Waking Up to Us

[behnd_blueyes]

There was some reason he wasn't supposed to wake up. Some memory his conscious mind couldn't stand, and kept trying to avoid by pulling the blackness around it like a shield. He could stay here, not warm exactly but not anything else, either

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[sharpestscalpel]

McCoy was sprawled in his chair - the only way he knew how to sit, it seemed, legs akimbo and inviting. Kirk's readings elevated and McCoy waited. Pike just kept leaving him the best presents and McCoy wanted to watch as the realization of this one dawned.

"Rise and shine, snowflake. But I wouldn't fucking try to get up off that bed just yet, if I was you."

[behnd_blueyes]

A wave of dizziness and nausea had crashed over him and he fell back, eyes finally swimming around to find McCoy. Waiting. Watching. Like some casual vulture. Someone had told him a story once about some guy, chained to a rock, and birds came and ate... something... out of him every day. Then it grew back. He couldn't remember who that was now. He felt empty, missing. Probably the anesthesia, melting away with every passing moment.

Pike.

He thrashed in the restraints as memory and pain returned at once, fire between his legs and horror in the deepest part of himself. "No," he said, his voice rasping painfully. It had to have been a dream. But his expression knew it wasn't; eyes wide, staring at McCoy, almost as if he was begging to be told differently.

[sharpestscalpel]

"Pike keeps giving me the best presents ever. If I didn't fucking know better, I'd say he goddamn liked me."

McCoy unfolded himself from his chair and approached, hypo in hand.

"You plan to keep struggling or am I going to get to knock you under again? Don't know what it'll do to your brain function at this point but, hey, name of the game is scien-fucking-tific experimentation around here."

[behnd_blueyes]

It was unclear whether Kirk was really taking in anything McCoy was saying. But his eyes were fixed on the other man's face, as if trying to glean some important information from cues he could more easily process. There was the man's lazy intensity, as always, the hypo, the deceptively gentle question.

Kirk stopped. But his vitals betrayed his alarm as he sought some way to make sense of this that wasn't the truth. But there was only so far he could go. McCoy had fed him. He'd brought him back.

"What did he do?"

Swallowing hurt. Kirk needed to hear it, needed to shove that information against his brain like a brand. Needed to know what was real.