=/\= Sickbay, USS Charon =/\=
Shortly after bringing the Charon to it's feet and activating the engines, Landon had found himself in a drug-induced rage in Engineering. The simple matter of allowing himself to slip so carelessly into such an immature failing was embarrassing enough. The embarrassment being more about his peers on Trill discovering his mistake. It was fine enough his new shipmates thought of him as callous and off-putting, but for those he had known for lifetimes to given pause... it was just embarrassing.
Now he sat, clad in just his underwear and hungover on a remedy of anti-intoxicants the doctor had prescribed to him. The hiss of a hypo-spray sounded as the nurse once again assailed his body with chemicals.
"Is this all really so necessary, Doc?" He asked, irritated. "You could just bed me and get it over with. No need to remove my clothes one piece at a time, Ms. Raleigh."
The young Lieutenant who had been on duty since the Counselor installed him into her gentle care had been quite nice, until she began to show her bedside manner. It was like Neyes was treating himself. She was curt, sarcastic and far too patient with his impetuous need to sexually harass her. Landon had been in the infirmary for just a few hours, and already he had more drugs in him than in the entire length of his tenure aboard the Charon thus far. He'd tried every trick he knew to get her to throw him out, yet she insisted on being there to care for him. There were also a couple bruises on his chest from where she'd pushed him back down onto the bed to keep him from storming out.
"We've been over this, Commander. We understand you have a problem, and we admire your ability to come and solve it. Now let us do that with you."
Even as he said it, Landon knew better. He just couldn't help himself. He felt weak, once again, and that was a place he did not like being in. Weakness brought out the worst in him. Neyes was a brick wall of fortitude and endurance. He held in the knowledge and wisdom of centuries, but he was just as much 26 as he was 751.
"So I needed a quick boost every now and then, Doctor. That doesn't necessarily mean I have some kind of addiction. The stressors of my job-"
She put up a stern hand. "The stressors of your job are handled by hundreds of other officers across the fleet. To my knowledge, less than a handful of which have your experience. You have a goddamn drug problem, Landon. Deal." She read through a PADD. "In your system we found, anesthizine, biotozine, cortocolate, four endorphin stims and a mild steroid. You made a very creative and remarkably stable little cocktail, Commander. Even without regulation, I would have probably slapped you on the wrist for replicating it without authorization, given the circumstances of the last few months. The repeated use, however, was bound to cause the problems you now find yourself in: an unhinged mood, elevated pain levels outside the influence of the meds, sweating... which granted isn't as much as a human, and your sleeplessness."
Landon raised an eyebrow, "THAT's why I haven't been sleeping?"
Landon raised an eyebrow, "THAT's why I haven't been sleeping?"
She smiled, almost satisfied in herself for getting to answer the question, "Yes. You royally outdid yourself. You traded the pain for the inability to let your body recover. I'm surprised you managed to keep your lid on this long."
He slumped a little, annoyed at finding himself in this position. "Yes well. Even I'm not perfect." He said, incredulously. "Later I'll show you the holo-program that took the brunt of it."
"Your bionetic implant will need extensive maintenance for the next few days. I need to adjust the musculo-neuro relay transmission levels to keep it from tearing itself apart. Your little whimsy drug was wreaking havoc with the implant's systems." Doctor Raleigh
Landon looked off to a random corner of the room. His eyes moved from an active participant in the conversation, to the dull and half-closed eyes of someone not all the way there. His reaction was almost callous, like he didn't care how his body was. "Any permanent damage."
Landon looked off to a random corner of the room. His eyes moved from an active participant in the conversation, to the dull and half-closed eyes of someone not all the way there. His reaction was almost callous, like he didn't care how his body was. "Any permanent damage."
Her voice quieted a little, as she saw the little flickers of distraction cross his face. "No. You'll live. Both of you. The symbiont is fine, and probably why you were able to handle the drugs so well."
"Probably."
Raleigh took her tricorder, slowly closed it as she eyed him, unsure of what to do next. Dealing with patients like this was something she didn't have a great deal of experience with, but in her gut something told her this man would respond much better to anything real, rather than professional. She took a lock of her long black hair and pushed it back behind her ear, moving in to the foot of the bio-bed. "What is it?" She asked.
Neyes blinked, but didn't really respond.
"Commander."
"I miss her, Doc." He turned and looked her in the eyes. His were starting to look listless.
"Who?" There was nothing in his record of being in a relationship. If the stress of a partner was something that needed to be in his psych file, then it would have probably been added quite a while ago. In a man like Neyes, however, there may not have been an example for anyone to see the problem until now.
He inhaled a little before saying her name. "Lexi." And without wanting to seem too mysterious, he spared her the effort of asking who she was. "An engineering specialist aboard the Intrepid."
Raleigh felt a little pang of guilt as she realized something. In Neyes' Starfleet psych file was nearly three books worth of information not normally found for a single person. Based on a joined Trill's unique mental design, it was difficult to align the personality of a whole list of people under one person, and Landon had joined Starfleet before being joined as a host. His file before his joining was also in there somewhere, but nothing was as clearly important as the 35 page report on his counseling treatment after leaving his best friend in hostile territory more than a year ago. Anything similar would have a deep and costly impact on him, and would explain his resigning to drug use to cope with it.
"And to you? Who was she?"
He smile a little, looking back off at nothing particular. "Better than the day I learned how to fly." Wetness lined its way down his cheek as he leaned forward. Other than the tears, his expression didn't change at all, not even his voice cracked under the emotional toll. "My fiancée. She asked me to marry her in the shuttle I would abandon her with two days later. We worked on it together."
The woman took a seat next to him, in an effort to bring something down between them. If she could get him to understand she genuinely wanted to help him, he might make it easier for her to do it. "The Intrepid was lost. You didn't leave her behind."
Neyes started to feel a little sick with himself as the things he'd done wrong in the last few years started to add up in his mind. Rob. Lexi. His family. "I feel like the same bad thing keeps following me around everywhere I go. The same story keeps coming... creeping up on me. It sounds really fucking childish and pathetic but I just want to keep the things that make me happy, but they just get ripped away, and I don't have the energy to keep dealing with new ones. When I lost my family I had people to keep me happy. I met Rob and we got to be best friends. Then I left him of Carida. I met Lexi, and she made me feel like I could make my own family to help fill the void of the one I couldn't save, but then I get yanked a million light years back into this forsaken galaxy and leave her and my crew left to rot alone in the black.
"You know I made a holodeck program that would show me a realtime image of the closest sensor information to the Andromeda galaxy? Hoping it would bring me a little comfort knowing I could at least see the part of space she was living in. I had pinpointed where the Intrepid would be. It took weeks of calculating and nearly just as long to keep my therapists on Earth from discovering what I had done. All I could see was a tiny little speck. It's not her, probably not even as small as the sector they're in. But it's as close to her as I can get. I designed the shuttle that brought me home, but I couldn't control the exotic matter that powered the drive. It fired and brought me the entire distance home in less than 30 seconds. They found me unconscious on the edge of the Rylon system four days later."
"You said it yourself. It was out of your control." She added.
Landon scoffed. "I'm seven hundred and fifty years old, Doc. I can control a little matter. I got sloppy. I pushed it too hard and the drive took off, leaving Lexi, the Intrepid and her crew lost in the Andromeda Galaxy without the means to get them home. The shuttle was the prototype for the modifications we needed to install on the ship. The whole damn lot of exotic matter was aboard that shuttle. They didn't have any more."
"They'll find more. You'll see her again."
Neyes' face crushed in pain as she flared anger at her for the first time. "Dont! You don't get to send me to hell and back hoping that the love of this lifetime comes back to forgive me and spend the rest of our lives together. I've put more spouses to rest than anyone else in Starfleet and I won't let some CHILD tell me what's going to happen! She's gone, I'm here and all you need to worry about is making sure when I wake up it's not because it hurts so much I see her face every time I close my eyes." His face turned red as he glared up at her, his face flush with the torment of ages.
Raleigh nodded quickly and stood, understanding she had crosses the line. "I'm so sorry. I-"
"And before you get any fancy ideas about taking me off active duty it's already been taken care of. I'm on medical leave until you clear me, so I can be as fucking crazy as I want until then, Doctor."
She slowly turned and returned to the console on the other side of the bio bed. She had been surprised how much he had allowed her to hear before clamming up. With what little she knew about psychology, it at least seemed like progress. After a while she looked over her shoulder and just spoke out loud, "I'm sorry", more saying for his sake rather than actually apologizing for anything.
Landon turned over and put his back between her and has face as he laid down once again on the biobed. "Me too." He said.
"Do me a favor, Doc." He added. "Put me out. Something...
"...anything so I don't dream."
"...anything so I don't dream."
=/\= TBC... =/\=
Lieutenant Commander Landon Neyes
Chief Engineer
USS CHARON
Chief Engineer
USS CHARON
