Captain’s Log, Supplemental.

 

Hazard Teams Alpha and Beta have successfully retrieved our personnel from Cardinal 1. There were no fatalities among our own personnel, but 47 Romulans were killed, and Lieutenant Sarcaryn was critically wounded. He has been in surgery for the past twelve hours with an uncertain prognosis. The warp drive aboard Cardinal 1 cannot be repaired, so I have ordered the rest of the flotilla to proceed without us while we take on their passengers. This will cripple our small craft launch and recovery abilities, as we must use our hangers to house another ten thousand people.

CW: This scene depicts someone experiencing the immediate aftermath of a traumatic injury. 

Lieutenant Sarcaryn’s breathing was shallow but regular as he woke up. The barely perceptible smell of antiseptic hit his nose and reminded him of the physiology lab. Things were blurry, and he was disorientated but not in pain while his senses rebooted. Flashes of the brief battle went through his mind, trying to knit themselves together to explain how he got to where he was then, but the last thing he could clearly remember was pushing Commander Slater out of the way of a collapsed structural member aboard the Romulan vessel. The ceiling above him started to look reasonably enough like a Starfleet sickbay, and he realized that he couldn’t move his head or limbs. His heart rate started to climb, and the monitor above him began to complain.

“Easy, you’re safe,” Dr. Anjar said, coming into focus as he put a hand on Sarcaryn’s shoulder.

“Can’t move,” Sarcaryn managed, not hearing his own voice in the sounds that came out; getting his mouth and tongue to form the words was hard, and something definitely felt wrong.

“You’ve been through a lot. I have the restraint field on so you don’t hurt yourself accidentally,” the doctor explained. “I can lift it, but I need you to promise to stay still.”

“Yes, sir,” Sarcaryn agreed. The doctor tapped a button on the side of the biobed, and Sarcaryn immediately felt free. He couldn’t help but crane his neck up slightly to try to catch a glimpse of himself, but he was covered in a blanket, and Anjar gently returned his head to the pillow before he could do an accurate assessment. “Sorry, doc.”

“Perfectly alright. I would have preferred to leave you under a little longer, but I need to do a neurological assessment. Are you in any pain?” the Bajoran said, picking up a hand scanner from the bedside table.

“Not at all. Just groggy,” Sarcaryn said. “Difficult to talk.”

“I’m not surprised. I’ll keep the questions brief, and then we’ll help you get back to sleep,” Anjar said, nodding past Sarcaryn to someone on the other side. Commander Vircar came into view, the only other Risian officer on the ship. Her presence made Sarcaryn start to worry, as he wondered how badly he must be hurt to have a commander and a captain looking after him. “Let’s start with something easy: What is your name and rank?” the doctor asked as Vircar started to take notes on a PADD.

“Lieutenant Junior Grade Zaos Sarcaryn,” he replied, though he got frustrated in the reduplicated first syllables of his surname, stumbling over them in a way that he never had before, not even when stone-cold drunk. “Serial number XX-690-66-999.”

Anjar chuckled. “Going for bonus points, Lieutenant. Do you know where you are and how you got here?”

“Sickbay on the Arcturus. Not sure how I got here, though,” Sarcaryn admitted.

“That’s probably for the best,” Anjar noted.

“I remember pushing Commander Slater out of the way. Is he OK?”

“You saved his life, Zaos. You’re a hero,” Vircar replied, watching as Anjar slowly passed the scanner over Sarcaryn’s eyes. She glanced down at the PADD. “Pupil responses are good, Doctor.”

Anjar reached over to take Sarcaryn’s hand, and the lieutenant wondered for a moment if that meant he was about to get some bad news. “Can you squeeze my hand?” Sarcaryn did so, finding his muscles responding quickly and easily to the command. “Quite the grip!”

Sarcaryn tried to grin, but that did hurt. “Can you release the field on my legs now?” Anjar and Vircar looked at one another, and Sarcaryn’s heart sank. “No, no, no…” he whimpered, trying with all of his might to move even a toe, but he realized that he had no sensation at all lower than his navel.

The heartrate monitor started to gently warn again. He tried to sit up to see what was going on, but Vircar held him back, and that just made his heart beat faster. His pulse was pounding in his ears, and he felt like he was going to hyperventilate.

“Zaos, look at me,” Anjar insisted. Sarcaryn’s eyes snapped obediently to those of the senior officer. “You’ve suffered several traumatic injuries. Your body will take a while to repair itself.”

“Tell me exactly what happened,” Sarcaryn said. “Please.”

Anjar sighed. “It’s a long list. Broken bones in all four limbs. A traumatic brain injury. Jaw fractured in three places… and a few lost teeth. Significant plasma burns on much of your body,” the doctor listed, each extra injury just numbing Sarcaryn further. There was a pause that he knew could not be good. “Those are all easy enough to deal with, but I believe your spinal cord has been severed between your L2 and L3 vertebra.”

Sarcaryn felt his heart rate climb, but he tried to take a deep breath. “Will I walk again? Don’t lie to me.”

“It’s… unlikely,” Anjar admitted. At that point, he and Vircar had a hand on either side of him, keeping Sarcaryn down. “There are still treatment options to explore, and the Risian nervous system is much more elastic than other humanoids, Zaos.”

“Once elastic breaks, that’s it,” Sarcaryn spat, though he managed to avoid sending himself into a panic attack. He was reeling at the idea that life as he knew it was over. Being active and athletic was central not only to his identity but to his culture. He simply couldn’t imagine losing that. “I want to see myself.”

“Zaos, I think it’s time that we let you rest,” Vircar suggested.

“No! Show me.”

Anjar nodded, and he folded Sarcaryn’s blanket at his waist. He tapped another button on the biobed, and a holographic mirror appeared above the bed so that Sarcaryn could get a full view of his body. What he saw shocked him; it wasn’t him. It just couldn’t be. Most of his chest and torso were covered in silver patches, likely knitting his skin back together. All of his copper-red hair was gone, and when he opened his mouth, he could see that most of his teeth were as well. Half of his face was also covered, and it took both of them to keep him from pulling the bandage off.

“I’m a monster,” Sarcaryn sobbed, rational thought leaving him entirely. He had always strived to be more than his looks, but that was also the feature he was most confident in about himself and the part that was most essential to his identity. Without them, he couldn’t imagine a future. “Why did you save me?!” he screamed, his panic leading to his upper body thrashing, trying to get his useless lower half to do something.

Sarcaryn could vaguely hear the two officers trying to calm him down as the lighting above his bed turned blue, and others swarmed him. He wasn’t taking in any breath at all and nearly whited out before he felt the cold applicator of a hypospray on his neck take him all the way to undreaming unconsciousness.

After having him on the operating table for twelve hours, Anjar was not about to lose Lieutenant Sarcaryn to a stroke or cardiac arrest. Once the sedative was in, he watched the monitor closely until the lieutenant’s heart rhythm left arrhythmia. The group let out a collective sigh of relief when Anjar canceled the code blue.

“Implement suicide watch protocols. He is not to be left alone at any time for any reason, understood?” Anjar said, looking at the nurses and techs around him.

“Yes, doctor,” they said together.

Alenis Anjar was one of the finest and most experienced neurosurgeons in the entire Federation, and yet he wasn’t sure how he could restore his patient to total health. He looked at the young man, wrapped in bandages and bruised from a heroic act at the peak of his youth and fitness, and it made him twinge with disgust. Sarcaryn was nearly killed—and the lieutenant had certainly intimated that he felt his life was over—saving one of his crewmates caught between Romulans firing on other Romulans. Anjar hadn’t seen things like that or felt the sheer level of contempt he had towards them in a long time.

“It’s still early days, doctor,” Vircar offered, putting her hand on his shoulder. “You should get some rest.”

“How can I rest with this man—this child—lying here mangled in my sickbay?” Anjar asked, even though he wasn’t sure if it had been thirty-six or forty-eight hours since he’d been in his own quarters, let alone slept.

“You had it right the first time. He’s a man, not a child,” the nurse pointed out. “We have other treatment options to explore, and he will get better, but not if you’re sleep-deprived.”

“Fine. But give him another six or seven hours up here and then have him moved to one of the isolation wards. He won’t want to be seen,” Anjar replied, catching sight of Counselor Sharma over Vicar’s shoulder.

Anjar nodded across the hall to his office, and Sharma joined him there. Though he was a neurologist by trade, or perhaps because of that, he never had much use for non-psychiatric counselors. To him, the brain and any resulting errors it might make were physiological issues to be solved, not to be talked about and cried about.

“How much of that did you see?” Anjar asked, leaning back against his desk.

“Enough. That poor boy,” Sharma replied. “He must be devastated.”

“He was. I should have left him under longer, but I wanted to make sure his nervous system wasn’t completely wrecked,” Anjar explained. “I put the chances of him walking again around twenty percent. There’s not enough case information for Risians with these types of injuries, though.”

“We’ll both have our work cut out for us, then,” the counselor replied, studying him. “Perhaps after you’ve had a chance to rest, we can talk about how you are feeling as well.”

“When the beds in my wards are empty, sure,” Anjar replied, trying his very best not to sound sarcastic. “I told Melandis that I was going to sleep, though. I’ll see you in the morning, Counselor,” he added, breezing past her towards the hall, though he paused for a moment when he caught a glimpse of Sarcaryn’s face in the dim lighting of the ICU.

The further Anjar got from sickbay and the closer he got to his quarters, the more tired he realized he was. He’d opted for a new set of quarters on the same deck as sickbay in their recent refit, but when the doors closed behind him, he still felt as though he were in another quadrant entirely. He glanced at the replicator, but he was too tired to eat. When he sat down on the bed to take his boots off, he saw the picture of him and Mason that he always kept there and snatched it up.

It was the last picture the two of them had taken together. Anjar was in his medical cadet uniform, and Mason was a newly-minted command division Ensign. He was two years older and was shipping out to serve during the Dominion War aboard the Valley Forge when Anjar was stuck behind in medical school. The picture was taken less than six months before Mason died at the First Battle of Chin’Toka, almost thirty years prior. It was the first and only time that Anjar had ever experienced romantic love with someone else.

The reason he grabbed the picture, though, was that he’d forgotten that Mason had the exact same shade of bold, copper-red hair that Sarcaryn did. Sarcaryn had arrived with his hair bloody and matted, and they’d had to shave it off for surgery. The two men otherwise looked nothing alike—Sarcaryn was traditionally handsome, with the sculpted muscles everyone imagined Risians having, while Mason had softer features and a rounder face—but they shared hair colors.

“I never thought I’d forget what you looked like,” Anjar whispered, feeling a day’s—or maybe a decade’s—worth of tears welling up in his eyes. “I’m not going to let him go the way I had to let you go.”

Anjar sniffed but refused to allow himself to break down and cry. That felt too… Bajoran. He set the photo back in its place and stood up, moving through the living room and into his private study, which was essentially the same as his work office, but with fewer patient tissue samples lying around.

“Computer, interface with the Risian Medical Commission and find me every available treatment record for severe neurological trauma involving any Risians, and cross-reference with available equipment aboard Arcturus and at any Starfleet Medical facilities in this quadrant,” Anjar ordered.

“Please confirm search parameters. The requested information may take several hours to collate,” the computer replied.

“Confirm. While we’re waiting, make a pot of black coffee and pull up the patient file for Sarcaryn, Zaos. I want to know about anytime this kid has had so much as a hangnail,” Anjar replied, literally cracking his knuckles before bringing all of the holographic displays on his desk into range. “He’s walking out of my sickbay on his own two feet, you hear me?”

“Message understood. Search in progress,” the computer replied.