Work Text:
D'Vana poked her head in through the door to the lab. "Hey T’Lyn!" she said cheerfully. "Whatcha workin' on?"
T’Lyn's eyes, from behind the semitransparent safety mask she was wearing, flicked up from her work for a second, then back down to the large-ish device on the bench before her. "I am attempting to repair this apparatus. It has been malfunctioning for several consecutive duty cycles, and I have yet to identify the cause."
"Oh, cool! What's it do? I don't think I recognize it. Can I help?" She started approaching the workbench, but stopped short when T’Lyn looked up at her once more.
"You may not. I have taken appropriate steps to render the device inoperative, but given the nature of its purpose, I do not believe that I have completely removed all dangers. You are not wearing any personal protective equipment. As such, it would be illogical to allow you to assist whilst there remains a non-negligible chance of accident or injury."
"O-oh, yeah, that makes sense," D'Vana said, taking in T’Lyn's choice of outfit more thoroughly.
In addition to the safety mask, T’Lyn was wearing a pair of rubber gloves and a standard-issue Starfleet lab coat, buttoned to the neck, leaving little skin exposed.
"So, I'm guessing it does a lot of work with electricity?" she asked, moving laterally around to the side of the room to get a better angle on the workbench.
"Indeed," T’Lyn answered. "I have been conducting experiments with my regenerative shield algorithms with obsolete shielding hardware provided by Lieutenant Commander Billups from the ship's stores. The electric potential differences involved are...." she paused, and raised an eyebrow for emphasis. "Significant. And the capacitors are somewhat degraded from use and age. As I said, I believe I have discharged them, but several of the components I used in the construction have been modified, repaired, or replaced so far from the original specifications that I am not confident that I have discharged them."
"Hence the gloves, and everything?"
T’Lyn's attention returned to the workbench. "Indeed." She was silent for several seconds, as she continued to work, but paused after removing another component from the guts of the device and placing it on the table with several of its fellows. "Was there something you required my assistance with?"
D'Vana shook her head, even though T’Lyn wasn't directly looking at her. "Nah, not really, just had some buffer time while some of my botany experiments run, figured I'd come say hi! Although, now that you mention it, can you tell me more about your regenerative shielding stuff while you work? I know my thing's really more botany and biosciences and stuff rather than graviton and particle physics, so you might have to dumb it down a little, but I still think it's super cool." And also, she thought, I like hearing you explain things.
"'Multi-tasking' would be ill-advised at this juncture. However, I would be willing to explain it to you in further detail once I have completed the disassembly," T’Lyn replied. "Additionally, there are several papers on the subject downloaded to the PADD on the port aft-ward table," she added. "I have no objections to your continued presence while I work, if you wish to peruse them."
"You don't? Aww, thanks T’Lyn!" D'Vana started towards her friend, going in for a hug on automatic, then, remembering why T’Lyn was so touchy about her approaching in the first place, arrested her forward movement and shifted the energy into bouncing on the balls of her feet. "I'll try and read and be excited really really quietly, I promise! You won't even know I'm here."
She moved to the table that the PADD in question (of Vulcan design, rather than standard Starfleet) was resting on, and, hopping up onto the lab stool, powered it up.
D'Vana was greeted by a security screen, which gave her three options to unlock it--biometric, voice print, and passkey. Given the PADD was T’Lyn's, D'Vana was fairly certain she wasn't going to be able to get through it by herself.
"Uh, T’Lyn?" she said, looking up. "I think you need to unlock it for me?"
"That will not be necessary," T’Lyn said, still not looking up. "I took the liberty of assigning you biometric and voiceprint authorization to my research PADDs upon our joint promotion."
D'Vana blinked, and a fresh bloom of warmth began to spread in her chest. Aww, that's so thoughtful of her, she thought. "Oh! Okay, uh, computer, Voice Authorization D'Vana Tendi Six-Two-Charlie-X-ray-Niner."
"Authorization accepted," the PADD's robotically-Vulcan voice announced. "Welcome, Lieutenant Tendi, D'Vana."
The lock screen faded away, and in its place a screen with a Vulkhansu graphical interface appeared. Then, the screen rippled, and the Vulkhansu was replaced with standard Orion script, laid out exactly how Tendi liked her own PADDs to be.
"Oh, this is awesome, T’Lyn, thank you so much!" D'Vana said excitedly, swiping through the file architecture to find the one labeled 'Regenerative Shielding'. "You didn't have to do all of this!"
"The additional work required was minor. I merely imported your system settings from the Bridge science station as part of assigning you authorization." A pause. "I hope that your reading is edifying."
Which was, D'Vana was pretty sure, a very diplomatically Vulcan way of saying 'Tendi, shut up and read'.
She saw no point in not obliging T’Lyn's unspoken request, and rubbed her hands together with glee before opening the first paper in the folder.
D'Vana read for a full forty minutes as T’Lyn continued to work. As she had said to T’Lyn earlier, graviton physics wasn't her strong suit, and T’Lyn's writings were full of technical terms to the point that she reckoned the papers were denser than a neutron star, but everything was laid out and presented with excruciating precision and in explicit detail. Between that, and the search and dictionary functions on another PADD on the far wall, D'Vana was able to--mostly--follow T’Lyn's work.
She had just gotten done with reading the second paper, and was preparing to move on to the third one, when the ship's alert lights went from dormant to a flagrant red.
The Cerritos's sirens began to whoop, and the Captain's voice came on over the intercom.
"Attention everyone!" Ransom said. "It seems we've managed to find ourselves a rogue ion storm, and the hull sensors are rating it at least a Cat-Six! All hands to action stations, stand by damage control teams, and everybody hold onto something!"
D'Vana was in motion as soon as the Captain said 'action stations'. She had to get to the bridge, and while the Cerritos was not a large ship, that was still two decks and a third the beam away.
She'd made it most of the way through the door when T’Lyn spoke next.
"Hm. That is strange. Why is--" The ship shook violently, and an arc of energy that must have been a byproduct of the storm whip-cracked across the room.
Then the device exploded, sending lightning everywhere.
T’Lyn went flying backwards towards the wall, impacted, and spasmed for an infinite moment as electricity skipped across her skin, before going slack.
"No! T’Lyn!" D'Vana shouted, and ran back towards her friend.
Her fingers scrambled to find the first pulse point she could put her hands on, and ripped away the collar of T’Lyn's lab coat to find the carotid.
T’Lyn's pulse was thready and irregular, and D'Vana rolled T’Lyn onto her side for better access to her heart.
D'Vana's hand went to her hip, where she usually kept her medical tricorder, but was dismayed to find that her holster was gone.
"Oh, man! No, no no, c'mon T’Lyn, hold on," D'Vana muttered, and tapped her commbadge. "Lieutenant Tendi to transporter room! I need a site-to-site to medbay!"
Static washed out a good chunk of the reply. "sssshtt--storm preventing transport, we can't--ksshhh--lock."
D'Vana bit back a curse. "Okay, D'Vana, you got this," she said to herself, as she hooked her arms under T’Lyn's armpits, "T’Lyn's just one Vulcan, how heavy can she be?"
The answer, as it turned out, was heavier than she was expecting. Vulcan was a world with stronger gravity than Terra or Orion, which drove its inhabitants to be stronger, but also meant they had to have a tougher bone structure to survive--which meant, in this instant, that T’Lyn was more difficult to lift upright, especially from a complete sandbagging.
(The lab coat wasn't helping, either.)
When she managed to get T’Lyn over her shoulder, D'Vana tapped her commbadge again as she made her way to the door.
"Doctor T'Ana! I'm bringing T’Lyn in to Sickbay! She got hit by some lightning and now she's unconscious and the transporter room says the storm is making it impossible to do site-to-site!"
"She's f#$%ing WHAT? F*@$ing hell," T'Ana swore. "Alright kid, bring her in. What turbolift's closest to you? I'll send a couple'a guys with a stretcher so you don't have to haul her unconscious ass all the way here."
"Uh, Turbolift three, I think?"
"Okay, great. MASTERSON! BATES! GET A STRETCHER AND GET YOUR ASSES OUT THE DOOR TO TURBOLIFT THREE!" She kept barking orders, but D'Vana tuned out the Caitan's shouting.
The turbolift. All that mattered was getting to the turbolift.
The lift shaft couldn't have been more than twenty or thirty meters away from the lab, but between the lower, ominous red alert lighting, the ship shaking in the storm, and the weight of eighty kilos of Vulcan (which was a lot for D'Vana to carry, even with Earth-Standard gravity plates) on her shoulder, the walk felt more like two or three hundred. When D'Vana finally made it to the turbolift, she was panting, and leaned herself up against the lift's wall--something that necessitated moving T’Lyn from her shoulder into a hold that normally would have resembled one of the hugs D'Vana liked to give all her friends.
But T’Lyn remained as limp as a ragdoll, and D'Vana shifted her grip to support T’Lyn's neck as it lolled down and to the side.
"Oh, please be all right, T’Lyn," she muttered, toe tapping inside her boot as the nervous energy inside of her looked for an outlet. "I'm gonna take care of you, you hear me? Not gonna let some stupid ion storm get away with this, not gonna let it--"
The turbolift doors hissed open, and Orderlies Masterson and Bates were waiting for them on the other side of it, hover-stretcher at the ready.
Masterson helped D'Vana carry T’Lyn out of the turbolift, and then, with a coordinated effort and a "And a one, and a two, and a lift!", they managed to get her onto the stretcher before taking off at a rapid pace back towards Sickbay.
Chaos wasn't completely running rampant when they got to Sickbay, but it was still sure as hell straining at its leash.
T'Ana was still shouting as the doors opened (D'Vana wondered briefly if she'd even stopped--to be honest, she doubted it), and her eyes found D'Vana almost as soon as they crossed the threshold. "Tendi! Get in here!"
D'Vana hurried over to the Caitian. “Doctor T’Ana! T’Lyn still hasn’t woken up, and I didn’t have my tricorder so I couldn’t get a good reading on her vitals beyond—“
But T’Ana wasn’t listening to what D’Vana had to say, and had instead shoved the hovering stretcher under the freestanding scanner without a fixed biobed maintained for the purpose.
The doctor hissed in annoyance as she read the scanner’s readouts. “Well, f*%#, that ain’t good,” she said, then looked back up at D'Vana. “Tendi, we got a batch of smoke inhalation cases coming in in about thirty seconds from Engineering.”
The ship rocked, and the lights connected to the ship’s main EPS conduits flickered. (Sickbay had microfusion reactors separate from the main grid to keep the critical components operational at a time like this, but that didn’t stop the power fluctuation from underscoring the severity of the situation.)
“I need you to run triage on the smoke cases and take care of the rest of this bulls#$% as it comes in,” T’Ana ordered. “Gonna need to do T’Lyn myself. F*/%ing Vulcan neurology and their f@¥#ing—“
“Doctor, I want to help! Please, can I? I know I'm not officially a medic anymore but T’Lyn’s—" the words caught on her tongue, trapped in a tumbling cloud of conflicting thoughts and emotions.
There were a lot of words D'Vana could say. 'My friend' was certainly one of them, and one she cherished dearly. 'Science bestie' covered a lot of ground as well, and that had been what they were doing before the storm hit, but T’Lyn had gone way more out of her way than she had to to do things like import her preferred PADD GUI, and indulge D'Vana's unnecessary presence while she did delicate work. 'Fellow officer and scientist I respect' was as stiffly formal as D'Vana could ever force herself to be, but was true in a detached, technical sense.
And of course, 'someone I'm in love with' was the truth buried at the bottom of it all, underpinning and underpinned by every other aspect of what she felt for T'Lyn.
Doctor T'Ana cut her rumination off. "Hsssst! Zip it, kid, I know, you wanna help T'Lyn, but unless you managed to slip both a deep-dive course into Vulcan neurology and severe electroshock training into your senior science officer training rota without me knowing about it, you're just gonna get in the way. But I know you can handle the rest of the s#%$ we got coming in without breaking a sweat, so hop to it, okay?"
D'Vana opened her mouth to lodge a final protest, but T'Ana didn't let her speak, and said, in a tone that was almost kind, "I've got her, kid, trust me."
That was when the doors to Sickbay hissed open, revealing Rutherford with an Andorian ensign hanging off his shoulder, and a gaggle of other coughing gold-shirted engineering personnel in various states of dishevelment.
D'Vana's protests died on her lips and she snapped into Crisis Management Mode, barking orders like she'd been born to do it.
(Well. She had, but she doubted any of her trainers had ever thought she'd be giving orders to save lives, not end them.)
Time melted away as she set to work, and though her brain did not in any way forget about T’Lyn, D'Vana's concern sat itself down in the corner of her mind that did trust Doctor T'Ana, and waited.
The storm itself had not lasted much more than five to ten minutes, but the damage to the ship was not so easily fixed, and nor was the damage to her crew.
Rutherford, miraculously, had escaped engineering's electrical fire with barely a singed hair, and a bit of soot on his face, and he sat with her as they waited for T'Ana and her assistant surgeon to finish with T’Lyn.
"I'm sure she's gonna be fine, Tendi," he said comfortingly, as she let out the latest in an innumerable sequence of wistful sighs, with another equally wistful glance at the one-way opaque door that separated the sterile room from the rest of Sickbay. "You got her here almost as soon as you could have without the transporters, and from what you told me she was wearing the right PPE. She can't have been hurt all that badly." The arm he had around her shoulders squeezed reassuringly, and she felt a fraction (admittedly a very small one) of her tension dissipate.
"Oh, I know," she said, leaning into him. "But they've been in there for a while now, and that gear was for the old out-of-spec stuff Billups gave her, not rated for a full-up ion storm discharge. And I never got a good look at her skin. If she got any significant amount of electrical burns under that labcoat..." She trailed off, and he made a sympathetic noise.
Neither of them had any illusions about the system-level trauma serious skin burns could do, if they covered enough of a body--Rutherford from painful personal experience--and neither of them knew how badly, or if, T’Lyn had suffered any such burns.
Just then, Rutherford's commbadge beeped. "Hey, Rutherford, you busy?"
"Oh, hey Mariner! I'm with Tendi in Sickbay right now, we're waiting for T’Lyn to come out of surgery."
"Oh, s$%#! I didn't realize she'd been hurt. No wonder you two didn't make it to the bridge."
"Yeah, we were in the lab, and had a big power surge blow up in her face--well, the device she was working on blew up in her face, so I took her to Sickbay and then Doctor T'Ana dragged me into helping with the rest of the casualties that came in. But the explosion was because of a power surge from the storm!"
They heard Mariner's wince over the comm, then the subtle shift in her tone from their friend Lt.J.G. Mariner to Co-First-Officer Mariner. "God, that sucks. Well, I hate to tear you away, Rutherford, but we could use a hand up here on the bridge making sure no more of the consoles are going to explode."
"Okeydokey," he answered, obviously unhappy with the order but also recognizing that it was an order. "I'll be up in a minute."
"And Tendi," Mariner's voice crackled, "lemme know how T’Lyn's doing, when she gets out, would you? And let her know I hope she's okay."
"Sure thing," D'Vana replied, and then the line went dead.
Rutherford gave her one last reassuring one-armed squeeze. "She'll be fine, D'Vana. And I know she'll really appreciate it that you stayed and waited."
D'Vana smiled weakly as he stood and left, and drummed her fingers on her leg in an attempt to burn off the rest of the nervous energy she was feeling, wishing she'd grabbed the PADD to give herself something to distract herself with.
Several minutes later, T'Ana stuck her head out of the door to the surgical suite. "Alright kid, get in here. We're gonna wake her up."
D'Vana was on her feet and through the door so quickly she could have sworn she'd transported those few meters.
T’Lyn's lab coat and PPE, D'Vana saw, were lying discarded on a nearby table, as was most of her uniform, with the Vulcan herself lying flat on the room's main biobed.
She was covered from the torso down by a surgical blanket, but her arms, shoulders, and face were all visible. There were electrical burns scattered across her arms, and while it was not as bad as she and Rutherford had feared, the burns still covered a significant part of the skin that was visible.
There was a delta-wave inducer resting on T’Lyn's forehead, and her eyes were closed in a deep sleep that looked at odds with the amount of pain the wave inducers were helping to suppress.
T’Ana offered no further warning, and stepped besides D’Vana's frozen form to remove the inducers.
T’Lyn's outer eyelids opened almost, but not quite, immediately, and her nictitating membranes remained closed for several moments as she began to stir.
"I hit her with a bunch of anesthetic before we got started," T'Ana muttered into D'Vana's ear, "so she might be a little cuckoo while it wears off."
"I fail... to see... what bearing... parasitic Terran birds... have on my current... situation," T’Lyn managed to say, her mouth barely moving.
D'Vana's relief burst through the dam of concern that had been stoppering up much of her emotions for the last few hours, and made itself known in a noise so high-pitched that it almost could have summoned The Dog. "EEEEE! T’Lyn I'm so glad you're awake! Ohmigosh I was so worried when you got shocked! Are you alright? How do you feel? Do you need something I can go get you something you're probably hungry--"
Weakly, turning her head towards her, T’Lyn interrupted her. "Tendi," she said. "At present... I require nothing I do not already have. Your offer, however... is appreciated." Her words were obviously draining her, and D'Vana deflated just a little bit.
"O-oh, yeah, you're probably pretty tired, aren't you?" she asked. "You've been out for a few hours, right?"
"Three'n'a half, kid, and I know you know that," T'Ana said. "Could see you sittin' and waiting out there through the door the whole time, after you got done triaging the smokeheads from engineering."
T’Lyn's eyebrow moved a millimeter or two. "You were?"
"Mhmm, sure was. Worried as I ever saw her." T'Ana's face split into a grin, and D'Vana got a sinking feeling she knew where her former boss was going with this. "You ask me--"
"Doctor!" D'Vana interrupted, face flushing darker.
T'Ana just laughed. "Re-lax, Tendi, I'm just pokin' fun. T’Lyn'll be fine, after a week or two of strict bed rest."
T’Lyn's head began to lift from the biobed. "That is unacc--"
A hiss shut her up, and a firm hand on her shoulder shoved her back down flat. "It sure f*$%ing is acceptable, Lieutenant, because while you didn't get hit by the actual zap that bad, you were damned lucky you were already in Sickbay when your respiratory system dropped off a f$&^ing cliff. 'Tween that, the blunt-force trauma you took to your back and spine when you hit that bulkhead, and followup monitoring for other bulls$#&, I'm not lettin' you outta here until I'm completely satisfied your lungs ain't gonna shut down again. Or that you don't develop, I don't know, retinal detachment, or something."
"But Doctor, I--"
"But nothin', Lieutenant. Once we clear ya of any cranial trauma, I'll let ya do some PADDwork--I know I won't be able to keep Tendi from sneaking it to you, anyway," she added, with a sidelong look at D'Vana, "but no more than that, capisce?"
T’Lyn nodded as best she could. "Yes, Doctor. Understood." She took a breath, a long, slow act that looked distinctly painful despite the painkillers T'Ana had said she was still on. "Are my injuries... critical enough... to require that you... monitor them personally?"
T'Ana shook her head. "Nope. Tendi, there's her vitals," she said in a clipped tone, and pointed to a display, "if her pulse falls below that, or her breathing below that"--two lines flashed an angry red on the monitor--"crash-cart her and call me immediately. She's got a CAT-scan scheduled for an hour from now, but otherwise I'll leave ya alone."
And with that, she left, palming the privacy seal that wouldn't actually keep her out if it came to it, but would stop almost everyone else except Nurse Westlake. Or Captain Ransom. Or Boimler or Mariner. Okay, so it wouldn't stop almost everyone, but the important thing was it would stop anyone D'Vana didn't already know well from barging in.
For a moment, or two, there was only the steady, if slow, bleeping of the heart and vitals monitor, and the notable absence of the warp core's soothing hum.
D'Vana filled the awkward silence by grabbing the stool near the wall and placing it next to T’Lyn's biobed so she could sit down.
"You did not... have to remain," T’Lyn said quietly, when she finally amassed strength anew to do so.
"What? No, of course I did! I mean, I brought you here, for one thing, and it would've felt wrong to just leave afterwards," D'Vana said, ducking her gaze away and scratching at the back of her neck. "Plus, you're my... I--well, I really care about you, and I don't know what I would have done if something even worse happened to you and I wasn't here to help."
"You would... have persevered, Tendi. You are... resilient, and it is... one of many of your admirable qualities."
"It's not--I'm not the point, T’Lyn! You are! You're one of my best friends!" Her hands found T’Lyn's (thankfully unburned!) hand on automatic, taking it between hers and squeezing as tightly as she dared. "I love listening to you, and spending our shifts working together, and hanging out in the bar with you and the rest of the group. And--and you're just--you listen, and you do a bunch of things you don't have to do, and you don't let any preconceived notions about Orions and Orion culture or sensitivities change the way you treat me, and--" her words once more tangled up in her throat, but a moment of clarity induced by the realization of how close she'd come to losing T’Lyn cut through the Gordian knot. "And the truth is I don't know what I would do without you, T’Lyn. I really don't."
Her science bestie didn't answer at first, at least not verbally, but the deliberate rise and fall of her chest, along with a volumetric flow sensor readout, told D'Vana that T’Lyn was finding the breath to speak.
"On the subject of popular... cultural sensitivities, Tendi, I wonder if you... are familiar with Vulcan customs regarding the touching of ha--"
D'Vana's face blazed, and she dropped T’Lyn's hand like she'd been the one burned. "OhmigoshI'msosorry I've been doing that for months now I should have realized I was--"
"D'Vana."
The use of her given name slashed a crystal-cold blade through her babbling, and her eyes widened as T’Lyn raised her arm from the bed.
"I did not say... that it was unwelcome," T’Lyn said with as much a wry, understated tone as she ever used, with her index and middle fingers outstretched, and her left eyebrow slightly raised.
For T’Lyn, it was the equivalent in enthusiasm of one of D'Vana's full-fledged tackle hugs, and they both knew it.
Tendi would be one of the first to admit that she didn't know all that much about most of the more personal Vulcan customs, but this one she knew as well as every other Starfleet cadet from holorecordings from the Enterprise during the Coridan Incident.
Face split into a grin, D'Vana touched her fingertips to T’Lyn's.
In that moment, D'Vana found herself privileged with a much deeper--and deliberately opened--connection with T’Lyn.
The connection an ozh’esta permitted wasn't a mind meld, by any stretch (and though she'd never undergone one to which she could make a comparison, T’Lyn had, D'Vana learned in that instant, and a ghost of understanding drifted into her), but it still went deeper than D'Vana could have imagined, and she realized exactly how much effort T’Lyn had put into maintaining the shielding she'd needed since the second D’Vana had met her.
Shielding which, I assure you, I no longer believe to be necessary. The words were said aloud as well as telepathically, but equally resonated into D’Vana's consciousness in reassurance--she was forgiven.
But reassurance was not the only thing D’Vana experienced, as T’Lyn stopped concentrating on active thought and allowed underlying parts of her psyche to surface.
A deluge of feeling and emotion crossed the bridge between them, with an intensity that took D’Vana by such surprise it felt like being hit by a tidal wave.
Respect and admiration, affection and attraction, concern and care and wonder, and love, and a million other emotions that every single stereotype she'd ever been spoonfed by the Syndicate (and a disturbing number of non-Vulcan Academy cadets in San Francisco) said Vulcans couldn't have, blazed through her with more heat than Orion's primary star.
It was so intense, in fact, that after a moment or two T’Lyn's emotions began to overwhelm her, and in the instant before T’Lyn reasserted control, D’Vana understood at a very primal, painful level why Surak had done what he had.
"Apologies," T’Lyn said, exertion plain in her voice and mental signature, "It seems... that I am, as Doctor T'Ana predicted," she continued with a dryly amused tone, "'a little cuckoo'. Or, at least... that the anesthesia is worsening my Bendii Syndrome. I did not mean... to overwhelm you."
"Oh, it's alright," D’Vana said, folding T’Lyn's hand back into her own and squeezing reassuringly. "Besides, it helped me realize exactly why you have to be so closed off all the time. If I felt with as much intensity as you do, and didn't know how to handle it..." she trailed off, and shook her head. "But what I don't understand is why you never said anything! Keeping all of that bottled up for so long, I... why didn't you tell me before?"
T’Lyn's hand squeezed back, as best it could, and shifted the tips of her fingers to lay one of them on D’Vana's pulse point. I knew my own feelings, but I was not sure of yours, she thought at her. We would not publish a paper without first acquiring the necessary data to support our hypotheses, yes? I did not know how to go about collecting additional evidence towards proving or disproving mine. And though I wish obtaining them had not been quite so painful, I find I am satisfied with the final results. This statement she punctuated with a minuscule-- but entirely genuine--smile.
"--can't just go in there, sir, she--"
D’Vana jumped as the privacy lock she'd thought no one would bother to bypass was bypassed, admitting Captain Ransom and a protesting Doctor T'Ana.
"Lieutenant! Mariner told me you got hurt during the storm, so I came to... see...." he trailed off, and took in the scene before him. "Huh." He looked over at T'Ana, confusion evident on his face. "Is this new? This feels like this is new. T’Lyn's smiling, she never does that."
"Why the f*$% do you think I told you not to come in here? She's gonna be fine, you f$#*ing meathead," T'ana growled, grabbing his shoulder. "Now come on, you've done your caring captain bit, now get the f#@$ out of my Sickbay and let me get back to doing my job!"
Ransom was not an easy human to move, however, and he stood his ground long enough to get a few more words out before T'Ana dragged him away. "I'm glad you're okay, Lieutenant. And congratulations on the girlfriend thiii--"
At that, T'ana finally managed to haul him out the door, which closed automatically. D’Vana kept staring at it for a few seconds, wide-eyed, but was brought back around as she got a general sense of amusement from T’Lyn.
I believe that constitutes our first 'peer review', T’Lyn thought at her, and D’Vana giggled at the extension of her earlier metaphor.
"I guess it does, yeah," she answered, and squeezed T’Lyn's hand again. "I really am glad you're going to be fine," she added.
As am I. And I am grateful that you were there to rescue me.
D’Vana blushed, and looked away.
When she looked back at T’Lyn's face, the smile was still there, just an upticked corner of her mouth, but there all the same, and D’Vana suddenly very much wanted to kiss it while it was still there.
Ashalik, T’Lyn said, as the smile grew, I should like nothing more.