By Lt. Commander Breaux and Captain Zanh
80621.21
Following Bleeding the Hourglass
-=Sickbay USS Serendipity=-
80621.21
Following Bleeding the Hourglass
-=Sickbay USS Serendipity=-
Zanh Liis was being supported almost entirely by Salvek as the Vulcan guided her into the medical bay.
"Captain," Avery rushed up toward the Bajoran and took her other arm over his shoulder. "What's wrong?"
"I'm," Zanh hesitated. She was afraid to speak, afraid that she'd be relieved of duty by the medical chief if she admitted she had been hallucinating, or whatever the hell these damned visions were that plagued her. Waking dream or nightmare, they were making her feel insane, just the same. "I'm not feeling well."
"That was my first guess," Breaux added trying to lighten the moment. He helped get her to a bio-bed and began scans immediately. "Tell me...what are you experiencing?"
Zanh looked at Salvek with the eyes of a guilty child- one who had been caught hiding a bad report card under their bed in the hopes that it would just go away and no one would ever be the wiser. She then looked at the floor.
"The Captain has been experiencing severe mood swings, acute anxiety, and," Salvek prodded her gently. He wanted her to admit to herself what was happening, it would perhaps be the only way to truly help her.
"Haven't we all?" Breaux said, once again hoping to lighten the moment but making a statement at the same time.
"I've been having extremely intense dreams...and..." Zanh felt defeated, but knew the jig was up. "Not always only while I was asleep."
"If you could elaborate on the dreams, it might be helpful," Dr Breaux offered in a clinical manner.
"You know that I was with Temporal Investigations in the past," Zanh began, and Avery found it interesting that this was the second time someone had mentioned the agency to him in the past few hours.
He nodded.
"Well, if the LMH was still online he could tell you, I've had far too much memory resequencing. It has never been truly successful for me though, my engrams were always resistant. After awhile, they found that my brain just worked around the engrams they'd erased and created another path all its own for retrieving perceptual strands and working them into functional memory."
Zanh sounded more like a doctor herself for a moment than anything else and Avery was amazed that she was speaking with such clinical coldness about something that had caused her so much pain.
Avery also found himself at that borderline of questioning who is telling the truth...he found himself wondering if it was just more Starfleet runaround...someone taking the fall for something that shouldn't have been done in the first place. He was fatigued with the whole mess and was finding it difficult to stay in his role.
"I have tried to convince myself that the episodes I've had the past two days are not related to all that, but the visions are so intense, I can't help but wonder if more of those pathways have bridged the gaps and I'm remembering things I was really not supposed to."
For a moment Salvek looked as if he wanted to speak, but he thought better of it and closed his mouth again.
"I'd like to say I'm just a country doctor, but we know that isn't true..." Breaux paused for effect, "...what else should I know?"
"The memories that I've been having," Liis twisted the chain of her earring so fiercely that the whole piece of jewelry came unclasped from her ear. She stared at it, holding it in the palm of her hand as if she had never seen it before.
"...are of Keiran O'Sullivan." She drew a halting breath and continued. "It's become apparent that he and I not only met before he came aboard this ship but worked closely together at one point for TI..." her voice faded.
Breaux comforted her hand as he gently prodded, "Yes, go on."
"We were," Liis cast her eyes toward the curtain across the room. She knew Keiran was behind it. "We were."
The twist she put on the pronunciation of the last word told Avery all he needed to know.
Breaux looked about at the group, "Well...complicated seems to be the order of the day. I have to say I'm not fond of watching my mates go through such hell, and quite possibly as the result of something our brethren have thrust upon them." Breaux caught himself, too late. "I'm sorry...I have medication that will help you some...and we will continue to track all of these events."
Salvek nodded to Liis approvingly, and finally only now released his hand from her shoulder. "Captain, I am going to leave you in the doctor's capable hands and I will see about gathering all the information that I can about the events taking place among others in the crew as well," Salvek explained. "If there is anything that ties them together with what you are experiencing, we will find it."
"Not to worry," Breaux acknowledged confidently. He began preparing several medications which would benefit those in his care.
Liis thought surely by now she must be incapable of producing tears entirely. She'd cried more in the past thirty-six hours than she had in the previous ten years of her life. Even when she was lying near death on that forsaken metal shelf on Aertok she didn't feel the desperation or confusion that assailed her now. Despite her belief that she just had no more tears left, when she looked at Salvek her eyes were brimming just the same.
"Thank you," she paused, catching his hand as he walked by and squeezing it once, "my friend."
After Salvek had gone and Breaux and Zanh were alone, he felt he could really turn up the heat and ask her questions that while may be uncomfortable for her to answer, were imperative for him to know the answers to if he was going to treat her properly.
His worry was that if she was suffering from anything like whatever it was that was ailing O'Sullivan, that her heart may be the next to give out under the physical and emotional stress.
"Captain, if I am to help you, or O'Sullivan, you have to be brutally honest with me now. I am finding it difficult to mask my feelings for this...as your physician, I won't mask my feelings. I simply want to know what the hell is going on." Avery insisted, as he held a tricorder to her and scanned around her head to check her brain activity. Perhaps a bit heavy-handed, but enough was enough.
"My honest opinion?" Zanh offered, her voice clinical once again and devoid of all emotion. "I've finally lost my mind."
"Well, if you have, then so has Keiran. Your brains are both lit up like New Orleans at Mardi Gras."
Just like O'Sullivan, he found elevated activity in the hippocampus, and the intraparietal sulcus. This intrigued him, because studies had shown that not only was this portion of the parietal lobe in the brain of many humanoid species including Humans and Bajorans responsible for visuospatial working memory, but also for interpreting the intent of others.
He put this information together with the fact that he had been unable to stop one of Keiran's 'episodes' in progress, even with deep sedation. This led him in the direction of thinking that Zanh and O'Sullivan were puppets in this situation, and some exterior force was pulling the strings.
"Mardi Gras," Liis thought back to the party that they'd thrown for Breaux and Rada not so long ago- and how there had been an electricity in the air that night between her and O'Sullivan that she couldn't, at the time, understand. It all made so much more sense to her now.
"We had a good time that night, didn't we?" She added dreamily. She seemed to be drifting in and out of lucidity now, and Avery hoped that it was due to the medications he'd administered and not the effects of...whatever was effecting her.
Breaux smiled at the mention of his hometown. "I need to run some more indepth scans on you, Captain," Avery began again but as he did, he discovered that Zanh was staring intently at the wall as if seeing something there that he could not.
"Zanh Liis," he tried calling her by her name to see if it would shake her from her trance, but she did not respond.
Suddenly, the whole of the Serendipity shuddered for a moment, and Zanh Liis' body went limp and as dead weight she lurched forward, heading from the edge of the biobed where she had been sitting, toward the floor.
"Now what?" Avery complained as he readjusted position to keep his footing. "T'Dara, help me here." The Vulcan grabbed Zanh's legs and swung them up onto the bed as Avery wrestled the rest of her back to a safe position.
"What the hell is going on around here? God damned bureaucrats...off-worlders..." Breaux wondered as he set about his work. He immediately turned to T'Dara, "My apologies."
"I don't mind battling tweaks, breaks, infections and the like, but if I'm going to find human adversaries...then just let me know, and I'll adjust," Breaux fumed.
T'Dara looked at him as if he'd lost him mind.
He caught her sideways glance, "Sorry...long story."
Without further explanation, Breaux set to work on the Captain.
------------------------------
Lt. Commander Avery Breaux
Chief Medical Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
and
Captain Zanh Liis
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
Lt. Commander Avery Breaux
Chief Medical Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
and
Captain Zanh Liis
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012