trans_9 | Hospital visits [Open]

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Hospital visits [Open]

Luly has been checked into the Med Bay after a bit of an odd incident in the Mess Hall. So far she's stayed mostly of the way, given a bed in a secluded niche, and while she's ended up babbling to herself a few times or doing other odd behaviors, nothing's been obviously harmful.

With the ship's somewhat annoying lack of proper hospital robes and her disdain for the plantsuits, she's wrapped in just a sheet, hopefully while somebody figures out something to clean her usual makeshift red wrap with. At the moment she's sprawled across the bed assigned to her, focused intently on a holographic keyboard and screen being projected from a little cylinder she's placed on the bed. To look at her she could seem almost normal, except for the one hand keeps rapping out a compulsive, staccato rhythm against the bedsheets.

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Luly lets out a hiss of breath, though it seems more like relaxation than resignation.

"Lafiel, could you come here?" she asks quietly. (One of her legs starts twitching a little, but her face twists as she forces it back out into place.)

Ok, good. She seems to recognize me.

Lafiel hesitantly walks closer, each step a small question mark sound on the bulkhead.

Luly reaches hesitantly to take Lafiel's hand. For a moment her grip trembles, but then her hand tightens to an almost painful degree.

"Oh, thank god," she mutters as she pulls herself up to a kneeling position. That sheet is wrapped pretty well, but—by accident or intention—it's still showing off a good bit of cleavage.

Then she pulls Lafiel into a sudden, tight hug.

I am a viscountess of the Abriel royal family. I do not blush or flail. That is not what's happening. I am not doing that. Which, of course, is exactly what she does. After a few moments she awkwardly returns the hug though. She's just not used to being hugged by anyone except her dad.

"What happened?" Her dark eyes seem to wriggle, shimmer and do other animated things with concern.

Luly shuffles back a little, trying to pull Lafiel onto the bed with her. (This jolts the holographic emitter thing a little too much and it shuts off automatically, though this doesn't seem to bother Luly any.)

"It's a... long story," she says with a frown, her gaze sliding to a point a little to the left and upwards of Lafiel's eyes. "Estoh, ah, they don't really have right stuff here for..." She squeezes Lafiel's hand again, distracted by something.

After a moment she comes back into focus. "Colo's control mechanism, part of it's... in me. I thought I could manage with the stuff I already had, but I guess trying that without a nejha doctor wasn't a good idea." She smiles very weakly. She seems... well, 'feverish' isn't quite the right word, but it's close.

Something about her friend seems not entirely there. She seems to desire contact like a frightened child. So she sits down at the edge of the bed, scooted back a little bit so she could face her.

"Is that the machine you're bonded to?" She says when her eyes seem to refocus on her. "Why does it have those effects?"

Meluly leans against Lafiel in a way that would seem almost intimate if she weren't seeming so like a lost child. "The communion process, it's—there are lasting effects." She swallows heavily, trembling. "It wouldn't be as bad if I had my doctor."

Lafiel's hands kindof do this useless, feckless twiddling thing. She spends visible effort getting control of them, trying to get a mental handle on the situation.
She reframes it as if she were dealing with the one type of creature she allows to touch her like this. She relaxes and strokes Meluly's hair in the exact same way she would stroke her family's cats. She doesn't say anything but silently urges her to go on.

"It would be so much better if I could just get to Colo," Luly mumbles, burying her head against Lafiel's shoulder. It's a lie, but the thought makes her feel better. "They don't have my cào nǐ zǔzōng shíbā dài doctor and I'm seeing things and the only reason I even know you're really here is that I'm not nice enough to myself to hallucinate you and, nnngh!" She coughs sharply, squeezing Lafiel tighter.

Lafiel continues with this new routine. Reassigning Luly temporarily to the mental category of 'cat' has made this vastly easier. She even gets in a few scritches behind her ears. She tries to make her smile reassuring but it probably comes out strained and artificial looking.
"I am not a hallucination and we are going to find a way to heal you. Any time you are afraid of that, you can contact me on the clyu- ah, the omnicomms." She'd momentarily lapsed into the similar Abh native device.

The dark-skinned woman slowly sprawls back, knees still bent and ankles up against her thighs in a way that looks like it'd be decidedly uncomfortable for anyone less flexible. She tries to pull Lafiel with her, too, almost thoughtlessly, because now she's staring into the blank space beyond Lafiel's shoulder.

"It's not something that gets healed... it's part of being an Engel pilot. You just have to deal with it," she says very quietly, as her eyes close and her head twists back, face twisting like there's some awful crick in her neck.

Lafiel gives a little yelp as she's pulled back. Somehow she instinctively twists stomach down, as if she were playing zero-g jousting. Her face gets buried in the pillow and she frantically disentangles herself from everything. She remembers...A coffin. But not the menacing kind. This coffin meant salvation.

Then, guiltily, she remembers the strange and vulnerable state of mind Luly is in right now. She sits back up in the bed and puts her hand back on the top of Luly's head. "So it's like a froce system...But what's inside the machine that causes that?"

"It's how Engels work. It's—" She shudders, letting out a convulsive cough-hurk that might have turned into a spate of vomiting if there had actually been anything in her stomach.

She mumbles something that sounds almost like a poem, all in Nazzadi except for the single recognizable phrase "war machine". Her hands clutch at Lafiel's arm like those of a drowning girl to a lifeline. "Oh, reiozy, I'm sinking," she moans quietly, face caught somewhere between sickness and vertigo.

I have to stop this cycle before she gets drawn into it again.

Lafiel doesn't know wether to pinch her or slap her or hug her or what, but she knows she has to act quickly. Her other hand rests on Meluly's shoulder as she talks in a clear, slow tone. "You're not. We...I won't abandon you." And if that doesn't work...

"Please don't go away," Luly mumbles. She pulls Lafiel in closer against her again--selfish, maybe, though she's too out of it to really process that train of thought. "I think this is gonna be a bad trip," she adds in a whisper, and her eyes are still jammed shut, and her arms are trembling enough that Lafiel could still pull away fairly easily.

"Reiozy, it feels like you're the only person here I can tr--" The admission breaks off into a little, wordless breath of panic, and her grip on any part of Lafiel ahe can reach suddenly tightens considerably.

Lafiel considers pulling back. Leaving her to her demons here and fleeing away down the hall. She probably wouldn't remember this later anyway.

But what would that say about Abriel honor if I abandoned someone in such obvious need of rescuing?

And it's clear Luly does need that, as much as any escape pod drifting through the void. So she sits back against the headboard and puts her arms around the other woman, making nonsensical shushing noises. This is going to be a long night...

The next hour or two or three pass in a tidal thrumming of delirium and nonsense: Luly sees and hears and feels things that clearly aren't there, sometimes speaking to empty air in Nazzadi or fragmented, hard-to-interpret English; sometimes trying to hide her face, quaking; and sometimes sliding into bouts of near-self-mutilation, scratching at her hands or face almost hard enough to bleed or chewing on herself, though some faint spark of sanity seems to pull her back from the edge of any truly dire consequences. The whole experience, from the up-close view Lafiel has, is in the most blunt sense just plain disturbing, and her occasional pleading murmurs or tighter clinging to Lafiel in her rare moments of near-normality only more.

Still, she seems to be slowly coming out of--exhausted and sweating, enough energy gone that she's nearly asleep, she murmurs in rhythmic Nazzadi. Huh, there's that word "reiozy" again...

Lafiel passes the storm with the tight control she learned as a captain. She envisions herself as a rock, a sun anchored against the celestial winds and storms. That's how she's able to process the whole thing. She snatches her hands away from doing herself harm, meekly accepts the pain when those sharp teeth turn on her. She has the same nervous tic.

When Meluly finally falls into an innocent, semi-dream state, Lafiel snatches up her omnicomm and types quickly into the holographic display: Translate: Reiozy. From: Nazzadi. To: Baronh.

The translation of meaning comes up as an awkward mix of insufficient concepts: caretaker-wife-partner-clanmate. The straight literal is strange, too: "(female) keeper of the home during the opposite daily cycle". (There is a male version of the word, it turns out, just the same but with an a instead of a y.)

Luly starts, very lightly, snoring.

Lafiel's heart does a little bump when she reads the translation. Wife means nothing to her: Abh do not have a marriage concept. The rest however...She can't possibly mean me. She was hallucinating. Thought I was someone else...What have I gotten myself into?

Lafiel carefully disentangles herself. On her way out, she snatches a box of bandages to treat the marks on her shoulder and arm.

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Hospital visits [Open]

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