for olivia

[sharpshooting]

John didn't make a habit of going up to the second floor of Sick Bay too often. Deserted more often than not, its quiet was sometimes eerie. There, more than almost anywhere else (except for some of the rooms in the Labyrinth, which he made an especial point of avoiding) he found himself imagining the station's former inhabitants, the uses to which they'd put the space, what some of the machines had been needed for.

Some, like the self-surgery pod, he no longer needed to imagine. Thanks to the facehuggers, he'd now had a chance to see it in lurid action-- and to thank their captors for its existence, as there was no way they'd have been able to save Santana without it.

But finding Olivia standing beside the pod, wearing a quizzical expression as she inspected it (carefully, without touching; he was impressed) set the memory at a good enough remove that he was able to approach her with a genuine smile on his face.

"Bit creepy, isn't it?" he observed wryly as her eyes lifted to his.

Comments

[seekanswers]

Olivia looked up. "I think I'm losing my edge," she said after a moment. "I didn't hear you come in." She said it in a way that invited him to take it as a joke, but she did wonder if this strange environment wasn't taking something from her. Every day she spent here felt like another day in a kind of purgatory, like a waking dream she couldn't break out of.

Like if she just waited long enough, Walter's homemade LSD would wear off and she'd open her eyes to see Peter standing by her.

"Is this what I think it is?" She asked. Redirect.

[sharpshooting]

"If you think it's a device which you climb into to perform surgery on yourself when there's no doctor present to do it for you, then yes," John said with a touch of wry humour. "Are you familiar with-- with things like this?" It hadn't occurred to him that she might be; something about her, the brief minutes they'd spent chatting when they'd met, had made John guess that Olivia was from a similar time to his own. But it wouldn't be the first time he'd missed the mark there.

[seekanswers]

Olivia shook her head, "Not exactly. Just--the idea of it."

She thought maybe she remembered sketches in some of Walter's old files. It was something he'd dream up, anyway. Something just out of reach of modern science, just beyond the modern imagination. John hadn't so much confirmed a suspicion as brought the image into focus.

"How does it interface?"

[sharpshooting]

"You program it from here," he said, standing back a bit so she could come join him on the far side and inspect the controls. "Tell it what you need done, then climb inside. It scans your body, you confirm that it's going to do what you need it to do, and it-- it does."

His tone was casual, but after a minute he had to grin and admit, "Most days Sick Bay's just my office, you know, it's where I work. But sometimes I walk past things like this and it's like, right, I actually do live on a spaceship."

[seekanswers]

Olivia stood next to him, arms folded against her chest. She nodded as she listened. "That's...incredible." She had been going to say 'unbelievable,' but only from reflex. She could believe a lot of things.

"Do you get used to it?" She didn't clarify. Place like this, time like this, she didn't need to.

[sharpshooting]

John had to consider that. "Some parts, yes. Others, I'm not sure I'll ever really get over the surprise." Over a year now, and still sometimes he looked at Sherlock and felt shock go through him like a knife.

"Has it started feeling any less surreal to you yet?" He couldn't remember at this point how long it had taken him to stop panicking about everything, or what had started to seem normal first.

[seekanswers]

"Ah--" Olivia cast about for a way to answer his question without sounding as desperate as she felt sometimes, but there wasn't much to say. She quirked one corner of her mouth in a sardonic half-smile. "Not really."

[sharpshooting]

John nodded, feeling a rush of sympathy for her, his mouth curling in a rueful smile. "It-- well, it comes and goes. Did for me, at least."

He felt a little embarrassed saying the rest, but if he'd come here and hadn't had Sherlock, hadn't met Sharon, he'd have wanted someone to say it to him. "You're not alone here. If you need anything, to talk, or not talk, just to sit with someone-- there's none of us who haven't been through the same thing. Except maybe Sherlock," he amended with another crooked grin. "But I try not to lump him in with anyone except Spock if I can help it."