Promises

Where: Refectory
When: Evening

"Miss Jones" White Wolf rumbled as he approached Cass with Candice in tow
"Yeah?" she looked up from her handheld terminal as her MED, towering darkly behind her, shifted uneasily
Pausing, the giant hamster frowned up at the robotic horror, privately reflecting on how much this woman had achieved with the mere scraps available to her here aboard the Dwarf, and wondering whether Jay might well have had a point when he had demanded she was thrown off the ship
"Is that thing really necessary?" he asked
Cass wrinkled her nose
"Not really..." she admitted "I've just come up from an inspection of the mining decks – It's still dangerous down there, and you never know what you’re going to encounter"
"Well..." White Wolf paused to pick his words carefully "After your earlier little display back in the hangar, its presence here comes across as you wielding it as your enforcer"
Cass was silent for a moment, White Wolf noting a subtle tightening of her jaw as she considered her response
"Point taken" she eventually conceded "I'd personally prefer the status quo to have been maintained as it was, but Jay's life was in danger, and... You know..." she finished lamely
"If you want a job doing properly, do it yourself" White Wolf nodded
"Well, someone had to take control" Cass shrugged, monetarily turning her attention away to glance down at the handheld
"And who would ever have thought it would be our Miss Jones that would step up and act the leader?"
Cass looked back up at White Wolf and frowned, folding her arms defensively and shifting her weight onto one hip
"Your point?"
"You're full of surprises" White Wolf smiled beatifically "But that's not what I wanted a word about"
"Oh?"
“Yes, indeed” the rotund hamster nodded, and proceeded to tell her about the possibility of a nearby Roo outpost, the pulse bomb he had found and his ideas about using a similar, functioning device to engineer Jay a mobile field generator

"It's a nice idea" Cass conceded after he had finished "But I'm not certain it'll work - The virus has infected virtually every cell in Jay's body, and at the moment, he's more machine than human; so while the EM field system we replicated is keeping him alive, it's also keeping him in his coma; using a pulse bomb as a field power source will just keep him as he is..."
White Wolf twitched his whiskers in irritation
"Bugger" he grumbled
"But hey" Cass continued brightly "If the outpost is as advanced as you suggest, they might have the sort of research facilities we’d need to be able to engineer Jay a cure; so I'd say it was definitely worth looking into once we've got our new drive room built"
“If we do manage to locate an outpost, it’ll be dangerous...” White Wolf warned
“Jay doesn’t have forever, so I think it’s worth the risk” Cass said after a moment’s consideration “but we’ll need everyone else’s approval before we go anywhere like that”
“Agreed” White Wolf nodded “We’ll float the idea over the next few days”



When: later
Unused to the unfamiliar chill aboard the Dwarf after the constant, sweltering heat of Fernando’s, Cass shivered a little and pulled her coat closer around her
Her coat! - After weeks of wearing little more than a couple of strips of cloth to conceal her modesty, her clothes had all felt unreasonably constrictive; and after having tried on a couple of outfits, she had finally settled on a long skirt, a top and three-quarter length coat – a combination of long clothes that, given the weight she had lost during her ordeal down on Fernando’s, didn’t, in her opinion, do her many favours; but at least she felt comfortable

Finding herself unable to sleep or even settle, she had taken to listlessly meandering the Dwarf’s corridors during the small hours, and in spite of the all the trigger alarms she had set, she had found heself almost obsessively checking her terminal every five to ten minutes, making sure the monitor feeds from the equipment keeping Jay alive were still green across the board

Morosely wandering onward for hours though the through the maze like tunnels, she paid little heed to her surroundings until she realised with a start that she was only a very short distance from the infirmary
Having arived there seemingly not of her own volition, Cass dithered for a moment, uncertain as to what she should do; she knew she shouldn’t really be there and that the best thing to do was to leave well enough alone, but she was tired and, more than anything, lonely and sorely in need of a bit of company
Ideally, it was Jay that she wanted, to soothe away her fears and tell her everything was all going to be okay, but even under the best of circumstances, she knew that this was just wishful thinking; and so while there was only the outside chance Doctor Black would be still around, at that given moment, she figured she'd take a chance on whatever company she could get, and so, bowed to the inevitable, and turned towards the infirmary

The dimly lit medical centre was deserted when she arrived, and so she stole in towards Jay's bedside and busied herself, checking the mass of equipment that she and the others had hurriedly engineered in place around him
Finally satisfied, she turned to stand beside Jay and gazed down at his pale, drawn looking features, hesitantly reaching a hand out to caress his face but thinking better of it at the last moment, and instead pulling up a chair to sit down beside him

"From what I know of coma’s, I think there's the possibility you can hear me" she began in a low voice "I don't know where you rank on the Glasgow scale, but if you can't hear me..." she shrugged and slumped back into the chair "I guess there isn't any harm in me talking to myself, is there?"
She paused a moment to gather her thoughts
"This is a bit of a mess, isn't it?" she murmured eventually
"What with Katrina, Brittany's revelations about me and this virus of yours, you and I have been in the wars a bit, haven't we?"
"I wish things were different" she continued wistfully "It takes a lot for me to want to have anything to do with anybody, and I really hoped things were going to work out okay for us"
Cass lapsed into silence for a bit, nervously chewing her bottom lip as she looked around the room
"I'm sorry for shouting" she said eventually "I was angry - What you said hurt me"
Looking back at Jay, pale and festooned in tubes and machines, she gave him a pointless, but wan smile
"It wasn't a very funny joke, you know?"
"I guess it doesn't matter anyway" she sighed "What's done is done and you've made your choice"
"I don't like it, but if I'm honest: I think I was expecting this to happen – You’re a good man, so everything working out like this was virtually inevitable"
"I can't begin to tell you how stupidly naïve I feel to have ever hoped otherwise"
"You see?" Cass chuckled humourlessly "I told you I was an optimist!"
"I suppose I was clinging to the idea that we..." she petered out
"No. That's stupid. As you pointed out, we were only together what? A month and a half? - Just enough time for me to feel the way I do and then another month or so more, having my feelings reinforced by desperately wanting what I couldn't have"
“I’m sorry - I get a little obsessive sometimes”
“That's just me”
“I try not to overanalyse myself any more, but that... that thing in my nature gets things done – It’ll get you your cure...”
“I promised you, remember?”
“I said I’d tear the stars from the sky for you if I had to...”
Runing her hands back through her hair, Cass momentarily closed her eyes, the room spinning dizzily from tiredness as she did so
“I concede defeat, okay?” she murmured sadly “But I want you to know that I’ll honour my promise”

Lapsing into pensive quiescence after that, Cassandra's eyes eventually began drooping in the warm, semi-darkness of the medibay, and her head slowly sank to her chest

She was still asleep there, curled up in her coat in the chair, when Jade returned to check on her patient early next morning
She wasn’t surprised to find her there in the slightest