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Posted on Sun Jun 29th, 2025 @ 12:35am by Ensign Iozhara

1,271 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Character Backstories
Location: Sickbay, Deck 12
Timeline: 2240 Hours

Sickbay lay in its hush like a thing waiting to be born. The pale lights low along the walls, the humming of the environmental units.

Iozhara sat on a low stool, a coil of surgical filament in her hands. These coils were rarely used anymore but still standard-issue on any Starfleet vessel. She moved slowly, winding the thread into careful spirals, though it didn't need organizing. That wasn't the point.

Emotions, she had learned, liked their compartments. Anger, fear, happiness--all could be folded neatly away when the moment passed, filed in tidy little labeled drawers somewhere behind the lungs and under the ribs. The body could do that. And the mind liked it too.

But grief was different. Grief did not obey. It seeped under doors, pooled in corners, and curled up beside her as she slept. It followed her when she went on-duty like an invisible, uninvited companion.

She continued working the thread around her fingers, the small coils forming like tiny nooses. It was completely unnecessary work, the kind of thing left to dispensers or junior technicians. But she liked the motion of it. The way the thread resisted slightly, then yielded. It made a brushing sound over her gloved fingers that was pleasing to the ear.

He would sit cross-legged on the floor of their home, visor pushed up onto his forehead, the tool kit laying wide open and looking like a chest of small metal bones. Iozhara had no memory of her father ever rushing a job. He would lay the pieces out carefully. He'd explain each one was if she were an engineer already, not a child of nine trying to mimic his grip.

This, he'd say, holding up the driver, "is the last thing you reach for, not the first. Anyone who starts with a heavier tool is trying to feel big. Use your fingers first. Know the problem."

His hands were rough--scraped knuckles, dark stains under the nails--but as precise as a surgeon. When she was small, she used to sit just beside him, legs tucked under her, and hum quietly to herself while he worked. Sometimes, he hummed too. Not words. Just low, tuneless sounds. It was music not meant for anybody but the room.

There was no ceremony to it. Only the quiet weight of presence. He didn't tell her to stop talking. He didn't correct her when she guessed wrong. He'd just lift a piece, press it into her palm, and let her feel the shape of something that mattered.

A clatter from across the room snapped her back to the present--just a colleague dropping a dermal regenerator while taking inventory.

Iozhara didn't jump, but her shoulders tensed in reaction. She looked at the nurse a moment, watching her reach down and place it gently back on the tray.

There was a night, a few weeks before he left, when the wind in their region on Barzan had shifted unexpectedly. Tornadoes were frequent during the wet seasons and some of the gases in the atmosphere were capable of causing asphyxiation in homes that were not airtight.

The seal on their habitat dome was good, but not perfect, and sometimes the atmospheric balance would skew enough to rattle the structure during one the windstorms. She had woken to the low groan of metal and the high whistle of beams under strain.

Her mother was already up, securing emergency shutters, voice tight and clipped in the way it always shifted during drills. But her father had simply pulled on his old coat--the one with the multicoloured patches--kissed her mother's cheek, and come to find Iozhara.

He hadn't said anything at first. Just took her hand, warm around her smaller one, and guided her to the back corridor where the dome's inner frame was exposed. The wind outside sounded angry, like something evil and ancient had come knocking.

They had each donned an emergency mask that would flush-out any of the toxins in the air, should they enter the habitat's interior.

"Do you know what fear is for?" he'd asked, eyes on the pressure gauge for their home.

She hadn't known how to answer.

He crouched beside her and tapped the glass of her mask lightly. "It teaches you to check the seal."

Then he looked at her fully, smile lopsided, and added, "It's not a warning. It's a reminder. Fear means you want to live."

She remembered nodding, not because she understood, but because he said it gently. Like he wasn't telling her--he was giving it to her. Something she could carry.

Another wrap and another loop. The thread spun smooth between her fingers.

Iozhara paused to stretch her neck, then opened a drawer and pulled out the old cloth pouch she kept tucked inside. It wasn't standard issue. Nothing in it had a barcode or a tracking label.

Inside were a few small tools her father had given her--all nonfunctional now. But they remained symbolic. A cracked circuit probe. A wire cutter dulled from age. One of his patch tags, the adhesive long since dried. She'd brought them with her on every assignment since the Academy. And finally, the last item.

It was the last gift he had given her--a tiny carved pendant, no larger than her thumbnail. It had been shaped like a Barzan leafwing, folded delicately in half each point slightly askew from the other. It had snapped when she was thirteen. She kept the pieces wrapped in a thin square of cloth.

She didn't believe in talismans. But the pendant was something.

She carefully unwrapped the cloth, folding it delicately until the pieces were visible. The design had worn soft with years, the edges now rounded and smooth. She held it a moment longer, then refolded the cloth and placed it back in the drawer.

When they had received news that his shuttle had vanished in the Celendi Nebula, her mother hadn't cried. Not in front of her. She remembered seeing her standing at the threshold to his office and staring for hours, as if waiting for something to happen. A feeling. A sound.

But there'd been nothing. Just silence. Her mother's hand on her shoulder, firm. Then the sound of her own breathing and the patter of her little heart. Too loud for someone so small.

She didn't believe he was gone, not really. Not even after they held the memorial and lit the filament lanterns, watching the streaks of fire float into the wind. Not after her mother remarried. Not even now.

Sixteen years. And still, the thread had not been cut.

Iozhara was roused from her reverie by the gently brightening Sickbay lights. Her shift was now over.

She looked down at her hands. The coil was complete. She couldn't remember finishing it. She placed it in its case as if closing a thought she wasn't ready to think through.

She stood, stretched until her spine answered with a soft crack, and moved down the rows of dimmed stations. The hush of the waking medical bay pressed around her. Colleagues began filtering in, voices low, steps soft.

At the threshold, she paused. Looked back once, as if expecting to see something left behind--a shape, a breath, the echo of a voice she knew by heart.

There was nothing. Just the slow, patient glow of the instruments and the tranquility of rooms that would never hold him.

"Fear means you want to live," she whispered.

She stepped into the corridor. The door closed behind her with a sound like some final breath, and the quiet swallowed her whole.


* * *

Ensign Iozhara
Nurse
USS Astrea

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