Take A Number

Posted on 14 Jan 2013 @ 10:43am by
Edited on on 15 Jan 2013 @ 2:52am

3,433 words; about a 17 minute read

Mission: Episode 02 - Resupply
Location: VEGA IX: Medical Center
Timeline: MD16 2100

ON:

The sparkling blue haze disappeared. Maenad was standing in a large plaza outside a tall concrete and glass building. There were small trees and benches, a decorative water fountain, and a few sparse people milling about by themselves in groups of two or three. This was the right place, she knew; it was thoroughly depressing. She looked up at the windows, wondering how many of them held the dying. Behind how many of them were people who wished to only be able to do what she was doing. She couldn't think about it.

The only reason she was here was because Athlen had told her, quite by accident, that Liyar had had some problems. Apparently, he felt that the ship's medical staff couldn't perform whatever it was he needed done to him. And so, naturally for her, her head filled with worry. The Galileo's medical staff was far from incompetent, so what was so wrong with her Vulcan friend that they couldn't take care of? As she climbed the steps into the hospital, each stair brought a further sense of dread into her heart. How many people had climbed these stairs for the first and only time in their life, never to descend them alive?

With a swallow, she made her way inside. People were sitting around waiting for their fates. They all looked stunningly pleased and unconcerned, she thought. Except for the man with the pot stuck on his head; she couldn't tell what expression was on his face, but the rest of them looked totally at peace with everything. What was wrong with all of them? Did they not care about all the incurable disease around them? That chlorine and sanitation only masked the stench of death, didn't they know that? She came to the reception desk and made very carefully not actually touch the thing. "Hello," she said hushedly, trying to seem like there was nothing wrong with her. "I'm looking for my friend. His name is Liyar, a Vulcan. Do you know where I can find him?"

A bored stodgy woman turned around, eying the gangly Starfleet officer. Unimpressed, she huffed toward the back of the waiting area. "Only Vulcan here," she droned monotonously. She didn't stop to wonder if that was all, or to offer any further hospitality, before she turned and meandered away. "Bit of a nut," she elaborated, watching while the man she pointed to smacked his fist into the side of a large plastic vending dispenser. It dented unforgivingly and something clunked out of the bottom.

Liyar, recognizable curly hair and all, was pacing. Not merely walking, or exploring, but nearly wearing a hole in the floor underneath him. He grabbed whatever it was furtively and stopped, whirled around, and blinked at Maenad directly. He tapped his finger against the edge of the can in his free hand. "Lieutenant?" He shifted a few PADDs and grabbed a stylus from the back of his whiteboard, leading a ways down the hall and sticking it to the wall in the empty hallway. He brought up the last screen, standing back and finally managing to open his can of Whatever. He tapped his fingers now against one another, restlessly. "Is something occurring aboard the Galileo?" he asked, looking up at the projections and correcting one of the numbers to the side. A few patients ambled by here and there, but no one seemed to pay them much mind.

Maenad gave the receptionist a dirty look for calling Liyar a nut, then hurried away toward Mister Liyar. He somehow looked different than usual, she noted absently. "Hi," she tried to smile. "No, the ship is fine. Athlen told me I could find you here. I came right away. Are you all right?" Each sentence came out disconnected from each other, as if each were said first and unrelated to the next.

Liyar blinked. "No," he shook his head. "You should not be here. I have managed to calculate the odds of what will occur should this information become public knowledge." He gestured to the board, before writing out several numbers and symbols in a row. "The outcome is unfavorable. They have given me medication. Once I readjust I am told I will feel better. I was within perfectly nominal operating efficiency, nominal," he repeated, jabbing the stylus into the board emphatically. He then turned to look at her. "You are in a hospital. You do not like hospitals. Why did you come here?"

She stepped closer toward him, sensing that something was terribly wrong. What had happened? Last night he had seemed fine; they had played music in her quarters, and then this afternoon he had visited her after finding her upset with her trip to the captain's ready room. Was this her fault? He frowned when she had accidentally forced him to remember the horrific deaths of his wife and son, she remembered. "Yes," she said to him. "But I like you more than I dislike hospitals," she said, "And I wanted to make sure that you were all right."

"Your variable shifts," he muttered to himself, shaking his head at the whiteboard. "It is uncertain. No. That is incorrect." He made no move to change the whiteboard, so he could have been referring to her thoughts themselves, the ones she hadn't spoken.

Maenad remembered that whenever she put her hand on him, her thoughts communicated more clearly to him. He said that he did not want this to get out around the ship, a Vulcan's pride was all he had after all. She stopped him from writing, gently touching his wrist. She was thinking that he could trust her, hoping that maybe it would communicate to him. "What happened?" she asked, both her eyes and voice soft.

Liyar's eyes tracked backwards and forwards emptily, ears drawing back as if confused, before he turned to look at her, as if suddenly realizing she was there. "Tarinol," he muttered very quietly with a wave of his unoccupied hand. A flash of a word traveled through their connection, unmistakably from outside of her own mind, but clear enough, a word she might even have recognized. Veren's. "They need to do a test," he spoke in odd fragments. "They want me on the medication, to do the last part of the test. Psionic test. P8. I have done the work, I know." He circled the giant 11 on his whiteboard. "How could that be?" He rambled and trailed off, before looking at her again. "To get used to it. To the medication. Again. Then I will be nominal. The psi-test," he shrugged. "It is wrong. It is unnatural," he insisted. "My mind is as it has always been. Only / there are more people," he quoted dryly. "You are touching me." He observed her, owlishly.

Maenad felt a quiver down her neck and spine. The word Veren came to her, but not from. She had never experienced psionic anything, and it frightened her to have a thought in her head that was not her own. She removed her hand. "I thought it might help you to trust me," she explained. But she didn't know what to do. He was scattered and not himself, obviously in a lot of turmoil. It wasn't hard to tell. Why did the doctors just leave him out here like this? She looked around for a place to sit and saw an empty couch near a deserted corner. "Shall we sit down?" she asked him.

He grabbed his whiteboard possessively and tucked it under his arm, as if someone were going to come along and steal it. It wasn't even his, but clearly that little tidbit didn't really matter. "I have made you afraid of me. That was not my intention." He sounded a little more solid, lucid, when he said that, following her absently to wherever she was leading them. He found himself sitting down and he balanced the board over his knees and tapped one index finger rapidly against the other. "I am not normally this way," he seemed to find it necessary to add. "This was not meant to happen." That was directed at his trusty whiteboard.

"I am not afraid of you," she told him, sitting there beside him. She was close to him, but not touching, with her elbows on her thighs as she hunched a bit. She still didn't understand why he was here; she had heard him say something about a psi test. Did they botch it? She shouldn't ask right now, she told herself. As much as she wanted to, it could put him at risk. "How long do you have to stay here?"

"Until they have completed the calibrations," Liyar said with a little more stability. "The test operates on a simplistic calculation mechanism. I have already determined the outcome. The test must be administered by someone with greater ability than myself. The only individual who qualifies is Lieutenant Coleman, but I prefer it to be..." he shook his head, "Confidential. Also I am uncertain as to her facility with telepathic minutiae," he rambled a little and forced himself back on track. "These effects should only last until," he tapped his fingers against the whiteboard, "I am able to filter out the mechanism of the medication."

Maenad inclined her head as she sat upright. She understood Liyar's reasoning to keep his needs private. She felt the same way about a lot of things, being a private person. "What made you come here?" she asked, looking at him beside her. She realised that she had already sort of asked that, so it was probably a good idea to change the question. "You have to take a test," she said thoughtfully, "But why now? What happened?"

"Due to Counselor Carlisle's assessment, Counselor Sekhet has reinstated conditional duty. One of these conditions is that I retake my psi-test. Due to the fact that I have demonstrated an ability in psionics that is," he paused, blinking a little, sounding a little more rational now than ever before, "That is far above average," he finally finished quietly, in a way that sounded more wary than boastful.

She watched him sympathetically, unable to help herself. She still didn't get it, which usually would have started frustrating her. But, Maenad didn't feel frustrated at all. What was causing his behaviour? She decided to save the questions for another time. "Well, I will stay here with you until the doctors let you go."

"They said," he kept looking at nothing again, "That I was supposed to," blinking now, "Eat. I would prefer not to." The revelation came at a completely separate tangent to what Maenad was discussing. He tilted his head and sighed. "I know that I appear," he let out a breath and gestured vaguely. This was becoming out of his control. He'd crawled out of the hole in Ka'veya, he'd managed to do the work, convince people he was competent, capable. He was. He hadn't been lying to her, when he said it was he who would ascend. Him. He had proven he was the choice. Not Neo. Not an interim. Yet here he was. He could tell, he could feel it inside, crawling through his molecules. Everything was off. Crazy. Insane. Nuts, the receptionist had said. "Your colloquialisms are most bizarre," he said out loud. "I have Veren syndrome," he admitted quietly to his feet. The word that had come through earlier.

"It is not public knowledge. I am normally very capable of functioning, when I direct my own treatment. I am in the V'Shar, I am a member of Miran's Council. I am functional," he insisted. "The Federation has come a long way, but we have not perfected this. Even now." He shook his head and frowned. "The medicine they have given me now, they say it is stabilizing to me, that it is logical to take it. It makes me logical, instead of irrational. You have a medical concern, you take the medication," he said very reasonably. "But it is not simple that way. When it is functioning, they tell me that I am logical, and reasonable. But I," he rose a hand, and looked over at her, into her eyes. "I feel," he gestured, not really sure what other word to use. Not that would convey what he meant, to a non-telepath. "Like I am dead. My thoughts, the things I can do, the things I can see." He waved a hand over the whiteboard. "They disappear." He brought his hands together as if snuffing out an entire universe in the middle of his palms. "As this is an illogical," he gestured again, knowingly, "An illogical reason not to take it, they believe I must continue to do so." He shrugged. "For the test, they have administered to me a high dosage. When the test is done, I will metabolize it. And, then, I shall be normal. For a time. Until the morning, when I am given my first dosages. Then," he said, looking up, "I will be back in the cage."

Liyar putting all of this to words, Maenad could tell it was very difficult. She wondered whether he were venting because of his scattered brain or because he genuinely trusted her. Did he have enough control to stop himself, or would this later become a regret? Her eyes never left his as he explained to her exactly what was happening to himself, but her mind did take a trip of its own. She was very grateful that Liyar had told her, but she also felt a pinch of guilt, like she had overheard something private or read someone's diary. And then she wondered about Liyar's admission of feeling; the way that he had described his medication seemed, to her, filled with conceit. It was like he was telling her that in some ways he liked having emotions, but he also liked being a Vulcan. But, if being Vulcan meant being eternally in a cage, should he have been doing it? Was that a way for anyone to live?

He should not have been seen as any less a Vulcan for choosing to live the way his body made him, and it was this irrational, illogical, side of Vulcans that inspired so much animosity from her. Why couldn't Liyar just be Liyar and be accepted? The difficulty that he must have endured for a lifetime broke her heart. And it was there, sitting beside him in that lonely hospital waiting room, that Maenad knew Liyar meant more to her than anything else in her life. She liked him exactly the way he was, and the respect that she had for him was now inarticulable. But none of this could be said, not here and not now. Perhaps never, even. She took his hand and pulled it toward her as she made herself touch him, so that their sides and legs were against each other. She laid her head gently on his shoulder, meanwhile rubbing the top of his hand with her thumb. Whether she were comforting herself or him, she didn't think about. And, she didn't care if he could hear her thoughts as they were nothing but understanding and complimentary. She only wanted him to find peace, for him to feel accepted unconditionally for who he truly was, and for him to know that if somewhere inside of him found solace in the approval of others he would find it in her.

The Vulcan made no move away from her. While his thoughts were enigmatic, perhaps that said more than anything, that he was all right with her. At this point, it didn't occur to him to question the wisdom of his behavior toward her, where possibly any other Vulcan would consider it an improper use of one's time, an improper association for a society of beings that relied on an internally consistent social order, but Liyar couldn't bring himself to care. Of course, caring about such things was never high on his agenda to begin with. There was something different about his interactions with Maenad. Moreso than any other member of Galileo's crew. Not well known for his congeniality and friendship, Liyar could only wonder if this was what having a friend meant to Terrans. On Vulcan, relationships between people were defined. They left no room for doubt, but this was different. There was doubt, he realized, in that he had to wonder at all. But there was also a freedom, to define the experience, that he never had before.

Of course, on Vulcan, allowing someone to take such liberties with their person would be an immediate sign of far more than friendship, but Liyar could feel her thoughts, almost calming in a way, even fragmented as they usually were. Terrans gave comfort in this way. Was that not reasonable? In his mind, he allowed her to sit with him and comfort him. Tolerated it, because of her human needs, but if he had to be deeply honest with himself, something he rarely was even in meditation, it was simply pleasant. And what he could feel from her, was beyond novel. In a life where he had always fell short of what others expected from him, demanded of him, and forced him to conform to, to simply be, in that moment in time, was a gift. The two of them were very highly flawed individuals, who disagreed more often than not, but somehow that did not matter. They were what they were. Kaiidth, in a way that wasn't a denial or a cover for grief, but real acceptance. "I do not regret informing you," he finally said, picking up on that initial thought of hers.

The tiniest smile spread from the corners of her lips. She was staring in the direction of a window, but the darkness on the other side had turned the glass into an onyx mirror. She sat that way, nestled into his side for a very long time without saying anything. Time seemed to stop for her. She wanted to tell him about her god-awful day so badly; she wanted to tell him about the terrible things that Stone had called her and her awkward experience with the counsellor, about her meeting with the man she saw as competing for her job, the man she thought that Starfleet and perhaps the captain would have preferred over her. Another time. Another time.

Eventually, she had lost all perception of time, Maenad tilted her head to look up into Liyar's brown eyes. They looked just as lost as he had said, but she also saw something else, something that she couldn't quite remember. "Liyar?" a lump had formed in her throat at some point, forcing her to whisper. "If they told you to eat something, then perhaps you should. Just something small?"

Liyar had settled back, listening to the wash of her thoughts, zoning out amidst the hustle of patients and doctors alike around them. He blinked down at her and eventually inclined his head. As time eventually resumed its usual droning, endless course, he was reminded of the fact that despite liking him more than she disliked hospitals, she was still very much disliking the sterile environment.

With that in mind, he stood, suggesting that he take his meal aboard the ship instead. He also knew that she'd been in the middle of something with Athlen, as they were to depart rather shortly, he knew that she had to return aboard to finish last minutep preparations. With a half-wrangled promise to inform her when he was through with his testing, he watched her leave the hospital and stayed behind for a while, before finally he simply decided he had enough of the environment himself, walked outside and beamed up to the mess hall for the remainder of the time until his results got back in.

OFF:

Lieutenant (JG) Maenad Panne
Chief Science Officer, SSC
USS Galileo

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

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