Chapter Text
There was a very specific art to being invisible, and Dot had it down to a science.
It wasn't about being quiet, although she was. It wasn't about staying in her room, although she did that too. It was about learning the rhythms of a place well enough that you could exist inside them without disrupting them.
In her case, she knew the Brave Olivine's rhythms better than she knew people.
She knew that Roy woke up at seven and immediately tripped over something within the first thirty seconds. She knew that Friede started humming in the hallway around eight, which meant it was safe to slip out for breakfast because he always looked at his rotom phone when he was humming, which also meant he wouldn't try to talk to her. She knew that Mollie did rounds between nine and ten, and that the infirmary was empty by ten-fifteen, which was the ideal window to use the bathroom near it because it was the only one with good water pressure.
She had a schedule, it worked, and it kept things manageable.
What did not fit into the schedule was this… situation.
Dot sat at her desk at two in the morning and was bathed in the blue light of her monitor while she tried to convince herself that the tightness in her chest was from bad posture. Or maybe the recycled air. Or maybe she had been sitting still for too long, and her lungs were just reminding her that they existed.
On her screen, a live stream counter ticked upward. Her Nidothing stream was running on a timer, a pre-recorded block she had queued up for nights like this when she just needed to not think about the chat for a few hours. The viewer count was good, and the comments were kind. She didn't look at them for too long.
She pressed her palm flat against her sternum instead, like she could push the feeling out.
Quaxly chirped softly from its spot on the pillow with an inquisitive, worried little sound.
"I'm fine," Dot whispered.
Quaxly did not appear convinced. It waddled forward on its small webbed feet and pressed its round, soft head against Dot's elbow.
"I'm fine," Dot murmured again, quieter this time. And then, because it was two in the morning and no one could hear her, "I think I'm fine."
She turned back to her screen and tried to focus on the editing project she had open, a highlight reel from her last stream. She got through approximately four seconds of footage before her head swam. It was a slow, rolling surge, like the ship had moved, but hadn't. She grabbed the edge of the desk and blinked hard until the feeling passed.
That was… new.
Dot sat very still for a moment and catalogued:
Tight chest. It started yesterday morning, maybe the day before. She had thought it was anxiety. Possibility still, but not eliminated. Headache. Dull, persistent. Behind the eyes. Tired. Worse than usual. The stream timer felt like it took ages to queue. Now: dizzy.
She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, which she was aware was not a medically reliable method of assessment, but it was what she had. Her skin felt warm. Maybe warm. It was hard to tell with her own hand.
She looked at Quaxly.
Quaxly looked back at her with those big blue eyes of his and was very clearly waiting for Dot to do something sensible.
"I don't need to wake anyone up at 2 AM," Dot muttered.
Quaxly made a sound that was not agreement.
"It's two in the morning," she repeated.
Quaxly made the same sound, slightly louder.
"I'll be fine until morning." Dot turned back to her screen. "I'll drink some water and it'll go away. It's probably dehydration. I forget to drink water when I'm editing." She paused. "I know that's bad. I'm aware."
She opened a new tab and pulled up a symptom checker because that was the sensible thing to do before waking up an actual physician. She started typing.
Forty minutes later, she had read seven articles and three medical journals, and the list in her head now had approximately forty possible diagnoses ranging from 'mild viral infection' to 'extremely rare but technically possible tropical disease she had almost certainly not been exposed to'. The rational part of her brain knew that symptom checkers were designed to be comprehensive rather than accurate.
Well, the less rational part of her brain had highlighted three of the tropical disease articles.
Quaxly had watched this entire process from the pillow with increasing concern.
"I'm catastrophizing," Dot acknowledged out loud. "I know. I know I'm doing it." She rubbed her eyes. "The point is I don't have enough information to determine if this warrants..."
She stood up to go get water from the kitchen.
And the floor came up at her very fast.
It wasn't a fall, exactly. It was more that her knees simply declined to continue functioning, and she went down sideways, catching herself against the desk chair with her forearm. She ended up on her knees on the floor of her cabin and was breathing in shallow, fast sips, because the chest tightness had sharpened all at once into something that genuinely hurt.
Quaxly was off the pillow instantly and made a high, urgent sound that Dot had never heard from it before.
"Okay," Dot wheezed to the floor, to herself, to the pokemon pressing anxiously against her side. "Okay. That was... okay."
She stayed very still until the sharp feeling dulled back to the familiar tightness. Her hands were shaking, and she noticed that with a strange, detached clarity, the way she noticed things when her brain needed to observe rather than feel.
"I think," Dot managed carefully, "that I might actually need to go find Mollie."
It was not a comfortable thought. Mollie meant someone looking at her, and someone looking at her meant she would have to talk, and she would probably also cry because her chest hurt, and she was tired, and the floor was cold, and she didn't want to be a problem at two in the darn morning.
But Quaxly was making that noise, the new one, and Dot trusted Quaxly's judgment more than she trusted her own right now.
"Okay," she breathed. "Okay. We're going."
She made it to Mollie's cabin without incident, which she counted as a small victory.
She did not knock immediately because it was two in the morning and she didn't know the etiquette for this. She stood in the hallway in front of the door for probably fifteen seconds before she managed to actually raise her hand. When she did, the knock came out quieter than she intended.
For a moment, nothing.
Then there was a soft sound from inside, the creak of a chair, and light appeared under the door. Mollie
Then, the door opened. Mollie stood there in a loose shirt and sleep pants, a medical journal held loosely in one hand, reading glasses pushed up into her pink hair. Her expression moved through confusion and then arrived very quickly at something sharp and assessing. The doctor look. The one that meant she was already calculating.
"Dot?"
"Hi," Dot stammered. "I'm sorry to... I know it's late, I didn't want to..." She stopped and started again. "I think something might be wrong."
Mollie didn't say anything for a fraction of a second. Then, "Okay. Come on. Let's go to the infirmary." She stepped out into the hallway without hesitation, pulling the door shut behind her.
Dot followed her, Quaxly close at her heels.
The infirmary was dim but not dark, lit by the soft amber glow of the standby monitors. It smelled like antiseptic and something faintly herbal, and it was very quiet (which Dot greatly appreciated). Mollie crossed to the desk and set her journal down, then turned and pulled the examination chair around with one hand.
"Sit," she instructed simply. "When you say something's wrong, what are we talking about?"
Dot sat down carefully because she wasn't fully sure her legs were reliable right now. Quaxly hopped up beside her immediately. "My chest hurts. It's been tight for... I think two days? And I've had a headache, and I got dizzy when I stood up just now. I almost fell."
Mollie was already pulling on gloves. "Almost fell or actually fell?"
"Almost," Dot replied. Then, "I went down on my knees. But I caught the chair."
Mollie made a sound that was not quite a sigh. "Okay. That counts." She reached for a thermometer. "Open."
Dot opened her mouth. The thermometer beeped after a few seconds, and Mollie looked at it. Something in her expression went very controlled in a way that made Dot's stomach drop.
"What?" Dot asked nervously.
"38.9 celsius," Mollie announced. She set the thermometer down and reached for her stethoscope, draping it around her neck. "That's a significant fever. How long have you been feeling off, actually? Be honest with me."
Dot considered. "Four days, maybe? I thought it was just... I've been having a bad anxiety week. I thought it was that."
Mollie paused for just a fraction of a second, then kept moving. "I'm going to listen to your breathing. Sit up straight for me." She pressed the stethoscope to Dot's back. "Deep breath."
Dot breathed. It hurt more than it should have.
"Again."
She breathed again.
Mollie moved the stethoscope, listened, moved it again. She worked in a slow grid, covering the upper and lower fields on both sides. Her face gave nothing away. Then, she came around to the front and listened there too, and Dot could tell from the slight stillness in her that she had heard something.
"Dot," Mollie began carefully. "Does it hurt to breathe? Not just tightness. Does it actually hurt?"
"Yes," Dot admitted. "When I breathe deeply. I thought I was just... I thought I was imagining it, or that it was anxiety. It's hard to tell sometimes."
Mollie nodded slowly. She reached for a small device on the tray and clipped it to Dot's finger. "Pulse oximeter. Keep your hand still."
The number that came up made Mollie's jaw tighten almost imperceptibly.
"Your oxygen saturation is lower than I'd like," Mollie stated, and Dot appreciated that she didn't soften it into nothing. "I want to percuss your chest. I'm going to tap on your back and chest wall. Tell me if any of it feels different or more uncomfortable than the rest."
Dot nodded.
Mollie worked through it with the same quiet thoroughness, tapping along the chest wall and listening to the resonance, pausing in a few places. She asked Dot to say the word 'thirty-three' while she listened again with the stethoscope, moving it to several spots, and Dot was not sure why, but she didn`t question it.
"Okay," Mollie concluded finally. She sat back and looked at Dot directly. "Here's what I think. Based on the fever, the duration, the quality of your breathing sounds, and what I'm finding on percussion, I think you have pneumonia. Most likely viral in origin given how it's presented and how gradually it came on." She paused. "Your lungs are partially consolidated on the lower right side. That's what's causing the pain when you breathe deeply, the reduced oxygen saturation, and the dizziness when you stand up. Your body has been working significantly harder than normal to compensate for it."
Dot processed this. "For four days…?"
"For four days," Mollie confirmed, not unkindly. "Without rest or treatment, which has made it worse than it needed to be."
Dot looked at her hands. "I didn't want to be a problem, or call attention. My bad."
"Dot." Mollie's voice was not angry. It wasn't soft the way it went sometimes with Liko, either. It was something quieter and more direct than either of those things. "You are never a problem. You understand that?"
Dot did not say anything.
"You came to my door at two in the morning," Mollie pointed out. "That took something for you, I know it did." She paused. "I'm glad you came."
Quaxly pressed itself more firmly against Dot's side.
"It's not the kind of thing you just tell someone," Dot murmured quietly. "That you're sick. It feels like admitting that something's wrong with you, to me."
"Something is wrong with you," Mollie countered. "That's what being sick is. It's not a flaw." She stood and went to the medication cabinet. "I'm going to start you on antivirals and anti-inflammatories, and I want to put you on an oxygen monitor overnight. You're not in immediate danger, but your body has been compensating hard for four days, and I want to watch it."
"Overnight…" Dot repeated, not exactly happy.
"You're staying here," Mollie confirmed, and it wasn't unkind. "Not up for debate."
Dot thought about her cabin, and her monitors, and her half-edited footage, and the pre-recorded stream still running. She thought about the four days she had spent sitting at her desk telling herself she was fine while getting incrementally less fine, alone except for Quaxly who had known and had been watching her the whole time.
"Okay," she relented.
Mollie glanced at her. "Okay?"
"I said okay." Dot pulled her knees up to her chest, then thought better of it because it pressed against the painful spots. "I'm not going to argue. I came here, didn't I? That means I already decided to stop arguing with myself. I think."
Something shifted in Mollie's expression, something more like recognition.
"Fair enough," she agreed.
They were quiet after that, in a way that Dot found much easier than talking.
Mollie had set her up in the bed closest to the door, Dot's preference, she'd said without asking how she knew that. She just did. She had dimmed the monitors to a comfortable level and had pulled Quaxly's pokeball from Dot's pocket and set it on the side table without being asked.
Dot lay still and watched the ceiling, listening to the soft beep of the oximeter on her finger and the hum of the ship's systems.
"Mollie?" she ventured after a while.
"Mm."
"Do the others..." She paused and tried again. "When you treat the others, is it always like this? Or does it feel different?"
Mollie was quiet for a moment. "It always feels different," she answered. "Because everyone is different."
"That's not really an answer."
"No," Mollie agreed. "I suppose it isn't." She turned a page of her journal. "With Orla, I have to be steady because she'll push through walls if I let any uncertainty show. With Roy, I have to be honest first because if he thinks I'm softening the truth, he doesn't trust me. With Murdock..." she paused. "With Murdock and especially Friede, I have to be blunt because they will talk themselves out of being taken care of if I give them the chance."
Dot listened.
"With you," Mollie continued, "I think I have to be straightforward because you're already running seventeen thought processes in your head simultaneously, and if I'm vague, you'll just fill the gaps with worse scenarios than the real one."
Dot considered this. "That's accurate," she admitted.
"I know."
"How do you know?" Dot asked. Not defensively, but genuinely.
Mollie set the journal down and looked at her. "Because I watch. That's what being a healthcare professional is, mostly. You watch people until you understand how they work." She tilted her head. "You do the same thing. From behind the camera, behind the streams. You watch."
Dot was quiet for a moment. It was strange, being seen clearly by someone. Usually it made her want to retreat. Right now, with her chest aching and the oximeter beeping and Quaxly warm against her leg, it just felt like a fact. Like one of the items in her mental list.
Mollie sees me. But that is okay.
Dot closed her eyes.
The chest pain was already slightly less sharp. Or maybe she was just tired enough not to notice it as much. Either way, she was aware in a quiet and matter-of-fact way that this was the first time in four days that she had stopped running calculations in the back of her head. The background process that had been running 'is this serious, is this serious, is this serious' had gone quiet.
Mollie was watching the monitors so she didn't have to watch them herself.
That was, Dot thought, a very strange kind of relief. She wasn't entirely sure she was comfortable with it yet, but she thought she could probably get there.
She was asleep within ten minutes.
…
In the morning, Liko was the one who knocked.
Dot heard it before she was fully awake, a soft hesitant tap, and opened her eyes to find the infirmary lit by pale grey dawn light and Mollie at the desk, now awake and actually reading the journal this time.
"Come in," Mollie called out.
The door opened and Liko appeared, still in her pajamas with Sprigatito draped around her shoulders like a sleepy scarf. She looked at Mollie, then looked at the bed, and then her face twisted.
"Quaxly was in the hallway…" Liko began carefully. "It came to my door. That's not... is Dot okay?"
"She's stable," Mollie assured her. "She's going to be fine. She came in herself last night."
Liko looked at Dot. "You came in yourself?"
Dot pushed herself upright slightly. Her chest still ached, but it was duller, more manageable. "Quaxly basically made me."
Liko let out a long breath, hiding a smile. She came in and sat down on the end of the bed. "I noticed you looked tired," Liko sighed. "I should have said something."
"You couldn't have known," Dot replied.
"I should have..."
"Liko." Dot looked at her. "You didn't know because I'm very good at not letting people know things." She paused. "It's a skill I'm maybe going to have to work on."
Liko considered this for a moment, then nodded slowly. "Okay. But also, if it ever happens again, you can tell me. I don't... I know you don't always want people to make a big thing of it. I know that. I wouldn't." She looked at her hands. "I'd just want to know."
Dot didn't say anything for a moment.
She'd just want to know. Which was somehow exactly the right thing. No performance required, and no asking Dot to need things in ways she didn't know how to need them yet.
"Okay," Dot promised. "I'll... I can probably do that."
Liko smiled, small and genuine. Sprigatito finally lifted its head, noticed Quaxly, and made a sound that might have been greeting.
Mollie watched all of this from her desk. She had her journal open and her expression was professional, giving them privacy by pretending to read. But Dot noticed, because she noticed things, that she wasn't turning any pages.
'She's watching,' Dot thought. 'That's what she does.'
And for the first time, Dot thought she understood something about why.