fic: Purgatory! (Star Trek XI)
Purgatory!
Star Trek XI(/House of Leaves); McCoy, Uhura, Nero; gen.
2000 words, unedited, pointless, will live to hold in contempt (but never regret), etc.
For this request.
Your complimentary warnings for mild gore and cannibalism are right here. Wow, that's convenient!
They all gathered under the wreckage of something that was probably just the ship. Hard to tell in the dark, harder to pluck up the nerve to go looking in the first place. McCoy got the feeling they wouldn't like what they'd find out there anyway. More darkness loping on and on like a black pack of warwolves, and no walls, and no roads, and nobody, and nothing, nothing, nothing. Say it like that, maybe make it true. Careful wishes.
First thing after a headcount of everyone who'd been dragged alive out of Enterprise's broken teeth, Chekov cracked a lightstick - which painted wounds across his face abruptly, and even McCoy was taken aback, he'd sounded like he was perfectly all right - and he knelt on the ground and he scratched at it.
“Like coal,” he said, then shook his head. “Like something else.”
He wandered off with the lightstick raised, exploring, and Uhura was calling after him to stay close when her terse warning suddenly transformed into a snarl. Chekov had frozen. Smudges of motion were clipping out of the darkness in front of him, soft as moths and drawn by light, congealing as human figures. No. Humanoid.
Chekov dropped the lightstick.
“Oh, look,” Nero remarked, from among a sickly cast of shadows, over wheeling motes of light. “Survivors.”
.
The Romulans swore up, down and backwards that their ship was lost completely, that they'd already been crunching the bones of their supplies just for substance beforehand. McCoy didn't buy that story for an instant, but what was he going to do, really? Everyone battered and bleeding like bodies in a blast zone, darkness absolute cloaking the tiniest distances, unfolding inches like origami bridges into a labyrinth of miles and slopes. He could send out a search party and expect never to see it again. More to the point, not many were up for the searching. Kirk was in a bad way, bad enough that McCoy didn't want to think too much about it. Scotty and Sulu were missing, Chekov had collapsed shortly after stumbling on the neighbours and hadn't really woken up since, most of the rotation bridge crew was nursing at least one broken limb apiece and anyone who was fit to walk was best employed looking after those who weren't.
Of them all, Spock had come through in the best shape; but he had flared at the sight of Nero, flexed and recoiled and was deflected somehow by Uhura, even as she tried to tend to her mutilated arm, pulled from its socket and nearly from her body in a maelstrom of squabbling forces before they hit the event horizon and after they were dashed across the black expanse brooding over them now. She'd dragged him off someplace and who knew where they were, when they’d be back, if they were all right.
So McCoy wasn't exactly in command, but he was in charge, despite having far too much to do in his official station. People were dying. People were dead. He let the Romulans settle under a shard of the hull that jutted like an enormous tusk up out of the limited reach of emergency lights, lanterns and flares, and he tried not to worry about them. Tried.
.
“Shame about your captain,” Nero said, and his eyes were frigid and inverted, a glimpse of the ocean floor. McCoy angled the lantern to make him narrow them, look away, but it didn't seem to bother him at all. “Sad. That he had to die so slowly. In the night.”
There were a lot of things McCoy could say to that. He could say: it seems like it's always night here. He could say: the man was my closest friend and I'll kill you if I hear you speak about him again. He could say: yeah.
He said: “Give us your dead.” And turned pointedly to the shapeless heap bundled up at Nero's side; he was touching it even then, unconsciously. At that, his face took on a strange, troubling stillness.
“Ayel,” he replied coldly, “is not dead.”
Silence.
“Give us your dead,” McCoy said again, quietly, “and we'll dispose of them with the safety of the living in mind; with dignity, too.”
“No.”
He sighed, hard, because there was nothing else for him to do with his frustration. “Soon we'll be bringing out some of the food and protein packs that have been salvaged. Come and take what you need, if you want it. We're not going to bring anything to you.”
“Have you noticed that there isn't as much as there should be?” Nero asked. He still hadn't come to his feet, seemed content to crane back and stare upward as if resigned to the idea that there were some things in life too large to topple. “Have you gone looking for the impact trail and found nothing yet, or checked the perimeter of your ship? That is, what's left of it.” He waited, measured the unspoken response. “The Narada had a few doors to this place. Not originally, of course. She found them for us over time. So we learned a little bit about its nature.”
“How are you going to care for your people?” McCoy demanded in exasperation, trying to look around at them, assess injuries, but they spooked away from his meager light with offended eyes.
“I said I didn't want your help. Before. You remember. And that hasn't changed, so there's no business to keep you here.”
There really wasn’t; no obligation or attachment. He tried to come up with another reason to justify his persistence. Nothing came to mind, so he turned abruptly and walked back to the Enterprise encampment, one hand on the freezing slope of the ship to keep from losing his way, certain in some deeply feral part of his mind that he was being followed all the way back, but it was impossible to be sure. Whenever he looked over his shoulder, after all, there was only a veil of perfect darkness looking back at him.
.
McCoy made the first cut at the throat. This is a clean blade, he thought, trying to settle himself. It was difficult; using his instruments without dousing them in antiseptic solutions first plucked at the wrong side of his nerves, but he wanted to save those fluids for surgeries on the living, since most of the laser scalpels had been destroyed. Butchers needed to be tidy, too, just in a different way. With meat on a slab, there were no worries about recovery time, about needing to backtrack in case of complications. The people who’d be eating it, that was where the interest stayed.
Blood welled slowly in the inadequate lighting, dark and bitter. McCoy guided the knife down the sternum, stopped just beneath the ribs. He wasn’t ready to deal with the stomach cavity; that always gave him trouble when he was working his first internship back on Earth. Instead he worked sideways; he cut under the clavicle and down through the external obliques on the right side, pulled back the right pectoral completely, slipped his blade under the skin, feathered it up and started slicing it back, exposing the red muscle. He felt better immediately, seeing meat. The change must have been evident in his face; Chapel stopped trying to convince him to let her make the next network of incisions, stopped talking to him at all. When he told her to get Uhura, she spent a moment staring at him before she complied and then took much longer than was strictly necessary to bring the lieutenant back with her. Of course, it was a long way to the other side of the ship, tricky to navigate in the dark. Maybe she only turned herself around on the way there.
“The light’s not carrying back to us at all. Nobody can see,” Uhura said, then muttered an oath McCoy didn’t recognize and snatched up a sterilized sheet, tossed it over the gray, sunken face tipped back on the table. “Cover him, that’s horrible.”
“So it’ll work,” McCoy replied.
“Yes, it’ll work, but why does it have to work, where are our supplies?”
Leaning over the table, McCoy gave the darkness an accusing look and shook his head. “Same place my equipment is going. Same place the debris is going. God knows.”
“Do you think they have anything to do with it?”
“I think they’re too calm, and dangerous as hell, but I’m not going near them again and I don’t think they’ll come any closer than they have already. I think they’re in worse shape than we are, all things considered.”
Uhura hesitated. “What did they say to you earlier?”
“That they still don’t want our help,” he answered, before she’d finished the question.
“Fine,” she said. “Fine with me.”
“Where’s Spock?”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“Well, Christ. Find him, Uhura, the last thing we need is a crazy Vulcan raising hell where we can’t see him and what if he goes after the Romulans alone-”
“No, he went the other way with some fluourescent markers and flares, he said he - wanted to think in the dark.”
“Christ,” McCoy remarked again, but had to admit a bit of relief to himself. Spock would either see the necessity of their decision immediately or snap them all in half over some moral fibre he’d never bothered to strum for them. “Well then, let him be, and we’ll get this done before he comes back.”
“Yes,” she said, “fine. I can get a fire going, I did, but there’s not very much material with substance to burn and it goes out. Quickly, if nobody’s watching it.”
“Go back to it, then. And watch it. Don’t let too many get close; tell them it’s dangerous.” Tight-lipped, McCoy looked down at the body, at the coarse fabric over its face. This is your fault anyway, he could have told it, always having to stay and gloat to the last second. But then he knew exactly where the blame for the food solution lay, too. Easier to pass judgement than accept it. “We can get started soon.”
.
Scotty, they pulled him out from under a bracing beam and his legs were tangled up something terrible but he was happy just to have some solid food to chew on once he’d been laid out and stabilized. People made fun of Chapel for eating so daintily; she didn’t even look ill at ease, just spoiled, as if actual fire-cooked meat was too uncultured for her. Somebody joked about going to dig for the replicator and then somebody else called: why, it’s fine, it’s actually pretty good.
And it was.
Uhura sat near McCoy for a while, waiting for Spock to reappear. They didn’t speak. They didn’t look at each other very much while they ate. There wasn’t much to say, anyway, or to see.
.
Darkness lay down with the Romulans a little more politely, moving as if it knew them. Nero gazed at it, feeling as though he should be able to see through it, into it; wondering if he could and had only forgotten how. He settled next to Ayel, wary of everything else.
“You know what’s going on?” he said, agitated. “Eating themselves out of house and home. Out of skin and bones. And they think we’re a threat.”
How tragic, this waste of life, Ayel agreed.
“What do I care about waste, about life?”
The Vulcan is gone.
“But not forgotten. We’ll wait for them to notice that his wayfinding marks have vanished.”
And then?
“And then nothing. I’m tired. My head hurts. Nothing. This time, we watch. And that’s all.”
Don’t sleep, Ayel whispered, and eased soft fingertips under Nero’s skin, and stroked his skull until all of the static went out of it at last.
I have to get around to posting other fills and fic here/storing them elsewhere, but have been putting it off. So lazy. Point: I actually have been accomplishing things! They're just things that would not impress the people I must deal with on a daily basis, not at allllll. :c
Star Trek XI(/House of Leaves); McCoy, Uhura, Nero; gen.
2000 words, unedited, pointless, will live to hold in contempt (but never regret), etc.
For this request.
Your complimentary warnings for mild gore and cannibalism are right here. Wow, that's convenient!
They all gathered under the wreckage of something that was probably just the ship. Hard to tell in the dark, harder to pluck up the nerve to go looking in the first place. McCoy got the feeling they wouldn't like what they'd find out there anyway. More darkness loping on and on like a black pack of warwolves, and no walls, and no roads, and nobody, and nothing, nothing, nothing. Say it like that, maybe make it true. Careful wishes.
First thing after a headcount of everyone who'd been dragged alive out of Enterprise's broken teeth, Chekov cracked a lightstick - which painted wounds across his face abruptly, and even McCoy was taken aback, he'd sounded like he was perfectly all right - and he knelt on the ground and he scratched at it.
“Like coal,” he said, then shook his head. “Like something else.”
He wandered off with the lightstick raised, exploring, and Uhura was calling after him to stay close when her terse warning suddenly transformed into a snarl. Chekov had frozen. Smudges of motion were clipping out of the darkness in front of him, soft as moths and drawn by light, congealing as human figures. No. Humanoid.
Chekov dropped the lightstick.
“Oh, look,” Nero remarked, from among a sickly cast of shadows, over wheeling motes of light. “Survivors.”
.
The Romulans swore up, down and backwards that their ship was lost completely, that they'd already been crunching the bones of their supplies just for substance beforehand. McCoy didn't buy that story for an instant, but what was he going to do, really? Everyone battered and bleeding like bodies in a blast zone, darkness absolute cloaking the tiniest distances, unfolding inches like origami bridges into a labyrinth of miles and slopes. He could send out a search party and expect never to see it again. More to the point, not many were up for the searching. Kirk was in a bad way, bad enough that McCoy didn't want to think too much about it. Scotty and Sulu were missing, Chekov had collapsed shortly after stumbling on the neighbours and hadn't really woken up since, most of the rotation bridge crew was nursing at least one broken limb apiece and anyone who was fit to walk was best employed looking after those who weren't.
Of them all, Spock had come through in the best shape; but he had flared at the sight of Nero, flexed and recoiled and was deflected somehow by Uhura, even as she tried to tend to her mutilated arm, pulled from its socket and nearly from her body in a maelstrom of squabbling forces before they hit the event horizon and after they were dashed across the black expanse brooding over them now. She'd dragged him off someplace and who knew where they were, when they’d be back, if they were all right.
So McCoy wasn't exactly in command, but he was in charge, despite having far too much to do in his official station. People were dying. People were dead. He let the Romulans settle under a shard of the hull that jutted like an enormous tusk up out of the limited reach of emergency lights, lanterns and flares, and he tried not to worry about them. Tried.
.
“Shame about your captain,” Nero said, and his eyes were frigid and inverted, a glimpse of the ocean floor. McCoy angled the lantern to make him narrow them, look away, but it didn't seem to bother him at all. “Sad. That he had to die so slowly. In the night.”
There were a lot of things McCoy could say to that. He could say: it seems like it's always night here. He could say: the man was my closest friend and I'll kill you if I hear you speak about him again. He could say: yeah.
He said: “Give us your dead.” And turned pointedly to the shapeless heap bundled up at Nero's side; he was touching it even then, unconsciously. At that, his face took on a strange, troubling stillness.
“Ayel,” he replied coldly, “is not dead.”
Silence.
“Give us your dead,” McCoy said again, quietly, “and we'll dispose of them with the safety of the living in mind; with dignity, too.”
“No.”
He sighed, hard, because there was nothing else for him to do with his frustration. “Soon we'll be bringing out some of the food and protein packs that have been salvaged. Come and take what you need, if you want it. We're not going to bring anything to you.”
“Have you noticed that there isn't as much as there should be?” Nero asked. He still hadn't come to his feet, seemed content to crane back and stare upward as if resigned to the idea that there were some things in life too large to topple. “Have you gone looking for the impact trail and found nothing yet, or checked the perimeter of your ship? That is, what's left of it.” He waited, measured the unspoken response. “The Narada had a few doors to this place. Not originally, of course. She found them for us over time. So we learned a little bit about its nature.”
“How are you going to care for your people?” McCoy demanded in exasperation, trying to look around at them, assess injuries, but they spooked away from his meager light with offended eyes.
“I said I didn't want your help. Before. You remember. And that hasn't changed, so there's no business to keep you here.”
There really wasn’t; no obligation or attachment. He tried to come up with another reason to justify his persistence. Nothing came to mind, so he turned abruptly and walked back to the Enterprise encampment, one hand on the freezing slope of the ship to keep from losing his way, certain in some deeply feral part of his mind that he was being followed all the way back, but it was impossible to be sure. Whenever he looked over his shoulder, after all, there was only a veil of perfect darkness looking back at him.
.
McCoy made the first cut at the throat. This is a clean blade, he thought, trying to settle himself. It was difficult; using his instruments without dousing them in antiseptic solutions first plucked at the wrong side of his nerves, but he wanted to save those fluids for surgeries on the living, since most of the laser scalpels had been destroyed. Butchers needed to be tidy, too, just in a different way. With meat on a slab, there were no worries about recovery time, about needing to backtrack in case of complications. The people who’d be eating it, that was where the interest stayed.
Blood welled slowly in the inadequate lighting, dark and bitter. McCoy guided the knife down the sternum, stopped just beneath the ribs. He wasn’t ready to deal with the stomach cavity; that always gave him trouble when he was working his first internship back on Earth. Instead he worked sideways; he cut under the clavicle and down through the external obliques on the right side, pulled back the right pectoral completely, slipped his blade under the skin, feathered it up and started slicing it back, exposing the red muscle. He felt better immediately, seeing meat. The change must have been evident in his face; Chapel stopped trying to convince him to let her make the next network of incisions, stopped talking to him at all. When he told her to get Uhura, she spent a moment staring at him before she complied and then took much longer than was strictly necessary to bring the lieutenant back with her. Of course, it was a long way to the other side of the ship, tricky to navigate in the dark. Maybe she only turned herself around on the way there.
“The light’s not carrying back to us at all. Nobody can see,” Uhura said, then muttered an oath McCoy didn’t recognize and snatched up a sterilized sheet, tossed it over the gray, sunken face tipped back on the table. “Cover him, that’s horrible.”
“So it’ll work,” McCoy replied.
“Yes, it’ll work, but why does it have to work, where are our supplies?”
Leaning over the table, McCoy gave the darkness an accusing look and shook his head. “Same place my equipment is going. Same place the debris is going. God knows.”
“Do you think they have anything to do with it?”
“I think they’re too calm, and dangerous as hell, but I’m not going near them again and I don’t think they’ll come any closer than they have already. I think they’re in worse shape than we are, all things considered.”
Uhura hesitated. “What did they say to you earlier?”
“That they still don’t want our help,” he answered, before she’d finished the question.
“Fine,” she said. “Fine with me.”
“Where’s Spock?”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“Well, Christ. Find him, Uhura, the last thing we need is a crazy Vulcan raising hell where we can’t see him and what if he goes after the Romulans alone-”
“No, he went the other way with some fluourescent markers and flares, he said he - wanted to think in the dark.”
“Christ,” McCoy remarked again, but had to admit a bit of relief to himself. Spock would either see the necessity of their decision immediately or snap them all in half over some moral fibre he’d never bothered to strum for them. “Well then, let him be, and we’ll get this done before he comes back.”
“Yes,” she said, “fine. I can get a fire going, I did, but there’s not very much material with substance to burn and it goes out. Quickly, if nobody’s watching it.”
“Go back to it, then. And watch it. Don’t let too many get close; tell them it’s dangerous.” Tight-lipped, McCoy looked down at the body, at the coarse fabric over its face. This is your fault anyway, he could have told it, always having to stay and gloat to the last second. But then he knew exactly where the blame for the food solution lay, too. Easier to pass judgement than accept it. “We can get started soon.”
.
Scotty, they pulled him out from under a bracing beam and his legs were tangled up something terrible but he was happy just to have some solid food to chew on once he’d been laid out and stabilized. People made fun of Chapel for eating so daintily; she didn’t even look ill at ease, just spoiled, as if actual fire-cooked meat was too uncultured for her. Somebody joked about going to dig for the replicator and then somebody else called: why, it’s fine, it’s actually pretty good.
And it was.
Uhura sat near McCoy for a while, waiting for Spock to reappear. They didn’t speak. They didn’t look at each other very much while they ate. There wasn’t much to say, anyway, or to see.
.
Darkness lay down with the Romulans a little more politely, moving as if it knew them. Nero gazed at it, feeling as though he should be able to see through it, into it; wondering if he could and had only forgotten how. He settled next to Ayel, wary of everything else.
“You know what’s going on?” he said, agitated. “Eating themselves out of house and home. Out of skin and bones. And they think we’re a threat.”
How tragic, this waste of life, Ayel agreed.
“What do I care about waste, about life?”
The Vulcan is gone.
“But not forgotten. We’ll wait for them to notice that his wayfinding marks have vanished.”
And then?
“And then nothing. I’m tired. My head hurts. Nothing. This time, we watch. And that’s all.”
Don’t sleep, Ayel whispered, and eased soft fingertips under Nero’s skin, and stroked his skull until all of the static went out of it at last.
I have to get around to posting other fills and fic here/storing them elsewhere, but have been putting it off. So lazy. Point: I actually have been accomplishing things! They're just things that would not impress the people I must deal with on a daily basis, not at allllll. :c