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Episode 02: Cosmic Imperative / Re: Epi: S [Day 03 | 0145] By these wounds...
Last post by Ellen Fitz -The corridor outside Sickbay was only marginally quieter than the ward itself. The distant rhythm of biobeds, shouted orders, and the low hum of surgical fields bled through the open doors behind her as Ehfva moved toward the cryogenics section.
She had made it only a few steps before a familiar voice drifted from one of the surgical suites.
"…misjudged a threesome with an Andorian and a Risan on Risa…" Ehfva stopped. The story continued in a strained, half-groaned cadence that carried just enough clarity to be understood through the doorway. Sedatives had softened the edges of the words, but not the personality behind them.
She turned her head slightly, ears angling toward the sound without conscious instruction. An old habit. Her grandparents had called it the first gift — the body listening before the mind agreed to.
"…instead returned to Ardana with an amusing story and a citation for excessive consumption of Romulan ale."
For a moment she simply stood there. Then, despite everything — the deep ache that had settled into the long muscles of her legs after the battle, the lingering copper taste of recycled emergency air still coating the back of her throat, the particular exhaustion that came not from injury but from the ongoing tax of keeping herself from trying to shift and causing more pain for herself when every instinct underneath said shift, drop, go to ground — a small, involuntary smile tugged at the corner of her muzzle.
Cute. Drug-fogged, half-disassembled by surgery, and the pilot was still trying to flirt with a medical android. Good.
That meant his mind was still reaching outward instead of folding inward on itself. She had seen both. Knew the difference between the two kinds of quiet. She had shared a bunk with soldiers the night before their deployment who told jokes until their voices went hoarse, and she had held soldiers in the dirt of Kyodai Obi who stared at nothing and made no sound at all. The ones who kept talking lived longer — not always in body, but in the parts that mattered most. No spiraling self-pity. No quiet resignation. Just humor and questionable judgment.
He would recover.
Keokuk would have laughed at that story. The thought arrived without warning, the way his memory sometimes did — not with grief's usual weight but with something more like the impression of warmth left on a surface after a hand had been withdrawn. He'd had a gift for finding the absurd in the most ill-timed places. He would have stored the pilot's Risan misadventure and reproduced it later, embellished, at the worst possible moment.
Ehfva allowed herself that small conclusion before turning away again. The moment passed as quickly as it had come. She was learning not to chase them.
She continued on towards cryo and noted how the air changed as she entered the cryo section. Colder. Sharper. The sterile bite of it registered first on the inside of her nose — different from the cold of Okashii Atama's asteroid mornings, different from the pressurized chill of battle-damaged corridors she'd moved through in her feral form during the civil war, belly low, breath controlled. This cold was manufactured. Maintained. It had no weather in it.
Emergency indicators blinked along one of the rows of pods, pale light reflecting off drifting vapor that curled slowly across the deck like something trying to decide which direction was down. And there. A Ferasan male had already forced his pod partially open, frost clinging to dark fur and bare skin alike. One arm gripped the edge of the chamber while his body fought the sluggish betrayal of muscles only beginning to remember warmth. Ehfva had watched a kit from her grandparents' colony fall through ice once on a frozen run — that same thrashing quality, that same body-wide confusion that predated coherent thought.
She closed the distance quickly.
"Easy."
She reached him just as his balance faltered, both hands coming up to steady him before gravity could finish the job. Her claws curled inward automatically, gripping fabric and the solid ridge of his shoulder rather than flesh — a precision that had taken years to develop. She guided him back against the rim of the cryo unit, taking the weight without comment.
Up close, she could feel the cold radiating off him in waves. Not just the ambient chill of the cryo pod but the deep cold carried in his skin itself, in the slow tissue of a body that had been suspended and was not yet certain it wanted to be otherwise.
"Don't fight it," she said, voice rough but steady. "Slow breaths."
Her grip shifted, firming as his body trembled with the violent shivers of reawakening metabolism. She had felt this before — not stasis-reawakening but a different version of the same betrayal, the body recalling itself after the mind had already moved on. It was not comfortable. It was not meant to be comfortable. But it ended.
"In — through your nose." She demonstrated, drawing a slow breath herself, filling her lungs with deliberate patience. "Out through the mouth. Again."
The fog of his breath thickened in the cold air. She kept one hand braced behind his shoulder blades, preventing him from collapsing forward, her other hand steady at his arm. She didn't speak to fill the silence. She had learned silence early, raised among elders who considered noise a form of waste, and she had relearned it later in the field, where silence was survival. She used it now as a tool — letting him hear his own breathing over her voice, letting his nervous system find its own rhythm rather than chase hers.
"You're safe," she continued, when the first sharp peak of disorientation seemed to crest. She lowered her voice into something calmer — something meant to anchor rather than command. "USS Theurgy. Cryogenics bay."
Her ears angled back briefly as a distant alarm chirped somewhere deeper in the medical deck, reflexive and involuntary, tracking the sound and categorizing it as non-immediate before her expression registered anything at all.
"We've recently come through a battle," she added evenly. "Which means things are loud at the moment." A pause — not uncertainty, but the deliberate spacing of information, the way her grandparents had once parceled out instruction to the kits: one thing at a time, until the thing was held. "But you're among professionals. You're not alone."
She did not know him. He did not know her. That was fine. She had sat with strangers in worse states than this on the dirt floors of captured outposts in Kyodai Obi. She had learned, through those years and the ones that followed, that it was not kinship that a person needed in those first disoriented moments after something terrible. It was simply presence. A body that was not a threat. A voice that was not asking anything.
"Your body just came out of stasis. It will feel wrong for a few minutes. That is normal. Take your time."
She held him steady through another shuddering breath cycle, watching his pupils — dilation, tracking, the slow return of voluntary focus — watching the posture of his shoulders, the changing quality of the tremors as they moved from the deep involuntary shaking of cold reawakening toward the finer, more manageable trembling of a body finding its edges again.
"Good," she murmured, when the breathing began to stabilize. "Just like that."
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