She didn’t react to his cry at all, but was staring, transfixed, at her hands. So was he, for that matter.
The mirror that had been hanging on the bathroom wall was now crushed, the pieces scattered all over the floor. Her hand was bleeding profusely and he briefly suspected she’d crushed it with her fist. But that wasn’t the only reason.
She had picked up pieces of the glass with her hands and was holding them in her closed fists, squeezed as tightly as she could. Blood was sippering through her fingers and her knuckles were turning white with the force. Her eyes were now clamped shut and she was letting out little whimpers as she squeezed the glass harder and harder.
“Beka!” he cried out. He got no response. “Come on, let go!” he tried again. It was as if she wasn’t even there. As if she didn’t notice he was there. “Beka, please!” He felt hot tears brimming his eyes and slowly running down his cheeks. With a trembling hand, he reached out and shook her gently. It didn’t seem to affect her.
Regretting it already, he clenched his eyes shut and with not quite as much force as he could have mustered, slapped her straight across the face. She blinked a few times and then looked around her. He could now see the tearsstains on her cheeks and wondered whether she’d actually felt the pain, or if she had been aware. She looked at him, then looked down at her hands. She opened them slowly to reveal her palms, the scattered pieces of glass bloodstained, some of them buried into her skin. She whimpered as she tried to pull them out and shake the other ones off, but her hands kept bleeding and when the pieces as well as her fingers were covered in blood, she kept slipping and couldn’t get them out. Eventually, she looked up at Harper with a shocked expression on her face.
“What’s going on?” she whispered. He frowned, then looked into her eyes and realised that she honestly didn’t know. He wanted to ask her, to figure out what she thought had been going on, but noticed one of her hands was bleeding very badly and he should be getting her to medbay.
“Don’t worry,” he mumbled, trying to sound calm though his heart was beating faster than slipstream, “we’re just going to go to medbay and fix your hands, ok?” He prayed silently that he would get her there. He couldn’t handle this on his own. Whatever “this” was.
“No…” she whispered, shaking her head. “Someone’s…someone’s here…” She started to look around her, breathing heavily.
“It’s just me Beka,” he reassured her, his voice shaking. Please, someone, come and help me. She looked at him.
“Harper, please leave,” she mumbled. “I have to…I have to be on my own.” He shook his head. This he wasn’t going to back down on.
“No Beka,” he said firmly, “I need to take you to see Trance.” She suddenly clamped her hands over her ears, getting blood into her hair, and gravity causing it to run down her arms, into her sleeves. He had a good view of the back of her hand now and it looked bad, as if she really had crushed the mirror with it. “You’re digging the pieces in,” he reminded her gently, almost feeling his heart trying to pound out of his chest. She looked up at him, seeming as if, though she’d just talked to him, she only now realised he was there.
“Harper?”
“Look, will you at least come out of the bathroom?” She glanced at him and nodded, standing up and walking out slowly with pieces of glass still stuck to her hands and blood dripping on the floor as she walked across the bunkroom to sit down on one of the bunks. He followed her and, keeping a close eye on her as she sat there, staring at her hands, went over to a console.
“Andromeda,” he whispered. She showed up on the screen.
“Harper? Is something wrong?” He nodded quickly.
“Yes. Very wrong. I need your avatar here as quickly as she can to get Beka to medbay.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t have time to talk Rommie! Just get down here, quick!”
She really did get there quick, within two minutes she was there and had Beka scooped up and carried off the Maru. Beka had now gone limp and didn’t fight. She was conscious but it seemed she’d given up and would let them do whatever they wanted to her. She hung limply from Rommie’s arms as the android carried her with ease, and Harper followed in her trail, trying to keep an eye on Beka all along. He knew Rommie would say something if she was bleeding too quickly, but still wanted to see for himself that she was ok.
Well, ok wasn’t a word he would use, he decided when they got to medbay and Rommie gently lay Beka down on a bunk. Trance ran up straight away, obviously already notified of what was going on. She grabbed Beka’s hand and started to gently pull the pieces of glass out of it, getting small whimpers out of her patient as she did. She then grabbed Beka’s other hand and her eyes widened.
“What has she done?” she whispered as she grabbed a tool from her table and quickly patched Beka’s hand up, gently laying it back down before she grabbed the other one again, cleaning the blood off it. Harper could see she had only been thinking out loud as she seemed busy and decided to walk over to Beka, to see if she looked any better.
He walked over to kneel next to the bed. She was staring blankly with tears running down her cheeks. The blood had dried into her hair and her face was stained as well where she had dragged her fingers across. Her hand, still dripping blood but not quite so badly after Trance had healed the cut on the back, had fallen off the bed and she’d made no attempt to get it back up again, but let it hang limply over the side.
However, it was her eyes that scared him the most. He didn’t think she was catatonic or in a trance, but it looked like she’d given up. He cursed himself for not checking on her earlier.
She must have been miserable, he thought to himself as he looked at her, crying being the only sign she was still there. He heard a throat clearing behind him and looked up to see Rommie. She gently pulled him up and took him aside, casting a glance at Beka to check she couldn’t hear.
“Harper,” she said gently, “what happened?”
He took a deep breath.
