Red Means Dead

The Moth

My bed is near the back corner of sickbay. It's quiet and semi-private but I have a line-of-sight to McCoy's desk and can watch most of the goings-on in the surprisingly busy medical space. With over four hundred people on the ship, someone always seems to have a headache or plasma burn or other minor malady.

It has been three days since I first woke. Most of the medications are out of my body, except for the ones for pain, and I'm nearly fully functional with a very noticeable limp. The thermal bandages fulfilled their purpose and sealed all of the new skin to the gaping wounds on my body. McCoy has had to tell me repeatedly not to scratch the slightly pink skin but it tingles and I can't help it. It reminds me of when I was eight and burned my finger while camping. The doctor gave me a sucker to keep me occupied so I wouldn't scratch which lasted all of five minutes. I still have a faint scar that would have disappeared if I left it alone.

McCoy moves his feet and it gathers my focus on the present.

I am sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing at the base of my sternum. I've been staring into the near space for five minutes, trying to grasp everything that he has said. For his part, he's letting me process the information in my own time. He's leaning against the nearest bed, his feet anchored on the deck between my dangling bare ones. He's watching me in his peripheral vision, like I'm a solar flare and he doesn't want to look directly at me for fear of what might happen to him.

Being told you died twice is hard to digest. He has said repeatedly that if we lived in a different century, I'd probably still be in a coma or worse. Apparently a few hundred years ago, if I had survived, I would have been in the hospital for weeks and rehabilitation even longer. McCoy had joked that after patching me up, he was beginning to think he could cure a rainy day. I might laugh at that one day but today isn't that day.

Also being told that everyone else on the mission is dead is painful to hear but I already knew this and have thought of pretty much nothing else since waking. Their faces haunt me when I sleep and beset me when I am awake. I've worried over and over in my mind the clues that I missed that could have saved their lives, the actions I took after Meiying was ripped in two when I should have done something to help that young ensign, the maneuvers I took to end the fight that should have ended my life yet I'm still here.

Wedging my hand under my thigh because I've nearly rubbed a bruise into the skin of my chest, I take a settling breath and clear my throat.

McCoy glances at me, expecting me to say something but he's disappointed because I'm still processing. Truthfully, my mind is seizing like a warp core without enough dilithium crystal as I try to come to terms on my own. He wants to help but I want to rip a hole in the plating and curl into a ball amongst the wires.

He wants something, I don't know what, but he wants something.

It's been a full week since the mission. A full week since I last saw Mei. A full week since we laughed together. A full week since she died. He's yet to say anything about her, maybe he doesn't realize how close she and I were. Maybe he does realize and wants me to bare my soul but I'm not ready just yet.

Perhaps, for piecing me back together, he wants a thank you or a status update on my physical well-being. As my doctor, he knows better than I how I am healing so it's not the latter and, at the moment, I'm not so certain how grateful I am to express the former.

I doubt he wants to know how I still hear the aliens' raspy screeches in my mind, or can feel their breath on my body and the rocks grating through my skin; or can see Mei's hollow gaze staring at me in my peripheral vision and I think if I move my eyes fast enough I'll see her; or what it's like to smell the gore of my comrades drenching me or my blood as it is draining from gaping wounds I inflicted on myself.