"I should have locked the door..."

[Vex Xiang 0]

"I should have locked the door..." Duty Log - Maturin

 

      Dox took the time he had to retreat into the sickbay locker room. He could hear Drake barking orders at some of his fellow nurses back out in the surgery ward. He grabbed the base of his tunic and stripped it off. The tunic squished and smeared along his face as he pulled it over his head, then pulling down his pants. His entire body was red, and his uniform was drenched with various peoples blood.

      Maturin stepped over to the sonic sanitizer and stood inside. He leaned forward and slammed the activation button with his fist. What had happened to him back on the station, he wondered. This soldier was tired. It was the first time since the war that he had seen anything so grusome. Slipping on the blood on the deck, body parts everywhere, fire burning him, smoke closing up his lungs. Sometimes when he looked at those bodies, it was like looking at a mangled piece of equipment. He was passive, uncaring, unfeeling. But for a moment, he lost connection with reality. Somehow he felt that he was back on some distant world, starving, watching his friends disintegrate around him. The Jem'Haddar hot on his trail, so close he could feel their stinking breath.

      He'd never experienced that before. What happened to him?

      The sonic sanitizer washed a cool blanket of energy over him. The blood particles vanished and left only his clean skin.

      "Oh, I'm sorry," a nurse had just walked in with a pile of clothes, putting them into the biohazard recycler, "I'm sorry I didn't mean to disturb you."

      She had been staring at his back. Maturins skin was so young. She had started counting the long scars on the skin, the scars he hid with his uniform. Long, stretching across his entire back, criss-crossed. The nurse knew they were lashes. It was only then that she noticed the scarred rings around his ankles and wrists, barely noticable if you were not looking. And she imagined him hanging there, bound with metal wires and help up in an X...the lashes whipping down onto his back with a loud cracks, followed by the juicy tearing of his flesh.

      Maturin turned to her, suddenly aware that he was naked. He quickly made his way to a locker and slipped on some scrubs under the nurse's fixed gaze.

      "I should have locked the door," Maturin apologized to her. Her face had flushed when he had turned around.

      Finished dressing, he smoothed out the scrubs against his body.

      The nurse couldn't resist asking him about the scars. "Sir, if you don't mind me asking..."

      "I have to get back to the surgical ward," Maturin cut her off, knowing perfectly well what she was about to ask. Some stories were better suited for more appropriate times. And at the moment, Kwai's life hung in the balance.