How does that make you feel

Posted on 20 Jan 2013 @ 8:02am by Chief Warrant Officer 4 Cyrus Kiwosk & Commander Scarlet Blake
Edited on on 20 Jan 2013 @ 2:27pm

2,786 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Episode 02 - Resupply
Location: USS Galileo - Counseling Office
Timeline: MD 05 1358 HRS

ON:

Cyrus sighed as he glanced down at his PADD. His head still pounded, but whatever concoction that Eve had given him had worked wonders. "Still tasted awful." He said to the empty corridor, resisting the urge to spit.
He had spoken with Lieutenant Parker, Had seen Pola and met with the now Captain...that left only one mandatory visit.

He was not happy that he needed to be assessed, it made him nervous. Half of him was terrified that the counselor would say that he was unfit for active duty and that he hadn't dealt with his near-death experience. Another part of him was scared that she would say that he had absolutely no symtoms of stress at all. Truth be told, he had no idea what to expect as he approached the office of a Counselor Scarlet Blake. The head couselor was indisposed at the moment he was told, so his appointment was set up for miss Blake.

He approached the door with more than a little hesitation, he knew he would have to watch what he said here more than anywhere else.

He pressed the chime and took a steadying breathe. "Chief Warrant Officer Kiwosk here for Couselor Scarlet Blake?" He asked through the comm.

"Come on in!" Scarlet called out, glancing up from the padd and to the door. She sipped her tea carefully before setting both cup and padd onto the table so she could stand to greet her patient. She gave a smile to the man who moved in, taking a moment to glance over him, taking in what she could from his appearence. She moved forward quickly though, to offer her hand out. "Kiwosk? Good to meet you, I'm Counsellor Scarlet Blake. Please, come in properly and take a seat. Would you like anything?"

Rum, whiskey? "No ma'am I'm fine, thank you." He replied instead kindly. His deep voice cutting through the entire office. He took her hand in a firm handshake, nervous for a slight moment that he was going to crush her hand in his. "Thank you for seeing me on Shore leave, I really didn't have the time grab an appointement any time previous. Things have been pretty hectic haven't they?" He asked.

"Yes," she laughed softly, moving to take a seat with him at the sofa area. "You could say that," although it was something of an understatement. "How are you finding the Galileo? Apart from the 'hectic' goings ons," she added with a wry, half smile, sitting back as she crossed her legs, resting a padd on her thigh.

Kiwosk shrugged his broad shoulders. "It's going better than I thought. The crew has been pretty good as they can be for welcoming new crew, and the doctor has been able to loosen up my shoulder. Scar tissue build up from..." He stopped and coughed awkwardly. "Well, you know." He smiled nervously and leaned back in the chair, wondering how much she had read into his file. If she knew about the medications, the trauma.

"I guess I really can't avoid this next question can I?" He asked. "Because I just remembered...I have...work...to do..." He jerked his thumb, "Wanna call it a day?" he continued only half-joking.

Scarlet chuckled softly, looking down with a small smile. "If you know you can't avoid the next question, why don't you just talk to me about it. Then I won't have to ask it," she suggested softly, her eyes warm as she looked back to him.

For a second Cyrus didn't want to answer, he wanted to get up and leave. Panic, long suppressed by the long days of interviews and stress began to pile on top of stress. He opened his mouth and moved noiselessly. It shut with an audible clack as he forced his panic down into his chest. His hands trembled slightly as he thought of the first words he needed to say.

"Well, " He finally managed. "As my records said I was critically injured fighting against Dominion Remnant Forces." Each word was said with the pain and sadness.

"That mission wasn't the only one that hurt, but it was the one I remember the clearest." He looked at Scarlet and tried suppress the urge to panic. "I was selected in a squad of four to make our planet side." He explained, not wanting to jump half way into the story. "The mission was simple: Land Planetside, deactivate the planet shield generator that was preventing transport and transmissions." He looked down at his shaking hands...

"I'm...I'm sorry about the shaking ma'am...I thought I was past this." He whispered.

"No, you don't need to be sorry," she replied firmly. Scarlet leant forward to him a little, her eyes firm but also reassuring as she watched him, so he knew he wasn't alone. To ground him to here and now. "You're doing great."

He took a deep breathe and fought on. "We touched down. It was myself the Marine Commander, and four others: two sergeants and two corporals that made up out the tactical group. It was then that we found out that they're was an entire Federation slaving operation happening. The Dominion were taking Federation citizens and making them slaves in order fuel a second Dominion War.
"Fernandez, our CO, decided that we needed to free as many of the prisoners after we shut of the generator. That way we could beam the prisoners onto the ship without too much problem."

"Risky, with such a small team," Scarlet said quietly, watching him with a slight frown. She thought back to her own Marine days as an officer, wondering what call she would have made. Wondering what her reaction would have been to the decision.

Cyrus nodded. "we were well trained, and for what we were expecting it would supposed to be an 'easy op'...." His voice trailed off, cracking slightly at the end. "We got in with almost no trouble, a scout here, a fire team there, hardly anything really.

"Everything was going fine until we reached the first cell block, one of the prisoners...she was maybe...four...maybe five." His eyes hardened. "Her arm had been cut off and the stump seared, she was dying...." He coughed. forcing himself to go on. "We freed the prisoners...that's when through our comms we heard that the marines in charge of taking out the field generator were caught and under heavy fire..." He swallowed. "The Dominion were waiting for a Fed ship to save these people and we fell for it. They wiped out alpha team before they turned off the generator.
"The prisoners...that little girl, there were so many of them, 30 maybe...40? Most of them were children and young adults. There were so many kids..." He almost whispered. His voice shook terribly.

"We burst through into the second cell block but they were in the process of killing them all. No method, just cell to cell slaughter." He thought back to the red and green blood covering the cell walls as he fought his way through to the few survivors that remained. "Fernandez and I took out the executioners and out of the 50 or so prisoners...we saved..." His voice broke, a tear ran down his face. "We...We saved 10, plus the 40. We had a little over half the prisoners and the marines were already at half strength." He thought back again to the flight down the corrider, the halting Jem'Hadar voices and the grating Vorta.

"We fought down hallway after hallway, we didn't lose any of them. Kilist, my best friend...we took a makeshift shrapnel bomb to the face and neck." He remembered seeing his best friend's face splatter violently against the bulkhead, brain matter and bone covering both Kiwosk and Fernandez.

"I never even got his tags. We were too hard pressed." His voiced tightened suddenly as he choked back a long repressed sob.

Scarlet frowned as she watched him, taking a breath. She saw the way he tried to repress the emotional outlet that came with telling the story. It was one of the things they would have to get past. "Understandable, in the circumstances," she assured.

Cyrus continued. "We went down each hallway. The little girl, the one with the burn...she fell over dead, 30 feet before the exit. She smiled at me and asked if we were going home..." The vision of the little girls haunting smile, as her eyes grew milky white, her convulsing as greenish yellow pus oozed from the stump. "I never had a chance to even say yes. All I could do was nod." He whispered.

His face was stark white as he stared into Blake's eyes, his hands gripped the sides of the table so hard that he though he heard a creak. His knuckles as white as the bloodless face above.
"As we made it out, we met out with Charlie when the Dominion ambushed us." He drew out the scene like it was yesterday. "They had the entire treeline, and they were behind us. It was going to be a slaughter.

"Fernandez charged forward, took two to the chest and disapeared into the treeline. I didn't see him until I woke up. I guess the survivors said he took on the entire upper ambush by himself to buy us time." He paused.

"People were dying everywhere, they weren't even aiming for us...they were shooting down the prisoners, everywhere people just ceased to exist. One of Charlie jumped in front of one bolt." He pointed to his right eye. "Punched right through the helmet and out the back of his head. I never saw an energy weapon do that before..."

The moment he was dreading was coming up...the blood everything as horrible as it was was bearable until this. "We were maybe 40 meters from the dropshuttle that the Commodore dropped down for us earlier. The pilot had waited, hoping that he wouldn't be needed. A few marines were holding the shuttle area from Dominion when i spotted a group of prisoners who had got behind the main group. I turned back to go help them when a Vorta..." He spat in hatred in disgust. "He looked at me and said something...I don't know what, but he had grabbed a photon grenade off one of the bodies of a marine and he had thrown it into the crowd of people, maybe 10 or so. I don't remember." He took a steady breathe and forced his hands down harder onto the table sides.

"I charged in, you know how fragile those photons are...you kick them after they have been cooking and..." He made a hand explosion. "Boom." was all he said.

"I didn't have a choice." He paused, gathering himself.

"I picked the grenade up...I....I knew I didn't have time to throw it. So I ran away from the group, I made for a nearby rock that was facing away from the group, funnily it was near the Dominion bastard. He was watching...laughing." The flashes, the burning of his flesh and disintegration of his body. He could feel it all over again and the pain showed clear on Kiwosk's face. "I don't even remember much when it went off. I...I dove behind the outstretched rock.." He closed his eyes trying to remember the dreaded thirty seconds. "And...and the grenade went off." He cringed inward...as if he was feeling it all over again. "I felt my body melt....I was knocked after the shockwave ripped through me, but I guess I got back up long enough to kill the Vorta that through the damn thing and one other before Fernandez found me in a pool of my own ...well...me" He let go of the table and forced himself back into his chair. "I don't remember anything until I woke in the Fitzgeralds sick bay. Apparently I needed grafts, bone replacements, and organ regeneration among other things." He sighed and sprayed his hands openly. "So there you go." He said almost bitterly. The memory in full was the worst, and he didn't detail all the gruesome details...all he did was to save himself the pain of seeing that little girl in his nightmares again.

Scarlet nodded gently to him as she took a deep breath. She took a moment to finish her notes, not wanting to miss anything. It had been an ordeal for the man. From start to finish. It had also been a rather badly botched mission from start to finish. They should never have let a five man team go down alone with no backup. She wondered if he felt the same, if he resented the service for it. She pushed it aside though; they could get to that in good time. "How did that feel?" she asked quietly, her features calm as she held his eyes. "Saying all that out loud, telling me that."

Cyrus glanced up and gave her a perplexing stare. "How did that feel? It felt like the gong show that mission was from the start. We didn't have the information we needed to go down there in the first place. Fernandez had to make do with what he was given." He took a breathe.

"I..I don't know." He stammered. "I mean I can get through it where two months ago I would have stopped talking before we even got into the building. There's more that happened, but I think you get the idea..." He added, unsure where he was going.

"It felt...forced, like I didn't want to talk about it, but I also know you could potentially prevent me from doing my job on board the ship, so I'm doing what I have to do. It felt...I don't know...needed?" He paused...thinking over the word. "Yeah, I needed to get it all out, people only know what the medical records show, the mission was covered up for the most part, Fernandez fought tooth an nail to keep in the bed and get me proper terms before I was released back into the field." He smiled weakly. "Politics...you know how it is, "if it didn't happen then, he has no excuse to now serve." Cyrus chuckled bitterly. "Fernandez almost punched the admiral when he told him that I'd imagine."

Scarlet nodded with a tight breath. That was understandable. "You know that a person doesn't just 'get over' something like that," she said quietly, but held his eyes firmly, hiding nothing from him. "It was a traumatic event. It's something you're going to need to work on. But I think you know that. I think it's why you told me."

Cyrus nodded. "Oh I knew the second I woke up. I've seen too many people lose themselves to PTSD and deciding to any number of stupid things to make the pain go away. " He sighed. "I'm not depressed, but that being said, it would take much to throw me, I know where I'm at and I want to do everything I can to get through it."

He sighed before continuing on. "You seem to know quite about what I've done...you wouldn't have been a marine?" He asked quietly.

Scarlet gave a small smile at that, glancing down with a soft chuckle in her throat. She hadn't realised it was still so obvious. "Yes," she said honestly. "So I know how much courage it takes to walk into a room, tell a stranger how things went wrong, and that it's left a mark on you. The good news is, I'm convinced that you're okay for duty. You're not in denial. You know exactly what happened, why, and that you need to face it. That keeps you in control. What I will be submitting, however, is the need for you to attend regular counselling sessions. A course of therapy. You can choose whichever counsellor you feel comfortable with though."

Relieved, a visible sigh should through the ex-marines muscled shoulders. "much obliged, Counselor. No worries I'll keep in contact with your department." He added chuckling.

"Good to hear," Scarlet smiled to him, hoping to lighten the atmosphere of the room as well as indicate he could relax now. "And if you ever need an ear in between sessions, you know where to find me. Even if you just need to let off some steam," she assured with a wink.

Cyrus nodded and smiled, permitting himself to stand. "It's been a pleasure." He said and made for the door.


OFF:

CWO Kiwosk
Security/Tactical Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant JG Scarlet Blake
Counselor
USS Galileo

RSS Feed