Caretaker - L. A. Graf [27]
That possibility was far more horrible to Fitzgerald than any ill feelings Paris might hold toward him. The doctor had even tried to explain that to Ensign Kim. "It's for the best, you know," he had said quietly over their breakfasts in the mess hall. "Men like that never come to any good." He'd only been trying to protect everyone.
So when the ship lurched mindlessly and pitched the sickbay into darkness, the first thought to race through Fitzgerald's mind was that he had to protect T'Prena. His first wife would have called him a chauvinist, would have claimed he didn't think women--even Vulcan women--were capable of taking care of themselves. But if Fitzgerald had ever given a damn about what anybody thought, he'd probably still be married to at least one of his previous spouses. Throwing his arm around T'Prena's shoulders, he pulled her against him and huddled them both tight against the sequencer, where they could use the wall-mounted unit to help guide them down to the floor, rather than be thrown about the room to smash into whatever examining tables and desks happened to be in the way. The doctor was proud of his quick thinking.
"I think it would be best if we tried to make our way into the corridor," he'd started to shout across the darkness.
Then the sequencer exploded.
The percussion of escaping flame and displaced air peeled most of the skin away from his skull and ruptured his eardrums with a clap of brilliant pain. He was glad the shock left him too dumbstruck to scream--his first intake of breath would have seared shut his lungs, leaving him helpless and mute for the five to seven minutes it would have taken him to suffocate. Assuming he remained conscious that long.
He struck the deck now in such a state of utter, chilling numbness, he knew his neurological systems must be severely damaged, his blood pressure already plunging below seventy. Of course--third-degree burns. Judging from the strange mixture of pain and insensibility cocooning his body, he estimated he'd suffered at least a forty-percent evaporation of skin surface in the initial explosion. That was not an encouraging statistic.
God, you're even starting to phrase your diagnoses like a Vulcan!
T'Prena.
Fitzgerald remembered her with the peculiar jolt of a doctor who has somehow, impossibly, blanked out in the middle of a medical emergency.
She wasn't just his nurse, now--if she'd been injured by the sequencer explosion, she was his patient and he had forgotten her. If she was dead, if he had killed her...! He'd never killed anyone in his life.
Not through accident, not through error, not even through some ill-thought inaction of his own. He dragged himself blindly across the floor as smoke billowed downward from the fire overhead, and the first sentence of the Hippocratic oath rang in echo to the thunder in his chest.
First, do no harm.
"... T'Prena...?"
She was a Vulcan--if she could have answered him, she would have.
That thought hugged his heart with pain as he searched for her through a gathering darkness that came from more than just the accumulating smoke. "Nurse...? It's Dr. Fitzgerald..." He coughed, and the pain of it nearly tore him apart inside.
He found her with his hands, his eyes too stained with smoke to see her anymore. The front of her uniform was blasted open, stiff along the edges where the fabric had melted and burned. He did his best to avoid all the places where his flesh and muscle would be exposed--he must be filthy, he reasoned, his hands impossibly septic after crawling across this blood- and debris-littered floor. When his hands finally closed on the rounded knob of her shoulder, he