Chapter Text
Part One
“Hey! Denella! Klath! Sunek! We’ve got a problem down here!”
Jirel supported Natasha’s limp body where she had fallen into his arms in the Bounty’s dining area, struggling to lift himself up from where they had both collapsed and pick her up properly.
He looked away from the disconcertingly blank expression on her face and her unblinking eyes, not wanting to give a second’s thought to the possibility that even as he was calling for help, it might already be too late to save her.
It had all happened in an instant.
One second, they had been talking about their misadventures back on the Makalite planet, where they had made an impromptu stopover to repair the Bounty, only to get caught up in an improvised scam at the expense of the pre-industrial population by stranded con artist Martus Mazur. The next, Natasha had started to look unwell. Jirel had barely had time to stand up from the dining area’s table and catch her before she had slumped down to the floor.
He staggered through the door, grunting with exertion as he carried her unmoving form the short distance to the ship’s medical bay.
He had just placed her onto the bay’s single bed before the others arrived.
“What the hell happened?” Denella, the ship’s Orion engineer, asked as she raced through the door.
In her wake, the rest of the Bounty’s motley crew followed. Sunek, the rangy and uncharacteristically emotional Vulcan pilot, and Klath, the burly Klingon weapons chief. Even they, usually the last to show too many outward signs of worry for other people, looked concerned by what they saw.
“I dunno,” Jirel babbled as he desperately powered up the medical computer, “She just collapsed. She said something about a plant? Or a thorn? On the Makalite planet?”
“She was injured by something,” Klath recalled, “When we were returning to the ship. But she did not seem concerned at the time.”
The Klingon had been with Natasha when she had been pricked by some of the local plant life back on the planet they had just departed from. But he also remembered that she had quickly checked herself with a tricorder and determined that there was no cause for alarm.
“Really am gonna have to remember to leave that place a bad review when I get a chance,” Sunek quipped.
Despite his usual jokes, as was his reaction to most things since he had opted to embrace his emotional side, the Vulcan moved over to Jirel’s side to work on the medical scans.
“Hope you know what you’re doing,” Jirel muttered.
“Me too,” Sunek replied, this time without a trace of humour.
In truth, he was the best option they had. Before Natasha had joined the crew, he’d been the ship’s unofficial field medic, utilising his core of Vulcan competence and logic that still lurked underneath the external barrier of laziness and bad jokes. He certainly wasn’t a doctor. But given that the Bounty’s entire roster of qualified medical personnel was currently unconscious, he knew he had to step up.
After a moment, the computer returned the results of the first set of scans, accompanied by a worrying series of urgent alarms. Sunek’s informal report only added to the mounting sense of worry in the room.
“Ok, so, what the hell?”
“What is it?” Jirel snapped back at the baffled Vulcan.
Sunek took a second to pore over the results again, but failed to improve on his initial diagnosis.
“Sorry guys,” he signed eventually, “I can’t make head or tail of this. Computer says she’s in a coma, I guess? Most of her vital signs are super weak. But…there’s an insane level of brain activity. Like, totally off the charts. Look!”
He pointed at one section of the readouts on the screen as the other three craned their necks to take a look, though the details he was referencing may as well have been written in ancient Iconian for all the sense it made to any of them.
“Meaning?” Klath boomed out.
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“That is not useful.”
Sunek sighed in frustration and looked over at the persistent Klingon. “Ok, Klath, let me tell you the story of how I got all my medical degrees. Don’t worry, it’s gonna be a really short story—”
“We don’t have time,” Jirel butted in.
It wasn’t an annoyed comment directed specifically at Sunek, more of a general statement delivered with an air of detachment. His focus was entirely on where Natasha lay prone on the bed.
“Klath,” he continued, “Get back to the cockpit and find the nearest medical facility. A starbase, a ship, a friendly port. Hell, I’ll take an unfriendly port if they’ve got a doctor on their books.”
The Klingon nodded and silently exited the room, feeling a little more comfortable inside himself now he was able to actually proactively assist in some way.
“We’re not exactly in a busy sector here,” Denella pointed out with a worried expression, “Could be a day or two from the nearest port.”
Sunek looked up from the scans, obliviously pointing out the part of the problem that Denella had deliberately left unsaid. “Not sure our patient’s gonna hang on for a day or two—”
“Yep, got it!” Jirel snapped immediately, shutting the Vulcan up for the moment as his previously benign demeanour evaporated in an instant.
The Trill forced himself to relocate some residual traces of inner calm, momentarily pulling his gaze away from the comatose figure on the bed and across to Denella.
“Any chance we can get something more out of the warp drive? For when Klath does find us somewhere to head to?”
Denella picked up on the plaintive edge to Jirel’s expression, and allowed an understanding smile to cross her face. “Are you kidding? I can always get something more out of the warp drive.”
Jirel mustered a smile back as his engineer departed the scene, leaving him with just Sunek and the comatose Natasha for company. He looked back down at her immobile form and instinctively balled his fists up in frustration, feeling a wave of familiar feelings surfacing inside.
He still wasn’t sure how genuine the feelings he had for her were, and how much they were just a combination of the loneliness of space coupled with the night they had spent together shortly after the Bounty had rescued her. The night he may have misinterpreted as meaning something more than it really had. The night that she had insisted had merely been her scratching an itch after spending six months marooned and alone on a hostile planet after escaping the destruction of the USS Navajo.
Either way, ever since then, his feelings had shifted around and evolved in different ways, but they had never threatened to disappear. And right now, they seemed stronger than ever.
“There has to be something else we can do,” he said eventually, looking across and gesturing to the confusing brain scans on the screen, “There has to be some way we can figure out what the hell all that means.”
Sunek looked from the worried face of his colleague back to the maelstrom of brain activity on the scans. And his occasionally unreliable sense of tact decided that it probably wasn’t the best time to offer the latest quip that he had on the tip of his tongue.
Instead, the Vulcan simply sighed. Because the truth was that one idea did occur to him. An especially stupid and risky idea.
And he had a horrible feeling that Jirel was desperate enough to go for it.