Impatient & The Evening After

Impatient

Month 11 Day 1

0730 Hours

Jane Burke

“There he is,” Jane muttered to her companion as she accepted her breakfast cup of coffee from the beverage dispenser. “In the far corner.”

“He beat us here?” Duck asked. Usually, Smitty caught up to them somewhere on the way here, sometimes he arrived a minute or two after them, but this was the first time in... a long time that he had beaten them to the messhall.

Smitty didn’t look up when they sat down, but continued to stare at his pancakes. “You okay?” Duck asked him. “You don’t usually leave food untouched like that.”

Smitty glanced at the doctor, blushed, and returned to staring at his breakfast. “I’m fine,” he stated shortly.

He doesn’t sound fine to me. He sounds mighty uptight about something. I suppose he expects me to chew him up for his behavior last night. And by rights, I should. So, how do I let him know that I didn’t ‘see’ anything? Even though it was my elbow that poked him so firmly when he completely forgot himself. “Well, I think that New Year’s Eve dance went fairly well last night,” Jane stated brightly. “Other than Winthrop, I only had to talk to 3 or 4 crewmembers about their behavior. That’s not bad. I hate having to be the bad guy all night.” No reaction. I wonder if anything I’ve said has sunk into his head at all. She reached out and touched his hand, which he jerked away in surprise. “Thanks for helping me separate Duck from MacDowell, Smitty. Turned out he only danced with her that time to keep her from having to dance with, uh--“

“Adams,” Duck offered.

At the mention of the midnight engineer, Smitty’s eyes flashed in anger for a second, and then his eyebrows puckered together. “I need to do something about that,” he muttered

What private world is he in? He certainly isn’t here with us. “We are doing something about it,” she reminded him. “Surely you haven’t forgotten all our carefully made plans. In another week or two—”

“It can’t wait another week or two,” he declared.

She kept her own voice calm and low; she didn’t want to discuss this in the messhall, but if they had to, then they should pretend it was simple chitchat. “We knew this would not be a quick fix. I want all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted, or it might not work out the way we want.”

“What are you two talking about?” Duck asked blandly.

Smitty glanced around them and finally cut into his pancakes. His voice was almost a whisper when he spoke again. “But I found out last night that while we’ve been doing... what we’re doing, she’s been piping the audio from the bridge to... anyplace else on the ship. Except to the senior officers. The entire ship might know by now what she has to go through! And that makes me look like an incompetent officer, to allow that to go on!”

“She does what?” Jane forgot to keep her voice low in her surprise, so she merely acknowledged it. “That’s a surprise,” she said normally, and held up a finger to keep him from saying anything while she took a drink of coffee. Then she was bland and quiet when she began talking again. “When did she start that?”

“I don’t know, but it’s got to stop, and it’s got to stop now! I won’t be made to look a fool!”

There he goes, blaming MacDowell again, when the whole situation wouldn’t be a situation if those two men had better control of their behavior. “If their behavior doesn’t reflect well on you, it reflects even worse on me. I’ll see what I can find out about this, but you sit tight. I still want the noose nice and tight when we pull on it.”

“But Captain--!”

“That’s enough,” she told him calmly. “We’ll discuss this later, in my office, if you can’t find some patience.”

Smitty frowned at his plate and stabbed a piece of pancake. “Yes, captain.”

“What a fascinating conversation we’re having this morning,” Duck stated cheerfully. “I just hope it isn’t about anything I should know about?”

“Not yet,” Jane told him. “Maybe later.”

Their table settled into a nervous, unsettled lack of conversation for a couple minutes before Smitty—with less than half his meal eaten—rose to his feet. “I’m going to go check on something.”

Jane watched him leave; he paused to make a statement to Della Harris on his way out. Harris looked mildly worried as she quickly finished her breakfast.

Not a word about his behavior last night. Not where he disappeared to after that fiasco of ‘rescuing’ MacDowell from Drake, nor why he didn’t come back when he got himself under control. Sooo, does his anger this morning indicate some guilt over how he behaved last night? Which he’s projecting onto MacDowell?

The Evening After

Month 11 Day 1

2331 Hours

Dr Margaret Davis

Peggy was in her office, looking forward to the end of her shift when a figure in a red uniform appeared in her doorway. “You got a minute, Doc?”

It was Mac, who rarely made an appearance in sick bay this close to the start of her work shift, but when she did... “Come on in. Take a seat.” The redhead did as she was told, and lay her arm on the end of Peggy’s desk, palm upward. Peggy waved her medical recorder over the arm and winced at the readout. “When did you stop drinking?”

“About 7 this morning. Bugsy woke me about 5:30 this afternoon. We’ve been playing games in the rec hall, and I just had lunch.”

“Bugalu didn’t know how much you’d had to drink?”

“No,” Mac replied.

She goes for weeks without needing this, and then—despite her efforts to sleep it off—she needs it. Peggy shook her head slightly, readied the proper dose of de-toxicant and administered it. “I won’t ask you how you do it, but I do wonder why you do it.”

Mac leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes, her hand now gripping the edge of Peggy’s desk. “Oh, you know. Cultural baggage that elicits an emotional overload.”

“Perhaps you need to talk to somebody about that. The baggage as well as the overload.”

“It’s hard to impress on people how big the baggage is, so they don’t understand the overload,” Mac answered, and opened her eyes as her body relaxed. “I even have trouble talking about it with Bugs, and he already knows about the baggage. He’s tried to help me unpack it many times, but... it’s still with me. It just doesn’t rear its ugly head nearly as often.”

“Then maybe you need a professional to help you.”

Mac sighed. “Maybe I just need to give up any hope.”

“Hope about what?”

“About... Oh, I probably should. After all, I went against all of Gaelunde’s traditions when I left to join the Fleet. Why should I now try to reclaim some of them?” Green eyes turned to Peggy. “Are you done with me?”

She ran her recorder over the girl’s arm again. “Yes. You are now fit to report to work.”

“Good. Thanks, Doc.”