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.