Unintended Consequences Part 2

Posted on Sat Nov 20th, 2021 @ 2:38pm by Lieutenant Aiko Kato

Mission: Breen in Paradise
Location: Quarters

Aiko closed her eyes trying to get ahead of the storm that was coming. It was too late to stop it now, she knew. She would just have to endure it and prayed to the stars that she came out of it less broken...


…already her mind and heart were racing in tandem as unwanted dark images from a dark period in her life flashed before her eyes. They were so vivid that she saw more than the images. She could smell the scents, feel the taste in her mouth and experience the sharpness of the emotions.

The images...or rather experiences, were from when she had been a Breen prisoner during the Dominion War. But there was almost always one scene that popped up whenever she had these psychosomatic episodes. It was that of the one when she was bound and gagged and hanging from the ceiling. Her arms were all that pulled the weight of her petite body, keeping her feet just shy of touching the ground. The shackles on her wrist were so tight they seemed to fuse into her wrist. Her fingers were a different story. At least with her arm she felt some numbness, but she had stopped feeling her fingers altogether ages ago.

The air, as brutally cold as it was, reeked of death and despair. Directly in front of her was the lifeless body of what had once been a proud Klingon warrior, but now his eyes simply starred forever at her with the haunting glare of shock and horror on his face.

On his body she saw various types of wounds varying from stabbings, cuts, and bruises. The blood pouring from the wounds had long dried up, but they left a vast powdery red residue across his entire torso. He had no arms to speak of, or rather they had been severed clean at his shoulders and they sat some distance from his body.

Even now, she could hear his screams- part defiance, part terror at the brutal torture that had been inflicted on his body.

Get a grip Aiko! she mentally chided herself desperate to pull herself from this memory and the psychosomatic episode. This is in the past and it has no power over you.

The latter was something one of her earlier therapists would say to her often whenever she had triggering episodes like this. But she could barely register her own rational thoughts. They were like a calm and still voice against the fierce backdrop of the trauma-induced giant wave of oblivion racing towards shore. As such, her rational thoughts were easily overpowered and appeared almost as if they had not been uttered in the first place…

...the Klingon's eyes were the most haunting of all. They looked squarely at her. Even when she looked away or closed her eyes. She still saw him starring helplessly at her as if he were piercing into her very soul. His lips that had once been full were agape, dried out and cracked.

Had he not seen that last strike that sent him from this life? Aiko wondered. She had been there after all. It had happened right in front of her. Their Breen captors always loved putting on a show for their prisoners in an attempt to demoralize them.

The Klingon was the third such "show" that Aiko was aware of, and strangely the one that had been most prominent just by the sheer and utter barbarism of it. There was a reason after all her mind kept coming to this scene every time her trauma resurfaced.

She had witnessed a Breen soldier mercilessly and playfully stick various blades into the Klingon alternating with physical strikes with various objects, including fists. And then there was the verbal abuse.

Of all the violence that had been unleashed on the Klingon, Aiko found it strange that it was a mere slap that the Breen soldier had delivered that had garnered the surprised look on the Klingon's face and ultimately his death. It had been an open palmed affair, which struck the Klingon squarely in his left cheek with no spectacular force to it. Nevertheless, she had witnessed his eyes rollback. She suspected she imagined it, but she thought she heard him exhale his last breath after which he remained forever still.

Perhaps it was the shock of being slapped that had been surprising, Aiko mused. In truth, it was the only slap the Breen soldier had ever delivered in the whole torturous event, which had felt like hours. Had the Klingon been surprised that a Breen had ultimately caused his demise, or had he simply been taken aback at the relatively weak strike of the slap, which paradoxically took his life?

They were burning questions it seemed, yet a part of her deemed them meaningless. They served no purpose to her except perhaps as a temporary reprieve from having to focus on her own impending death...

Stop this! The still voice was back, pleading for reason in the midst of chaos and confusion. This is meaningless and unimportant. Remember the Washington! The Captain needs you on the Bridge now! Get your ass moving Aiko Hinata Kato!

For the briefest of moment- something akin to the intermission between the retreating form of a wave recoiling back into the ocean- Aiko came to her rational senses. She checked her surrounding realizing she was still in the restroom of her quarters. She could feel the cold hard floor on her cheek and realized that she was lying on the ground. This close to the ground, she could hear the hum of the engine, pulsing with bridled power.
Aiko tried to latch on to her surroundings to understand what was transpiring…was she in her quarters or was she in the Breen prison camp? Confusion began to set in even as she tried to find order in the chaos of her mind.