In Memoriam

Posted on Sun Sep 4th, 2022 @ 8:53am by Lieutenant JG Calanthe 'Cal' Diaz

Mission: Mission 6 - Memory
Location: Personal Quarters
Timeline: An hour or so after "A Parting Gift"
1062 words - 2.1 OF Standard Post Measure

"You beat me home? How does that happen?"

"Perks of the job, coupled with slight obsessive tendencies on your part. You were allowed to take a couple of days over those transcripts, you know."

"What, and lose my train of thought?"

"Gives the rest of us a chance to catch up."

"Just a sliver, if you're lucky. Mmmn, you smell good."

"And you look great. There's got to be some kind of rule against pulling off a double shift and still leaving the rest of us for dead."

"Speaking of, are we playing tonight?"

"Is this the face of a man ready to out-poker his entire crew?"

"Hmmn, let me see."

The banter bounced around inside Cal's head as she stared at the boiling kettle, registering several seconds too late that it was already steaming viciously. Removing it from the heat and leaving it to settle, the weary brunette returned to the confusion of conflicting thoughts and winced as a familiar discomfort forced her eyes closed. In the last hour, she reasoned, she had slowly succumbed to the oddly disjointed sensation of sharing her head with a bunch of rambling nonsense that didn't make sense. They'd all been warned to expect it, of course, the shaking up of memories and the way they could return out of sequence and lacking proper context. And given everything that happened, it wasn't necessarily an immediate surprise that her brain was trying to process the return of a once-familiar face but every once in a while, a snippet of conversation, or a recollection of a shared moment, didn't fit at all with what ought to have been a reasonable recollection of possible events.

She screwed her face into a grimace. It was bad enough when she knew she was channelling her inner tornado-in-a-bottle. This just felt like memory soup.

Pouring the tea, which wasn't hot chocolate or coffee but was the only available thing she had to prepare for herself, Calanthe took the scalding hot drink to her desk and sank into the chair. She had attempted, at least, to document some of the more bizarre flashbacks, thinking that perhaps there'd be a visible thread eventually that tied them all together. All she was encountering was a whole heap of incoherent impressions and emotions that looked extra specially bonkers when she tried to phrase them into sentences.

Someone had discovered an old Terran custom of using teaspoons as musical instruments.

Pancakes for breakfast, after months without flour substitute.

Tucked against the bulkhead and his huge frame ought to have felt suffocating but it was the safest she'd ever been.

Alone in the rain.

Using the last of her supplies to sketch them a month's supply of fresh produce.

"Has anyone heard of limbo?"

Others, like the earlier exchange, were far more tangible and came with not only remembered conversation and associated emotions, but a visualised impression of location and physical interplay. That was causing her the most distress, and was also constituting the bulk of the reason for her not having run screaming to Sickbay that Smith's attempts to stirfry her mind had turned her into a raving lunatic. There were a lot of things that felt familiar; worrying about Lexi after her accident, the private and one-sided conversations she had with her mother before she went to sleep every night, the constant sense of responsibility to be coming up with things to keep the crew interested and engaged, and her sketchbooks full of memories from childhood and back home that she wanted to capture before they faded too much. Those things felt very close-by, something she could reach out and touch and know to be correct.

Then there were the others. The memories that didn't fit. The emotions that shouldn't be. Conversations she'd never had, at least she didn't think so. Experiences that didn't make sense and this overriding, overbearing sense of grief and loss and anguish. Of failure.

Of dying.

She'd told Lexi in passing but had struggled to put into words how powerful and poignant the sensation was. Now, having experienced a very similar dream less than an hour after dropping off again, it was harder to pass it off as her mind's approach to healing. Chronologically, it didn't mesh with what she'd found out about her last encounter with Smith, and yet it was so intimately detailed and steeped in viscous sentiment that it was likewise hard to believe she'd just made it up. Worried that it would render her unfit for a return to duty, and likewise give Smith a victory in his absence that he didn't deserve, Cal was reluctant to front up to Sickbay blathering nonsense about remembering her own death. She certainly didn't want to be woken up by the recollection over and over again but she likewise didn't want to be turned into some sort of laboratory rat. It was all probably just part of what the creature did to you, and since he'd never shown much of a liking for Cal even from the start, she could easily pass this off as just a little parting gift.

Could you gift-wrap insanity?

The first sip of tea burned her tongue but she didn't care, picking up the remains of a graphite pencil to work at the details of the drawing she'd started. As much as it didn't provide any extra clarity, drawing what her mind was trying to grapple with at least felt more satisfyingly accurate, even if Cal was pretty sure it would buy her at least a month in a therapist's office if anyone ever saw them. It was a decent enough excuse to keep them private, and also allowed her some hope that it was a viable strategy for working through the confusion without the need for medical intervention. She had promised Lexi she'd get help if she needed it, but she hadn't designated a timeframe on when that would be. So, a week seemed reasonable. A week or two. And probably once she went back to work and started using her brain for something useful, everything else would calm down.

The scratch of the pencil across the paper slowly added warmth to the eyeball staring back at her.

Probably.