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Nahla Ake couldn’t sleep.
This wasn’t a remarkably rare occurrence and, truth be told, she really didn’t need that much sleep to begin with. Nevertheless, sleep eluded her in a way that was becoming an annoyance. She let out a loud sigh of frustration and flipped onto her stomach, pulling the blankets over her head.
Not for the first time in her long life, she wished she were a cat. Able to sleep wherever she wanted, spending her afternoons basking in the warmth of Earth’s sun. Maybe a lioness, lounging carefree in a tree full of winding branches. It had been years since she’d slept in a tree.
With a flurry of movement she pushed herself up from the bed and flung the blankets from her head with a sudden realization.
She just might know of a tree she could sleep in.
Minutes later she found herself in the main Atrium of the Athena, staring up at the cherry blossom tree. It was the middle of the night and she hadn’t come across anyone on her journey, something she was mildly disappointed about. She loved to see the mischievous shennans that come with the youth of her promising cadets.
She yawned and stretched before starting her ascent into the tree. It wasn’t a very tall tree, but everything seemed tall compared to her spritely stature. Near the top she found a perfect branch and nestled herself into the curve where it met the main trunk. She closed her eyes, letting one of her legs dangle off the side in a gentle sway.
Only a few moments had passed when she heard an ominous creaking sound. Her eyes flew open as she felt the branch shift beneath her.
Then, there was another, louder crack.
“Oh no….”
~
~
Cadet Master Lura Thok respected bedtime. She knew the importance of being well rested in order to always be in peak physical form should the call to battle arise.
Commander Jett Reno also respected bedtime. Well, she respected Lura’s bedtime. For Jett, she always struggled to sleep when they weren’t in space. She scrolled through her padd, looking over her notes for the next lesson she had planned for the first years. The silence of their room was broken by a quiet voice coming from somewhere near Lura’s side of the bed.
“Lura, are you there? Please come in.”
The voice was a strained whisper but no less recognizable. It was Chancellor Nahla Ake.
She didn’t speak with any particular urgency or concern but there was definitely something odd with the way she sounded. And Jett knew she’d only wake Lura if it was some kind of emergency. At least, she hoped that was the case.
Jett cleared her throat loudly as the Chancellor’s voice came through again.
“Nahla to Lura, please don’t make me call Kelrec.”
Lura grunted, coming to consciousness with a level of instant alertness Jett envied.
“Chancellor, what is it?”
“Yes! Lura, I need you in the atrium. Now. Don’t use the transporter and come alone.”
Lura was already moving and Jett’s curiosity was too piqued to not start moving with her.
“She said to come alone.”
“It’s the middle of the night and the Chancellor needs your help in the atrium? There’s no way I’m not coming with you to see whatever she’s up to.”
Lura sighed as she finished pulling on her boots.
“Fine. Lura to the Chancellor. Reno is coming with me.”
~
Lura and Jett arrived to the completely empty atrium a few minutes later. There was no sign of the Chancellor anywhere and, for a moment, Jett was worried this was some kind of prank that she was certain Lura would not find funny.
“Chancellor?”
Lura’s voice was as much of a whisper as she could manage as she looked around.
“Up here.”
They both approached the tree the voice came from and looked up.
Nahla Ake was hanging from a tree branch by her ankle which was caught in the space between two branches. She grinned at them and gave a small wave which Jett returned with a puzzled, but not quite surprised, look.
“And how did you get up there?!”
Lura’s voice had an exasperated bite to it.
“I couldn’t sleep. Started thinking about cats sleeping in trees. Thought I’d try sleeping in a tree. The tree fought back.”
Lura stepped up to the tree, getting a closer look at her superior officer’s unusual predicament. She could just barely reach Nahla’s head but could see that the way her foot was caught was going to make it difficult to get her down. She looked over to Reno.
“Can you get her down?”
“Yeah, give me just a minute and I’ll have the transpo”
“No! No transporter. I don’t want it showing in the logs.”
“Since when do you care about the official logs?”
“Since now. Will you two just help get me down the old fashioned way?”
Jett put her hands up in surrender and Lura let out a guff of air.
“I don’t know how you expect me to get you down when I can’t even reach your head properly.”
Jett had a vision from her childhood and closed her eyes in anticipation.
“I have a terrible idea.”
~
Before she fully knew how or why, Jett Reno found herself perched on Lura’s shoulders and slowly trying to reach their Chancellor who was stuck in a tree. If she could just lift Nahla up enough so she could get her foot free, they should be golden. She easily pushed her up by the shoulders. As soon she was able to move, Nahla let out a sharp hiss as she tried to dislodge her foot.
“What was that?”
“It was nothing.”
“Didn’t sound like nothing. It sounded like it hurt.”
Jett easily kept her balance as Nahla continued to shift herself free, small grunts of obvious pain coming from her every few seconds.
“Pretty sure the branch isn’t the only thing that snapped.”
She was finally able to get her foot free, something the three of them did not fully think through because her trapped foot was the only thing helping her defy gravity and without it… well the gravity always won.
One moment she was halfway up a tree, holding up the tiny frame of her Captain, the next they were all on the ground.
Lura recovered first, getting up and moving to pull the Chancellor to her feet. She easily hoisted the smaller woman up but Nahla let out another groan of pain, putting her full weight on Lura as she avoided putting any on her right leg.
“Thanks Number One. If you could just help me back to my quarters that would-”
“Abosultely not. You need sickbay.”
“Yeah, Chancellor, I don’t think even Lanthanite legs are supposed to bend in that direction.”
Nahla winced as she gingerly tried to put weight on her leg and bowed her head in defeat.
“Fine. Nahla to the Doctor.”
“Please state the nature of the emergency.”
The Doctor appeared before them and immediately frowned as he took in the scene before him.
“Well, I must say, this is not what I was expecting to find on a middle of the night house call. That leg is most definitely broken. Computer, four to beam directly to sickbay.”
Nahla had tried to tell herself it wasn’t that bad. She thought that maybe once she was free of the vice like grip of the tree branch she might find that the loud snap she had heard after the branch gave way had not been one of her bones after all.
The moment Reno had helped support her body weight she knew that had been wishful thinking. Now she was sitting in the last place she had wanted to end up, a biobed in the Athena’s main sickbay with the Doctor fussing over her with an unending lecture.
“I’m not sure how you managed something like this during a time where most people would be sleeping but I must say this is a very impressive break.”
Nahla closed her eyes and laid her head back.
“Uhhh, Chancellor. All this fun has me actually ready to sleep for a change, can Lura and I…”
“You and the Cadet Master are free to go. I’ll have the Chancellor fixed and on her way in no time.”
Nahla cracked open one eye to give the Doctor a look as Reno and Lura made their quick retreat from the room. She opened her eyes fully and looked around as the Doctor moved to grab one of his many medical instruments. Her mind wandered through the past as she thought of all the technological achievements they had made in the field of medicine over the last millennia. Broken bones were mended in a matter of minutes in the current age but she had heard of a time in ancient earth days where they would have to encase in the limb in hard plaster and let the bone heal naturally.
She always wondered what it must have been like in the days before modern medicine. She wondered what it felt like to experience your bones heal themselves in real time. It was something she’d never experienced. Something new. A rarer and rarer occurrence in her long life.
The Doctor approached, ready to heal her bones in an instant.
“Wait! Doctor. How familiar are you with ancient Earth medicine?”
~
~
The next morning Lura Thok entered the Chancellor’s office. She found said Chancellor sprawled on her chaise reading through an incident file for one of their cadets.
“What is that?”
Nahla didn’t look up from her padd. She knew exactly what Lura was asking about and was thrilled that her shennan was about to start again.
“What’s what?”
“That thing on your leg.”
“You mean my cast?”
“Your what?”
Nahla put the padd down and pulled her glasses off. She sat up with some difficulty and knocked on the solid purple cast that completely encased her right leg.
“It’s a cast. A form of ancient Earth medicine to help with the natural healing of a broken bone.”
Lura gave her a look that was not amused.
“Was the Doctor unable to heal your leg properly?”
Nahla scooched to the edge of the chair and looked up at her first officer.
“I asked him to do it this way instead. I’ve never let a bone heal naturally. Isn’t that an exciting thing to have never experienced something?”
“And how long does this antiquated form of medicine take to heal?”
“The Doctor wasn’t sure as he doesn’t have any first hand experience with it, but from what we've been able to find, usually about 6 weeks.”
“6 WEEKS?! Chancellor, this is unreasonable, even for you. Why on Earth would you- and what is that??”
She had sat down next to Nahla and was getting a closer look at what appeared to be some kind of graffiti taking up a spot on the side of the cast.
“Well, I also read that it was an ancient tradition to have one’s peers and acquaintances sign the cast with well wishes for a quick recovery. I made the Doctor go first.”
Nahla watched Lura tilt her head to read the short message written in a neat script.
“Enjoy the Slow Healing”
Lura gave her an incredulous look and Nahla shrugged her shoulders with a laugh before rummaging around her tunic and pulling out a black marker and holding it out to the cadet master.
“Sign my cast, Number One?”
“I’m not writing on your self inflicted torture device.”
“Pleassse?”
“I don’t even know what to say.”
“It doesn’t have to be a message. You can just sign your name.”
Nahla looked up at her with pleading eyes.
“I could make it an order?”
Lura scoffed and nabbed the marker from her.
“Fine.”
She only wrote 2 characters before handing it back to Nahla who craned her neck to see a tiny “#1” scribbled near the Doctor’s message. She beamed, satisfied. Lura stood, straightening her uniform as she scrolled through the day’s schedule.
“We’ve got a lot to do today which brings me to my next query. How are you going to walk with that ridiculous thing on your leg?”
Nahla hadn’t quite had her fill of teasing her first officer and thought up something she knew would get her going again. She kept her voice light, and overly innocent.
“Well, as my first officer, it’s your duty to carry me wherever I go.”
To really seal the deal, she lifted her arms out to Lura. She was not amused.
Nahla sighed and pulled the two crutches the Doctor had replicated for her out.
“Apparently these make it possible to keep weight off my leg while still allowing me full mobility to go about my everyday life. Though, I do find them rather uncomfortable if I’m being honest.”
Nahla struggled to her feet, noticing the way Lura seemed to purposely not notice this struggle. A sign of her disapproval with her antics. The crutches were Nahla’s least favorite part of the experience so far and she was convinced the Doctor had replicated them wrong on purpose because there was no way the humans of ancient Earth dealt with this level of discomfort for weeks on end.
She finally got herself situated and balanced.
“Lead the way, Number One.”
~
~
“I don’t understand. Why would you chose to incapacitate yourself in such an unnecessary and compromising way.”
Kelrec helped her down the steps into his office, her crutches tucked under his other arm awkwardly. She hobbled to the couch and laid back across the cushions.
“And what is the purpose of the writing on the surface of the, what was it you called it?”
“A cast. And it’s meant to be a way to show support and well wishes for the injured.”
He moved to his tea station, a move Nahla recognized as a defensive mechanism, a safety tether in the face of unknown problems, usually Nahla related. He set a cup in front of her and sat on the couch next to her feet. She lifted her broken leg and shuffled closer to him with minor difficulty.
“It doesn’t have to be a full message. Some people just wrote their name. Or drew a picture.”
“I don’t draw.”
“How about your name? You know how to spell that, don’t you?”
He set his own cup down with an exasperated sigh.
“Of course I know how to spell my- that’s not the point. Nahla, why are you doing this?”
She pulled herself into a more upright position and pulled out her marker, struggling to bend her leg in a way she could reach.
“Kelrec, when you get to be my age, there are few things that you get to experience for the first time. And when you have so much time in the world, it’s exciting to look back on the past and experience new things that were once the everyday norm for humanity. Don’t you find it even a little bit fascinating that even a time where their medicine was archaic, humans were able to fix a broken bone by letting time heal it naturally? Especially in a time when their time was so limited to begin with.”
Kelrec eyed her carefully before leaning over and taking the marker from her. He marked her cast quickly and handed the marker back to her. She looked at what he had drawn in confusion before looking to him questioningly.
“It’s a teacup.”
Nahla looked again and smiled.
~
~
2 weeks later and Nahla sat in her office, restlessly trying to get comfortable on her chaise. It had been fun at first but she had grown tired of the cast and especially of the crutches. She wasn’t ready to admit it to the Doctor yet, though. He had given her such grief for even suggesting the idea and said she wouldn’t even last 1 week before begging him to take it off. She was too stubborn to give him the satisfaction of being right.
Of course, her leg wasn’t actually broken anymore. The Doctor only agreed to her “childish request” if she allowed him to heal her leg properly before putting the cast on. She could have the full human experience of a healing broken bone but without any risk of lasting medical damage.
She pulled her leg up next to her and examined all the notes and drawings that had been left for her.
There was a slew of “get well soon” messages and lots of plain signatures but there were some original gems as well. Her favorite was the tiny warp core Caleb had scribbled next to his name and the Talaxian Furfly specialist Krebs had attempted to draw with pretty impressive success. She was nearly out of space though, and the novelty of it was definitely wearing off.
She suddenly felt an itch somewhere on her leg beneath the cast. She tried reaching it but it was just too far down. She looked around for something to extend her reach to scratch it but only found her crutches on the floor and uniform jacket draped behind her.
Then she spotted her commbadge and the sharp points of the extended Starfleet logo looked enticing enough that they just might do the trick. She plucked it from her jacket and carefully slid her hand into the top of the cast. The badge was just long enough to touch the itch and she groaned with relief as she gently scratched at it.
She needed to get a little deeper and moved the badge to the very tip of her fingers when she let it slide too far and she felt it slip from her fingers and out of reach.
“Uuugggh”
She fell back against the chaise in defeat.
“Computer, please send the Doctor to my office.”
The Doctor appeared a moment later.
“14 days, 2 hours, and…. 8 minutes.”
He looked at her smugly and she pulled her uncasted leg up, resting her chin on it.
“This isn’t me giving up.”
“I told you the novelty was going to wear off.”
She felt the itch return and needed the cast off immediately.
“Yes, yes you were right. Though I did remember you saying I wouldn’t last more than a week. And not to mention, I think you replicated those crutches wrong, I swear I’m going to have bruises under my arms.”
The Doctor let out a quiet hmmph of amusement before sitting down next to her and pulling out a small instrument.
“Now, my research tells me the phsicians of the past would use a mechanical spinning saw to remove the casts but I’m afraid that’s beyond what even I’m willing to entertain. So this laser scalpel will have to do.”
Nahla positioned herself in a way that allowed the Doctor easy access to her leg.
“Did you know some humans used to actually keep the cast once removed as some strange memento.”
She did know.
“Oh, don’t cut through that drawing please.”
He eyed her suspiciously but adjusted his position, quickly cutting two slits on either side of the cast and gently pulling it apart. There was a small clatter as her commbadge fell to the ground.
The Doctor looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
“Do I want to know?”
“Casts are itchy.”
He did a quick scan of her leg before handing her the pieces of the cast and standing.
“You’re officially healed. I don’t suppose you’re ready to tell me how you broke your leg?”
Nahla held the two pieces of her cast together, smiling at the notes and drawings now that she could really see them properly. She gave the Doctor a twinkling smile.
“Curiosity killed the cat, Doctor.”