This is a test post of a fic for a challenge, so ignore it
Jim glanced at the clock; he could always hear it ticking. It didn’t help that the clock hadn’t ticked in years. Sometimes he knew he’d gone a little crazy in that one respect, and when he looked over to check the progress of the second hand again, angry like he always was when the clock began to tick, he’d question whether he’d begun to slip in other areas, too.
Maybe he’d begun to slip.
Scotty tapped a round metal washer against the steel toe of his boot, cross-legged amidst a pile of parts, dumped carelessly and without intention. When he was furious he would tinker, assembling goliaths and lepers out of steel, filling their hydraulic limbs with his piss and angst as he toiled worthlessly away. He didn’t need to, of course, but when he was enraged, he could feel the pieces speaking to him, soothing him, and he wondered if this was the only thing keeping him sane.
Maybe it was the only thing.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be up there,” Sulu called, flecks of light reflecting off the slightly shiny surface of Chekov’s shirt as the ensign climbed higher and higher. It was like a jungle gym down in engineering, a huge playground to a kid like Pavel, and if the captain ever found out-
If Scotty every found out…
That was Sulu’s job. That’s why he was there. He kept an eye out, played the nurse maid, kept a leash on Chekov’s insanity. He used to fence for the sake of practice, but now he practiced for the sake of sanity. If he didn’t have that release, that outlet, that dedicated place in his mind that he buried himself within every time he pulled out a foil, he might have snapped Pavel’s neck for this the first time he found him clambering through tantalizingly askew riggings.
Maybe he would have snapped.
“You have to be careful,” Sulu told him twice. The first time Chekov ignored him. The second time, Chekov laughed.
“You vorry too much,” Chekov countered.
Chekov knew it was dangerous. He knew it was stupid, completely stupid, pointless, reckless, irresponsible, and unnecessary. But he needed it, and he knew that too. He needed someplace where he could throw himself and feel wind in his face, gravity at his feet, the screaming fear as his mind told him he was going to die, he had to die this time.
Maybe he had to die this time.
Jim dropped the clock on his floor, placed his heel over the face, and with slow, deliberate pressure, shattered it.
Scotty got to his knees, examined the ugly work in progress before his hand, and pushing it from its center of gravity, let it fall, toppling slowly and then faster and faster and faster, until it slammed to the ground and exploded in a myriad of cogs.
Sulu looked hollowly at the foil lying across his bed, but his hands felt weak, and he couldn’t even reach for the hilt, his head heavy as his heart.
Bones. There had been a bone jutting through that shiny gold fabric, a matted red-brown stain smeared along the length of his arm. Cold sweat stood like shuddering crystals on his brow as he lay still, eyes clenched shut, breath coming in slow, shallow bursts. Pain unlike anything he’d ever imagined radiated upward from his pelvis, sunken and ill-placed beneath his ribcage, as if it had failed to stand up with him in the morning and was now hung as a boat upon a stormy sea.
This fall wasn’t his fault.
Bones felt the terror in his body before his mind could process why it was there.
The floor beneath him was slick as he tried to push himself up. His arms felt cold and hot at the same time, his palms burst into blossoms of insatiable pain when he put his weight on them, and the sea of glass shards around his body told him that these things were not just isolated symptoms. Something very bad had happened.
Jim looked solemnly at the sleeping forms laid out in sickbay. It was quiet now, cold and antiseptic, but in his head the screams were fresh and seething, the stuff of nightmares. He could see blood on his hands where he’d washed them clean time and time again over the last few hours, and in his nose the stench of it clung heavy and dank. A thick knot grew in his throat, but instead of bile, as had come rushing up to greet him the first time he could slip away to the bathroom, now it was grief he had to choke down.
Bones stirred, fitful in his drug-induced slumber. Jim reached to smooth his brow, but his fingers curled as his hand grew near; he couldn’t touch him with these blood-stained hands.
There was no time.
They had come out of nowhere, emerging like lions from the long grass. They’d come about hard, fast as they could, the engines screaming loud enough that the sound tore through the ship like a shot, but it wasn’t good enough.
Phasers. Fire. Something essential must have caught in the ventilation system, too fast for life support to react, and half a deck had their lungs poached in an instant as pure oxygen slammed into a wall of flames.
On the bridge, Jim had screamed orders, clutching the arm of his command chair with every heaving blow.
There was no time.
Spock was shouting something, pointing at his monitor, gesticulating to Uhura. He turned to see what she needed, but couldn’t find her. He stood up and made his way to her work station, turned a half-pivot, and found her on the floor. Unconscious. Still breathing, though.
There was no time.
Scotty, over the intercom, shouting about incoming projectiles, and Sulu saying there were none on his screen. Something exploded by the map grid, and a steel girder flashed out of nowhere, spring-loaded from its cumbersome load, holding up one corner of the bridge’s ceiling.
Chekov flew across the bridge, folded in half, crumpled like a doll. He seemed so fragile and small, rolled into a ball and lying in a corner, Jim almost couldn’t believe he’d seen it happen.
Then everything got very quiet.
“Jim,” Bones whispered. Jim caught the doctor’s good hand in his own as he flailed weakly. The other arm was strapped to his side and held to the bed for his own protection.
“Don’t move, buddy,” Jim replied, stepping closer to the bedside and laying his friend’s arm back down. “You took one hell of a spill.”
“Where’s Chapel?” Bones asked.
“Sleeping.”
“Good.”
Without a word, Bones suddenly sat straight up, though he swayed as blood loss caught up with his head. He waved Jim off as the captain placed a hand on his shoulder for support, but Jim ignored his gesture.
“If you try to get up, I’m gonna have to knock you out,” Jim joked as Bones clumsily freed his other arm, but his voice cracked, and he knew Bones could tell he’d been crying.
For a moment, the doctor just stared at him, a look of dread and comprehension spreading across his features.
“It’s that bad?” he asked.
“It’s that bad,” Jim affirmed.
Half the crew was dead.
“We’re seaworthy again, I hear,” Sulu said softly, watching from a distance as Scotty tossed the last of his wayward collection into a desk drawer.
“Aye, we might be,” Scotty grumbled, rubbing his nose. “N’if we had but a crew to fly her, we mighta’ be a bit better off.”
Sulu flinched; what good was he, anyway? What good was a pilot without a navigator?
“I-…”Sulu began, but he felt breathless, lost. He looked away, scanning the tangle of pipes over his head, and he could almost hear Chekov’s laughter floating down to him. His heart faltered, and he was sure for a second he was going to have an infarction.
There was a hand on his shoulder, strong and rough, and when he looked up, he could see, from so close, that Scotty had been crying, too. They stared at each other for a long moment; the dark circles around Sulu’s eyes, and the hastily-stitched scar across his cheek, told the engineer a story similar to the violent chaos he’d witnessed himself.
“I want him to be okay,” Sulu murmured, his voice thick and lethargic, and he knew he was going to lose it. “I want him to be okay so badly, and he’s not. He’s not going to be okay, is he?”
All Scotty could do was let him cry.
“Jim,” Bones said calmly, “It wasn’t your fault.
The captain froze, and then his lips curled backward over his teeth as if his mouth was a vacuum pulling them in, his fists clenched, his shoulders sagged. There was a weight on him, like a thousand suns stacked against his neck, crushing him slowly into the floor. It was worse, he realized, to have someone else say it, and not just repeat it feebly in his head.
It meant he’d failed.
“Then whose fault is it?”
“It’s nobody’s damn fault.”
“I’m the captain,” Jim growled, stepping forcefully toward Bones, and the doctor reeled back from him, hands up in a defensive posture, but Jim steamed along. “I’m in charge, I’m responsible, and it’s my responsibility to make sure this doesn’t happen. When Starfleet gave me command of this ship, they didn’t tell me to just do a good job when it was easy, Bones, and I expect-“
“I expect,” he repeated, rubbing his mouth. “I expect so much better. I expect myself to do better than…This.”
He waved absently over his shoulder at the rows of quickly-assembled beds covering every square inch of the sickbay. Bodies in various states of assembly lay beneath ghostly sheets, most only alive by the will of the machines that harbored them. They had modern science, modern medicine, and modern technology, but there was still no such thing as the modern miracle.
“I have 283 letters of condolence to write tonight,” Jim croaked, his eyes searing into Bones’ as they met. “I have 283 families to tell…that their sons and daughters are never coming home. I have to explain to them how, on my watch, their children, and their spouses, and their fathers and mothers…I have to explain to kids how I let their mommies and daddies die.”
“Jim,” Bones started, “Nobody’s blaming you for this. Nobody but you, at least. And I don’t think a single one of those people would say you did anything wrong. Hell, you saved the rest of us, didn’t you? What the hell does that count for?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. He was becoming despondent; he had to hold it together. He had all those letters to write… “I don’t know, Leonard, what any of this counts for anymore.”
“How are they?” Sulu asked, his voice unnecessarily hushed, as Spock crossed paths with he and Scotty near the sickbay.
“They are…still alive,” was Spock’s reticent reply. Even for a Vulcan, he was looking more piqued than ever, his skin too pale, a smear of green blood slithering free from the bandage over his right eye and tracing a streak down his cheek. “I cannot safely make any greater forecast than that. The captain is with them presently, however.”
“Tha’s just ducky,” Scotty said, a forced laugh coming out more like a hoarse cough. “Y’think he won’na mind if we pop in for a tick, eh? S’not ‘is raigh’ alone t’wish the dead off, now is it?”
Spock took a menacing step toward the engineer, but Sulu leapt between them.
“Cut it out,” he growled, ignoring the fact that he was significantly shorter than both of them. Shoving them both apart, he barely suppressed a sneer; “The last thing we need is this petty crap. I’d ask you two to shake, but I think you’d take me the wrong way.”
“We have no need for dissidence here,” Spock said deliberately, eyes fixed on Scotty’s, basically ignoring Sulu’s words. “If you wish to take issue with the captain, Mister Scott, I suggest you begin with me.”
“I suggest you both cool it,” Sulu interjected, stepping between them again, but this time Scotty wasn’t amping up for a fight.
“Th’on’y thing I take issue with, Mister Spock,” Scotty replied, “S’that my bes’ fren’ got skew’rd like a shishkabob, an’ I had t’muck around pullin’ his legs out o’that gory fan while th’bloody ship came down abou’ our heads. N’if it’s th’same to you, I’d like t’see if my only surviving core engineer ha’still an arm left to ‘im.”
Without another word, Scotty stepped around Spock and ducked through the sickbay entryway, leaving Spock and Sulu frozen in the hall. Sometimes, Sulu realized, Vulcans really got the short end of the stick.
Grieving was, for all the living, a privilege.
You have to be careful. He touched Pavel’s cold cheek.
You vorry too much, Hikaru! He laid his hand upon the ensign’s still chest.
“I have to worry,” he whispered.
Dah, but you vorry too much. Is not heelthy. He let his hand wander down the lifeless arm to the stiff fingers and worked his palm open, squeezing the hand into his own.
“You let me worry about that, Pavel,” Hikaru smiled, but his face was covered in tears. They’d brought him back twice now; his heart was strong, Chapel said, but he’d taken a huge insult. They had to hope now, and pray, and wait to see if he could come back. They’d said-
“You’re going to break that hand off,” Jim said, suddenly very close. In the half-light, Hikaru couldn’t see the captain’s face too well, but he could feel the grief radiating from him like an odor. It smelled like blood all around him, somehow.
“Captain, I-“ he began, but he could see the captain hold up a hand to silence him. He has blood on his hands, Hikaru thought.
“You can stay with him if you want,” Jim said, his voice hoarse. “We’re not going to be getting underway for another day, Mister Sulu. Starfleet has advised us that the Reliant is en route to help tow us to Starbase 4, and we’re to wait here until she arrives. I don’t think the rest of the crew is too savvy to be pushing along just yet, anyway.”
“They still have to say goodbye,” Sulu said more to himself than the captain. He inhaled shakily, that awful metallic smell filling his mouth and nose. “All those people…We just need time to say goodbye.”
Jim touched Hikaru’s shoulder and the lieutenant jumped. For a moment neither of them spoke, eyes fixed and watery in the half-light, like reflections of men in the dark. Somewhere in the murk, Scotty sniffled, hunched over the bed of his protégé, a young man newly without arms and without a future. The wheeze of machines and watery lungs made the air feel dense and damp, but the air was cold, and their bodies numb by now, from all the pain and suffering and sadness.
“It’s not your fault, sir,” came Sulu’s rasping voice, and blinking away guilty tears, turned back to the bedside of his dying comrade.
In his quarters, Jim slipped a bottle of brandy from the bottom of his bedside table and plucked a tiny shot glass from the end of a line of antiqued books on a narrow shelf by his viewscreen. They were in orbit above a dead world, a planet with blackened moons and a hellish facade, and as he watched its ferromagnetic surface rage and roil, the shimmering red glitter of 283 coffins seemed to line up in a fantastic refractive show, bouncing astrals and halos of light out across the vast vacuum of space.
It was beautiful, he decided, as he knocked back his second shot, and pondered whether he was capable of personalizing so many letters of apology. They deserved it, each of them, each of their families. Each of those people had a story and a purpose, and somehow it had all wrapped up in one meaningless space battle, out on the edge of a backwater sector that no civilization had any interest in. They had died for nothing, in short. They hadn’t even the luxury of honor.
You did the best you could, Jim
“Not good enough, Bones.”
There will be other victories, Jim. Today will have its vengeance.
“I don’t think you even believe that, Spock.”
It’s not your fault, sir. Captain. Jim.
Every one of them had told him so; Bones and Sulu in sickbay, Scotty and Spock in passing, Uhura as she’d waited for him in the lift. Uhura as she’d kissed him goodnight…
“It has to be,” Jim whispered to that slowly ebbing tide of death, “There’s nobody else to blame. This is my pain, my mistake, it’s…all mine to bear. And I have to make it right.”
But it wasn’t his alone, and he knew that. It was his, and Sulu’s, and Scotty’s and Spock’s, and Uhura’s and Bones’s, and it was that of every person who would cry themselves to sleep that night, or drink until the numbness became a stupor, or who slept soundly back on Earth with no knowledge that their loved ones were never coming home. It was the loneliness of that pain that crushed him, because it wasn’t just his after all, but a massive, growing, encompassing thing that would swallow him up. He put his hand to his mouth as a sound like an animal in a trap burst from his lips, and with a rush he knew what this was.
It was loss. He was lost.
He wanted so much to lie down and just sleep, but the guilt and shame kept him standing, the fierce pain that told him he had to stand. He was still captain, damn it, and he had a job to do.
Maybe he’d begun to slip.
Scotty tapped a round metal washer against the steel toe of his boot, cross-legged amidst a pile of parts, dumped carelessly and without intention. When he was furious he would tinker, assembling goliaths and lepers out of steel, filling their hydraulic limbs with his piss and angst as he toiled worthlessly away. He didn’t need to, of course, but when he was enraged, he could feel the pieces speaking to him, soothing him, and he wondered if this was the only thing keeping him sane.
Maybe it was the only thing.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be up there,” Sulu called, flecks of light reflecting off the slightly shiny surface of Chekov’s shirt as the ensign climbed higher and higher. It was like a jungle gym down in engineering, a huge playground to a kid like Pavel, and if the captain ever found out-
If Scotty every found out…
That was Sulu’s job. That’s why he was there. He kept an eye out, played the nurse maid, kept a leash on Chekov’s insanity. He used to fence for the sake of practice, but now he practiced for the sake of sanity. If he didn’t have that release, that outlet, that dedicated place in his mind that he buried himself within every time he pulled out a foil, he might have snapped Pavel’s neck for this the first time he found him clambering through tantalizingly askew riggings.
Maybe he would have snapped.
“You have to be careful,” Sulu told him twice. The first time Chekov ignored him. The second time, Chekov laughed.
“You vorry too much,” Chekov countered.
Chekov knew it was dangerous. He knew it was stupid, completely stupid, pointless, reckless, irresponsible, and unnecessary. But he needed it, and he knew that too. He needed someplace where he could throw himself and feel wind in his face, gravity at his feet, the screaming fear as his mind told him he was going to die, he had to die this time.
Maybe he had to die this time.
Jim dropped the clock on his floor, placed his heel over the face, and with slow, deliberate pressure, shattered it.
Scotty got to his knees, examined the ugly work in progress before his hand, and pushing it from its center of gravity, let it fall, toppling slowly and then faster and faster and faster, until it slammed to the ground and exploded in a myriad of cogs.
Sulu looked hollowly at the foil lying across his bed, but his hands felt weak, and he couldn’t even reach for the hilt, his head heavy as his heart.
Bones. There had been a bone jutting through that shiny gold fabric, a matted red-brown stain smeared along the length of his arm. Cold sweat stood like shuddering crystals on his brow as he lay still, eyes clenched shut, breath coming in slow, shallow bursts. Pain unlike anything he’d ever imagined radiated upward from his pelvis, sunken and ill-placed beneath his ribcage, as if it had failed to stand up with him in the morning and was now hung as a boat upon a stormy sea.
This fall wasn’t his fault.
Bones felt the terror in his body before his mind could process why it was there.
The floor beneath him was slick as he tried to push himself up. His arms felt cold and hot at the same time, his palms burst into blossoms of insatiable pain when he put his weight on them, and the sea of glass shards around his body told him that these things were not just isolated symptoms. Something very bad had happened.
Jim looked solemnly at the sleeping forms laid out in sickbay. It was quiet now, cold and antiseptic, but in his head the screams were fresh and seething, the stuff of nightmares. He could see blood on his hands where he’d washed them clean time and time again over the last few hours, and in his nose the stench of it clung heavy and dank. A thick knot grew in his throat, but instead of bile, as had come rushing up to greet him the first time he could slip away to the bathroom, now it was grief he had to choke down.
Bones stirred, fitful in his drug-induced slumber. Jim reached to smooth his brow, but his fingers curled as his hand grew near; he couldn’t touch him with these blood-stained hands.
There was no time.
They had come out of nowhere, emerging like lions from the long grass. They’d come about hard, fast as they could, the engines screaming loud enough that the sound tore through the ship like a shot, but it wasn’t good enough.
Phasers. Fire. Something essential must have caught in the ventilation system, too fast for life support to react, and half a deck had their lungs poached in an instant as pure oxygen slammed into a wall of flames.
On the bridge, Jim had screamed orders, clutching the arm of his command chair with every heaving blow.
There was no time.
Spock was shouting something, pointing at his monitor, gesticulating to Uhura. He turned to see what she needed, but couldn’t find her. He stood up and made his way to her work station, turned a half-pivot, and found her on the floor. Unconscious. Still breathing, though.
There was no time.
Scotty, over the intercom, shouting about incoming projectiles, and Sulu saying there were none on his screen. Something exploded by the map grid, and a steel girder flashed out of nowhere, spring-loaded from its cumbersome load, holding up one corner of the bridge’s ceiling.
Chekov flew across the bridge, folded in half, crumpled like a doll. He seemed so fragile and small, rolled into a ball and lying in a corner, Jim almost couldn’t believe he’d seen it happen.
Then everything got very quiet.
“Jim,” Bones whispered. Jim caught the doctor’s good hand in his own as he flailed weakly. The other arm was strapped to his side and held to the bed for his own protection.
“Don’t move, buddy,” Jim replied, stepping closer to the bedside and laying his friend’s arm back down. “You took one hell of a spill.”
“Where’s Chapel?” Bones asked.
“Sleeping.”
“Good.”
Without a word, Bones suddenly sat straight up, though he swayed as blood loss caught up with his head. He waved Jim off as the captain placed a hand on his shoulder for support, but Jim ignored his gesture.
“If you try to get up, I’m gonna have to knock you out,” Jim joked as Bones clumsily freed his other arm, but his voice cracked, and he knew Bones could tell he’d been crying.
For a moment, the doctor just stared at him, a look of dread and comprehension spreading across his features.
“It’s that bad?” he asked.
“It’s that bad,” Jim affirmed.
Half the crew was dead.
“We’re seaworthy again, I hear,” Sulu said softly, watching from a distance as Scotty tossed the last of his wayward collection into a desk drawer.
“Aye, we might be,” Scotty grumbled, rubbing his nose. “N’if we had but a crew to fly her, we mighta’ be a bit better off.”
Sulu flinched; what good was he, anyway? What good was a pilot without a navigator?
“I-…”Sulu began, but he felt breathless, lost. He looked away, scanning the tangle of pipes over his head, and he could almost hear Chekov’s laughter floating down to him. His heart faltered, and he was sure for a second he was going to have an infarction.
There was a hand on his shoulder, strong and rough, and when he looked up, he could see, from so close, that Scotty had been crying, too. They stared at each other for a long moment; the dark circles around Sulu’s eyes, and the hastily-stitched scar across his cheek, told the engineer a story similar to the violent chaos he’d witnessed himself.
“I want him to be okay,” Sulu murmured, his voice thick and lethargic, and he knew he was going to lose it. “I want him to be okay so badly, and he’s not. He’s not going to be okay, is he?”
All Scotty could do was let him cry.
“Jim,” Bones said calmly, “It wasn’t your fault.
The captain froze, and then his lips curled backward over his teeth as if his mouth was a vacuum pulling them in, his fists clenched, his shoulders sagged. There was a weight on him, like a thousand suns stacked against his neck, crushing him slowly into the floor. It was worse, he realized, to have someone else say it, and not just repeat it feebly in his head.
It meant he’d failed.
“Then whose fault is it?”
“It’s nobody’s damn fault.”
“I’m the captain,” Jim growled, stepping forcefully toward Bones, and the doctor reeled back from him, hands up in a defensive posture, but Jim steamed along. “I’m in charge, I’m responsible, and it’s my responsibility to make sure this doesn’t happen. When Starfleet gave me command of this ship, they didn’t tell me to just do a good job when it was easy, Bones, and I expect-“
“I expect,” he repeated, rubbing his mouth. “I expect so much better. I expect myself to do better than…This.”
He waved absently over his shoulder at the rows of quickly-assembled beds covering every square inch of the sickbay. Bodies in various states of assembly lay beneath ghostly sheets, most only alive by the will of the machines that harbored them. They had modern science, modern medicine, and modern technology, but there was still no such thing as the modern miracle.
“I have 283 letters of condolence to write tonight,” Jim croaked, his eyes searing into Bones’ as they met. “I have 283 families to tell…that their sons and daughters are never coming home. I have to explain to them how, on my watch, their children, and their spouses, and their fathers and mothers…I have to explain to kids how I let their mommies and daddies die.”
“Jim,” Bones started, “Nobody’s blaming you for this. Nobody but you, at least. And I don’t think a single one of those people would say you did anything wrong. Hell, you saved the rest of us, didn’t you? What the hell does that count for?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. He was becoming despondent; he had to hold it together. He had all those letters to write… “I don’t know, Leonard, what any of this counts for anymore.”
“How are they?” Sulu asked, his voice unnecessarily hushed, as Spock crossed paths with he and Scotty near the sickbay.
“They are…still alive,” was Spock’s reticent reply. Even for a Vulcan, he was looking more piqued than ever, his skin too pale, a smear of green blood slithering free from the bandage over his right eye and tracing a streak down his cheek. “I cannot safely make any greater forecast than that. The captain is with them presently, however.”
“Tha’s just ducky,” Scotty said, a forced laugh coming out more like a hoarse cough. “Y’think he won’na mind if we pop in for a tick, eh? S’not ‘is raigh’ alone t’wish the dead off, now is it?”
Spock took a menacing step toward the engineer, but Sulu leapt between them.
“Cut it out,” he growled, ignoring the fact that he was significantly shorter than both of them. Shoving them both apart, he barely suppressed a sneer; “The last thing we need is this petty crap. I’d ask you two to shake, but I think you’d take me the wrong way.”
“We have no need for dissidence here,” Spock said deliberately, eyes fixed on Scotty’s, basically ignoring Sulu’s words. “If you wish to take issue with the captain, Mister Scott, I suggest you begin with me.”
“I suggest you both cool it,” Sulu interjected, stepping between them again, but this time Scotty wasn’t amping up for a fight.
“Th’on’y thing I take issue with, Mister Spock,” Scotty replied, “S’that my bes’ fren’ got skew’rd like a shishkabob, an’ I had t’muck around pullin’ his legs out o’that gory fan while th’bloody ship came down abou’ our heads. N’if it’s th’same to you, I’d like t’see if my only surviving core engineer ha’still an arm left to ‘im.”
Without another word, Scotty stepped around Spock and ducked through the sickbay entryway, leaving Spock and Sulu frozen in the hall. Sometimes, Sulu realized, Vulcans really got the short end of the stick.
Grieving was, for all the living, a privilege.
You have to be careful. He touched Pavel’s cold cheek.
You vorry too much, Hikaru! He laid his hand upon the ensign’s still chest.
“I have to worry,” he whispered.
Dah, but you vorry too much. Is not heelthy. He let his hand wander down the lifeless arm to the stiff fingers and worked his palm open, squeezing the hand into his own.
“You let me worry about that, Pavel,” Hikaru smiled, but his face was covered in tears. They’d brought him back twice now; his heart was strong, Chapel said, but he’d taken a huge insult. They had to hope now, and pray, and wait to see if he could come back. They’d said-
“You’re going to break that hand off,” Jim said, suddenly very close. In the half-light, Hikaru couldn’t see the captain’s face too well, but he could feel the grief radiating from him like an odor. It smelled like blood all around him, somehow.
“Captain, I-“ he began, but he could see the captain hold up a hand to silence him. He has blood on his hands, Hikaru thought.
“You can stay with him if you want,” Jim said, his voice hoarse. “We’re not going to be getting underway for another day, Mister Sulu. Starfleet has advised us that the Reliant is en route to help tow us to Starbase 4, and we’re to wait here until she arrives. I don’t think the rest of the crew is too savvy to be pushing along just yet, anyway.”
“They still have to say goodbye,” Sulu said more to himself than the captain. He inhaled shakily, that awful metallic smell filling his mouth and nose. “All those people…We just need time to say goodbye.”
Jim touched Hikaru’s shoulder and the lieutenant jumped. For a moment neither of them spoke, eyes fixed and watery in the half-light, like reflections of men in the dark. Somewhere in the murk, Scotty sniffled, hunched over the bed of his protégé, a young man newly without arms and without a future. The wheeze of machines and watery lungs made the air feel dense and damp, but the air was cold, and their bodies numb by now, from all the pain and suffering and sadness.
“It’s not your fault, sir,” came Sulu’s rasping voice, and blinking away guilty tears, turned back to the bedside of his dying comrade.
In his quarters, Jim slipped a bottle of brandy from the bottom of his bedside table and plucked a tiny shot glass from the end of a line of antiqued books on a narrow shelf by his viewscreen. They were in orbit above a dead world, a planet with blackened moons and a hellish facade, and as he watched its ferromagnetic surface rage and roil, the shimmering red glitter of 283 coffins seemed to line up in a fantastic refractive show, bouncing astrals and halos of light out across the vast vacuum of space.
It was beautiful, he decided, as he knocked back his second shot, and pondered whether he was capable of personalizing so many letters of apology. They deserved it, each of them, each of their families. Each of those people had a story and a purpose, and somehow it had all wrapped up in one meaningless space battle, out on the edge of a backwater sector that no civilization had any interest in. They had died for nothing, in short. They hadn’t even the luxury of honor.
You did the best you could, Jim
“Not good enough, Bones.”
There will be other victories, Jim. Today will have its vengeance.
“I don’t think you even believe that, Spock.”
It’s not your fault, sir. Captain. Jim.
Every one of them had told him so; Bones and Sulu in sickbay, Scotty and Spock in passing, Uhura as she’d waited for him in the lift. Uhura as she’d kissed him goodnight…
“It has to be,” Jim whispered to that slowly ebbing tide of death, “There’s nobody else to blame. This is my pain, my mistake, it’s…all mine to bear. And I have to make it right.”
But it wasn’t his alone, and he knew that. It was his, and Sulu’s, and Scotty’s and Spock’s, and Uhura’s and Bones’s, and it was that of every person who would cry themselves to sleep that night, or drink until the numbness became a stupor, or who slept soundly back on Earth with no knowledge that their loved ones were never coming home. It was the loneliness of that pain that crushed him, because it wasn’t just his after all, but a massive, growing, encompassing thing that would swallow him up. He put his hand to his mouth as a sound like an animal in a trap burst from his lips, and with a rush he knew what this was.
It was loss. He was lost.
He wanted so much to lie down and just sleep, but the guilt and shame kept him standing, the fierce pain that told him he had to stand. He was still captain, damn it, and he had a job to do.