After the Aftermath

Posted on Mon Oct 6th, 2025 @ 6:48pm by Lieutenant Irynya

Mission: Port of Call
Location: Iry's Quarters
Timeline: Mission Day 1 at 0100

[Deck 3 - Iry's Quarters]
[MD1 0100 Hours]

The door to Irynya’s room swooshed shut with the familiar sound of quiet pneumatics doing their jobs. Even damaged, the ship went about doing what it was programmed to do. Systems ran. Doors opened and closed. Atmospheric pressures were maintained and gravity held.

There was no thunk of the door being sealed. No pounding on the other side. No adrenaline spike from worrying that this time the tool created by the Ferengi officer they’d found wouldn’t work.

The silence that followed as she stood there felt loud–broken only by the soft white noise of waves. Unmoving, she surveyed the room. The familiar Risian seascape covering the walls was set to dusk. Warm filtered sunlight drew out the comforting shades of burnt orange, brick, and cream that covered her bed.

The bed looked like something out of a dream and despite herself she yawned, unable to help the reflex.

She was so tired.

She was so tired, and she could barely stand the feel of her own skin–dirt and blood and other unidentified elements still clung to the places that were harder to reach outside of a shower. She still wore the bedraggled uniform pants, boots, and undershirt she’d put on that morning. Had it really only been a day?

Somewhere along the way her uniform jacket had been discarded. Probably in Sickbay. A ghost of physical memory–Noah’s head tilted to rest atop hers for just a moment as they stood in the wrecked corridor on Deck 2–seemed to settle around her. Her gut squeezed and her stomach clenched in grief even as her heartbeat quickened.

She frowned, too tired and too dirty and too uncomfortable to parse the dissonance in her own reactions to the memory.

A few more steps into the room and she toed off her boots, letting them lay where she stepped out of them. She stripped out of her uniform pants before tugging the SOJO t-shirt she wore under her duty jacket over her head. She debated stripping off her undergarments as well, but even exhausted and knowing she would understand, Irynya didn’t want to subject Debbie to her momentary nudity if the matron happened to step into the common room.

Stooping she scooped the items she’d sloughed off and stepped back out into their shared space - stopping at the replicator to discard what she held. Let the boots and pants and shirt all be recycled into something else. Into something other than the memory of the terrors of this day.

In the bathroom Debbie’s anthropomorphic starship shower curtain greeted her. They were almost too cheerful. Garish in their color and frozen pinup girl poses. It felt too normal and she couldn’t muster an appreciation for the curtain’s comedic element. Not waiting, Iry stripped out of her undergarments, and stepped past the curtain into the shower. Her hand found the controls almost instinctively, flexing slightly against the burn scars that had now been eliminated–the motion settling over her with yet another physical ghost of memory.

Water. It was a precious commodity, but she used a small allotment of hers, tilted her head back into the flow mixed with the deep blue purple of the sonic portion of the shower. It felt almost criminal. As if, after everything, the normalcy of a shower was undeserved.

And with that feeling came a rushing flood of guilt. She was alive. Against all odds she was alive. And four others… four… Jyl-eel Tor among them… were not.

In the rush to find Noah and the move to Sickbay afterward she’d been too focused on him to feel her own grief. Even her fear, something she felt had become a near physical companion that day, was pushed back when she and the nurse, Gatien, had found him. There had been no time then to mourn anything. There had just been Noah. Getting him to Sickbay. Making sure his–and her own–wounds were fully cared for. Watching for signs, signals, anything that might give her a clue of how to help what she knew in the pit of her gut was a deep well of his own grief. She’d been tempted when they finally separated to go to their own quarters, to follow him. At the time she had told herself it was because she wanted… needed… to know he was ok. Now though…

Guilt and grief crawled its way up her throat and, finally, escaped her lips with the sound of a sob. Tears mingled with the drizzle of warm water until she couldn’t tell which was which. For long moments time stood still while the storm of emotion overtook her.

Finally a chime from the computer signaled that her water allocation for her shower had run out. Mechanically she went through the motions of cleaning herself. She rung the water that clung to her hair from its strands, feeling as if she had wrung out her whole body with it.

Still on autopilot she exited the shower, snagging her robe and a towel and wrapping herself in them before going through the muscle memory motions of brushing her teeth and then her hair.

Once again she stood just inside the door of her room. She knew that she ought to put on a pair of pajamas. Knew that the familiarity would feel safe and welcoming. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It was too much of an effort. Instead she curled up on top of the comforter, wrapped in her robe, hair tucked into a spiral of towel atop her head.

The quiet of the room felt oppressive and she realized with a deep seated certainty that she didn’t want to be alone. She wanted… Her gut twisted again with the dissonant sensation she’d felt earlier–stronger this time.

“Computer,” she called barely above a whisper, “where is Ensign Noah Balsam?”

“Ensign Noah Balsam is in his quarters,” the neutral effeminate tones of the computer answered.

“Computer…” she said, mouth open, ready to ask the next thing.

No words came, though. She couldn’t. Couldn’t ask him to be there for her when his own grief was so deep. It would be selfish to ask him to come. To want to be held and wait out the quiet hours with him there where she could put a hand on him and know he was ok.

There was a preemptive chime that echoed through the room–the computer prompting her to continue. She sighed and squeezed her eyes shut, pulling her knees to her chest and tucking her head until she was wound as tightly as she could be into the fetal position.

“Cancel that,” she confirmed, feeling as if all of the air had gone out of her.

She lay like that for a long time, exhausted and emotionally spent. When she finally did fall asleep minutes or hours later, it was to the soft sound of the waves brushing the shore on Risa.

Never before had their sound been less comforting.