Mestral’s Legacy: Chapter 39

Sickbay,
Enterprise

The last time Sickbay had been this crowded was when the ship had come under attack in the Expanse. Fortunately most of today’s injuries were minor and there was only one fatality.
Vorak remained unconscious, laid out on a biobed. According to his monitor he was slowly coming around. Phlox would have preferred to examine him more closely, but Alaia guarded him fiercely and indications were that he would awaken on his own. Phlox wasn’t quite ready to argue with her unless his patient’s life was in danger, which it currently wasn’t. The closest he got to Alaia was to take a handheld scan. Her ions were out of whack, she had a mild case of shock, and her hormones were off the charts–in other words she was fine, considering the circumstances. He left them to their own devices, Alaia curled up next to Vorak, and turned his attention to more needy and co-operative patients.

The MACO had regained consciousness fifteen minutes ago–almost half an hour after being attacked. His neck was bruised and the swelling made him prone to passing out, but other than that he was more intrigued by the neck pinch than injured by it. Having kept him in Sickbay as a precaution, Phlox now checked the effectiveness of the anti-inflammatory hypospray he’d given to combat the swelling and sent him off to his quarters with a MACO corpsman to make sure he made it. The MACO left only when it became clear that he would have to wait until another time to find out how to apply a neck pinch.

Daniel had recovered from being stunned by the MACO. Phlox had offered to give him something for ‘phaser hang-over,’ the headache triggered by a phaser stun, but he was reluctant to stay in Sickbay with everyone else and left while Phlox was treating the MACO.

That left Phlox with two patients. Of the two, Archer’s injuries were physical while T’Pol’s were less obvious. At some point Archer had dislocated his shoulder, which Phlox popped back into place as soon as they beamed up. The clammy, pale complexion had been replaced by one of stoicism. The pain killer he’d been given earlier was kicking in and he refused further attentions from Phlox until T’Pol had been taken care of even though the biobed she was on was monitoring her condition. Knowing better than to argue with the captain in this frame of mind, he checked the biobed monitor. Some symptoms of exposure and mild shock–not unexpected. The other values were as close to normal as he could expect; the elevated hormones could easily be due to her ordeal–something he would have to keep an eye on. He pulled the curtain around the biobed and gave her an Enterprise uniform to put on since her clothing was unusable.

Judging from the noises coming from the other biobed, Vorak had regained consciousness. Phlox cast a voyeuristic eye in that direction–not that he could see much through the gauzy curtain–before Archer’s pointed clearing of the throat caught his attention. Phlox pulled up Archer’s scan; there was one more injury to address before he let the captain go. Now that Archer had had a chance to recover from the excruciating pain of the dislocated shoulder, other parts of his body were starting to hurt. Phlox picked up a laser scalpel on low power and cut away Archer’s shirt–removing it any other would have required moving his shoulder. Twenty-second century painkillers were good, but not that good.

There was a welt, rapidly turning an ugly shade of purple, snaking around his chest and ending in a gouge in the middle of his back. The imprint of chain links were faintly visible along the welt. A hypospray was useless for bruises that large, and in any case Archer’s system was full of painkillers. Phlox applied a fine spray of Lavendula to the length and breadth of the welt and then turned his attention to the gouge in his patient’s back. He was disinfecting the wound when Archer tensed. T’Pol had donned the StarFleet uniform and was staring at the welt she had inflicted.

“How are you?” Archer’s attempt at nonchalance was somewhat marred by the stifled groan that Phlox elicited as he applied the suturer to the gouge. The silence that followed was broken only by the increasingly intrusive sounds coming from the other end of Sickbay. Having finished his ministrations, Phlox helped Archer off of the biobed and discharged him and T’Pol. On the way out the door, Archer stopped to wait for Phlox who had suddenly decided his creatures needed feeding.

“Phlox.”

“I have some things to finish up,” Phlox said cheerfully.

“Phlox!”

“Yes?” Something clattered to the floor in the depths of Sickbay.

“I think you should leave too.”

“Why?” A mediscanner missile hit the wall next to the doors, bounced off of the hard surface and barely missed hitting Phlox in the forehead.

“I suppose I could check on Daniel.”

“Good idea.”

Jonathan Archer watched long enough to make sure Phlox didn’t return to Sickbay, before turning to T’Pol.

“If you don’t want to be alone–”

“I do.”

“Alright. If you change your mind–”

“I need to meditate.”

“If you change your mind, I’ll be in my quarters. I should be up for hours dealing with paperwork.”

“You should rest.”

“Yeah.”

“Jonathan?”

“Mmm?”

“I would like to apologize for striking you.”

“It’s fine, T’Pol.

* * *

Phlox found Daniel in the conference room, staring out at the blue globe below. The lights hadn’t been activated, and Daniel didn’t acknowledge Phlox’s arrival when the doors swished open. The Denobulan set about dealing with the cuts and bruises Daniel hadn’t given him a chance to treat earlier.

“I haven’t been back there in 44 years.” The words were so soft Phlox strained to hear them. He stopped attending to the cuts and looked up at his patient. There were tears coursing down his cheeks; tears Phlox attributed to grief over his brother’s death.

“He’s better off. I would be too.”

“Did you help him escape?”

“I can’t imagine being tied up like that. No options. Slowly losing my mind. I kept seeing myself strapped to that bed.” Daniel sighed deeply as if to expel the memory from his body. “No. I know what he’s like–was like. I just wanted to talk to him, give him some answers. Thought it might help. Don’t know why I thought it would.”

Phlox sprayed the last of the bruises and offered Daniel a Starfleet-issue shirt.

“I assume you’ve found a different way of, um, dealing with your Pon Farr than your brother.”

“You don’t know what’s happening the first time.” Daniel looked at him then, searching for something but not finding it.

“I’m not sure I–”

“I had no idea, none. I loved her. I never meant–it was an accident,” he said, repeating the last words to himself, lost in his own thoughts. After a moment, Phlox left him there, in the dark, his face lit by the glow of Earth.

When he returned to Sickbay, his last patients had left although they had done a considerable amount of damage in the process and one of his Pylorian bats was loose. Phlox pulled up the records T’Pol had transmitted before her scanner had melted. Humans would call it a hunch. The search didn’t take long to run, limited as it was. The computer beeped once, establishing the paternity of Lily’s unborn child.

* * *

It was almost dawn when T’Pol entered his quarters, though the ship didn’t acknowledge the passage of time. She had tried meditating in her quarters, but found it difficult to concentrate. She told herself it was because her candles and incense were down on Earth, and did not want to admit that the empty room, with its lighting turned down low, was too much like a dark cave to be conducive to meditation.

He had managed to change into pyjama bottoms but had eschewed a shirt, and was laying on the bed, a datapad rising and falling in tandem with his chest under the fluorescent lights. She picked up the datapad and moved it to the desk. She briefly considered meditating in his quarters, but exhaustion was starting to sap her motivation to do anything further. She hesitated before sitting down on the bed. He shifted as she lowered herself onto the bed but didn’t waken. For a long time she sat motionless before laying down. When she did, he rolled over in his sleep, draping his arm over her waist. His breathing remained regular and he made no other move.

* * *

Even before he opened his eyes, he could smell her and feel the weight of her next to him. Still lost in the remnants of a dream that had suddenly taken a turn for the better, he moved to pull himself closer. A move that made every muscle he had make its existence known to him. He decided he was fine where he was. He must have made noise because she stirred, turning to face him. He opened one eye to find her watching him.

“How did you sleep?” He asked, resorting to the most diplomatic question to ask when finding a woman in his bed that he didn’t remember bringing there–not that it happened a lot, but certain members of his crew apparently made habit of it. She looked better than she had yesterday–no great feat, considering–but not quite like herself yet. Instead of answering his question, she traced the bruise she had given him. It had already started to turn yellow along the edges, and with any luck it would be imperceptible by the end of the day.

“It’s fine,” he said, embarrassed by her scrutiny. She withdrew her hand. He closed his eyes again, and gingerly rolled onto his back. His shoulder still ached, and he wondered whether it was safe to go back to Sickbay for another shot of painkillers.

First he had to figure out how to extricate himself from his current situation. Not that finding T’Pol in his bed was the worst situation to wake up to, but he was having a hard time figuring out what was going on between them. He was so distracted by these thoughts and by the competing messages his body was sending him that it took him a moment to realise that it wasn’t just his muscles that were stiff. T’Pol, it seemed, was well aware of her effect on him and was taking the opportunity to increase his distractions. He was just about to say something when her lips pressed against his. She took his open mouth as an invitation, and he momentarily forgot what it was he wanted to say. After what seemed an eternity, he gathered his senses enough to pull away.

“T’Pol, what are we doing?” The question earned him a raised eyebrow. Apparently she wasn’t prepared to believe that he’d never been in this particular position with a woman before. “And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m asking.”

He sat up to keep her from trying to distract him again, and then regretted it immediately as he realized that he was now sitting right next to her head, a position that brought back thoughts of the rainstorm on Nutka Island. Apparently deciding that he was serious, she sat up beside him.

“We have already discussed this.”

“I’m not satisfied with the answer.”

“It is the only answer I have.”

“So you’re just curious, and now that you’re not part of my crew you want to experiment?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. They sat on the bed, listening to the air being pumped into the cabin, the thump transmitted through the hull as one of the maintenance pods docked clumsily with Enterprise, and the sound of a new shift of maintenance workers tromped past in the hallway outside. Finally Archer swung his legs off of the bed, and reached for his shirt, ignoring his screaming muscles as he did so.

“Not good enough, T’Pol.” She looked at him as he pulled on his shirt, waiting for his head to emerge again. When he could see again, he found her still looking at him. “It’s not enough for me, T’Pol.”

“What is it you want?” She was still sitting on his bed as he punched the door control, and the doors swished open.

“More,” he said, heading out to Sickbay, alone.

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