Through the Desert of Grief
A/N 1: This is not a WIP! It is merely broken apart for better readability and to make posting easier. Unfortunately, my internet connection is pure crap right now (don't get me started on the dial-up fail rant or else, I won't ever stop ;) ) and lj is also behaving like a bitch (for the umpteenth time, the damn cut isn't working! I'm ready to scream in frustration, fall asleep over trying or just give up and subject my flist to the lengthy post .. I am thinking, option 3 is the one I will go with, sorry, flist! EDIT: o_O Or then again .. I might just be too drunk to have seen it right? 'cause it's showing up as cut now when I didn't change a DAMN THING to before. Wtf, lj?!). It's 6am here now and I've been trying to get this posted/ put together since I got back from Sonnwendfeuer at 11pm last night - needless to say, I will NOT bother with the other parts right now. I'll link them in tomorrow. Apologies to the trekreversebang mods and my artist. Also, apologies for leaving it so long to begin with, sometimes I think I'd lose my brain if I didn't have it contained within my head :P
A/N 2: I'd like to thank my put-upon beta Rose for her help with this. Also, a great thanks to stereowire for letting me play with her artwork and create a fic for it despite the fact that she had to drop out! I was, and still am, highly intrigued by the image you created and was glad to envision a story for it!
Title: Through the Desert of Grief
Artist: stereowire
Author: XLcatloveress
Rating (both art/fic): Art: gen, Fic: R (though not in this part yet)
Genre/Pairing: nuTrek, K/S
Word Count: 4300 in this part
Warnings: nothing for this part
Thumbnail:
Fic Summary: When Jim Kirk wakes under a scorching sun, surrounded by an arid mountain area, and cannot remember how he got there, things start out weird - and get weirder still at every turn.
Link to Art: Work of Art
The first thing that Jim became aware of when the tendrils of consciousness started stirring within his mind was heat. It. Was. Hot. He was hot.
Next was the realization that he was lying on a hard surface, sprawled in a haphazard heap with that damn heat surrounding him, beating down at him from above, seeping through his skin from below.
For long moments, he lay completely still, unmoving in the oppressive temperature that was draped over him like a heavy blanket, stifling, almost suffocating in its intensity. Far hotter than the lazy summer-days of his childhood years, spent in the oftentimes humid heat of Iowa, the current temperatures felt .. almost hostile, as if they were made to be lethal, deadly to all unprepared life by leeching away what moisture might be present.
Impressions were slowly trying to form sensible thought, but even as his awareness grew further, it felt as if the electric pulses fired between neurons had to push through thick molasses. It took a conscious effort to catalogue and order the feedback he was receiving from the different parts of his body. The sluggishness that slowed down his coherent thought processes worried him -- where the hell was it coming from? There was nothing he could immediately detect that helped him make sense of the way his thoughts were moving at snail-pace. He didn't feel drunk or hung-over enough to account for this impairment, and nothing really hurt to make him assume he might have gotten his brains knocked about in a good fist fight. All he could feel was the heat, and, with increasing intensity, the fact that the surface on which he was lying was really hard and not made for sprawling on.
He couldn't stay down, unmoving and with his eyes closed, needed to face the situation he was in before he allowed himself to be put at a disadvantage by his inactivity. Stirring for the first time, he swallowed a groan when the shift made his hip bone dig sharply and awkwardly into the surface beneath his body. At once blinking his eyes open and pushing himself into a sitting position, he remedied both factors that had previously lowered his vigilance.
Except -- that he didn't really see much of note, even now that he was in an upright position and actually had his eyes open. Forehead knotting into a frown, he looked around himself, scrubbing his right hand over his eyes to dispel any lingering effects of his .. sleep? Unconsciousness? For now, he pushed that question aside, right along with the equally pressing ones of how he had gotten 'here' and where the hell 'here' was to begin with! First things first, and that was to scan his surroundings for potential dangers, possibly usable benefits and most importantly, exit/entry areas.
As his eyes slowly traveled the small cavern in which he had woken, he automatically noted as the first thing the absence of other living beings right along with the absence of places where they might hide from his searching gaze. He judged the diameter of the cavern to be about 5 or 6 meters, an almost perfectly circular floor space created by the cavern's seemingly natural sandstone walls that softly sloped inward in a dome-shape from where they met the floor. The highest point of the dome was approximately 2 meters above him, and he felt fairly certain that he should be able to reach it with minimal effort and a small jump once he had actually risen from the ground. Right there at the peak of the dome-ceiling was a hole, wide enough for him to wriggle his body through once he'd have gotten a hold of the rim. It was through that 'sky-light' that sun-beams were pouring into the cavern, shining down on the position where he had lain almost like a spotlight that had been set to illuminate him. At first glance, it seemed as if that hole was the only place through which he could have entered the cavern in the first place, outside of transporter beams, that was. The fact that there only were 2 quite obvious possible ways of entering made the fact that he couldn't remember getting in all the more worrisome to him. Who woke up on the floor of a small cave without knowing how the heck they had gotten there? And without a lump anywhere at the back of his head too -- not that he longed for the headache that usually came with such an injury, but at least a lump would have given him reason to believe that a concussion was messing with his ability to remember!
Now, he couldn't deny feeling odd, in a decidedly strange and unspecific kind of way. 'Odd' as in undefinable -- floaty with an underlying confusion and his mind still mired in what he self-diagnosed as a mixture of addle-headedness and disorientation. Not to forget the heat which also seemed to be doing a number on his ability to think straight. But even as he mentally went through those symptoms and tried to match them up with afflictions he had known before, he could not come up with a single one that had made him feel like he felt now. No concussion, alcohol, spores, alien mind-control or physical ailment had ever affected him like this! So, yeah, he felt dizzy, bewildered, hot, annoyed with the status quo, uneasy, exposed, ..
.. speaking of which .. Jim's frown deepened into a scowl as he redirected his gaze from where it had been scanning the walls around him for a potential exit-way down his own body -- how in all the blazes of all seven hells had he gotten 'here' literally butt-naked?
"What the fuck?"
The words escaped him before he could rein them in, drawing a huffed breath of annoyance right in their wake. Great, talking to himself already, was he? It wasn't time yet to drag out the crazies, he had only just woken up, for crying out loud. Still, the sentiment of his words was solid -- what the fuck indeed.
Slowly, he could feel his thought processes gathering speed, the odd numbness in his head dissolving to a certain degree. Fact was that he was presently naked, alone, lacking in provisions and knowledge regarding his current status, subjected to immense heat and basically imperiled by all of the above. There was nothing immediate he could do about the heat, but his common sense told him that he should at least try and find potable water before dehydration did him in, making the search for provisions his top priority. If he found some clothes and perhaps even a computer terminal along the way, hey, he'd take that as an added bonus. A man had to dream big, after all.
Rising to his feet, he tested his balance, prepared to return to the ground in case the motion added symptoms he hadn't been aware of while he'd stayed down. To his great relief though he found that there was no further dizziness, that his balance was good and that no nausea assaulted him the moment he stood up. Again, all signs that he was not afflicted by an amnesia-inducing concussion or alcohol-based memory loss. While this didn't put him any closer to determining the cause for not knowing where he was and how the hell he had gotten here, it did at least rule out some of the potential causes, and he forced himself to believe that this was better than nothing.
He tried to forget, or at least ignore, his nakedness and began physically searching the cavern for anything that might be of use to him. Slowly and deliberately, he ran his palms over every centimeter of wall he could reach, feeling for tell-tale nooks, crannies, ledges, spots that sounded as if they were concealing a hollow or areas that felt cooler or hotter than the surrounding material. As his visual examination had suggested, he came up without success -- and even hotter than he had been before. Not necessarily much dirtier than before though, he realized as he completed his full circle and stood up straight once more. Wiping his palms, he couldn't help but notice that they had merely gathered a light dusting of dirt, all of which easily came off as soon as he slapped his hands together.
It shouldn't have been that easy to clean them off, Jim knew, and he could feel worry pooling in his stomach. The fact that the dust covering his fingers hadn't turned to grime didn't bode well for his level of hydration -- and truly, when he reached up to run his fingers across his temples and down the back of his neck, they came away dry. No sweat.
"Damn it!"
He knew that lack of sweating was already pointing towards a severe case of dehydration, and that soon, his judgment would become impaired and his body's ability to function would go into a rapid decline. Was the dizziness he had experienced earlier tied to dehydration? Had he possibly fainted because he had lost 5% of body fluid already? Was that what he had woken up from before, a faint? He couldn't tell whether he felt hot because of the ambient temperature or due to an elevated body temperature, but was definitely feeling thirsty and uncomfortable, both of which he remembered as potential symptoms from back when dehydration had been his usual state of waking up after alcohol-binged weekends. He noted with a certain detachment that there still was no headache or nausea, and that his heart-rate didn't seem to be any faster than he was used to, but that might still come, if he were inclined to wait for it. Seeing how the dry heat in which he was moving about was continuing to suck all the moisture out of him, he couldn't risk it. He'd start losing his wits around a fluid loss of 10%, and had no clue how close he already was to that mark.
Finding water had just jumped in the order on his list of priorities to n minus 20, at least, with n being the long-time, academy-ingrained adage to secure one's surroundings and safety above all else. And that basically meant that he'd make his way out of the hole in the ceiling now, nevermind 'scouting' ahead with his senses or trying any other available methods to ascertain whether or not danger was waiting for him above.
"All right, let's do this."
He moved to stand right under the hole, gazing up to it through squinted eyes. If he stretched out his arms over-head, the rim was less than half a meter above him, a distance he should easily be able to cover with a standing high-jump so that he could catch a hold of the rim and pull himself up and through. Gaining a good hand-hold was probably the most problematic part of the exercise, seeing how he needed to not only find a spot where no gravel would let his fingers slide off again but also, to gain good enough a grip to support his whole weight with merely his fingers for climbing up. Good thing that he should be able to put forth enough finger strength to pull off this stunt; after all, free-climbing was one of the high adrenaline sports in which he had dabbled while growing up. One of his more hare-brained dreams, as Bones tended to put it, was that some day, he would climb El Capitan without any gear or equipment -- for today though, getting out of this hole would have to do for an adrenaline boost.
Bobbing at the knees slightly to test his stance and prepare himself for the standing vertical leap, he took a few deep, calming breaths, eyes focused on his intended target areas. With another deep breath, ignoring the way the hot air seemed to all but burn its way down to his lungs, he suddenly launched himself into the air in one powerful movement, putting all of his sinewy strength to the test as he lept upwards and slammed his fingers into the hand-purchase he could find. He could feel nails break as he scrambled to position his fingers in the best way possible, and a hissed drawn-in breath betrayed the momentary sharp pain that shot through his hands and arms the moment his whole weight dangled from merely his finger-tips. But .. so far so good, now he needed to hurry before the exertion he was putting on his hands broke the grip he had established.
With a grunt, he began pulling himself up. Muscles bunched and strained against his skin, his legs tried to create momentum by swinging but he forced himself to keep them as still as possible, acting against instinct and natural urge. If he brought himself into too much of a rocking or twisting motion, he could easily lose his grip and crash back to the ground below.
Centimeter by centimeter, curse by curse and labored breath by labored breath, he lifted first his head, then his shoulders out of the hole, his attention fully focused on maintaining a supporting hold. The muscles in his arms burned and quivered under the strain, his finger-tips felt like breaking from the weight they were made to hold. He was too focused to allow an expletive to slip past his lips but in the back of his head, a string of them was playing as he heaved himself up. As soon as his upper arms had cleared the hole, he lodged one elbow over the ledge and secured his hold enough to let go of the grip of his other hand long enough to brace its palm and wrist against the floor-level onto which he was attempting to climb.
His hands were cramped into tight claws, and he couldn't have straightened his fingers if his life had depended on it right now. In his arms, muscles trembled and protested against the over-exertion they were subjected to, and he could feel his strength draining rapidly as he hung in a precarious balance. Giving a groan, as much to voice his depletion as to spur himself on for the last effort, he pushed up against his flat palm, then hurried to bring his other arm into a similar position so that he now hung suspended with his full weight on both his locked arms.
Feeling secure in his hold, at least for a moment or two, he stayed where he was and gave his surroundings a perfunctory once-over. No immediate threats were obvious, no enemy lying in wait to ambush him now that he had shown his head through the hole. With that established, he gave his body the last push, bringing his knees through the hole and onto the ground before him, then collapsing forward quite out of breath but still no more sweat-streaked than before. He had a feeling that a higher-than-Earth-norm gravity contributed to the exhaustion he was feeling and that at least some of his panting was caused by an atmosphere that was thinner than he was used to but without a tricorder it was hard to estimate the degree of deviation.
Slowly, his breathing and heart-beat calmed, and he managed to flex his fingers from their claw-like state once more. He rose from his knees into a standing position and, for he second time in only a few minutes, took the time to carefully scan his new surroundings.
He was standing out in the open, all around him stretching an arid mountain-range with dry-baked canyons and snow-less peaks as far as the eye could see. There seemed to be holes like the one he had just climbed out of pock-marking vertical and horizontal surfaces all around him, indicating that both ground and rock-faces were littered with caves, caverns and hollows. Squinting against the harsh glare of the sun above, he took note of some tracks that looked to be animal-made -- probably a good idea to follow those tracks and hope for them to lead him to a source of water. But if he were to traverse the mountain plains stretched out before him, he needed clothes, or at least something to cover himself up with, preferably before the sun baked him to a crisp.
'Suns!' he amended when the realization suddenly hit that he was standing under a twin set of .. hmm .. was that a sun and an ever-present moon? Two suns? A sun and a sister planet to the one he was on? If it wasn't impossible, he'd say that all of his observations were best in keeping with the planetary conditions he had learned for Vulcan -- but Vulcan was no more, destroyed a little over a year ago.
Either way, two celestial bodies were visible and beating down on him. He really needed clothes, wished for the UV protection afforded by his Starfleet uniform .. and had barely even voiced that thought within his mind that he turned around to find a neatly-folded bundle lying on a rock nearby, looking for all it was worth like regulation-black and command-yellow.
"Huh."
He must have .. somehow .. missed the pile in his eagerness to scan his surroundings. For .. it surely had been there before. He couldn't be in delirium yet, refused to believe he'd go down before he even had had much of a chance to put up a serious fight for survival! The bundle had been there before and he had missed it, and that was that. Decisively, he walked over to it, and there was no hesitation when he stooped to pick it up. There also was no sigh of relief when indeed, the clothes were real to his touch and his, according to insignia and fit. Whose else could they have been anyway, out here in the middle of god-forsaken nowhere! He was being silly, and knew it too. All the question this bundle should beg for him to answer was why the hell he had felt it necessary to get naked before shimmying down into that damn hole, and what he had hoped to find down there in the first place.
'And why I can't remember ever doing so!' his mind supplied, ever so helpful in his current, already-quite-anxious state. "Well, crap." This place looked like the most uninhabitable planet he had ever been on, with no telltale signs of nearby civilization anywhere that he could tell, and while it felt good to slip his uniform over his head, he still was no closer to obtaining any other provisions or equipment that might actually help him find what he needed. Had he been marooned here? Another Delta Vega, except with a desert instead of the eternal ice? But then .. where was the shuttle pod? And .. if he had been marooned here while still wearing the Captain's uniform, did that mean his crew had mutinied?
"Why can't I fucking remember?"
His frustration was mounting, he could feel annoyance seething within himself, disgust at his lacking state of mind threatening to overwhelm him. "Enough with the pity party!" he admonished himself, pulling on his boots with a little more force than necessary. Time to put his earlier plan into motion and seek out what he had identified as possible animal tracks before -- he needed water, and following them was his best bet at finding some in this hostile terrain. If the Enterprise came looking for him here at his current location, he trusted their sensor equipment (and his science officer's tenacity) to find him even if he had wandered off.
He took one last good look around the ledge he was on, making sure he hadn't, by any chance, missed a spare tricorder, phaser or communicator lying around inconspicuously and came up short when there was another bundle of meticulously-folded clothes behind the stone where he had found his own before. Again, there was regulation-black predominant in the bundle but this time, instead of command-gold, the top-shirt was held in science-blue. He didn't even have to check the insignia to know whose uniform he was holding in his hands. There went his hope for his science officer's tenacity.
"Spock?" he whispered, clutching the clothes to his chest where suddenly, his anxiousness seemed to have exploded tenfold. What the hell had happened here? And why couldn't he remember? And .. this bundle .. dare he even pose the question regarding his sanity? Could he have only just .. missed it when he had first walked over here to pick up his own uniform? His head ached, not the pounding headache he would have expected from dehydration making him ill, more of a dull throbbing that was like a sound that he couldn't block out. What was happening here?
"Spock!" he called out, his voice echoing loudly off the canyon walls. Pausing for a moment to listen for a reply, he tried again, louder: "Spock!" Nothing. Not a sound aside from his harsh breathing broke the silence of the desert scene around him. 'Fuck.'
He rubbed his temple with his left hand, right hand still clutching Spock's uniform close -- if he concentrated, could he still smell some of Spock's scent lingering in the clothes? So much had not yet been said between them, duty, missions and yes, personal cowardice keeping Jim from telling the Vulcan in words as well as in his actions just how important he was to him. How important, and how dear to his heart. He couldn't have lost Spock out here, in the arid wilderness, could he? Not before he had finally taken his chance and told the other man that he valued him as more than just his trusted second in command. Fate couldn't be so cruel as to deny them this chance -- a chance he had clearly seen in the meld with the other universe's Spock!
With trembling fingers, he examined the uniform he was holding for blood or tears, anything that might shed some light on Spock's fate, and it was with relief that he found the undamaged. He still didn't know where he was, how he had gotten here, where Spock had disappeared to, what condition his First Officer was in or why 2+2 didn't seem to add up to anything anywhere near 4 right now, but the state of the uniform seemed to suggest that Spock had been all right when he had last seen him and that he was around here somewhere, and that alone gave Jim a whole new hope for getting through this current situation alive. If anyone could pull his ass out of the fire when he most needed it and least expected for the cavalry to arrive, it was Spock.
Invigorated by the thought, he placed all of the clothes and the boots on top of the uniform shirt, then tied it into a bundle utilizing the sleeves. He wasn't going to leave Spock's clothes lying around here where they might be dragged off by a wild animal, and no, he was not going to admit to himself that he felt better for simply having a token reminder of Spock's presence with him. Sometimes, his subconscious suggested the damndest of things!
One last time, he called out: "SPOCK!", hoping for an answer but receiving .. a howl? Jim's brow furrowed. From up ahead, a sound very much like a coyote-howl had answered his call. Not Spock, but at least he had found a trail to the animal behind the tracks he had seen earlier. His best bet, as he had established already. Quickly, he gathered up some rock pebbles that lay strewn all around and fashioned a crude way-marker out of them, an arrow pointing in the direction he intended to go. Next to it, he drew the Captain's insignia into the sand, with a check-mark behind it, while Spock's insignia were left a few centimeters off, topped of with a question-mark instead. That should tip potential rescuers off to the fact that they had been split up and Spock's location was currently unknown to Jim.
Shadowing his eyes against the suns' glare, he took one last look around himself, just to ascertain that he had not missed anything vital like he had before. But no, there still was no Spock, nor any sign pointing him towards what might have happened here or any miraculously turned-up equipment. so, he was alone -- a state that, funnily enough in the hysterical-not-really-funny kind of way, had never bothered him until .. well .. during the last year when he had first learned what camaraderie could actually mean. How nice it was to have friends. A family even. And how good it felt to know there was someone there who would always have your back. Someone whom you were willing to trust implicitly, no holds barred, no questions asked. Someone whom you could consider as a partner, in every sense of the word, and someone whom you desired in such a position, again, in every sense of the word. He'd get that back, all of that, or die trying. Now that he had had his taste, there was no going back to the the deserted loneliness he had known before. Life hadn't been living before he had found his spot in the center-seat on the Enterprise, with Spock always by his side. No one and nothing would take that away from him.
With a sigh on his lips and worry tempered by steely determination in his heart, Jim shouldered the bundle he had made from Spock's clothes and set out, in the direction of the sound and tracks.
A/N 2: I'd like to thank my put-upon beta Rose for her help with this. Also, a great thanks to stereowire for letting me play with her artwork and create a fic for it despite the fact that she had to drop out! I was, and still am, highly intrigued by the image you created and was glad to envision a story for it!
Title: Through the Desert of Grief
Artist: stereowire
Author: XLcatloveress
Rating (both art/fic): Art: gen, Fic: R (though not in this part yet)
Genre/Pairing: nuTrek, K/S
Word Count: 4300 in this part
Warnings: nothing for this part
Thumbnail:
Fic Summary: When Jim Kirk wakes under a scorching sun, surrounded by an arid mountain area, and cannot remember how he got there, things start out weird - and get weirder still at every turn.
Link to Art: Work of Art
The first thing that Jim became aware of when the tendrils of consciousness started stirring within his mind was heat. It. Was. Hot. He was hot.
Next was the realization that he was lying on a hard surface, sprawled in a haphazard heap with that damn heat surrounding him, beating down at him from above, seeping through his skin from below.
For long moments, he lay completely still, unmoving in the oppressive temperature that was draped over him like a heavy blanket, stifling, almost suffocating in its intensity. Far hotter than the lazy summer-days of his childhood years, spent in the oftentimes humid heat of Iowa, the current temperatures felt .. almost hostile, as if they were made to be lethal, deadly to all unprepared life by leeching away what moisture might be present.
Impressions were slowly trying to form sensible thought, but even as his awareness grew further, it felt as if the electric pulses fired between neurons had to push through thick molasses. It took a conscious effort to catalogue and order the feedback he was receiving from the different parts of his body. The sluggishness that slowed down his coherent thought processes worried him -- where the hell was it coming from? There was nothing he could immediately detect that helped him make sense of the way his thoughts were moving at snail-pace. He didn't feel drunk or hung-over enough to account for this impairment, and nothing really hurt to make him assume he might have gotten his brains knocked about in a good fist fight. All he could feel was the heat, and, with increasing intensity, the fact that the surface on which he was lying was really hard and not made for sprawling on.
He couldn't stay down, unmoving and with his eyes closed, needed to face the situation he was in before he allowed himself to be put at a disadvantage by his inactivity. Stirring for the first time, he swallowed a groan when the shift made his hip bone dig sharply and awkwardly into the surface beneath his body. At once blinking his eyes open and pushing himself into a sitting position, he remedied both factors that had previously lowered his vigilance.
Except -- that he didn't really see much of note, even now that he was in an upright position and actually had his eyes open. Forehead knotting into a frown, he looked around himself, scrubbing his right hand over his eyes to dispel any lingering effects of his .. sleep? Unconsciousness? For now, he pushed that question aside, right along with the equally pressing ones of how he had gotten 'here' and where the hell 'here' was to begin with! First things first, and that was to scan his surroundings for potential dangers, possibly usable benefits and most importantly, exit/entry areas.
As his eyes slowly traveled the small cavern in which he had woken, he automatically noted as the first thing the absence of other living beings right along with the absence of places where they might hide from his searching gaze. He judged the diameter of the cavern to be about 5 or 6 meters, an almost perfectly circular floor space created by the cavern's seemingly natural sandstone walls that softly sloped inward in a dome-shape from where they met the floor. The highest point of the dome was approximately 2 meters above him, and he felt fairly certain that he should be able to reach it with minimal effort and a small jump once he had actually risen from the ground. Right there at the peak of the dome-ceiling was a hole, wide enough for him to wriggle his body through once he'd have gotten a hold of the rim. It was through that 'sky-light' that sun-beams were pouring into the cavern, shining down on the position where he had lain almost like a spotlight that had been set to illuminate him. At first glance, it seemed as if that hole was the only place through which he could have entered the cavern in the first place, outside of transporter beams, that was. The fact that there only were 2 quite obvious possible ways of entering made the fact that he couldn't remember getting in all the more worrisome to him. Who woke up on the floor of a small cave without knowing how the heck they had gotten there? And without a lump anywhere at the back of his head too -- not that he longed for the headache that usually came with such an injury, but at least a lump would have given him reason to believe that a concussion was messing with his ability to remember!
Now, he couldn't deny feeling odd, in a decidedly strange and unspecific kind of way. 'Odd' as in undefinable -- floaty with an underlying confusion and his mind still mired in what he self-diagnosed as a mixture of addle-headedness and disorientation. Not to forget the heat which also seemed to be doing a number on his ability to think straight. But even as he mentally went through those symptoms and tried to match them up with afflictions he had known before, he could not come up with a single one that had made him feel like he felt now. No concussion, alcohol, spores, alien mind-control or physical ailment had ever affected him like this! So, yeah, he felt dizzy, bewildered, hot, annoyed with the status quo, uneasy, exposed, ..
.. speaking of which .. Jim's frown deepened into a scowl as he redirected his gaze from where it had been scanning the walls around him for a potential exit-way down his own body -- how in all the blazes of all seven hells had he gotten 'here' literally butt-naked?
"What the fuck?"
The words escaped him before he could rein them in, drawing a huffed breath of annoyance right in their wake. Great, talking to himself already, was he? It wasn't time yet to drag out the crazies, he had only just woken up, for crying out loud. Still, the sentiment of his words was solid -- what the fuck indeed.
Slowly, he could feel his thought processes gathering speed, the odd numbness in his head dissolving to a certain degree. Fact was that he was presently naked, alone, lacking in provisions and knowledge regarding his current status, subjected to immense heat and basically imperiled by all of the above. There was nothing immediate he could do about the heat, but his common sense told him that he should at least try and find potable water before dehydration did him in, making the search for provisions his top priority. If he found some clothes and perhaps even a computer terminal along the way, hey, he'd take that as an added bonus. A man had to dream big, after all.
Rising to his feet, he tested his balance, prepared to return to the ground in case the motion added symptoms he hadn't been aware of while he'd stayed down. To his great relief though he found that there was no further dizziness, that his balance was good and that no nausea assaulted him the moment he stood up. Again, all signs that he was not afflicted by an amnesia-inducing concussion or alcohol-based memory loss. While this didn't put him any closer to determining the cause for not knowing where he was and how the hell he had gotten here, it did at least rule out some of the potential causes, and he forced himself to believe that this was better than nothing.
He tried to forget, or at least ignore, his nakedness and began physically searching the cavern for anything that might be of use to him. Slowly and deliberately, he ran his palms over every centimeter of wall he could reach, feeling for tell-tale nooks, crannies, ledges, spots that sounded as if they were concealing a hollow or areas that felt cooler or hotter than the surrounding material. As his visual examination had suggested, he came up without success -- and even hotter than he had been before. Not necessarily much dirtier than before though, he realized as he completed his full circle and stood up straight once more. Wiping his palms, he couldn't help but notice that they had merely gathered a light dusting of dirt, all of which easily came off as soon as he slapped his hands together.
It shouldn't have been that easy to clean them off, Jim knew, and he could feel worry pooling in his stomach. The fact that the dust covering his fingers hadn't turned to grime didn't bode well for his level of hydration -- and truly, when he reached up to run his fingers across his temples and down the back of his neck, they came away dry. No sweat.
"Damn it!"
He knew that lack of sweating was already pointing towards a severe case of dehydration, and that soon, his judgment would become impaired and his body's ability to function would go into a rapid decline. Was the dizziness he had experienced earlier tied to dehydration? Had he possibly fainted because he had lost 5% of body fluid already? Was that what he had woken up from before, a faint? He couldn't tell whether he felt hot because of the ambient temperature or due to an elevated body temperature, but was definitely feeling thirsty and uncomfortable, both of which he remembered as potential symptoms from back when dehydration had been his usual state of waking up after alcohol-binged weekends. He noted with a certain detachment that there still was no headache or nausea, and that his heart-rate didn't seem to be any faster than he was used to, but that might still come, if he were inclined to wait for it. Seeing how the dry heat in which he was moving about was continuing to suck all the moisture out of him, he couldn't risk it. He'd start losing his wits around a fluid loss of 10%, and had no clue how close he already was to that mark.
Finding water had just jumped in the order on his list of priorities to n minus 20, at least, with n being the long-time, academy-ingrained adage to secure one's surroundings and safety above all else. And that basically meant that he'd make his way out of the hole in the ceiling now, nevermind 'scouting' ahead with his senses or trying any other available methods to ascertain whether or not danger was waiting for him above.
"All right, let's do this."
He moved to stand right under the hole, gazing up to it through squinted eyes. If he stretched out his arms over-head, the rim was less than half a meter above him, a distance he should easily be able to cover with a standing high-jump so that he could catch a hold of the rim and pull himself up and through. Gaining a good hand-hold was probably the most problematic part of the exercise, seeing how he needed to not only find a spot where no gravel would let his fingers slide off again but also, to gain good enough a grip to support his whole weight with merely his fingers for climbing up. Good thing that he should be able to put forth enough finger strength to pull off this stunt; after all, free-climbing was one of the high adrenaline sports in which he had dabbled while growing up. One of his more hare-brained dreams, as Bones tended to put it, was that some day, he would climb El Capitan without any gear or equipment -- for today though, getting out of this hole would have to do for an adrenaline boost.
Bobbing at the knees slightly to test his stance and prepare himself for the standing vertical leap, he took a few deep, calming breaths, eyes focused on his intended target areas. With another deep breath, ignoring the way the hot air seemed to all but burn its way down to his lungs, he suddenly launched himself into the air in one powerful movement, putting all of his sinewy strength to the test as he lept upwards and slammed his fingers into the hand-purchase he could find. He could feel nails break as he scrambled to position his fingers in the best way possible, and a hissed drawn-in breath betrayed the momentary sharp pain that shot through his hands and arms the moment his whole weight dangled from merely his finger-tips. But .. so far so good, now he needed to hurry before the exertion he was putting on his hands broke the grip he had established.
With a grunt, he began pulling himself up. Muscles bunched and strained against his skin, his legs tried to create momentum by swinging but he forced himself to keep them as still as possible, acting against instinct and natural urge. If he brought himself into too much of a rocking or twisting motion, he could easily lose his grip and crash back to the ground below.
Centimeter by centimeter, curse by curse and labored breath by labored breath, he lifted first his head, then his shoulders out of the hole, his attention fully focused on maintaining a supporting hold. The muscles in his arms burned and quivered under the strain, his finger-tips felt like breaking from the weight they were made to hold. He was too focused to allow an expletive to slip past his lips but in the back of his head, a string of them was playing as he heaved himself up. As soon as his upper arms had cleared the hole, he lodged one elbow over the ledge and secured his hold enough to let go of the grip of his other hand long enough to brace its palm and wrist against the floor-level onto which he was attempting to climb.
His hands were cramped into tight claws, and he couldn't have straightened his fingers if his life had depended on it right now. In his arms, muscles trembled and protested against the over-exertion they were subjected to, and he could feel his strength draining rapidly as he hung in a precarious balance. Giving a groan, as much to voice his depletion as to spur himself on for the last effort, he pushed up against his flat palm, then hurried to bring his other arm into a similar position so that he now hung suspended with his full weight on both his locked arms.
Feeling secure in his hold, at least for a moment or two, he stayed where he was and gave his surroundings a perfunctory once-over. No immediate threats were obvious, no enemy lying in wait to ambush him now that he had shown his head through the hole. With that established, he gave his body the last push, bringing his knees through the hole and onto the ground before him, then collapsing forward quite out of breath but still no more sweat-streaked than before. He had a feeling that a higher-than-Earth-norm gravity contributed to the exhaustion he was feeling and that at least some of his panting was caused by an atmosphere that was thinner than he was used to but without a tricorder it was hard to estimate the degree of deviation.
Slowly, his breathing and heart-beat calmed, and he managed to flex his fingers from their claw-like state once more. He rose from his knees into a standing position and, for he second time in only a few minutes, took the time to carefully scan his new surroundings.
He was standing out in the open, all around him stretching an arid mountain-range with dry-baked canyons and snow-less peaks as far as the eye could see. There seemed to be holes like the one he had just climbed out of pock-marking vertical and horizontal surfaces all around him, indicating that both ground and rock-faces were littered with caves, caverns and hollows. Squinting against the harsh glare of the sun above, he took note of some tracks that looked to be animal-made -- probably a good idea to follow those tracks and hope for them to lead him to a source of water. But if he were to traverse the mountain plains stretched out before him, he needed clothes, or at least something to cover himself up with, preferably before the sun baked him to a crisp.
'Suns!' he amended when the realization suddenly hit that he was standing under a twin set of .. hmm .. was that a sun and an ever-present moon? Two suns? A sun and a sister planet to the one he was on? If it wasn't impossible, he'd say that all of his observations were best in keeping with the planetary conditions he had learned for Vulcan -- but Vulcan was no more, destroyed a little over a year ago.
Either way, two celestial bodies were visible and beating down on him. He really needed clothes, wished for the UV protection afforded by his Starfleet uniform .. and had barely even voiced that thought within his mind that he turned around to find a neatly-folded bundle lying on a rock nearby, looking for all it was worth like regulation-black and command-yellow.
"Huh."
He must have .. somehow .. missed the pile in his eagerness to scan his surroundings. For .. it surely had been there before. He couldn't be in delirium yet, refused to believe he'd go down before he even had had much of a chance to put up a serious fight for survival! The bundle had been there before and he had missed it, and that was that. Decisively, he walked over to it, and there was no hesitation when he stooped to pick it up. There also was no sigh of relief when indeed, the clothes were real to his touch and his, according to insignia and fit. Whose else could they have been anyway, out here in the middle of god-forsaken nowhere! He was being silly, and knew it too. All the question this bundle should beg for him to answer was why the hell he had felt it necessary to get naked before shimmying down into that damn hole, and what he had hoped to find down there in the first place.
'And why I can't remember ever doing so!' his mind supplied, ever so helpful in his current, already-quite-anxious state. "Well, crap." This place looked like the most uninhabitable planet he had ever been on, with no telltale signs of nearby civilization anywhere that he could tell, and while it felt good to slip his uniform over his head, he still was no closer to obtaining any other provisions or equipment that might actually help him find what he needed. Had he been marooned here? Another Delta Vega, except with a desert instead of the eternal ice? But then .. where was the shuttle pod? And .. if he had been marooned here while still wearing the Captain's uniform, did that mean his crew had mutinied?
"Why can't I fucking remember?"
His frustration was mounting, he could feel annoyance seething within himself, disgust at his lacking state of mind threatening to overwhelm him. "Enough with the pity party!" he admonished himself, pulling on his boots with a little more force than necessary. Time to put his earlier plan into motion and seek out what he had identified as possible animal tracks before -- he needed water, and following them was his best bet at finding some in this hostile terrain. If the Enterprise came looking for him here at his current location, he trusted their sensor equipment (and his science officer's tenacity) to find him even if he had wandered off.
He took one last good look around the ledge he was on, making sure he hadn't, by any chance, missed a spare tricorder, phaser or communicator lying around inconspicuously and came up short when there was another bundle of meticulously-folded clothes behind the stone where he had found his own before. Again, there was regulation-black predominant in the bundle but this time, instead of command-gold, the top-shirt was held in science-blue. He didn't even have to check the insignia to know whose uniform he was holding in his hands. There went his hope for his science officer's tenacity.
"Spock?" he whispered, clutching the clothes to his chest where suddenly, his anxiousness seemed to have exploded tenfold. What the hell had happened here? And why couldn't he remember? And .. this bundle .. dare he even pose the question regarding his sanity? Could he have only just .. missed it when he had first walked over here to pick up his own uniform? His head ached, not the pounding headache he would have expected from dehydration making him ill, more of a dull throbbing that was like a sound that he couldn't block out. What was happening here?
"Spock!" he called out, his voice echoing loudly off the canyon walls. Pausing for a moment to listen for a reply, he tried again, louder: "Spock!" Nothing. Not a sound aside from his harsh breathing broke the silence of the desert scene around him. 'Fuck.'
He rubbed his temple with his left hand, right hand still clutching Spock's uniform close -- if he concentrated, could he still smell some of Spock's scent lingering in the clothes? So much had not yet been said between them, duty, missions and yes, personal cowardice keeping Jim from telling the Vulcan in words as well as in his actions just how important he was to him. How important, and how dear to his heart. He couldn't have lost Spock out here, in the arid wilderness, could he? Not before he had finally taken his chance and told the other man that he valued him as more than just his trusted second in command. Fate couldn't be so cruel as to deny them this chance -- a chance he had clearly seen in the meld with the other universe's Spock!
With trembling fingers, he examined the uniform he was holding for blood or tears, anything that might shed some light on Spock's fate, and it was with relief that he found the undamaged. He still didn't know where he was, how he had gotten here, where Spock had disappeared to, what condition his First Officer was in or why 2+2 didn't seem to add up to anything anywhere near 4 right now, but the state of the uniform seemed to suggest that Spock had been all right when he had last seen him and that he was around here somewhere, and that alone gave Jim a whole new hope for getting through this current situation alive. If anyone could pull his ass out of the fire when he most needed it and least expected for the cavalry to arrive, it was Spock.
Invigorated by the thought, he placed all of the clothes and the boots on top of the uniform shirt, then tied it into a bundle utilizing the sleeves. He wasn't going to leave Spock's clothes lying around here where they might be dragged off by a wild animal, and no, he was not going to admit to himself that he felt better for simply having a token reminder of Spock's presence with him. Sometimes, his subconscious suggested the damndest of things!
One last time, he called out: "SPOCK!", hoping for an answer but receiving .. a howl? Jim's brow furrowed. From up ahead, a sound very much like a coyote-howl had answered his call. Not Spock, but at least he had found a trail to the animal behind the tracks he had seen earlier. His best bet, as he had established already. Quickly, he gathered up some rock pebbles that lay strewn all around and fashioned a crude way-marker out of them, an arrow pointing in the direction he intended to go. Next to it, he drew the Captain's insignia into the sand, with a check-mark behind it, while Spock's insignia were left a few centimeters off, topped of with a question-mark instead. That should tip potential rescuers off to the fact that they had been split up and Spock's location was currently unknown to Jim.
Shadowing his eyes against the suns' glare, he took one last look around himself, just to ascertain that he had not missed anything vital like he had before. But no, there still was no Spock, nor any sign pointing him towards what might have happened here or any miraculously turned-up equipment. so, he was alone -- a state that, funnily enough in the hysterical-not-really-funny kind of way, had never bothered him until .. well .. during the last year when he had first learned what camaraderie could actually mean. How nice it was to have friends. A family even. And how good it felt to know there was someone there who would always have your back. Someone whom you were willing to trust implicitly, no holds barred, no questions asked. Someone whom you could consider as a partner, in every sense of the word, and someone whom you desired in such a position, again, in every sense of the word. He'd get that back, all of that, or die trying. Now that he had had his taste, there was no going back to the the deserted loneliness he had known before. Life hadn't been living before he had found his spot in the center-seat on the Enterprise, with Spock always by his side. No one and nothing would take that away from him.
With a sigh on his lips and worry tempered by steely determination in his heart, Jim shouldered the bundle he had made from Spock's clothes and set out, in the direction of the sound and tracks.