Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.

--Charlie Brown

"Tell me again how you did this, Mr. Garrison?"

"Wrench slipped, Doc. I just banged them up some. No big deal."

Anna Raynor eyed him speculatively. There was a lot more to the story here, but so far she hadn't figured out what it was. She would have thought Buddy Garrison would need a lot more than a few scraped knuckles, however painful they looked, to show up in the infirmary. He'd always given the impression that while grateful for the extensive medical treatment he'd undergone, he'd just as soon avoid professional interactions with doctors for a while.

"If it's 'no big deal', then why are you here?"

He rolled his eyes. "Harkness saw me do it. He insisted that I come get them checked out."

"Ah." One piece of the puzzle revealed at least. Although as attentive as Jack was proving to be to the well being of his crew, that still seemed a little excessive. Anna's tone must have revealed her ongoing question, because after a moment, Buddy continued.

"I think he may have seen me do it three times. Including dropping the wrench once when my fingers went numb."

"But you weren't going to come by on your own."

He gave her a long, "you've got to be kidding me" look, and Anna sighed.

"Clearly not. But you're here now, so let's take a look."

She ushered him over to the exam area and seated him next to the bed, with his hand lying flat on its surface. Carefully she ran a scanner over the entire hand and up his arm to his elbow.

"Well, you do have a chip off of the proximal end of the first metacarpal on your third finger. You must have hit pretty hard. I don't see any neurological damage, though. I was afraid when you said 'numbness' that maybe there was a lesion higher up, but…"

"Sometimes some of my implants give me weird sensory—I don't know, ghosts almost. The docs couldn't figure out how to stop them, so I live with it. That may have been what happened."

"Maybe." But Raynor was clearly sceptical. She was no fan of coincidences, temporal or otherwise.

"It's fine now, the sensation. That wasn't even the last time I banged up my hand."

Raynor started working, cleaning up Buddy's hand, and covering the abrasions with a temporary skin before reaching for the bone stimulator. One of the many joyful surprises of serving on the Welshman was the sophistication of the medical equipment, much of which, she had surmised, incorporated alien technologies. Hardly Empire approved, but it worked well, which was all she was concerned about.

"I'm told this feels a little odd," she warned him.

"Not my first night at this dance, Doc. Do your worst."

"So," Anna asked, with studied casualness as she ran the machine over his hand, "since when is Buddy Garrison so distracted that he wracks up his knuckles three times in a morning?"

"I guess I had a lot on my mind today. Nothing very interesting, just—stuff."

"Anything you want to talk about?"

Buddy thought about it for a moment longer than he'd considered telling the Captain, but reached the same conclusion.

"Thanks for the offer, Doc, but it's nothing. Really."

"Okay. If you change your mind…"

"Thanks."

"And remember, the knitted bone isn't as strong as it was—no more punching the engine, all right?"

"Yeah. I'll get Roberta to do all the heavy lifting," he told her dryly. The engineer's post on Welshman was a tough, physical job that required an all out effort by each of the two people who held the post and both Garrison and Raynor knew it. How Roberta had handled it alone as well as she had before Buddy joined the crew was a complete mystery to him, as brilliant an engineer as her knew her to be. He was sure he wouldn't have been able to manage it by himself.

"I thought she did that already," the doc responded lightly, returning his smile. "Take care of yourself, Buddy. You off shift now?"

"Yeah, and I have dates with one hot, long shower and then a soft bed. See ya, Doc. And thanks again."