Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft - "And I'd do it again!" - Imril, probably
Carter Schimpff
(( Library, Deck 4 – USS Artemis-A ))
The question earned a surprised bark of laughter from Gavrin.
Tarsan: Sorry. I’m not laughing at you, Doctor. I just… don’t really know how to answer that question. I’m never really alone in my head. On a ship this size? Something always leaks through from someone, though I’m pretty good at blocking it.
Roy’s mouth eased into a smile. The laughter had reassured him more than the answer.
Bancroft: Fair enough. I’ve still got a lot to learn about telepaths. Let me try that again – is any of what you’re hearing still hers?
Gavrin nodded, a small smile creeping across his features. He took a moment, lacing his hands in his lap.
Tarsan: No, I know what you meant. She never really was in there, not in the way you think. It was… like the ghost of a memory. Like when you lay down on one of those foam beds and you get up and there’s an imprint of the person that was there once? It was like that.
Roy kept his attention on Gavrin without subjecting him to the full clinical stare. The Ensign’s fingers had begun winding together in his lap, whitening at the knuckles as his gaze settled on them.
Tarsan: Normally when you link with someone there’s… more control. It’s easier to sort out their mind from your mind. But when something like that happens it’s like someone’s taken the pages of two books and thrown them into a pile and you have to spend some time figuring out which book is which. Which is why we’re told over and over again not to do what I did without intensive training.
Ferenginar returned to him: the first time Alex’s voice had appeared inside his head. It hadn’t been planned, but it had still been recognizably language – words, or ideas shaped closely enough like words that he could receive them as such. Gavrin was describing something without sentences. Someone else’s thoughts arriving before they had been made communicable.
Roy tried for a moment to imagine it. The muscles at the base of his skull tightened in sympathy, and he quickly abandoned the exercise.
Gavrin frowned and seemed to be searching for more words, but the flow was broken by a third voice – one Roy recognized well.
Imril: Ensign? Is there a console fritzing over here?
oO Imril. Hey, buddy. Oo
Tarsan: Oh! Lieutenant! No. Sorry. I was… saying goodbye to someone.
The Bactrican engineer approached, giving Roy a friendly wave before addressing Tarsan. Roy returned it with two fingers held aloft.
Imril: Oh, alright then. Great work on the Afalqi, by the way. I doubt we’d have stopped that self-destruct without your quick thinking with the neutrinos.
Tarsan: Thank you, Lieutenant. I admit, I wasn’t entirely in my right mind at the time either. I had been exposed to the counter-agent so the idea could either have gone really well or really… badly.
oO I’m sorry, what? Oo
Roy kept his face still. Almost. His nostrils flared once before he could stop them.
It wasn’t anger. Gavrin was perfectly capable of making his own decisions, including apparently spectacular ones involving chemical weapons. But Roy liked him, which meant the confession landed in that inconvenient place where affection kept trying to become supervision.
The fact that Roy had helped develop the counter-agent with Breys and Meyers did nothing useful for the guilt tightening beneath his sternum.
Gavrin shot him a terrified look. Roy answered with the wan smile of a physician deferring, rather than forgiving, an argument.
Bancroft: Well, you’re clearly alive. ::clearing his throat:: And apparently no less sane than you were beforehand. So… I’ll postpone the lecture.
Imril, by contrast, asked the question Roy should have asked.
Imril: Are you alright?
Gavrin leaned back against the bookshelf behind him.
Tarsan: That’s a more complicated question than you might think, Lieutenant. Join us? I guess I can declare this Gavrin’s Emotional Support Shelving.
The conversation paused as Imril set down their engineering kit and took a seat.
Tarsan: I don’t know if you’ve had occasion to read the reports from the Hazardous Materials Lab, but while we were working on the weird box we ended up retrieving a dying Romulan from its pattern buffer. ::glancing back to Roy:: Doctor Bancroft attempted to save her but she was too far gone. I… didn’t want her to die alone. And very quickly learned why it’s drilled into us to stay out of the mind of a dying person.
Imril: Commander K’Wara relayed some of the details during our team’s analysis confab. I read the rest later, to clear up some of the questions I had left once everyone was back on the Artemis.
Roy suppressed a rueful chuckle.
Bancroft: Learning lessons the hard way is a bit of an Artemis one-pip tradition. ::side eye and sly grin at Imril:: Some of us still prefer leaning that way, from time to time.
Gavrin spread his hands towards the candles.
Tarsan: This is my way of honouring her memory, the small part of it I carry. How I feel about her actions is irrelevant. She was a person, and for a very short time I felt what it was like to be her. She died, I didn't. ::clearing his throat as his voice threatens to break:: The least I can give her is this.
She died, I didn’t.
Gavrin had set the two facts beside one another as though his survival had created an obligation. Roy was still deciding how to question that without diminishing what the candles meant when Imril spoke.
Imril: You may have heard, or read, what I did with all that plasma you helped me to beam off the Afalqi. The very literal mess that I made. Several messes, actually.
Bancroft: You made a decision under fire, and there’s a fair chance none of us would be here to argue about it if you hadn’t. ::slight shrug:: Besides, Captain MacKenzie only yells at you if she likes you.
It wasn’t a verdict. Roy hadn’t finished the reports, hadn’t been on the bridge or the Afalqi and didn’t possess enough engineering expertise to reconstruct Imril’s choices from a comfortable chair after the fact. He wasn’t qualified to tell them that every decision had been correct.
He did know the difference between accepting responsibility and fastening oneself beneath it. Or, at least, he was beginning to.
Imril waved it off like a good officer.
Imril: That’s not on you. It’s on me. I only bring it up to say that if things had gone differently… If things had happened in a way where that other Romulan was the only other one left aboard the Afalqi when that plasma threatened to destroy it… I would have still launched the skiff. Burned off all the plasma energy through it, just to save her. Even for a little while, before the Nascaik claimed her. Or, at least, I’d like to think I would have.
Roy studied Imril for a moment, then nodded. He believed them. Whether launching the skiff in that scenario would have been tactically sound, ethically defensible, or just an especially elaborate way to make Captain MacKenzie yell even louder was beyond anything he could determine from a hypothetical. The motive, however, he understood.
Bancroft: We’ve all made decisions that have had consequences. Remind me to tell you about that cave on Galaris IV some time.
Tarsan/Anyone: Response
Imril: A person’s value doesn't begin or end with which side of a border they were born on.
But did it begin – or end – with what that person could provide?
Roy had spent years behaving as though it did – working harder, making himself indispensable, stacking one impossible success atop the last in the hope that no one could question whether he had earned his place.
Hearing a version of that bargain in Gavrin’s she died, I didn’t made it sound harsher than it ever had inside his own head.
Bancroft: No, it doesn’t. And nobody should die alone, either.
Tarsan/Anyone: Response
Roy looked toward Imril, expecting whatever agreement or objection they might offer, and only then noticed that their attention had gone somewhere else. Their eyes were fixed beyond the candles and shelves, their body gone still beside him.
Imril: ::Somewhat started:: I’m sorry. What?
Roy nudged them lightly with his elbow – enough to call them back without making a production of it.
Bancroft: Did we lose you, buddy? ::softer:: You alright?
Tarsan/Imril/Anyone: Response
Now both of Roy’s eyebrows rose. He let the answer sit for a moment, then pursed his lips and released a small breath through them.
Bancroft: I get it. Or… enough of it, anyway. Do you know where you go from here?
Tarsan/Imril/Anyone: Response
He shrugged.
Bancroft: I love 'alone', but I'm not sure it loves me back. After a mission, or twelve hours in Sickbay, a few hours of silence and solitude sounds wonderful. Then I get it and spend half of it wondering what I forgot, or spiraling about what I ‘should’ be doing. ::his brow furrowed as he turned toward Gavrin:: Does ‘alone’ even have real meaning for a Betazoid?
Tarsan/Imril/Anyone: Response
TAG/TBC!
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Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240205RB1