The Worst of the Worst

Posted on Tue Nov 24th, 2020 @ 5:35pm by Lieutenant Aemilia "Millie" Stepanova & Lieutenant JG Chance Crow

Mission: Shore Leave
Location: Shuttle Resurrection

Chance trode the floor of the shuttle. Trisha was as patched up as she could be, and, if miracles happened, resting. Her injuries were the worst, but that didn't mean they were all. Millie had her own wounds. He found her and settled down next to her, opening his medkit once more. "How are you?" he asked as he scanned her with the tricorder.

Millie flinched as she was pulled from whatever deep thought she'd been immersed in. She recovered quickly and gave a somewhat weary smile. "Sorry, I didn't even notice you sit down."

He smiled sympathetically. "You've been through a lot." He looked at the results and his eyes widened. "A lot apparently. What happened to do all this to your head?" And they were old wounds. A reminder of how south things had gone soon after the girls had gotten out here. This whole thing had been a mistake.

"I don't know. Things went black when we hit the planet's surface." Millie rubbed the little scar at her hairline. "If I had to guess, I probably hit my forehead on one of the consoles." She paused. "How badly did I hurt it?"

"It was bad, but it's healed over. You're showing signs of having had a concussion at the time too. There are no physical remnants of that, but we'll have to see about mental or psychological remnants. I'll look closer at that and fix the cranial repair back on the ship. Have you had any significant headaches or migraines since the injury?"

Millie shook her head. "I got really sick shortly after the crash. High fever, vomiting, I wound up unconscious. The locals called it the 'sun sickness'."

"Mmhmm," he said with a nod. "How about now?"

"Just this underlying nausea since. It's not bad, but just enough to notice that it's there."

"I can give you something to stop the nausea for now, but the equipment to get to the heart of it is back on the ship." He stood and came around to her back side. "Is this the most serious flesh wound?" He asked with a light touch on the back of her shoulder.

Millie flinched pulling her shoulder away. She took a sharp breath in and shuddered.

He took his hand off of her and even stepped back. There was no way that hurt her, which meant it was a psychosomatic reaction. "Can you tell me what happened here," he asked gently.

"I took a knife in the back from one of those--those metal-mouthed things. I think it was two or three weeks after we crashed. Three of the things ambushed us at the crash site. One stabbed me, another got its teeth into Trish's shoulder." Millie swallowed hard. "Those things are the cause of what Trish was looking into."

Chance made a sound of agreement. "And her looking into it was the cause of all this." He grabbed the dermal regenerator. "I'm gonna fix the scar," he warned.

"It wasn't her fault, Chance." Millie gave a quiet sigh as she shifted her sweatshirt up over her shoulder.

"It never is," he replied, waving the device slowly over her old wound. At least it hadn't shown signs of being infected. That was something.

"She was right, Chance. The people in those colonies were either kidnapped or killed." Millie looked up over her shoulder. "That discovery would have killed her, several times over, if she hadn't finally opened up to someone enough to let them have her back."

"Yeah, it's a shame there isn't anyone else she could open up to." He finished the skin regeneration, and only those closest to her would ever know anything had happened.

"That's not fair, Chance." Millie almost clenched her jaw as she pulled the Starfleet Academy sweatshirt back down over her torso. "There's a big difference between being a spouse and a psychologist."

"What's not fair is Evie and I going about our days, trying to fulfill our duties, all the time wondering if this mission is just taking longer than expected, or if you're both lying dead on some unknown planet." Later, he'd apologize to Millie for laying into her, when it wasn't her fault, but at the moment, he couldn't help but let loose. "Unfair is watching your kid flinch because you snapped at him when all he did was ask a question. Or sitting on information, that she tracked down after some deep digging, unsure if you should run into a situation that may be more than you can handle, or wait for news that it already was."

Millie pivoted. "What's unfair--" she hissed under her breath, "was watching your best friend lose everything she'd worked to become because she lost you, Chance. To watch her unravel and revert to the person she was before because she mourned the loss of her family like a death." She swallowed the bile in her throat, not sure if it was the nausea or her rising anger. "And I don't know if it was worse to witness that, or to realize that I was becoming the exact same person that Trish didn't want to be."

She closed the distance between them. "We gave up, Chance. We gave up any hope of being rescued." The words spat from her lips. "And I just had to tell the warrior that fell in love with me--even though he would never be able to touch me without physical pain--that he would probably never see my face again. So you don't get to talk about what's unfair."

Chance let her finish her tirade, but he locked into her first comments. His expression changed as he pleaded with her. "Will you please use this to convince Trisha to let someone know where she's going? If we had known that and how long it should have taken you, we could have been here sooner. But she refuses to say anything, claiming some misguided notion that she's protecting us. Maybe if someone else says the same thing..." he sat back, almost defeated. "Maybe she'll listen."

"You don't understand," Millie's voice wavered as she sat next to him. "I will never be able to unsee the things those creatures did--not to us, and not to the planet we stopped at. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone...and certainly not on someone that I loved."

He was confused, "I don't see what that has to do with what I'm asking you. If we had known you'd been gone way too long, we could have been here sooner, and prevented some of the things you
saw."

"Those creatures we were fighting ambushed us a few days in, Chance. What we saw was--something I can never unsee. The old Trish wouldn't have been phased...the woman who first walked into the Counselor's office would have brushed off the body count like it was an every day occurrence." Millie gave a soft sigh. "But you won't have to worry about it happening again."

That piece of information caught him off guard. If something had shaken Trisha, it was noteworthy, indeed. "What do you mean? Did something happen I should know about?"

"She broke, Chance. I watched her break into a thousand pieces as she mourned losing you, losing your son." Millie put her hand on his. "She is still afraid that she's lost you."

"Lost us? Is that a way of saying she didn't think she would make it back?" Even as angry as he was, that was a sobering thought. He would have sworn she wouldn't ever think she'd gone too far until she had one foot in the grave.

"She blamed herself for everything. The mission. The crash. The fact that finding us would be next to impossible." Millie gave his hand a squeeze. "And then there was the thought that she'd lost the two of you forever. As much as your conversation before leaving tore her up, the thought of never seeing you two again ate her apart."

Chance sighed, recalling the way Trisha had reacted when he first saw her. He'd been so focused on treating her, that he didn't talk to her much. It appeared they'd have to talk things out when this day blew over. It looked like he might finally be getting his wish, yet it didn't feel like a win. He looked back at Millie. "Anything else I missed?" He asked, referring to her injuries.

Millie shook her head. "Nothing that won't wait until we get back to the ship." She paused a moment before looking up at him. "Maybe a mild sedative so that I can rest?"

He nodded, knowing they'd both been through a lot. "Go on and find a place to lay down, and I'll come find you in one moment." He watched her trudge away, and rumaged aeound in his kit for the sedative. As he stuck it into the end of the hypo, he considered whether this would be the start of some changes.

Lieutenant JG Aemilia "Millie" Stepanova
Chief Counselor, USS Mercutio



Lieutenant JG Chance Crow
Medical Officer, USS Mercutio