Red Fingers
Posted on September 30th, 2021 by Emilaina Acacia

Doctor Acacia sat on her knees in her quarters in front of the glass coffee table, focused entirely on her Vulcan meditation lamp. The lamp was a gift from one of her roommates and good friends at the Academy, T’Paea. It had spent years in a box, but since the time travel incident, she had been using it more often during her now regular meditation sessions.

She’d read a couple of books on Vulcan meditation, but that was all tailored to suppressing emotion. As a Betazoid and as a Human, by contrast, she was supposed to be getting ‘in tune’ with her emotions. Sometimes she envied Vulcans, with their reliable logic.

The flame swayed left, then right, then in a circle. Emily wondered if she was controlling the flame, or just feeling where it would go next. She wondered if there was a difference. She closed her eyes, and began to focus on the events of the day that she needed to process.

The bright lights, beeping monitors, and sanitized smell of the operating room filled her mind. How many surgeries had she performed due to the battle with the Xovul? She’d lost count, but the records hadn’t. 

“Computer, how many surgeries did Doctor Acacia perform in the last twenty-four hours?”

“Forty-seven.” 

“Hm,” she breathed.

There was a moment that lingered in her mind. The one patient who had died on the operating table, who she now knew to have been Lieutenant Jake Belmont, came in with one of the most severe head wounds she’d ever seen. As she was trying to save him, she ended up with some of his blood on her hands. She remembered staring at it, red smears on the solid red surgical garb, blending in enough that you might not notice if you weren’t paying attention.

After him she washed her hands for twice as long, even knowing that her gloves had gone into the recycler and brand new ones would come back out. She wanted to keep scrubbing until she felt clean, but she eventually realized that wasn’t going to happen.

Ensign Paige Fleur was declared dead in Engineering by one of the medical teams and brought directly to the morgue due to the chaos in Sickbay, but she was examined after the battle as per protocol. She had been killed by an exploding console, a piece of shrapnel basically getting an unlucky shot.

A third person, Crewman Hill, had died on the stretcher as a medical team was carrying him into Sickbay, where he was declared dead. He’d gone into a jefferies tube to fix something, took a tumble when Atlantis was hit by a chunk of Xovul ship, and broke one too many bones.

Finally, Emily found out after the battle that one of the Sharks, Tightrope, had been shot down. She always worried about the Sharks, especially Zorro, but hearing that any of them had been killed sunk her heart.

She prayed for them all, remembering their faces and letting a single tear roll down her cheek. When she opened her eyes she found the flame on the meditation lamp was tiny and fleeting. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, and the flame jumped back to life. Then she wiped the tears from her eyes, sighing.

Emily blew out the lamp and got up, going to get ready for the memorial service. No doubt the Captain would give a rousing and endearing speech, and the friends of those passed would tell great tales of the dead. Everyone would cry, many would drink, and then eventually, life would move on.

Emily took some small solace in the fact that she had so little to deal with, comparatively. Preparing bodies for funerals was never something she enjoyed, but losing a handful was better than losing the entire ship, as some allies had. This may have been the busiest she’d ever seen Sickbay, and she hoped to keep it that way, but everyone got treated in the end.

The cost had been great, but Refuge was safe, for now. As Emily got dressed Vinny found her, pecking at her shoes as she tried to put them on. She managed a small smile and patted his half-chicken half-rat head, wondering briefly if a creature like him had any concept of death. She replicated him a treat and tossed it to him to distract him, quickly pulling on her shoes and heading out the door.