Fidgeting with his cadet rank pips was a terrible habit, and yet Cal’s propensity to do it had only increased since he had joined Starbase Bravo. Something about being so close to graduating, so close to being back at the bottom of the totem pole, it unnerved him. Four years was a long time, the fresh faced boy who had joined the academy as Cal Dorn felt like a different person. In some ways he was, the Cal he had been before joining with the Prax symbiont was for all intents and purposes dead and in his place a new Cal had emerged.

A survivor, that was the way the doctors had described him after the Borg assimilation and plasma burns that had robbed him of his original left arm. Before him, Prax had been a pilot, a doctor, a xenobiologist and an author, all of whom had lived long happy safe lives whilst joined with the symbiont. Yet mere months into his time as a Joined Trill Prax had already endured severe injuries requiring life-saving surgery. 

Despite his best efforts and that of multiple counselors, Cal could not erase the memory of awakening after his assimilation with Borg augmentations and burns covering his body. Feeling Prax’s condition deteriorate, certain that it would only be a matter of time before one of them died inevitably dooming the other. Still he remembered the sickening scent of charred flesh he had accepted as the last thing he would ever experience before fading into the void. The distant echo of voices incomprehensible against the ringing of his ears.

In the end, Cal spent over a month in the Sol Station hospital, as doctors tended to his injuries in consultation with a representative from the Trill Guardians seconded to Earth to tend to Joined Trill caught up in the Borg incursion.

Learning to use the biosynthetic arm had been a challenge on its own but juggling the codependent health of Host and Symbiont had proved an even greater struggle. When Cal overworked himself trying to retrain his new arm, his increased cortisol and blood pressure was enough to cause Prax to develop a minor aneurysm. Much to the disapproval of the Guardians, one of which had tried to have Cal deemed unfit for active duty and forcibly placed on extended medical leave. Though the doctors overseeing his care had quickly put a stop to it. 

Yet despite plasma burns, aneurysms and assimilation they had survived. Even now the pair’s recovery was still ongoing, Cal had only been approved to return to full duties with under the condition he commit to 6 months of regular check-ins with Trill doctors and any subsequent immunotherapy injections they deemed necessary to ensure host and symbiont did not contract any further ailments whilst still recovering. 

Returning to his dorm and the lab on Sol station had been difficult, many of the officers and cadets from Advanced Ops he had once worked so closely with were either dead or had already sought reassignment, trying to find new purpose away from the station that had played host to such traumatic events.

Cal looked out over the satellite campus that would be his final posting as a cadet. The artificial lighting dimmed to give the impression of a rudimentary day/night cycle before slipping off his uniform and climbing into bed.