1056: Friendship

By Lair Arie (as told by Lair Kellyn) and Tam Elton (as told by Rada Dengar)
100305.2230
Concurrent with Lockdown Two and NUTS

-=Sickbay; USS Serendipity=-

Tam Elton yawned.

He was beginning to tire of this game.

He and Lair Arie had been stuck in a continual stalemate in their game of Exago. Every time he moved and he felt victory was finally within reach, Arie countered perfectly and he was forced to block her and then the cycle continued. He was getting hungry, too, though his heart really wasn't in eating since his mother had left the ship. After hours of thinking of nothing but the game they'd been playing he was finally ready for food.

"Arie," he sighed. "Can we come back to this later?"

"Coming back to it later will not help your chances of victory, Tam." Arie said, sounding every bit in that moment more her Vulcan side.

Tam's Betazoid half could sense her assuredness that she was going to win in the end and he felt at this point like just letting her have it. "Aren't you hungry?"

"I want to stay until my mother wakes up again, then I will eat," Arie replied. She looked up through the pane of glass separating the waiting room from Sickbay proper, and she saw that her mother was still sound asleep. Though it was far harder to read on her face than it would have been for many other less disciplined children, as sick as her mother had been, it was a great relief to Arie to see her still and resting and not thrashing about in a semiconscious state induced by her fever. Far more than her countenance would reveal was still so very clearly told in the time it took before her eyes seemed even able let alone willing to turn away again.

Arie felt a great responsibility to watch over her mother in her father's absence, even if she wasn't actually caring for her. Doctor McKay and his staff were doing that, Arie knew, but still she wanted to be able to tell her father upon his return from Vulcan that she had stayed as much as she was allowed to, nearby her mother. It is what she was sure he would have done had he been here and when Arie turned to her Vulcan side in difficult times she turned much more to her father than to the teachings alone.

"That might take hours," Tam thought aloud as he studied the game before him, which could undoubtedly be extended until long after Kellyn woke. Now Arie frowned, considering that Tam may well have seen her responsibility as his obligation.

"I did not say that you had to wait with me,” She assured him, though the difficulty of being alone was only really becoming clear as she said the words. “Go and eat if you are hungry."

"I didn't say that-" Tam quickly objected, not wanting Arie to think that he was abandoning her and thinking she wasn’t old enough to be expected to cope with all this alone.

She had stood by him through the hardest times, and he had learned from Rada that when a friend is loyal to you when times are tough for you that when they have tough times, you should always stand by them too.

"That's what makes a real friend a friend," Rada had said, "real friends are walking in the door when everyone else is walking out."

Those words as many others of Rada’s had been echoing recently in Tam’s mind. For however many ways people may have argued against it there was no doubt in Tam’s memories that in every way that mattered Rada had been his father just as much as Salvek was Arie’s. Now suddenly Tam felt sadness again as he thought of how much he missed those talks he'd gotten so used to having with Rada. He wondered in this moment if he would ever again just have the chance to look at Rada and see recognition and happiness in his eyes.

It very quickly became very clear that neither child was really thinking about the game anymore as both thought instead of the things that they’d lost and those that they hoped they had not. For Arie the experience was far more familiar than for Tam but it still never became at all easy.

There was a moment of, if not true understanding, then empathizing between the two before Arie tried to ignore the worry in the traditional Vulcan manner.

“I did not mean to suggest…” she started, before quickly being cut off before she could finish by a jarring jolt to the ship.

Their game board flipped over, scattering colored tiles everywhere, allowing Tam almost an instant of relief before each child clearly heard a sickening thud and looked up as they attempted to scramble to their feet.

It wasn’t as much as sound as it was the horrifyingly simple sight that drew them quickly nearer.

Lair Kellyn's bed was now empty.

"Mother..." Arie bolted for Kellyn and Tam stumbled a step behind her. The ship shook again, and supplies came crashing down from shelves all around them as the lights in Sickbay flickered on and off.

In that way most true of children and those whose loved ones were injured, doubly true for Arie, it felt like an eternity to wait before she managed to locate her mother at last, collapsed flat on the floor beside the bed. Having been so soundly asleep, Kellyn had no chance to prevent herself from being thrown, and she was now bleeding what seemed like a flood of sickening red from a gash in her forehead which had impacted against the bedside table before she landed.

"Doctor McKay!" Tam shouted at the sight of Kellyn's blood on Arie's hands, as she gathered her mother into her small arms and desperately attempted to rouse her. Slightly Kellyn groaned offering the smallest of hopes but it was obvious that she'd taken far too good a hit to consider this sign as meaningful.

Seeing the woman who felt in many ways like his mother so lifeless on the floor, McKay wasted no time hurrying from his office. However even as he ran he flickered, fading in and out even quicker than Kellyn, before their eyes. He needed to help her but with the failing of his own life he didn’t know if he’d even have time to save himself.

He made it to the bedside but his hands were losing form even as he reached them towards Lair Kellyn. He had to hold himself together in more ways than one to help her and any hope of doing that relied on shutting himself down to start again. It was then he was struck with another horrifying realization beyond the blood spilling so quickly from the woman before him.

He’d been working in Sickbay alone the past hour while his on-duty nurse went to get a meal and now due to sudden shorts in the system all over the ship he found that he could not deactivate his program. He was losing control of his body.

If he did not deactivate his program and there were any more fluctuations, his whole matrix could be compromised or worse, deleted. Kellyn wasn’t the only one in this room whose life may be in danger; and only one conscious person here may have had the knowledge to help him.

"Arie!" he struggled to say, "you have'ta shut me down. Until Engineering can..."

His eyes implored her as he fizzled and reappeared completely beyond his ability to control or even influence. "Deactivate me now and then get an engineer! Hurry!" Dalton commanded. "Help m…me, Arie."

In a remarkable display of her Vulcan strength, Arie merely nodded and gently set Kellyn back down so as not to hurt her. Then she rose and reached out. She rapidly punched several buttons on the doctor's emitter, the combination of which she had knowledge of due to the studies she'd completed for that holographic science project she'd taken just a bit too far and been reprimanded for. She was glad in this moment that at least some good could come from that knowledge.

One would never have known how much it was tearing her apart inside to be deactivating the only man she knew was even on this floor who with a decent chance could help her mother, as the Doctor vanished and she gently set his emitter down on the nearest biobed. She then turned quickly to Tam and spoke with calm and something akin to authority.

"Tam, you have to go get help,” She insisted. “My mother needs medical attention."

Tam wouldn’t argue but in spite of all she’d taught him about Vulcan logic he still found it remarkable that Arie was even now acting so unemotionally. Tam was not so unemotional as he moved to the nearest communications panel but found it unresponsive. He was neither aggressive enough to hit it nor stubborn enough to try to force it to work, so instead simply turned quickly in search of some other way to get help.

"I'll be back soon!" he promised her already running towards the door, not catching the look on Arie’s face now that she knew no one was watching. When he got there however, he realised to his dismay that it wouldn't open. Nothing was working; like what was left of his world was falling apart around him.

"I can't get out!" he called back to Arie, stepping back and forward again as if in hopes of waking the door from its slumber. "It's stuck!"

"Manual release!" Arie answered as she began rifling around in the nearest drawer for a dermal regenerator. "Hold on, Mother, I will try to help you," she then promised quietly into Kellyn’s closest ear.

With all his might Tam tried to force the manual release but he wasn't strong enough to push down the handle even a millimeter and in spite of all the determination within him to try he was even at his age deadly aware of the fact that he didn’t have the time to waste here. "I can't do it, Arie."

For a second Arie paused and considered running over to help him, but someone had to be here with her mother.

"Come here then!" She called and as Tam ran back to her side she handed him the dermal regenerator and the responsibility it carried with it. "You have to apply this to the wound on my mother's forehead,” She explained already moving towards the nearest window. “I am going to have to find a way to try to get help from outside."

She noticed now for the first time just how strange everything looked outside the windows, staring for just a moment. "Something is very wrong..." she shook the thought away as best she could and Tam nervously shook his head as he regarded the regenerator.

"I don't know how,” he protested, looking at Arie rather than at Kellyn. “I might hurt her."

"I already calibrated it, you won't hurt her,” Arie assured him, her tone with a quite underlying almost pleading for him to hurry. “Just shine it on the wound until it stops bleeding. Please, Tam. Help us."

Considering how hard the thought of such a task was for him Tam now felt like he better understood just what was meant by friendship. So he nodded and kneeled beside Lair, attempting to do as Arie asked. He used all of his focus to still his small hands which looked even smaller wrapped around this instrument meant for one much larger, as he held the device over the wound and after a moment of hesitation activated it. It was with small pride and great fear that he held his breath as Kellyn’s injury slowly began its healing.

Arie meanwhile was becoming more and more frustrated that she could not get anything here to work properly. She couldn't force open the door. She couldn't even get a message to security. They were, for the moment, stuck here and this was the moment in which it most counted. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do and she didn’t have time to figure it out now. As much as she hated to admit it, she was unready to cope with this alone, but she still new the course to take to fix that.

"We need to wake her up." Arie confidently decided, moving back towards her mother. "She will know what to do."

She then began to look over the hyposprays in the nearest medkit mounted to the wall. She chose one she was sure was appropriate and reached up, finding it was thankfully within her grasp. Tam could only watch as she did some quick calculating in her head and then took a deep breath.

She then turned and still Tam knew not what to say. However as she moved to press the hypo to her mother's neck Tam couldn’t just watch anymore. He cried out for her to wait and Arie stopped. She tilted her head, calmly questioning why.

"What if you give her too much?" Tam desperately tried to make Arie see the danger here when she seemed so very fearless.

"I won't." Arie replied with certainty. "She has given me lessons in first aid. Also, T'Dara..." Arie stopped, looking down at the hypo again as she tried to dismiss what were illogical thoughts to associate with that name at this time. "T'Dara taught me how to use a hypospray and a dermal regenerator. I will not hurt her."

Tam however put his hand on her wrist, his Betazoid half telling him enough about Arie to know that it wasn’t completely her logic helping her make this decision.

“You can’t know that,” He implored her to really listen to what he was saying. “She’s hurt. She’s hurt really bad and maybe waking her will make it better but maybe it’ll hurt her more. We don’t know.”

Looking down at her mother’s still entirely unmoving form that seemed so large compared to Arie even now, she suddenly realised she hadn’t considered the possibility that it could make her worse to wake her. Knowing she hadn’t considered a possible consequence of her actions was enough to truly devastate even the Vulcan side of her, and the way she let the hand with the hypospray in it go limp said that quite clearly.

“We have to do something,” She decided, internally agreeing that this simply wasn’t it.

“What can we do though?” Tam asked quietly, releasing her wrist now. “It looks like the entire ship’s been damaged. It’s quiet, so I don’t think a lot of people are doing anything.”

At first Arie simply nodded, but then her mind suddenly made a connection.

“It is quiet,” she realised, but more important was the fact that it shouldn’t have been.

When Kellyn fell from the bed Arie was sure that alarms should have started being set off. They should have been able to be heard far outside of Sickbay. Yet they weren’t because whatever had happened must have damaged those systems too. If she could only fix them…

Immediately she craned her head in the direction of the scanner that was supposed to be responsible for monitoring the patient in Kellyn’s bed. From the outside it looked like it could still be functional.

“If we can activate the alarm it may bring help,” She observed.

“Okay…” Tam could appreciate the idea but didn’t quite understand her plan. “But how do we do that?”

Unfortunately Arie wasn’t too certain about exactly how she expected to do that either, as she had little knowledge of these systems and none of what had damaged them.

“I do not know,” She said with something that a full Vulcan could have picked up on as frustration, but would rarely admit to having noticed in one of their kind.

Indeed Arie was frustrated, below her she had her mother she couldn’t even help to get back into her bed, behind her she had a door she hadn’t the strength to force open and now above her she had a scanner she wasn’t even sure she could reach let alone had the knowledge to fix. At times like this she very much wished she were older. Reason told her that given how older people spoke of being her age it was supposed to be something great, at least when you had a life as comfortable as hers, but whenever people around her were being hurt it felt more like a handicap than any kind of gift.

“It’ll be okay,” Tam quietly tried to assure her, but as Arie’s eyes fell down to her mother again it was clear she’d little faith in his words.

“I am not so certain,” She added, knowing that the longer her mother went without receiving proper medical attention the worse her chances were or coming out of this unharmed. “For some reason the scanner is not registering that anything has changed.”

“Are you sure you can’t fix it?” He asked her, looking back up to the scanner.

“I believe it is extremely unlikely I will be able to do so within the time we require,” she explained as she again regarded the hypospray in her hand.

Following her eye line to her hand, and knowing she was reconsidering waking her mother, Tam however had a very different idea. It could be very stupid, but it could also be the only thing that worked.

He grabbed the nearest small object he could find, another hypospray, and then began to aim.

“Stand back,” he advised Arie, and Arie stepped back as he requested although no further than her mother’s position.

“What are you intending to do?”

“My father says that when all other repairs fail sometimes a good knock is what it takes,” Tam announced uncertainly, as without another word he quickly pelted the device up and directly into the scanner, causing it to ricochet off onto Kellyn’s former bed.

Nothing happened, and they didn't have time to waste, so he grabbed more and began to desperately throw them up at it as well. At first Arie looked at him with confusion about to protest as he just kept throwing and throwing whatever he could find from the nearby table with all his might even though still nothing was happening.

Then suddenly her expression turned to utter disbelief, when after his tenth throw the alarm suddenly began its deafening scream forcing them both to cover their sensitive Vulcan ears.

-=^=-

As he stepped off the turbolift Dane Cristiane was confronted by a painfully piercing sound; the kind of sound that normally made you want to run the other way. Only in this case Dane realised what this alarm had to mean.

“Kellyn,” he said with shock as he started to run in the direction of the sound.

Arriving at the door to find it locked, he immediately located the manual release. It felt like it was stuck, it wasn’t moving, but through force and persistence he suddenly found it was budging.

Then finally it slipped up and the door flew open, to reveal to Dane’s horror Kellyn collapsed on the floor with her daughter and young Tam Elton standing beside her. Both appeared to be surrounded by small medical instruments.

“What happened?” Dane yelled over the alarm as he rushed to her side, and Tam looked like he was about to explain. Arie cut him off however, realizing there was still no to waste here.

“That is unimportant,” Arie answered, moving towards him. “You must get my mother medical attention and to take Doctor McKay’s mobile emitter to Engineering.”

Though still somewhat confused, Dane didn’t argue.

************************************

Lair Arie
Worried Daughter
As told by Lair Kellyn

&

Tam Elton
Concerned Friend
As told by Rada Dengar