With an appetite so dangerous (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on 26 Jun 2012 @ 6:49am by Commander Andreus Kohl & Chief Petty Officer Lucalin Mrina Ph.D.

4,434 words; about a 22 minute read

Mission: Episode 01 - Project Sienna
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 2, Mess Hall
Timeline: MD07 - 1656 hours

Previously...

"And I can trust you?" Luca inquired as he swallowed and ate the last of the eggs. He touched emptied plates and bowls on the tray and found they were all empty.

Andreus Kohl's breath caught in his throat at the question. His languid posture of thirty seconds ago became still, and became stiff. He was relieved to be staring at his empty tray if only because it meant he didn't have to look away from Luca's question. At first blush, Kohl couldn't think why the question disquieted him so, at least not until he was saying, "I don't know," because he really didn't. He didn't know why he didn't either. "I guess that's up to you," Kohl said.

Luca's ears flexed and shifted independently when the man beside him stilled. It was such a quick reaction, he thought for a moment that there was something happening in the room, but the noise around them carried on, vague and general with spots of laughter and debate. Then came the words, suddenly dropped in, simple and serious: 'I don't know'. The honesty was so pleasant that Luca closed his eyes and hummed. "Your people are hedonists," he said with a small smile. "Mine are practical, sometimes selfishly. Sometimes to a fault." He held out his hand, "Let's trust each other, then, and see how much we both can learn."

"I can do that," Kohl said, with the certainty of gradual acceptance. He reached over and squeezed twice on Luca's outstretched hand. "But I have an awful lot to learn."

And now, the conclusion...


[ON]

"And a lot to teach," Luca asserted confidently, his eyes shifting slightly, uselessly, nerves reflecting the sounds around them. Flim Flam had gone back to purring, her head resting against his chest. The rumble of her purr shook his body, making the uncomfortable hunger worse. He needed more. Great mountains of calories. More than that, he needed his nutritional pack to work again. Something to stave off the worst of it. The sound of the utensil scraping against the bowl only moments before had told Luca that Andreus had nearly finished his meal. How fortunate for him - that such things could be passing instead of interminable... Oh, of course. Of course. Why was his first instinct always to make things harder on himself? "What do you do in sickbay?" he asked.

"Nursing," Kohl answered, but that didn't sound quite right, and so he said, "I'm a nurse. In fact, I'm probably supposed to be there any moment now..." As he trailed off, Kohl looked around for an LCARS display, any LCARS display, that might have a chronometer in the corner. From where he was sitting against Luca on the chaise lounge, Kohl turned his head from left to right. There was a woman reading something on a PADD two tables over, and when Kohl saw the time, he "hmm"ed to himself under his breath. "And how does it work for you then?" Kohl asked Luca. "On a science ship, will you be allowed to pursue your own research, or will you be given assignments?"

"I guess we'll see. As far as I gather, it will be a bit of both. But that works for me," Luca added. "If I wanted to hole up in a little lab and do just what I thought of myself, I could have stayed on the starbase. I want to know things. Have wisdom, not just knowledge." He winced slightly as his stomach began to ache worse. "Maybe I could go with you? To the-" he pressed his lips together as his stomach groaned. "Sickbay. If you don't mind terribly." He nudged Flim Flam and she nyaked at him, rolling off onto the floor in a disgruntled heap. A little less pressure, but it didn't help much. "Are you familiar with parenteral IVs?" he asked, carefully pushing himself to stand.

Considering Luca's guileless discomfort, Kohl's hands moved instinctively. Kohl reached over to help Luca get to his feet, but he stopped himself. He closed his open hands. Luca was perfectly capable of getting himself where he needed to go, and Kohl didn't want to make him feel unnecessarily coddled. Kohl rose to Luca's side, and he took Luca's tray to pile atop his own. "I have a certain finesse with parenteral IVs," Kohl said. He discarded the trays in the nearest replicator, and took it as a given that Luca would accompany him to Sickbay. "On Bactricia, we would use them preventatively, for patients with abdominal wounds, to avoid infections or complications." Kohl didn't say anything more, as he moved towards the exit. He left a silence for Luca to fill however he wished.

"Good," Luca breathed a sigh of relief, stopping by the buffet and filling his hands and pockets with boiled eggs. "Then maybe you can help me get mine to work again. Last time I replaced the pack was this morning before the transfer, so-" he kept his breathing shallow, shoved an egg in his mouth, chewed, swallowed, "-that's about four hours I've been going without it. I didn't even realize until maybe an hour ago and then I thought I would use this as an opportunity to test if I could regulate my metabolism with diet again." He laughed shallowly, wincing. "We'll call this one a poorly considered risk." He ate another egg the way a heartsick man might take a shot, "Four hours, though. That is a good sign. I think it might be better than it used to be." He was sweating now, as though every small movement it took to walk, to talk, to click and sense the sounds around him and find his way were more of an effort. His muscles were beginning to burn as they left the mess hall. Maybe it was all the sitting, he thought now. He'd spent far more time sitting down than he usually did. That was a whole halving of the muscle groups that were using his limited resources. And now that he was walking, it was all much worse. Maybe it wasn't getting better, after all.

"It's been four hours since the last time you used a parenteral IV," Kohl said aloud, to confirm he heard Luca rightly. That Kohl needed to repeat the information at all could lead one to infer Kohl's surprise. In his delivery, though, Kohl was very careful to use his impartial, surgical-nurse tone of voice. Kohl handed Luca a bundle --four more hardboiled eggs wrapped in a napkin-- that he had scooped up from the buffet in case Luca would need more food than he could fit in his pockets. Evidently, he would. Once his hands were free, Kohl pressed the call contact for the turbolift. Kohl cleared his throat, and he asked, "For how long have you been receiving your nutrition intravenously?"

Lucin greatfully accepted the additional eggs, popping two in his mouth at once and grinding them up into mash before swallowing. "Always," he answered. "Supplementary," he added. "Or maybe the real food is supplemental. Either way. Every few months I look for a new way to go about it; it's just I burn through food at about the same speed I take it in. The IV lets me do things other than this-" he stuffed another pair of eggs into his mouth and chewed.

The double doors pulled apart as soon as the turbolift car arrived. Kohl strode in, and he spun around to put his back to the bulkhead. He turned his head, briefly, to request Sickbay's ICU as their destination. When Lucalin stepped onto the turbolift, Kohl was staring at him. Staring right at him. Quizzically, Kohl said, "Which somewhere else are you from?"

Lucalin did not get the benefit of the stare; his eyes continued to shift uselessly in their sockets. "Meratah," he answered. Where he was from didn't have much to do with his current state, but it was a fair question. "A few clicks between star base 173 and the Romulan Neutral Zone."

"I know it," Kohl said, leaning against the wall, "I... think I know it. My first posting was on the Romulan Neutral Zone. Starbase 128." --He waved a hand at Luca vaguely-- "That would make you Gwer? Or Bireikar? ...All of whom have an internal digestive system."

Luca could have offended by the question, as the differences between the Gwer and Bireikar were many and varied, but that would have been impractical. All the races on Meretah had erupted from the same original stock and none of them had completely dominated the others. It was a fair question for someone who knew their planet academically. "Bireikar," he answered with a little sway of his head. "You know of us. That will make things easier. Yes, it is internal. I was created in the second Meratah War, as an attempt to amplify our more volatile characteristics for the purposes of defending us against the Gwer assaults. But Mera never intended us to go into battle, to lay hands on any living creature in violence, so the eugenics turned out proof of this: I was born flawed. It happens. I am fortunate they found a way to help me survive despite it."

If Kohl wasn't already leaning against the side of the turbolift, he would have been doing so now. His mind spun in three different directions at once, trying to take what he remembered from old diplomatic corps reports and refract that into the context of anthropology, and eugenics, and the medical history of this one man. He couldn't say anything at first. There was no critical emergency to narrow his focus into something laser-like, and so his mind spun. Kohl knew he didn't want to say something like, You were created? What? He stared at a spot in the air somewhere over Luca's shoulder. As the silence between them was about to grow fecund, the nursing training took over.

Kohl straightened his posture, as he could feel the turbolift slowing in approach of their destination. "Have you had difficulties with the IV before?" Kohl asked.

"From time to time," Luca said simply. "It is, as all systems, fallible." He then ate three eggs in a row as the doors opened and he stepped off the turbolift. He swallowed hard. "Hopefully, a solution can be found that will not deprive you of too much time."

"Don't worry about my time," Kohl said emphatically, taking long strides off the turbolift to catch up with Luca and then get enough ahead to lead them in the direction of Sickbay. "This is what I do. This is what Starfleet wants me to do -- support the crew until they're well enough to do what they do. When I help you with your IV, I'm really helping you study new living organisms with completely unique genetic patterns."

"You do that by existing," Luca said, swallowing a mouthful of chewed egg, shells and all. He was staving off the worst of it, but trying to conserve his energy while keeping up with the nurse and furiously grinding food to fit down his throat was complicating matters. He fit another pair of eggs in his mouth, patting his pockets for the last one as he chewed, and rested one hand on the back of Andreus' shoulder. He could talk and echolocate, but chewing was another matter.

As soon as Luca's hand tapped against Kohl's shoulder blade, Kohl reached out to wrap a supportive arm across Luca's mid-back. Kohl gave Luca a light squeeze, and guided him through the doorway into Sickbay. He headed directly for the nearest biobed available. "Uh, what do you mean by that?" Kohl asked.

"You're a living organism with a completely unique genetic pattern. All living creatures are, of course, but I don't think I have any Argelians in my sequence database. Perhaps you'll give me a skin sample to analyze some time," Luca said as he was levied up onto the biobed. It was a flirtation, of course, the request for genetic data. It was, in his mind, the highest form of compliment. And thinking about pulling apart the strands of the nurse's DNA was far preferable to thinking about the reality of his body attempting to swallow itself. Flim Flam was grumbling worriedly, nyaking her concern up at him, her paws resting on his foot to hold herself up.

Kohl clasped Luca by both shoulders until he was sure the other man was steady on the biobed. He tilted his head to the left, and he studied Luca's features. Lowering his voice to a rasp, Kohl said, "...I would be comfortable with you sampling my skin."

Luca smiled at the prospect and let his imagination travel for a moment to the prospect. There were a whole host of tests, really, that he could perform to learn more about Andreus- for the purpose of expanding his understanding of the genetic structure and how useful it might be to other projects. Cheek and torso samples, stress tests, heart rate monitoring, electroencephalograms... a neural map might prove thoroughly engaging.

Nurse Kohl step-hop-stepped away from the biobed, diverting awkwardly to avoid trampling all over Flim Flam. He moved smoothly, though, as if it were a kind of dance. Kohl closed the distance between himself and the replicator. Before he reached the alcove, he looked back at Luca. He had to ask, "Is your technology compatible with Federation nutrition packs?"

Kohl's question drew him out of his head, and he issued a short trill of assent. "The ports were replaced after I tested into Starfleet Academy. I've been living off of Federation technology for years."

"That's promising... That's very, very promising for your chances of comfort and pleasure in the near future," Kohl said, a little bit too amused with himself. He turned back to the replicator to prepare a fresh nutrition pack. Once it materialized before him, Kohl took it between his hands, and spun back towards Luca. "I'm no engineer. I probably couldn't have corrected a mismatch between technologies. But I know our medical tech. I can make it hum."

Luca hummed in reply, his eyes gleaming and unfocused. "Excellent," he said, his voice low, "I'm glad to hear it." He inhaled slowly and deeply, overcoming a dark aching twinge as the contractions in his stomach worsened. "Near future," he reminded himself, flexing his hands on the edge of the biobed.

With the nutrition pack in his left hand, Kohl fetched a tricorder from a storage cabinet. He touched the display to initialize the tricorder, and as he stared at it, Kohl idly asked, "Can you show me where you're having problem with the--?" He stopped talking abruptly. Kohl was walking back to he biobed when he took notice of Luca's flexing hands, pained posture, and sudden use of simple sentence structures. "It's getting more painful?" Kohl asked with an empathetic wince.

"Yes," Luca admitted. It was impractical to pretend otherwise. "Once it starts. It only gets worse. Have to. Keep ahead of it." As he finished the last short sentence, his stomach contracted again, worse than before, and he groaned involuntarily. "Port," he said haltingly and lifted a hand to point to the back of his neck where the small brushed metal port protruded at the cross between his neck and shoulders. Internally, the tubing from the port actually fed down directly into his digestive system just above his stomach, bypassing any other opportunities for his body to use the nutrients in any way other than they were specifically intended.

Setting down the nutrition pack on the biobed, Kohl came to stand behind Luca. He raised the tricorder and swiped a finger across the controls to activate its sensors. The tricorder began to whirr its usually song, and Kohl idly wondered if Luca would hum along with it. With his free hand, Kohl started to roll down the teal collar of Luca's uniform. Kohl's fingertips were warm and dry. He managed to reveal more of Luca's neck beneath the collar, but the port was further down still. "Take off your jacket," Kohl said.

Luca whistled in response to the sounds of the tricorder as he unzipped his jacket without argument. Moving hurt; his muscles were all overtensed. When he peeled the jacket off, his muscles were visibly tightening under his pale skin and his spine stood out from his back. The port, the accessible part of the feeding tube, was clogged and the skin around it was bright red in comparison to his otherwise unsunned flesh.

Lightly, Kohl tapped at the skin around the port with two fingers. He watched for discolouration and felt for the firmness of the reddened skin. After the physical inspection, Kohl returned his gaze to the display on the tricorder. He studied the readings for some moments, and then he quieted the tricorder and set it down too. "Luca," Kohl began in a perfectly matter-of-fact timbre, "when was the last time you had the port flushed?"

"Unsure. The last time they told me to." Lucalin's taut stomach muscles were flexing reflexively, his hands back to gripping the edge of the biobed. "A week ago? My schedule muddled somewhat when the transfer orders came through."

"That should have been-- that should have been recent enough..." Kohl said. He sounded less than focused on his words, because he was staring at the port on Luca's neck. It wasn't as if he could see the clog with his naked eyes, but he stated at it all the same. He stared at is as though it were a picture puzzle he could solve. As intently as he was driven to study the problem, to understand the cause, Kohl felt compelled to end his patient's pain first. The nurse retrieved a pale grey tool, the kind he would use to sterilize medical equipment. It fit in the palm of his hand. Kohl narrowed the sterilizer beam, and he positioned it over the port in Luca's neck. With the swipe of a toggle, the sterilizer beam washed over the port.

Lucalin hissed as he felt his flesh react to the beam, tingling and flinching. That vague uncomfortableness paired with the increasingly sharp pull of his skin and twisting of his gut made his lips peel back in a grimace, canines flashing in the bright lighting of the sickbay. "What's wrong with it?"

"I'm sorry," Kohl said, some defeat in his tone; "I don't know. I can tell you it's clear now. It should work according to specification." Toggling off the sterilizer tool, the beam cut off and Kohl put the tool aside. He glanced at the biofunction monitor to confirm his earlier statement. There were no blockages in the port know, the sensor readings confirmed. Without any warning or waiting, Kohl grasped for the nutrition pack on the biobed, and he attached it to the port firmly.

"There," Kohl said, "That should help. I'm going to need you to come back to Sickbay regularly. Every twelve hours or so. I'll need to monitor the port and see how quickly residue builds up inside."

Luca shuddered a touch as the nutrients began to pour into him. He closed his eyes in pleasure when the cramping finally stopped, the spasms easing. "Yes. Thank you."

Rounding the biobed, Kohl came to stand in front of Luca. His feet settled shoulder width apart, and he stood close to the biobed. Kohl proffered the black uniform jacket to Luca. He watched his patient, watching the tension in his body easing, the facial expressions of pain fade away to memory. It allowed Kohl to breathe easier. "Did you want that skin sample now?" Kohl asked, as he rubbed the back of his own neck. He pointed out wryly, "We have the tools on hand."

Luca unclenched his fingers from the side of the biobed, taking the jacket and Andreus' hand at the same time. The jacket went to the bed, the hand was drawn close to Luca's face, almost as though we were going to kiss it. But kissing hands had little meaning to his people. Instead, he did what meant a great deal. He turned the nurses' hand over and pressed his nose to the inside of the wrist, inhaling the scent there and filing it. His life would last a little longer, thanks to Kohl. He wasn't going to forget that any time soon. Whether that was the nurses' job or not didn't even enter into it. All life was sacred and those that protected his own were even more sacred still. "I would like that," he said finally.

"You don't have to limit yourself to a skin sample..." Kohl said, and there was encouragement in his tone. He left his hand in Luca's tender grip, the other man's lips and nose so close to his wrist. Kohl studied Luca's sightless green eyes, and briefly wondered at how Luca's sense of smell must differ from his own. It was only briefly, though, until Kohl elaborated on his earlier thought. "Among humanoid lifeforms, Argelians have distinctive pheromones in our sweat."

Lucalin already knew that. He could taste it on the back of his tongue, like molt'ar sap; his nose was buried in Andreus' wrist, nostrils flaring against the flesh. Genetics were fascinating. How anyone could stand to not understand the tiny differences that made every individual life form unique and precious, he could not begin to imagine. He rubbed his nose up, resting it on the curve of Andreus' wrist and licking slightly where he'd scented. Bireikar tongues were not entirely dissimilar to cats; the sides were rough, the center smooth, a genetic trait that allowed them to clean and care for each other in the often dusty tunnels of their homeland. What was the purpose of the pheromone, he wondered. A way of lulling potential enemies into a state of arousal, confusing the chemical signals in their brains? Anger and lust were mapped close in the neural patterns of several species. Or had it been a gradual thing, an evolution based on the pleasure-centered behavior of the society. Breeding-based cultures often took on the traits of the most in demand figures; in a culture like Andreus had slightly touched upon, it was entirely possible one male with mutated pheromones had cast his DNA like a wide spread net over his people. Wouldn't it be interesting to find out, to track back, to understand it? He pressed his thumb against the inside of the wrist as he licked once more, feeling the pulse and the temperature shifts of the skin. "More than skin?" he asked quietly. "Or more of skin?"

The skin on Kohl's wrist shivered and he felt goosebumps all the way up his arm. His face flushed, and he swallowed hard. "...Ask me again," Kohl answered, his voice low, "when you're not my patient." Even now, Kohl didn't recoil his hand from Luca's grasp, but he used his other hand to offer the uniform jacket to Luca again.

Every passing second, between the pheromones and the taste of foreign skin and the nutrients pouring into him to ease the gripping the pain, he felt better. "Then, for now, a skin sample will do," he said, smiling at Andreus' response. Body temperature rising, pilomotor reflexive reaction, intensified pheromone production, pulse increase. And people doubted how much a blind man could see. He breathed in Andreus' wrist one more time and let go. This time, Luca took the jacket, gingerly sliding his tensed sore muscles through the arms and arranging the small hole in the cloth over the port at the back of his neck.

As Luca dressed, Kohl stepped aside. He approached the nearest cabinet set into the bulkhead. The nurse opened the panel and it took him all of five seconds to realize he had notion of where to find what he was searching for. The last time he had been to Sickbay, it had been as a patient. Studying Sickbay's layout would need to be a high priority for Kohl. He reached in to pick up a hypospray loaded with an empty cartridge. Kohl tapped the controls on the side of the hypospray, changing the settings to collect rather than to spray, and he was still smirking all the while.

"Did you want to collect skin from my wrist, or..." Kohl said, leaving the question hanging, as he pressed the hypospray into Luca's hand.

Lucalin finished zipping up his jacket as Kohl returned. "Your wrist first," he told him, clicking at the instrument Andreus had placed in his hands. He ran his fingers over the module to sense the wavelength of the function light and satisfied himself that it was on the lowest skin retrieval setting. "Then hair and cheek, if you're willing." He located the nurse's hand and firmly dragged his thumb over the back of the hand and wrist until he found a slight valley just above the wrist on the back of Andreus' arm. He lifted it, licked it once to clean the area of potentially data-confusing bacteria, and rested the unit over the spot. "Three, two," he activated the hypospray unit and collected the sample, "one." He hummed to himself, just knowing that he now had something fascinating to study once he arrived in his lab. "Thank you," he said, the timbre of his voice roughened with pleasure.

"Start with the skin sample, yeah?" Kohl said playfully; "Save some of the mystery for later." Kohl pulled his arm in close to his chest, and rubbed it where it was starting to hurt. All the same, his expression remained pleased. "I need to check in with my department head. ...And, you are welcome."

There will always be mystery, Lucalin thought, no matter how many samples I take. No amount of testing quantifies sentient existence. It's one of the wonders of my work. One of the magnificent things about you. But he didn't say anything. There would be other chances to discuss it. He'd been lucky to be offered the skin sample at all; it was far too great a fortune to lessen in any way. He rose gingerly from the biobed and touched Andreus' shoulder lightly. "Enjoy the rest of your evening, Andreus Kohl," he told him, as Flim Flam began to purr uproariously at their feet.


[OFF]


Chief Petty Officer Lucalin Elil Mrina Ph.D.
Bioengineer
USS Galileo

and

Ensign Andreus Kohl
Nurse
USS Galileo

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