USS Manhattan
Elsewhere / Shuttle Bay - Fitzgerald's backstory + coming aboard
Posted by Ensign Anna Fitzgerald (Medical Officer) in Elsewhere / Shuttle Bay - Fitzgerald’s backstory + coming aboard
She’s running. Running towards the swirling white mass; running towards the sound of water coming down hundreds of liters at a time. Her heart is pounding in her ears, her breathing ragged, her chest too small to take it all in; her thoughts are so jumbled they’re unintelligible even to her. But she knows one thing: she needs to keep going. She’s going to be too late, again.
“Please try not to chip the paint. It’s taken me two days to get it to look right.”
Commander Jonathan O’Neil frowned as he carefully stepped around the fence. It had a hand-written sign hanging from it: CAUTION - WET PAINT.
“I didn’t really think you had it in you, Anna. This whole traditionalist suburban housewife routine? The home with the white picket fence, the 1.3 kids, the carefully crafted image of domestic bliss – and then I come here, and I find that half of it is not even proverbial. What happened to you? Where is your sense of adventure?”
Anna smiled. Typical of Jon. Only the choices he made in life could possibly be the right ones. When they were both a lot younger and a lot more careless, she used to tease him mercilessly about his unspoken conviction that anyone who chose to live in an actual house must be an incarnation of boredom itself. Ten years and many a hard-earned lesson about the pointlessness of certain arguments later, she just smiled at him indulgently. Her life was anything but boring.
“I doubt you’ll ever get to discover this for yourself, Jon, but believe me, there’s plenty of adventure involved in my so-called traditionalist life. Try being a parent for one day. I’m sure you’ll understand. And for your information, the fence serves a purpose.”
“Oh, it does?” Jon sounded mildly amused, and she knew he was quietly mocking her, but she didn’t care. A pair of tiny toddler feet chose that moment to come peeking out the front door, neatly proving her point.
“Yes,” she said, “It serves the purpose of keeping my two-year-old out of trouble. Now tell me you didn’t come all the way from San Francisco just to mock my lifestyle.”
“I didn’t come all the way from San Francisco just to mock your lifestyle.”
She picked up her daughter and walked back inside, expecting Jon to follow her and clarify. When he didn’t, she turned to face him.
“So why did you?”
“I came because an old buddy of mine needs a good CNS,” he said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jacket as he walked inside and took a look around her hallway – painting supplies, plastic bins full of carpenter tools and boxes with labels like ‘office’ and ‘guest bathroom’ were stacked against all four walls, some of them fenced in by what looked like disassembled pieces of furniture – “but from the looks of all this, it seems you have your hands full around here.”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” she said, looking at him pointedly. “My private practice is set to open in three weeks, and as you can see, I’m nowhere near ready.”
“Oh please, Anna. You were once one of the rising stars in the Fleet, and you’re telling me you gave it all up for this? For living in the middle of nowhere and spending your days telling adult teenagers with way too much time on their hands that it’s OK to be angry with daddy?”
Anna had to make a conscious effort not to roll her eyes at him.
“Too bad you can’t sit in on the conversations your current ship’s counselor has day in and day out, Jon. I think you’d be surprised. And besides, you and I both know that was a different lifetime. My daughter will be starting kindergarten before too long. I want her to grow up breathing actual fresh air. I want her to know what it feels like to have real grass beneath her bare feet. I do not want the habitat she calls home to be an artificially created one.”
Jon shrugged. “Suit yourself. But one day, I guarantee you, you’ll come begging me to rescue you from this mundane existence.”
“OK, Jon,” Anna said, another indulgent smile on her face. Then she re-opened the front door for him and pointedly added “Goodbye, Jon.”
“Won’t you at least offer me a synth ale before I go? Or better yet, a good old-fashioned shot of Johnny Walker. I suppose these traditionalist hide-outs at least have that going for them – drinking real alcohol around here doesn’t get you the criminal treatment.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no alcohol in this house; and the replicator hasn’t been installed yet. This is, after all, a traditionalist hide-out. Goodbye, Jon.”
“Oh come on, Anna. Really?”
“Really.”
She proceeded to stare at him until he got the message; and when he finally did, she closed the door behind him with a somewhat gratifying slam.
She’s running. Running towards the swirling white mass; the sound of water coming down hundreds of liters at a time is perfusing her whole conscious being. Her heart is pounding in her ears, her breathing ragged, her chest too small to take it all in. And then she sees it. A small child’s hand sticking out of the wall of water. She needs to keep going. She’s going to be too late. Again.
A drowning is a very silent event. People who are drowning don’t scream. They don’t wave for help. They don’t attempt to swim to safety. They just flap their arms beside them, bobbing quietly up and down in the water until their body can’t keep up anymore. Sixty seconds or less. And then they’re gone.
“You know it’s natural to feel this way after such a tragic accident, Anna. You are angry. You’re looking for someone to blame, and you’re placing all the blame on yourself. It may seem impossible to you now, but this will pass.”
It had been Lisa’s third birthday party. Anna had taken her daughter and three neighborhood kids out to the beach that day. Some of the other parents had been there with her, but she was the only one who had been in the water with the kids. Her own daughter had drowned not five feet away from her, and she hadn’t seen it until it was too late.
Anna looked at her longtime friend, and trusted colleague of six months. “I know it is natural, yes. But to be honest, knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. Everything in the house reminds me of her. The little nook up in the den where she used to spend hours playing with her dollhouse; the piece of wall where we kept track of how she was growing; the color of the carpeting upstairs – she helped me pick it out. Every waking moment, I spend missing her as if she were a physical part of me that I’ve lost. And when I close my eyes …”
She trailed off there, and Evelyn put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Are you at least getting some sleep?” she asked softly.
Anna shrugged. “Some nights are better than others. I keep having these dreams …”
“What kind of dreams?”
She sighed. “I’m running like crazy; breathing the lungs out of my body to get to her in time. But I always wake up before I reach her.”
“That too is a natural part of the process, you know; you’ll keep re-living the experience, if not by talking about it, then in other ways, until you’re done with it.”
“You know you don’t have to tell me any of that, right?”
Evelyn shrugged. “I know that you know the theory as well as I do, if not better. But sometimes it can help to hear it from someone else. You know I’m always willing to lend an ear, right?”
Anna smiled weakly. “Yes, I know. Thank you.”
“I heard about your daughter. I’m sorry, Anna.”
“I’m sure you are, Jon. Your concern is appreciated. Now if that’s the only thing you called to say, I have … things to do.”
Jon raised an eyebrow. “Do you? That’s not what I heard.”
She considered hanging up on him then and there. She wasn’t in the mood for being judged by him. But then, whatever rumors he had been hearing about her, she would probably only make it worse by refusing to talk to him. She sighed.
“Oh really. What did you hear, then?”
“I heard you don’t get out much these days. That you just sit at home doing whatever with the blinds closed, and you’ve all but given up on your practice.”
Anna just looked at him blankly.
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“And if it is, what’s that to you? Are you going to personally come down here and shake me out of it?”
Jon shrugged. “I became Captain of a ship without a Counselor last week, and it seems to me you could use a change of scenery.”
“Are you trying to rescue me from my mundane existence again, Jon?”
“I’m just trying to be your friend, Anna.”
“I didn’t see you trying to be my friend back when I found myself pregnant and single, Jon. Just get rid of it and move on? Isn’t that what you said? I think it’s a little late for you to be playing sensitive now.”
“At least think about it.”
“Goodbye, Jon.”
She’s running. Running towards the swirling white mass; she can only hear the sound of water coming down hundreds of liters at a time. Her heart is pounding in her ears, her breathing ragged, her chest too small to take it all in. And then she sees it. A small child’s hand sticking out of the wall of water. She grabs it. “Take me with you. Please, please take me with you!”
“I don’t know if I can do this, Evelyn.”
“Take all the time you need. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Do we have to do it today?”
“We don’t have to do anything today, if you’re not ready for it. But we do have to do it at some point. You know that. You won’t be able to move on until we have.”
She nodded, then took a deep, shaky breath, and opened the door to her daughter’s bedroom.
Just seeing Lisa’s favorite teddy bear sitting forlornly in a corner was enough for her to break down completely and burst into tears.
Everything around her is white. It is disconcerting, but somehow safe at the same time. She’s OK. Her daughter comes toward her, and she can feel a single tear trickling down her cheek.”Don’t cry, mommy. I’m not scared anymore.” She reaches out to the child, and for a moment, she can feel the skin of her tiny wrist beneath her fingers. Then it starts to fade away. “Go now, mommy. It’s OK. You don’t have to cry anymore.”
“Are you still looking for a Counselor? Or better yet, a Doctor?”
Jon looked at her pensively. “I’m not, but I can ask around. I’m sure there are one or two Captains in the Fleet who still owe me a favor. Are you ready?”
She smiled. “As ready as I’ll ever be. You were right. I do need a change of scenery.”
“All right, then. Let me contact a few old friends. I’ll see what I can come up with.”
That had been six weeks ago. And here she was, walking off the shuttle, her duffel bag slung over her shoulder. Aside from the two changes of civilian clothing that had always been her companions on shipboard assignments, the bag contained only one thing. Lisa’s favorite teddy bear. A keepsake. The rest of her possessions had either been donated or sold; the private practice had moved to another location and been taken over by Evelyn; the house had been liquidated.
Anna hoped that the USS Manhattan, all the way over in the Delta Quadrant, might offer her the chance at a new start. She didn’t know exactly what kind of strings Jon had been able to pull, but here she was, nearly five years after her last shipboard assignment. She’d been a psychiatrist, there. She planned to start over in Medicine, literally on the other side of the universe.
‘Well, no time like the present’, she thought, and she started to make her way towards Sickbay.
~ Doctor Anna Fitzgerald
OOC: This is stunningly beautiful! ~Linds