Nothing Changes

[Troy Parson 0]

In the tiny bathroom connected to his quarters, Troy examined the wound on his arm. He’d closed it up with the auto-grafter from the medikit that he kept in his quarters for dealing with minor injuries, and while it’d probably hurt for a little while—the graft wasn’t quite as well-aligned with the surrounding tissue as it would have been if the treatment had been done by a professional medic—the bleeding, at least, had stopped. After closing the wound, a shower had been in order, taking advantage of the real water-based shower that he had built for himself to replace the efficient but decidedly unpleasant sonic unit that had been fitted previously. The experience of the shower was exactly as Troy remembered it—the water, always too hot or too cold, running down his skin, the slight smell of dirty smoke from dust, or perhaps something more important, burning off of the heating coil, the blood spiraling down into the drain, mathematically, a fractal in reverse.

 

He’d expected to find his quarters more or less destroyed, his left-behind possessions sold off, stolen, or just stored somewhere else, but in fact, everything was more or less as he had left it: his books, in the cases that took up most of the room’s wall area, secured by bits of rope run across the front of the shelves, having needed only the slightest of straightening to undo the misalignment caused by the ship’s recent movement; his collection of humanoid skulls staring back at him from their mounts, their expressions not having changed at all in reaction to the recent chaos. Even the top-heavy decorative lamp by his bedside was still in place. A quick check revealed that the small wooden box he kept behind a loose wall panel was still there, too.

 

Now that it had been grafted and the blood had been washed off, the wound looked quite small. Looking at it in the mirror, it was hard to reconcile it with the bloody mess that he had been carrying around earlier. By the look of it, it probably wouldn’t even leave a scar. Nothing changes.

 

Troy wasn’t quite sure what happened next. In his memory, it would be recorded as three fixed frames, pictures with all of the “why” lost somewhere in between. One moment he was standing in front of the mirror, examining the scratch on his arm; the next, his fist, clenched hard enough that he could feel his nails cutting into his palm, was heading towards the wall, the muscles on his face feeling the expression of a snarl, a tightness in the back of his neck sending tremors through his body that painted the whole scene in shades of red. And then the third frame: his hand recoiling from the wall, the coldness of the air between his teeth as he bit back a cry of pain, the thought, What did I do that for?

 

Then the scene went back into fluid motion: taking a step back from the wall, clutching the hand that he had just harmed quite severely, the choked cry escaping from his locked-down throat as a low growl, the wall, Klingon, solid, undamaged, mocking him. And then he punched it again, and again, and again, until the pain won out, a quiet part of his mind asking him if he was proud of being able to act as if he felt something that strongly. The wall watched him surrender, unmoved, unblinking.

 

A shot from one of the hypos in his medikit calmed his hand down a little, enough that he could see straight again, but it wasn’t enough. He made his way out of the bathroom, headed straight for the loose wall panel, which he removed, feeling for the wooden box with his better hand, removing the box as well, placing it on the bed. He opened the box: a zip-lock bag of his home-grown tobacco filled most of it, beneath it, a pile of rolling papers and some filters. Next to the zip-lock bag, there was a glass phial filled with orange powder.

 

It had been no accident, leaving the box behind, but a tactical, calculated move, part of a stratagem that had very nearly worked. He’d managed to stay clean for most of his stay on Tranquility, right up to the point where it had become clear that his attempt at making a life for himself there had failed. That point was what sent him to an old, seldom-used QoB safe-house, where a box much like this one, complete with orange powder, was concealed within the mechanism a ratty old reclining chair. It had been pure luck—he had not yet decided whether it should count as good or bad—that the remaining members of the crew had chosen to gather at that very safe-house, and had decided to include him in their scheme du jour.

 

Carefully, with perfectly practiced motions, he set about assembling a smoke for himself, portioning out the tobacco by feel, positioning the filter, adding the orange powder across the top before rolling it up. It was a seemingly inviolable law of the universe that, whatever should befall him, his lighter would still be waiting in his pocket when it was needed, and now he flicked it on, lighting up. He inhaled, the oh-so-familiar taste of the smoke working its way from his throat to his lung to his arteries to every cell in his body, the pain receding, a feeling of near weightlessness coming over him, his thoughts breaking out of their loops and moving forward again, faster and faster. He blinked once, then again, taking stock of his condition and his surroundings. Books, skulls, lamp, smoke, walls, QoB, life.

 

Nothing changes.