Counselor, Heal Thyself (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on 06 Dec 2017 @ 4:37pm by Ensign Miraj Derani & Lieutenant Lake ir-Llantrisant

2,006 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Episode 15 - Emanation
Location: USS Hathaway - Deck 13, Medical Laboratory
Timeline: MD 94 - 1120 hours

[ON]

Stepping back from the doorway, Lake ir-Llantrisant offered a sweeping gesture towards the laboratory's seating area. In design, the neurology lab's seating area had been installed as a conference desk, but the furniture had been rearranged for comfort, rather, when Lake had claimed the lab as his own. (As a Constellation-Class starship, the Hathaway wasn't exactly designed from the era of a counselor on the main bridge.)

"Have a seat," Lake said invitingly, "Please." He smiled over at Miraj as she entered; it was a practiced expression. As he watched her entering the compartment, Lake bobbed his head from side to side as second thoughts came to mind. He added, "Unless you're a pacer at heart, or a kinetic communicator."

"I don't know." Miraj said, sitting down, "It depends I guess." She crossed her legs, but didn't sit back in the seat, slightly on edge.

Unlike many in his profession, Lake attended to his duty in a regulation Starfleet uniform. It would take another Counselor to understand why Lake's assignment to teach Cadets had caused him to start cloaking himself not only in his uniform, but in the pale blue medical smock that served as a modern day labcoat. Folding his hands over his abdomen, Lake's expression pinched into a subdued frown as he watched over Miraj. "In that case," Lake said, "don't feel committed to your answer." --On small steps, he moved towards the chair opposite to Miraj-- "We can take a walk through the arboretum later, if you prefer."

Lowering himself into the chair, Lake asked Miraj, "What objections would you have to my cadet observing our discussion?" He raised a hand, vaguely gesturing towards the young Arcadian who was sitting behind at a laboratory workstation, casual as if she was one of many in a typing pool. "I can ask her to step out?" he offered.

Miraj looked where he pointed. The arcadian seemed normal. "sure, not a problem?" she was wondering if this was a test.

Nodding at Miraj, Lake took her words at face value, for the most part. He couldn't help but hear the tinge of a question in her statement. Lake said, "Thank you for your generosity. What this may cost you in a fraction of privacy will enrich Cadet Yuulik's learning."

"Yes," Cadet Yuulik chimed in. From her perch behind the workstation, she was already typing notes furiously into a PADD, finding this interaction eminently fascinating. She too wondered if this was a test. "Thank you?" she said, somewhat unconvincingly.

"So, what now?" Miraj asked. it had been some time since she'd seen a counsellor. Several months, if not longer. She wasn't sure about the drill

"Let's," Lake started to say, but then he paused. He looked down at his lap and set his palms down on his knees. Looking up to meet Miraj's eyes, Lake continued to say, "make it easy." --He stressed the final word-- "Many prefer to start at the beginning..."

Where to begin. She looked at the counsellor. He was vulcan she thought, surprisingly relaxed for a vulcan though. And something about him seemed familiar, but she couldn't place it. "I kind of found trouble. Again. It seems there's actually something other than flying I'm good at."

Lake squinted at Miraj when she said that. He looked visibly perplexed, but he let his expression relax into something far more neutral. "If you don't mind me sharing an observation, you sound surprised by that," he said. "The words you chose, the way you said it, you sound surprised to discover something new you're good at?"

"I'm not good at much." Miraj explained. "Its like my entire share of being good at something went on one thing. Flying. I'm the best, no exceptions. Can fly anything, any how, anywhere. But I can't do anything else for toffee. I was bottom of my intake in everything else. I got through all my exams on cramming and luck. I can't shoot, and I don't know an EPS conduit from a sensor array connection."

Nodding at each of the points Miraj was offering, Lake acknowledged each of them with a, "right," and a, "right." He raised a palm to the level of his chest as if he were weighing a grapefruit. "Given the evidence available, you've taken it to mean you're not good at anything but flying and trouble," Lake said, "And there's another perspective too: What do you call a doctor who cruises through medical school with nothing but Cs?"

She was looking at him quite closely, and it took a moment to register the question. "Uh. I don't know. I don't know that many doctors personally."

"A doctor who graduates the academy with straight-Cs," Lake said to land his metaphor, "is called doctor." He opened his mouth to point out that Miraj is a Starfleet Officer. To point out that she wouldn't be permitted to wear that uniform if she didn't meet Command's expectations of excellence.

Instead, Cadet Yuulik interjected with, "Doctor Lake ir-Llantrisant," is what one calls a doctor who graduated with straight Cs.

Miraj was looking at him again, there was something about him that she couldn't put her finger on, but it was tickling the back of her mind so she didn't really hear his answer, but she did hear the cadet's. "You only got C's?" she was surprised. She never really imagined that doctors would get low grades. Doctors were smart. Smarter than her by a long way.

As much as Lake took notice of the way Miraj was looking at him, studying his features so intently, he didn't know her nearly well enough to understand why she was looking at him like that. Plus, Yuulik was proving a distraction more than a faithful student. His cheeks flushed slightly green with embarrassment and his voice hardened into his most-professional timbre when he spoke. "Cadet Yuulik has no knowledge of my academics," he said to Miraj. He didn't even look at Yuulik.

Quick to change the subject, Lake straightened up his posture in his chair, and he said, "I heard you talking about finding trouble earlier. What does trouble mean?"

"Trouble." Miraj echoed. "My first month on the Galileo i went to do a quick survey of a nearby planet to the one we had been sent to. And there was some sort of criminal base on it, and they chased us through the jungle and nearly killed us. That was me and Lt Commander Wyatt.

"Then there was the kreanus incident. We were all captured, and the klingons asked me some questions, very. uh ... forcefully. and i told them everything. I didn't mean to, it was just too awful.... then the Klingon general took my clothes and I had to walk back to quarters naked and nearly froze to death. And then I was made to help in that horrible mutiny, and then when I think everythings getting better, I take a chauffeur job and end up facing down an undead-psycho-cyborg-robot-thing that will not die."

She looked at her fingernails. "Trouble magnet."

"Those," Lake said in an even manner, "Those are some serious life-or-death experiences. It would be a lot for anyone to go through. I'm sure it's natural to believe you are the common denominator running through all of those varied emergencies." Lake cast a glance over at Yuulik, but it was only long enough for him to observe her, not long enough for him to communicate anything to the medical cadet. "I am curious about one thing," Lake asked of Miraj, "what role do you play in attracting all of this trouble?"

"I'm not sure." Miraj shifted in her seat. It just felt like when it came down to it, she was ground zero for trouble. "There's always something. I'm the girl. Or the youngest, or the stupidest. The weakest." She tugged at her pink hair unconsciously. "The one that gets noticed. And not in a good way."

"Tell me more about that," Lake said, gesturing to Miraj with an open palm when he made the request. He cast a subtle glance in Yuulik's direction to observe her manner, but he kept most of his attentions with Miraj. "What choices have you made lately to reinforce your perception
of weak or stupid?"

Miraj sighed. So many to choose from. "Well. There was giving Kor'aH a piece of my mind. That was just dumb. Especially as he obviously told his minion I was an idiot, so they picked on me for their mutiny. And the admiral was right. I could have told people what they were planning. But I was too scared. And when we ran into the cyborg thing it was Lieutenant Sandoval who figured out how to get rid of it. I couldn't think if anything that wouldn't have just killed everyone."

"That's-- that's a lot going on in your life. That would be draining for anybody," Lake said to validate everything Miraj's tone of voice had communicated, especially that sigh. He didn't say anything more than that for a moment. His own thoughts drifted to another Starfleet officer in his life -- Kellin, who had been killed in the service. Unbidden, thoughts appeared in Lake's head, wondering if Kellin had been killed by cyborg things or Klingon plots. He sucked a lungful of air in all at once. Then he asked, "Take me a step back. What role did you play in unleashing that... cyborg thing on everyone?"

"Well, there were people who we thought were bad guys but were actually good guys, relatively speaking, who went to deal with the cyborg thing and would have dealt with it, if I hadn't seen them, and warned every one so we we went after them and because we did I then had to turn off the bomb that was supposed to kill it so we didn't all die and that was when it woke up."

Against his better instinct, Lake squinted at Miraj. He really squinted at her, while she spoke, because of how much effort it took to follow the strand of events she had laid out before him. He nodded a couple of times, and he asked, "Tell me more about what you did to diffuse a bomb that prevented you all from dying? Roughly how many people are you counting in that all?"

She thought about it. "The bomb was just a switch," anything more complicated and she would have most likely blown everyone to kingdom come. "And there was me, lieutenant Sandoval, at least half a dozen people from the dig down with us, and the protesters. I don't know. Maybe a dozen? Not many."

Lake echoed back at Miraj with, "A dozen," to confirm his understanding. Nodding slightly, he said, "I heard you say you contributed to unleashing a cyborg, because you stopped some good guys from blowing up the cyborg with a bomb that would have killed twelve people." Shrugging off a question to Miraj, Lake said, "What does it mean to you that those twelve people weren't killed?"

"Not a lot. Most of them still died." Miraj stared at the floor, remembering the cloud of insect like robots. She'd been quick to close her eyes and mouth and protect her nose, and instinct honed growing up on space wrecks where who knew what could be kept behind sealed bulkheads. "There was this....swarm of tiny robots this thing could control. I got lucky, but the others, they were suffocated by them. Seven men and women...."

"And what about your own life," Lake interjected, he was quick to ask the follow-up question. It seemed the obvious question to him; he wondered if Miraj thought so little of herself, why she dismissed her accomplishment. "What does it mean to you that you saved your own life?"


[OFF]

To Be Continued…

Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Lake ir-Llantrisant
USS Hathaway
Chief Counselor

Ensign Miraj Derani
USS Hathaway

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