Waking Nightmares
Posted on 19 Nov 2021 @ 12:16am by Major Minka Mazur, MD (*) & Ptolemy Cumberland
Edited on on 29 Nov 2021 @ 10:34pm
Mission:
M2 - Sanctuary
Location: Doctor Mazur's Quarters
Timeline: MD09 - 0200HRS
1185 words - 2.4 OF Standard Post Measure
The scream of pain pierced through the din of the battle, ringing in her ears and chilling her to the bone. The great robotic monstrosity had all but cut Fallabor in half and his dying screams were one of sheer agony. Minka tried to run to him, but she was frozen to the spot. Caught on the ground with no cover, staring at the Romulan woman standing over her with her disrupter pointed right at her. The woman had led the charge into the Infirmary, had ordered the robotic Goliath forward and killed so many of her comrades, she knew she had to be next. Her rifle was a foot away, but there was no way she was going to get it, not in her current state. She was at the woman’s mercy. The Romulan leveled the weapon to fire, but snapped away at the last second as a man howled with fury and charged her.
Minka looked up and over to see Ptolemy running straight at the woman, ready to strike. The Romulan moved the weapon casually to him and fired, sending the lance of green light straight through his skull. Minka howled in answer and scrambled to get to the gun. The Romulan turned her weapon casually to Minka and fired, not striking her in the chest or in the head, but straight through the belly. Minka felt the result and forgot about anything else, just curled inwards, desperate to render herself aide.
“How sad,” the Romulan woman declared sarcastically, raising her weapon once more.
Shaking with pain and fear, Minka turned to look and saw Ada by her father’s corpse, picking up an abandoned Starfleet phaser. The Romulan woman raised the disruptor once more and smirked wickedly at Minka.
“NO!” Minka cried out.
Minka Mazur sat bolt upright in the bed of her quarters, heaving for breath and drenched in sweat. To her left, Ptolemy was sound asleep and snoring gently, very much alive. Frantically, she patted her stomach to feel that there were no burn marks. She whipped the covers off and got up, hurrying into the living area of their suite to her emergency kit. Minka dumped the whole thing on the dining table in her frantic search for the tricorder and turned it on herself. She almost cried to see that nothing was wrong. For good measure, she went to the bedroom, easing the door open to see Ada fast asleep on her bed. She closed the door back and walked into the living room once more.
“It was just a dream,” she told herself. “Just a dream…”
But it wasn’t just a dream. They really had been boarded, that Romulan woman had been there as had the robotic monstrosity. It was just a personification of the fears she had. She knew that, but that hadn’t made it any easier to kick these dreams. Tonight’s was the worst by far, but they’d been a steady occurrence ever since the battle. Always some measure of the same outcome - losing her family.
It was starting to affect her day to day work. She was irritable (which most would say was saying something), she didn’t sleep well and she was now incredibly over-protective. Usually it was Minka calming Ptolemy’s temper down when he got fired up as he was usually the one that ran hot. But of late, it was Ptolemy pulling Minka back from her aggression. Whether that was getting after a kid she thought was playing too hard with Ada, or a parent thinking that they could stop her. She knew something wasn’t right with her and it certainly wasn’t just because she was pregnant. As a Doctor, she knew there was more to it. She just didn’t want to admit what it was. She’d fought too long and too hard to be where she was and she refused to admit the answer she knew was staring her in the face.
Minka sat on the couch in her suite, lowering into it carefully and sat back, hands over her eyes and tried to focus her mind. Tried to keep telling herself that this was all a dream, it was just stress, hormones and perfectly rational fear. She was strong. She was stronger than anyone else. She could get through this. She could do it. She could focus her mind on the reality. Ptolemy, Ada and their baby were perfectly fine. Fallabor and the Marines in the Infirmary from the battle were fine now; all healed up. The world around Obsidian Command was in perfect order. Starfleet had it all in order. Major Finn was there, his Marines were fully staffed and armed to the teeth. They were safe. The world was right, and smelled of mint like her favorite mint tea. She drank that in, repeating it in her head until a tiny light bulb began to flicker in her mind.
Why did the world smell of mint tea?
Slowly she removed her hands from her eyes and sat up properly to see a steaming cup of mint tea on the coffee table and her eyes tracked slowly up from that to see Ptolemy unfolding the throw blanket from the other couch opposite to put around her. He gave her a wan smile as he came over, put it around her and sat down next to her.
It was a simple gesture, and a loving one, but it was the one that broke her. As he put his arm around her shoulder, she leaned against him, wrapped hers around him and began to cry.
For Ptolemy’s part, he knew his wife wasn’t quite the same as she’d been at Falkirk. He knew she’d seen plenty of battles in her time in the Marines; it’s why she was as good as she was. She’d cut her teeth as a Doctor with the Marines in Tholian space; he knew she’d seen her fair share of insanity. But this time was different. He could see it in every facet of her day to day, and it’d been getting worse.
At first, he’d let her have her space to decompress. Combat action was bound to have recurring issues. But lately it’d been getting way worse. The fighting, the bickering, the way she tried to protect Ada from absolutely anything that might cause her harm, no matter how innocent. It was bordering on the insane. The only glimmer of the old Minka he'd seen had been their dinner date with Thaddeus, other than that, it was this new, paranoid version. Seeing her up again with another nightmare, he knew he couldn’t just pretend to be asleep anymore. They had to meet this head on. Together.
“We’re all safe here, Minka,” Ptolemy offered quietly as she cried against his chest. “All of us,” he said, touching her stomach with his opposite hand.
MInka sniffed and shook her head against his chest, “I wish I was that sure…”