Break It To Me Gently

Posted on Mon Nov 21st, 2022 @ 10:05am by Chief Petty Officer Manishie Karalo & Ensign Isaac 'Zac' Hughes

Mission: Sojurn
3285 words - 6.6 OF Standard Post Measure

Manishie hobbled out of the lift in the direction of the medical bay. The twang in her knee clearly indicated that something had gotten overstretched, hopefully not torn. The pain radiated all the way out to her lower and upper leg and despite trying to tough it out in front of the other armoury officers she felt like in a more private situation she would've probably cried out in pain when she landed down from the chin-ups. It was such a stupid way to get hurt, and she also knew that non-contact injuries like that, where it wasn't due to hitting or being hit by anything or anyone, took way longer to recover from.

She shuffled through the double doors and winced as she wasn't able to hold herself up against the wall for the moment that she had to step through. "Doctor!" She called through gritted teeth, hoping to see her Andorian friend rush to her aid.

It had taken Isaac a while to adjust to the more mundane pace of Sickbay under normal circumstances. Looking back, there seemed nothing beyond the recollection of overwhelming odds, of death and defeat and desperation. That wasn't accurate, of course, but life before the obliteration of his entire existence seemed as if it belonged to someone else. For a few days, there had been the treatment of those most affected by the creature's attacks in this universe, and then even those had recovered to the point of needing no ongoing intervention. Sickbay, though it was no long his Sickbay, had returned to the slow amble of occasional concussion and endless paperwork.

The panic in the familiar voice had him instantly out of his seat. More than that, it transported him immediately backwards into the grit and smoke, amidst the shrill alerts of defibrillators and the sensation of being swept away by a deluge. As he reached her, he was less cautious than he had chastised himself to be, took no note of the slight variation of hair length, nor the more telling lack of recognition in her eyes. All he saw was Manishie, in pain. Again.

"What happened?"

His arm fell immediately around her back to help take the pressure from the damage limb and he watched carefully that it didn't move too much as they hopped awkwardly towards a biobed.

Manishie was more surprised that she should've been when another doctor rushed to her aid. It was good to see Avira was taking a bit of a break from the medical bay. He was a lot more personable as well. She remembered him to be called Zac or something, couldn't quite remember his last name. But he had been the doctor that had saved the other her. "Thank you." She leaned into him quite heavily as he guided her to the bed. "I had a graceful dismount from the chin-up bar in the gymnasium."

Realisation started then, though Isaac was too focused on the immediate priorities to know it. It wasn't how Nish would have told him, nor would she have thanked him for anything out of the gate since she took far too much delight in drawing out the heartfelt stuff, often sidelining him with it as she walked away. Helping her up onto the bed to swivel the injured leg up to rest against the geometric cushion he wedged beneath the knee, Zac turned for a tricorder and flipped it open. "It's generally recommended that you chin-down before you let go," he quipped vaguely, exactly as he would have had under more familiar circumstances. He looked up at her then and paused.

Ah.

"Can you explain how you landed?" he continued quickly.

The quip took her for a bit of a loop, "Oh, wait, you're like. I'm sorry. I'm... euh." Manishie's awkward reintroduction of herself to the doctor was interrupted by a wince. He had barely touched her but it still shot pain through her entire leg. "I don't know, I just let go after the last chin-up, because it's just way cooler that way. Must've locked my knee on the landing. Just an instant pang."

An incident from his past, years and years back when he'd fancied himself capable of kicking a soccer ball with some success, provoked an instant wince of sympathy from the doctor. "And knees don't generally take kindly to that," he acknowledged with a smile, an attempt to set her at ease without the need to really state the obvious. The encounter was inevitable, he had several well-laid plans for its eventuality, most of which he'd already completely blundered.

With his first scans initialising, Zac moved to the refrigeration unit and drew out a couple of the icepacks and the freshly laundered pouches that would keep them from burning the skin. With gentleness that oozed empathy, he slowly tucked one beneath her knee and settled the other on top. "Any weird sensations on landing? Sounds?" If his first guess was correct, it was the sound that still stuck with him to this day.

Manishie winced and looked at the doctor as he put the cold compresses around her knee. Once everything had settled again the pulled in her lower lip and made a loud popping noise with her mouth. "With that sound, my knee suddenly stopped supporting my leg, wanted to go its own way."

Isaac nodded, having expected as much. A brief look over the initial scans confirmed suspicions and he set aside the tricorder to smile at her kindly. Somewhere, tucked behind his professional veneer, a very confused conglomeration of concern and affection challenged his intentional reminders that this wasn't Nish and the compulsion to reach out and hug her was wildly inappropriate, but it was difficult to see the pain in those impossibly-blue eyes and maintain at a clinical distance. "Do you want the good news or the not-so-good news?"

"Let's start on the bad news, hopefully, the good news can be enough to compensate." Manishie laid back and tried to relax a bit as the cold compress was starting to numb the pain.

"Well, that's a pretty significant Grade 2 tear to your medial collateral ligament." Whoever had been responsible for designing human knees should have been thrown out of the pantheon a long time ago, Isaac had decided, back when his own knee had buckled under the brunt of someone else's foot. "However, it's not a full snap and I don't think walking here on it unsupported has added too much friction damage. Should just be some minor surgery, if you want us to try pack it with some analeptic gel to speed things up a little, then a brace for a few weeks and cut back on the jujitsu." The doctor smiled, hoping to convey a sense of hope despite the fact that he understood what a miserable injury it was, especially on a starship.

"Weeks?! As in Plural?" Manishie deflated with a loud sigh. "Anything I can do to speed up recovery?" She closed her eyes as she was sure she didn't really want to know the answer to the question she just asked. It was also a shock that her insistence on walking to the med-bay under her own power might have actually made things worse, but didn't want to show relief that it didn't.

"Injecting into the knee joint will help stabilise it, and should stimulate healing and reduce the swelling. It's not as bad as it sounds, I did my own knee a few years back." Moving to another cabinet without so much as a limp to show for his claim, Isaac came back holding several knee braces, which he'd try on her good leg to get a decent fit. "See? It's just there to provide the stability the ligament is normally responsible for so that your leg can support enough weight for you to move about. There will be some limitations to what you can do but if you're sensible, you should still be able to get about pretty well."

"Sensible. I think there's the main issue." Manishie took in a deep breath and had no choice but to accept her fate. "Do what you must, doc. Get me patched up."

Hughes moved quietly at first, his approach a methodical setting out of several steps as a prepared painkiller, followed by the injection of analeptic gel set aside it. The braces he'd collected were quickly measured against her good knee and the most likely added to his procedural row so that, once he started, it was simply a matter of one thing after the other. The painkiller was first. Trying the brace on for size, once again using her good leg, came next.

"So," he started tentatively as the need to fill time presented itself. "How are things, I mean aside from the obvious." He left the brace fastened and gently adjusted the ice pack draped over the damaged knee. In a minute, there'd be an awkward need to request the removal of her pants so that he could inject directly into the joint. He risked a glance at her face. "Been an odd time of it," came the understatement of the century. Isaac felt a twinge of guilt for discussing the situation with the other side, though a close examination of his choices didn't really paint it as outright disloyalty. It didn't help that she looked very similar to someone who didn't often let him get away without acknowledging elephants in the room.

"Odd is the right word." Manishie followed his moves and prep around her legs. "Perhaps a bit understated, but definitely odd." She then seemed to realise something, a realisation that was only followed by a short moment of hesitation. "What's she like?"

It was a loaded question, one that didn't seem the easiest to give an honest answer to given who it was asking. Certainly a detailed answer seemed to grossly overstep an invisible boundary. "Merciless," he responded, with a clear effort to ensure that it came across as a glib jest. "With an annoying tendency to be always right." Isaac cleared his throat then and dipped into professionalism as a means of escape. "I'm going to need to access the knee joint directly." The statement hung in the air a moment. "I can get you a surgical gown if you'd feel more comfortable."

"What?" Manishie looked at her leg and realised that the tight fitting yoga style pants was only going to come off by being pulled fully down. There was no situation where she was going to be able to roll it up over her injured knee. "Oh. Right. No. I don't think I'd need that." She started to pull them down, her right boxer briefs still gave enough modesty in the situation for her to not feel too uncomfortable, especially since he was a medical professional and they barely knew each other. She didn't consider in the slightest how it would be for him to be doing this for a near-identical clone of someone that might be close to him.

For someone as deeply entrenched in his work as Isaac, the situation would never normally have even registered as a potential issue. This hit weirdly though, in the same way that trying to hold a conversation with her seemed peppered with potential indiscretions. How similar were the two of them? How much had they experienced that was the same? What would it do to his friendship with his Manishie to inadvertently learn something she wasn't comfortable with him knowing from a version of herself who didn't know him from a bar of soap? Any information, even as something as ridiculous as what kind of undergarments she wore, felt like crossing a line somehow.

In typical form, he offered her a wry smile.

"This might feel cold."

The injection into the joint was done delicately to avoid as much discomfort as possible. Once he was finished, Isaac draped the ice pack back over the kneecap and started to unfasten the brace he'd fitted to her good leg.

"I'm going to grab you some crutches for tonight, the swelling will take a while to settle and I'd recommend elevating and resting it for now. Keeping the ice on it in twenty-minute cycles will help too."

Manishie had been laying back on the bed grinding her teeth to avoid shouting out profanities at this man that was clearly doing whatever he could to make it hurt the least amount possible. Water had accumulated in her eyes and she felt a drop of it slide down her cheek. "That wasn't too bad." She lied. "Can you send a doctor's note to my supervisor? Don't want him to think I'm playing hooky."

"You can always use these to convince him," Isaac suggested as he emerged from his quick investigation flourishing a pair of crutches. "At the very least, he'll think twice about arguing." Leaning them against the biobed, the doctor studied his patient's face for a moment before seeming to arrive at a conclusion that he didn't vocalise. Instead, he smiled as he folded his arms across his chest. "Now we just wait for the painkillers to kick in, the gel to start working its magic, and we'll strap you into the brace and send you off to conquer the cosmos." It was eerie, he decided, how her eyes were exactly the right shade of blue. It had always been a shade he'd considered uncommonly striking, so to see it replicated exactly was...odd.

"You're staring." Manishie was just laying there, waiting for the pain in her knee to subside. "It's awkward, isn't it? You feel like you know me, but you have no clue whether I'm that person." She shook her head, "I'm not. I've met me. Her. We're very similar but our year on the Atlantis has been very different."

Isaac opened his mouth to protest and then promptly shut it again, favouring honesty over saving face. "Sorry," he offered anyway, and then managed a sheepish smile. "I don't expect you to be the same, though the similarities at a cursory glance are remarkable. It's an unusual situation." Having stated the blatantly obvious, the doctor leaned back against the adjacent biobed and hunched a shoulder. "It's probably best to just consider you sisters at this point."

"The most identical twins you've ever encountered." Manishie smiled. "Did you know that at some point they weren't able to distinguish identical twins in criminal cases, not even with the introduction of DNA. It took them almost 40 years to figure that one out." Her eyes narrowed a bit, "I wonder if minute changes in the environment caused differences in our DNA."

"Sounds like something the two of you will definitely stay up until all hours trying to figure out." Isaac smiled warmly, a hesitant kind of affection that he hadn't quite figured out how to convey appropriately. Over time, he realised that it would become increasingly hard to avoid the psychological compulsion to attribute them each their own unique origin, and there was plenty of evidence to suggest that was the correct and healthy way to approach things. There was just the underlying proof that, no matter how you tried to frame it, there were overlaps that siblings just didn't have to deal with.

The painkillers were starting to do their job and Manishie could relax her muscles a bit now that the worst of the sting subsided. "Can you do me a favour?" She looked over at the new doctor.

A pair of raised eyebrows became her first response. He had learned, though it might not be fair to apply it in this case, to treat questions like that with an air of self-preserving caution. "I can certainly try. It depends what kind of favour you're referring to."

"Can we avoid telling Avi about this?" Manishie looked a bit guilty as she made the request. This wasn't the first time she was in here in regards to a self inflicted injury.

Isaac squinted at the request, firstly because it took a moment to translate who 'Avi' was, then because there was no easy way to phrase a response that wouldn't end up in disappointment. "If she's thorough about her paperwork, she'll read it for herself," he pointed out, gently. He was having to allocate resources to her, the brace and the crutches, and the gel he'd administered, as well as the painkillers, were now accounted for as prescribed drugs against her medical record. "I also think she might guess if she sees you."

"Can we at least say it was in a sparring thing or something?" Manishie sighed. She really didn't need another speech and at least this way the ire of the doctor would be focused on someone else. "Maybe I can say I was sparring with myself. That might confuse her enough not to pursue it."

Something about the exchange, about her concern, struck a chord with Isaac long enough to render him silent by smiling. Stubbornness, tenacity, a tendency to push herself too far... He knew this person, and in different circumstances, he'd be the last person she'd be trying to enlist as an ally. Burying the misplaced affection, the doctor affected an upwards consideration with partial squint of his left eye before a gentle chuckle eased her fears. "The good doctor doesn't strike me as the type to be easily fooled. And I'm not sure how Nish would feel about you instigating a mental health observation on the pair of you." Her other counterpart had the advantage of knowing his background credentials. "Just tell her you wrenched it the wrong way at work," he compromised. "Or just tell her the truth." His gaze lowered and along with his tone. "People only chastise you because they care."

Manishie let out a huge sigh. "I guess that's a way to approach it." She wondered why Avi always seemed to care so much about her in particular. There were almost 200 people on this ship, surely there were more important people aboard for her to worry about. "But since there's no shrink on board I might also just take my chances." She pushed herself upright on the bed and looked around the sickbay. "I guess that's it?"

Offering her a hand first, Isaac then gathered up the crutches and held them steady as she adjusted her weight to balance. "Give yourself a good 24 hours on these and then we'll see what we can do to get you an adjusted work station for the next week or so. Once this heals," he warned her, "there will be some exercises and strength work we need to do. Most of that you'll be able to take care of yourself once we show you the ropes."

"Ooh there's ropes?" Manishie goaded the physician, "I would've been a lot less reluctant if I knew there'd be ropes." She started to bounce away on the crutches, belying the fact that this wasn't the first time she'd had to propel herself with the aide of them. She turned over her shoulder a second before she exited the bay; "Thank you, doc."

With a wry smile, he flipped her a casual salute. "Try to stay out of trouble," he suggested, having about as much hope of her following the advice as he'd ever had pleading the same of her counterpart. As the doors closed behind her, Isaac paused a moment to stare at them and then shook his head, moving to clean up.

Some things, despite having an entirely different universe to develop alternatives, never changed.