Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic

Posted on Mon Jan 31st, 2022 @ 4:29am by Evahnae Kohl & Ships Doctor Hiram Maitland M.D.
Edited on on Mon Jan 31st, 2022 @ 4:39am

Mission: Mission 14: Holoworld
Location: Sickbay
Timeline: MD06 1400
10834 words - 21.7 OF Standard Post Measure

An explosion woke her up.

It surprised her, as one might expect a significant detonation would, especially one that made the ground beneath you shake and free-standing partitions fall over, and Christmas lights suddenly swing precariously from where they'd been dislodged, the hooks that strung them along the cornices not strong enough to battle the world's sudden intent to fall entirely to pieces. It was a disconcerting way to arrive at full alertness, gasping and jolting upright, though you didn't actually move because you were pretty firmly anchored on a bed and strapped to machines that gave new meaning to the word incessant. Jolting upright was more or less a metaphor for the way your heart disengaged from your body just long enough to turn several somersaults in the air and then smash back into your chest. Come to think of it, explosion was also not to be taken literally. It had woken her but it also hadn't actually been real.

At least she hadn't been dead this time.

A long intake of air through her nose allowed Eva to pause and accept the fact that she was now awake by blinking fuzzily at the overhead lights and then releasing the breath slowly to relax. Consciousness arrived more or less as a coherent package this time, explanation falling into place swiftly as she recognised where she was and immediately recalled the conversation that had explained why. She'd been asleep a while. Nearly dying, having also spent weeks battling with a vicious bout of insomnia, would do that to you. As she adjusted to the demands on her senses, Eva scanned the immediate vicinity for signs of the familiar and frowned at the assortment of stuff that had appeared in her partial absence. A PADD, a glass of water and a box of tissues seemed the most practical. Where had an entire television come from though? It wasn't hers, still set up in her quarters presumably, it wasn't big enough. Someone had pinned a drawing of two stick figures with speech bubbles over their head that read 'blah blah blah' to the screen. Her sketchpad and pencils, the ones she kept under the bar and not the more personal ones from her room, sat on top of the appliance. A deck of cards. Someone had folded an origami flower.

Slowly, struggling to get her hands in the right position to manage it, Eva edged herself up to a compromise between sitting and laying down and stretched to reach the glass of water.

At first she was alone, but it became clear that it was alone amongst the bustle; her bio-bed laid behind a partition that separated her from the rest of sickbay and afforded her some measure of privacy, but not so much that she couldn't hear Beya, Oliver and Hiram flitting about in pursuit of their duties, most of which was maintaining order in the sickbay itself and as Eva's circumstances had elucidated-ensuring that everything that required clearance and replication was properly within reach. And then he'd taken it upon himself to-there was no other word for it, fret, and now Eva found herself in possession of a great many possessions.

Alongside toiletries, socks with funky patterns on them, a stasis unit with cookies and milk inside, a charging device, and a giant fuzzy purple bear that was probably the size of Eva. It had a tag that indicated it had been, ahem, liberated from -mer Children's Hospital and a little logo of a shield that included a crayon-drawn city skyline beside, faded after many years. The bear had a bow-tie and wore a bandana over its head. A box of chocolate. The good stuff, definitely replicated, but someone had done their research and figured out that Rixx was famous for its exported bitter-dark confectionary.

It only took about five minutes from the time Eva awoke until a blond head poked itself into her convalescent space, and seeing she was awake, Hiram stepped more fully inside. "Good afternoon," he greeted her, holding a PADD in one hand on which he tapped in her biosign values before placing it back into the pocket of his shirt-he'd since changed out of the scrubs and into a light button-down and khakis. "It is good to see you are awake. How are you feeling?"

"Confused." Already, her tone sounded much sturdier than their previous conversation, which seemed reasonable. Being attacked, stabbed, dying, these were all traumatic experiences and would play out in their own way regardless of Eva's preferences in certain respects, but attitude was imperative to recovery and Eva had never presented as the type to wallow. She certainly did not present with all the usual hallmarks of victim either. Her hand shook as she took a sip, which annoyed her, but that was just something for her willpower to work on. She raised her eyebrows at the doctor. "I went to sleep in a sickbay and woke up in a gift shop."

Hiram's lips pursed dryly. "I knew that you would not make a full recovery without Purple-I was a creative child-and several well-placed works of art." He indicated the blahs and the little origami cranes, flowers, and geometric shapes. "Fortunately, I was on the scene, and you are out of the woods."

"And into the madhouse."

With another tentative shuffle, Eva tried to find an upright position that didn't put too much pressure on her recent injury site and centred her focus initially on the bear. The signs of age indicated longevity of acquaintance before she even had to consider the fact that the name was apparently a childish whim, and the implication that Hiram had brought the thing with him struck his friend as significant, in some way. That had a knock-on effect to the perception of it as a gesture now, and she smiled faintly. "So is there anything left in your quarters?"

"Some odds and ends," his head ducked to one side and then the other, and he moved to help her reach a seated position more easily. "I suppose I shall have to sleep here, for the time being. You thought you had gotten rid of me, but alas," his brows bounced right back. He sat down on the chair across from her, straight-backed with his hands folded primly on his lap. "In actuality, you should be due for release from sickbay within the next day or so. You are progressing well," he made sure to tell her.

"Like any of us believe you didn't already sleep down here." Sleep was a stretch. Having been more or less a terrible advocate for the act herself recently, Eva only knew that it had never been particularly difficult for her to seek him out at all hours. He'd never asked why she was still awake and she'd returned the favour. "When can I go back to work?" This question, considering her personality, didn't seem very unusual. Staying idle wasn't Eva's idea of fun and now there was the added complication that having nothing else to do left her with far too much thinking time.

"Concretely, I would say a few days, and predicated on light duties only at first. Our technology has come a long way but you are required to rest, and heal. Collapsing at the bar and sustaining a head injury would not be my preference." It was dry, but soft. "My recommendation is to play it by ear, and see how the next few days progress. I know you are keen to return to the bar, but we must balance that with what is realistically feasible."

A few days were better than a week, and timelines could be renegotiated. As of right now, Eva was very accepting of her lack of capacity to stand upright for more than a few minutes, let alone open the bar for as long as she had been. It was a goal, however, something to focus on. Something that wasn't...

Her dark eyes found his and, for a moment, she just gazed at him.

Even though she had spent most of a quite a number of hours asleep, there had been layers to that sleep that had allowed for moments of meandering reflection. During the lightest stages, Eva had listened to the sounds of people moving around and tempted herself with trying to remember some of the details that were still a little hazy, but after a while, she had also allowed her mind to drift towards a reality that existed outside of her own, though intricately connected. When she'd first woken up, she had been very fixated on the immediacy of her injury and the reason for her feeling as, frankly, shit as she had. Eva had that explanation now and couldn't do more with it other than process it and attempt to move on. There were more things missing though, other pieces of information and revelation that possibly made her a little awkward for not having asked sooner, but such was the nature of self-preservation. She'd made herself an expert at disconnecting before the connection got too strong. Made a habit out of holding her tongue when she really probably ought to speak. He had her at a disadvantage again; stuck in his room of memories. Already less inclined than she'd been in a while to just flee.

"Are you okay?"

"I am all right," Hiram told her with a nod. She had never known him to not be all right, even inches away from death himself. "But I appreciate your asking," he said, smiling with closed lips, it was uncertain if it was genuine but it wasn't-and hadn't ever been, a hostile gesture. Being hostile, being rude, or displaying anything other than his patented stare of neutrality didn't appear in Hiram's capacity both as a physician (though it was sometimes taken the wrong way, sustained interaction with him ordinarily proved otherwise) and, more recently, as a friend. "My primary goal is to ensure that you return to stability."

"That's a very nicely packaged response." Nearly dying hadn't damaged her deadpan. "Maybe I'll rephrase it then." Eva held up a finger. "Were you hurt?" A second finger. "Was anything damaged?" An eyebrow raised, and then a third finger. "And did I call you anything I need to take back?" This finally broke her expression, a wry smile that didn't reach the worried expression in her eyes. He could be as blasé as he wanted, or rather as blasé as he was, but having established the status of her intimate surroundings, Eva was determined to focus on the next layer out. She still couldn't recall what they'd spoken about, if anything at all, before he'd been forced to cut into her.

He held up one finger. "I was not injured." A few bruises, easily patched. Two fingers. "My pair was damaged, but it has been retrieved and Mr. Burnstein is working to fix it." Three fingers. "No," his head shook once, and this time the response was softer. "You told me a little bit about your love life. I told you about my ex. Nothing that I believe you require to take back." Certainly nothing Hiram would have held against her, given it was his own visage she'd watched stab into her.

Eva had latched onto his outright honesty since the start, clung to it as a small marsupial would its mother, but there were definitely times when it blew up in her face. She grimaced. "We talked about what? Oh god, you poor bastard." Laughing hurt, and so she coughed instead and then tried to stop that because it wasn't much better. "Wait, what did I tell you?" Dying was easy; this was scarier.

"You did not tell me anything specific," Hiram promised. "Merely that you had dated some jerks, I believe the phrase was. My condolences," he added, bowing his head wryly. "But I did not mind hearing about it," he assured, meeting her eyes.

"Oh, so I went for understatement then."

The roll of her eyes saw Eva sink back still clutching the glass of water, having unconsciously pulled herself up in tension that was no longer necessary. There wasn't a whole lot of bitterness to her tone, which did tend to suggest that perhaps there was more balance to her private life than the shock of blood-loss had allowed for. It did make the brunette frown faintly, puzzled if not also a little perplexed. Of all the things to have brought up whilst severely injured, her previous dating catalogue seemed...kind of irrelevant.

"I'm annoyed I can't remember all the juicy stuff about your dalliances as a mysterious heartthrob though." Nestled back against the pillows, Eva looked tired and pale but her eyes danced with a familiar sense of mirth at his expense. "All that effort to dig up dirt and I got distracted by dying." Flippancy. Another way she handled stress.

"As it were, I am afraid I must disappoint you when it comes to being a mysterious heartthrob," Hiram said with a huff of laughter that was very probably engineered. "Understatement sounds quite unpleasant," he replied to her first response. "My hope is that the 6'7" Zami linebacker I have arranged for you to meet will be much less of a jerk. But he may have 35 other wives. It is a give and take."

"If you make me laugh, I stab you." She already was laughing, and the threat was another example of close-to-the-bone dismissal of an actually very significant traumatic reality as a method of coping with it, but Eva sat forward to grab a tissue and mop up the small puddle of water she'd just spilled into her lap, and then lobbed it at Hiram. The effort hurt and wasn't even successful; Purple took it to the face instead. "Now look what you did."

"My beloved Purple. He was a faithful companion for these last fifteen years. And now, within five minutes of meeting Evahnae Kohl, he is no longer. Truly a tragic day in the Purple saga." Hiram's nose scrunched up, and he couldn't resist leaning over to dab at Purple's nose with a tissue. He picked up the bear and waved him around before nudging him into Eva's lap. "Let me loveee youuu."

Having screwed her face up, more as an anticipation of pain than the actual eventuation of it, Eva winced at the purple invader all up in her business and retorted, 'Is this your grand plan? Trying to set me up with your best friend?"

"Hey, you leave Purple alone," Hiram laughed lightly. "He has been a solid companion for many years." This was stated with somewhat more warmth than one might typically owe to a stuffed animal, reminiscent of perhaps more history than ordinary.

There was, tucked away inside her own quarters, a very worn and circumspect looking elephant who could have told war stories to the poor maligned bear, with his bow tie and slightly woebegone expression. Eva took the toy by the shoulders and repositioned it to sit high on her ribcage so that she could get a better look at its face.

"So, Purple, my love, what do you think about all this? A September wedding, perhaps? Shall we make him bridesmaid or flower girl?"

"Always the bridesmaid. Never the flower girl." Hiram shot her a pair of double finger-guns, another in his arsenal of nonsensical attempts at humor.

"If he keeps making terrible jokes like that," Eva confided in the bear, who retained her complete focus and attention, "He'll be lucky to even get invited." Turning the toy around, Eva tucked it under her chin and closed her eyes, meant to be part of the snub but very swiftly proving to be a necessary reprieve. With her eyes open and her wit firing, it was easier to ignore how pale she was and, as her hips shifted again, the faint lines of agitation across her forehead became more pronounced. Wisps of pain, on the very periphery of the medication's reach, prompted a slow breath in and out. Eva blinked open her eyes again.

"Is everyone else okay?"

For anyone previously warned about the telepath's tendency to veer suddenly mid-conversation, the return of Eva's pensiveness wasn't exactly so much a surprise as it was a reminder that she also tended to beat things over the head with humour until she felt better. Lack of energy was making that more difficult, and lack of information was proving too much of a distraction.

A nod. "As far as I know, they are. There is a shuttle expedition to the vessel to investigate the malfunctions." Hiram's opinion of that was not clear, but his expression had cleared from its ordinary good nature and into something of a manufactured neutrality. "My hope is that everyone aboard will continue to remain in optimal health." He shifted when she did-it might have been easy to ignore, but he hadn't been.

"They didn't take you with them?" Her wariness was more a disorientation of time, which she currently had no concept of. No idea how long they'd been stuck over there themselves, no idea how long surgery had taken, or how long it had taken her to wake from it, or the time she'd been sleep since. There was a distinctness to the way Eva's eyes pinned the doctor, however; a mixture of suspicion that he hadn't told the full truth about his own health and a simmering fear that he'd have to go back. That he'd be needed elsewhere and she'd have to stay here and do the whole not-dying thing on her own.

Somewhere, buried beneath the pain medications and marriage plans, traumatic grief was making a right pain in the ass of itself.

"No," answered Hiram, calm. "I stayed to perform your surgery and I have been here since." As the chief medical officer it was of greater prudency to keep him aboard rather than send him out on away missions, even if he was uniquely qualified. Beyond that, Hiram did not desire to be elsewhere. The fact that they were still here was quickly proving an exercise in futility. This was not Starfleet, and they were not obligated to continue to put their crew at risk when it was evident that vessel was nonfunctional at best, downright adversarial at worst.

"Why are we even still here?"

Yanked from the pit of his private thoughts. Not because of a sudden propensity for telepathic intrusion, which would have been unlikely in any case given the neutrino blocks and their blissful reprieve, but perhaps because of an innate synergy the pair shared that had made for such an unpresumptuous friendship right from the beginning. There might have been time to reflect warmly on how close their thoughts connected had Eva not whispered her question with the kind of dread that only poorly-contained fear could provoke. Whatever it was that had stabbed her, whatever problem or malfunction, Hiram dispatching it clearly hadn't resolved the central cause. Forget being concerned about everyone else still over there, which she was; Eva was busy dealing with the irrational yet palpable panic that it was only a matter of time before it found them over here too.

She'd be mad about how stupid that sounded later on.

Hiram's lips pressed together, watching somewhere beyond Eva's shoulder for a very brief moment before pulling back into the here and now. "Presumably Starfleet has gotten involved," he murmured. The way the words were delivered; flat and affectless-Hiram's mask had dropped for a moment to reveal the lifeless expression in his eyes that he worked diligently to construct around. "I have no plans to leave this sickbay," he assured her, finding her hand to give it a squeeze. "I will protect you, and any other patient that comes through these doors. You have my word." His eyes met hers.

"You shouldn't have to. Starfleet has resources, far better than this ship." Hiram might not say it but nothing in all the time he'd known the woman suggested that Eva wouldn't. What's more, she'd tell Gregnol to his face if pushed far enough. "The only assistance they should have required from us, after we busted our guts pulling her out, was to send a message to her buddies."

"This is not a military vessel," was Hiram's reply, delivered very calmly, and very carefully. He was, always, careful with his words. Diplomatic. But this had reached something in him, where many things otherwise wouldn't. His friend had been injured. His friend. "You matter. Your injury tells us what we need to know about this vessel. We should not be expected to undergo military operations, assuredly not with a civilian contingent. Our contract with the Suarez Company should have been null and voided the moment that this posed a risk to our crew."

It wasn't exactly a comforting situation, which was an understatement coming off the back of something like actually dying on the operating table. But there was a risk, with every new employment, of falling into an environment that didn't have the best interests of its people at heart. Eva had worked for some pretty big, pretty corporate ventures before but even then, there had been rules and protocols and some semblance of push-back if conditions got too unacceptable. Gregnol was an unknown quantity but Eva didn't feel like the vibe was quite right for something this toxic. If nothing else, she prided herself in being a better judge of character than that.

"It's got to be something else," she murmured, hand slowly curling around his to tighten whilst her eyes stared into Purple's beady, vacant ones. After a moment, Eva blinked, frowned, and then lifted her gaze to meet Hiram's.

"I'm glad they didn't take you, anyway."

Vulnerability, coupled with a rare display of preference for another person's safety. Not that Eva ever wished anyone harm, she was just typically a lot more shit at telling people she liked them with all their limbs intact.

"I meant what I said before," he added, head tilted very slightly. "About teaching you some self-defense, if you would wish it. If nothing else it could act as physical therapy." He flicked Purple's nose fondly. "I am sorry," he told her, for the first time. "This should not have happened to you. It was unacceptable. Our presence was handled poorly. You should have been protected."

"I shouldn't have suggested we go." Tired, strained. Eva closed her eyes. "Ever since I set foot on that damn ship, I knew it wasn't right. None of it is right. It's too valuable to still be here, unattended and as operational as it seemed. It's not how the industry works." This time, as her eyes opened again, Eva was forced to blink back moisture in order to focus on him. "It's just not. When Kali mentioned the holograms tending to the injured, I didn't think..." Except she had, had even tried to joke about it. "I wanted to believe they'd been picked up. It's what should have happened, there's entire indemnity shit that they put into the contracts that obligate them to send a fucking rescue response." The telepath's eyes squeezed shut again, tears sneaking passed her lashes to settle against her cheekbone. "But they're not meant to forget people. I knew. I knew better and I still suggested that stupid movie because I'm an idiot and I'm selfish and I'm sorry." Suddenly, one 15-year-old purple bear became a very good place to bury her face.

He reached for her shoulder and squeezed it gently, shaking his head. "This is not your responsibility. If blame is to be assigned, let it rest with me. I knew better. I have the training and the awareness, and I permitted the excursion anyway." He held up a finger. "This was a convergence of several events. We were pursuing a personal connection that-in my opinion, was meaningful, and that distracted us. In addition we were not officially informed of any danger on the vessel, nor advised not to go. I should have stopped it. But more than that, we should not have been here in the first place. This is a lesson, to all of us."

"Oh good, I've got a great track record with those."

Breathing helped, she'd learned that a long time ago. It was a little harder to fully engage the diaphragm at the moment because her insides had recently attempted to be her outsides, but a slow expansion of her ribcage allowed Eva to reestablish a brittle equilibrium rather than collapse all the way into a fully-fledged breakdown that wasn't going to help anyone. It took her a moment but she eventually lifted her face and rested her chin on top of the bear's head, exhaling another shaky breath before unravelling her grip on the toy to pat the bed, an invitation, request to sit. "Going back over was stupid and we can dress it up as much as we like as being someone else's responsibility to lock the door but I don't think that's going to fly. I did go because I wanted to hang out with you," she confessed, agreeing with at least one of his points. "Cheesecake aside, you're also pretty decent company."

Eva watched him for a moment and the offered the doctor a sad smile.

"I'd forgotten," she started another kind of confession, having arrived at a point where it felt pointless to keep pushing for the wilful ignorance angle. He was the doctor, part of her had already more-or-less accepted that some form of this conversation was inevitable. "...how hard it is to be confined to one space with people all the time. Maybe forgotten isn't the right word, I'd just underestimated how much smaller Rosie is from the last ship I was on." Eva lifted a hand and swirled an index finger in a gesture roughly meant to indicate, apparently, what was inside her skull. "This doesn't always deal with being around people non-stop. I know, makes the career choice a really smart one, but you try arguing with a counter-compulsion to put oneself out there." Eva spread her arms to emphasise the point. "It gets messy sometimes, I've had trouble adjusting."

Here, her gaze averted to scan the bedsheet.

"Going over there, even though I knew it wasn't a great situation, just gave me space. Back home, I work a shift, and then I'm out of there. There's a division, it helps." Wearily, Eva drew up a shoulder in a faint hunch and lifted her eyes to meet Hiram's again. "You only have to be an addict once to know the right things to tell yourself. Just one more. Last time. After this, I'll stop. Taking you with me was selfish though, even though I did genuinely want to spend time with you."

Hiram listened as she spoke and didn't interrupt, even when the silences stretched while she attempted to compose her words, though he did remain in physical contact with her, letting his fingers drop to her inner elbow in solidarity. When she looked up to find him, she found him, eyes focused on hers, rhythmic in time. "I am grateful that you took me with you," is what he said at first, lips quirking upward ruefully. That was for an obvious reason, but also a less-obvious one, couched in the statement he had made just prior, the agreeable point.

"This ship is..." his gaze drifted slightly. Odd not-amusement-yet briefly touching his eyes. "I understand how difficult it can be to adjust to a scenario that you may not have anticipated. I'd like to help, if I can. Perhaps we can work on a plan to provide you with more of that space. You've mentioned that you find it easier to be in my presence, and this ship does have possession of a few shuttlecraft. Commandeering one once in a while should not be too difficult."

On the surface, it seemed a little silly. Take a shuttlecraft for a spin around the block because the broken telepath hadn't been able to sleep all week, but the sentiment was possibly one of the kindest gestures anyone had made recently. Other than, you know, saving her life. Big surprise; same guy. Eva's features relaxed into a smile, a familiar half-tug to the side that lacked the razzle dazzle of her mischief but drew from a source of far more substantial emotional richness. It left her expression with an overwhelming preference for gentle fondness. Affection. She shook her head but not to disagree, simply a conveyance of wonder. "I don't think you know how unique you are. Well," Eva amended, features adapting to concede a point, "no, I'm pretty sure you're very aware on some levels. But you're..." She frowned, trying to settle on an explanation, and then reached up to press an index finger to the centre of his forehead. "Gentle on the head. You don't goop me as much as some people do."

Sitting across from her, straight and formal but for the slope of his back that precipitated leaning forward to place a hand at the crook of her elbow, Hiram could be mistaken for a ship's Emergency Medical Hologram. Even had the vernacular down pat. "I am aware," he murmured with that same deep, wry acknowledgment as he always held. But to have it highlighted in a manner that was positive, was distinctly... unique. Being seen for himself was not a luxury afforded easily to Hiram and he still, to this very moment, worked very hard to curate a demeanor that was pleasant and prosocial. And Eva was a Betazoid no less. Rael had left. Telepaths... generally did not like Hiram. His thoughts whirled about, logical manifolds puzzling together. "What you say about your difficulties adjusting aboard this vessel-I do understand." He touched his own chest with his fingertips. "I understand personally. You are not alone, here."

"I bet it's weird." Having come so far, it was inevitable Eva would end up full circle to land directly in the middle of state-the-obvious-but-make-it-blunt. Her eyes wandered his hairline, which wasn't really useful except for the fact that, if you were searching for a way to peer inside somebody's head, it felt like a reasonable place to start. "But you know, aside from the fact that cosmic radiation absolutely trashes your ass," Eva brought her gaze back to bear on him, frank as always. "I don't even really know what your deal is. And it's not that I'm not curious because, hello, have you met me? I just..." She screwed up her nose at him. "I figured you'd tell me if you wanted me to know. Preferably before you tried dying on me again."

"I believe I would," Hiram said, straightening up as though to give himself some equilibrium. "Wish for you to know, that is. However, it is quite... heavy," he warned her, his tone gentle and quiescent as ever. "I spend a good deal of my time isolated from others. I presume that is somewhat evident," his head canted to the side in a sardonic gesture. His fingertips tapped along his jeans as he sought to order his thoughts.

Eva had shared with him, something he knew to be a difficult subject for her. He hoped that Eva would allow him to try and assist her with it; if it were possible to ease. Part of reciprocal relationships, though he had learned this by rote, perhaps now was the time for give-and-take. She had given, he would not take. But he could share. What was him, his deal, made mundane. If the giving of himself could be of value, he did not see a purpose in hedging.

"But I would like to be your friend, and I would like to be honest." He sat back, taking a simple breath. "I have a disorder of fixed and stable traits." He just said it. As blunt as Eva had been, certainly not impacted by her broaching the subject-as it was Hiram didn't appear to get impacted by things. But soft. Hearing this information typically resulted in responses ranging from disbelief, to abject fear. "It is a psychiatric condition, influenced by outside circumstances. It is one that is... challenging, to bring to the table of-"

He gestured between them. "Interpersonal relations."

If one wanted to be completely and utterly fair to Eva, she had started from a point of very quiet, very attentive and tender understanding that he probably had a lot of shit that wasn't easy to talk about. Their experiences were undoubtedly very different but you didn't internalise baggage for a living and not recognise when other people were sagged under the weight of a similar burden. And, it needed to be pointed out, she had been unceremoniously forced to divulge another secret because the Sony Spacestation implanted in his chest had decided to become momentarily anaphylactic to the universe. Eva had a pretty fair notion that Hiram was different in ways that most other people weren't. He was an odd bod. He pinged around playing Normal Boy and sometimes looked vaguely pleased with himself when he got it right.

But somewhere around 'fixed and stable traits', which sounded to her medication-addled mind like something her accountant would bombard her with, Eva started to struggle. And, as he continued, her eyebrows raised, but not for the reasons Hiram probably expected, and then her brow furrowed, which was also misleading, and thus by the time she was being pointed at, the telepath's expression was more-or-less one of completely open, eyelash-fluttering, bafflement.

"Hiram." If anything indicated she was well on the way to a full recovery, it was his name rendered in that exact tone. "Let's just assume for a moment that I am an imbecile, which I'm pretty sure you just succeeded in turning me into anyway. What the fuck are you talking about?"

It rendered a slight laugh from the man, self-deprecating. So, maybe not-hedging wasn't accurate. Look. The foray into even-blunter seemed to stir him just a bit. He attempted to facilitate an outward appearance of non-threatening calm. He knew these things were hard to hear. It was hard. People did not like hearing that their friends didn't know how to reach them on these deep emotional levels. As much as Hiram tried his hardest to bridge those gaps over the course of his life, he had never quite succeeded.

Others eventually caught on and asked for an explanation. Hiram did provide it, and it usually... changed things. It made things harder. He did not feel sorry for Eva because he could not feel sorry for her. But he did regret that it was the case, that he could not provide her with more. She was coping with the immensity of her position. Being brought back from the brink of death. Dying. Contending with her choices, believing she was responsible, internalizing that weight. And it was heavy, and he wished he could bear it for her. Most especially because she had reached out to him with nothing but open arms. Somewhat guarded, somewhat uncertain and insecure, yet eager to connect.

But Hiram was defective. Unavoidably so. "My ability to experience and process emotions, particularly with regards to affective empathy-what we feel for others-is non-linear. It is not absent, but I have not developed along the ordinary trajectory." It was a lot of gobbledegook, so Hiram gave some examples. "I lack felt emotional sensations. I am unmoved by most things. My ability to care for others is limited. My ability to predict other people's emotions is based on cognitive analysis."

One of the truths people usually realised about Eva, not necessarily early on but eventually, was that her apparent emotional intelligence and social aptitude and general sense of oneness with centre stage was nothing compared to her analytical capacity. Very few people got close enough to quantify it, which meant that Hiram had definitely cheated right off the block, but the longer you spent in her company, the more an underlying shrewdness, if nothing else, became impossible to ignore. If it was a situation where the breadth of her heritage was known, people usually attributed it to psionic proficiency and Eva was actually fairly comfortable with that being the popular opinion because it explained nothing but sounded like something that would cease most lines of inquiry from the genuinely-disinterested. Very few people really cared to understand others, at least those who intersected their lives the way that Eva did. She was an extension of service, an entertainer, and at her most projected, a glitter ball. People liked her because her surface was interesting to look at and she took the time to carve out a little piece of special space, tiny little bubbles, that propped up the ego. It was a very rare occasion that any of them stuck around long enough for her ability to pierce right through them to really matter.

But despite a certain propensity for tangling herself up in her own party streamers, Eva found it practically impossible to be as frivolous and scatter-brained and downright ditzy as her curated behaviour suggested because her mind simply did not slow down. It whirled at a speed that left dust-trails, documenting and categorizing and allocating, attributing, defining, decoding, compiling... Even she couldn't keep up with everything she noticed some days, the flood of information simply too dense to bother sifting through when she had no viable use for it. The information was sorted all the same, most of it was stored, and under certain conditions, if she turned herself to look at it a certain way, the patterns always emerged. The universe was full of them. And whilst it might not always have a practical use, and was probably the cause of just as much angst as the other business her brain had going on, what it fundamentally equated to was a very simple and easy to grasp reality.

Eva was not stupid.

She was, in fact, incredibly smart. Smart enough to know what the implications of being legitimately incapable of affective empathy meant. Why it didn't work. In many regards, she had an over-abundance of just the opposite, and that didn't work either but it was a damn sight better than trying to experience existence through a scratched and misshapen lens. And she knew why many had a problem with it because people relied on the capacity of others to engage emotionally as an extension of regulating their own feelings, and it was very damn difficult to orient yourself when the person staring back at you was fundamentally denied the opportunity to experience whether they cared if you were there or not. How could you care if you were there or not in those circumstances? If you didn't matter to others, did you matter at all? Most sentient species sought connection and community in some shape or another. The prospect of a non-reciprocal entity trying to exist in the same space was counter-intuitive. And frightening.

And so it was with this shrewdness that Eva watched him, absorbing and compiling. It wasn't an expression he'd really seen before, since the last time she'd let slip how her mind actually worked, there was panic involved and he had been struggling to breathe. For someone still hooked up to machines as a result of recent flirtations with death, her reaction was surprisingly measured, in fact. Not dismissive. Far from it. Not only was it not flippant, it also did not indicate immediate repulsion. This was her mind reassembling things, accessing previous data, finding the correlations. From a certain point of view, Hiram hadn't needed to tell her at all because Eva had already figured it out just through watching him, interacting with him, feeling the bounce back and how that resonated, or didn't as the case may be. And if their experiences thus far had proven anything, it was that she didn't panic. She sat within the overwhelming space of clarity and just nodded slowly.

"You must have received some fairly effective treatment." Because, for goodness sake, she was alive because of him. Somewhere along the way he'd found an alternative for caring that produced similar results. "It's a lot to learn as a premeditated script."

For all that Eva was, Hiram spent a large portion of his life doing the same thing. It wasn't necessarily a brilliant intellect or even an incline toward logical analysis; as it often presented when Hiram spoke, dense and particulate as he could be-a product of his education and occupation. He was intelligent the way any self-aware sentient being held an intelligent view of themselves and the world around them. But there was a disconnect; most sentient beings also handled the strings that attached them to others. They maneuvered through those strings and sorted and organized them in unconscious ways, like buoys through a sea that rippled periodically through and tugged on the woven line. This was not something that most people were aware of, because it was an automatic process. A limbic push and pull, a little yank in the chest cavity that propelled this way and that, through the cosmos.

Eva, for all of her natural observational ability, had picked out those pieces where others viewed him as eccentric or odd, to form a deeper, more holistic picture. And to then reach into that, and pluck at its strings as easily as she had played her guitar to his metronomic drum-beats. And beyond that, to sit without judgment. This amalgamation of events had already made it very clear to Hiram; alongside their previous interactions with his Synapse pair, that Eva too possessed a divergence in neurology. Her loneliness struck him. Alone in a sea of people that pressed in without permission. Her pieces and his pieces fit together in odd little ways.

"I did," he murmured with a nod. "I spent four years in a residential psychiatric unit, in Chicago. I mentioned earlier that I served in the military." He let out a breath and gestured to himself slightly with an open hand. He could not have sat up straighter if he tried, practically at-attention. "My military service started at age three, and concluded at age twelve. I was in the Laile Resistance. I testified in the trial of Ratan Polis in the Interstellar Criminal court as part of the Cessation of Armed Conflict in Satiz-Irath protocols." Ratan Polis, one of the primary belligerents of the LR, was sentenced to one-hundred and seventy years in a minimum security prison on Mount Cook, New Zealand.

Laying it all out on the table was a lot. Especially now, given Eva's circumstances. But it had come about, and Hiram wasn't certain a real friendship could blossom without such integral pieces of knowledge being disclosed. Hiram did not over-value honesty, and frankly tended to lie about it with acquaintances, if only because it tended to hit a conversation like a bomb. Getting it out of the way, so to speak-would be assistive in the long-run. Or Eva would decide Hiram was a crazy person and unworthy of her attention, and at least he would know sooner rather than later.

"I understand that these things are very challenging. That I represent a threatening image. I wish to assure you that I pose you no danger. I value you. In what manner I can, and I know that is insufficient. And I do apologize, because you are an exceptional entity. I do see that." His smile was very slight, but it crept up toward his eyes, where his sincerity typically laid. "And I hope to continue to be able to get to know you, if you will allow me, on your terms."

Three years old. Interestingly enough, Eva thought she might struggle more with that information than anything previous, though some of that was owed to ignorance and could be eventually rectified. Having a father who immersed himself in historical context had not always translated to the most attentive conversations around the dinner table. Having a general gist of things didn't seem nearly enough if you wanted to dig deep into the roots of experience and how it impacted the individual. Still, Hiram arrived at a point that was impossible to ignore and couldn't be addressed by pursuit of factual inadequacies. Eva's expression hadn't changed much, still far more serious than he'd ever seen her, but there was a slight nuance to her eyes, a glimmer of the very thing Hiram himself was legitimately incapable of experiencing.

"I don't think you're a threat, Hiram." Bold, considering, but she'd have been an idiot to adopt that opinion now. Eva's eyebrows raised gently. "You just saved my life. And if we want to be brutally honest, and start painting you as some unfeeling monster incapable of making moral choices, you really didn't have to. Who the hell would have known if you'd just stood there and watched me bleed out?" It wove back into that sense of vulnerability and loneliness, of feeling like little more than a hologram herself sometimes. Regardless of how much that might have proven true, there was still no denying that the opportunity had been ripe for him to bust out some callous disregard, if that was how he genuinely presented. "I know that it's a lot." And she did understand that, knew that this was something that had to be accounted for and not just swept under the rug in her usual laissez faire manner, but starting from a point of wanting to distance herself just didn't seem sincere. "But if this is how you are when you don't care, then you're a damn sight more tolerable than half the people in my life who've said they do. So there's that."

The telepath smiled faintly. An offering, as simple and monumental as the continuation of her usual self.

"You made me cheesecake," she pointed out softly. "Which, in light of all this, was not something that held any real reward for you other than I guess it ticked a box somewhere. People probably get funny about that, right?" Intuitive. She might have been a terrible telepath but she was still capable, in a fashion. "They get kind of possessive about collecting other people's esteem. Or struggle to communicate, I guess," she added, thinking of a particular father, "without the whole emotional back-and-forth. I don't know though." Eva hugged Purple to her chest and once again rested her chin on his head. "Finding out what might make someone feel better and taking the time to do it, when there's literally no emotional imperative to bother you if you don't... I kind of love that. It feels a lot more sincere than some of the manipulative trash that gets flung into the mix."

It was an odd juxtaposition, for just a moment, Eva on the bed hugging Purple and Hiram straight and formal across from her, of patient and doctor. His lips pressed together, eyes flicking upward as the shifts moved within him that he did not always quite understand. "It is a process of learning," he murmured, swallowing what appeared to be a lump of bloop. A head lamp attached to the giant angler-fish. "I may get it wrong. I may not always know what you are feeling," he gestured with his hands, one on top of the other, like miniature scales.

"But I would like to ensure that you feel well. I decided a long time ago that I wished to conduct myself peacefully, not harmfully. I saved your life because your life is of immeasurable value. Yourself, as an individual, and because life is valuable. I understand that, no matter what, you are contending with a circumstance that was violent and traumatic, and if I can assist in helping you process that, I shall do my utmost. I do have an understanding of violence myself, and I know how unpleasant that sensation is."

It was... almost-empathy. A cheesecake, reached over an incomprehensible chasm. "And that is my deal," he huffed, soft. "Your response... thank-you," he added, his voice having reached a tone it didn't usually find.

It would be a challenge. Despite all very well-performed evidence to the contrary, Eva was not particularly good at being upfront about her emotions. This was confronting for reasons that were perhaps a little different to other people's reactions but it was oddly compelling, the invitation to step outside her own comfort zone for something as unique as this. She hadn't known Hiram very long but Eva could hardly deny that she found the prospect of an actual, meaningful attempt at friendship with him more palatable than usual overtures. That probably said a lot about her, if you wanted to be honest. She'd probably need to say a lot more about herself if she wanted to maintain any sense of balance or fairness.

Right now, there was that tone to address. Time to test the waters, and her own willingness to divulge. "I don't know what to tell you, Hiram. I've known plenty of people quite capable of empathy who chose to ignore it. It's not a golden ticket to being a decent person and, frankly, this dumb brain of mine gives me more than enough trouble with other people's emotional output, I don't need to buy myself more by having an issue with you. Maybe, if I'd known this before..." Her sentence trailed off, there being really no need to label the elephant in the room. This kind of information, whilst bleeding to death and completely at his mercy, might have made it harder to see reason with any clarity. "But that's not what happened." She smiled faintly again, and sat a moment in a soup of her own vulnerability. "At least if you wind up not giving a shit about how I feel, it'll be different kind of indifference. One that isn't actually your choice."

His eyes fluttered closed in a nod. Her vulnerability was there for him, not precisely ignored or batted-aside. Not disregarded. Existing on its own, across from Hiram, who did not weight it against any other presentation that she had; all owing to the truth, judgment was not something that came naturally to him, either. "My choice would be to know," he said, laying his palm over the left side of his chest where his heart resided. It was silly-emotions didn't emanate from the heart. The hand came out toward her, making contact with her elbow once more. To know the difference. To feel it. "You struggle with the input of emotions from others," he deduced softly, tapping his own temple. "I can imagine having one's own to deal with, on top of another person's, is-uncomfortable."

"Careful there, Captain Understatement." The return of the dry humour was likely a relief for both of them. Eva shot him a look that had been flung Hiram's way a considerable amount of time since their first meeting, and whilst her easy slip back into an easy-going bluntness might have been the input of that slightly superficial veneer, there was a point where it also just was Eva. Everything was big and hard and laughing about it, whilst doing nothing to fix it, at least kept you from going insane. Or at least, made the journey a far slower one. "I think it goes without saying that just about everything in life has the potential to make you wish you could flick a magic switch. It's not great," she peppered in that honesty, still evidently awkward about discussing something she'd invested a lot of time running away from. "When it's bad, the noise is constant. Concentrating is just brute forcing your own sense of self through the muck of everyone else. Trying to sleep is a joke." Another hinted-at confession. "And when it's really bad..." Purple's ear got a tug. "There's probably not many available holes in space to crawl into, except black ones and I hear they're kind of risky."

"Captain Understatement is my father's name. I prefer Captain Underpants," Hiram smiled at her after delivering this abjectly foolish statement. Every once in a while he just said shit like that, and Eva had gotten used to it, but it still came out of nowhere a good percentage of the time. He was willing to indulge her penchant for humor, viewing it less as a denial and more as a necessity.

He spent much of his time in the deep and dark. The product of a life lived mostly in darkness, it was where he was comfortable, but he also lacked something that most people had. The sensation of darkness beyond pressure and weight. A congenital insensitivity to pain, only this wasn't pain you could wrap fingertips around, nor feel the edges to. The rest of the world had to cope, and humor was a fantastic tool, one that he regularly used to ease the tension. Even Hiram couldn't stay in the darkness forever, he had grown bored and tired and sought to journey out beyond his confines.

"I cannot profess to understand what you experience," he said honestly; and honestly, this was probably true of literally everyone, not just Hiram. "Nevertheless, if you need a friend to skate down the halls with at 0300 or to take you out for a ride, or yell at the universe-or perhaps to engineer you your very own black hole, please rely on me. I will try to help you, in whatever way is most comfortable for you. Whether that is medication or making you a friend for Purple. We can call her Green. It is a theme."

Or she could just steal Purple. He was comfortable to lean a cheek against when you were just about done with the entire universe trying to kick you in the face. Eva cuddled into the bear and watched the doctor, a smile digging into the corner of her mouth as the words tumbled from him; earnest and honest, yet just perfectly crafted enough to betray the forethought, the intention, that went into them as a requirement. In the space of the last ten minutes, Hiram had extended consideration well beyond what half of her previous relationships had mustered and if that didn't say something about her taste in lovers, Eva didn't know what did. Things had been a little less dire in that department over the past few years, maturity kicked in eventually, but she was still here, still recovering from more than just a stab wound to the stomach. And here he was, proving that you didn't, in fact, need empathy to be a thoughtful and respectful friend. The irony left a bitter taste.

"I guess we both just take our busted brains and make the most of things. You think they'll let us share the same padded cell?"

"I think they already have," Hiram gestured to the walls of the Rosie, lips pursed together in amusement. "You should keep him," Hiram's chin lifted to the bear, brows knit together in a furrow of a nod towards the companion that had followed him to Northside Rush and then Starfleet Medical Academy, the Navir, the Palais and now Rosie. The latest in a long litany of assignments, but the first that really made him feel like he was alone in the vastness. Having Purple in an odd way had helped, provided a sense of connection to his roots-the ones that he was proud of, not the ones laid out in unflinching confessions behind glass boxes, reeled in documentaries on the latest Netflix specials. But now, Purple had somewhere else to be, someone new to help, who needed him more than Hiram did. Together, they just might be able to cobble together some woven web of connection. "He likes you." Hiram waved the thing's arm, silly.

"Oh, for fuck's sake." The laughter was watery, sprinkled with indignation and yet loaded with an underlying burden of emotion that had finally proved too much for Eva. She used the bear to bop Hiram on the head; gently. "Who the hell ever told you there was something wrong with your brain? I'll have ten of them, please. Order to go." There didn't seem any conceivable way to explain to him why, at least in her instance, his concerns were unfounded. At this point, his precision was achingly accurate.

This, at least, seemed to spur a moment of confusion for Hiram, who first wondered if he'd made some kind of grave miscalculation-mixed with a bit of confusion, since those periods had actually grown less and less as he'd become older and became more purposeful and deterministic about how he engaged with others. He had many late nights googling how to offer condolences and appropriate conversational topics for work under his belt.

Eva suddenly cursing at him and crying-for a split second, Hiram sat back, as though concerned his presence would exacerbate her emotional reaction, and then she spoke and he realized-oh. He even said "oh," out loud. "You're very kind," he murmured, gentle. She reminded him of Rael, in an odd way. That indignation on his behalf, that belief in him-it was the cornerstone of everything he'd been taught as a child. That the more opportunities you gave a person to be good, the better they often were.

Expecting excellence in achievement and accolades didn't yield the same results-or if it did, it was at the expense of the child's mental health. Expecting excellence in conduct and compassion-that was different. There was the accompanying desire not to let her down, as he had others in the past. Rael's opinion of him remained positive, but Rael hadn't remained. He hoped, perhaps foolishly so, that it wouldn't end in a similar fashion.

"Says the guy who saved my life, just wrote me an entire thesis on how they intend to help me keep my shit together, and then tried to give me their teddy bear. Purple can visit with me," Eva added, a compromise. "I'm not sure I'm ready to commit to him moving in yet, we've only just met." Grasping both the teddy's paws in her hands, Eva reached towards Hiram, purple arms outstretched as a small child would beseech a parent for affection. "Papa, why did you leave me with the crazy lady?"

Hiram was gonna have a whole conversation with that bear. "Now, now," he rose a finger to Purple. "Crazy is very mean. I prefer... sanity challenged?" His eyebrows bounced, teasing. The foray from child-like to adult, but then back again. "Door-hinge deficient. Pasta enthusiast. Ice water despising. Now that is crazy," his lips pursed, a curated warmth.

"You should be grateful I'm removing you from this unhealthy relationship," Eva informed a teddy bear. She even turned it around to face her. "He eats his pizza with a knife and fork."

"It keeps the pizza from burning your chin, and it gives you the precise ratio of cheese to bread that ensures you do not eat all of the cheese in one go!" Hiram was defending himself to this bear, who looked at them both like they were escaped mental patients probably. "You will see. One day you will see my pizza ways. You will all see!" he affected a maniacal villain voice.

"You see how entrenched this is?" Purple probably did not; Purple was a stuffed bear. "He brought celery to a movie date. And cake. And he forgot a blanket." The crimes just piled up.

"That is true," Hiram nodded solemnly. "I will be soon going to vegetable jail for my celery crimes." Hiram was laughing. "We shall have to watch Die Hard 29 next time. I will bring fondue. Purple, you will be the judge of our culinary creations." Purple was gonna get an egg smooshed on his head, just you wait.

If forced to be honest, and Eva really hoped that wasn't any time soon because she'd had just about a gutful of her own nonsense at this point, it might take a while for her to re-engage with the franchise. Something about having it jump up and literally stab her in the guts left a bit of a funny aftertaste. She didn't mention it, however, simply turned the bear around, placed her hands on its shoulders and fixed it with an earnest, though admittedly a little over-exaggerated, frown. "His crimes are heinous and his betrayal absolute, but maybe we can rescue him after all?" The bear, who really probably didn't even notice, earned a small smile then, and a heartfelt sentiment that was somehow far easier to direct to this impassive, slightly dopey face than the just-as-impassive-and-even-more-dopey one hovering just beyond. "He is shaping up to be a pretty decent friend and I don't have many of those."

Eva had not known Hiram to go beyond the expressions that she was slowly coming to realize were practiced; often they made sense, they were appropriate, but they occurred too frequently and in too much of the same way to be truly genuine. Similar to how he would say certain phrases, or speak in a certain way; it all made sense, it was just-more rote, than not-rote. And it really was more organic than all that-he knew better than to mindlessly recite nonsense all the time, it just happened a little more than usual.

Nevertheless, at this moment, something peculiar happened. It wasn't a sudden influx of emotions that meant he was cured, but rather it looked like the exact opposite. His features completely neutralized, eyes far-away for a long moment. His true face. Somehow quiescent in its utter stillness. Most beings interpreted neutrality as hostility. But when Hiram spoke, it was not hostile at all. It was honest. And another expression rose up, clearing off the snow of honesty into what was known.

The effort of communication, to put something out there that was intelligible. Friendship was not easy for Hiram, for all of the above reasons, but if Eva were willing to contend with his baggage, there was no level of baggage that she could present in turn that would cause him to turn away from her. Her brain blooped a lot. It was regretful, because it caused her suffering, only. And if Hiram gooped her less, which she had stated was true, he could be only grateful for that.

"And now, you have two," he held up two fingers, looking down at Purple. Not a platitude, nor rote.

She would hug the damn bear. Firstly, because it was close enough to and Hiram had perched himself in a small café on the edge of Cardassian space apparently, but secondly because it was probably going to be easier to let the bear go afterwards. Plus, bonus, probably couldn't accidentally switch buttons on the bear that might turn it off suddenly. So Eva squeezed the business out of Purple and then, face scrunched into its mushed-up forehead, murmured the immortal phrase;

"Real friends fetch cookies and milk."