| There are times
when he makes this job nigh on impossible. How do
you protect someone who won't stand still? Someone
who won't take a bodyguard with him when he goes on his
daily walk around the station? Someone who insists
on going for a stroll outside. We're on a
damn space station! He scares the living shit out of me. This afternoon he scared me even more. He took a poison dart shot by a two-bit assassin with delusions of grandeur. It was panic throughout the Zocalo, controlled pandemonium. John was fine for about two minutes. I was by his side when he looked at me with these wide eyes and dropped like a fucking puppet. Stephen's as bad as me when it comes to our beloved captain. He mobilised his medical forces, finding a cure faster than our would-be terrorists could make their first call. They'd set John up in isolation on life support but by the time the virus had wreaked havoc on his system enough to start alarms ringing, Stephen was injecting John with the concoction he and his team had reversed engineered from a sample of infected blood. There is no one in this universe I admire more than Stephen. ~ I didn't know I had tenderness in me until I met John. From hating the sight of him when I first laid eyes on him my whole body now reacts when I see him. Everything happened so fast this afternoon that it's only now, seeing him lying here with all this medical paraphernalia around him, that I realise how close we came to losing him. So many fucking risks, so many and varied ways to die. John risks his life each and every day just by being captain of this station, just by trying to pretend that everything's normal. It isn't. Everything's going to hell and what it makes it worse is that he's at the forefront of it all. When something really bad happens he's gonna be there taking the brunt of it. On duty, when we're in the thick of things, I'm okay with that because he really makes it seem as if he's immune to everything. But here, like this, he reminds us he's only human and as vulnerable as the rest of us. He shifts in his sleep, lets out a deep breath and makes a small sound like he makes when he's sleeping soundly at night. Don't know how he manages that either. Reaching across, I brush his hair away from his eyes. For these moments at least. he's safe. Anything could happen tomorrow. He could be shot by a stray PPG blast in a bar brawl. We could all be blown to hell by EarthForce ships intent on wiping us out. Or, on the bright side and if all goes well, we could be spending tomorrow night fucking like rabbits in his ridiculously large bed. Being the captain's lover has its perks. So I think I'll just sit here and let the station take care of itself for a few hours. It usually moves to his heart beat anyway, so perhaps it'll just take the night off and chill out. As I lean forward to touch John's face, the whole of Medlab shakes and I swear to myself as I hear a voice say, "In your dreams, Michael." Indeed. And I hear Stephen's raised tones, "We have an emergency people!" This place never sleeps. |