.

Death was not foreign to Hiram. Having a friend die, was different. He seemed far away, for just a second, paused with the stethoscope against her skin. The metal warmed with her, in time. For just a moment. As though he had glitched, thoughts tumbling over themselves. It lasted but a second before his gaze returned to hers, and he helped her lay back.

"I am very pleased you are here," he made sure to tell her that.

"Hey."

He had her at a disadvantage. Back from the brink, stuck in his Sickbay, forced to confront her own mortality and all the what ifs that came with it; chief of those being what if that had been it? Whether or not she was happy with this as a final chapter should it ever come to it was a whole can of worms for a different day. Eva chose, for now, to contend with the smaller inconveniences. Of gratitude and connection and being real about shit. She could talk the hind leg off a donkey but it was always just stuff. Rambles and frivolity and gibberish. Eva did decidedly worse than even Hiram, sometimes, when it came to speaking from points of vulnerability; left the glitter for the outside and hid the tarnish as best she could. She was too tired for bullshit now though, and found his hand as he lowered her down again to give it a squeeze.

"We're probably even now, right? Stop any time we like. We got this whole save-the-friend thing down to a fine art." Eva smiled, languid to match the slow blink of her eyes. She was drifting. "Doesn't mean I'm going to make you cheesecake though."

He didn't need to be real, he just needed to be here. With her. In this moment. The moments mattered, every individual point. Hiram didn't feel that tug inside that propelled most others toward their destinies, nor the visceral sense of fear and emotion that guided others through their lives. What he had, was his cognition, his logical understanding of events, and that lead him to conclusions. The conclusion that Eva's rambles and frivolity and gibberish were sometimes exactly what the moment needed. Hiram's laugh was pulled from him, a confused jangle of sincerity vibrating in his chest. "Oh, there shall be plenty of cheesecake. You mark my words." He poked her in the chest, his own attempt at playful. "You shall have cheesecake coming out of your ears."

Her eyes had already drifted closed, a faint smile on her lips the last vestige of her response to his threats, other than the gentle murmur of, "Makes a change from my brain at least," before Eva relaxed into a calmer sleep that would ultimately prove healing. This time, she didn't dream of being dead but of shades of green and blue, and songs that worked best as duets, as long as one of you could remember how to keep time.