Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft - We Are Lesion
Carter Schimpff
(( Primary Sickbay, Deck 7 – USS Artemis-A ))
At night, The Huntress’ Sickbay had a peculiar way of pretending it had never known urgency.
The lights were lowered to a thoughtful hush. Biobeds idled in soft blue, their monitors speaking only when spoken to. A handful of patients slept beneath the quiet tyranny of his observation – bodies and minds mending in a way that required no more than a passing audience.
For the moment, the room held fast.
Dr. Roy Bancroft sat at a spare console, one elbow braced against its edge, turning a problem over with the slow, absent focus of someone not entirely sure whether he was truly working, or just avoiding something else.
The main sickbay doors whispered open, and Roy glanced up. There, framed in the threshold, was the unmistakable silhouette of Lieutenant Junior Grade Ollie Bergmen: all length and angles, a neck that seemed perpetually halfway to its own orbit, and a presence that, under normal circumstances, arrived several seconds before any room had a chance to prepare fully for it.
Tonight, the silhouette hesitated.
Bergmen lingered just inside the doorway, as though unsure whether he was entering sickbay… or asking permission to.
That, more than anything, caught Roy’s attention.
He lifted a finger in gentle apology – one moment – and turned back to his console long enough to close out of the patient scan he’d been pretending required review.
Bergmen: Doctor Bancroft? I’m here for… after-Callis check up.
They’d spent a week together, along with Commander Jovenan and Lieutenant K’Wara, in a cave system that seemed to have no intention of letting them leave alive.
Teeth and hate and hunger. Cold that seeped into one’s very soul. The slow, dawning arithmetic of how long a body could last.
Ollie had come the closest.
Roy still carried that with him – not as a memory, exactly, but as something unfinished. A quiet, persistent sense that there had been a moment, somewhere in that frozen dark, where a different choice might have changed the course of this man’s history.
He hadn’t yet arrived at what exactly that moment or that choice might have been. He suspected he never would. Self-blame, he’d learned, was rarely interested in things as pedestrian as evidence or rational thought.
He pushed the thought aside and rose, a familiar, easy warmth returning to his expression as he began crossing the room.
Bancroft: ::smiling:: While I’m flattered you’ve chosen to honor protocol at an hour like this, I’m afraid we forfeited titles somewhere around… what, day two, in that cave? ::a beat:: It’s Roy to you – just ‘doctor’ if you really must.
He came to a stop in front of the Operations Officer, resting a hand briefly on Ollie’s shoulder – the one that hadn’t been injured on Galaris IV.
Bergmen: May I ask… a favor, doctor? Can we do it in a little privacy? Preferably inside the radiation treatment ward.
Roy tilted his head slightly – not refusal, not even quite confusion. More a quiet recalibration of expectations.
There were, in this Sickbay, no shortage of ways to manufacture privacy. Curtains that sealed with a gesture. Isolation suites designed for contagion and containment. Entire rooms built for the careful handling of things that did not wish to be seen.
The radiation ward… was not typically among them.
Then Ollie met his eyes, and, after a moment, gave the smallest, almost imperceptible nod – explanatory, not pleading.
Roy’s expression stilled.
Something in his posture followed – some instinct, honed less by medicine than by experience, quietly stepping forward and taking the lead.
Ah.
Not routine, then.
Bancroft: ::steadily:: Of course.
He gestured toward the corridor with an easy, unforced motion, falling into step beside Ollie rather than ahead or behind.
(( Radiation Treatment Ward, Deck 7 – USS Artemis-A ))
The door closed behind them with a soft, deliberate finality – quiet enough to go unnoticed beyond the threshold, yet firm enough to suggest that whatever followed would remain contained within these walls.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Ollie’s composure loosened in subtle degrees, the easy, practiced presence he carried through the ship slipping away to reveal something unguarded beneath. Roy saw it immediately and adjusted without thought, resisting the instinct to fill the silence or soften it, choosing instead to hold the space steady simply by remaining within it.
Ollie crossed to the biobed with careful deliberation, each step negotiated rather than taken, as though movement itself required conscious effort. Not sharp pain, Roy noted – something deeper, more sustained, the kind that rewrote the body’s expectations over time.
The jacket came off one-handed. The bandage beneath it told its own story – bandage? – discolored, wet, wrong in a way that suggested progress rather than recovery. Roy allowed his gaze only a moment’s pause before moving on.
Then the underlayer gave way.
The lesions spread across Ollie’s chest and abdomen in irregular constellations – red and black, mottled in a pattern that resisted interpretation. Not rash. Not trauma. Not anything that resolved cleanly into the familiar logic of injury or disease. To a trained eye, the problems were several: their severity, the apparent failure of every intervention thus far, and – most troubling of all – their refusal to belong to any known category.
Roy did not react – though inside, every alarm he possessed went off at once.
What in God’s name am I looking at?
He did not allow the thought to surface.
Bergmen: You will probably need to unseal my medical record, stardate 238802 point 19. To understand.
Roy lifted his gaze to Ollie’s, not searching so much as confirming the quiet trust embedded in the request. When he spoke, his voice remained calm, unaltered.
Bancroft: ::casual nod:: We’ll look at it. Computer, access Lieutenant Bergmen’s medical record. Unseal all entries indexed to stardate 238802.19. Authorization Bancroft X-Ray Delta four-one-six, three-one-two.
The computer chirped – brief, polite, faintly suspicious – before acquiescing. The file resolved in a wash of light, and Roy, without hesitation, swiped it to the larger display at the foot of the biobed, angling it so they could both see it – a small, practiced courtesy.
Then he read.
Not slowly, and not carelessly, but with the quiet, ruthless efficiency of someone long accustomed to extracting meaning under pressure. His eyes moved in clean, deliberate passes, assembling the shape of it as it unfolded: radiation exposure, accelerated recovery, uncontrolled growth, treatment failure.
His expression did not change.
Inside, the alarm tightened.
Chromosomal instability. Repair defect. No viable markers.
He paused only once – at the baseline samples – and read the line again, not out of confusion, but out of a brief, futile hope that it might resolve differently on a second pass.
It did not.
By the time he reached the Gideon intervention, the conclusion had already settled into place: not a cure, just… containment. If that.
Roy let the display linger for a fraction longer than necessary before dimming it slightly. When he looked back at Ollie, his expression remained composed, attentive, and unchanged.
Only his voice, when it came, carried the faintest shift – something beneath it having quietly, irrevocably realigned.
Bancroft: ::softly:: Ollie… Help me understand why this is the first time I’m seeing this, please.
There was no accusation in it. No edge. Only quiet, unmistakable concern – and beneath that, something harder to name: a physician’s instinct colliding with the simple, human question of how something this significant had remained unseen.
Bergmen: Response
Roy resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose.
Bancroft: We could have… we could have been helping you. I could have been helping you. And now–
He stopped.
Not abruptly, but deliberately – as though catching the line just before it crossed into something it had no right to become. The breath that followed was controlled, measured, a quiet reassertion of the discipline he wore as easily as his uniform.
Bergmen: Response
When Roy spoke again, the edge was hidden – not erased, but folded carefully beneath something steadier.
Bancroft: ::softer:: We’re going to get to the bottom of this. I can read what happened. I can see what they tried. Here’s what I need from you: in your own words… what do you believe is happening to you? And why now?
Bergmen: Response
TAG/TBC
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Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft
Medical Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240205RB1