Posted by Lieutenant Junior Grade Leah Hart (Nurse Practitioner/Counseling) in Temp Quarters- Assessing the Situation

Posted by Commander Roman Alden (First Officer & Chief Science Officer) in Temp Quarters- Assessing the Situation

Posted by Lieutenant Junior Grade Leah Hart (Nurse Practitioner/Counseling) in Temp Quarters- Assessing the Situation
Posted by… suppressed (3) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snip)

“Why not?” she asked softly. It wasn’t the first time he had asserted he couldn’t talk about it. He could but he was choosing not to and Leah needed to understand what was behind it, even if it was only a hint. She also knew that she would have to shift into Phase 2 very soon, but much depended on how he answered.

~Leah Hart, NP

Roman took a short, shaky breath, shaking his head again. Because it hurt too much, because it reminded him of things he couldn’t think about without breaking down in tears, but he wasn’t able to verbalize that. So instead he said, fighting to keep his voice something resembling even, “I just can’t.”

~ Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO

She watched him struggle and Leah well knew what that felt like, even if their experiences of it were vastly different. She inhaled deeply and radiated the genuine compassion she felt for this man. “You are so strong,” Hart said with conviction.

“You have to be in order to carry something that heavy, that overwhelming, for however long you have carried it. And it’s hard to be that strong. Harder still to feel like we can set that burden down for a moment. It can make everything feel so precarious, like everything will fall apart if we do.”

~Leah Hart, NP

“I’m not, though. ‘Cause I can’t keep doing it.” Roman replied. “That’s why. Why the note. Why all of it.” He looked up at her, not quite meeting her gaze. “There’s nothing to be put aside. Nothing can change things.”

~ Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO

She nodded very slowly. “Just because we’ve reached a breaking point, doesn’t mean we aren’t still strong. It just means that we’ve run out of tools to deal with the thing we’re carrying. It’s like running an experiment and finding that the one process you’ve been using isn’t ideal. So instead of tossing the whole experiment out as a failure, we adjust variables one by one till we find a process that works better.”

~Leah Hart, NP

“Except the experiment only needs to be run because of a catastrophic failure, irreparable.” Roman gave her a look, for once not hiding his emotions from his face. “It’s not fixable. I can’t go back and change things, that’s not how things work.” It was unimaginable to him to ‘get over’ it or move past it. And that’s what he felt like he was being forced to do. There was more to it, but he couldn’t say. Couldn’t make himself do it.

~ Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO

There were circular conversations they could get into that would not help and they had approached the entry point to one. It was okay, she would get there a different way, when he was more ready. Roman might not know what that point truly was, but her goal was to give him every reason to take that change when it appeared. “Not everything needs to be fixed, Commander. Sometimes the answer is finding our way to some level of acceptance, when we’re ready.”

Roman shook his head again. There could be no acceptance, for to him, to accept it was to let go of something dear to him. And he couldn’t do that.

She drew in an audible breath. “Now, I think it might be time for a quick break. I will allow your fiancee to come visit later, but we need a bit more time to finish this assessment. In the meantime, if you could have anything here with you in these quarters, is there something you’d ask for?”

~Leah Hart, NP

“How long of a break? I want to get this over with so I can get out of here.” Roman complained, looking at her. He shook his head. “There’s nothing that important to me… Well, maybe the reports from the labs....”

~ Cmdr Alden, XO/CSO