Cracks in the Veneer

Posted on 12 Jan 2014 @ 2:20am by Lieutenant Teth Miir

878 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Episode 05 - Solstice
Location: Starfleet Headquarters, Temporary Quarters
Timeline: MD 8, 0430

ON:


The room was black except a sliver of purple light emanating from below the curtain. It cut across the floor like a cold, burning laser that Teth could barely stand to look at. Instead he clenched his eyes shut and curled into a ball under a pile of covers. The pain in his head was immense and debilitating. An ever present stabbing sensation through the right side of his skull. He had altered the environmental controls in his room to make the air quite frigid, the warmth was just making him more nauseated

This had happened before, countless times. He could go to sickbay and get a simple hypospray injection and feel better immediately. But that would mean either getting up, braving the blinding corridor lights, and managing to walk there without falling due to the vertigo he was experiencing. Even laying there, the entire room seemed to be spinning. He was some lone microbe in a vast and endless whirring vacuum.

He knew he could ask for help. It was a matter of tapping his comm badge and notifying sickbay. But even after all this time, he would rather suffer alone indefinitely than receive medical treatment. It wasn't anything against the doctors or their abilities. Starfleet Medical was an outstanding facility. After all, it was the same facility that reconstructed his skull and restructured his brain some thirteen years before.

The migraine began the day before following his meeting with Captain Holliday. It was a routine enough visit. He had had talks like that with hundreds of different officers, thousands of times before. But this one seemed to trigger something inside of Teth. It began with the quick loss of all peripheral vision, spots of light like little candle flames everywhere, He barely made it halfway down the hall before he had to duck into waste reclamation to vomit. He cancelled the rest of his appointments for the day, returned to his quarters and turned out the lights to hide from himself.

But that's what the images began.

Fractured, violent imagery, so vivid he could taste the air. But he couldn't quite place or what it was. It could have been from the attack when he was young, he had never had any recollection of those events. He was walking down the street one moment, then suddenly he was in a hospital bed, in medical restraints with artificial respiration. Everything in between was lost forever due to the brain damage. The events were just guesses by his array of injuries and the state in which he was discovered.

He rolled over, away from the window and tried very, very hard to focus through the shearing pain in his head. He tried to bring clarity to the images. He was being dragged somewhere, conscious but paralyzed. He was quite young, surrounded by a group of maybe... four men? He wasn't certain. They stop at some point, a room with a single light suspended from the ceiling, the rest is gray tile floor and shadow. But there had to be a door, right? He gets kicked in the ribs by one of them, they're talking but he can't make out the words. One starts to cut of his clothing with scissors while the others still talk. Was it a different language? Was that why he couldn't understand? They tie his wrists and ankles, something is said about a paralytic wearing off. He tries to break free, but he can't. He hears something similar to an electrical drill to his left and then- nothing.

Teth gasped for air and sprung from his bed to the other side of his room. His fur disheveled and in a panicked mess. Hyperventilating and wanting to open the door and just run somewhere very far away.

Instead he slid against the wall, tears flooding his face. He thought back about his conversation with Captain Holliday. He told him the only way to recover was to face his problems. And in that moment Teth knew he was a fraud, a hypocrite.

He had gone through years of therapy after the attack, physical and psychological. He thought it had taught him to cope with what had happened. But instead, he had compartmentalized the entire event into a neat little box that he had placed far away, in the deep recesses of his mind. Somewhere buried past the bio-plastic bone grafting and experimental Borg neural processors and cerebral scar tissue.

He thought the brain damage had erased the event entirely. Instead he had just become so adept at the art of denial, he manage to make himself believe it never happened.

But now the images are leaking through the cracks in the veneer.

Teth managed to pull himself up and replicate a glass of water, but the entire thing tasted like blood and metal. Perhaps the blinding lights of the corridor and the sterile stench of sickbay weren't so awful after all. He couldn't be alone with his thoughts any longer and decided to make the journey to sickbay. He left in hopes finding a cure for his pain or perhaps some way to sleep and forget the whole thing. If only for a little while.

OFF:

Lt. JG Teth Miir
Counselor
USS Galileo

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