Dibah.

[mirror_brightly]

Time, always and never, time.

It crawled and jumped in dashes and stutters. Twisted and cracked, sliding, scraping light and silence off the surface of metal. Peeling long white rows that dissolved into the air, into his head, into his lungs. It was niggling cold, and every so often he could hear the dibah. They were crawling down stone paths that

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[headnursechapel]

Christine was the senior officer on duty when the call came through.

With the CMO running around the ship playing hide and seek, the Head Nurse looking after yet another deaged crewmember, and her own Dr. McCoy using all his accumulated days off to spend as much time as possible with his recently returned bondmates, Sickbay was running rather short of staff these days.

"Slow down," she told the frantic security guard on the comm screen. "I can't understand you."

It took a lot of coaxing, but she finally got the relevant information. Prisoner - one of the Romulans, here in the brig - she's gone crazy.

Held the knife up to the forcefield and then to her skin. Don't know where she got it...

"All right, Lieutenant," Christine told him, keeping her voice calm for his sake. "I'll be right there."

She'd considered trying to find Dr. M'Benga - but in-depth knowledge of Vulcanoid physiology wouldn't be required to treat burns. Getting down there now was more important

[mirror_brightly]

Couldn't read it, not through the thickness in the air, the smell. Dead flesh could feel. He pushed life into the veins, she did, flavored with thick forgiveness for his cowardice.

He couldn't feel her arm, she released it. The burn was ice cold, throbbed as it crawled up his veins, into his chest. It filled him up and he slid against the glass. A clatter preceeded nothing. His hand was lighter and he could smell blood.

Naele's eyes were less troubled, serene, numb with the vigor of a corpse. He didn't care about anything else as he watched them.

[anon_crewperson]

Lieutenant Travis Harris had not signed on for this. Shooting hostile aliens in the face, sure. Protecting non-combatant crew from other kinds of hostile aliens, okay. Keeping an eye on hostiles in the brig, making sure no one was going in or out, no problem whatsoever.

Watching one of those hostile aliens try to burn her own arm off?

He wasn't a totally wet-behind-the-ears newbie. The Enterprise had not been his first assignment. But still - Harris had never come closer to barfing all over his regulation boots out of sheer horror.

He managed not to, mostly by looking away until the screaming stopped and deliberately not breathing through his nose, but the relief he felt when the nurse he'd talked to on the comm came running into the brig was so intense that he almost lost control of his guts after all.

"She is totally bugfuck crazy," he said, eloquently. "She just kept burning herself until she fucking passed out."

[headnursechapel]

"Well, at least she's not feeling any pain, then," Christine said, trying to look around Harris into the cell. "And she'll be easier to deal with, if she's unconscious."

She finally managed to step around him and up to the forcefield. The prisoner was off to the side of the opening, outside of Christine's line of sight. Damn. She'd have much preferred being able to confirm Harris' announcement that the Romulan was unconscious before going in, but there was nothing else to be done.

She glanced back at Harris and braced herself before nodding curtly. "I'm ready."