The toolbox was dented and tarnished, spattered with black paint on one side and stained an ugly orange around the places where the original hardware once was. New hinges and a clasp had been added in the years since its creation, but it bore the name of it's owner in the same faded, stylized white lettering: Sisko.
Open now with many of its contents scattered about, the toolbox rested on the coffee table in the engineer's room, next to a HK USP Match. Music blared from a tablet, covering any other sounds inside the room. Sisko sat on the floor, pants off and a screwdriver in hand, meticulously tightening tiny screws in the prosthetic that made up her right leg from just above the knee.
After awhile she reached up and took an unlit cigarette from behind her ear, holding it between her lips as she worked. She could imagine the taste of it, lit; the faint burn of the smoke filling her lungs and the release of the exhale. She still craved it, sometimes, but she did not yield to it. Not even once, since her boss and friend had lost a lung. She wouldn't make life any harder for Vodka than it had already been.
Sisko switched the screwdriver for another and continued the work that let her function like anyone else aboard the ship. Robotic and pneumatic processes combined to make the limb operate smoothly, and she tended to the intricate details of each one. No one but Vodka knew that she was missing pieces of herself, and she planned to keep it that way. Her head nodded to the music, strands of pale hair falling into her eyes until she shook them back to focus on her work. The maintenance was a weekly practice, one she found oddly soothing. Machines were easy. Not like people. She reached over with her free hand to turn up the music, drowning out sound and thought alike.
"It’s hard for me to love myself right now
I’ve waited, hated, blamed it all on you…"