Fire Walker

Posted on 18 Apr 2013 @ 1:51am by

6,282 words; about a 31 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo: Sickbay, LTjg Maenad Panne's Quarters
Timeline: MD4: 1410 hours

[ON]

Maenad sat on the edge of the biobed with her feet dangling just above the floor. Her hands were clasped together on her knees in torn nylons, her elbows supporting her slouch as she stared down at the floor. She was thinking about all that had happened on the away mission and how fortunate she was to be all right. If the glass had pierced her neck she probably would have died. If it had gone in her eye she would have been blind. She flexed her right hand; it was still stiff and the skin taut from the burns, but it didn't really hurt as much. Her uniform jacket was next to her, torn and bloody. She still wore her blue tunic, but the entire right side was tattered, ripped, and dark with stains of her own blood.

She was free to go now; after having been given more specialised treatment for the past half hour, though, she was feeling overwhelmed. She had never been as seriously injured as this. Kohl had done a great job in the shuttle, but there was only so much a medkit could do. And if it weren't for him, she very well could have died. She blinked for the first time in a while and sucked in her lips, thinking that she could return to her quarters but couldn't find the will to move.

One might think Liyar was looking at a picture of the universe, or a far-away galaxy. Spiraling branches, impulses, protoplasmic protrusions, tapering out into reaching points - we do not know how to communicate with one another. Always reaching, never touching.

The image zoomed out, revealing not a galaxy but a simple neuron, with several marked tags on it open for study. The hologrid surrounding him was full of rambled notes, theories, medical texts, tests. A sharp tug in the back of his mind interrupted his work. He didn't know what it was. Panicked distortions, waves transmitting harsh electricity. It jolted him, and his hand jerked spasmodically above the grid he was writing at, causing an unnaturally jagged line to mar his notes. He breathed in sharply. It was sterile, there was blood everywhere - Liyar swallowed and looked about the room. It was stiflingly empty. Behind his ear, the cortical emitter bleated pitifully, whining along with autonomic spikes. He curled his hand into a fist. It was empty, clean, but he rubbed them together compulsively anyway. The hologrid had to come down. He had to go. Go, go, go.

Tucking the fereikek reh under his arm he hurriedly exited the lab, nearly knocking down a crewman in his haste to get to the turbolift. Go where? He touched his right eye with his fingertips. He did not feel upset. It was in his body, but it wasn't of him. The threads, they spread everywhere, neurons, touch, warmth, peripheral, central. Muscular, sensory, autonomic, psionic. Maps and lines. Too vast an atlas. It was someone. He tried to follow the scent in the hallways, through the ship. A nauseating stink of iron and sugar. He twitched and held his hands protectively to his chest, pressing himself against the wall outside of the main sickbay. Shields. Inner shields. Outward. They stretched, thinning, strained against the input. Mantras. Fractured mind, stable body. He straightened up - up and out - relaxed his posture, and pushed open the sickbay doors with his fingertips.

"Maenad," Liyar sounded surprisingly normal, eyes landing on her bloodied form. He didn't hurry over, but his strides were purposeful. "You are injured."

She almost jerked up her head to see him, but she made it look more natural. A smile came. "Liyar," she said, almost relieved. She stood, using her hands to push herself off the bed. She didn't step forward to meet him as he'd already come to her. She instead gripped her hands against the biobed frame behind her. Her hair was greasy and completely disheveled and her little makeup had smudged in places from the mix of grease, grime, and sweat. Her eye whites were speckled with red veins and purple beneath. She looked exhausted, but her happiness at the sight of him was still hard to miss.

His face was set in a grim frown of determination as he assessed her. He rubbed the edge of the singed uniform at her shoulder between two fingers. "What happened?" he wasted no time asking.

"My console exploded," she said simply. "But, I managed to cover my face and neck." Maenad touched her hair behind her right ear, a nervous mannerism that she had. "I'm okay now," she smiled at him, showing her teeth. Somehow, she believed what she said. Seeing him there, well, made all the difference. Her eyes stung again as they flooded with tears, but she didn't cry.

If one didn't know Liyar very well, they might have made the assumption he was angry underneath his emotionless exterior. He gleaned snapshots of moving images. Debris, molten planets, craters. Crashing, impacting. Crunching metal. "You have been cleared to leave the sickbay."

"Yes," she was still smiling and looking him in the eyes. "Thank you for coming." She wanted to hug him, but didn't. Instead she touched his shoulder and ran her hand down to his wrist and gave it a gentle squeeze. She collected her destroyed uniform jacket and looked down at her feet, then up at his eyes again.

He hadn't visited on purpose, but did that matter? He knew now that what he experienced in the lab was her. He'd been aware of her emotional state, her perceptions. Calling to him. Disconcerting as it was, he did not fault it. "Of course." He used the rest of his reserves to dispel the remnants of her nervous energy, chasing away ghosts in the dark. "We will return to your quarters." He gestured toward the door.

She nodded agreeably by ducking her head and pressing her lips together, clutching the jacket over chest like a teddy bear. As she walked out into the corridor she thanked a nurse, then the way to the turbolift. She ordered it to deck two and within moments they were in her quarters. Maenad let out a sigh of relief as the doors closed. She went straight to her bedroom and eased onto her bed, pulling her legs up one at a time, and laid flat on top of the covers with her arms at her side. She smiled as she closed her eyes to relax.

Liyar followed her in and stood at the edge of her bed, his hands clasped at the small of his back. "Do you have any specific nutritional preferences?" he asked unceremoniously. "You require sustenance."

"I just want to rest," she said, opening her eyes again. In the pleasant fragrance of her bedroom, she could smell the horror of her uniform. She had to get rid of it, but she didn't want to move. She smiled at him gently.

"You will rest. After you have eaten and changed your clothing." He stared pointedly at all of the blood.

Maenad closed her eyes again for a moment. She wasn't hungry at all. But she did need to get rid of this wrecked uniform. She sat up, putting her legs back over the side of the bed so that her feet were flat on the floor. She reached into her collar and unzipped the tunic until it came apart, then carefully pulled her arms out of the sleeves. Her skin along her right side was still tight and a little numb, so she was especially gentle with removing her right arm. She took the tunic and jacket over to her bedroom replicator and dematerialised them. Then she unclipped the skirt and did the same, sat down on the end of the bed and pulled off the ripped tights. She got rid of them in the replicator too, then returned to the bed in only her white underwear. She laid herself out flat again, arms at her sides and stared up through the arched window over the bed. "I'm not hungry," she said finally without looking at him.

Liyar crossed his arms casually and regarded her, a glint in his eyes. "That is not relevant. You lost a significant volume of blood along with the added stress of injury. You need to replace that energy in order for your body to fully recover at the optimal rate."

She turned her head to look at him sideways. She knew better than to argue with him about this. "Fine," she resigned. "But nothing too big."

He folded his hands and tipped his chin upward in assent, heading out through her door and into the kitchenette where her food replicator system was embedded in the wall. He keyed up something simple. Something he'd seen her eat before, so it would not be unpalatable. The options were limited. Strawberry jam on toast, or chicken. He naturally went for the toast, adding a bowl of mixed fruit. The tray materialized a few seconds later and he brought it back to her, sitting at the edge of her bed and holding the tray out.

She sat up and drew in her legs so that she was sitting cross legged. She accepted the tray and set across on her thighs. "Thank you," she said, then bit into a piece of toast. He even slightly burned it, just how she liked it. She finished the toast and took a strawberry from the fruit bowl. "Want some?" she asked, holding out the bowl.

As though the bowl might snap at his fingers like a pitcher plant and spirit them away, he gingerly reached out and took one of the strawberries. He struggled to decipher what exactly to do with it before eating the entire fruit in one go. He swallowed awkwardly. "On your away mission. You stated a console exploded."

She looked at the remaining piece of toast while an anxious smile grew on her lips. "Yes," she said. She picked it up and bit into it, then quickly finished the rest.

"What happened?" Liyar asked, handing back the bowl. "Why did this happen?"

Maenad ate some more strawberries and other fruits from the bowl before she decided she'd had enough. She moved the tray off of her lap and onto the sidetable next to her bed, returning the fruitbowl to Liyar if he wanted more. She pulled back the covers and climbed beneath them, then laid on her side. She sighed once, then looked at him. "The planet was surrounded with a dense field of debris. Its moon had collided within the past few years, ejecting countless billions of elements into orbit. The shuttle collided with something after one of the thrusters failed. I've never experience turbulence as bad as that before. I thought we were going to crash and burn in the lava. There was a power surge; an EPS conduit blew above Mister Darius' head, and part of his console blew out." She pressed her lips for a moment. "I covered my head at the same time to hide from the cockpit explosion. At the same time, my console blew as well," she remembered, her voice fading off. She stared past Liyar at one of the walls but then brought her eyes back to his. "My right side was burned. I had bits of glass in my arm, shoulder, and my shoulder blade." She didn't say anything for a long moment. In all the chaos that had happened, though, she distinctly remembered thinking of him, that she wished that he could have been there with her. She smiled a little. "I was very scared, Liyar."

Vivid lines made up her consciousness, slashing jagged lines into her thoughts. Cold dread, like lightning. They were imprints, echoes, slowly fading away as the memories of the crash blurred. He laid his hand in front of him on the mattress, beside her. "I was not told that you were injured. I felt it, here." He gestured two fingers to his temple.

She frowned, not sure that she understood. "What do you mean?"

Liyar shrugged. He hardly knew what it meant at the best of times. He could hear her thoughts, a mild haze in the background. "I knew that something had happened."

Maenad was still frowning, still not understanding. "Thank you for coming to see me."

Liyar didn't have the language to make himself clearer. "It was logical. I would ensure that you are well." He held out the bowl and rested it next to her, looking at her with familiar, if peculiar inscrutability. Studying her, as though full of thoughts underneath the surface, giving voice to none of them. "You should finish eating."

She took another piece of fruit and ate it just to make him happy. "That's enough for me," she told him. "You finish the rest."

He began eating slowly. He wasn't pleased, but he wouldn't force her. "You will feel better once you have rested."

"What did you do today?" she asked. "Do you want a pillow?"

"I have been working on analyzing a code that was discovered on a public encryption station," Liyar answered. He took the pillow she offered and held it in his lap. The work sounded dull, but he appreciated doing it. Being idle was one thing he couldn't stand. "And I met with a new diplomatic officer. She is Vulcan, who has worked as a translator in the wake of the Hobus disaster."

Maenad sat up a bit, propping herself against an elbow. "A Vulcan?" She thought she'd known all the Vulcans on board. "Who?"

"Yes. Crewman Jaeih. I have reason to suspect she has come aboard specifically to interact with me. Although at this time I do not precisely understand her motives." Was it peace, she wanted? He didn't think it was war. He had always believed that the Romulans should have the ability to choose for themselves, to restructure for themselves. If they wanted to live in Miran or on MS1 forever, it was their choice, but it was always a temporary solution to him. He watched Maenad contemplatively. "Aside from the crash-landing, did you discover anything of interest on the planet you visited?" He did not know what was involved in an away mission to a desolate planet. Did they collect samples? Run scans? Do flips in anti-gravity?

"The planet collided with its moon," she said. "The surface was like standing inside an oven, or like the inside of a volcano. Ash and smoke, visibility of only a few kilometres at most. Flame and sparks drifted on currents in the air, and the air rippled with heat. It was like something from a nightmare," she explained, but not shakily. There almost a hint of excitement in her voice. But, Maenad was more interested in this Crewman Jaeih than she was with talking about a real-world Hell. "Maybe she likes you, Liyar," she smirked at him, propping herself up further, her blankets fell down to her stomach. "It sounds like she does," her teeth showed as her lips got further apart.

"I sincerely doubt that. She is, as you might term it, engaged."

Maenad frowned, but she was still smirking. "Liyar," she said, "if she is engaged and is Vulcan, I doubt she would just up and leave to come with us. As I understand it, bonds between Vulcan mates are powerful. If they are engaged..." she was still smiling. "Maybe she is considering a new mate." She nudged him with her foot from beneath the blanket. "Besides, I think you'd be an ideal mate for any Vulcan female."

He swallowed another strawberry. "That -" he blinked, "- that is generally not done." He did have to wonder why Tetrik would not have an issue with Jaeih being posted to active service without him, but that was not his business. Her suggestion that he would make an ideal mate was extremely puzzling. The Frown cropped up. "Crewman Jaeih is already promised to another. I suspect her prospects are more than sufficient. It would not be logical of her to sever her connection to her intended to pursue me, as I would provide only situational benefit. If I accepted, which she has no guarantee I would do." It would not be logical to sever an already established emotional connection to pursue pure familial benefit, he thought. Despite all of Vulcan's claim, an emotional attachment to one's mate was considered good fortune. The established connection provided stability, certainty. Severing it would be very peculiar.

Maenad sat up even more now, crossing her legs under the blankets an setting her hands in her lap over them. "Well," she insisted, "it seems like it was done. It would be illogical for a couple who has yet to bond to stick with it. Maybe Jaeih wanted to see who else was out there. You said she came here, just to be with you." She shrugged.

"I did not -"

"You come from a prominent family and are set to inherit a whole province, a prince Liyar. You're in the V'Shar, you were an ambassador, now you're a chief diplomatic officer on the fleet's leading exploration ship. And it isn't like Vulcan women don't know that you're no longer bonded, sadly; and we both know the dangers and stigma of being a Vulcan your age without a mate. You're also quite brilliant," she laughed as she held her hands out by her sides. "And, you're good-looking. It isn't that unfathomable."

"I am not a prince." The pillow lounging against him didn't help him appear any more dignified. He removed it moodily and set it beside him, crossing his arms over his chest. He thought of smothering himself in the pillow instead. Family politics. He could hear the far corners of his katra cringe. "I would hope that Crewman Jaeih knows better." If this person was another sent by his family, he was going to begin pulling out his hair. Strand by strand. Setting his whole head on fire. Shoving his face into a concrete wall to desiccate forever. "I have no interest in - " he paused and looked at her sideways, belatedly realizing that she was teasing him. He took a different tack. "Brilliant and good-looking," he hmmed, resisting the twitch of amusement that threatened his features. "Really."

"I'm just saying," Maenad spoke truthfully, but was smiling even brighter than before. She looked shocked, opening her mouth, as though she were about to defend herself. "Is she pretty?" she asked instead.

"I did not notice." He thought back to his meeting with her, but his own analysis was much less enthusiastic. "I suppose so."

"Mhm," she grinned. "Well, why did she say she came here? What about you brought her?"

"We share a common history," he answered. "When Romulus was destroyed, she was among the small percentage of Vulcans who were affected telepathically by the resonance. Along with Mr. Zaren, she has a vested interest in the wellbeing of the Romulan refugees located within the Federation. As a Vulcan, she is aware that Miran province is the only Vulcan province to have built a resettlement camp."

"Right, but what does that have to do with you, Liyar?" she asked, thinking he was avoiding the question.

"I am responsible for the resettlement camp," Liyar answered. "Miran is also one of Vulcan's more removed populations. As such, it has become something of a haven for individuals with dissenting opinions. Crewman Jaeih may fall under that description, I have yet to be certain."

Maenad looked at him sideways. "Liyar," she said firmly. "I do not believe that a Vulcan would come all the way here, leaving her male Vulcan fiancee behind, just because you are from Miran or have to do with a resettlement camp. She has to have some deeper interest in you than that."

He did not roll his eyes. Or sigh. Or give any indication at all that he found this discussion patently ridiculous. A lopsided frown was looking to make a permanent home on his face. How did they even get to talking about this? "She will find herself disappointed." He shifted a little and missed the pillow, feeling unshielded. "Will you still be attending our away mission tomorrow?" he asked instead. He wasn't sure how Starfleet medical procedures worked. Did they just let injured crewmembers jump straight back into work? They did, of course. On Vulcan, too. But he did not approve. Not at all.

It didn't like a psychiatrist to see that Liyar was getting upset. His resistance to the question had her thinking that he was, in fact, more attracted to the Vulcan girl than he was letting on. He wouldn't even tell her why she found him as interesting, as alluring, as he'd said. She didn't think it was an unfair question. With a dismissive shrug, and a tinge of disappointment, she gave him a reduced smile. "Yes," she told him, "I will still be on the mission the tomorrow, and I will still be leading it. We're lucky to have the people we do on our medical staff."

"I have answered your question," he insisted. He could not understand the source of her confusion. Her disappointment even more alien, like floating feathers lost in the rain. He thought he had been quite clear, but her thoughts clearly suggested otherwise. Liyar's shoulders slumped minutely.

Maenad's smile went away now and she closed her eyes for a moment. She shook her head only slightly, then repeated what she had said before, as if Liyar hadn't gone into her head and responded to her thoughts. "I will be leading the mission tomorrow."

Liyar flexed his hands against his legs, stretching each finger one by one before curling them back against the palm. He tried to pull his head back into the present. It was difficult to discern competing motivations, thoughts, words and feelings, to separate them. This lagged his response time, but eventually he nodded. "You are certain that you are recovered enough for this?"

"Yes," she said. "I am. I will be fine. I just need some rest. I'm having dinner with Kiri tonight, and then I will be going straight to bed." She uncrossed her legs and laid down again, but curled her pillow so that she could sit in a lean more than a full lay down. "Don't worry about me."

Worrying would be illogical. He did not worry. He did think that Maenad had an underdeveloped appreciation for her own safety. She could have been killed. Sucked into the vacuum of space, crushed under the pressure of broken metal. Disintegrated. Nothingness. His jaw tensed. Did that not register with her? Why would she want to return to the unknown? Why did she need to lead another unnecessary away mission? She should not have been hurt in the first place. Lamar Darius should have done better. He stared at the low corner of her bedroom, where the wallpaper met duranium, cracking the edges. "If the medical staff believe you are recovered," he acknowledged tightly.

"They do," she smiled again, but not as much as before. Flashes of terror, fear of pain and death, entered her mind as pieces of memory came and went. "But, I think, what happened will be on my mind for a while," she trailed off. "I've never been more scared in my life, Liyar," she was barely more than whispering, and she was staring at the wall. "I'm glad you came to see if I was all right," she found his eyes and gave him an affectionate look, one that said she had more to say but couldn't without his permission or unless she was asked.

The storm clouds raining on his head evaporated as he listened to her. Her fear was captured dust particles in flickering strobelights, heartbeats. He could feel it in his chest and arms. He endured it, let it dissolve into puffs of air. "You stated that your shuttle impacted with the debris in the atmosphere," he prompted dubiously, meeting her eyes and leaning forward slightly.

"Yes," she said. "I thought we were going to crash into the molten surface and burn to death, or be cooked inside the shuttle."

"Warrant Officer Darius saw fit descend further into an excessively turbulent environment?" Liyar asked evenly, voice flat. A small wrinkle manifested where his brows drew together incredulously.

"Well, not exactly," she almost sighed. "We were doing a survey of the planet, and we had to enter a low orbit to get better readings. The planet and its moon collided about a year ago, which we didn't know right away, and its orbit is filled with rocky debris." Maenad didn't know much about shuttles and their parts, but she tried to explain as best she could. "Something got clogged, or damaged, somehow from the orbital debris and we lost our thrusters. But we were too low to maintain altitude and we plummeted to the surface. Darius' console blew over his head, but he got away unscathed. Mine blew after his; if I hadn't protected myself when his blew out, I would have been a lot worse." Perhaps dead, she didn't say. "We crashed on the edge of what I think was the moon's crater. Rhodes had a giant piece of metal lodged in his leg, so I had to exit the shuttle with Darius to assist him." She paused for a long moment. "It was terrifying out there, Liyar. I was like a child. I was not like a senior officer."

Her concern was that word would spread through the ship about her being half-naked, about her fragility, about her inability to take command in such a desperate situation. Her reasons were legitimate, certainly, but she had never been in a situation as demanding before and thought that she could do better. "I was not like me. It was like I was a little girl again."

Liyar nodded. "Your responses to such a situation are very common, even for a Starfleet officer. Your body and mind were not operating like you," he agreed, repeating her phrasing in his stilted way. "It would not have been possible. You were operating instinctively. Fear is the most instinctive emotion there is. This is the first time you have ever experienced a situation like this, is it not?" he asked.

"Yes," she agreed.

"Then as it stands you have the potential to improve these responses," Liyar pointed out in an awkward attempt to reassure her. "The fear response and how to handle it when it comes up will also play a part in our training sessions. Identifying these areas of fear will lessen their impact in the future, should such incidents arise again. There is no shame in your reactions. They are very normal."

She already knew that. It didn't mean very much to her, though. She adjusted herself to get more comfortable, grimacing as her still tender body reacted to her change in position. She didn't say anything, but a sharp inward gasp and and a mouthed yelp showed how she felt. She smiled at him as a thank you for the reassurance.

"You are in pain. The medical staff did not offer you an analgesic?" Liyar watched her try in vain to find a position that did not hurt. He reached out a hand to still her. The answer to his earlier question now obvious, he didn't wait for an answer before continuing, speaking before doing that pesky thing called thinking. "Prolonging your movement in that way will only make it worse. If you wish, I can help alleviate your discomfort."

"They did," Maenad explained, "but if I move a certain way it hurts." She was comfortable now, half on her side. She smiled. "What do you mean, you can alleviate my discomfort?"

"Unless you would prefer to remain in that particular position," Liyar said dryly. But she had a dinner to go to in a few hours, and if she could barely move now, he doubted that would go well. "Vulcans practice a form of neuromuscular stimulation known as neuropressure. It is a combination of telepathy and physical pressure. I would be capable of reducing your pain by releasing the tension in your primary back muscles, negating inflammatory cytokines and inducing protein and mitochondrial growth in the muscle cells."

Maenad blinked. "How would you do it?" She hated pain more than anything else, and she sounded interested.

"I would require to touch you in order to facilitate the necessary telepathic component. You would lie on your stomach. The practice would not differ much in application from traditional acupressure," Liyar answered stoically.

"Like a massage?" she asked.

He tilted his head. "I suppose that is one method of looking at it. However, given that the practice of neuropressure is largely telepathic, there will be some minor differences in perception. You would not be harmed."

Maenad winced as she rolled to move the covers off. Being under the blankets where it was warm chilled her exposed bare skin. Now on her stomach, she hugged the pillow. "All right," she muttered.

Liyar waited until she was comfortable before sitting closer to her, leaning over to inspect some of the mottled bruising that marred her otherwise pale complexion. His expression shifted neutrally before he carefully pressed the edges of his fingertips against the top part of her shoulder. At first, there was nothing but the mundane touch of fingers against skin, at once warmer than any human hand could be. He felt across the area tenderly, as though he were mapping it, finding the spots of irritated pain. He watched her for any signs of distress or discomfort, but when they didn't show up, his thumb found the center of her shoulder and he opened the telepathic link. It came on slowly, barely separate from her own body's responses, breathing deeper, easier, until he increased the pressure. Quite suddenly, the tension in the cluster of nerves and muscles burst like a bubble, dissolving in a rush of heat, taking away some of her immediate pain along with it.

Again, she did not produce any discernible response, so he took that as a sign to continue. He rotated one of his thumbs down to the center of her spine, settling in the groove between two disks, while his other continued applying the same fuzzy, alternating charges of telepathic energy as earlier. He fit his other thumb into the groove of her spine and pressed forcefully, but slowly. The added telepathic component let him know precisely when she would start to feel the flare of throbbing pain, but before she could speak up, that too burst into trickling warmth down her spine and across her back. His thumb moved up her spine, repeating the same process evenly while his other hand focused on loosening the muscles in her shoulders. He switched hands a while later and began administering to her opposite shoulder, once more surveying the layout of muscles and bone before methodically dissolving the spots of pain, warm and firm across her back. The pads of his thumbs, fingertips and knuckles sought out the tightly coiled spots of pain, and persuaded them to relent, introducing a hazy, bone-deep calm through her. He worked silently, but not uncomfortably, his chest rising and falling deeply as he allowed his calm to flow through his fingertips and melt against her skin. After an indeterminate amount of time breezed by, he looked up, observing her thoughtfully. "How do you feel?"

The connection that Liyar made sent a comforting tingle though her body, but was most intense along her spine, up her neck, and into her head. Unlike when she was at the hospital with him on Vega or when she was in the arboretum with his plant pet Vaikreyan, Maenad was not startled or uncomfortable. She was completely the opposite, in fact. Pleasurable pulses of calm and collectedness rippled through the topmost layers of her skin before moving gradually deeper through muscle and then to her, through her bone. She was almost aware of every part of her entire body, like she could feel it, and it felt comfortable and relaxed. Her eyes were closed now and a the slightest of a smile was on her face. She knew that he was comfortable, concerned for her, and trying to make her feel better because it was what he wanted. For him, she knew, it would disturb his peace for her to be anything else but comfortable. "Good," she whispered, but probably didn't need to say for him to know.

"Vaikreyan is not a pet," he said lowly, with just a bare hint of teasing. He let his hands be guided by the small shifts of movement under his fingers, allowing her body to speak to him. It wasn't difficult to tell that he enjoyed doing it for her, absorbing the calm, sleepy waves emanating from her unconsciously. Only the deliberate and careful way he made sure to focus only on areas that genuinely were tense and painful prevented it from being awkward or disturbing. He lifted his hands from her another while later, when he was certain that she was sufficiently relaxed and pain free.

Maenad opened her eyes and turned her head to look at Liyar over her shoulder, using her elbows as supports. Her muscles were soft and lucid and the pain was mostly gone, just a distant numbness remained. "What did you do?" she asked, surprised.

"Only what I stated I would do," Liyar told her. "The pain in your muscles is caused by strain and tearing of the muscle fibers, such as that associated with exercise. By reducing inflammatory cytokines and using pressure points to produce a mitochondrial response, your pain will dissipate." He wasn't meaning to bore her, but he didn't want her to assume he'd done anything frightening. "I applied a telepathic process to this in order to better facilitate the release of tension which had built up in several key areas of your back and shoulders."

"Oh," she said, turning back around and laying her head on the pillow. "Well, it worked. Thank you. I had no idea you could do that."

Liyar knitted his fingers together and braced his elbows against his knees. His lips pursed slightly, eyes soft. "You were in pain. You mentioned that you were planning to attend dinner with Kiri Cho." He had to wonder. He'd never gotten the impression from Kiri that she - well - did anything. He held his tongue. "It was logical to assist," he told her. "You did not appear to benefit from analgesic medicine."

"I did," she insisted, "but medicine can only do so much." She looked back at him again. "There's nothing like a massage," she smiled.

He only tilted his head and arched an eyebrow wryly. "If your pain returns before tomorrow's away mission, I can assist you again if necessary." Leading an away mission into foreign territory while diminished and sore was a disaster waiting to happen, in his opinion. He didn't understand precisely how Terrans worked, and it showed. To him, pain was a sign of severe injury, even if he intellectually knew better. "You should rest."

Maenad let out a long and relaxed sigh, like she was climbing into bed after a long day - a bed that she was already in. "Well," she began, regretful that he'd stopped, "if you are finished, then I suppose I should."

Liyar stood and pulled the covers back over her before picking up the abandoned tray on the bedside table. "Rest well, Maenad. If you require further assistance, I will be available."

Saddened that he had to go, Maenad rolled over, pushed the covers off, and stood up. "I will see you to the door," she said with an affable grin, her eyes glistening and bright.

He clasped his hands behind his back, letting her follow him to the door. Once he was in the hall, he turned to observe her leaning against the doorframe. He could feel the small pulses of her disappointment against his mind, but he did not know what else to do or say. He even would have preferred to stay, but he was having trouble putting any of his thoughts into proper words, it was still his duty shift, and she did need to rest. "I am gratified you are no longer in pain. I will speak with you at a later time." He ducked his head in farewell, before heading off to the turbolift.

"Thank you," she said one more time, an anxious smile on her face. She watched him leave, then stepped away from the door so it could close. She stood there for a moment, staring intensely at the floor. Feeling alone now, but placid, she went to her couch and grabbed the quilt off the back of it. She draped it over herself, laid down, and was soon off in the peace of restful mid-afternoon nap.

[OFF]

Lieutenant (JG) Maenad Panne
Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant (JG) Liyar
Diplomatic Officer, VDF/SDD
USS Galileo

RSS Feed