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Everyone else is besides themselves with excitement over the newly discovered protostar engine. Even the holographic Janeway is intrigued, pulling up displays to try to figure out how it works.
Gwyn is glad they escaped the Diviner, certainly. But she can't stop thinking this is what Father would've let me die for.
It's ridiculous to be resentful of an engine system, she knows. And yet.
She stands, hoping to depart the bridge before the others think to revisit the question of whether or not she's still a prisoner. But her broken leg, which she'd managed to forget in the adrenaline rush of escape, makes itself suddenly and insistently known when she puts weight on it. She hisses in pain, and the others whip around to look at her.
So much for leaving unobtrusively, then.
"Oh, your leg!" Dal exclaims. "Sorry Gwyn, I forgot." Gwyn waves off his apology. She can hardly blame him when she'd been trying to fade into the background.
"What happened to your leg?" Janeway asks.
"She broke it," Zero answers before she can. "When the shuttlecraft she and Murf used to escape the Protostar crashed."
"And you've been walking on it all this time?" Janeway asks, though she doesn't give Gwyn a chance to explain that she had braced it. "Sickbay, now, with me," she orders, tone stern. Not that Gwyn’s inclined to argue - hopefully this sickbay will have painkillers.
This time when she tries to stand, Janeway helps her up so she doesn't have to put weight on her bad leg.
They hobble down to sickbay together, Gwyn leaning against Janeway's side, arm looped over her shoulders. Janeway may be a hologram, but right now she feels real - there’s texture to the fabric of her uniform, and she’s warm, as if she has body heat.
Even once they reach sickbay, Janeway doesn't let go of Gwyn until she's safely seated on a biobed. A moment later and she's pressing a hypospray against Gwyn's neck, who sighs in relief as the pain is immediately muted.
It isn't until Janeway is pulling out a tool - an osteo-regenerator, Gwyn thinks, though it's sleeker than any she's seen before - that she thinks to ask, "Are you a doctor?"
Janeway laughs a little at that. "No, it turned out that comprehensive command and medical training was too much for one hologram, so I just have basic first aid." She runs the osteo-regenerator over Gwyn's leg, who feels the itchy sensation of bone knitting together. A fond look passes over Janeway’s face. "The real Captain Janeway served with an Emergency Medical Hologram for years. He'd be horrified to know I can't do more than patch up scrapes."
"Well, 'just' first aid seems pretty great to me," Gwyn says as Janeway completes the final pass of the osteo-regenerator. "My leg feels much better, thanks." She sits up, tries to stand, only to have Janeway stop her with a hand to her shoulder.
"Hold on, let me check the rest of you while you're here. Who knows what else you got up to on that planet," she adds, almost to herself as she uses a shiny tricorder to scan Gwyn.
"Just some cuts and bruises, thankfully," she pronounces a minute later. "Still, let's get those cleaned, shall we?" she continues, pulling supplies out of a drawer before Gwyn can answer.
She thinks about objecting on the grounds that she's seventeen, practically an adult, and perfectly capable of washing herself, but it seems easier just to go along with Janeway.
Janeway takes one of her hands in hers, turning it palm-side up and swabbing the scrapes with a disinfectant-soaked cotton pad.
It's strange, to have someone so focused on her, on such minor injuries. The prison colony had doctors, of course - sick and injured people don't work very efficiently, after all - but they weren't exactly known for their bedside manner. And her father had never been the type for hands-on parenting.
Tears that have nothing to do with the sting of the disinfectant prick her eyes.
Janeway notices. "Does this hurt?" she asks, concerned.
"No," Gwyn says immediately, only just stopping herself from adding please don’t stop. “It’s nothing.”
Janeway doesn’t say anything as she runs the dermal regenerator over Gwyn’s now-clean hand, and for a moment Gwyn thinks she’s going to drop the subject. But when Janeway moves to her other hand she says, “It couldn’t have been easy to leave your father.”
Gwyn thinks of being pulled under by vines and her father turning away from her. “He left me first,” she says, voice hitching on the last syllable.
Janeway’s grip on her hand tightens, just slightly. “I’m sorry,” she offers.
Gwyn shakes her head, suddenly angry with herself. “He always cared more about the ship than me. It was stupid of me to expect anything else.”
“No it wasn’t,” Janeway contradicts, in a tone that brooks no argument. “He’s your father. He’s supposed to love you, unconditionally and irrevocably. Choosing you over a ship is the least you should expect of him.”
Gwyn doesn’t know what to say to that, but Janeway doesn’t seem to need an answer - she just runs the dermal regenerator over Gwyn’s other palm. “There, good as new,” she pronounces.
Gwyn inspects her hands; other than a slight pinkness to the skin they look like they were never injured. "Thanks for patching me up," she tells Janeway, hopping off the biobed.
"I'd say 'Any time,' but let's try not to test the limits of my medical programming, hmm?" Janeway says, but she winks, so Gwyn doesn't think it's meant as an admonishment.
"No arguments from me there," she agrees easily, heading for the door, only to turn back when Janeway speaks again.
"Gwyn, I know the circumstances aren't ideal," she says, looking serious again. "But I'm glad to have you aboard, as a member of the crew. I think you have a lot to offer."
Being a part of such a ragtag, immature team on a stolen ship they barely know how to pilot should feel like a joke of a consolation prize after being the Diviner's sole heir, but it doesn't, Gwyn realizes. It feels like possibility.
It feels like hope.