The Shrink Is Off His Meds

Posted on Tue Apr 2nd, 2013 @ 10:47pm by Lieutenant Commander Robin Swift M.D., PhD & Lieutenant Nick Marcinko
Edited on on Tue Apr 2nd, 2013 @ 10:48pm

Mission: Breaking New Ground
Location: Nick's Quarters
Timeline: Current

* * Nick’s Quarters * *

Robin arrived at Nick’s quarters and, after being let in, began to sit but stopped momentarily. “I apologize, Master Chief,” he said, remembering to call him by his rank as requested. Normally he would have called him Nick anyway, but since this was his first time and the fact that Nick wasn’t exactly keen on seeing anyone from the counseling staff, or maybe just Robin, he decided to go with what worked. “It’s a bit late for me. Would it be okay if I got a cup of coffee before we began?”

Nick shrugged. He wasn’t comfortable with another man in his quarters, much less the chief shrink, but he had called him here at this time of night so it was only fair. “Knock yourself out.”

Now seated with a very strong cup of coffee, cream and no sugar, Robin crossed his left leg over his right and held the cup in his hand. “Well, I think we should begin. You mentioned Leto over the comm. Can you fill me in on what’s been happening?”

Several moments had passed before Nick would even speak. He looked around the room, flopped his head back on the rear of the couch and huffed then, finally, he leaned forward and appeared to be cleaning his fingernails with his other fingernails while looking at the floor.

“You know me, doc,” Nick began. “This is not how I operate, so I’ll warn you now that I may not be as...receptive to this sort of thing. But I really don’t know what else to try.”

Robin said nothing and nodded, even though Nick didn’t see it.

“I know that you were involved with her mission on Archadia as Imara, and that’s cool, no biggie there. It’s been done before so I can’t fault you for doing your job.” Nick paused, his hands now clenched. “My problem, however, is that while she was there she...” He sat up, then flopped back on the couch again. “She slept with the target, several times.” He put the palms of his hands on each eye and kept talking. “Before she came to see you, though, I asked her not to go, told her that someone else could have done this particular bit of the mission. I knew that it would probably lead to that and I couldn’t stand it.”

He sat up now, looking at Robin for the first real time since he’d arrived. “You probably know of the relationship that we had before she became Leto, and despite my little freak out at her complete change of appearance, we were mending and getting back into our old ways.” He shook his head. “I’ve never loved anyone before, doc, ‘cept my parents, and I didn’t even get to know my father much before he was killed protecting my mother. But Leto, I’m completely in love with. So much that I even asked her to leave Starfleet with me before her mission, and I was serious! I would have given up everything here to go anywhere else with her.” His face turned to rage as he slammed his fist into the couch pillows beside him. “But she wouldn’t give it up! We both knew what was coming, and she had to be the one to go!”

Robin had already had a meeting with Leto, but he couldn’t divulge any of that information with Nick. He couldn’t even tell Nick that he’d seen her, outside of the original hypnosis prior to the mission, which Nick already knew about. So he’d heard all of this before but was interested to hear Nick’s side of things.

“So you feel that she violated your relationship by knowing what would happen on the planet,” he said as a statement, not as a question.

“Exactly!” Nick replied angrily. “And to make matters worse, she doesn’t seem to care at all about it. She said it was all about work and it had to be done. Well, that’s a load of bullshit, if you ask me! We could have programmed a goddamn science officer hottie to have been Imara, go down there and fuck that guy’s brains out and give her the information. But Leto keeps saying that it required her expertise. How the hell does that factor into it? Her expertise was off limits when she was Imara! It never came into play, but that’s her flimsy fucking excuse and I’m supposed to accept that?”

“Didn’t she have some sort of run-in with...” Robin paused as he pulled out a PADD.

“Zoudin Veist,” Nick offered.

“That’s him,” Robin said as he confirmed it on the PADD. “Before she became Leto, she was captured, right?” Nick nodded, now up and pacing back and forth in front of the couch. “Maybe this was her way to get revenge on him?”

“Well, kiss my hairy ass, doc, maybe that’s it!” he said sarcastically. “‘Hey, bad guy, you tried to kill me. Wanna’ fuck and make up?’ Yeah, that sure as shit sounds like the plan of attack I would go with.” He cursed under his breath now, his hand rubbing the back of his neck as he showed several outward signs of stress.

“Please, hear me out,” Robin said matter-of-factly. “She had to make a major life change after she was captured. She likely knew how it would affect you--you even said it yourself, about a little ‘freak out’, and felt that Zoudin had potentially ruined her life.” He paused a moment. “Now, you and I aren’t beer buddies, or anything, but from what I know about you, had you been in her shoes you would have stopped at nothing to get revenge on this man. Is Leto not afforded the same opportunity?”

Nick turned on him. “The opportunity to go have sex with whomever she wants!? What the fuck is wrong with you??”

Robin stood, his eyes narrowed and the coffee cup ready to be flung at Nick. “Sit down!” he roared, startling Nick. “You called me here to help you. If you’re not going to participate, then tell me now and I will leave and you can flounder about trying to fix this in your own way, but you will not insult me and you will not yell at me, is that understood, Master Chief?”

The startling only lasted a moment for Nick, primarily because he never expected Robin to have a spine. He always acted so girly that he would never have seen that he had some serious cajones under that uniform, especially since Nick was known to do really, really bad things to some nice people that didn’t really deserve it. He sat, thinking that he may have been wrong about ol’ Robin the shrink. But he wasn’t going to tell him that.

“Now,” Robin continued, sitting and returning to his normally soothing voice, “where were we?” He paused a moment. “Oh, yes. Revenge. I hear it is something in which you excel, Master Chief. Had it been you, and your primary target a female, would you not have slept with her for the coup de grâce? That one moment where you had them in your clutches and could ruin them for the rest of their lives, no matter how short that life may have been?”

Nick was trying to form an argument for this, his mouth forming the beginnings of several words, but none would come out. The man was right, damn him.

“I take your silence as an affirmative response,” Robin continued. “So what you are actually saying is that since you have an outie, and she has an inny, that it’s somehow different.” Robin almost chuckled when Nick looked up at him with a puzzled look. “Oh, good grief, man. Boys have a penis and girls have a vagina, and since yours sticks out while hers goes in, that makes this whole ordeal different?”

“You’re part Vulcan, aren’t you?” Nick said, now wary of the man’s seemingly infallible logic. He began sniffing to see if he could tell from where he sat.

“Am not.”

“Well, when you put it like that, sure, it makes sense, but it’s not just academic like that,” Nick said. “Zoudin Viest was with the woman that I love and he put his outie in her--” His face went blank and he stopped talking.

“Nick?” Robin asked.

Nick began dry heaving, his eyes watering as he thought about what he had seen on the storage unit that he’d found under Zoudin’s home. He tried to compose himself, but now all he could think of was the two of them together, an image that he would never be able to tear from his mind. “They were togeth--” Another dry heave, followed by several more in rapid succession.

“Whoa, whoa!” Robin said, quickly setting his cup down and sitting beside Nick. “Okay, stop. Stop focusing on that, get it out of your mind.” The heaves weren’t stopping and it was evident that he was actually going to begin vomiting soon. Robin was going to have to do something quickly or he may find himself in a sticky situation. He stood right in front of Nick. “You’re not going to like this, and we doctors don’t normally do this to our patients, but it’s the best thing I can think of on short notice.”

Before Nick could question it, Robin had reared back and came around with an open handed windmill smack, right across Nick’s face. He knew that a fist would have hurt his own hand too much but the combination of the loud connection to his face, and the sheer shock that he had struck his patient, would get Nick’s attention off of what he was concerned with.

It worked. Nick gasped. He looked up at Robin and, momentarily, his teeth were bared and he was ready to kill him. But as quickly as it happened, Nick calmed down. He rubbed the left side of his face and smiled. “Damn, doc. That was pretty good!”

Robin shrugged it off and sat back down across from him, to put more room between them in case Nick did decide to tackle him. “Ah, that’s nothing. Despite what many might think, I’m not all doilies and tea cups, you know. Do you think this body is just god-given?” He snorted. “Hardly. But, it seemed to work. And don’t you dare start that again or the next time I’ll do it more than once.”

Nick rolled his eyes but nodded and sat back on the couch. “Fine. What am I supposed to do, then, smarty-pants? I love Leto more than anything, but that...stuff,” he shook his head again, “I’m not sure I can forgive.”

“Then how can you say that you love her?” Robin countered. “All relationships hit a bad spot. Love, true love, finds a way to work around it and move on. And I would expect nothing less from you, Master Chief.”

Nick cleared his throat, signalling his discomfort, and said, “I think it would be okay if you called me Nick.”

Robin smiled. “Okay, Nick, what do you say? Seek her out. You two need to talk about your relationship, where you want it to go from here, what you are willing to do for her and how she might reciprocate, and just make this thing work. It’s not going to be easy, I guarantee that, but you two have probably done things that would make my hardest day look like a lazy Sunday afternoon nap, so I don’t see that as being a problem. It’s just the matter of getting your head on straight.”

Nick sat quietly before he replied. “And what if I can’t get...you know, that stuff out of my head? I don’t think that I could even bare to look at her like that again.”

“Give it time. I don’t expect you go to speak to her and be bedding her before the hour’s up. What I want you to do is just talk. That’s it. Nothing more. After your little episode, I expect that you may now have intimacy issues that need to be worked out. If that happens with her, come see me. We can talk it out and try to get you to stomp on those memories and forget about them.”

Nick put his forehead in his hand, not really looking forward to the prospect of talking about his sex life with this man. But he definitely had a newfound respect for him. “I...will try,” he finally said.

“No. Try not. Do...or do not. There is no try.”

Looking blankly at him a moment, Nick replied, “Did you seriously just quote that green dude from those old space movies?”

Robin shrugged. “Don’t judge me.” He stood. “You have your marching orders. And I will be seeing you soon. I’ll set up an appointment for you for five days from now, so you’ll need to have had a sit-down with Leto by then and report back to me. If you need me before then, just call.”

Nick stood as well, sighing heavily.

Robin turned on his heel, his hand cocked back and his eyes slitted, ready for delivery.

“Okay, damn, knock that shit off,” Nick said, forcibly pushing Robin out the door. “And, doc?” he began, but Robin cut him off.

“Don’t go getting all soft on me,” Robin said as he closed the door between them.

As he found the turbolift, he leaned against the wall and let out a big sigh of relief. He was certain that he was going to wind up eating a fist back there.

“Well, if he can put up with me like that, there may be hope for he and Leto yet.”

-----------------------------------
Lt. Cmdr. Robin Swift
Walking a Dangerous Line

Master Chief Nick Marcinko
Respecting the Shrink