Castles in the Sand
Posted on 28 Jun 2023 @ 8:46pm by Chief Petty Officer Ibis Xeri & Olivia Winetrout
Edited on on 25 Apr 2024 @ 4:06pm
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: Pathfinder, Sickbay & Guest Quarters
Timeline: M3 D11 ~1000hrs
3675 words - 7.4 OF Standard Post Measure
In the curtained off examination area, Ibis chewed on her cuticles around her nails as she watched the nurses making their notes over Ikemba. While Ibis had no choice but to grow accustomed to the emaciated look of the children and the rest of the castaways over the years, the nurses didn’t often see such extreme cases of starvation. Ibis witnessed the expressions of horror crossing their eyes as they took in the sight of Ikembas distended belly and counted on each of his little ribs in his side and noted his pointy little scapulae, and stick like arms and legs…
Ibis silently kept mouthing the words “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” behind a cupped hand to try and hide her guilty horror.
Ikemba was unwilling to sit and have an IV and they debated about giving him a sedative and feeding tube, but Ibis had insisted he was eating very well from the replicator and that seemed to satisfy the staff enough to settle on doses of minerals and vitamins by hypo and a series of micro organic tablets as enzymatic and probiotic supplements, as well as some flavored drops for deworming medications. As they finished the exam, Ibis put the boy’s shirt back on to cover her shame.
Called in next, Olivia took her turn with a kind of distracted indifference to begin with, mostly interested in the padd she was holding when she was ushered behind the exam curtain. She didn’t like the nurses poking and prodding and being nosy and often answered them in Korin, forcing Ibis to translate for her. Although originally opposed to wearing clothing to the appointment in the first place, she decided she wanted to keep her shirt on after all, just to be contrary when they asked her to change out of it.
Ibis answered the exam questions about Olivia honestly, as best she could. Hearing that she was not eating as heartily as Ikemba and was being particular and obstinate about food, Olivia was kindly asked if she wanted a recovery bed; they could set her up by Major Wallace if it would help her, and they would keep her a while under observation and put a tube up through her nose into her stomach and—
The nurse never finished explaining, as it was about there that Olivia had thrown a supply cart and told them to, “Put tubes up your own stupid noses. My mother was a doctor and my mother said I’m as healthy as an Ox-Wren!”
“I’ll make sure she eats more!” Ibis promised while on her hands and knees, desperately trying to gather the scattered tools while Ikemba clung to her neck and screamed, afraid for Olivia. “It’s only been a couple of days,” she pleaded. “We’re adjusting.” She grew afraid by the doubtful look in the male nurse’s eyes that Olivia was about to be admitted against her will.
“Here, ya’ll lemme handle this,” he finally said, shaking his head as he helped the pitiful Miss Xeri back up. “I’ll sign the bill of health for today. We’ll go on an’ send the tablets and the supplements along to your quarters. You mosey on out, Chief, and take your rugrat and lil’ miss spitfire here along with you. We ain’t makin’ a lick o’ progress like this anyhow.”
A child’s hand in each of her own, they left the exam area by way of the main sickbay and Ibis looked over her shoulder, catching Wallace trying to crane his neck to see what all the shouting was about. She flashed him a smile that with any luck telegraphed some confidence she didn’t feel and hoped he didn’t spend any energy he needed for healing on worrying.
When they had gotten back to their quarters, Ibis had paced around, her worry gears spinning without being able to engage in any useful activity. She ended up wearing a path in the carpet between the replicator and the table, ordering up all manner of snacks and breads and puddings and fruits and everything that she could imagine should be appealing to Olivia until there was a cornucopia at hand and Ibis finally looked up, wondering where the girl had gotten to. She took one of the cups of pudding with her and followed some noises from the bedroom.
Ikemba was the first thing she noticed, her heart going into her throat as he took a flying leap from the top of the chest of drawers and belly flopped into his bed. It was the first time he’d even used the bed at all, landing into it like a trampoline, and hopping back up with his mop of curls bouncing over his shoulders. Ibis’ heart settled halfway back into place, reassured by the expression of glee on Ikemba’s face, and she watched as he scaled the furniture to plan his next jump. Her anxious mind could picture all of the ways this particular activity could go quite wrong. But he had so much delight, she decided maybe she could pretend it was okay. It was like all of the times he got it in his head to leap from the large rock outcroppings on the beach, or to jump and tumble down the sand dunes. Jimoh had never stopped the baby from scaling things, and Wallace had encouraged it all the more as time went on. It was good for a growing boy.
Having decided on refraining herself from over reacting to Ikemba’s new game, Ibis exhaled and looked to the other side of the room, on the floor between the other child’s bed and the wall, where a faint light was glowing up from. The bedclothes had been pulled off the mattress from one side and tented over, the corners tucked into one of the drawers of the opposite built in chest of drawers. Careful to keep the cup of pudding upright, Ibis got on her hands and knees, crawling under the tented sheets.
“May I come in?” She asked, seeing Olivia’s face glowing with the light of the tablet screen.
Olivia seemed too distracted to tell her differently, so Ibis shuffled in beside her. There was a whump on the bed nearby and Ibis froze mid-crawl, afraid until Ikemba laughed. He’d taken up jumping and tumbling from one bed to the other, between his leaps from the dresser.
“What are you watching?” Ibis asked, seeing faces and places on the tablet out of context at first.
“Wallace gave me this remembering pad. My mom and dad are on it.” Olivia explained to her. “But there are a lot of people I don’t know.”
“Can I see?”
Olivia angled the pad a little to share it as Ibis settled in closer. There was a beach scene, but one very different from their polluted dreary island view. The water was pristine and blue, sparkling under sunlight. There were gulls in the sky and sailboats in the water. Swimmers in their bathing suits were running past, kicking up sand, and children were everywhere with pails and shovels or throwing frisbees. It was a seaside holiday. A white haired woman with soft wrinkled skin formed into smile lines, took a rock out of the baby’s fist just when it looked like the baby wanted to give it a taste test.
“Matt, dear, I think Olivia is hungry.”
“She’s not hungry, Ma.” Matt said, slightly off camera. His hairy legs were partly in frame as he struggled with a large beach umbrella. “Laura literally just nursed her.”
“She’s eating rocks.”
“Tell her she’s not a horta.”
“I can give her some pretzels.”
“Don’t give her anything solid. Laura said she’s not starting solids.”
“She’s cutting her teeth and she’s sitting up. You were eating solids when you were sitting up.”
“I told you we should just reserve one of the cabanas.” Ibis heard Laura’s voice before she saw her. The camera was at an angle, sitting on something in the sand. But it still caught Laura who was stunning in a white swimsuit with a loose wrap tied on, a floppy beach hat setting off her face like a big white, straw halo. Ibis briefly made herself a wish, that if she ever had kids she could get a beach body back that quickly.
Matt’s follies with the giant colorful umbrella were occupying him thoroughly. The baby in focus was sticking a small plastic toy into the sand and flicking it up, milky spit bubbles forming in the corners of her mouth as she drooled.
“The baby is me.” Olivia explained to Ibis. Ibis nodded, pretending that she didn’t already come to that conclusion.
The old lady slipped the baby a pretzel. “Don’t tell your father.” She said with a grin and a wink, crunching on another pretzel of her own and putting on shades. The baby examined the snack in her sandy fist before slobber-gumming on it.
Ibis laughed at the candid moment on camera. “That’s got to be your grandmother.” She explained. “Your father’s mother.”
As the scene continued, a balding man with a somewhat portly belly flip-flopped walked into the frame in the background act, hauling towels and colorful inflatables. He dropped his beach gear into the sand behind Grandma’s chair and began helping Matt with the umbrella. “It’s been in the shed a long time. I think the winch is sticking.” When he bent down to troubleshoot the umbrella, it was obvious Matt was his spitting image, a chip right off that block.
“That’s your grandfather on the Winetrout side. Your dad’s side.” Ibis said confidently. As she continued to watch the family scene, the heart that had been in her throat a minute ago was now sinking like a stone. Olivia had family. Wallace had mentioned that Ikemba had family. Ibis was reminded that they weren’t hers, not to keep. “Your mother’s parents, she told me her parents had been older when they met. Her father had died before she finished school and her mother was getting on in years and living with cousins to help her out. Your mother got interested in Medicine because of her father’s condition. That’s what she told me.”
Ibis wasn’t sure Olivia understood the idea of extended family. There hadn’t been a lot of examples in their lives to talk about family structures and all of her Korin pup friends were spawned in organized orgies and lived in community housing.
While Ibis carried on talking about more people Olivia didn’t know, Olivia flipped through the moving thumbnail images in the catalog level again. Ibis marveled at how quickly Olivia adjusted to using technology that she’d never encountered in her life before. The teen’s next selection was another thumbnail of her own baby-self, featuring as a toddler of about two or so, and dressed in a pile of peach tulle while holding a fistfull of white rose petals. Her chubby cheeks were red and her eyes still baby blue, and her hair was coming in just long enough to be styled into two tiny pigtails with curly sprigs of baby blonde locks spiraling out of little bows.
When the video began, there was classical music playing, live music on a cello and a violin, by a couple of gifted crewmembers of the Sunrise, Lenessa and Craig, Ibis remembered, even though she didn’t see them in the picture. She remembered because she’d been the one to ask them to perform that day. The camera was moving and swaying at a strange low angle. Ibis knew from the context of the thumbnail where it was taken even before it started the playback, however. She’d seen Olivia in that dress at a wedding aboard the Sunrise. The camera was in hover mode, angled down the aisle they had formed in the mess hall, Ibis having ordered the chairs out of storage, and helped count them out and arrange them, the seats in the recording now filled with crew members in attendance on either side. Ibis’ memories of all of these people were triggered all at once; they were the faces of so many friends and coworkers who had been lost either immediately in the destruction of the ship, or in the case of some, over the time of struggling to survive on Korix. She wanted to look away, but at the same time felt she couldn’t blink for trying to recapture all of their whole and happy likenesses in her mind.
Ibis blushed as she saw her own bare legs, the camera almost low enough to see up her dress white uniform variant mini skirt. She had been in the wedding party, which wasn’t that extensive. Besides the bride, Petty Officer Doreen Ackers- one of the scientists on her survey team, and the groom, Ensign Levi Bronder from ops, the party only consisted of herself and the best man, Bronder’s darts-playing buddy, Lt. jg Thavis, the very fetching Andorian pilot on Gamma shift, whose arm she was on. The camera caught his charisma, possibly even more from the worm's eye view, looking up at the way he cut in his dress uniform.
“That’s you!” Olivia said, surprised, looking back and forth between the spritely twenty-something and the woman that was all that remained of her anymore.
“Yeah.” Ibis said. “That was me. It was a wedding we had on the Sunrise, our ship.”
“What’s a wedding?”
“This… is a wedding.” Ibis said, almost telling Olivia to pay attention and see for herself.
Bronder’s dog, some kind of collie mix, trotted down the aisle, the rings tied to his collar and just glinting under the shag of his neck as he happily sauntered to his friend and master, the groom, waiting at the front of the mess hall alongside Commander Kahn, standing under an archway made of ribbons and tulle; the camera auto tracked the man and the dog as the beast happily accepted his good-boy accolades and sat beside, eager tail thumping on the deck.
The multi directional camera tracked a new motion and auto cut and refocused on the end of the aisle again. Ibis could see the shadow of the bride in the corridor, waiting as someone else passed her to file through the mess hall door. It was Matt Winetrout, in his dress whites like the rest of the party, but bent down sideways, with a toddler clinging to his pinky finger, a tiny basket of petals in her little arm. Matt was so proud and Olivia so confused. When he took away his hand to see if she would continue down the aisle, she put her hand in the basket then looked back at her dad.
“Yes, throw them.” Matt whispered. "You throw them."
She took out a fistful of petals and tried to look at them, her eyes crossed as she examined them in her chubby little fist. She tasted one and then shook them out of her fist like she had something icky. There was a soft wave of laughter over the attendees. Laura was in a party dress, covering her mouth as Olivia stole the show.
Ibis noticed then that Wallace was in a seat between Laura and the Chief Medical Officer, Doctor Wei, blocked into the middle of one of the rows. In all of the years Ibis had known him, Wallace usually hid in the back of those kinds of functions, and only attended when it had been clear he was required to. So when the camera captured him awkwardly pulling at his collar around his neck, Ibis found it strange. She tried to remember him even being at that event, but didn’t recall talking to him there. But then, she’d been focused on the bride, helping to make all of the arrangements, and then caught up in the growing spark of attraction between herself and Thavis… In the few moments that Wallace was in the frame, Oliva didn’t point him out or seemingly recognize him at all. Ibis could see why. He was almost a completely different person in appearance— younger, clean shaven, tightly cropped hair, his trained and muscled body in a pressed Marine uniform. Even his eyes were different now. Softer now than they used to be, most of the time. Although blurry and in the background, the fidelity of the image was good enough to tell he looked bitter and irritable, shifting impatiently like he was trapped.
Ibis’ kneecaps were in the frame again— clearly Matt had set up his camera at that height for a good view of his daughter— and as the maid of honor her duties included helping the flower girl to finish the walk to the front. Once Olivia had made it down the aisle Ibis returned the bundle of tulle and drool to Laura while Matt squeezed past everyone in the row to take up the remaining seat beside his wife, just in time for the music to change, signaling the pièce de résistance of the procession, and heralding the radiant bride to start her walk down the aisle.
“You were really a cute kid.” Ibis said as the camera returned to the couple at front where Bronder and Doreen held hands and Commander Sajal Khan, the Captain of the Sunrise began the ceremony. Khan, in her Earther Indian accent, related an antidote about Levi, who she had a fondness for as a kind of young protegee, and explained a trick he’d played to get someone to change shifts with him so he would be on watch with Ackers on Gamma Shift where they’d had a lot of quiet nights to chat on duty. Now that they were tying the knot, Khan was putting him back on Beta shift where he belonged. Everyone laughed again. And she opened a little book to read something more prepared for their vows.
“What are they doing?”
“Exchanging vows. They’re making promises to stay together, as a couple.”
“Why is everyone watching them making promises?”
Ibis shrugged, trying to figure out what to say. “Promises matter more when everyone hears them. Your parents had a wedding before you were born. It’s how most Humans and a lot of other races start their families.”
That made sense to Olivia. Nothing made her more cross than when someone broke their promise. So if you said it with more people there it would be even harder to break, because they would remind you or tattle. “Did you and Wallace make promises?”
“No.” Ibis swallowed. She toyed with the spoon in the cup of pudding she had been holding. “We aren’t married.”
“Aren’t you going to stay together?”
Ibis looked down, thinking. Wallace had meant everything he’d said to her during their last night on Korix, building sandcastles. She knew in her heart that much. But what would be waiting for them upon returning to the wider world? The night before when she’d talked to him in the infirmary, Ibis had thought he’d murmured something about wanting to be married, but he was in and out of sleep and medicated. Probably he was talking to Elizabeth in his dreams, imagining his young family, his wife and his daughter. She knew she couldn’t replace that. Ibis reminded herself that she had gotten used to being bridesmaid for her friends a long time ago. It was easier accepting her singleness outright, doing away with those expectations, than it was having her dreams crushed. Maybe she and Wallace would stay together, after a fashion. Or maybe the dream would run out at the same time as the nightmare’s end and she was fooling herself. In either case, she knew Porter. He was faithful to Elizabeth’s memory. Even if he did love her now, marriage was probably off the table.
She sighed heavily.
“You ask too many questions.” Ibis put the pudding in one of Olivia’s hands. “Eat this so that mean nurse leaves you alone.”
Setting the pad aside, but letting it continue playing so as to serve as a light in the tent, Olivia stirred the pudding and took a tiny test taste of it.
“See? It’s not awful.”
“It’s not fish,” she said. Olivia liked it, but she didn’t want to tell Ibis she liked it. Taking a full spoon, she acted like it was an effort.
Ibis let her feel like she was still resisting, and then something occurred to her all of a sudden.
“It’s too quiet—”
Ibis threw back a corner of the blanket and stood. She’d just realized all the hopping and jumping and squealing had stopped some time ago and anxiously scanned the little room for Ikemba. He was there laying very still on the corner of the bed and at first she panicked that he was hurt. But when she held still a moment longer, she recognized the soft rise and fall of sleepy breathing. He’d worn himself out and taken a nap.
Ibis extricated herself from the tent and laid down on the bare mattress too, her heart relaxing with the musical percussion of Olivia’s softly clinking spoon scraping the cup of pudding and the gentle sawing inhale and exhale of Ikemba at rest.
With a growing comfort and a gnawing fear in her chest all at once, unable to be sure of anything, Ibis curled herself around the boy protectively.
