trans_9 | That Dizzying Moment When Past and Present Becomes One [Closed]

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That Dizzying Moment When Past and Present Becomes One [Closed]

If Eva has a personal raincloud, she's convinced it's storming today.

She sits on her feet in the garden, wrenching plants from the earth, not caring about the hard dirt digging angry separations between her fingernails and her flesh. What she'd really like to do is throw all the silverware and dishes in the house onto the yard, but she can't justify that luxury on Stacy. So instead she digs aimless holes and uproots weeds and flowers alike, up to her arms in earth, face smeared with dust.

She's keeping herself in the mechanical headspace where the only thing she can focus on is the movement of her arms, the way her shoulder's old wounds ache, the unbidden clench in her jaw. If she thinks about anything less physical, she'll think about Marco, scared and maybe sick in the Med Bay. She'll think about that violation on the Quarter from the psychic wave. She'll think about how much she could use Peter to lean on right now. She'll think about the possibility that they won't find a cure for Marco and that his last memory of her will be her betraying his physical safety to Kang.

So she doesn't think. She digs, she pulls, and she waits for Rory.

[trigger warning]

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She nods, feeling almost abashed and as if Rory's accused her of not caring about the other patients. She kneads her hands through the dirt some more.

"I don't know where any of it is. I told you that," she says, frustrated. It's not Rory's fault, really. He's been perfectly polite, perfectly professional, and under better circumstances she might even classify him as comforting. But she can't help more because she knows even less than Marco does, even if she's willing to reveal a little bit more, and it leaves her feeling useless and hopeless. "No, he didn't mention anything to me. He doesn't exactly keep a curfew here. I don't get kept in the loop."

She grinds her teeth and ducks her head again. It's easy to get angry at everything and everyone, including Marco for getting himself into this situation, however that happened. With no target for her anger, it just ends up spilling everywhere. "There might be ice cream he ate in the freezer. I don't know."

"I'm sorry, Ma'am. I don't mean to bother you. I realize some of these questions may sound repetitive, but often times it's the small details that help us discover the root of the problem. Marco is essentially patient zero, he's the first one that showed any sign of infection and therefore we need to find out as much about him as possible."

He frowned, restraining a sigh and observing the tension lining her face. "Thank you, Ma'am, that would be helpful. If you wouldn't mind, could I ask a few questions about Marco's vaccination history and childhood ailments? It might not help, but I'm trying to cover everything that could possibly be interacting with it. You are a resource we lack for most of the other infected."

She sighs, a deep motion that moves her entire body. "I know. I'm sorry. It's just...difficult." There's no other word for it, and yet that one doesn't quite capture how awful it is. She gets up slowly and motions for Rory to follow her into the house, wiping her shoes at the doorstep.

"Of course. I can't attest to his teenage years but I was there until he was eleven," she says, her affect going flat and detached again.

He almost reached out to put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, but there was something about the way that she carried herself that warned him against touching her without her permission. "I know, Ms. Salazar, you don't need to apologize for being worried about your son." He carefully wiped his feet before stepping inside, taking note of the mention of her being gone but not addressing it just yet.

"Anything you can give would be a great help, Ms. Salazar. Complete medical records are literally a life saver. Any allergies we should be aware of? Is he all caught up on immunizations?"

"I'm apologizing for being irritable, not for being worried," she corrects, as if there's a difference to her. She opens the fridge and pulls out the box of ice cream - what Marco was eating right before he decided she was Visser One again. She pauses for a moment, willing it to just be ice cream, then hands it to Rory.

"No allergies. No major childhood illness. Just chicken pox and the yearly flu and all that. I always took him to get his shots on schedule, but I don't know if Peter did." She highly doubts he did, actually. "And he hasn't needed them since I got back, because of the morphing."

"Aren't they the same thing?" He quirked his lips, accepting the ice cream. "Thank you."

He nodded, resting his pad on the paper and writing. "So he's had most of the normal childhood ailments, then. We won't need to worry about that." He frowned. "The morphing keeps him from getting sick?"

"No." She glares at the refrigerator door.

"It keeps him from getting injured and takes care of bacteria and viruses, almost always. It's based on DNA, but I'm no scientist. I don't know entirely how it works." She really wishes she did, although she supposes if this is happening to multiple people the morphing isn't causing any of the problems. Or fixing anything.

He didn't push her further, watching her curiously. No, it wasn't, was it? Irritation was being used to disguise her hurt, to bury it. It was unimaginable, to have a son think you were the enemy. And even harder to imagine that at one time, she must have been, and this could only be reminding her of a time she would rather forget. Worry and anger and- well, if he was home, he would give her the number for his hospital's grief councilor. But he wasn't and those mundane services were lost to him.

"That's a very interesting ability, and that information...Do you know if it works on contaminates, such as poisons or medication?" To be able to heal from anything and not get sick. Fascinating, and worrisome. That meant they could rule out mundane and some mystical ailments. Which meant there had to be some sort of root cause, likely not a poison. "Thank you." He wrote quickly, frowning. This was useful information, and they should have known it for treatment purposes.

Their ability to morph and heal their own injuries could mean the difference between the life and death of another patient. "Is there anything else you can think of that would help us treat him, Ms. Salazar?"

"I'm fairly certain it works on poisons, so I guess by that logic it has to work on medications too. I can't...I can't think of anything else that would help you treat him. If he's going backwards he'll lose the morphing powers as a young teenager, so if there's any reason to take that into effect you should." She exhales deeply. "And of course, the irony is that the younger he gets the easier it'll be for you. He wasn't always paranoid and uncooperative."

"Ah, how young? That might be important. I doubt he'll tell us, right?" That was something even more concerning, if they needed to be sedated they'd need to use something fast acting. But he wasn't going to tell Marco's mother that. And if they were going to be aging backwards and losing that ability, then the issue might become making certian they didn't OD. "That's good to know. Children...well." He shook his head, thinking of Conner. "We'll find out what's causing this, Ms. Salzar. And reverse it."

"Thirteen. That's when he loses his powers, at least. Although...I don't know about his attitude. I didn't exactly get the chance to observe," she says bitterly, but her anger isn't directed at Rory. There's just an acrid sense of anger hanging in the air around her in general. "You'd better. He's a good boy, Mr. Williams. Brave and self-sacrificing. He shouldn't...and I couldn't handle losing him."

She knows this as fact.

His face softened, hand extending in a gesture of comfort. "You won't have to, Ms. Salzar. Between the medical team and the Doctor, I promise you no one will die or be harmed. They're too clever for that. It'll just be a brief vacation into...fonder times. Time travel is something the Doctor deals with on a daily basis, you can trust him to find a solution to this." And he'd just be crossing his fingers for angry lizard women with high tech weaponry or a TARDIS breakdown, just for the moment. He needed her to believe him, to believe in the Doctor. To believe that everyone would make it out of this ok.

"I don't need your empty reassurances," she says, jerking away from his hand. "You have no idea what's going on and neither do any of them. At least respect me enough to give me facts instead of optimistic hypotheticals. I've given you facts."

"They're not empty. I trust the Doctor." He obediently withdrew his hand. "The more impossible the situation seems, the more likely he is to come up with a solution. He's even found a way to slow it down, even if not permanently. Please trust that we are all doing as much as we can, Ms. Salazar, and I won't lie to you to make you feel better. That helps none of us."

He kept his voice calm, serious. Reacting to an angry and upset parent with further anger helped no one. He needed to remain calm. If she needed to yell at him, then that was acceptable.

"And that's nice for you, but I don't hand trust out like Halloween candy, so save it for someone unprepared for the worst," she says, balling her hands up into fists and covering her eyes. She knows she shouldn't be like this, not to someone who's just trying to help, but her world is falling in and every nerve in her body distrusts the people telling her not to panic. She takes a deep breath. She's trying to be cooperative, but she feels so damn helpless and uninformed and she just wants to break something.

"Do you have any more questions? Because eventually I need you to leave so I can empty the contents of this refrigerator onto the floor." Mostly ice, of course. They don't keep much in the fridge where Ax can get at it.

He swallowed the sigh, nodding. "Of course, Ma'am, I'm sorry for bothering you. Thank you for your help and I'll make certian to send someone to inform you the moment we have any new information. Thank you for your time."

He bowed his head, retreating to the door and leaving her in silence once more.

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That Dizzying Moment When Past and Present Becomes One [Closed]

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