AN: Here you go!
I posted a ton today, so please don't forget to read Chapters 32-34 before you read this one. (And please don't forget to show me some love on those chapters, if you enjoy! You know I survive on validation, right? LOL)
This won't mean anything to my Caryl people, but to my Voyager people, it will. The doctor has his mobile emitter already. We're going to pretend they traded for it before this story started. This really changes nothing at all about the story, it just means that the doctor can move around the ship where he wants.
At any rate, I hope you enjoy the chapter! Please let me know what you think!
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Chakotay knew very well that, by the time Kes had gotten the words "before you panic," out of her mouth, Daryl had already begun to panic. Chakotay was concerned, and that concern gnawed at his gut, but he'd spent enough of his life in Starfleet to know that sometimes it was best not to panic when an explanation was about to be offered.
Daryl didn't know that yet.
"Put me back now, asshole!" Daryl demanded loudly.
"Where do you want to go?" Ensign Riviera asked sincerely. He looked a little terrified of Daryl's very powerfully spoken demand.
Chakotay reached a hand out in Daryl's direction to try to catch his shoulder and ground him.
"Wherever the fuck you put Carol!" Daryl yelled. He lunged in the direction of the ensign as though attacking the man might somehow lessen whatever cocktail of emotions he was feeling. Chakotay understood the urge. He was also somewhat thankful that lunging for Daryl, and practically wrestling him backward, let him use some of the energy that was beginning to boil up inside of him.
"I'm sure there's an explanation!" Chakotay said, holding tight to Daryl to keep him from going in any direction.
"There is!" Kes said, stepping closer to the transporter pad.
"Better be you tellin' me where the hell Carol is!" Daryl barked.
Normally Daryl was fond of Kes, but it was clear to Chakotay that he had no attachments to anyone, at that moment, at all. He wasn't fighting Chakotay, but he would, if that's what he felt needed to be done.
"Carol is in sickbay," Kes said. "With Captain Janeway."
"Is it the virus?" Chakotay asked.
He felt his own desire to react surging up, and he released Daryl. He headed for the exit, determined to make it to sickbay as quickly as possible. Daryl didn't argue with this plan at all, and Kes was left running after them.
"We don't know what it is," Kes called as she ran behind them. "The doctor is—running tests now."
Kes stopped trying to fill them and, instead, simply did her best to keep up with them as they made their way to sickbay. As soon as the doors whooshed open, and they were inside, Chakotay tried to figure out what exactly was going on.
Kathryn was at one biobed, clearly trapped in a forcefield, and two biobeds away, Carol was doing her best to escape by digging out of her own forcefield—with no real progress, especially given that such a feat was impossible. The doctor's alarms were going off, indicating that one of them—more than likely Carol—was in some kind of distress that put her vitals outside of normal and acceptable range.
The doctor was unsuccessfully trying to persuade her to calm down.
Daryl ran over and spat a curse at the forcefield when it denied him access to Carol and pushed him backward.
"Let her outta there!" Daryl yelled at the doctor. "Let her out! She can't breathe! She's claustrophobic, you asshole!"
Chakotay remembered that Carol had very nearly gone into severe panic when they'd been put in the stasis chambers. She'd had to be sedated in order to go in hers.
Now it was clear that she was in distress and she was desperate. It even hurt his chest to see her on the floor, begging for release, and gasping at her imagined shortness of breath. The truth of the matter was that she was causing any shortness of breath that she might feel.
"The atmospheric forcefields are for the protection of Carol and the captain," the doctor insisted. "Until I know that their systems are completely free of the virus, I'm holding them in protective atmospheric bubbles to keep them from suffering the same fate as Ensign Reynolds."
It was a positive and proactive step, in Chakotay's opinion. He was sure that Carol and Daryl would both agree when Carol was calm and able to see reason. Chakotay stepped up to the forcefield.
"Carol—Carol—can you hear me?" Chakotay asked. She looked at him, but through gasping for air, it was clear that she couldn't, or wouldn't, respond. "I know it feels like you're trapped. But the bubble is for your protection."
"She can't breathe!" Daryl barked. He somewhat lunged toward Chakotay out of instinct more than anything. When he realized what he'd done, he backed up. "I'm sorry," he said. "But she can't fuckin' breathe! You gotta get her out!"
Desperate to do what he asked Chakotay to do, Daryl clawed at the forcefield like he might scratch Carol free with his nails. Chakotay pushed him back to stop the noise that his futile efforts created.
"That won't work and she can't hear us if you're doing that," Chakotay said. "Carol—Carol—you can breathe."
"That's what I've been trying to tell her since she began to hyperventilate," the doctor said. "I can hardly treat her for a problem that she doesn't actually have. We need to get her anxiety under control, though. It's certainly not doing anyone any good."
"Least of all her," Chakotay offered. "Daryl—see if you can get her attention. See if she'll focus on you. The atmospheric bubbles have constant oxygen flow. The oxygen rate is monitored and carefully controlled."
"You hear that?" Daryl asked, clearly excited by the news. "Carol? You hear that? You got oxygen. Plenty of it!"
Carol looked at him. In her panic, she gasped at him a little like a fish out of water. It was silent and half-choked by her tears of desperation. The pain she was feeling, as she clutched at her chest, was not the pain of suffocation—as her brain feared it to be. It was the pain of her own anxiety. But at least she looked at Daryl. The heartbreaking thing, Chakotay was sure, for Daryl, was that she looked at him like she trusted him to get her out of the bubble that he couldn't control.
Chakotay chanced a glance toward Kathryn. In true Kathryn form, she was clearly concerned, but it was pretty evident that almost none of that concern was for herself. She stood at the edge of her forcefield, just before touching it, and watched with concern at what was happening.
Kathryn cared for Carol—and Carol's suffering, no matter how minor the result of it would actually end up being, would be Kathryn's suffering.
"Carol," Chakotay said, adding his voice to Daryl's to try to calm the situation for Kathryn as much as for Carol, "the air inside the forcefield is measured and controlled. It's circulating constantly. You have more oxygen in there than we're guaranteed to have out here."
Carol seemed to pause for a moment. She looked from Chakotay back to Daryl. She was on the floor. She'd sunk down, likely in the earliest moments of panic. She crawled forward and touched the forcefield like she was reaching for him. She jumped back when it loudly denied her the ability to leave the space. Daryl knelt down in front of her.
"You got air, Carol," he promised. "You got it. All you need. Just breathe in."
"I hate to be the one to inform you," the doctor said, "but she's been breathing all along. That isn't the problem. The problem is the rate of her breathing. She needs to breathe deeper and slower."
Daryl gave the doctor a clear warning look before he softened his expression and turned back to Carol. She very clearly fixated on Daryl.
"You hear that? You hear him?" Daryl asked. "You got plenty of air. You need to breathe deep, though. Take a real deep breath."
"I can't!" Carol protested.
"You can!" Daryl insisted.
"Tell her we'll all breathe with her," Kathryn offered from her own bubble.
"You hear that? Kathryn's gonna breathe in her bubble, too," Daryl said. "We all gonna breathe."
"I'll use up all the air," Carol protested.
"You can't," Daryl said. "You breathe it in, Voyager's just gonna pump more air in there. It's mechanical. That means B'Elanna's runnin' it. You know she's not gonna let you suffocate, right? Klingons—they don't suffocate their victims anyway. And she'd never suffocate you. She knows how pissed I'd be with her if she even thought about somethin' like that."
The whole thing was a fabricated story. B'Elanna did keep the ship in top working order, so there was, perhaps, a grain of truth there, but mostly Daryl was talking because it calmed Carol. Without her realizing, she focused on what he was saying and she forgot, for even a split second, to focus on her perceived suffocation.
A second was long enough for her to begin to feel like she got some more air, so she started to calm more. It got even better when they all convinced her to that first deep breath, hold it, and let it out slowly. It improved further when they convinced her to do it again.
Finally, Carol was calm and breathing normally on the floor of sickbay.
Chakotay walked over the Kathryn's bubble. She clearly looked tired from the ordeal, but she relaxed when Carol's alarms stopped going off to indicate that all her levels were returning to normal.
"Are you OK?" Chakotay asked.
Kathryn smiled softly and nodded.
"I'm fine," she assured him. "We were beamed directly here. We were beamed directly into the bubbles. There wasn't time to discuss things with the doctor because Carol's panic immediately started to set in and the alarms went off."
From her bubble, Carol's panic was now replaced with upset and embarrassment over the uncontrollable response. She cried out her apology in a loop until Daryl shushed her and Chakotay and Kathryn both promised her that all was well and nobody was even inconvenienced. She was visibly tired and, more than likely, was the one who had suffered the most from her panic—though Daryl might have been a close runner up.
"If I may," the doctor said, finally interrupting them.
"Please, Doctor," Kathryn offered from behind her field.
"When I was first planning to beam you aboard, my original thought was that it would be better to put everyone in containment. The crew has been inoculated against the virus, so I had very little fear of you bringing it onboard to contaminate anyone else, but I knew that what happened with Ensign Reynolds was very sudden, and it took place the moment that she made contact with our atmosphere. The virus aside, I also didn't know what else you might have come into contact with on the planet's surface. The Vidiians had assured me, though, that the virus was the only known illness that resulted from that particular planet. They'd worked with it before. They knew, perfectly, what it was and how to cure it. They did warn me, though, that they'd only ever tested their cure and their inoculation on Vidiians. Therefore, they really had no way of knowing how it would work on humans."
"You got a point?" Daryl asked.
"I'm getting there, Mr. Dixon," the doctor said, allowing all his annoyance to shine through.
"Yeah—real slowly," Daryl said. "Why are they in the bubbles? What's gonna happen?"
"Well—I'm not entirely sure," the doctor said. "I don't know that I have an answer for either of those questions, but I was coming to that."
"We're sorry, Doctor," Kathryn offered diplomatically from her bubble. "Daryl is just anxious about the—the status of his…mate." It was clear that she hadn't known quite how to express what she wanted to say, and she had never discussed titles with Daryl and Carol. It was also clear that she wasn't pleased with her own choice of words, but it was enough to appease the doctor, and that was all that mattered for the time being. "Please, continue."
"As I was saying," the doctor offered, "I considered putting everyone in containment. I finally decided, though, that such a precaution wasn't necessary. Instead, I had B'Elanna help me to set the transporter with a medical scanner and contamination scanner. Instead of simply alerting us to contamination in the transporter room, I set it to transport the infected person—if such an individual might exist after the medicine was administered—directly to one of the four atmospheric containment fields that I set up with the exact specifications of the planet's atmosphere. I expected them all to remain empty. As you can see, my hypothesis was incorrect."
"I'm glad the containment fields are in place," Chakotay offered, his stomach sinking. "The virus was fatal. What—are we going to do?"
"If she goes back down," Daryl said quickly and firmly, "I go back down. I don't give a damn about a virus."
"Nobody is being beamed back to the surface," the doctor said. "At least—not yet. We've left orbit already, and I'm sure that we would prefer not to have to return if we're able to avoid such a thing. I had the transporter scanner set to detect the virus or any other abnormality that could be attributed to the fact that everything on the planet is alien to us and, therefore, may affect the human system in ways of which the Vidiians may not even be aware. I haven't been able to run many tests, though, to find out what's infecting the captain and Carol, because as soon as I set the computers to start scanning and sent Kes to let you both know what had happened, Carol's panic attack began. I was trying to calm her. Whatever it is, I'm confident we can treat it on Voyager—especially now that we know the forcefields work to mimic and maintain the protective atmosphere."
"Forcefields are workin'," Daryl said. "And she's breathin'. Can't you find out what's wrong now? Instead of wastin' time?"
The doctor opened his mouth like he might protest, but Kes stepped in to distract him just as Chakotay stepped forward to try to soothe things over.
"Doctor—this might be of some interest to you," Kes said, handing him a PADD. "They're the preliminary results following the computer scan."
The doctor took the PADD and studied it.
"This is interesting," he said.
"What is it?" Chakotay asked. "The virus or some mutation of it?"
"Not exactly," the doctor said. "I'd like to run some individual tests and perform an examination of each of my patients. The preliminary scans, though, indicate that it's not the virus. Instead, it seems that they've picked up some kind of parasite while on the planet's surface."
