(I'm finally playing a Marine alongside y'all! Fresh New Meat, coming up! LOL!)
Then
Planet: Goliath
Location: CSC Space
Date: August 7, 2186
Time: 0600, Local
"Behave yourself."
"Behave?" Prepped for surgery and stomach down on the table, Dmitri struggled to stay awake against the drugs they'd given him. Oksana leaned over him, her face hidden behind a surgical mask but her eyes were crinkling in that way they tended to when she smiled. She squeezed his hand and he hated the glove separating her from him. He would rather have his last impression be the warmth of her skin instead of the latex on his fingers.
"I've seen you flirting with that nurse," Oksana said, her tone more amused than admonishing. "Remember who you arrived with, yes?"
"Save the last … dance for you … Promise …" Dmitri squeezed her hand as the drugs took him down and the world fell away.
Date: August 7, 2186
Time: 1930, Local
Dmitri blinked awake in a bed in the recovery ward. The beep and hum from the machines and monitors greeted him. Tubes and lines snaked under the sheets. A chair and a small cart with a glass and water carafe stood at bedside. Privacy curtains were drawn all around.
Oksana wasn't there.
Frowning, he blinked hard to clear his vision and looked around again. He was alone. There was no sign of Oksana having been there at all. No jacket on the chair suggesting she'd momentarily stepped away. No blanket or pillow that had once marked her bivouac at his side. He listened past the curtains. Her voice was nowhere within earshot, a sharp contrast to her constant dialogue with the surgeons in charge of his procedure.
Where was she?
He swept the cubicle again and spied the envelope lying on the cart. He stirred and felt a distant tingle from his toes. Ignoring the sensation, he grabbed the envelope and saw it was addressed to him. Inside was a letter. It was short.
Dmitri,
I cannot take it anymore, the fighting, your anger, the bitterness between us. I am leaving you …
Dmitri had no memory of bolting out of bed and ripping the curtains aside.. He only knew that the Universe had gone suddenly, stunningly wrong, his heart screaming denial even as he screamed her name. It took two orderlies to wrestle him down. He felt one man's nose give way under his fist before he felt a sting in his neck … and then felt nothing at all.
Now
Planet: Goliath
Location: CSC Space
Date: January 1, 2187
Mission Time: 00:00
Dmitri had just arrived on the last transport to find the Marines of the Easy Eights scattered about on their various tasks. There was no one to greet him, but he didn't think it odd. He hadn't messaged ahead that he'd be coming. And truth to tell, he preferred a little time alone to adjust to the new reality before having to explain it to the others.
Reality was he'd regained the use of his legs but he'd lost his wife. In a sickening reversal of the Universe, he was now the bereaved party suffering the absence of a beloved spouse and yet … he felt the letter in his breast pocket, a constant talisman of everything wrong.
It had been addressed to him, the writing was in a woman's hand, but Dmitri did not believe Oksana had written it any more than he believed in the Easter Bunny. The writing, though womanly, wasn't
his woman's. The language was English,
not Russian, which he and she used in all the notes they left for each other since the beginning of their courtship and beyond.
Her leaving him was completely out of character. She'd refused to believe he was dead, had waited two months for him despite overwhelming evidence that he'd gone down with his ship. She'd braved punishing seas and ungodly creatures to bring him home. She'd saved his life after he'd been impregnated. She'd stayed by his side while he'd put them both through hell afterward.
No. That letter had not been written by the woman who'd done all those things, the woman he loved and married. Dmitri believed with everything he had that Oksana had not willingly left him. The letter had to be a fake. Someone else had written it to explain her absence.
Where had she gone—or more to the point, where had she been taken? By whom? Why?
All through his rapid recovery after he'd woken up alone, to the amazement of the doctors who had scarce hoped for so favorable an outcome from their experimental procedure, Dmitri had pushed himself to the utmost to regain his legs. He would need them to carry out his mission:
Find Oksana. Make the bastards who took her from him pay.
Bloodthirsty, perhaps, but Dmitri wasn't the sort who took obstacles lying down. Neither, he knew, was his wife. She was out there somewhere, trying to get back to him. He was out here, where it all began. With God's blessing, they'd find each other again.
Which explained why he wore the Marine uniform: as soon as he could get free of the hospital, he enlisted and got himself through boot camp as hard and fast as he could go. When the time came for his first posting, he requested and was granted assignment to the Eights. It took some doing, but his first hand experience with the Xenos—up close and personal, survived at high cost—and his skills from his prior career had been leverage he'd had no compunctions against using. So now he was back where he could finally get underway.
Dmitri found the barracks, stowed his gear in an unclaimed locker, and struck off to find someone from the Eights he knew. He had to report for duty.
He'd caught word that Quinn had been court martialled on bullshit charges over the Snakefighter, and therefore wasn't sure who would be in command of the Eights. Dirk, he thought, or Sam. He strode the halls with a military snap and at a fast clip, his carriage upright and his body fit. One would be hard pressed to believe he'd spent months as a cripple.
He found Sam in the mess hall, grabbing what appeared to be a cup of tea. He remembered she preferred it over coffee, though she didn't take it the proper (Russian) way. He noted all this in a second and closed the distance between them, stopping short and smartly coming to attention.
"Private Dmitri Mikailovich Barayev, reporting for duty, ma'am."
<TAG: Sam>
<TAG: anybody else in mess hall>
((OOC: Apologies for the length. I had a lot of ground to cover.))