The King of Bedside Manner

Posted on Tue Nov 3rd, 2020 @ 3:21am by Alden Loxley & Daiyu

Mission: Just A Short Hop to Priam
Location: Fortune's Echo - Daiyu's Room
Timeline: Day 16 - Very Early Morning

She'd slept longer than the couple of hours Karen had promised, and Alden was starting to worry. At first, he'd rested back in a chair pressed up against the wall in Daiyu's sanitised room, but now he paced up and down across the uncluttered space.

Daiyu didn't have much stuff to move, so the clean-up operation hadn't taken him and Jonas long. And moving her had been easy enough, her lightweight frame seemingly so fragile, though yet clearly capable of enduring so much. Too much, Alden thought, as his brain guessed at what might have been done to her. He had ideas, bad ones, and dark enough to mean he hadn't wanted to be alone in the room with the young woman when she finally woke up. No, he needed Niamh with him for more than one reason, and his primary concern was their unexpected passenger's safety.

As Daiyu's eyes fluttered open, it was like pulling up from a riptide in the ocean. Unconsciousness clung to her, threatening to pull her back under. Finally a sudden start let Daiyu force her way to full wakefulness.

"Where am I?" she gasped. Seeing Alden, she asked, "What happened?" Then, seeing Niamh, she asked, "Who are you?"

A long exhale of pure relief exited Alden's lips before he spoke a word. He traded a quick, grateful look with Niamh, then responded to Daiyu, his tone firm but gently offered. "You're in your room on the ship," he told her. "You hurt yourself so the Doc had to help you get better. This is Niamh, she's a friend of mine and she's travelling with us for a bit. How do you feel?"

"Kàn ganjué bìng dé bù qīng." I feel like death. Daiyu rolled her head around and took in the situation. "How did I hurt myself? I... I don't remember..."

"You drank surgical spirits," Alden said honestly, and with a heavy heart. "Not good for you, Mei Mei," he added. "Really not good. Doc saved you, but you genuinely could have died. Kinda hoping," he continued. "You'd talk to us, even a little bit."

"What's the point?" Daiyu's face was stoic at first. "Nobody wants me here. Nobody wants me... anywhere..." Her eyes began to glisten, so she looked away.

"That ain't true," countered Alden pointedly. "I want you here. But I want you safe. I need all the people on this ship to be safe..." His own voice briefly faltered as Noah's demise was far too recent a loss, and Alden skipped forward. "I can't lose anyone else, Daiyu, and that includes you. But you gotta understand, I don't know anything about you so it's kinda hard for me to help."

Daiyu just stared. "I'm not sure what you want to know..." Thoughts. Memories. Pain. "I don't even know what I could tell you."

Alden looked awkwardly at Niamh, then back to Daiyu. His voice was gentle as he spoke. "People hurt you, in the past," he stated rather than asked. "I don't need to know the details of that, though you can share whatever you feel a need to. With me, or with Niamh." Alden let that sink in before he continued to speak.

"People won't hurt you here, Daiyu. If they try, they'll answer to me." A loaded pause. "But, I also need to make sure no one else here gets hurt. By you. Understand?"

"Why... would I hurt anybody?" Daiyu asked. "Because they insult me? I am worthy of shame. Will they steal from me? I have nothing." She stared at Alden with an unreadable expression. "Will they violate me? You will protect me." Another pause. "So, I still do not understand."

"I don't know. And I hope you won't... hurt anyone," said Alden, and he stood still, leant his back against the wall. "But like I said, I don't know you. Someone left you in an escape pod. I don't know why. Who hurt you, Daiyu?"

Her voice fell to a whisper. "... which time?"

Alden crossed the room and sat on the very edge of the young woman's bunk. His expression told an emotional story of concern, regret and shame at the unfortunate acceptance of the Verse's cruelty.

"How about we start with how you ended up in the escape pod?" He asked.

"I... I don't know," Daiyu said. "The last thing I remember was buying passage off Hera after..." Well, never mind that. Daiyu shook her head. "I couldn't afford a nice seat, so they stuck in me in the back. In a pod... Next thing I know, I'm trapped and have to eat... eat my plants..." The confession made her start crying again.

Her words tugged at Alden's heartstrings well enough and he didn't even try to deny that emotion as he shuffled closer and reached out his right arm, seeking Daiyu's hand with the intention to offer the simplest form of physical comfort. There was whispered cursing, a whole filthy string of it, in Chinese, that Alden offered up to the ceiling as he considered the bastards who would eject a pod with a young woman it in. "It'll be okay, Mei Mei," he said, with absolutely zero idea of how he intended to make that truth.

But Daiyu's admission also begged another question. She'd been a paying passenger and they'd given up an escape pod to be rid of her? That didn't make sense at all.

"Can you tell me why you left Hera?" Alden asked, wincing as he pushed yet another question at a tearful Daiyu.

Daiyu cowered under the question. The truth was too awful to say, but what choice did she have? To lie was wrong. "I lost my home."

Alden looked to Niamh, who was quiet support right now and offering him a mild, cautionary frown. Don't push too hard. "I'm sorry, Daiyu," Alden sympathised, quietly and with sincerity. He waited a few long moments of quiet before speaking again. "Where was home?" He risked asking.

"... I don't remember," she said at length. "Father Johns took me in at the Monastery. He said I was gifted with the gardens. Life began in a garden, he always said." Her dark eyes drew cold as her voice turned monotone. "But I don't know where I came from. Before the Monastery, there's...fire...poking...blood..."

Daiyu clenched her eyes shut and began thrashing her hair about in anguish. "PAIN! I WON'T DO IT AGAIN! I'M SORRY!"

And then she wailed like a banshee.

That cry resonated and reverberated through the small ship, a loud and clear keen that sent ice-fire splitting through Alden's heart and soul. Instead of covering his ears, he reached forward and placed his open right palm firmly at Daiyu's right shoulder.

"Easy, kid," he said with a tone as sure as those strong splayed fingers. "Daiyu. Easy. Nobody here needs you to do anything right now." He looked to Niamh in the hope of some form of miracle help.

“Calm down, sweetheart, you’re safe here” Niamh reassured softly whilst edging slightly closer but not enough to invade Daiyu’s personal space. “You have done nothing wrong beyond giving us a fright, but that’s okay, we just want you to be okay” she explained earnestly. It was likely going to take a long time for her to gain the younger woman’s trust, but as she watched her fall apart she silently swore to be patient. She’d likely need the whole crew on board though, something she would discuss with Alden once they were alone.

Daiyu eased her tumultuous cries, though whether due to the comfort and consolation of the two others in the room or due to simple exhaustion was hard to tell.

"I don't know where to go," she said at length. "There's nowhere I belong..."

"For right now," Alden promised, despite all the misgivings of his crew, pilot and the nagging doubt in his own mind. "You belong here." It might be a dumb idea, a crazy decision and something that would bite him back hard and heavy, but that, for now, was just how this was going to be. "That be okay?"

"Piànzi!" Conman/Deceiver!. Daiyu spat the word at Alden. "Nobody wants me here. Why are you lying?!"

"I want you here," Alden returned, his tone even and his gaze direct. "Maybe I'm the only one, but I'm also the one who makes the final decision on that score. But..." He sighed and aimed a frown at the young woman in the bed. "I'm also responsible for everyone's safety. If you want to belong here, want folks to want you to be here, that's gonna take some work. Right now, you're an unknown, is all."

Daiyu started to whimper and cry. "I don't know who I am either..."

"Well," Alden said, letting her emotions play out uninterrupted this time. "Maybe that's not a bad thing? You can figure it out one day at a time?"

"What if..." The tension on Daiyu's face turned to grief. "... I don't want to know?" Her memory was not exactly a box of treasures.

"You don't have to look back to know who you are," Alden told her. "Make a new start."

"Whether you remember or not, you're not alone and you'll be free of judgement," Niamh added softly. "Not one member of this crew is a saint, if anyone of us took to judging the past of the others we'd be nothing more than hypocrites," she comforted, "Let's start a new chapter in the story of Daiyu, together," she finished with a soft smile.

Daiyu looked at both of them with hard penetrating eyes. "Xíng," she said softly. Okay.

After a pregnant pause where her dark eyes continued watching them, unblinking, making her thoughts unknowable, she made an alarming query.

"Are we going to fornicate now?" Her tenor was somewhere between nonchalant and uncertain.

Two unreadable expressions studied Daiyu back for a moment, then Alden stood up and backed up slowly towards the door, arms out to his sides, palms outward in a definite declaration of 'not touching can't get mad'.

"I'll check in on you two later," he said, shot Niamh a helpless look and left the two women alone.

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