Post 207: Fight or Flight Parts Two and Three

Stardate:70602.2030
Title: Fight or Flight Part Two
Author: Lt. February Grace
Scene: Sickbay
Time: After Part One
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Gilmore tightened his hands around her throat with surprising strength and speed for a man so ill. Two male nurses heard the commotion and came running. They had to use all their strength combined with the Trill's to release her from the Captain's grasp.

She dropped to the floor like a rock, her hands instinctively protecting the bruised flesh of her throat.

"I'm all right," she croaked as they helped her to her feet. One tried to scan her with a tricorder, and she pushed it away angrily as she tried to normalize her breathing. "I said I'm fine!"

The nurse held his hands up as if to apologize, and backed away. Head nurse Samantha Hain came running into the room now, and was briefed on what had just happened.

Grace looked over at the bed, seeing that Gilmore finally appeared as if he were truly awake. Horror shown in his eyes over what he had done. The beeping of the monitors warned that his vital signs were fluctuating, his blood pressure elevated.

"You're all right, Captain. Calm down." Hain instructed. She turned to the Trill. "You have to go."

"Don't throw me out now," February pleaded. Let me have just a few minutes to try to reason with him. If he doesn't agree to have the replacement soon, nothing else is going to matter. Is it?"

Samantha knew that Grace was right on that count, and relented after giving Gilmore another hypo.

"Just a few minutes," she warned. She cast sympathetic eyes upon the lieutenant, and the Captain in the bed beside them. She replaced the oxygen tubes that had been dislodged from his nostrils during the struggle, and turned away quietly wishing Grace good luck.

February tried to speak, but what could she say? She called on the experience of the wiser being dwelling within her for help.

The Grace symbiont reminded its young host that she needed to cast aside all the doubts she'd had about her friendship with Gilmore since he'd refused to send her on Morris' away mission without explanation. Both halves of this joined being cared for the man and whatever his reasons had been, none of it mattered now. February reached out for his hand and he looked away, ashamed.

"I'm sorry." His breathing rasped loudly between the words. "I didn't mean to,"

"No, don't. You were somewhere else," From long talks over the years they'd known each other, she knew exactly where he'd been. "I was just in your way between there and here." Absentmindedly, she reached up and touched his face. Her fingers grazed the bristly silver whiskers on his chin affectionately. "Even here they find you, don't they?" She saw a look cross his face and pulled her hand away quickly.

"You're safe now. Everyone here cares about you here. I-" She preempted the end of her sentence, embarrassed. Often since they'd been joined, the Grace symbiont had challenged February as to what her feelings might truly be for Gilmore, were he two decades younger than he was. Or given the way he looked at her every now and then, what his might be regardless. February might be only twenty-five herself, but the symbiont within her had lived for hundreds of years. To that being's mind, a quarter century was but a day in the course of its lifetime. A span of no consequence at all.

February had always stopped those internal discussions cold, telling that infernal worm to just shut the hell up and stop asking stupid questions.

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Stardate:70602.2030
Title: Fight or Flight Part Three
Author: Lt. February Grace
Scene: Sickbay
Time: After Part Two
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"I don't want you to die. Please, accept the transplant. We need you, Sir."

"We," Gilmore almost sounded amused. "February, in an instant we've gone from Ronyn Jameson all the way back to "sir" again," he observed, the merest hint of a smile crossing his lips at the kindness of this girl. How she'd found out his full name he may never know but it had to have taken some digging. This attention to detail was evident in every single thing that she ever did. It had been one of the first things he'd ever noticed about her.

"You'll find it a bad proposition to care for, or need," he warned, struggling for breath again, "someone who is barely existing."

"But you can be so much better. The new heart will carry you for years. Years. I've lost so much. So many people that I cared about-" It was as if the Grace symbiont had taken over her voice now and was struggling beneath the weight of its past. February winced, feeling very confused. She didn't want to sound selfish in her motives for wanting him to live, yet she felt that way, deep down. She didn't want to let him go for her own sake.

"Don't you understand?" he grasped her fingers once again, on his own this time. "To take the living heart out of a man- to replace it with a mechanical pump, Valves, screws, springs, and wires,"

"It is not the same thing, Captain," She knew what he was driving at. "It's not like becoming Borg."

"It's the next worst thing."

"If you don't accept the new heart, you'll die." She said this as matter-of-factly as if she were telling him that up was above and down, below. "Soon."

"I might die anyway."

"Highly unlikely. You know that. You know that the surgeries have come so far since the end of the war. That the hearts contain biological material salvaged from your own, they are still, really, a part of you. Just. . .souped up a bit. Like- like a really fine ride."

He thought that if he had the strength, he would have laughed at her choice of words. She seemed to put such store in him and always had. Even before she'd gone off to become joined to Grace and nearly died. He didn't know if he could live up to her expectations- anyone's expectations.

"We're all going to die someday," he whispered.

"But you don't have to die today."

"I'm not the man I used to be, February," he sighed and closed his eyes a moment. "Certainly not the man you think me to be."

"I know exactly who you are," she replied, blinking back tears for the first time since this ordeal had begun. "Don't you wonder what you might miss out on?" she saw Hain approaching and knew that her time to speak was coming to an end. "You've never been a man to take the easy way out," she paused, stressing the letters "RJ," as she chose to use his name again instead of his title "Please, help me to keep you here."

She released his hand and without looking back returned to the waiting room. He'd become such a steadying influence in her life over the past three years, she didn't want to think about what would happen if he were no longer there. Out of his sight she gave in to her conflicted emotions and sobbed, holding her head in her hands.

Nurse Hain checked Gilmore's vitals. He was as stable as he was going to get. The time for the CMO to perform this surgery was now or never.

"So, Captain Gilmore," She asked. "What's it to be?"
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Lt. February Grace
Helm/Flight Controller
USS Independence NCC-90791