Bajor's Last Gleaming (Jai's Anatomy: Epilogue)
Posted on Wed May 31st, 2017 @ 7:11pm by Lieutenant JG Jai
Mission:
Refined Relations
Timeline: 2392 / 2388
Tags: Jai
1458 words - 2.9 OF Standard Post Measure
The date had almost passed him by.
Time seemed so inconsequential in space. There was no day. There was no night. The patterns and repetitions of daily life were guided by the duty rotations, regular intervals that soon became routines around which the day began and ended. What day specifically didn't matter. He got up at the same time every day. He meditated at the same time every day. Went to work at the same time every day, for the same amount of time every day. He would try to vary the routine a bit -- perhaps he would walk to work along the port-side corridors as opposed to the shorter starboard route, or dine in the aft mess hall rather than the forward.
But for rare moments of brief interludes, such as a shipwide alert or a medical emergency, Jai knew one moment to the next how the events of the day would unfold. The First Contact with the Republic of the First Worlds had provided such a momentary distraction, but just as quickly the ship seemed to be returning to routine.
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, each minute had seemed an endless stream of unending tasks, emergencies, and sequences of events beyond his control. A single minute spent in an Emergency Room on Earth provided more work for him than did the Vesta in a month.
That lackadaisical attitude bred a certain apathy toward the passage of days, so it was startled when the boy looked down to sign off on a patient chart and saw there, partially concealed beneath his thumb, today's date.
Four years ago, he'd traveled to Bajor for the first time.
To bury a friend he'd only met a few weeks before, and face the sum of all fears.
Failure.
Four years ago today, Jai failed. As a doctor. As a Buddhist. Healer or holy man, it hadn't mattered. He had tried -- desperately, angrily -- he had tried and he had failed. And unlike any other time in the ER that he had dealt with trauma or death, this felt different.
It had been... unnecessary.
The same facts, a different sequence of events, and it didn't have to happen. They could have cured her.
Instead, the make-shift crew of the Federation starship Discovery, mostly made up of the sleep deprived nightshift at Starfleet Medical's Emergency Medicine Residency Program, had set out for Bajor in the hopes of saving the same person they arrived to bury.
It was raining on Bajor.
The seasonal rains watering the fertile Kendra Valley that was known to host the planet's famed, picturesque farmland. It hosted as well a national graveyard that had originally been dedicated to victims of the Cardassian Occupation and grown into a cemetery that rivaled only Arlington on Earth.
Mika was being buried next to her grandparents, the procession slowly making its way through the haze.
Jai was numbly aware of the water seeping through the dark field jacket he wore over his uniform as he watched the child-sized coffin moving toward the freshly dug spot over which a vedek of the Bajoran faith stood arrayed in his Sunday finery.
If the rain bothered the ceremonial clad vedek, the pious cleric didn't show it. As the coffin arrived, the round-faced, burly figure of a priest smiled faintly as he intoned, "Torum and Midal were graced with a gift from the Prophets that they we had the pleasure to know as Mika. Today we celebrate her time with them and with us..."
A swell of emotion seemed to grip the boy by the throat, depriving him of breath. Averting his eyes, he cast them down to look at his feet. More than any time he could recall, Jai struggled to collect his thoughts. His mind seemed to be everywhere except for where he was, or where he thought that it belonged. Instead of thinking about Mika, he just thought about himself.
Glancing up, the boy surveyed the forest of adults that arrayed the small ceremony. A forest of darkly clad giants, overshadowing the Tibetan monk that time had either forgotten or forsaken.
In four hundred years, standing in crowds just like this, he'd always been alone.
That was when he felt the hand laid atop his shoulder.
Tiran Amaen was not a big man. He hand the hands of a surgeon. With them, he might have just as easily been a concert pianist instead. But, against Jai's small frame, the Betazoid man seemed larger than life.
He didn't say anything. He just laid his hand on the boy's shoulder. Jai looked up for a moment, then tried to look back at the funeral taking place in front of them, but found himself unable to so much as look at that coffin now.
Reaching inside the cuff of his sleeve, the Miran tugged on the small set of prayer beads that encircled his forearm. Soon, he was anxiously pulling the prayer circle through his hands.
Strange, that. Jai didn't really feel like praying.
If anything, he felt like cursing the gods -- be they Prophet, spirit, ancestor, deity, or the ghost of Christmas past. He felt like cursing them all.
He felt like cursing himself, or was he cursed already?
"It's all just... wrong," the boy uttered, the soft words coming with an anger that surprised and frightened him.
He was supposed to be the thirteenth reincarnation of the Gyalwa Lama. He had debated the Kohlinar monks of Vulcan and meditated among the spiritual gurus of the Andorian Aenar. He was supposed to be above such base emotion. He was supposed to be better than that.
...better than he was.
People on his homeworld had died believing him to be something he wasn't. Not now. Maybe not before.
What had that faith brought them? They were dead.
What had his faith in medicine wrought? A girl who ought not have died was dead nonetheless.
And who was the blame? He very much wanted someone to blame.
Was it god? Was it any of them?
Was it him?
"Is this what it's all about?" the child whispered, the anger dissolving into a sadness. "Is this what... what it's all for?"
That was really the question, wasn't it?
Turning his head up, the brown eyed child stared up at the stony faced Betazoid captain and asked, "What's the point of being a doctor if you can't save anyone?"
It was a moment he'd never forgotten.
Bending down slightly, Tiran's hand held fast to the boy's shoulder as he looked the boy in the eye and answered, "This is what it means to be human."
This is what it means to be human.
To live. To die. To hope. To grieve. To try. To fail.
Life lessons he couldn't learn in the classroom or the hospital, but a rainy day on Bajor.
Within his monastic, spartan quarters, the young monk began to unfold a piece of cloth. When he had, what lay at the center was a delicate, silvery earring of Bajoran religious design. The ancestral markings indicated that the wearer belonged to the Jahn family. That owner had been Mika. The earring passed into Jai's possession when the girl's failing immune system resulted in her developing an allergic reaction to the earring's beritium metal content.
Jai, being somewhat religious or spiritual himself, had taken it on him to research Bajoran custom. It had helped to fill the void while waiting for the computer to run the lengthy analysis required in replicating her treatments in response to the degenerative effects of the progressive disease. And, he saw that not being able to wear the earring was negatively effecting his patient so... it was really just part of the care.
He'd replicated an earring for her, out of an Andorian ceramic that had silvery metallic-like qualities.
...he'd only learned after the fact that a boy giving a girl a new earring was the Bajoran custom of betrothal.
Awkward.
She'd worn it. And her family was most gracious for the gesture, pressing her earring into his care in return.
Reaching up with both hands, the boy carefully attached the earring to the bottom and then top of his right ear. Sitting in a lotus position, he leaned forward as he lit two sticks of incense and then leaned back.
Laying his hands in his lap, the boy closed his eyes and meditated on those words from four years before.
On what it meant to be human.
