Le Morte De Jim
Jim hit his head on the way down, and even if he hadn't just been tasered, he'd have been too stunned to move. They threw him in a small metal container, and then pumped it full of liquid as he slumped against the wall, unable to move.
Eighteen days later, the Enterprise came to his rescue.
~*~
He sloshed to floor, unmoving, not breathing. Leonard found a pulse, and initiated CPR until Jim spit up two lungfulls of pinkish fluids. They beamed back to the Enterprise, where Jim got a biobed in sickbay to sleep on for the next week while they pumped him full of intravenous fluids and antibiotics and ran every diagnostic they could.
~*~
There wasn't a diagnostic for this: Jim woke up believing himself to be dead, and there was nothing anyone could do to convince him otherwise.
~*~
"I'm dead. I stopped breathing almost a month ago," Jim told him, tone compassionate, like Leonard was the one who needed consoling. "I died."
"No you didn't," Leonard explained, gently. "The fluid they had you suspended in did exactly that: placed you in suspended animation. When we found you, you'd stopped breathing, yes, but you weren't dead. You're still alive Jim."
They've had this conversation six times now.
~*~
Jim had it figured out like this:
He’d died (drowned, executed in the name of some unknown agenda he couldn't even get the bastards to talk about) and then floated for a very long time, conscious but immobile, as whatever higher powers had tallied up his vices and virtues. And when that was finished he had ended up here.
He wasn't entirely sure what here was.
~*~
Almost eight weeks to the day after he was killed, however, he came to decision: it didn’t matter where he was. If he didn’t start doing something soon, he’d be in a place known as ‘crazy’. And there seemed to be only one way to be allowed to do something.
When Bones swung by his quarters he greeted him with the words: "Bones, I'm not dead."
Eventually, he forgot that he was lying.