Admit to Tim exactly what the problem was...

It was the last thing Halley ever wanted to have to discuss with Tim, much less over an open microphone, but he was meant to be her mentor, and pretty much the only person she had to fall back on out here. If she was already in enough discomfort for it to be noticeably affecting her work, Halley wasn't sure what else she could possibly do.

"I'm sorry," she muttered over the headset, praying nobody else was currently monitoring their personal channel. "I guess I'm just having a bit of a problem here right now."

"Yeah? What is it?" the tone implied impatience rather than any hint of empathy, making Halley hesitate once again before she was to reply.

"It's only... I kind of really need the bathroom all of a sudden, you see..." she quavered, plaintively.

Tim's exasperated sigh was very audible over the radio.

"No you don't, rookie," he insisted unsympathetically. "We've been over this. Just get on with it. What do you think you're wearing a diaper for?"

"Um..." Halley swallowed, very uncomfortably, obliged to offer further details even though she already knew Tim was only going to dismiss those too. "It's... more than you might think..."

"I don't care if it's Montezuma's ," Tim snapped predictably. "Use your diaper. You're supposed to be an astronaut, so try and at least think like one. You're a thousand kilometers up, in an environment which can kill you with a single mistake. Forget the petty foibles, and get on with your actual job already!"

Halley blanched. She couldn't do that! But, it was also clear she couldn't say anything else about it now. Tim had made his expectations sickeningly clear. She'd just have to try and focus as hard as she possibly could, and somehow battle through to the end. It might be the hardest shift she'd ever done, but Halley would just have to make it through somehow, without succumbing to the unthinkable. Just a matter of willpower and focus, she tried to convince herself.

That lasted about another forty minutes, by which point Halley's intestinal discomfort seemed to have ramped up about tenfold. Whatever was inside her might not have been related to any kind of actual sickness, but it really wanted out. As it turned out, however hard she tried, Halley could only seem to distract herself and will her focus for so long. Sooner or later, the insistence of her intestines just kept on pulling her attention back away.

Matters came to a head not long after that, as Halley slid her hand down the length of yet another antenna, searching for the access port to attach a second wire. As she did so, another cramp ran through her, and for a moment Halley felt things begin to move, as if matters were about to go completely out of her control. She concertinaed her body strangely to try and suppress it, and for just a moment forgot which anchor point she was gripping onto with her hand, or where. In gravity, things would have been perfectly okay, as any new sudden impulse would have been absorbed through Halley's feet. Out here, however, as she contorted her body Halley found her boots lifting off the deck, breaking their weak magnetic seals, and for a moment all was instead concentrated through Halley's only other point of contact with the station. The antenna snapped in her gloved hand, and Halley felt a sudden rush of air and icy cold across her palm, as its jagged fracture point ripped across her suit. A litany of frantic alarms and flashing red lights broke out across her helmet as Halley stared down at her open hand to see air jetting out of a rend in her glove like blood from a severed artery, and no less fatal.

She'd been trained for this kind of scenario, of course; but underwater in a swimming pool was very different to here in freezing outer space, with frozen nothing coursing into her dominant hand, and instead having to try and find the pocket with a patch kit using only the other. Tim got there with his own long before Halley was anywhere close, slapping the putty pad down hard onto her hand like some kind of ironic hi-five to recognise her mistake. Even by that point, Halley could barely see out of her helmet due to the ice that had formed on it's interior, and she could feel the cold of space already being sucked down into her lungs. Quickly, however, the suit began to repressurise, and the alarms slowly abated.

"Fuck me," she breathed over the radio, against all proper protocols, and despite the fact that Halley was the kind of person who almost never swore. Well, if it was ever justified...

"Inside," was all Tim had to say in response to that. Halley still couldn't see, though, so he pretty much had to tow her back.

Back in the suiting room, getting her helmet off and finally able to see again, Halley suddenly realised that, somehow, there was one kind of accident she had still managed to avoid. It felt like it was going to be a horribly near thing, though, so Halley abruptly shifted gear to start stripping off the rest of her gear as fast as possible. Coming out of the suiting area only a few minutes later, she had to hurry past Tim, who was already waiting there for her despite her speed.

"What just happened there?" he caught her arm. "You realise how close you just came?!"

"Just a minute," Halley pulled away. "I'll be right back... I just still gotta..."

She ran for it. Fortunately there were bathroom facilities right beside the suiting area, and Halley was very well acquainted with them by now. She got herself into a cubical just in time. Nothing especially remarkable transpired after that, though what occurred was definitely one of the more memorable bathroom visits of Halley's life. Partially because, on exiting the cubical, she found Tim standing right outside waiting for her. In the woman's bathroom, no less.

"I don't think I need to ask what happened any more, do I?" he confronted her sourly. Halley hung her head, but Tim wasn't ready to be easily appeased. "So... someone else is going to have to go out there and finish our job, on overtime, while we do accident reports..." he berated her. "You almost died, and quite easily would have done if I'd been even ten more meters away from you. Your gear is going to need about ten thousand dollars of repair work, and probably a whole new glove. There's pieces of broken antenna floating away out there, cheerfully doing its bit for the Kessler effect; and what we did retrieve is going to be irreparable... And all because you didn't want to do a shit in your suit? Does that about sum things up?"

Halley liked to imagine herself a serious, capable young pioneer, who could take a thing or two. In this particular situation, however, there didn't seem to be any other response but to burst into a humiliating flood of tears. Not that it was intended to have any effect on moving Tim, but if it had been, she might as well not have bothered.

"You got about four hours of paperwork to do, Rookie," was all he said, thrusting a wad of tissues into Halley's hand.

That wasn't the only thing he had to thrust at Halley either. There really was close to four hours of incident paperwork, and by the time all that was said and done, Halley had at least dried up a bit. Once again, however, she found Tim ready to approach her with something in his hand. It was, of all things, a full pack of the disposable diaper things they were obliged to wear, and he presented it to her forcefully.

"Um, what's this?" Halley murmured, recovered enough to be somewhat more responsive to yet another display of Tim's familiar uncomfortable peculiarity.

"You got three days off, Rookie," Tim grunted. "I switched the roster. And this is your homework. You're going to wear a fucking diaper every single day. All day. As if you were in a suit. You're not going to set one foot near a latrine, the whole fucking time."

"Don't be ri...." Halley rolled her eyes, but Tim quickly cut her off.

"...or don't bother coming back. I'm serious." He held her gaze, clearly not messing around this time. "You're going to give me your solemn word that's what you're going to do, and you're going to come back to work having come to terms with this... or you're not coming back at all. Okay?"

Halley swallowed. She knew she was in trouble, but accidents did happen, and they happened for all kinds of reasons. She didn't know it was as serious as this. Then again, it had been remarkably hard to write 'action items' on the forms to address this accident. Short of coming to terms with the diapered part of her job the hard way, could Halley really guarantee she wouldn't end up in exactly the same situation again next week?