Camp Sunrise: The Winetrout Clinic
Posted on 17 Mar 2023 @ 12:04pm by Chief Petty Officer Ibis Xeri & Olivia Winetrout
Edited on on 25 Apr 2024 @ 3:58pm
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: Korix, Camp Sunrise
Timeline: MD08 Morning on the island (following Camp Sunrise: Pappa’s Song)
1531 words - 3.1 OF Standard Post Measure
The largest shack in Camp Sunrise had been built to accommodate not just Laura and her daughter Olivia, but also to house the clinic that everyone had relied on. There had once been a series of reed-woven covered breezeways that had linked it to a semicircle of sick-shacks behind it, where Doctor Laura Winetrout would tend the most acute cases. But those reed coverings had been taken away by stormwinds years ago. The sheds stood long since useless, with no one left to tend, and no doctor left to tend them.
Olivia had grown up in the clinic with her mother. She was only three years old when the Sunrise had been destroyed and didn’t seem to remember anything of her shipboard life. Her mother, one of the ship’s doctors and the wife of Chief Engineer, Lieutenant Matt Winetrout, had managed to get her young daughter to safety just before Ibis was forced to seal the hatch on their escape pod. A moment’s more hesitation would have been deadly, but somehow Ibis had the presence of mind to pull the lever in spite of all of the desperation screaming through her mind from the crew in the plasma-steam bathed halls beyond. She’d waited as long as she could, even defeating the auto-launch to let on as many others as she could. The pod was three people overweight, but one was just a toddler, and Ibis had faith in Starfleet Engineers to have over accounted a little… As she sealed the door, in a reflex of self preservation similar to closing one’s eyes against a violent visual onslaught, she also steeled herself telepathically against the pain, panic, and desperation of the rest of the crew in her mind; all the seats being taken, Ibis strapped herself in by using a cargo brace under her arms and around her shoulders. She managed to get a latching strap to Doctor Winetrout in time for her to fashion a restraining extension for the toddler amended to her own harness, and someone else cranked little Olivia’s strap down around her toddler hips just before the kick of the ejection system exploded against the floor.
Standing before the Winetrout clinic, Ibis rolled her left arm, remembering the dislocated shoulder from the makeshift harness. She thought about Laura, as they were floating away, everyone in the pod transfixed and helpless while watching through the small portal of the door they had come through and locked behind them as it still faced the direction from which they were fleeing, and moments later, observing the Sunrise silently fly apart in the distance. She remembered Laura looking to Ibis and through thin, bloodless lips, saying one syllable… “Matt” as a question to Ibis, and Ibis closing her eyes to try her best… had to shake her head. She couldn’t sense the Chief Engineer at all.
There was one broad, low-set step into the clinic. Ibis stepped up on the little riser. Regarding the door, she knocked, three even raps with a knuckle.
“Go away.” Olivia’s voice sounded close, probably just on the other side.
Ibis knew from memory that the door was the general entryway to the bigger room where there were two surgical beds- essentially crude tables- and a long work bench with the doctor’s tools and supplies organized. There was one window with a specially constructed shutter to close against the wind and rain but which could also open to allow for sunlight over the worktable. One of the other walls held racks where a variety of oddball containers were stored.
When not laboring for rations, Ibis had spent many of her days with Laura, little Olivia in tow, seeking out plants and materials with potentially useful properties and sitting at the workbench making preparations in salves and teas and liquors— Quartermaster Amos had cobbled together a passable moonshine still by his shack. What grain the camp could afford to set aside went to making the alcohol to use for disinfectant and to soak some of the herbals. Although the grain was collected from the group’s efforts, Amos took from the tap as he pleased. Since he claimed ownership of his work, Ibis and Laura had to accept Amos’ reckoning as to what amount of the product was for himself and how much the clinic received. It left them in a pinch any time a virus was going around, since preparations needed to soak for weeks in advance before they could be administered and they could only work in tiny batches. They never had enough of their remedies.
When he had learned of the racket, Wallace had ended up belting a buzzed Amos and claiming the still as a group resource. That event hadn’t gone over very well with a few of the men who didn’t like where it implied Wallace might fall against them in the future and something of a club had fomented against him of which he dealt with the social unrest and distrust for years after. The contested moonshine still had been relocated beside the clinic where Wallace could keep an eye on it from his place. Ibis and Laura, always close, had become the ‘witches’ of the Camp— constantly brewing something else to try and always keeping a close confidence with one another, and Amos and his unofficial gang took a special interest in making things difficult for the Doctor and assistant after the incident. Eventually Wallace had helped bury each one of the disgruntled detractors, dead of sickness and disease, same as the rest. At the old Quartermaster’s burial, Ibis had thought she noticed Wallace giving Amos’ grave a few more shovel fulls than necessary and an extra few thumps with the back of the implement for good measure.
“Did you… go away?” Olivia said, with a small, sad voice, truly believing she was all alone again.
Ibis snapped out of her trailing thoughts. She felt especially reflective today, but tried to remember that she was needed now, in the present. “No, I’m still here, Olivia. I’m not leaving you.”
“Not leaving me, yet!” The girl snapped, picking right up again with her angry act.
Ibis sighed. It wasn’t that Olivia’s fears were unfounded. They were very well founded and part of a long holding trend. Ibis tried to think what she would want to hear in Olivia’s place. She would want security, and she would want the truth. Two things almost diametrically opposed.
“I know it’s difficult to think about,” she said calmly and firmly. “But we don’t know what will happen in the future. All we can promise you is that while there’s any breath left in us, Wallace and I are going to stay with you, Olivia. We love you.”
“Wallace doesn’t love me!”
“Yes he does, Olivia. He just doesn’t know how to say it. He loves you very much.”
“If he loves me so much, then why is he always yelling!”
Why are you always yelling? Ibis wanted to snipe back. Instead she held her tongue long enough to compose a better response. “He wants you to be safe. If anything happened to you, I don’t think he could forgive himself. Ever.”
Olivia seemed quiet again.
“We’re mortal, like everyone else. We know. We have to look out for one another. And Wallace and I… we need you too, okay?”
“Yeah, you need me to watch Ikemba,” she said sarcastically.
“Well, that’s one part of it, yeah.”
“What’s the other part, then?” Olivia challenged.
Ibis struggled with how to explain it. “Without you and Ikemba… It just. It wouldn’t be the same for me, or for Wallace. Things would be very different.” Her fingers went to the tin commbadge, brushing her thumb over it as she continued, softly. “Sometimes just loving someone gives a person a reason to keep their hope up. A reason to keep being their best selves.”
Olivia was quiet again and Ibis intuited that maybe the talk had gone a little deep and Olivia was out of steam to argue against it. The girl needed an out.
“Hey, when you’re ready to, come on out and help me, okay? We can talk while we go fetch water. You can tell me about your friends. Who did you meet yesterday when you were visiting the pool's edge?”
“When I’m ready,” Olivia said, not willing to be talked out of her sulk yet.
“I’m not far,” Ibis replied, lowering herself to sit on the stair and watch Ikemba from there. Relieved that the discussion hadn’t been so terrible, she relaxed and settled in to wait until Olivia had decided she was calmed down. Ibis could feel her mind wandering again already, meandering through the broken past, trying to process and make sense of it all. It was always an empty enterprise, but her heart wanted answers, just as Wallace had been searching for at dawn each morning. “I’ll wait for you.”
