Melt Down

Posted on Wed Oct 27th, 2021 @ 1:21pm by Ensign Noah Balsam & Lieutenant JG Irynya
Edited on on Fri Nov 5th, 2021 @ 11:04pm

Mission: The Place of Skulls
Location: Junior Crew Quarters - Deck 4
Timeline: Mission Day 26 at 2000

[USS Sojourner]
[Deck 4, Junior Crew Quarters
2000 Hours, Immediately Following "I Know"]

The minute that Irynya's relief officer appeared at the door to the Bridge she was out of her chair and moving, a curt nod given to the relief pilot and no words exchanged as she made for the turbolift, single-mindedly. She was already breathing hard by the time the lift doors slid open and tears had started to well as the panic took over. The effort of holding it back the last 45 minutes made her feel like she'd run a marathon making her limbs shaky. She could feel her heart pounding and the weight on her chest doubled tenfold as she stood there, staring at the turbolift and willing herself to step on.

"Not now," she ground out under her breath. "Just... not... now..." But still she stood there unmoving for long enough that anyone who might have been watching to become alarmed. But no one was there. Tentatively she stepped into the Turbolift, "Deck Four," she breathed, voice barely loud enough to register.

The turbolift doors closed behind her. It was a cylinder of silence, only the hum of the structural integrity fields of the ship at warp.

The young stick bug of a Midshipman had watched Irynya go for the port corridor in silence. Once he'd been relieved, he sidled out the starboard door. When it closed behind him, the same circling wonder kept gnawing at him. He'd suspected for awhile. But it was strange to get a confirmation in the most random of ways.

Noah sighed a long breath, pushed off the wall and went into the turbolift. "Um. Duh-deck four. Crew quarters." He said into the air. The turbolift swelled into motion downward and then with a sway, astern.

The turbolift deposited Irynya on the port side of Deck 4, leaving her with a bit of a walk to get to her quarters, something she had not thought about when choosing her exit from the Bridge. It was too late now, though, so she made her way along the corridor quickly, steps hurried and eyes cast down to the floor. She turned to eye the corridor wall anytime anyone walked past, looking about as interested in the wall as any person could ever look, while she hurried on.

Finally she stopped outside of the door to her quarters, mind spinning. She couldn't be sure that Sheldon and Kennedy weren't there, but at this point she wasn't sure it mattered. Stepping into the sensor she triggered the door, tears already streaming down her face. The room was, blessedly, empty. She made for her bedroom getting so far as triggering the door before she stopped and let out a long shaky breath.

Noah. She had said they would talk about it.

For one long moment, she considered hiding. Pretending she hadn't said it. Maybe just walking out of an airlock so she didn't have to face this conversation. The thought scared her enough to bring her back into the moment and she turned to make her way unsteadily over to the couch. Not bothering to remove her boots she curled up in the corner and waited.

The doors were airy and carefree when they opened. But inside strode a stooped, contrite Midshipman. He started toward his bedroom and stopped when his proprioception prickled with the spatial awareness of the other. He stopped and turned around to see a uniformed and curled Irynya on the small couch. "Um." He fingered up and down his triceps and back. "I um. I'm. S-sorry. I shouldn't have. Um. I shouldn't have um. S-said um. A-anything. Anything."

Irynya was roiling anxiety. Noah was roiling guilt.

The Risian lifted her head from where it had been cradled on her arms when he addressed her. Her eyes were sad, darting up to meet his, hold them, and then look away quickly. She wanted to tell him it was fine. That he could always talk to her even when the stuff he was going to say was hard. But she was afraid if she tried to say that what would come out was sobbing.

There was a long silence--the kind that stretched taut as if any movement would snap it. "Noah," she finally managed. "I'm not ok."

That wasn't lost on Noah. But he hesitated to nod in agreement. "How can I help? I feel like I'm the wuh-one that broke you. I didn't mean to."

She shook her head, no, then echoed it. "No," she said. "No, that's not right. Or fair. This..." she unwound her arms gesturing self-deprecatingly at herself, "is not your fault." She tucked one of her arms back around her legs, the other she held out to him. "Sit with me? If that's ok?" Her voice was starting to steady as she said it, finding it easier to focus on Noah's feelings than her own in the moment.

Noah's feet pushed off the deck plates like he was wearing grav boots but once he was moving, he was moving. He cross the small space and sat down next to her. "I heard a few Enlisted talking about... an officer showering in their, um, area. And when they-they said they thought she was in Flight Control... it just um..." He hesitated. "I've noticed... I mean I run into Sheldon and Kennedy sometimes in and out but.. l-lately not you. And more and more it got strange because we have similar shifts... sso...." he hesitated again, fumbling fingers. "I checked the water resource reqs and r-ran an-an analysis. And... there was a 22% less req in our quarters.... buh-but a 20% net increase in um... in theirs."

Noah's dark eyes looked at her. He held his studious gaze. "How do I f-fix...? Why?"

Irynya nodded, slowly, head feeling heavy as she moved. "You don't fix it, Noah," she said quietly. "It's not yours to fix." She was quiet for a few more long moments, the screaming loud of panic in her brain starting to fade.

"It started after getting stuck in the shower," she confessed, voice quiet. "I honestly don't... It's really hard to talk about," she said looking over at him, willing him to understand. "I did try. Really I tried. But I just... Every time I thought about using our showers I panicked."

Noah's face fell. It was hard to hear that a new friend was suffering. He lifted up and sat next to her.

The tears started to well again, pricking the corners of her eyes. "And I felt... Stupid... What... What Starfleet officer can't do something as simple as taking a shower in her quarters? What department head..." She trailed off, her voice cracking. One arm came up; the edge of her uniform sleeve scrubbing across her eyes. She closed them, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly.

"I have been showering in the Enlisted showers ever since."

"Because it-it's more open?" Noah asked. He put an arm around her shoulders. He wasn't entirely sure what to say. Noah was most comfortable with listening and he had no answers. He wasn't a Counselor. "You're not stupid..." murmured out of him. "Uniforms don't take a-away your Hum- Risianity." A flicker of a smile crossed him as he tried to personalize a term. "Ha-have you ever felt this before? Trapped?"

She leaned into him, letting the feel of his arm around her distract and calm--reassure her that she was here and not stuck somewhere. She was, oddly, surprised to find he was warm.

Warm, if probably quite bony. Noah rested his chin atop her hair and cuddled her. He was imitating his Mom- and those few times that Elizabeth had broken up with a love interest back in the Academy and friend-zoned Noah was her lean-to. He was as lost for words then as he was now.

"Not like this, no. In the Delta Quadrant, after our last mission with the Adelphi I had nightmares for weeks... Months... Usually in the worker bee and they always end with me getting opened up to the vacuum of space... Being trapped." Her brow creased, "They were gone though. I saw the counselors, did the right things. They were gone. And... They didn't come back until after Ankerus. This... This started before that so... I don't know."

Noah listened. He hadn't been privy to the Adelphi's final mission. He just knew that after this sojourn, they were going back to finish what they'd started. Worker Bees? Vacuum? Claustrophobia. His own experiences quickened his heart and pickled his upper lip with a tingly heat. He pushed it down.

Somehow it hadn't occurred to her to link the dreams to the claustrophobia. Maybe they were linked... Maybe she was just damaged. She sighed, as the thought crossed her mind, the shame-filled feeling of failure close on its heels. She took a shuddering breath and tilted her head into his shoulder.

"I'm sorry Noah. I didn't mean for you to have to worry about this," she said, embarrassment lacing her tone.

"I-I don't mind..." he offered. "I wish I was better at h-helping but... I-I could show you the techniques. Um. My counselor taught me. Um. To-to deal with the accident on Enceladus."

She adjusted into him slightly, a confusing mix of curiosity, comfort, and longing running through her head. "Noah, you're better at helping than you realize. You..." Her brow creased as she trailed off, a not-memory of his arm around her surfacing at the most wildly inappropriate moment it could do so. She blew out a breath

"You help just by being you," she said finally. Her brain took too long to come back around to the last thing he had said, but when it did she tilted her head, trying to look at him and really only getting a solid look at his neck.

"Accident?"

"Yeah," Noah's breath tickled soft, his own voice was dropped. He hugged her with his arm. His breath tickled her neck. "I was um. Ten. Ten Earth years anyway. Just about a third of a Saturn year. We were on a cuh-camping trip to Qamashli Ice Shelf for our quarterim science trials for Key Stage 2. S-sort of... well... I don't know what the Risian school system is like. Anyway. I was ten." He shrugged. "I was with six others in the Bright party. Um." Noah scratched his nose errantly. "We got to the ice shelf... and we were puh-positioning scanners to take samples of the archaeozoological samples. Non-invasive of course. Of the uh, f-fossils."

Irynya swallowed back another non-memory as the hairs stood up on the back of her neck while he talked. For a second, trying to concentrate on what he was saying, she shut her eyes. The picture he painted was innocent, young, but the image behind her eyes was... She opened them again quickly, willing herself to focus on what he was saying.

Noah fidgeted, "Well, Eh-Enceladus was passing Dione- um- another moon of Saturn. But the gravimuh-metrics were OK and we got the green light that morning. Well. We were setting up a deep magneto-imaging dish when a quake hit. Enceladus is... um... k-kinda like a raw egg. Hard on the outside and squishy on the inside. Normally we live on the inside part. Well the quake struck and the ice shelf destabilized."

Noah shook his head after he pushed a breath out. "I just remember falling for forever... and getting beat around by chunks of ice. Then I just remember a lot of cold and... r-really not much else. I-I woke up in the hospital. I'd almost died. Three of-of my school... people... they died." he blinked and shrugged, "It-it was intense. really intense. I s-still get weirded out by vacuum suits and falling and big open spaces, But I'm w-way better than I used to be."

Irynya was quiet for a long moment after that, turning his story over in her head. She twisted slightly, wrapping her arm around his torso and squeezing. "I'm glad you're here," she said quietly. "I don't think I would have known any of that if you hadn't told me."

His beaky nose touched in her hair and he hugged her. Though it was awkward to try and find a way to drape his other arm, Noah finally just held over her shoulders and sort of around her otherwise. "I-I don't really like to think about it much. I-I bet like you don't like thinking about the worker bee." There was no judgment- no measurement- of trauma in Noah's voice. Trauma was trauma. It was relative to a listener, and absolute to the victim.

"My-my counselor was a Betazoid. He thought me this trick." Noah straightened a little. "Um... cuh-can I move your..." he gestured with his own curls which were a springy and short, pale comparison to Irynya's slinky long locks. "Your hair?" He waved it off, "H-here I can just show you on me. See. Umm. On Humans its called a mastoid bone. It's right um, behind your ear. You'll feel this bony c-conchy thing..." He pointed at the subtle change of skull shape behind his ear.

She moved back a bit so she could see, reluctant to move entirely away from him. She had an idea of the spot he meant, but without a mirror to be sure she wasn't confident how quickly she'd find the right spot. Carefully she swept her own hair back, pulling the ponytail back along her back instead of down her front where she usually wore it. Long fingers reached up, feeling along the space behind her ear. "Here?" she asked, trying to feel for something that felt like what he had described.

"S-sort of that general area..." Noah tried not to say an outright negative. His articulate fingers shifted. It's right about um... h-here." And gently Noah began to drum on the Risian equivalent of a mastoid bone. It was very gentle and quite rhythmic. He tapped it almost like a heartbeat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump." "Ih-if you do it right you get this nice.. um... s-sort of buzz. Like you just had some tension break."

She closed her eyes at the feel of Noah's fingers behind her ear, the small hairs on the back of her neck which had finally calmed down standing on end again. She pressed her lips together tightly, focusing on the sensation while simultaneously reminding herself that this was a coping technique. Just... a... coping... technique. A forced breath pressed out through her teeth. Eyes closed had been a bad idea. Damp hair and pale skin made its way across her mind's eye and, without thinking, she tilted her head slightly as though giving him more access to the spot behind her ear. She caught herself too late, eyes flying open.

"It's usually enough to dull an-an anxiety att-" Noah began before Irynya was turning her head. "Attack." He finished, his dark eyes blinking. "S-sorry if that was weird... umm..." He swallowed, his pale throat undulating around its musculature. Those same muscles, in a dream, had tilted their head up so those same eyes could peer up from kneeling in front of her. The difference was- his eyes were innocent, gentle, not the lustful darkness cast in tanzanite purples of a sonic shower.

She blinked back at him for a long moment before her face fell and she pushed back. "No, no," she said, voice tense. "It wasn't weird it's not... that." She sighed then. "Please don't take this the wrong way," she said, knowing instantly that it would be the easiest thing in the world to misunderstand her right now. "I need... a minute to breathe?" She pursed her lips twisting them to the side then before tilting her head up and staring at the ceiling.

Noah patiently waited. He didn't move away. He kept an arm around his friend. But something about plexing her mastoid bone had made her tenser, not less. Maybe it had an opposite effect on Risians, Noah supposed. He stayed quiet, honoring that Irynya for whatever reason needed a moment. He itched to ask if it'd worked but all signs pointed to not. Maybe he should have checked to see if it worked on more than just Betazoids and Humans before he'd suggested it. "Tuh-take your time," Noah said softly, "Sorry."

He glanced at the wall, "Would you like some water?" He offered.

"Don't apologize," she said the softness of her voice matching his own. Irynya sighed, breath flowing out if her in a half frustrated rush. She debated his offer for a moment, but ultimately shook her head. "That's ok."

She pursed her lips tucking them to the side as she finally worked up the nerve to look at him again. This was Noah. The real one. Not one her brain had conjured into the mess of her anxieties and uncertainties.

"Have you ever... Like... Dreamed something happened... I mean... when you're asleep... and when you wake up it seems like it was real even if it wasn't?"

The conversation had definitely shifted away from plexing. Noah's eyes danced with uncertainty while he connected those points in reality. "Sh-sure yeah. I mean pretty sure?" He fingered away some stray curls from his ear. "Sort of the opposite of lucid dreaming..."

She nodded, gathering words carefully. Irynya's stomach twisted slightly, worried about what admitting this could do. Finally, her lips pressed together, decisiveness taking the place of hesitation. "That spot," here her finger went up to trace behind her ear, "Is really sensitive. And, umm... you featured in an umm... intense... dream I had yesterday. That had to do with the shower, and umm... that spot behind my ear at the beginning, but..."

Irynya's cheeks flushed lightly, embarrassment taking over with a solid dose of worry. "I'm messing this up."

Noah blinked. And Noah blinked again before his brows shot up. "Oh. Uh. You mean... a shower dream with... uh. Us in it." he gestured a swaying finger between them. The youth flushed a pink color when he unabashedly grinned toothily wide. "I-I am so sorry..." he chuckled.

Irynya had the wherewithal to keep her eyes up, but that was about it in that moment. "Don't be sorry it was... umm... a lovely dream... once the anxiety faded." As she said it all of the spots where he still had an arm around her conspired to remind her that they were still touching and she found herself holding extremely still as if movement might startle him. "Apparently I can use the showers in my head... under certain circumstances anyway."

Noah grinned downward. "Um. W-well... at least in your head you... you know... you're trying to confront your fears. So that's. Um. That's good." He smiled at her. It was weird- for anyone- to learn that they had been in someone else's midnight movie. "I-I'm glad it was nice though." Noah hadn't shifted away. He was still in a loose half-cuddle of her. But he was aware it was an odd sitting stance to be in. For the moment he was frozen and didn't feel like he should move.

"I-I think though... I mean dreams are g-good at.. you know... um, stuff. But I think we need to find you someone to help. With the showers. And um, disconnect you showering from the worker bee."

She frowned slightly, brow creasing. He was right, of course, but she was having trouble gauging his reaction to finding out that her brain had, basically, incarnated him into an incredibly compromising position. She wasn't sure she was ready to let that go, latent anxiety still lingering--a whisper at the back of her head warned that he might soon decide that this recent revelation was enough to want to walk away from this mess. And like that, as she let that thought take root, the anxiety rushed back in.

"Umm... do you want me to move?" she asked quietly only the shortest of beats before the rest of the anxiety rushed ahead in a tumble of words not exactly giving him enough time to respond. "I don't know who to talk to. I'm a department head, Noah. I'm in charge of people. And we don't have enough pilots as it is, let alone if they deem me unfit for duty. I can't just... stop." Her breathing had started to tick up a notch, but this time she was more aware and so she closed her eyes, murmuring under her breath, "Uniform. Noah. Couch. Boots. Teeth." This last she said as she tucked her bottom lip in between her teeth, holding there for a long moment before opening her eyes.

"Sorry," she said, her voice sad, "Grounding... I... Sorry." She couldn't look at him again.

"I know..." Noah smiled. He hugged her. "I-I know about grounding. I had to do a lot of it on the asteroid." He smiled again and pulled her close as an answer to her question. He just had to go with what he knew or what he thought was comforting. "Pull your feet back up," he said while his skinny lanky arm went around her. he pulled her down into a little spoon. "Couch, me, uniform, socks, boots... warm?" He suggested.

Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes as she let him lead her. A mixture of relief and anxiety-fueled fear twisted in her stomach. "Warm," she said her voice quavering on the edge between tears and heavily guarded reaction.

Noah was careful where he put his arms around her. "L-look your rank and your department head.. uh... ness... doesn't stop you from getting help. And nobody's going to think badly of you... this isn't some Ti-Tilonian Psycho-Torture Chamber. Star-starfleet knows about my trauma and I-I'm still here. They just help you, they don't lock you up and take away everything. Tha-that's not what they do." His brows furrowed. "You didn't fail anything. Or anyone."

She melted into him as he spoke, muscles unknotting and breathing starting to steady. The tears, though, continued to fall -- silently. "How can you know that?" she asked, her voice giving away the tears as she spoke. "Everyone looks at me and sees... Ease... And... and... confidence... isn't being the exact opposite of that letting people down? Failing them? If I'm not what people need me to be."

Noah didn't have all the answers. And he didn't know for sure that people would change from seeing her as the ideal she had built up in her head. "I.... I don't," he acquiesced after a long moment of indecision. He just said it. "But maybe that's not a bad thing. N-nobody asked you to hold to some ideal in the first place..." He sighed softly across her neck. "I know I wouldn't think of you any less. You-you'd still be fun and confident to me. And... I-I dunno... maybe even better. If you know you have a problem and you go to fix it... in-instead of letting it get worse."

That gave her pause, silencing her for a long moment. She knew, somewhere, buried under anxiety, that he was right. But he wasn't the only person whose good opinion she was worried about keeping. She sighed then. "Does Kennedy talk to you about... Stuff...?" She asked hesitantly.

Noah shook his head. "No. I mean we share sp-space but we don't get to talk much. He-he seems really private."

She nodded her head against the couch, quiet again, debating. "He and I have been... uh... talking... a lot. Like... a lot a lot. And... umm... right before Ankerus..." She shut her eyes, trying to figure out the right words. "Umm... There was a conversation that... complicated, the way he sees me. And the way I see him and..." She trailed off, anxiety tickling at the back of her head again, more muted than before, but still there. "I don't know that he really understands who he thinks he is falling for. And if he did..." She stopped, not liking the direction her brain went.

Again Noah prickled with his own anxieties. He simply had no answers. Irynya was not a bioneural gelpack that needed a duromyelin regenerator. He couldn't swap out the offending parts of her nervous system or recalibrate her drivers to offset this. He hugged her gently. "T-talk more about that... if-if you want to. Talk about Kennedy... if you two are... um... y-you know... interested in each other...."

She laughed at that, a sort of strangled embarrassed sound with no mirth to it. "Interested," she said, voice choked. "Kennedy isn't interested. Kennedy is in love. He hasn't said that, but he is." Even now, in the most emotionally and physically inopportune moment, that statement set up a flurry of butterflies in her stomach. "I'm... Something. Interested? Falling for him? Emotionally compromised?" She frowned then. "I told him I needed time to think about it. If he were Risian this would be easy. There are guidelines. Easy steps to take to figure this out. But he's not Risian and not only is he not Risian he's inexperienced from a human perspective. Everything is new and big and shiny to him. It's... a lot of responsibility."

She was rambling now. "I am sorry, this has, officially, got to be the weirdest conversation we have ever had." She ticked things off, "Panic attack, and sharing about traumatic experiences, and sexy shower dreams, and I am falling for your roommate and telling you about it while we're sitting here... like... this." She stammered then, "I don't... I don't mean to be this messy, Noah. And I don't really know how this moment would have played out if you weren't here." She hesitated. "Not well."

Noah just listened. So his roommate was in love with Irynya. Twenty-six days after meeting and he was in love. So there were some powerful emotions under that phlegmatic exterior after all. To Noah, it was a bit of an alien concept. He loved his family. He cared for his friends. But his own experience with romantic love was probably closer to Walsh's than Irynya's. Noah fell for friends, longstanding friends that somehow easily nudged into something more. "I... hmm. I don't know e-exactly what to say. I mean.. we're not Deltans. Or something. But I-I don't think we're like... Arbazans. Or Kostolain. But... he-he is really... different. For a Human. And I mean, I-I come from a really... well, Enceladus is cerebral. And even I noticed."

Noah looked on over her shoulders at the far wall. "I-I don't mean to... um... r-right now Kennedy isn't the priority. You're the priority. You need help with this. Maybe we should talk to Counselor Bracco."

Irynya blew out a breath, cheeks puffing as she did before nodding again. "Ok," she offered, her voice more level than it had been the whole conversation now that there was an action to take. "Bracco." Even as she said it a part of her brain rebelled, screaming at her that it wouldn't be good. She would be considered damaged goods. Insufficient. Failing.

"When?" She asked quietly.

"How soon do you w-want to feel better?" Noah asked back. "Sooner is better... we can go now if you want."

Gently she extracted herself from his arms and sat up, scrubbing at her eyes with her hands. She was fairly confident she looked as big of a mess as she felt. "Now." She said voice quiet and heavy with worry. "Now, or I will lose my nerve."

Noah sprung up and offered out his hand. "Now then. C-come on." He tapped his commbadge. "Um, Midshipman Balsam to Counselor Bracco." He paused a moment, "Ha-have you got a moment?"

A Post By:

Lieutenant JG Irynya
Acting Chief Flight Controller

Midshipman Noah Balsam
Systems Specialist