FIX-IT CHALLENGE - "Lucky Chance - part 3"
Hey its part three of the fixit fic exclusively posted here on gaeta_squee! Yes, its a StarTrek Next Gen Crossover featureing sweet Felix Gaeta.
When he woke up again, it felt like more of a struggle to wake up, as though he was fighting against the deep sleep. He opened his eyes, and above him, he saw the same computer field, upside down. The funny thing was, he felt better. There had been another doctor, human, an older woman with red hair and very pretty, and she had explained… something to him. That surgery was necessary, that there was nothing to be afraid of, that he was safe and she could heal what was wrong with him.
He didn’t believe her, not really. Human or not human, he knew what the odds were. If he really had a brain tumor, a malignant brain tumor, there was next to no hope. A rogue ship that had found aliens, friendly aliens, lucky for them but he was likely to die regardless of what they did.
Felix started to sit up and stopped. It felt… wrong. All kinds of wrong. He… could feel both of his legs. He pushed himself up with his arms and looked. It was strange how relieved he felt when he saw an obviously fake prosthetic leg connected to his stump. Fake, he told himself. Its just a fake leg, nicer than the steel pipe and boot that Cottle had made, but fake. If it seemed like he could feel the bed under the heel of the foot, that was just his imagination. At least it doesn’t hurt, he decided as he looked at the prosthetic. It was ghostly white, plastic looking, but the shape looked more like a natural leg, the foot was shaped like a foot. There were toes. As he thought about them, the fake toes twitched. “What the frak?”
He intentionally thought about wiggling his toes, and the fake toes moved again. Not quite how he wanted, slow and stiff, but he was thinking and the fake toes were moving. And the sensation of feeling the leg wasn’t fading.
“You’re awake.” He jumped at the sound of the new voice. The red haired woman, the head doctor smiled as she walked into the room. She tapped the small device she held. He suspected it was some sort of advanced hand held computer. They were incredibly advanced, he had seen that already. She looked him over. “You are an early waker. I didn’t think you’d wake up for at least another hour. How do you feel?”
A stupid question. “I feel ok. Like before I went to sleep.” Before the operation that the doctor had insisted on. He put a hand to his forehead, and found that the medical device was gone. “Did it work? Or didn’t you do it?” He felt very good for having had his skull cut open and dug into.
“The surgery was a success and you’re responding very well to the vaccine.” She eyed him carefully, and then smiled again. “Do you remember my name?”
She was assessing him. “You’re Dr. Crusher…. And this is the medical facility on your ship, the Enterprise. And my name is Felix Gaeta, and there are… non human people on this ship called Vulcans, and Dr. T’Kil is one.” Beyond that, he wasn’t sure she had any questions to ask. He knew they had talked but he had… been gibbering at her. Angry and almost hysterical, and it suddenly occurred to him how much of the last month of his life had been spent angry and almost hysterical. “I feel calm. I don’t know how to describe it…”
“That’s a good sign, actually.” Crusher said. “Your brain isn’t being flooded with the wrong chemicals. It’s not unusual for people to not realize that they’re overreacting or out of control until their brain chemistry returns to normal.” She gestured to the fake leg. “I hadn’t planned on you waking up so soon so the prosthetic leg is still reading your DNA profile and accepting neural commands from your brain. It takes about two hours to be ready and you have a half hour to go.”
“I can move my… its toes,” Felix said. That was well beyond what he had expected when T’Kil had mentioned getting a more advanced limb replacement. As he spoke, he thought about the toes moving and they did move.
Crusher nodded and then let her hand rest on the top of the fake foot. “You can probably feel my hand, as well.”
“Yes….” He was almost afraid to think where she was going with that.
“Once the prosthetic is fully coded to your system, you’ll have full control and feeling in the prosthetic leg.” She smiled at him. “This is a standard prosthetic limb for Starfleet. We don’t have the room on the ships for the gene bath tanks that regrow limbs, and I don’t generally recommend that treatment unless you have a bad reaction to this. And you’re already doing fine.” She patted his fake foot. “Now it isn’t ready for you to try out yet, so you need to sit still and try not to move it just yet. Would you like some breakfast? I have you on a fairly bland diet for the first few days, but you do need to eat.”
“Why are you being so nice to me,” Felix asked suddenly. He wasn’t sure he wanted the answer but he had to ask. He still didn’t really know who they were. Starfleet, the Federation…. Vulcan… after all was said and done, those were just words. He was afraid to ask the real question about who they were. “You found me in the Raptor. You know what I did.”
“I know. And we do know what you did.” The doctor looked at him intently. “There’s two answers to your question. The first answer is the easy one. I’m a doctor, and you are sick and injured so regardless of who you are or what you’ve done, I give you medical care because that’s the decent thing to do. The longer answer is more complicated. We were able to view the inflight security camera footage. We know you only killed one person, and that you were provoked, and I’m not convinced you were wrong to defend yourself or that you were rational. Your oxygen levels alone were low enough to have caused you to act irrationally. You’ll be assessed by our counselor, but frankly my opinion is that there were too many factors affecting your brain for you to be considered responsible for your actions. It’s not entirely my decision, but… You may not realize it yet, but your behavior right now is significantly different than when you and I first met.”
“Really?” He didn’t remember it being that bad. She had taken off the medical sensors off of his forehead and asked him some questions and…. “I didn’t want the surgery at first but… you convinced me.”
“Actually you were quite angry but also rather suggestible, and ultimately Dr. T’Kil convinced you to agree. You also threatened to kill me if I didn’t do a good job and that you would make pay from the grave if it came to that.” Crusher smiled slightly. “I can tell by your expression you don’t remember that.”
“No…” That was frightening. He remembered a rather disjointed conversation about the surgery, where he wasn’t really disagreeing. “I don’t remember Dr. T’Kil being there.” Considering that she wasn’t human, he assumed he would have noticed her.
“That was the brain tumor affecting your reasoning and perception, and it proves my point,” Crusher said. “I’m not going to tell you that what you did wasn’t… disturbing, or that no one should care, but I do think you were under incredible stress and predisposed to handling that stress in a violent way. Captain Picard is going to ask you questions about what happened, and where you’re from and what you were doing out there. You’re concerned that you’ll be punished?”
“I murdered someone. She was a Cylon but we have a treaty. Actions have consequences.” He tried to let the worry ease down. The doctor was trying to reassure him, he could see that, and he didn’t think she was trying to mislead him or trick him. And he understood the point she was making. It just felt like a cop out.
It wasn’t as though he had the brain tumor on New Caprica.
“Let me get you something to eat.” Crusher said easily. She walked away and then came back in seconds, stopping at the odd empty box that made the strange noise. Now she was holding a tray that had a bowl of steaming hot oatmeal and a glass of milk. There was moveable table so he could sit up on the bed and eat. More streamlined and cleaner than the ones in the Galactica sickbay, but familiar.
It was the food that seemed strange. He took a bite of the oatmeal and the taste seemed to explode in his mouth. Intellectually, he knew that he was eating something plain, something the doctor had chosen precisely because he hadn’t had anything to eat for almost a year that wasn’t processed algae. It was a struggle to eat slowly, because it was so delicious. So was the milk. “We haven’t… We haven’t had milk in the fleet for almost two years,” he said as he sipped the milk. The doctor nodded, and he made the decision. “You’re not from the Twelve Colonies…. You’ve never even heard of them.”
“No. I haven’t heard of the Twelve Colonies. But you’ve heard of Earth. T’Kil mentioned that you two had discussed it.” She seemed to hesitate. “A lot of the humans on this ship were born on Earth. I was born on Earth’s moon. And that is upsetting you. Can I ask why?”
“Because…” He wasn’t even sure where to start. “Our worlds were destroyed by the Cylons. We were the only survivors because we were in ships, and we had no where to go until the Admiral… The Admiral lied to us, and said he knew the way to Earth. Which is where the 13th Colony went…” Admiral Adama had never apologized for that lie either, something he was certain he had been railing about in the rec room recently. Louis had even told him to be quiet, but people had been listening. He shook it off. “It was religious. Earth was just a place in the religious scrolls. We didn’t have anywhere else to go. And then the President started having visions, or saying she did and…and we kept finding things that made it seem like she was right. But… Earth is all right? People live there?”
“My son goes to school there,” Crusher said. “We’re pretty far out but at last check, everything was fine.”
It shouldn’t hurt. He knew that. Knowing that the highly advanced ship was filled with humans, and aliens, who were from Earth and who clearly had food and resources… That was a good thing. But if they were pretty far out, it meant that the planet that all the stupid visions and signs had pointed to wasn’t Earth at all. So many people had died for nothing. Dee had died for nothing. “We found a planet that… we thought was Earth and it was nothing but a blasted radioactive heap. With signs that it fit the prophecies but… That was maybe ten days ago… we’re out of fuel and food and I lost my leg because someone having a vision was more important than getting me to a doctor, and the frakking planet wasn’t even Earth.” He pushed the empty bowl away. “My best friend came up from that planet, and just shot herself in the head, and I had to clean it up… and it was the wrong damn planet. We were so stupid….”
The doctor took his hand and squeezed it gently. “It’s never stupid to have hope, Felix. It sounds like it kept your people alive and now you’ve found us and we can at least help you and possibly help your people as well.”
She meant well. She was good at her job, he realized. Whatever Starfleet was, it seemed military to a point, and she was sympathetic and not overstating her power. If it was a military ship, and he suspected it was, they weren’t going to drop their orders and go looking for a random fleet of people.
Crusher gave his hand another pat and then took his dishes away. “Now, I need to show you how this leg is going to work. It’s pretty intuitive. I want you to move your toes.”
He did, and it felt completely natural and effortless. The leg seemed to have changed as well, taking on a shape that looked almost exactly like his real leg. It was still an off white plastic color, but he could almost see the lines of muscle under the fake skin. He flexed it and was shocked at how he felt the stretch in the calf. “It feels real.”
“It’s supposed to,” Crusher said. She gestured for him to stand. “It looks like an excellent adaptation, but I want to see you walk on it before we finalize the coding.”
It felt so odd, he realized as he stood up, because it felt so normal. The leg looked fake as hell, but he could feel the carpet under his feet, under both of his feet and he couldn’t really tell the difference. Crusher gestured for him to walk, and he did, feeling off balance only for a moment, like his body wanted to be off kilter and lean on his good leg, but it passed in seconds. “It feels… like my real leg. Like I could stretch it, or go running…” He had put running out of his mind after the amputation. He had never been a sports jock the way some people were but he had liked to run for exercise. Just walking had become so painful, he hadn’t even wanted to think about it.
“Good. Get back up on the exam bed for me, and I’ll get this finished,” Crusher said easily.
“It’s not finished?” he asked as he sat on the bed, reflexively touching the calf of the fake leg. It felt warm, like skin, even though the color was really disconcerting. But he could feel it and the line showing where the leg connected to the stump wasn’t so awful. Neither was the color.
“Not quite,” Crusher said. “We use this sort of prosthetic because in Starfleet, sometimes our people are required to mix with cultures that have taboos about artificial limbs and frankly most people find the look of an artificial limb jarring. This limb is designed as a permanent replacement and I will show you the basic maintenance steps, but let me show you the final step.” She pressed hard on his calf, and he felt something click, like a button was pressed. The white plastic color of the leg changed, darkening to match his other and a film of skin seemed to cover the stump line. In seconds the fake leg looked real. Crusher nodded at the change. “Its easier for this type of injury, if the replacement looks as much like your original limb as possible. You’re not naturally hairy,” and she seemed amused by that for some reason, “but you’ll notice this limb will start to have hair on it like your real leg in the next few days. If you had freckles or moles on your original leg, they’ll appear in the next few hours and the full color change takes a few hours.”
He was afraid to touch it at first but when he did, he could feel his fingers tracing along the muscle on his calf and it felt like real skin. He couldn’t help it, he started to cry.
Let me know if you want this to be slow and involved or quick and get to Felix telling Bill and Laura how stupid they were.
When he woke up again, it felt like more of a struggle to wake up, as though he was fighting against the deep sleep. He opened his eyes, and above him, he saw the same computer field, upside down. The funny thing was, he felt better. There had been another doctor, human, an older woman with red hair and very pretty, and she had explained… something to him. That surgery was necessary, that there was nothing to be afraid of, that he was safe and she could heal what was wrong with him.
He didn’t believe her, not really. Human or not human, he knew what the odds were. If he really had a brain tumor, a malignant brain tumor, there was next to no hope. A rogue ship that had found aliens, friendly aliens, lucky for them but he was likely to die regardless of what they did.
Felix started to sit up and stopped. It felt… wrong. All kinds of wrong. He… could feel both of his legs. He pushed himself up with his arms and looked. It was strange how relieved he felt when he saw an obviously fake prosthetic leg connected to his stump. Fake, he told himself. Its just a fake leg, nicer than the steel pipe and boot that Cottle had made, but fake. If it seemed like he could feel the bed under the heel of the foot, that was just his imagination. At least it doesn’t hurt, he decided as he looked at the prosthetic. It was ghostly white, plastic looking, but the shape looked more like a natural leg, the foot was shaped like a foot. There were toes. As he thought about them, the fake toes twitched. “What the frak?”
He intentionally thought about wiggling his toes, and the fake toes moved again. Not quite how he wanted, slow and stiff, but he was thinking and the fake toes were moving. And the sensation of feeling the leg wasn’t fading.
“You’re awake.” He jumped at the sound of the new voice. The red haired woman, the head doctor smiled as she walked into the room. She tapped the small device she held. He suspected it was some sort of advanced hand held computer. They were incredibly advanced, he had seen that already. She looked him over. “You are an early waker. I didn’t think you’d wake up for at least another hour. How do you feel?”
A stupid question. “I feel ok. Like before I went to sleep.” Before the operation that the doctor had insisted on. He put a hand to his forehead, and found that the medical device was gone. “Did it work? Or didn’t you do it?” He felt very good for having had his skull cut open and dug into.
“The surgery was a success and you’re responding very well to the vaccine.” She eyed him carefully, and then smiled again. “Do you remember my name?”
She was assessing him. “You’re Dr. Crusher…. And this is the medical facility on your ship, the Enterprise. And my name is Felix Gaeta, and there are… non human people on this ship called Vulcans, and Dr. T’Kil is one.” Beyond that, he wasn’t sure she had any questions to ask. He knew they had talked but he had… been gibbering at her. Angry and almost hysterical, and it suddenly occurred to him how much of the last month of his life had been spent angry and almost hysterical. “I feel calm. I don’t know how to describe it…”
“That’s a good sign, actually.” Crusher said. “Your brain isn’t being flooded with the wrong chemicals. It’s not unusual for people to not realize that they’re overreacting or out of control until their brain chemistry returns to normal.” She gestured to the fake leg. “I hadn’t planned on you waking up so soon so the prosthetic leg is still reading your DNA profile and accepting neural commands from your brain. It takes about two hours to be ready and you have a half hour to go.”
“I can move my… its toes,” Felix said. That was well beyond what he had expected when T’Kil had mentioned getting a more advanced limb replacement. As he spoke, he thought about the toes moving and they did move.
Crusher nodded and then let her hand rest on the top of the fake foot. “You can probably feel my hand, as well.”
“Yes….” He was almost afraid to think where she was going with that.
“Once the prosthetic is fully coded to your system, you’ll have full control and feeling in the prosthetic leg.” She smiled at him. “This is a standard prosthetic limb for Starfleet. We don’t have the room on the ships for the gene bath tanks that regrow limbs, and I don’t generally recommend that treatment unless you have a bad reaction to this. And you’re already doing fine.” She patted his fake foot. “Now it isn’t ready for you to try out yet, so you need to sit still and try not to move it just yet. Would you like some breakfast? I have you on a fairly bland diet for the first few days, but you do need to eat.”
“Why are you being so nice to me,” Felix asked suddenly. He wasn’t sure he wanted the answer but he had to ask. He still didn’t really know who they were. Starfleet, the Federation…. Vulcan… after all was said and done, those were just words. He was afraid to ask the real question about who they were. “You found me in the Raptor. You know what I did.”
“I know. And we do know what you did.” The doctor looked at him intently. “There’s two answers to your question. The first answer is the easy one. I’m a doctor, and you are sick and injured so regardless of who you are or what you’ve done, I give you medical care because that’s the decent thing to do. The longer answer is more complicated. We were able to view the inflight security camera footage. We know you only killed one person, and that you were provoked, and I’m not convinced you were wrong to defend yourself or that you were rational. Your oxygen levels alone were low enough to have caused you to act irrationally. You’ll be assessed by our counselor, but frankly my opinion is that there were too many factors affecting your brain for you to be considered responsible for your actions. It’s not entirely my decision, but… You may not realize it yet, but your behavior right now is significantly different than when you and I first met.”
“Really?” He didn’t remember it being that bad. She had taken off the medical sensors off of his forehead and asked him some questions and…. “I didn’t want the surgery at first but… you convinced me.”
“Actually you were quite angry but also rather suggestible, and ultimately Dr. T’Kil convinced you to agree. You also threatened to kill me if I didn’t do a good job and that you would make pay from the grave if it came to that.” Crusher smiled slightly. “I can tell by your expression you don’t remember that.”
“No…” That was frightening. He remembered a rather disjointed conversation about the surgery, where he wasn’t really disagreeing. “I don’t remember Dr. T’Kil being there.” Considering that she wasn’t human, he assumed he would have noticed her.
“That was the brain tumor affecting your reasoning and perception, and it proves my point,” Crusher said. “I’m not going to tell you that what you did wasn’t… disturbing, or that no one should care, but I do think you were under incredible stress and predisposed to handling that stress in a violent way. Captain Picard is going to ask you questions about what happened, and where you’re from and what you were doing out there. You’re concerned that you’ll be punished?”
“I murdered someone. She was a Cylon but we have a treaty. Actions have consequences.” He tried to let the worry ease down. The doctor was trying to reassure him, he could see that, and he didn’t think she was trying to mislead him or trick him. And he understood the point she was making. It just felt like a cop out.
It wasn’t as though he had the brain tumor on New Caprica.
“Let me get you something to eat.” Crusher said easily. She walked away and then came back in seconds, stopping at the odd empty box that made the strange noise. Now she was holding a tray that had a bowl of steaming hot oatmeal and a glass of milk. There was moveable table so he could sit up on the bed and eat. More streamlined and cleaner than the ones in the Galactica sickbay, but familiar.
It was the food that seemed strange. He took a bite of the oatmeal and the taste seemed to explode in his mouth. Intellectually, he knew that he was eating something plain, something the doctor had chosen precisely because he hadn’t had anything to eat for almost a year that wasn’t processed algae. It was a struggle to eat slowly, because it was so delicious. So was the milk. “We haven’t… We haven’t had milk in the fleet for almost two years,” he said as he sipped the milk. The doctor nodded, and he made the decision. “You’re not from the Twelve Colonies…. You’ve never even heard of them.”
“No. I haven’t heard of the Twelve Colonies. But you’ve heard of Earth. T’Kil mentioned that you two had discussed it.” She seemed to hesitate. “A lot of the humans on this ship were born on Earth. I was born on Earth’s moon. And that is upsetting you. Can I ask why?”
“Because…” He wasn’t even sure where to start. “Our worlds were destroyed by the Cylons. We were the only survivors because we were in ships, and we had no where to go until the Admiral… The Admiral lied to us, and said he knew the way to Earth. Which is where the 13th Colony went…” Admiral Adama had never apologized for that lie either, something he was certain he had been railing about in the rec room recently. Louis had even told him to be quiet, but people had been listening. He shook it off. “It was religious. Earth was just a place in the religious scrolls. We didn’t have anywhere else to go. And then the President started having visions, or saying she did and…and we kept finding things that made it seem like she was right. But… Earth is all right? People live there?”
“My son goes to school there,” Crusher said. “We’re pretty far out but at last check, everything was fine.”
It shouldn’t hurt. He knew that. Knowing that the highly advanced ship was filled with humans, and aliens, who were from Earth and who clearly had food and resources… That was a good thing. But if they were pretty far out, it meant that the planet that all the stupid visions and signs had pointed to wasn’t Earth at all. So many people had died for nothing. Dee had died for nothing. “We found a planet that… we thought was Earth and it was nothing but a blasted radioactive heap. With signs that it fit the prophecies but… That was maybe ten days ago… we’re out of fuel and food and I lost my leg because someone having a vision was more important than getting me to a doctor, and the frakking planet wasn’t even Earth.” He pushed the empty bowl away. “My best friend came up from that planet, and just shot herself in the head, and I had to clean it up… and it was the wrong damn planet. We were so stupid….”
The doctor took his hand and squeezed it gently. “It’s never stupid to have hope, Felix. It sounds like it kept your people alive and now you’ve found us and we can at least help you and possibly help your people as well.”
She meant well. She was good at her job, he realized. Whatever Starfleet was, it seemed military to a point, and she was sympathetic and not overstating her power. If it was a military ship, and he suspected it was, they weren’t going to drop their orders and go looking for a random fleet of people.
Crusher gave his hand another pat and then took his dishes away. “Now, I need to show you how this leg is going to work. It’s pretty intuitive. I want you to move your toes.”
He did, and it felt completely natural and effortless. The leg seemed to have changed as well, taking on a shape that looked almost exactly like his real leg. It was still an off white plastic color, but he could almost see the lines of muscle under the fake skin. He flexed it and was shocked at how he felt the stretch in the calf. “It feels real.”
“It’s supposed to,” Crusher said. She gestured for him to stand. “It looks like an excellent adaptation, but I want to see you walk on it before we finalize the coding.”
It felt so odd, he realized as he stood up, because it felt so normal. The leg looked fake as hell, but he could feel the carpet under his feet, under both of his feet and he couldn’t really tell the difference. Crusher gestured for him to walk, and he did, feeling off balance only for a moment, like his body wanted to be off kilter and lean on his good leg, but it passed in seconds. “It feels… like my real leg. Like I could stretch it, or go running…” He had put running out of his mind after the amputation. He had never been a sports jock the way some people were but he had liked to run for exercise. Just walking had become so painful, he hadn’t even wanted to think about it.
“Good. Get back up on the exam bed for me, and I’ll get this finished,” Crusher said easily.
“It’s not finished?” he asked as he sat on the bed, reflexively touching the calf of the fake leg. It felt warm, like skin, even though the color was really disconcerting. But he could feel it and the line showing where the leg connected to the stump wasn’t so awful. Neither was the color.
“Not quite,” Crusher said. “We use this sort of prosthetic because in Starfleet, sometimes our people are required to mix with cultures that have taboos about artificial limbs and frankly most people find the look of an artificial limb jarring. This limb is designed as a permanent replacement and I will show you the basic maintenance steps, but let me show you the final step.” She pressed hard on his calf, and he felt something click, like a button was pressed. The white plastic color of the leg changed, darkening to match his other and a film of skin seemed to cover the stump line. In seconds the fake leg looked real. Crusher nodded at the change. “Its easier for this type of injury, if the replacement looks as much like your original limb as possible. You’re not naturally hairy,” and she seemed amused by that for some reason, “but you’ll notice this limb will start to have hair on it like your real leg in the next few days. If you had freckles or moles on your original leg, they’ll appear in the next few hours and the full color change takes a few hours.”
He was afraid to touch it at first but when he did, he could feel his fingers tracing along the muscle on his calf and it felt like real skin. He couldn’t help it, he started to cry.
Let me know if you want this to be slow and involved or quick and get to Felix telling Bill and Laura how stupid they were.