After reading back over the last chapter I realised it looked a little displaced timeline wise. I should have put some kind of time on it and didn't because later chapters I'm writing sort of place each event as basically the day following 'Just One Second'. I know it's moving slowly, and I apologise I just have a very specific idea of where I want each character to be at each moment which is very pedantic of me but at least it keeps me busy.
I promise that Riker WILL return in the next chapter, and I think I'm done being hard on him for now so it should be a good one for the Riker fans out there. As usual your feedback is hotly anticipated - happy reading!
"Dr Crusher, if we might have a word?"
Schreiber appears as though from nowhere, a single data-pad caught up under his left arm. He has one eyebrow quirked up in question, and a smile that matches the expression.
She is not unnerved by him in the least.
"Absolutely, of course, yes, just through here,"
Beverly babbles back, completely uncontrollable, and points him ahead of her in the direction of her office, just at his back where they stand off to one side of the main Sickbay.
There's the grunt of his ascent, then the shuffling of heeled boots on the carpet floor as they walk over, leaving a pace or two between them
They are about the same height, a good match for one another, she might imagine, if this weren't such a delicate situation they find themselves meeting in.
Her glancing hand on the door panel seals them both inside together, and he takes no time in sitting down in front of her desk, crossing one long leg widely over the top of his other.
The man cuts a broad, easy figure, something of a fixture to him that makes her think again, however wishfully, that this might not mean these high stakes in another universe.
She does not find him to be presumptuous, even twirling a tablet stylus between his delicate fingers.
"You've been through everything now then?"
Beverly asks him, sitting behind the desk, pushing her own computer terminal off to the side so that she can lean into him, to be engaged, to gaze.
His eyes, smooth around the edges, long-lashed, near-grey, are consuming.
"I have yes, and I think there's definitely some areas we can be improving on."
She does not hear the fleck of derision he masks behind a disarming smile, so smiles back, nods her enthusiasm.
"That's good news, something to show me?"
Beverly gestures down at the pad he's placed face down on the desktop.
"Ahh, yes, the protein structure,"
He breezes, unblinking, and reaches to grab up the tablet, rolling the stylus still in just the one hand. It lights up to his ministrations, and there is the intricacy of biology rotating a 3D structure on it's screen.
She leans even closer to see it, wishes she didn't wish she had her glasses to clear away the little strain this causes her.
"That's incredible,"
She sighs in awe, and reaches out as if to take a closer look at the tablet.
Instead of extending back, Schreiber grips onto it tighter.
"Quite right, I believe it's the missing piece of your puzzle Doctor,"
The man puffs back importantly, though she mistakes this for simple professional pride.
"I found it attached to an incomplete hydrocarbon sequence in the mutated strand of fetal DNA, incredibly tricky stuff to pin down but I managed to isolate it just an hour or so ago in my own lab,"
He uses the stylus to cycle the image around to it's opposite side, then magnifies something he clearly wishes to draw her attention to.
"You'd be forgiven for overlooking it given the sensitivity of equipment required - a proper laboratory like my own was necessary to examine the samples with this kind of precision, you're Sickbay is no research facility after all."
Beverly is too distracted to properly listen to his judgments of her, and she reaches out for the tablet again.
Again, he keeps it close to him.
Her fingers whisper just over the surface of the screen, at their greatest extension, and she breathes out her awe.
"This is really incredible."
Like this, she misses the grin he flashes, the way he adjusts higher in his seat to look down on her.
"As I said, I think this could be what you're missing,"
Schreiber tells her, and she looks up to him, a question in her eyes.
"With further analysis, we could really be looking at some serious implications for the medical community - I mean,"
He stops to take a breath."
"- if this protein is the key to the growth we've seen in this study, then imagine the kinds of leaps we could make going forward,"
He puts the tablet down on the desk again, and Beverly rests her chin on a bent wrist just a few inches from his face.
"We could grow genetically identical organs from a single cell in a matter of days - there's rapid regeneration of neural tissues and the nervous system, we could even be looking at curing blindness using this research,"
He reels off quickly to her, passionate but not lacking in composure, and perhaps even something just a little sinister, though that feeling is very easy to shake off.
"It's just like science fiction,"
Beverly hears herself echo in awe, then swallows sharply and attempts to return to herself.
She steers her eyes away from his, sits back into her seat leaving her hands to fold neatly on the tabletop, trying to comb through all the words he'd said.
"Surely that's years away?"
"That's what I'd thought before seeing this,"
He gestures casually to the forgotten pad.
"It's incredibly complimentary to my own research, I've been working on it for years already and I think somehow you've stumbled on my white whale, Doctor."
A clattering of instrument trays out beyond their window steals his attention for a second, and he throws a look over his shoulder, not caring much about what he'll see there, if only to fix it with a disapproving frown.
She follows his gaze, and a man she had almost forgotten about is there grinning widely, collecting things up off the floor for a nurse who bats her eyelashes maddeningly for him.
"About time,"
Schreiber comments dryly, turning back, and she is pursing her lips at him now, looking away too.
"Sorry?"
"Oh nothing,"
The man wafts a hand through the air:
"Riker's been somewhat of a presence back on Tiberius,"
He tells her delicately, attempting to be aloof but really just alluding to his own insecurity about having his crown taken from him for a while.
Beverly nods back, flits her gaze between the two of them once more and sees how Will is ushered by another of her staff, to sit on the edge of a bed.
He clutches onto one of his ribs through absolute shit-eating laughter.
"I wonder what's brought him in?"
She muses, and Schreiber scoffs fast.
"Don't worry about him Doctor, he'll be fine,"
He says calmly, assuredly, and she tries to believe he's right and not just impatient.
"I want to show you something else."
"Oh?"
They turn attention back to the pad, his slender fingers drawing it back up and into life, swiping around expertly on it's screen.
"This is the maternal blood sample-"
Schreiber indicates a microscopic reel of rushing cells, flipping and flying disks alongside few lumbering, larger globular ones, the occasional spiked virus soars past; she nods.
"And this here is the fetal blood sample-"
The screen splits in two, and alongside the first, a second recording appears, much richer in the large white cells, and swimming with healthy red cells, full and rounded. There is not a single spiked virus in the looping footage.
"Now, watch what happens when I directly combined the samples."
The screen divides into thirds now, and the centre section begins to show a series of hurried and confused movements, everything rushing and red.
"Good god!"
Beverly exclaims, keeping it beneath her breath for the sake of saving face.
He nods back, chest puffed.
"They're completely incompatible,"
He affirms plainly, as the cells begin to collide, attach, split open all at random.
"The combination was completely in-viable after less than 30 seconds -"
A beat.
"By all accounts, your counselor should be dead."
Beverly covers her mouth with a clasped hand to stop from saying anything too rash, to make her trembling less obvious.
"She should be?"
She manages to ask from behind her fingers, confused.
"Oh absolutely."
The tablet is discarded again.
"Her white blood cell count is too low to fight back and win - they're attacking each other and she should have lost by now."
He leans back in his seat, and Crusher's expression turns to one of deep thought.
"I mean -"
She takes her hand away and gestures through the air.
"- I knew there would be some incompatibility - there always is - but I'd thought that their DNA being almost a one hundred percent match would mean the fetal antigens are identical to Deanna's own."
She takes a quick breath.
"I never thought we'd see this level of rejection, it makes no sense."
"Unless -"
Schreiber cuts in fast:
" - the rewriting of her DNA, in combination with this alien-factor, has made it so that the child is almost completely foreign, despite appearing compositionally native to the mother."
Beyond the window, Will throws his head back in deaf, raucous laughter.
"What if her DNA is meant to be just the way it is, and she's just as much an anomaly as the child?"
He posits with the suspicion Picard had had a few days ago.
"That's -"
Beverly starts, isn't quite sure what she had in mind.
"- well, it's an intriguing theory."
She glances down at her hands on the tabletop, almost nervous to challenge him on this; he clears his throat in the silence, acutely aware of how he makes her feel.
"I just don't understand how this didn't abort the fetus weeks ago, before her white-count could fall so low, it should have done, shouldn't it?"
"It should have, this is the issue."
Schreiber changes over his crossed legs, eyes lit up in his excitement.
"It would just be so fascinating to see what's really going on within the placenta, don't you think?"
He does not give her a chance to respond.
"I really do think we could be learning more from this than we are,"
He adds fervently, pointing forwards at her with the stylus between his fingers.
Off in the background, Will is being coerced into lying down by the same giggling nurse as before, still holding his ribs together in one hand.
"If we delivered by cesarean then we'd have the perfect opportunity to observe the live tissues before they become redundant, really get a good picture of how it is they both have survived so long,"
He goes on without her, terribly enthusiastic and yet still in control of all of his words, not allowing them to spill into one another.
Beverly takes a split second to realise what he's said, but as it dawns on her, she finds herself reeling just a little, not wanting to offend him in her rebuttal.
She blushes just slightly as she speaks:
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves, I really don't think her body can recover from that kind of surgical trauma, you've read her medical reports so you must know as well as I do that her heart won't survive it,"
She urges him, not wanting to consider the knowledge that he did know that before he suggested it, that maybe he doesn't really mind what happens beyond the collection of his data.
"Besides,"
Beverly sighs out:
"All of this is very compelling, but it doesn't offer anything new to her treatment, it doesn't help me keep her alive and strong enough to deliver, and if we can't develop some kind of immuno-therapy to combat this, then there's really no point in looking so far ahead as a cesarean,"
She finishes frankly, wishes there were a way to put a full stop at the end of her sentence, but terrified of where that will leave them all in the end.
Terrified, that a full stop means death, and nothing worse can possibly happen beyond that.
"Of course,"
Schreiber acquiesces, but he is not ashamed or taken aback, and has the gentle quality of foreboding about him, as if he is not quite smug, as if he knows her opinion won't matter somehow.
"You said there were improvements we could be making - we should be starting with them okay?"
He nods back, takes a pause.
"Yes, so -"
Briefly, his eyes flit to the wall chronometer behind her head.
"- I think you've been on the right path with immunotherapies, but, well, I think you've been a little withholding in the treatment, if I'm to be honest."
"No of course go ahead."
Beverly finds herself smiling placidly.
"With what we've seen in regards to fetal white count, and the incompatibility with maternal antibodies, I'd say it's safe to assume there's much more room for aggression in her treatment than you've been willing to use so far,"
He explains, shifting both legs to rest in flat feet on the floor, stance wide and commanding.
"If the goal is to keep them both alive, then you're going to have to begin administering in higher doses and concentrations, the patient will need much closer monitoring, I'd even consider having her kept residentially, though I'm surprised she's been allowed such free movement thus far -"
An open mouthed, disappointed sigh has him cutting himself off.
"Really, I'll be wanting more samples for my lab analysis, hopefully I can look at the relationship across the placenta to see where the highest reactivity occurs, and maybe from there we can modify the interaction so that their chemistries have minimal exposure to one another."
Beverly nods along, following closely even though he talks but does not say an awful lot.
"I'm not making any promises Doctor Crusher, her body appears to be in complete rejection of the fetus, quite frankly I've never seen a single thing like it."
She remembers the conversation back on Betazed, about love and choices and what it is to be wanted; she thinks she might understand, wishes she knew nothing at all.
Had she no eyes, at least she might be blind to all this.
"I understand, I do, and I'm grateful for your help Derrick, you've no idea,"
Her voice shakes as she speaks, and she has to stand from behind her desk to convince gravity to push air into her lungs when she's not the strength to pull it in herself.
"I guess this all just means we've still got work to do,"
She adds in equal measures of hope and desperation; Schreiber stands too, seems taller now than before, a little more bold.
"It does."
Picking his tablet up, he dips his head in acknowledgement, smiling again with no apparent reason.
"If you don't mind then, I'll be working from my lab,"
He tells her; it is not a question.
They come very close at the doorway, where she is holding a hand ready over the door panel, threatening to open it in a completely non-threatening way, and she finds herself smiling too.
"Would you see if you could get her to volunteer some different samples, I can send over a list of what I need?"
Somehow, his use of the word volunteer, makes her feel as though he was close to telling her he will have them one way or another anyway, but she opens the door for him with another bounding nod, and chooses to remain ignorant.
The man dips his own head a second time too, and her eyes follow the movements in his hips as he walks away, the tautness of his muscles beneath skin-tight trousers.
Ignorance, it appears, is just the best she can do.
