Day 50: Chapel

[full-score.livejournal.com]

The last thing Claude heard was the Head Doctor's voice faintly filtering into the corridors of the ship before he found himself tucked beneath the sheets of his bed. It took a moment to register he'd even changed locations, but then he he abruptly sat up, fought the wave of nausea that washed over him, and felt the blankets beneath his fingers. The room. He was back in his room now. Under different circumstances, he might have wondered if last night had been some horrid dream, but the sharp pain in his eyes gave him a rude awakening. Hissing through his teeth, Claude buried the heels of his palms against his lids, only to discover two cold compresses had been taped over them.

"Good morning, Thomas," he heard the nurse's cheerful voice from beside his bed. Her sudden presence nearly made him jump out of his skin, and he sharply turned toward the source of the greeting, heart beating rapidly in his chest. "I'm sorry you're not feeling well today, but hopefully you can still enjoy some of the activities we have planned."

'Not feeling well' was a bit of an understatement. His hand hurt, his stomach kept turning with every movement, and it felt like someone had dumped a bunch of sand into both eye sockets. Right now, Claude just wanted the nurse to leave him be, but it didn't look like that was an option. Taking his uninjured hand, she gently tugged him out of bed, despite his protests that, no, really, he just wanted to stay in and sleep, please.

"I think getting out of your room a little bit will do you good," she told him. "I'm sorry your eyes are probably hurting, though. If you're ever feeling uncomfortable, don't hesitate to ask one of us for some pills."

"What about eye drops?" Claude asked tightly.

"Oh, no, too much of that could damage your eyes," she cautioned, and the sheer irony of the situation hit Claude so hard that it would have been laughable if he didn't already feel like crying right then. The nurse was as oblivious to it as always, however. "I know you usually go into the chapel during this shift. Would you like to go there again?" Claude didn't answered immediately, but that didn't deter the nurse. "Yes, I think that sounds best..."

In truth, he probably should have requested the sun room -- it was closer, for one, which meant the nurse didn't have to lead him as far of a distance. For another, lying down on one of their sofas sounded like a good option. But by the time Claude came to that conclusion, he was too stubborn to say anything, and he made his way up to the second floor, his footing slow, but steady.

The nurse deposited him on one of the central pews, next to the aisle, before leaving him to himself. Thankfully, it was still early in the shift. As he paused to listen, the room was mostly silent, save for the footsteps and hushed voices of the occasional staff member or patient who trickled in. But it was probably only a matter of time before others came. For some reason, the thought of being stuck in a crowded room made him tense, not necessarily because he thought anyone would pay him any mind, but because he simply didn't want it right then.

Somehow, the full implications of what happened last night hadn't sunken in: experiments, healing himself, the issue of whether he could actually go home after this, not being able to see, the ship, father. Instead, he just felt saturated with all of it, paralyzed by the horror of what they'd done to him, and the uncertainty of what it all meant beyond this moment. Claude took a shuddering breath, uninjured hand balling into a fist in his lap.

[For Guy.]

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[hes-deadjim.livejournal.com]

McCoy was just flipping to the middle of the book and skimming the pages there when a man sat down next to him. The doctor looked up. The humanoid was fairly tanned, with black hair and yellow irises. It wouldn't have been too out of the ordinary for him until he spoke.

The man seemed to beam at him with his voice but not the rest of his face. It looked odd on a human, but, and McCoy thought of ZEX, there were plenty of alien life forms out there that didn't communicate the way a human did. Some used telepathy, others used sign language, and yet others used color displays, or body language only. It didn't stop that momentary reaction against the conflicting messages, but he was practiced enough to get over that instinct quickly.

Did he just call him a meatbag?

Maybe he'd heard wrong. "Mornin'," he said. Maybe he had or hadn't, but he'd certainly heard him actually preface that good morning with 'greeting'. McCoy's mouth threatened to quirk. "Can't say I've ever heard a greeting quite like that."

[arc-wrench.livejournal.com]

Confusion. A promising start! Confused meatbags could be entertaining, although he preferred to cause such reactions as "Why is their blood on the ceiling?" and "How did that hand grenade find its way into my cereal?". He liked those sorts of responses to his work, however brief the period of appreciation might be.

"Query: Which part? The 'Greeting' prefix, the 'good morning', in which case I would next ask what rock have you been living under and how large was it to provide such a disconnect from the idioms of your species, or the 'meatbag' part? And no, I will not stop calling you that. Even if I wanted to, I cannot." And of course he wanted to. No more perfect summary of organic life had ever been created.

[hes-deadjim.livejournal.com]

The amusement he'd been starting to feel vanished. He'd definitely said "meatbag", which, unless there was another meaning for it wherever he came from, certainly sounded derogatory to him.

"The first and last one," McCoy said a little crossly. "Why are you doing that?"

The prefix had to be a linguistic matter, native back where this man came from, maybe a mode of polite address or alert. He'd never heard any species follow anything exactly like it, but if this facility was able to pull people from across space, time, and other dimensions, then it wasn't too difficult to imagine this man hailed from a civilization still undiscovered by the Federation.

How were they all understanding each other anyway? Some of the mannerisms remained despite a different body, like the Admiral's difficulty with eating, but aside from this prefix and "meatbag" business with this patient, they seemed to understand each other. He didn't spot any universal translators.

[arc-wrench.livejournal.com]

Repetition: As I have said many times before in this place--I have begun deleting previous instances from my memory core, they are becoming far too numerous to bother with--I speak with prefixes because that is how I was programmed to speak. I called you and will continue to call you 'meatbag' because after my master first heard me use the term to describe her apprentice, she ordered me to continue using it for all organic lifeforms."

As repetitive as this explanation was, he almost always enjoyed its results "Addendum: Also, I like saying it." So there.

[hes-deadjim.livejournal.com]

Programmed, memory cores, organic life forms? Sounded like he wasn't so flesh and blood outside of this place. McCoy couldn't say he cared at all for being addressed as a meatbag, but he'd heard worse.

"You don't sound like any machine I've ever met. Never heard one admit it actually liked anything,' he said. He'd been around plenty of computers in his life time, machines and the rare robot, Spock if you counted Vulcans in the mix, they shared a similarity or two, but he'd never heard one speak of having a 'master' or preferences.

[arc-wrench.livejournal.com]

"Condescending: Of course I am not. I was created by my master as a unique model to serve as her personal assassin, a job that I excel at." Yes, he could have gone with a less irritating prefix, but he wasn't exactly in this facility to make meatbag friends. That would be normal (and possibly sensible), and everyone could agree, HK was anything but normal.

"Statement: Additionally, most meatbags never really pay attention to droids. 'Why should I care what the loyal robotic slave wants?' they always seem to think, 'It will keep working anyway.'" HK was on something of a roll now, this was an easy subject to antagonize others with. "It was a sort of functional blindness to the qualities and character of droidkind that made some assassinations ridiculously simple. The meatbags no more suspected me than they would suspect that a table would suddenly pull out a high-powered rifle and shoot them dead."