In 2385, Luca Sheppard was a second-year nursing student at Starfleet Academy. Right at the end of his second year, the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards were destroyed by the rogue synth attack and Mars was set ablaze. Sheppard and his fellow cadets were pressed into emergency service as orderlies as Starfleet prepared to receive casualties back on Earth. That day, Sheppard saw many, many wounded people and he’d seen all sorts of suffering, but Arcturus’s mission to the Cardassian border in 2401 was his first real experience with death on a mass scale. 

Several days into the process, Sheppard and his team were long past the point of preparing whole bodies for burial. Most of their remaining work was ensuring that what biological matter and fragments they could identify were placed together into torpedo casings, as was customary. Combadges and rank pips helped with the identification process, but it was deeply unsatisfying to only have a finger or an ear to put to rest. Every death certificate needed to be signed by a physician, though, which meant that he’d done hundreds himself.

Even with a dedicated team from Mortuary Services, the entire medical department was busy. In addition to recovering and cataloguing the dead for burial, they also had 47 patients in various stages of recovery across the two sickbay complexes. Sheppard had to divert almost all of his non-nursing staff to help in the morgue, and they were pulling in personnel cross-trained from other divisions just to keep adequate staffing levels. To their credit, no one was complaining. They were handling the job like the professionals they were. But to Sheppard, it felt like sprinting through an entire marathon. 

During the briefing, he felt as though he should be annoyed at the speed with which they were going to be consigning the dead back into space, but he felt nothing. His husband, the captain, was nothing if not logical, and if there was another alternative, he would have considered it. He hadn’t wanted to stick around in the conference room because he knew that his staff was barely finding the time for bathroom breaks—there was work to be done, and he had to set an example. Thankfully, staff routines were starting to come closer to normal as the amount of physical labor with managing the bodies declined—but that meant that hope of recovering anyone else, let alone any survivors, had all but vanished, and that felt like a pall over the whole ship.

When Sheppard entered sickbay, he only made it a few steps towards his office before he was intercepted by Lieutenant Gardner, one of the charge nurses. The young man normally had what Sheppard thought of as “capital-T Twink energy,” meaning that he was sassy, flirtatious, and chaotic, but even he was somber and quiet.

“Doctor, Lieutenant Kane is conscious,” the nurse announced. Lieutenant Lysander Kane was listed as Outpost C-91’s deputy chief of security. He was the highest-ranking survivor they’d been able to pull from the wreckage. “He keeps saying something about ‘Security Alert Purple,’” Gardner continued as Sheppard walked with him into the ICU. 

Lieutenant Kane was twenty-five, tall, handsome, and blond. He was the spitting image of a Starfleet security officer—now that the swelling had abated from the traumatic head injury he’d suffered. Sheppard had kept him sedated for the first few days of his stay aboard Arcturus to ensure he wouldn’t further injure himself, but they were allowing him to come out of that sedation naturally. Watching the lieutenant’s vitals carefully, Sheppard stepped in closer to hear him faintly muttering about that same purple security alert.

“Lieutenant, you’re aboard the starship Arcturus. Can you hear me?” Sheppard asked. He turned to Gardner. “Figure out what that alert means.”

“Big ship,” Lieutenant Kane muttered, eyes fluttering. That was a good sign. Before Sheppard could respond, Gardner handed Sheppard a PADD with a list of standard station security alerts: code purple was a bomb threat. “Who did it?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Sheppard said. He saw Kane try to sit up, so he quickly put his hand on his shoulder. “Easy, lieutenant.”

“I’ve gotta get to ops,” Kane said, trying to sit up again. That was a less promising sign: the lieutenant was having trouble staying fully conscious. Sheppard glanced up to see that his cognitive vitals were still shaky. He grabbed a hypospray and applied it to Kane’s neck before he could try anything else. “Must have been… freighter,” the security officer managed before passing out again.

“What freighter?” Gardner asked.

“No idea. Watch him,” Sheppard replied before leaving the nurse and the patient to head towards his office.

Sheppard tapped his badge to report the new information but tapped it again to cancel the call when he saw Lancaster waiting for him in the office. He was never unhappy to see his husband, but unannounced visits like that were rare. The doctor managed a smile and crossed the room to kiss him on the cheek. They hadn’t seen much of each other in the past few days.

“What are you doing down here?” Sheppard asked.

“I came to see how you’re doing. I know this has been hard on you,” Lancaster said bluntly.

“I’m fine,” Sheppard replied. “It’s good you came down, though. Lieutenant Kane woke up just long enough to say that there was a bomb threat alarm. He also mentioned a freighter, but that’s all we could get out of him,” he said, pressing straight into the business at hand.

The machinery behind Lancaster’s eyes was already starting to whir—Sheppard could recognize that look from his partner, anywhere—but he surprised Sheppard by just nodding.

“That’s a good lead,” the captain said. “Computer, privacy,” he ordered, which prompted the computer to close the door to Sheppard’s office and switch the glass from transparent to frosted within a few milliseconds. “You’re not acting like yourself.”

Sheppard scoffed. “I don’t feel like myself,” he admitted. He shook his head, not used to the emotional intelligence quotient in their relationship being flipped like that. Usually, he was the one who had to remind Lancaster to rest, eat, and breathe during stressful situations. “We don’t have a choice. We have to get this done. I’m not going to slack off on my first real assignment as chief medical officer.”

“I’m a bad influence on you,” Lancaster murmured. “After the ceremony, I want you to rest. I know from your reports that the caseload down here is stabilizing. You’ve ‘made’ me do that on more than one occasion.”

Sheppard nodded. “I’ll try,” he conceded. He’d been unable to tell Michael Lancaster ‘no’ for over a decade by that point. “Maybe I’m a bad influence on you,” he teased, though he still felt a little too numb to find much joy in their banter.

“Physician, heal thyself,” Lancaster said. He tapped his badge. “Lancaster to bridge. Doctor Sheppard’s team has learned from one of the survivors that there was some sort of freighter present before a bomb alert went off. Find it,” he ordered, slipping back into his captain mask before leaving Sheppard’s office.

Sheppard took a deep breath as the weight of days of poor work-life balance hit him. He hadn’t been to the gym in days, which was extremely unusual for him. He was tired, irritable, and overwhelmed. But he also had a job to do. After that deep breath, he walked back out into sickbay to keep up the fight.