star trex xi fic: name the stars (an interlude) [mccoy/chapel, r]
name the stars (an interlude). star trek xi, r, 889 words.
This is not your McCoy. But the lie is comforting, for as long as it lasts.
{index.}
{previous.}
an interlude.
Don’t move. Keep staring straight into my eyes. It feels like you’re not moving, the way when, dancing, the room will suddenly fall away. You’re dancing: you’re neck and neck or cheek to cheek, he’s there or he isn’t, the open road. Imagine a room. Imagine you’re dancing. Imagine the room now falling away. Don’t move.
{you are jeff; richard siken.}
“Christine,” he says. “Christine, you have to get up now.”
His hand on your arm is shaking you awake and you push it off irritably, coiling closer into yourself, knees drawn up against your chest. The floor is hard and unforgiving and you’re cold and every inch of you is aching but you know that it’s preferable to the alternative, it’s better than facing the dark and the monsters again. “Go away,” you say, and you resolutely cover your head with your arms.
He laughs, and you flinch.
“Christine,” he says, his voice amused and patronizing, like one might treat a particularly recalcitrant teenager. You push yourself up and glare at him.
“What do you want,” you spit at him. “Leave me alone.”
His smile fades, and he looks at you, and you glance down at yourself. You see that you’re wearing your cadet reds again, and there is a nagging suspicion you can’t quite articulate in the back of your mind that this is all wrong. You look into your lap, and your hands are clean and white against all that unsettling scarlet and you stare at them for a long time; you know it’s not right, you know there’s something you’ve forgotten - there should be blood on these hands, under these fingernails -
You begin to shake.
He seizes your hands, covers them with his tanned warm large ones. “It wasn’t your fault,” he says, fingers encircling your wrists as hard and sure as steel; the heavy pressure is welcome and distracting, an anchor, a reminder that you are still alive. “You have to stop blaming yourself.”
“I don’t know,” you say, and your voice quivers and breaks on a sob, “I don’t know what I’m blaming myself for - ”
His hands slide down your forearms, languorous and strong. “Come here,” he says, and his fingers curl around your elbows and draw you in close, your head cradled against his chest, his fingers drifting through your hair.
You remember everything.
Your eyes flutter closed against your memories of the blood and the shadows, and you turn your face into his neck, lower lip trembling. “No,” you say like a petulant child. “No, no, no. This isn’t fair.”
“This is life, Christine,” he says, and you remember his name now: McCoy. Leonard McCoy. But - and you know this, even as you’re pretending it’s not true - he is not McCoy. McCoy has never been this gentle or so infinitely sweet in his life. That’s not what you love him for; and you do, you do love him, if you can’t say it now, when will you ever be able to?
This is not your McCoy; this is some fragment of your shattered subconsciousness. But the lie is comforting, for as long as it lasts. You let one hand trail up his chest, thumb smoothing over his cheekbone, fingers tracing down the stubborn line of his nose and over his lips, and you sigh and pull away.
When you open your eyes again, you are back in the outpost on Ranaulma’ar IV, curled on the floor in your circle of light amidst the blackness and the cold and the demons that claw at you, just out of reach. You are wearing your science blues, but they are more mottled red-and-brown now than blue, and Kostya’s blood is caked into the creases of your fingers.
“Hey,” he says, and you look back at him, surprised; you didn’t expect that he would linger, but then, you’re no psychologist, and you’re unversed in the revelatory nature of dreams. He is crouching beside you, and he reaches out to touch the backs of his fingers to your knee. “Christine, you have to wake up. You have to finish what you’ve started.”
“I don’t want to,” you say wretchedly, sitting back on your heels. “I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it.”
“I know,” he says, and his dark eyes are sad and steady as he pulls his hand away, curls it into a fist. “But you have to.”
“I’m too tired,” you say. “Please don’t ask me to do this. I - I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do.”
He reaches for you, tucks a loose lock of hair behind your ear and cups your cheek in his broad hand. “You know what you have to do,” he says. “Get up.” Your heartbeat stammers and jumps and your face turns up to his as he leans in to kiss you, sunlight flaring behind your closed eyelids -
And then you wake up.
Thousands of miles above you on the Enterprise, McCoy stands over a dimly-glowing display, his fingers lingering over the screen at the last spot where the blue dot tagged with your name and number appeared, before the EM field came crashing down over the planet, before he lost you again. Kirk claps his shoulder bracingly, but McCoy doesn’t look up, and he doesn’t lift his hand away from the display.
{next.}