"Please try to hold still." Rachel sighed and relaxed under Doctor Chen's grip, letting her button-down shirt dangle in her free hand. He shifted his fingers slightly to the left. "Do you feel that?"

"No."

He nodded absentmindedly. "All right. The local's had time to start working." He leaned over to the instrument table and picked up a weave suture, then immediately began working the thin blue stitches into the captain's upper arm. "So, how exactly did this happen? If you don't mind my asking."

Rachel shrugged with her free shoulder. "Fell into a corner durin' that fantastic landing Mona just pulled." She looked over at the doctor's progress, and saw that he was smiling. "Somethin' funny about that?"

Leopold stole a glance up at her bemused eyes, then looked back down to his work. "No, not at all, it's just…when my uncle said we had to head for the frontier and that I might have to bring my skills into play, I imagined I'd be treating…" He shook his head.

Rachel was looking at him again with interest. Over the past week since he and Sir Anderson had come on the ship, she'd seen more and more of a wild streak on the young doctor. "What?"

He shrugged dismissively. "I don't know. Bullet holes. Knife wounds, laser burns, grenade shrapnel, like that."

Rachel smiled just a little. "You're saying you wish we got wounded more often?"

"Well…" The doctor paused for a moment, as if seriously thinking about it. "Not more often, just more…creatively." He grinned, and Rachel's smile widened momentarily. "Just, since we left Paquin, I've treated a headache, an ingrown toenail and, lest I forget, a severe case of the hiccups."

Rachel grinned as she thought back on Daphne's 'medical emergency.' "I kinda wish you'd left her like that, now you mention. Seemed like we'd finally struck a surefire way to keep Daphne from talkin'."

"You two really don't get along, do you?" Leopold pinched the sides of the applicator and the severed end of the last stitch adhered to the rest. "Why is that?"

"We have different styles."

"Yeah