Part VI - We Get Better

Posted on Sat Feb 1st, 2014 @ 3:21pm by Lieutenant Commander Horatio Hawke

Episode: Trauma
Location: Starfleet Medical, Pike City
Timeline: 13 November 2390

“Are you okay?” Counsellor Toma asked with that gentle, concerned voice of his.

Horatio nodded as he sat down and looked over his hand. The medics had done an excellent job and there were no signs of the damage he had done. Which was extensive. Glass had shredded several ligaments and he almost lost a finger. Fortunately, none of the shards ruptured an artery or things might have turned out differently.

“The hand is good as new,” Horatio said, holding it up for the counsellor to inspect.

Toma didn’t inspect it, he just sat down ignoring the hand. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I didn’t think so,” Horatio said. He sat back in the sofa. It had only been a day since their last session; a day since the accident.

“But since you mentioned it,” Toma said. “What did you do to your hand?”

Horatio looked at him with a patronising expression. “Don’t you read your briefing notes, Counsellor?” he asked.

“I want you to tell me,” he said. “There’s only so much one can get from an incident report.”

Sighing, Horatio started to tell the story. Except it wasn’t the real story. “After I left here, I went for a walk to clear my head. While I was out, I tripped in the street and fell into a window.”

“Just fell into it?”

“Yep.”

“And only your hand sustained an injury?”

“I must have regained my balance enough to stop all of me from going through,” Horatio said. “I’m pretty lucky I guess.”

Toma watched him for a moment in silence, then seemed to move on. “Let’s pick up where we left off yesterday. We were talking about the crash on Ollara Four and Ensign Kalik.”

A stab of pain flared in his gut. Zera.

“Tell me about the crash,” Toma said, there was an urgency in his voice this time, though. “What happened inside the shuttle?”

“Have you ever been in a shuttle crash?” Horatio asked, remembering the squeal of metal as it was torn apart. The shattering of glass, the crumpling of tritanium alloy all around him and the sudden, lethal stop. Her blood.

“No,” Toma said.

You couldn’t save her!

“It’s hell,” Horatio said. The control console pinning him down in his shattered seat. The smell of hydraulic fluid leaking, the acrid smell of something burning. “The cockpit is designed to minimise risk of death or injury. But designed to and actually doing are two very different things.”

“You lost your legs, didn’t you?”

Horatio nodded, “Mostly.”

“And Zera died?”

Her blood is on your hands!

She was in the right hand seat in the cockpit. As they came in for the crash landing, Horatio had been trying to keep it level. At the last second, a power surge in the RCS thrusters had shot the left side of the shuttle up and drove it into the ground. The point of impact was on the right side of the nose and Zera copped the full force of it.

The nose crumpled, collapsing in on them. Horatio’s legs were crushed under the console, but Zera was pinned higher. The console crushed her from her stomach down and she had somehow suffered a massive head wound. The post mortem described it as the killing blow and she probably struck the console in front of her.

When he woke up, he saw that she was still in the seat next to him. He didn’t realise the full extent of her injuries. Gradually, he noticed that the console that pinned them both was resting tight against her stomach. Then he saw the blood on the console. It was hard to see in the dim emergency lighting, but it was unmistakable as it dripped down off the edge.

He called to her. An urgency in his voice, “Zera!” He tried to reach her, but he was pinned and excruciating pain shot through his body whenever he tried to move. He leaned as far as he could and managed to grab her left hand. It was cold; so cold! “Zera!”

There was no movement. She was so cold. She was gone.

Tears spilled from his eyes as he said, “Yes. She … her injuries were worse than mine.”

It should have been YOU!

“How did you hurt your hand?” Toma asked.

Horatio had no fight in him. His first instinct was to deny what happened, but he knew he couldn’t keep it up. He felt weak and lost. “I … I wasn’t thinking. I just … just did it. I saw the window …” he swallowed and tried to focus, blinking away tears. “I felt numb and I wondered … how can I stop this? It hurt so much.

“I saw myself … my reflection. I hated it. I hated me. I hate that I can’t make it stop. The memories, the pain. I tried to make it stop.”

He looked down at his hand, now clean, but still saw the blood. Felt the sting of the glass. “I can’t stop feeling like this.”

“Horatio,” Toma said. “You are in so much pain right now and you have no idea what’s going on inside your head. That’s okay. Your mind is locked in a kind of damage control and you’re struggling to make sense of it all.”

“So help me!” Horatio snapped.

“You have post-traumatic stress disorder,” Toma said, matter of factly.

Horatio was stunned. It can’t be! “No,” he said, shaking his head.

“It’s okay.”

“No,” he insisted. “I can’t have that. It’s been three years …”

“You’re going to be fine, Horatio.”

“Am I?” he said, feeling a tinge of panic. “That doesn’t sound like something they let you have if you fly starships.”

“That’s why we post counsellors on starships,” Toma said. “You will have to keep seeing a counsellor, but you will be able to return to duty. What we need to do, Horatio, is get you to a point where you can remember what happened to Zera and not relive it.”

Horatio shook his head, confusion setting in. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I’ve remembered it plenty of times. Why is this time so different.”

“You had a post-traumatic stress episode,” Toma said. “A couple of things triggered it, but it locked you into reliving what happened again and again.”

“What triggered it?” Horatio asked, immediately thinking it was the loss of the Endeavour. “Was it the Endeavour?”

Toma nodded, but with a twisted expression on his face. “Sort of,” he said. “That was a major trigger, but you didn’t truly set off until later. Usually for PTSD victims the trigger is a sound or a smell that they associate with the traumatic event. In your case it was a smell.”

It clicked, “The hydraulic fluid!” he said, a strange moment of clarity descending over him.

The counsellor nodded, “That’s right,” he said. “That coupled with the recent trauma of losing the Endeavour sent you into damage control.”

“Hang on, does that mean I’m going to flip out every time I smell hydraulic fluid?”

“No,” Toma said, shaking his head.

“Why not?”

“Because we get better, Horatio,” Toma said with a confident smile. “You will get better.”