Disclaimer: Not mine. BtVS belongs to Whedon. Star Trek is Gene Roddenberry's baby.

Leonard McCoy scowled. There was no physical reason why the woman who had identified herself as Faith wasn’t talking. They knew she could speak- she’d done so in the first few minutes she’d been aboard the Enterprise, mostly to insist that she didn’t need to be in Sickbay. One of the nurses had gotten her name. Scans had showed her to be in perfect health.

Perfect health at present, anyway. The scans had also revealed a sizable catalog of old injuries, many of them horrific. Visual inspection had showed a fair number of scars to match, though most of them were faint. McCoy wasn’t positive, but it looked as though she’d been tortured at some point. Possibly several points.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t ask her about it. Or rather, he could ask, but he wouldn’t get an answer. The girl had shut down completely when the Romulan ship had been destroyed. She hadn’t even screamed, just gone silent. At first, he had thought the situation would resolve itself. Jim had reported that she had been a prisoner, although apparently allowed more freedom than Captain Pike. Logically- and damn that pointy-eared Vulcan for ruining the word for him- she should be relieved that they were no longer a threat.

But as hours wore into days, and he had to start considering sedation since both his medical staff and the computer monitoring her reported his patient was neither eating nor sleeping, he started to wonder just what the hell had happened to Faith.

Jim was subtly haunting Sickbay, and while he hadn’t said anything, McCoy got the distinct impression that something aboard the Narada had not gone according to plan. He’d known James T. Kirk long enough to recognize the symptoms of Jim feeling guilty about something. If this went on much longer, he might just put the two of them in a room together to see if it didn’t cure both problems.