Chapter 22
(Cottle's POV)

I light a cigarette as I wait for the Admiral and Apollo to show up, knowing that --even though it won't be pretty--this conversation can't really be put off any longer. Simply put: Starbuck's situation has reached a point where something has to be done, the problem is that --no matter how I look at it-- I can't escape the feeling that all of our options leave much to be desired. Oh, I do have a couple of ideas, of course, but implementing them is going to be tricky as hell and I won't be able to do it alone... nowhere near it. That's why I called for this meeting in the first place.

"You wanted to speak with us?" asks the Admiral almost as soon as he and his son step into sickbay.

"Yes. It's about Starbuck," I say and I have to fight the urge to roll my eyes when I see the two of them all but stand at attention as soon as that girl's name comes into play... and they say she is just another pilot. I mean, who the frak do they think they are kidding?

"Is there a problem?" comes Bill's rather predictable question.

"No, and that's precisely the problem," I mutter, shaking my head.

"I'm afraid I'm not following you," he says.

"I mean that there's no problem and that physically she is doing fine. She is eating with only a handful of restrictions and she is off her IV. In fact under normal circumstances I would probably have released her a couple of days ago. Of course, I am well aware that these are anything but normal circumstances and that does present a problem because while on the one hand she is more than ready to be out of here, on the other she is nowhere near ready to rejoin the crew," I explain.

"So what are the alternatives?"

"Well, the Galactica was not designed to deal with this sort of situation, not in the long term, but seeing how we don't have much of a choice we are going to have to improvise... especially because this mess is not going to go away any time soon. For the time being I'm going to be moving her to a private room."

"A private room?" asks Apollo, sounding somewhat puzzled at that.

"Or as close to one as we are likely to get," I reply, shrugging my shoulders. "I'm going to set her up in one of the isolation chambers. It won't be particularly comfortable but it will give her a measure of privacy and she will have some control over her surroundings, at least more than she does now, though the trick is going to be keeping her from using that privacy as an excuse to isolate herself even further. That means that once she is settled I'm going to start pushing her to see her husband and I am also going to be 'encouraging her' to eat at least one meal a day in the mess hall... and I'm going to need someone to take her there."

"That shouldn't be a problem, but are you sure that's safe, her being alone, I mean?" asks Bill, still sounding somewhat worried... not that I blame him. The truth is that Starbuck came closer to succeeding than I care to contemplate and avoiding a repeat performance is definitely near the top of my list of priorities... and pulling that one off is going to be a balancing act... a particularly tricky balancing act.

"There's going to be an element of risk no matter how we go about this, there's no way around that, and because of that I will be keeping a close eye on her but the bottom line is that sooner or later we are going to have to start trusting her and I'd rather do that in a controlled environment. Besides, even though being in an isolation chamber will grant her some privacy, those chambers were designed for the specific purpose of allowing the medical staff to monitor contagious patients while minimizing their own exposure to contagious agents... and their monitoring equipment does include video."

"So even there she won't really be unsupervised, at least not completely?" asks Bill, still not sounding particularly convinced.

"Exactly. That's the good news. The bad news is that, unless we give her something to do, keeping Starbuck alone and confined to an isolation chamber is not going to do us much good... in fact it will probably drive her more than a little crazy," I warn him, I warn both of them, knowing that that is the real danger... and that figuring out a way to work around it is not going to be easy, especially not considering the fact that that girl is an extremely physical person but her injuries will remain an issue for some time to come and that is going to limit her physical activity. "Sure, she will have the ability to open and close the hatch and she will be allowed to come and go as she pleases, or at least to come and go with some restrictions, but in the short term we can reasonably expect her to perceive it as a form of imprisonment and there's nothing I can do to change that. That is far from ideal considering the nature of the trauma we are dealing with here in the first place and it is something that, even in the best of cases, might end up leaving her with too much time to think. The problem is that the last thing she should be allowed to do right now is to be dwelling on what she's been through 24/7 so we have to figure out a way to prevent that. In other words she is going to need some kind of distraction while she is stuck in there, something to keep herself busy with --some sort of occupational therapy-- and the bottom line is that I sure as hell can't picture that girl taking up crochet."