Trek fic: Waiting for Tomorrow, Pike/Boyce
Title: Waiting for Tomorrow
Pairing: Pike/Boyce
Rating: R
Word count: around 13,000
Beta: the lovely imachar
Warnings: STID compliant, off-screen character death - nevertheless with a happy ending!
Summary: Phil Boyce is not coping well with the death of his partner of 30 years. He hatches a half-mad scheme to find himself a substitute.
Author's Note: Dr Phil Boyce is canon as of STID, where he is listed as the attending physician on the biobed monitor when Kirk comes out of his coma. He was Pike’s CMO in TOS, and after the first reboot was fancast as Mark Harmon. imachar is the queen of the Pike/Boyce pairing with her The Weight of a Man series and has some lovely photos of the two of them here.
This story was written as fix-it gift fic for imachar
Phil knelt down by the black box that sat innocuously nestled under the console of the transporter and carefully switched it on. It would take an hour before it was fully operational, and he watched the timer start to count down, the numbers flicking past with every second. Sixty minutes left of this life.
Chris, with his interest in engineering systems and his access to Starfleet supplies, could always be counted on to over-spec everything at their Mojave ranch. What appeared to be just a small domestic transporter had in fact been purchased off the back of a major Starfleet order for some of the finest systems currently available. And it was that fact that made this idea theoretically possible.
When the Starfleet authorities finally worked out what he’d done - if they did manage to work it out - when would they decide that the madness had started? Because it was mad, he knew that. There was a small detached part of his mind that was watching his preparations with horrified fascination, the ultimate insider’s view of a highly intelligent man undergoing a slow-motion descent into lunacy. What was strange to him was how little he felt about that fact.
He’d always been an outgoing man, not one to tolerate fools but nevertheless mostly easy to get along with and quick to make friends. He’d needed to retreat into privacy at times, to recharge his batteries and centre himself in solitude, but he’d always felt himself to be profoundly normal. He’d certainly sailed easily through the many psych evaluations required for a highly successful career in Starfleet Medical.
He’d laughed easily and loved generously and had never felt cut off from himself, but now his emotions were trapped behind a thick wall, transparent but impenetrable. He felt neither grief nor fear, just a steady irrevocable commitment to his chosen path of action, despite the uncertainty and the danger that he knew it would bring. It wasn’t as if he had much reason left to care about his life. Nevertheless, he found a detached amusement in trying to decide what the powers that be would pinpoint as the start of this tragedy.
Had the madness begun the moment he was informed that the emergency senior command meeting had come under attack and there were deaths? No, not then, he’d known who was at the meeting, but Chris had cheated death so many times in their decades-long acquaintance that he’d been convinced the man was a particularly attractive tawny grey cat with several lives left.
He’d been wrong.
So had it started with the frantic voice call from one of the emergency responders on the scene, a woman who’d realized that perhaps the Surgeon-General should be informed that his partner of thirty years had just died in the wreckage of the Daystrom Conference room. Perhaps not. To begin with he’d reacted normally enough. The three days afterwards had been a period of stunned misery - sitting the death watch in the mortuary with Chris’s body, making arrangements for the funeral, comforting others while being utterly unable to imagine any comfort for himself. And then it had all been buried beneath the carnage of Khan’s ship smashing through most of North Beach, taking down several Starfleet buildings in the process. Hundreds of personnel with appalling injuries had come flooding through their hospital, every doctor they had was required, even the Surgeon-General who should have been on compassionate leave, and his grief had been crushed beneath endless hours of surgery that had left him physically exhausted and mentally numb.
He left the transporter alcove, tired of the agonizingly slow count-down of the numbers, nerves on edge from the wait. Crossing through the family room, he opened the floor-to-ceiling glass panels and stepped out onto the deck, looking across the miles of desert that lay spread out below him, rising towards hazy purple rock ridges in the distance.
Perhaps it was more accurate to say the madness had begun when he’d finally had the time to return to the Mojave ranch that Chris had inherited fifteen years previously and which they had shared as their true home ever since, the one place that outlasted the various ships and anonymous staff apartments of the many postings of their careers. As he had wandered restlessly from one empty room to another, it had finally began to sink in that Chris wasn’t simply away on another extended mission, out of radio contact for the foreseeable future. He was gone for good and the silence that echoed around Phil was never going to be filled.
Had the madness stared to creep in to the cracks caused by the weight of his loneliness? One might pinpoint the moment when Phil had started sorting through the private files on Chris’s personal media account and found the heavily protected research that Chris had apparently been using to fill his time in-between the grueling sessions of physical therapy that had been part of his post-Narada recovery.
But really that was putting it much too late. That research had given him the physical means to do this, but the story had started much earlier. For that you had to go back nearly three years, to the moment when a garbled wave of news had flooded forth from the Enterprise, which had abruptly emerged out of the comms silence that had surrounded the incomprehensible vanishing of the planet of Vulcan from their monitoring systems. A sudden flood of information told him Chris had been captured, tortured, released, operated on and was now being held in medical stasis to limit the damage done to his nervous system by some damn bug that had dropped in from another universe.
Phil left the terrace and began to pace restlessly back and forth in the family room, letting his eyes slide over all the fittings. They had spent much of their time in this room, with its magnificent views out over the terrace and its old furnishings, chosen for comfort rather than style. They’d talked here endlessly and laughed often, fucked on every flat surface over the years and frequently fallen asleep together on the broad couch. His eye was caught by the fake elephant’s foot in the corner, the sort of quirky purchase that had always amused Chris, and the collection of canes that it contained. Purchasing ever more exotic canes had been part of Chris’s coping strategy as he had slowly recovered his mobility.
The implications of the Narada crisis had been too much to take in at one time, and it had been weeks, even months, before he finally started to understand the grim reality that underlay all that drama. The truth was that the Chris that he had lived with and loved for many years had been lost in the agony of the event and someone had been returned to him who was his Chris and yet not his - angry, guilty, physically and mentally compromised and agonized because of it.
Apparently only Phil had seen through the slick PR smile with which Chris had handed the Enterprise on to Kirk. Of course Chris had cared deeply about Kirk, had even loved him. If Chris couldn’t have the Enterprise for himself, then his protege was going to get it instead. But that didn’t mean Chris had been happy with the outcome. But even Phil had not realized just how unhappy Chris had been until later. He’d been so tightly focused on helping Chris recover his mobility that he’d paid less attention to what was going on in the deep waters of the other man’s mind.
The material that he’d found at the ranch after Chris’s death had told him a story of a building obsession with the possibilities of travel between quantum realities. Starfleet had rapidly shut down any official investigation into the matter, afraid of further alarming the already panicked general public and preferring to focus their denuded resources on the immediate needs of a Federation dramatically weakened by the loss of Vulcan.
Chris had apparently discretely pushed ahead with his research by teaming up with an old Academy classmate, who had gone on to a position high in the division of Deep Space Anomalies. Phil had been glad to see Chris spending so much time with Cho Myong-chol, hoping that her lively company would help draw Chris out of his depression. Now that he knew what they’d been working on all those months he was less sure that it had been a good idea. Not that he’d ever get the chance to tell her so, Cho was one of those who died when Khan’s ship took out the Coppola Tower and with it all the Earthside staff of Deep Space Anomalies who had had their offices and research labs on the fifty-third floor.
It had taken Phil months to fully understand what the two of them had discovered and it had left him astonished once again at the depth and complexity of Chris’s intellect. Chris, helped by Cho, had taken all he’d seen and learned while captive on the Narada, put it together with hints dropped by Spock’s alter-ego from another universe, added in the possibilities opened up by Mr Scott’s discovery of trans-warp beaming and come up with some astonishing conclusions. The two of them had even built a test unit using the transporter at the Mojave ranch.
Still, Phil was no slouch himself, you didn’t get to be Surgeon-General and one of Starfleet’s finest surgeons by being stupid. He would have been a talented systems engineer if he’d not decided that living systems were more interesting to work with than mechanical ones. He’d let the analysis of Chris and Cho’s research fill his own long lonely hours, and finally he’d turned their work to his own account, working out sets of potential co-ordinates and finishing the work of building the remote control. Now the time had come to use it.
He was well aware that he’d plunged himself into exactly the kind of obsessively-focused isolation that he’d considered to be bad for Chris after the Narada. He was aware that someone should have challenged him on his behavior, should have dragged him in for a psych evaluation followed by intensive therapy, but he was too senior in rank and too formidable in character for anyone to dare, now that Chris was gone.
He returned to the transporter alcove to check that the count-down was running smoothly and then stopped to look at the walls of the corridor that led from there to the rest of the house. Transporter technology had allowed many roads to be abandoned, and Chris had chosen to make the transporter the only way into the ranch, leaving a pristine wilderness to flourish beyond the generous decks. It meant that the corridor that led from it was effectively the entrance to the ranch and at Phil’s suggestion they had covered both walls with photographs from their life together.
In an age of holos and constantly changing media displays, it was a rather old-fashioned choice, one inspired by a similar collection up either side of the staircase in his grandparents’ house. Phil had liked the steady permanence of printed photographs, he’d enjoyed the way they told the ongoing tale of their decades of life together. He looked sadly at a head-and-shoulders portrait of a cadet-aged Chris, all smooth skin and huge blue eyes under a wild mop of golden curls.
Given that it was all about Chris, you might say that the madness really started many decades ago, when a young Lieutenant Boyce had found himself doing a physical exam of candidate Starfleet cadet Christopher Pike. Within ten minutes he’d found out that the beautiful, cocky, talkative boy was the son of Admiral Pike - who he’d not spoken to since a nasty divorce when he’d been ten, and the protege of Captain Weller. Yet despite all his connections, he was very much his own man, determined to blaze his own trail through Starfleet.
And blaze he had, confident, brilliant, and yet still able to laugh at himself. He could flirt for the Federation, and once he decided he wanted something, he went all out to get it. By the time that first physical had ended, he’d decided he’d wanted Lieutenant Boyce and he’d not changed his mind in the thirty-five years that had followed.
By sheer force of will, Phil had fended him off right through Chris’s Academy years, refusing to jeopardize either of their careers by breaking the rule of no fraternization between cadets and instructors. It had meant he’d spent a lot of evenings on his own with his hand down his pants but he’d held his ground and earned Chris’s respect in the process. And their first fuck, in the hours immediately after Chris’s graduation, had been truly epic.
They’d been together ever since, brought together by a similar dry humor, a shared playfulness, and an intense respect for duty. They’d both been brilliant and hardworking, devoted to their careers and determined to make a difference in the world. All their adult lives, they’d been told what a handsome couple they made. But Phil knew there was a darker truth that underlay their satisfaction in each other. They shared a certain kind of obsessive temperament too, an ability to devolve into a single-minded focus almost frightening in its intensity. The seeds for this particular tragedy had been laid many decades ago.
He was suddenly angry with the display of photographs, they were now a tale frozen in time, there would be no more images to add. He walked through to the formal dining room that they had so seldom used, preferring to eat at the old wooden table in the kitchen, or out on the terrace. He stopped by the blue and white flag that lay haphazardly across the table. It had been handed to him in a beautifully folded little square at the end of Chris’s funeral service and he’d thrown it furiously across the room when he’d got back to the ranch. There it had lain ever since, a perpetual reminder of what he’d lost and what empty comfort it was to know that his loss had been in service of the Federation.
Any one of the moments could justifiably be pinpointed as the start of this madness, but in truth none of them were. Phil knew exactly when this had all started to spiral out of control and it had been the moment Chris had come bursting through the door of his office to tell him that Kirk had fucked up good and proper this time and had lost the Enterprise. That Pike had managed to get it back for himself and in the process create a second chance for Jim that might save the young man’s career.
Chris’s tone had been properly disappointed in the folly of the young Captain Kirk and properly concerned for the youngster’s future prospects, but Phil had not been fooled for a moment. He could sense the glee that underlay all of it, feel Chris’s shivering excitement at being able to get back up into the black, the Enterprise’s deck beneath his feet and an infinity of possibility spreading out beyond his viewscreen. He had sat behind his desk and listened to Chris talk and watched the life he had hoped they were building crumble to ashes. He’d anticipated creating a solid future together, not just yet another interlude between deep space assignments.
He’d listened as Chris reeled out a long and detailed justification as to why his taking back the Enterprise was the best of thing for Jim and clearly a matter of duty. Anyone who got assigned the Enterprise wouldn’t be giving her back to Jim any time soon. And where was the young man to be sent? The other captains disliked him because he’d leapfrogged the chain of promotion. And they’d fear being outshone by him, even losing their ship to him.
It was highly likely that Jim’s new captain would set out to take him down a peg or two. If Starfleet wasn’t careful, they’d lose Jim altogether, there was no doubt that there’d be plenty of offers from the private sector for the hero who saved Earth. Chris had pointed out that the easiest solution was that he take the Enterprise, intending to return it to Jim in time, after a period of emergency command training for the youngster to try and get him back on the Starfleet straight-and-narrow.
It had all been very reasonable, carefully thought through and persuasively argued. But Phil had also noticed that not once had Chris asked him how he felt about all of it. And that had meant Chris didn’t want to ask because he knew the answer and it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Phil didn’t fear that Chris wouldn’t come back to him. He knew his competition didn’t lie with other men or women. It lay with ships and with the black, and there he wasn’t at all sure if he came first in Chris’s affections.
Eventually he hadn’t been able to take any more. He’d stood up and called bullshit on all Chris’s convoluted justifications. He’d pointed out that Chris was breaking the commitment they’d made to each other after the Narada without giving it a second thought, without even acknowledging that he was doing it.
It had ended in a bitter shouting match, a fight that had clearly echoed down the corridors of Starfleet Medical, given the way nobody would meet his eye when he stalked out of his office some ten minutes after Chris had stormed out, incensed that Phil could doubt his motives. And it had fed into the curious pity in everyone’s eyes when the news of Admiral Pike’s death had spread through the corridors a few hours later. Things had been said that he would never get a chance to take back. Accusations had been made that would never now be tempered by apologies in calmer times. Now he was left to live with the guilt of that, with the memory of that final encounter that could never be altered.
He regarded his own reflection in the mirror that hung on one wall of the dining room. In his opinion, he looked old and tired, the lust for life that had carried him through all these decades virtually extinguished by the grief of the last few years. He could analyze his own motives as clearly as he could those of a patient, even though he had no intention of taking the advice he would have offered to a patient.
He knew that what he was about to do was born out of the unique cross-pollination of his guilt with Chris’s. Chris had embraced responsibility for the destruction of Vulcan, the worst disaster ever to befall the Federation. It had happened on his watch, with him in command of the flagship, in Vulcan space in the dying minutes of the planet, and he’d not been able to save the planet or its people. No amount of arguing from Phil that he’d done all he could had shifted Chris’s bone-deep conviction that he was somehow personally guilty.
Although it was not explicitly stated anywhere in the research notes that Phil found, he suspected Chris and Cho had been hoping to replicate what Nero and Spock Prime had done, and find a way to go back into the past and stop the destruction of Vulcan. Phil had taken their research forward in a different - and a much more selfish - direction.
He simply refused to continue to live in a universe where Chris Pike didn’t exist. Obviously suicide was the easy solution to that, but he didn’t have it in him to do it. Now this plan - well, to call it suicide by proxy would be pretty accurate but at least it let him actually do something about his problem. If there was no Chris in this universe, then he’d go and find the man in another one.
An alarm chimed from the transporter alcove. Sixty minutes had passed. It was time to stop prevaricating and do this thing. He activated the shut-down sequence that would prepare the ranch for an extended absence. He’d bought himself a period of time for this little experiment, having taken a month of leave and told everyone he would be entirely out of touch. It was the first leave he’d taken since Chris’s death and everyone had told him what a very good idea it was and how he must absolutely take the time to get away from it all. Well, he was going to be far, far away alright, further away than any of them could envisage.
He walked into the family room one last time, now in deep shade from the darkening of the windows. In his heart he suspected that he wouldn’t be coming back. He turned to the coffee table, on which lay his uniform jacket, his padd, a phaser and a control unit. He pulled on the jacket, carefully smoothing down the sleeves. He was hoping that his position as a Starfleet Admiral might buy him a little time if things got complicated.
He slipped the padd into his pocket. On it was every single piece of material that proved his worth as a doctor - his qualifications, his research papers, his awards, and records of all the surgery he’d ever done. His value as a doctor was the one thing he had unshakable faith in and it might give him something to bargain with. He then considered the phaser. Doing this unarmed seemed an appalling risk to take, but traveling armed might be even worse, signaling ill-intent in ways that could be dangerous. In the end he decided to leave it behind. He’d have to rely on his wits.
Finally he picked up the remote control and walked down the short corridor to the transporter terminal, ignoring the photographs. The time for nostalgia was long past. He checked the status of the black box one last time, it was a remarkably underwhelming box in appearance, given what it had managed to do in the last hour. If Chris and Cho’s research and design was correct, it had generated a quantum fissure, an anomaly which would act as a fixed point across the spacetime continuum, allowing him to beam to the same point in each universe. The remote that he carried with him would let him control the console without having to step off the beaming pad.
He had a set of co-ordinates pre-programmed into the control, co-ordinates that would supposedly take him to the universes closest to his own. The control would theoretically interface with the transporter console of the Mojave ranch in any universe. It was time to find out whether all this theory had any connection with reality.
He stepped up onto the beaming pad, cast one last look around the place that had been home to him for so long, took a deep breath, and pressed engage.
* * *
He felt himself fall away into the familiar golden swirl of the transporter beam, but he was falling too far, it was going on too long - much too long. He could feel himself being pulled apart, his atoms being stretched over unbearable distance, his body and mind being pulled so far that the bonds would surely snap any moment, leaving his component parts adrift in the gaps between quantum time.
And then just when he was convinced he couldn’t bear it a moment longer, the transporter room snapped back into focus around him.
Intruder alert! Intruder alert!
The security alarm was blaring around him, he could see the blue shimmer that meant the safety shield had gone up around the transporter platform. It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d be denied access into his own home. He tapped quickly at the screen of his control unit. Access was apparently denied to both him and Chris. He wasn’t about to hang around to find out why.
Now was the moment when he discovered whether he could in fact control the transporter console remotely. He quickly pulled up the next set of co-ordinates and pressed engage. He was sucked back into the golden swirl, now jittery with adrenaline and tense with worry as to what the next universe would bring.
Once again it took far too long before he finally dropped back onto the transporter platform. He glanced around quickly, now hyper-alert to danger. The shields hadn’t gone up but the computer console hadn’t welcome him home either, the way it would normally. He hesitated, unsure what to do, and then heard a voice in the distance, a woman’s voice, high and musical, sounding as if it came from the kitchen.
“Chrissy, sweetie-pie, it looks like someone’s just arrived. Have a look, won’t you?”
Sweetie-pie? Chrissy? There was actually a universe where Chris happily went by Chrissy? A universe where he hadn’t chosen to be with Phil, where he’d preferred a woman? Phil rapidly hit the next of his pre-programmed co-ordinates, he wasn’t hanging around to see what this looked like. As he vanished back into the golden swirl it was increasingly clear to him that he really hadn’t thought this through. Still, at least he was now certain that the death of Chris in one universe wasn’t part of a mass extinction event across all of them.
Eventually he dropped back onto the transporter platform and once again the safety shield snapped up, but this time the alert siren was personal. Intruder! Boyce! Intruder! Boyce!
“Dammit, you fucker, I told you if you ever came back here, I’d kill you.” It was Chris’s voice, matched by the pounding of footsteps coming down the corridor to the transporter room. He was frozen in place by the sound of Chris after all these months of silence, unable to process the meaning of the words. It was all so unlikely that it took the blast of a phaser shot going wide past his head to startle Phil into engaging the next set of numbers. What the hell had gone wrong there? And why had he ever thought it a good idea to try this unarmed?
By the time he dropped out of quantum space once more he was ready to throw up, shaking with nerves and so tense he could taste the bile in the back of his throat. This time nothing happened. The shields didn’t go up but the computer made no attempt to assess his identity either. There was simply silence.
Phil sat down on the edge of the transporter platform and buried his face in his hands, glad of a chance to simply catch his breath. Still, it was quickly clear to him that something was off. Clearly all the electronics were still working, the air was filtered and the surfaces were clean but there was a depth to the silence that was more than just a house waiting for the owners to return on the weekend.
At last he reluctantly levered himself up onto his feet and walked cautiously down the corridor. Faded patches on the wall suggested that photographs had once hung there but they were all gone now. The house was still furnished but all the small things that had made it a home personal to them had vanished. It was not locked down, the way he had left the ranch at home, yet it was clearly uninhabited. The sliding doors that led onto the wide terrace opened at his touch and he walked outside and looked up into an empty sky. The ranch was remote but it wasn’t that remote. He’d expect to see vapor trails or hear the distant drone of a craft. The sky was an odd color, too, tinged with a lurid violet that deepened towards the horizon.
By now thoroughly unnerved, he made his way back to the transporter room and wondered what to do next. What would have happened if he’d dialed into this world and the transporter unit hadn’t been working? Maybe he should just give this whole thing up as a terrible idea and head back to his home universe. The thought of that shook him out of his funk. The idea of going home to the empty rooms of the Mojave ranch, to a life without any hope for the future - it was unbearable. There had to be a better universe out there somewhere. He just had to keep dialing until he found it.
* * *
Once more Phil swirled through the disorientation of beaming until the transporter room of the Mojave ranch reformed around him once more. The voice of the computer spoke, the way it did at home: “Identifying-- identifying-- Identification incomplete. Wait for facial scan.”
Phil waited while the light beam scanned down his face. “Identity confirmed. Welcome home, Doctor Boyce.” The security shield around the transporter unit dissolved. Home! Well, that was better that any universe he’d yet found.
“Computer, when did I last visit?” he asked.
“One year and one hundred and ninety two days ago,” it replied. So just before the time Khan had emerged in his own universe.
“Show me the log of my visits,” he instructed, walking over to the console. The log appeared instantly and showed that he’d visited on and off for many years before then. So what had happened? He listened carefully as he looked around, walking to the entrance of the corridor into the house. There was no sign of life, yet the house didn’t have the dead feel of the previous universe. It had just occurred to him to ask the computer if Chris was here when he got distracted by the photos along the wall of the corridor. Most of them showed one or other or both of them, and they were clearly a couple in this world too, but he found himself confounded by the images of himself.
A buzzcut? Seriously? There was a universe where he’d thought that was a good look? And there were a lot of photos of him heading relief crews at the site of various planetary disasters. Some of them he recognized but he hadn’t been there. Of course it was all worthy work but he’d been more interested in working as a surgeon. He’d always thought of the sort of self-righteous doctors who often ended up working for organizations like Doctors Without Borders as disaster junkies. When they stayed in Starfleet they normally came to grief over the restrictions of the Prime Directive. He was disconcerted to discover he apparently was one.
He turned to examining the other face that was in most of the images. Chris was as attractive as ever in this universe and he found himself following this strange photo story of a life he hadn’t lived down the corridor, images of people he knew and places he recognized but all of them subtly off, the differences leaving him with a strange sense of vertigo.
Then he noticed a flag lying on top of a small table, the surface crumpled in a shape of a handprint, as if someone had slammed it down angrily and then left it there. It was the same white and blue flag that lay in the formal dining room back home, the flag of the Federation. So one of them was dead in this world too. But which one?
He turned the corner into the family room--
Chris.
Sitting on the couch, elbows on his knees, head in his hands, a half-empty bottle of whiskey in front of him.
Chris! Alive. Breathing. Whole.
He felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach, giving an involuntary gasp as his diaphragm contracted.
Chris looked up when he heard the sound.
“What the fuck!” Chris was up on his feet, the bottle knocked over by his sudden movement, the golden liquor spilling unnoticed across the table top and dripping down onto the rug below.
For a moment that seemed to hang like an eternity, they simply stared at each other.
“You grew out your hair?” Chris said incredulously. “And what’s with the uniform? You got promoted to Admiral in the afterlife? No! Wait, you’re fucking dead. Who are you? What are you?”
Chris was moving sideways, eyes trained on Phil but reaching out behind him for the cabinet. Phil realized he was searching for a phaser. He lifted his arms and spread out his hands. “It’s OK, I’m unarmed, I don’t mean you any harm.”
Chris froze, as if stunned into stillness by the sound of Phil’s voice. For a moment he looked as if he wanted to cry. “Who are you?” he whispered eventually.
Phil’s heart twisted at the pain in Chris’s voice. Honestly, he was glad he was dead in this world, it removed a layer of messy complication, but he hated to see the hurt on Chris’s face. “I’m Dr Phil Boyce, I’m just not your Phil Boyce.”
“Explain,” snapped Chris, arms now folded protectively across his chest, his face tight with suspicion.
“Are you aware of the existence of a number of alternate quantum realities?” asked Phil.
“As a theoretical concept, yes,” snapped Chris. “Not as a reality where you can hop from one to the next on vacation.”
“Well, it’s all true,” replied Phil. “And it seems the knowledge is spreading from one universe to the next at about this time in history. I’ve come across from an alternative quantum reality.”
“Oh really.” The sarcasm was heavy in Chris’s voice. “Why exactly?”
For the very first time, Phil had to voice his mission to another living being and he was suddenly acutely aware of how bizarre it sounded. “In my universe, you’re dead. So I came looking for you elsewhere.”
Apparently even Chris Pike, with his quick wit and way with words, couldn’t think of a good reply to that. The two men stood staring at each other. “Look,” said Phil abruptly, “I’ve been through half a dozen universes already this morning and it’s fucking exhausting. Do you think I could sit down for a minute and have a cup of coffee?”
“How do you take your coffee?” demanded Chris.
“Double espresso, black!” snapped Phil, who was still feeling annoyed by the buzzcut idiot in the photographs who had abandoned Chris to drink alone in the ranch. “Don’t even try and persuade me I take it any other way in any quantum reality.”
Chris huffed out a startled laugh. “Fuck me, you’re an opinionated asshole in all universes. Fine. Lead the way to the kitchen.”
* * *
Phil leaned against the big wooden table in the centre of the kitchen while Chris programmed his coffee order into the machine. He looked around curiously while he waited. There were many small differences, different color schemes, different models of equipment, but overall they seemed to have made similar choices here to those they’d made at home, choices that valued comfort over looks and the old over the new.
Mostly he was surreptitiously staring at Chris, still incredulous at simply seeing the man once again moving about in their kitchen, casually dressed in blue jeans and a white t-shirt, with his feet bare. This Chris had longer hair, long enough for his wayward curls to show, curls that his own Chris had cut off years before, when he started getting serious about his position as a captain. Phil had secretly missed those curls and it left an aching twist in his heart to see them again.
He accepted the coffee gratefully when Chris handed it to him, letting himself indulge in one long swallow before settling in the savor the rest of it more slowly. Chris had made himself a latte but he wasn’t drinking it, rather watching Phil closely instead.
“Why are you here?” he asked suddenly, his voice tense once again.
“I told you--” started Phil.
“No, I mean why are you still here. Didn’t you go down onto the planet? Or was there a cure?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” replied Phil cautiously, wary of the building anger he could hear in Chris’s voice.
“Not much of an alternative reality then, is it? Doesn’t sound like you’ve done your homework. Who are you really and where have you come from?”
“We don’t know much about alternative realities,” said Phil carefully, trying to keep his voice neutral and unthreatening. “We’ve only had one set of visitors and that was a bit confusing because they came from the future as well. As far as I know, I’m the first person to travel on from our universe. The knowhow is very new and was mostly put together by you before your death. You had reason to be a bit obsessed about it.”
Chris looked at him uncomprehendingly. It seemed as if Nero hadn’t materialized in this world. Phil felt a pang of jealousy at that thought, although clearly other things had gone wrong. “As far as we know, the universes seem to parallel each other and while things do change when different choices are made, there does seem to be an inertia that pulls universes back towards similar overall outcomes. But honestly, we’ve very little idea at this point.”
“Prove it,” challenged Chris.
Phil thought quickly. “Run a DNA test, you must have a basic tricorder here and presumably you have the records of your Boyce? The base DNA should show up as identical but I assume the selective expression will be subtly different. You know, the genes that get expressed later in life and so are influenced by the environment. Nature will be the same but upbringing won’t. If he was anything like me, there’s a tricorder in that top drawer over there, it was always handy when your nieces and nephews caused havoc in the kitchen.”
“Good guess,” said Chris grudgingly, opening the drawer and pulling out a tricorder. It was a little different to the models Phil was used to but didn’t take him long to figure out. With Chris’s help he pulled up his own medical records. It was a shock to see Deceased stamped across them. He stayed away from the report of his death, some things he’d rather not know. It didn’t take long for the tricorder to analyze his drop of blood and come up with the results. As he’d predicted, the base DNA was identical but the selective expression differed in various minor ways.
“Fuck me,” breathed Chris as he stared at the screen. “You’re telling the truth.” He suddenly slammed the tricorder down on the kitchen counter, ignoring its beeps of protest at the rough treatment and turned on Phil, grabbing him by the shoulders and slamming him up against the wall. “Why didn’t you die?” he demanded. “Why the fuck should he die and you get to damn well live? What makes you so fucking special?”
Phil tried not to let his unease show. He was acutely aware this man seemed just as much a trained combat specialist as his own Chris had been. “Tell me what happened to him,” he said as calmly as he could. Clearly there was no way to avoid learning about his fate in this world.
Chris backed off just enough to let him breathe freely but not enough to let him easily move away. “You know who Khan is?” “Yes, we had the bastard too. It was his attack on Starfleet HQ that killed you.”
“It didn’t happen that way here. He was released from cryogenesis by Admiral Selmarestral--”
“Wait, a Vulcan admiral, really? It was Admiral Marcus for us, trying to stir up war with the Klingons.”
“Marcus?” Chris sounded taken aback. “He’s a decent enough guy and why would we go to war with the Klingons? Half their fleet got destroyed in the fuck-up with Nero, they aren’t a threat, they’re trying to negotiate a peace treaty with us.”
“You got Nero but without the time travel universe jumping bit?” asked Phil in surprise.
“Time travel?” replied Christopher, sounding surprised. “He did have some weirdly advanced technology on his ship but he didn’t say where he got it from. He wasn’t exactly the chatty type and I was hardly in a position to ask many questions at the time.”
“Fuck this is confusing. Okay, go back to Khan,” said Phil.
“Selmarestral decided human emotion was polluting Vulcan culture but they still needed us as allies. He thought Khan would be perfect seed stock for a new non-emotional human race and held his crew hostage to force Khan to co-operate with him. He wanted to engineer a virus that would slowly kill off the weaker humans, and where the stronger humans could be saved by injecting them with blood from Khan and his crew, slowly changing the genetic stock of the human race.”
His disgust at all this was clear in Chris’s voice. “Of course, he completely underestimated Khan. Working with Section 31 resources, Khan was able to do some innovative virus engineering of his own, then steal a ship and release a virus into the Vulcan atmosphere, an extraordinarily virulent airborne pathogen that killed any humanoid it encountered within hours.”
“Hang on, do you mean Vulcan or new Vulcan? Didn’t Nero implode Vulcan here?” asked Phil.
“What? No, he attacked Earth,” replied Chris. “The planet of Vulcan is still there, just quarantined for the next eon due to the virus still lying dormant. He imploded an entire planet? How do you even do that?”
“I’ll tell you about it another time,” said Phil. “So your Boyce was on the surface?”
“No, there was a medical conference being held at the Vulcan spacedock, discussing improved response protocols for humanitarian disasters on Federation planets. Virtually all our medical top brass and many of our Earthside Starfleet doctors were there, when news of the virus came through. Within hours they’d identified it as beyond our ability to control and Starfleet had ordered total quarantine of the planet while we tried to engineer an antiviral response.”
Chris’s curiosity about the alternative timeline had disappeared and he was once again getting steadily angrier as he told his story. Phil watched him warily, ever more conscious that this might look like a man he thought he knew inside and out, but there were all sorts of differences in this universe and he had no idea how those differences impacted this person.
“So you had a bunch of doctors in orbit around Vulcan, told they could nothing to intervene,” said Phil slowly. He could see where this going.
“Exactly,” replied Chris shortly, glaring at Phil as if he held him personally responsible for all this. “And fucking Philip wasn’t having any of it. He never did take orders well. He decided to beam down and talked two-thirds of the doctors there into coming with him, despite it being in explicit contradiction of their orders. So we lost every Vulcan on the planet along with a huge number of our own medical staff.”
Something about the simmering anger he could feel radiating off Chris was making Phil increasingly nervous. “When was the last time you spoke to Philip?” he asked carefully, a sickening apprehension building in his gut.
“We had a massive row over vidcomm when he told me he was going to break orders. I forbade him from doing it, he told me to fuck off and it just got worse from there. We said some unforgivable things.”
Phil watched him carefully, although he could empathize, he also knew all too well how little use empathy could be when you were trapped in a cage of your own making. Chris seemed to have sunk deep into himself, lost in miserable memories. Still, Phil was taken by surprise when Chris suddenly reached out to grab the front of his jacket and then slammed him back against the wall. Chris pushed right up against him, so close he couldn’t focus on Chris’s face any longer. Chris pushed a hard thigh in-between his legs, grinding up against his crotch with deliberate brutality.
“So what is it you want exactly? Seeing as you’ve been so fucking clever about staying alive. Do you want a nostalgic little chat about what it was like in the old days or do you just want to get down to it, and have me fuck you?”
“You don’t want to be doing this, Chris--”
“My name is Christopher” snarled the other man, grabbing Phil by the throat, forcing his head back against the wall.
As he battled to breathe, Phil tried to fight down his rising fear. This wasn’t his Chris, this was Christopher, a Starfleet officer trained to withstand torture and to kill when required, and Phil really had no idea of the psyche that lay behind those skills. He was horribly aware that he was alone in this universe, no one knew he was here and there was plenty of desert bush out back where Christopher could dispose of the body. The vultures would pick the bones clean in short order.
“Fight back, dammit, why are you just taking this? What’s wrong with you?” “I can’t fight you,” protested Phil, trying vainly to push Christopher away from him. “You’re the fucker who’s trained to kill. I just shuffle papers around.”
“No you fucking don’t. You’re always playing hero, running off to disasters on planets, you’re as fit as I am.”
“I’m not. I’m the Surgeon fucking General.”
“What? You can’t be.” In his surprise, Christopher relaxed his chokehold on Phil’s throat. “You despise paperwork and you hate the fat-assed brass.”
“There’s a damned point to paperwork, it keeps the world turning, and I do it well. And the brass exist to stop idiots going off half-cocked. I’m not your guy, he seems like a complete fucking asshole,” snapped Phil, who was sick of being told what he was like when it was all so wrong. He’d decided he didn’t like the sound of Philip at all. “Who the hell thinks it’s a good idea to disobey orders and beam down onto a planet awash with a deadly virus? What kind of fucking officer does he think he is?”
“The kind who’d make Surgeon-General and then go AWOL to hunt down doppelgängers of his dead lover in other universes?” said Christopher, the very blandness of his tone laden with sarcasm.
Yes, well. There was that.
“So you’re not my Philip,” continued Christopher implacably, “and yet you thought you could just march across universes and find yourself some carbon-copy of your partner?”
There it was, the utter failure of Phil’s nonsensical plan, the flaw he’d never allowed himself to acknowledge. The whole compelling illusion that had kept him going for well over a year since Chris had died had crumbled to dust in front of his eyes and all that lay beyond was an unending future of aching loneliness. He slid down the wall until he was seated on the floor and buried his face against his bent knees. It was over.
Looking back he could see how he’d grabbed onto the idea as a crutch. The first weeks after Chris’s death had been spent in a haze of exhaustion, as they dealt with the victims of the destruction of North Beach. As Surgeon-General he’d been pulled into all the crisis meetings designed to assess and mitigate the damage done to Starfleet by the destruction of property and the loss of lives. And on top of it all was the public relations nightmare that was one of Starfleet’s own inflicting this kind of damage on Earth, barely a year after Starfleet had so publicly failed to save Vulcan. Through it all it had felt as if Chris was away on a mission, out in the black as he had so often been, but coming back to Phil eventually.
Then the chaos had finally died down and Phil had had to face up to the paperwork of Chris’s death and the reality of inheriting Chris’s assets. He’d been digging randomly through the files on Chris’s private media account, furious at the man for being dead, guilt-stricken over their last conversation and all that he’d said, horrified at having to live the rest of his life on his own, always avoiding the razor-sharp fear in the back of his mind that he wasn’t sure that he could go on alone. And then he’d found the research into alternate quantum realities and his mind had instantaneously latched onto one all-consuming idea. This was a way to get Chris back.
Now, after many long months of hugging that idea close to him, a comfort blanket through a night of loneliness that stretched on without end, he could see that it had all been as unreal as a passing dream. No human in any reality got to evade the utter finality of death. Chris was gone, not gone on a mission but gone as if he’d never been, dust returned to dust and swept away on the solar winds. Phil would never see him again.
His breath was beginning to hitch as the tears he’d stubbornly refused to shed through all the months of the research into quantum travel finally caught up with him, the frozen core within where he’d locked down all his feelings now thawing to release a tsunami of grief. There was nothing to do other than accept that he was going to drown in it.
Part 2/2
Pairing: Pike/Boyce
Rating: R
Word count: around 13,000
Beta: the lovely imachar
Warnings: STID compliant, off-screen character death - nevertheless with a happy ending!
Summary: Phil Boyce is not coping well with the death of his partner of 30 years. He hatches a half-mad scheme to find himself a substitute.
Author's Note: Dr Phil Boyce is canon as of STID, where he is listed as the attending physician on the biobed monitor when Kirk comes out of his coma. He was Pike’s CMO in TOS, and after the first reboot was fancast as Mark Harmon. imachar is the queen of the Pike/Boyce pairing with her The Weight of a Man series and has some lovely photos of the two of them here.
This story was written as fix-it gift fic for imachar
Phil knelt down by the black box that sat innocuously nestled under the console of the transporter and carefully switched it on. It would take an hour before it was fully operational, and he watched the timer start to count down, the numbers flicking past with every second. Sixty minutes left of this life.
Chris, with his interest in engineering systems and his access to Starfleet supplies, could always be counted on to over-spec everything at their Mojave ranch. What appeared to be just a small domestic transporter had in fact been purchased off the back of a major Starfleet order for some of the finest systems currently available. And it was that fact that made this idea theoretically possible.
When the Starfleet authorities finally worked out what he’d done - if they did manage to work it out - when would they decide that the madness had started? Because it was mad, he knew that. There was a small detached part of his mind that was watching his preparations with horrified fascination, the ultimate insider’s view of a highly intelligent man undergoing a slow-motion descent into lunacy. What was strange to him was how little he felt about that fact.
He’d always been an outgoing man, not one to tolerate fools but nevertheless mostly easy to get along with and quick to make friends. He’d needed to retreat into privacy at times, to recharge his batteries and centre himself in solitude, but he’d always felt himself to be profoundly normal. He’d certainly sailed easily through the many psych evaluations required for a highly successful career in Starfleet Medical.
He’d laughed easily and loved generously and had never felt cut off from himself, but now his emotions were trapped behind a thick wall, transparent but impenetrable. He felt neither grief nor fear, just a steady irrevocable commitment to his chosen path of action, despite the uncertainty and the danger that he knew it would bring. It wasn’t as if he had much reason left to care about his life. Nevertheless, he found a detached amusement in trying to decide what the powers that be would pinpoint as the start of this tragedy.
Had the madness begun the moment he was informed that the emergency senior command meeting had come under attack and there were deaths? No, not then, he’d known who was at the meeting, but Chris had cheated death so many times in their decades-long acquaintance that he’d been convinced the man was a particularly attractive tawny grey cat with several lives left.
He’d been wrong.
So had it started with the frantic voice call from one of the emergency responders on the scene, a woman who’d realized that perhaps the Surgeon-General should be informed that his partner of thirty years had just died in the wreckage of the Daystrom Conference room. Perhaps not. To begin with he’d reacted normally enough. The three days afterwards had been a period of stunned misery - sitting the death watch in the mortuary with Chris’s body, making arrangements for the funeral, comforting others while being utterly unable to imagine any comfort for himself. And then it had all been buried beneath the carnage of Khan’s ship smashing through most of North Beach, taking down several Starfleet buildings in the process. Hundreds of personnel with appalling injuries had come flooding through their hospital, every doctor they had was required, even the Surgeon-General who should have been on compassionate leave, and his grief had been crushed beneath endless hours of surgery that had left him physically exhausted and mentally numb.
He left the transporter alcove, tired of the agonizingly slow count-down of the numbers, nerves on edge from the wait. Crossing through the family room, he opened the floor-to-ceiling glass panels and stepped out onto the deck, looking across the miles of desert that lay spread out below him, rising towards hazy purple rock ridges in the distance.
Perhaps it was more accurate to say the madness had begun when he’d finally had the time to return to the Mojave ranch that Chris had inherited fifteen years previously and which they had shared as their true home ever since, the one place that outlasted the various ships and anonymous staff apartments of the many postings of their careers. As he had wandered restlessly from one empty room to another, it had finally began to sink in that Chris wasn’t simply away on another extended mission, out of radio contact for the foreseeable future. He was gone for good and the silence that echoed around Phil was never going to be filled.
Had the madness stared to creep in to the cracks caused by the weight of his loneliness? One might pinpoint the moment when Phil had started sorting through the private files on Chris’s personal media account and found the heavily protected research that Chris had apparently been using to fill his time in-between the grueling sessions of physical therapy that had been part of his post-Narada recovery.
But really that was putting it much too late. That research had given him the physical means to do this, but the story had started much earlier. For that you had to go back nearly three years, to the moment when a garbled wave of news had flooded forth from the Enterprise, which had abruptly emerged out of the comms silence that had surrounded the incomprehensible vanishing of the planet of Vulcan from their monitoring systems. A sudden flood of information told him Chris had been captured, tortured, released, operated on and was now being held in medical stasis to limit the damage done to his nervous system by some damn bug that had dropped in from another universe.
Phil left the terrace and began to pace restlessly back and forth in the family room, letting his eyes slide over all the fittings. They had spent much of their time in this room, with its magnificent views out over the terrace and its old furnishings, chosen for comfort rather than style. They’d talked here endlessly and laughed often, fucked on every flat surface over the years and frequently fallen asleep together on the broad couch. His eye was caught by the fake elephant’s foot in the corner, the sort of quirky purchase that had always amused Chris, and the collection of canes that it contained. Purchasing ever more exotic canes had been part of Chris’s coping strategy as he had slowly recovered his mobility.
The implications of the Narada crisis had been too much to take in at one time, and it had been weeks, even months, before he finally started to understand the grim reality that underlay all that drama. The truth was that the Chris that he had lived with and loved for many years had been lost in the agony of the event and someone had been returned to him who was his Chris and yet not his - angry, guilty, physically and mentally compromised and agonized because of it.
Apparently only Phil had seen through the slick PR smile with which Chris had handed the Enterprise on to Kirk. Of course Chris had cared deeply about Kirk, had even loved him. If Chris couldn’t have the Enterprise for himself, then his protege was going to get it instead. But that didn’t mean Chris had been happy with the outcome. But even Phil had not realized just how unhappy Chris had been until later. He’d been so tightly focused on helping Chris recover his mobility that he’d paid less attention to what was going on in the deep waters of the other man’s mind.
The material that he’d found at the ranch after Chris’s death had told him a story of a building obsession with the possibilities of travel between quantum realities. Starfleet had rapidly shut down any official investigation into the matter, afraid of further alarming the already panicked general public and preferring to focus their denuded resources on the immediate needs of a Federation dramatically weakened by the loss of Vulcan.
Chris had apparently discretely pushed ahead with his research by teaming up with an old Academy classmate, who had gone on to a position high in the division of Deep Space Anomalies. Phil had been glad to see Chris spending so much time with Cho Myong-chol, hoping that her lively company would help draw Chris out of his depression. Now that he knew what they’d been working on all those months he was less sure that it had been a good idea. Not that he’d ever get the chance to tell her so, Cho was one of those who died when Khan’s ship took out the Coppola Tower and with it all the Earthside staff of Deep Space Anomalies who had had their offices and research labs on the fifty-third floor.
It had taken Phil months to fully understand what the two of them had discovered and it had left him astonished once again at the depth and complexity of Chris’s intellect. Chris, helped by Cho, had taken all he’d seen and learned while captive on the Narada, put it together with hints dropped by Spock’s alter-ego from another universe, added in the possibilities opened up by Mr Scott’s discovery of trans-warp beaming and come up with some astonishing conclusions. The two of them had even built a test unit using the transporter at the Mojave ranch.
Still, Phil was no slouch himself, you didn’t get to be Surgeon-General and one of Starfleet’s finest surgeons by being stupid. He would have been a talented systems engineer if he’d not decided that living systems were more interesting to work with than mechanical ones. He’d let the analysis of Chris and Cho’s research fill his own long lonely hours, and finally he’d turned their work to his own account, working out sets of potential co-ordinates and finishing the work of building the remote control. Now the time had come to use it.
He was well aware that he’d plunged himself into exactly the kind of obsessively-focused isolation that he’d considered to be bad for Chris after the Narada. He was aware that someone should have challenged him on his behavior, should have dragged him in for a psych evaluation followed by intensive therapy, but he was too senior in rank and too formidable in character for anyone to dare, now that Chris was gone.
He returned to the transporter alcove to check that the count-down was running smoothly and then stopped to look at the walls of the corridor that led from there to the rest of the house. Transporter technology had allowed many roads to be abandoned, and Chris had chosen to make the transporter the only way into the ranch, leaving a pristine wilderness to flourish beyond the generous decks. It meant that the corridor that led from it was effectively the entrance to the ranch and at Phil’s suggestion they had covered both walls with photographs from their life together.
In an age of holos and constantly changing media displays, it was a rather old-fashioned choice, one inspired by a similar collection up either side of the staircase in his grandparents’ house. Phil had liked the steady permanence of printed photographs, he’d enjoyed the way they told the ongoing tale of their decades of life together. He looked sadly at a head-and-shoulders portrait of a cadet-aged Chris, all smooth skin and huge blue eyes under a wild mop of golden curls.
Given that it was all about Chris, you might say that the madness really started many decades ago, when a young Lieutenant Boyce had found himself doing a physical exam of candidate Starfleet cadet Christopher Pike. Within ten minutes he’d found out that the beautiful, cocky, talkative boy was the son of Admiral Pike - who he’d not spoken to since a nasty divorce when he’d been ten, and the protege of Captain Weller. Yet despite all his connections, he was very much his own man, determined to blaze his own trail through Starfleet.
And blaze he had, confident, brilliant, and yet still able to laugh at himself. He could flirt for the Federation, and once he decided he wanted something, he went all out to get it. By the time that first physical had ended, he’d decided he’d wanted Lieutenant Boyce and he’d not changed his mind in the thirty-five years that had followed.
By sheer force of will, Phil had fended him off right through Chris’s Academy years, refusing to jeopardize either of their careers by breaking the rule of no fraternization between cadets and instructors. It had meant he’d spent a lot of evenings on his own with his hand down his pants but he’d held his ground and earned Chris’s respect in the process. And their first fuck, in the hours immediately after Chris’s graduation, had been truly epic.
They’d been together ever since, brought together by a similar dry humor, a shared playfulness, and an intense respect for duty. They’d both been brilliant and hardworking, devoted to their careers and determined to make a difference in the world. All their adult lives, they’d been told what a handsome couple they made. But Phil knew there was a darker truth that underlay their satisfaction in each other. They shared a certain kind of obsessive temperament too, an ability to devolve into a single-minded focus almost frightening in its intensity. The seeds for this particular tragedy had been laid many decades ago.
He was suddenly angry with the display of photographs, they were now a tale frozen in time, there would be no more images to add. He walked through to the formal dining room that they had so seldom used, preferring to eat at the old wooden table in the kitchen, or out on the terrace. He stopped by the blue and white flag that lay haphazardly across the table. It had been handed to him in a beautifully folded little square at the end of Chris’s funeral service and he’d thrown it furiously across the room when he’d got back to the ranch. There it had lain ever since, a perpetual reminder of what he’d lost and what empty comfort it was to know that his loss had been in service of the Federation.
Any one of the moments could justifiably be pinpointed as the start of this madness, but in truth none of them were. Phil knew exactly when this had all started to spiral out of control and it had been the moment Chris had come bursting through the door of his office to tell him that Kirk had fucked up good and proper this time and had lost the Enterprise. That Pike had managed to get it back for himself and in the process create a second chance for Jim that might save the young man’s career.
Chris’s tone had been properly disappointed in the folly of the young Captain Kirk and properly concerned for the youngster’s future prospects, but Phil had not been fooled for a moment. He could sense the glee that underlay all of it, feel Chris’s shivering excitement at being able to get back up into the black, the Enterprise’s deck beneath his feet and an infinity of possibility spreading out beyond his viewscreen. He had sat behind his desk and listened to Chris talk and watched the life he had hoped they were building crumble to ashes. He’d anticipated creating a solid future together, not just yet another interlude between deep space assignments.
He’d listened as Chris reeled out a long and detailed justification as to why his taking back the Enterprise was the best of thing for Jim and clearly a matter of duty. Anyone who got assigned the Enterprise wouldn’t be giving her back to Jim any time soon. And where was the young man to be sent? The other captains disliked him because he’d leapfrogged the chain of promotion. And they’d fear being outshone by him, even losing their ship to him.
It was highly likely that Jim’s new captain would set out to take him down a peg or two. If Starfleet wasn’t careful, they’d lose Jim altogether, there was no doubt that there’d be plenty of offers from the private sector for the hero who saved Earth. Chris had pointed out that the easiest solution was that he take the Enterprise, intending to return it to Jim in time, after a period of emergency command training for the youngster to try and get him back on the Starfleet straight-and-narrow.
It had all been very reasonable, carefully thought through and persuasively argued. But Phil had also noticed that not once had Chris asked him how he felt about all of it. And that had meant Chris didn’t want to ask because he knew the answer and it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Phil didn’t fear that Chris wouldn’t come back to him. He knew his competition didn’t lie with other men or women. It lay with ships and with the black, and there he wasn’t at all sure if he came first in Chris’s affections.
Eventually he hadn’t been able to take any more. He’d stood up and called bullshit on all Chris’s convoluted justifications. He’d pointed out that Chris was breaking the commitment they’d made to each other after the Narada without giving it a second thought, without even acknowledging that he was doing it.
It had ended in a bitter shouting match, a fight that had clearly echoed down the corridors of Starfleet Medical, given the way nobody would meet his eye when he stalked out of his office some ten minutes after Chris had stormed out, incensed that Phil could doubt his motives. And it had fed into the curious pity in everyone’s eyes when the news of Admiral Pike’s death had spread through the corridors a few hours later. Things had been said that he would never get a chance to take back. Accusations had been made that would never now be tempered by apologies in calmer times. Now he was left to live with the guilt of that, with the memory of that final encounter that could never be altered.
He regarded his own reflection in the mirror that hung on one wall of the dining room. In his opinion, he looked old and tired, the lust for life that had carried him through all these decades virtually extinguished by the grief of the last few years. He could analyze his own motives as clearly as he could those of a patient, even though he had no intention of taking the advice he would have offered to a patient.
He knew that what he was about to do was born out of the unique cross-pollination of his guilt with Chris’s. Chris had embraced responsibility for the destruction of Vulcan, the worst disaster ever to befall the Federation. It had happened on his watch, with him in command of the flagship, in Vulcan space in the dying minutes of the planet, and he’d not been able to save the planet or its people. No amount of arguing from Phil that he’d done all he could had shifted Chris’s bone-deep conviction that he was somehow personally guilty.
Although it was not explicitly stated anywhere in the research notes that Phil found, he suspected Chris and Cho had been hoping to replicate what Nero and Spock Prime had done, and find a way to go back into the past and stop the destruction of Vulcan. Phil had taken their research forward in a different - and a much more selfish - direction.
He simply refused to continue to live in a universe where Chris Pike didn’t exist. Obviously suicide was the easy solution to that, but he didn’t have it in him to do it. Now this plan - well, to call it suicide by proxy would be pretty accurate but at least it let him actually do something about his problem. If there was no Chris in this universe, then he’d go and find the man in another one.
An alarm chimed from the transporter alcove. Sixty minutes had passed. It was time to stop prevaricating and do this thing. He activated the shut-down sequence that would prepare the ranch for an extended absence. He’d bought himself a period of time for this little experiment, having taken a month of leave and told everyone he would be entirely out of touch. It was the first leave he’d taken since Chris’s death and everyone had told him what a very good idea it was and how he must absolutely take the time to get away from it all. Well, he was going to be far, far away alright, further away than any of them could envisage.
He walked into the family room one last time, now in deep shade from the darkening of the windows. In his heart he suspected that he wouldn’t be coming back. He turned to the coffee table, on which lay his uniform jacket, his padd, a phaser and a control unit. He pulled on the jacket, carefully smoothing down the sleeves. He was hoping that his position as a Starfleet Admiral might buy him a little time if things got complicated.
He slipped the padd into his pocket. On it was every single piece of material that proved his worth as a doctor - his qualifications, his research papers, his awards, and records of all the surgery he’d ever done. His value as a doctor was the one thing he had unshakable faith in and it might give him something to bargain with. He then considered the phaser. Doing this unarmed seemed an appalling risk to take, but traveling armed might be even worse, signaling ill-intent in ways that could be dangerous. In the end he decided to leave it behind. He’d have to rely on his wits.
Finally he picked up the remote control and walked down the short corridor to the transporter terminal, ignoring the photographs. The time for nostalgia was long past. He checked the status of the black box one last time, it was a remarkably underwhelming box in appearance, given what it had managed to do in the last hour. If Chris and Cho’s research and design was correct, it had generated a quantum fissure, an anomaly which would act as a fixed point across the spacetime continuum, allowing him to beam to the same point in each universe. The remote that he carried with him would let him control the console without having to step off the beaming pad.
He had a set of co-ordinates pre-programmed into the control, co-ordinates that would supposedly take him to the universes closest to his own. The control would theoretically interface with the transporter console of the Mojave ranch in any universe. It was time to find out whether all this theory had any connection with reality.
He stepped up onto the beaming pad, cast one last look around the place that had been home to him for so long, took a deep breath, and pressed engage.
* * *
He felt himself fall away into the familiar golden swirl of the transporter beam, but he was falling too far, it was going on too long - much too long. He could feel himself being pulled apart, his atoms being stretched over unbearable distance, his body and mind being pulled so far that the bonds would surely snap any moment, leaving his component parts adrift in the gaps between quantum time.
And then just when he was convinced he couldn’t bear it a moment longer, the transporter room snapped back into focus around him.
Intruder alert! Intruder alert!
The security alarm was blaring around him, he could see the blue shimmer that meant the safety shield had gone up around the transporter platform. It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d be denied access into his own home. He tapped quickly at the screen of his control unit. Access was apparently denied to both him and Chris. He wasn’t about to hang around to find out why.
Now was the moment when he discovered whether he could in fact control the transporter console remotely. He quickly pulled up the next set of co-ordinates and pressed engage. He was sucked back into the golden swirl, now jittery with adrenaline and tense with worry as to what the next universe would bring.
Once again it took far too long before he finally dropped back onto the transporter platform. He glanced around quickly, now hyper-alert to danger. The shields hadn’t gone up but the computer console hadn’t welcome him home either, the way it would normally. He hesitated, unsure what to do, and then heard a voice in the distance, a woman’s voice, high and musical, sounding as if it came from the kitchen.
“Chrissy, sweetie-pie, it looks like someone’s just arrived. Have a look, won’t you?”
Sweetie-pie? Chrissy? There was actually a universe where Chris happily went by Chrissy? A universe where he hadn’t chosen to be with Phil, where he’d preferred a woman? Phil rapidly hit the next of his pre-programmed co-ordinates, he wasn’t hanging around to see what this looked like. As he vanished back into the golden swirl it was increasingly clear to him that he really hadn’t thought this through. Still, at least he was now certain that the death of Chris in one universe wasn’t part of a mass extinction event across all of them.
Eventually he dropped back onto the transporter platform and once again the safety shield snapped up, but this time the alert siren was personal. Intruder! Boyce! Intruder! Boyce!
“Dammit, you fucker, I told you if you ever came back here, I’d kill you.” It was Chris’s voice, matched by the pounding of footsteps coming down the corridor to the transporter room. He was frozen in place by the sound of Chris after all these months of silence, unable to process the meaning of the words. It was all so unlikely that it took the blast of a phaser shot going wide past his head to startle Phil into engaging the next set of numbers. What the hell had gone wrong there? And why had he ever thought it a good idea to try this unarmed?
By the time he dropped out of quantum space once more he was ready to throw up, shaking with nerves and so tense he could taste the bile in the back of his throat. This time nothing happened. The shields didn’t go up but the computer made no attempt to assess his identity either. There was simply silence.
Phil sat down on the edge of the transporter platform and buried his face in his hands, glad of a chance to simply catch his breath. Still, it was quickly clear to him that something was off. Clearly all the electronics were still working, the air was filtered and the surfaces were clean but there was a depth to the silence that was more than just a house waiting for the owners to return on the weekend.
At last he reluctantly levered himself up onto his feet and walked cautiously down the corridor. Faded patches on the wall suggested that photographs had once hung there but they were all gone now. The house was still furnished but all the small things that had made it a home personal to them had vanished. It was not locked down, the way he had left the ranch at home, yet it was clearly uninhabited. The sliding doors that led onto the wide terrace opened at his touch and he walked outside and looked up into an empty sky. The ranch was remote but it wasn’t that remote. He’d expect to see vapor trails or hear the distant drone of a craft. The sky was an odd color, too, tinged with a lurid violet that deepened towards the horizon.
By now thoroughly unnerved, he made his way back to the transporter room and wondered what to do next. What would have happened if he’d dialed into this world and the transporter unit hadn’t been working? Maybe he should just give this whole thing up as a terrible idea and head back to his home universe. The thought of that shook him out of his funk. The idea of going home to the empty rooms of the Mojave ranch, to a life without any hope for the future - it was unbearable. There had to be a better universe out there somewhere. He just had to keep dialing until he found it.
* * *
Once more Phil swirled through the disorientation of beaming until the transporter room of the Mojave ranch reformed around him once more. The voice of the computer spoke, the way it did at home: “Identifying-- identifying-- Identification incomplete. Wait for facial scan.”
Phil waited while the light beam scanned down his face. “Identity confirmed. Welcome home, Doctor Boyce.” The security shield around the transporter unit dissolved. Home! Well, that was better that any universe he’d yet found.
“Computer, when did I last visit?” he asked.
“One year and one hundred and ninety two days ago,” it replied. So just before the time Khan had emerged in his own universe.
“Show me the log of my visits,” he instructed, walking over to the console. The log appeared instantly and showed that he’d visited on and off for many years before then. So what had happened? He listened carefully as he looked around, walking to the entrance of the corridor into the house. There was no sign of life, yet the house didn’t have the dead feel of the previous universe. It had just occurred to him to ask the computer if Chris was here when he got distracted by the photos along the wall of the corridor. Most of them showed one or other or both of them, and they were clearly a couple in this world too, but he found himself confounded by the images of himself.
A buzzcut? Seriously? There was a universe where he’d thought that was a good look? And there were a lot of photos of him heading relief crews at the site of various planetary disasters. Some of them he recognized but he hadn’t been there. Of course it was all worthy work but he’d been more interested in working as a surgeon. He’d always thought of the sort of self-righteous doctors who often ended up working for organizations like Doctors Without Borders as disaster junkies. When they stayed in Starfleet they normally came to grief over the restrictions of the Prime Directive. He was disconcerted to discover he apparently was one.
He turned to examining the other face that was in most of the images. Chris was as attractive as ever in this universe and he found himself following this strange photo story of a life he hadn’t lived down the corridor, images of people he knew and places he recognized but all of them subtly off, the differences leaving him with a strange sense of vertigo.
Then he noticed a flag lying on top of a small table, the surface crumpled in a shape of a handprint, as if someone had slammed it down angrily and then left it there. It was the same white and blue flag that lay in the formal dining room back home, the flag of the Federation. So one of them was dead in this world too. But which one?
He turned the corner into the family room--
Chris.
Sitting on the couch, elbows on his knees, head in his hands, a half-empty bottle of whiskey in front of him.
Chris! Alive. Breathing. Whole.
He felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach, giving an involuntary gasp as his diaphragm contracted.
Chris looked up when he heard the sound.
“What the fuck!” Chris was up on his feet, the bottle knocked over by his sudden movement, the golden liquor spilling unnoticed across the table top and dripping down onto the rug below.
For a moment that seemed to hang like an eternity, they simply stared at each other.
“You grew out your hair?” Chris said incredulously. “And what’s with the uniform? You got promoted to Admiral in the afterlife? No! Wait, you’re fucking dead. Who are you? What are you?”
Chris was moving sideways, eyes trained on Phil but reaching out behind him for the cabinet. Phil realized he was searching for a phaser. He lifted his arms and spread out his hands. “It’s OK, I’m unarmed, I don’t mean you any harm.”
Chris froze, as if stunned into stillness by the sound of Phil’s voice. For a moment he looked as if he wanted to cry. “Who are you?” he whispered eventually.
Phil’s heart twisted at the pain in Chris’s voice. Honestly, he was glad he was dead in this world, it removed a layer of messy complication, but he hated to see the hurt on Chris’s face. “I’m Dr Phil Boyce, I’m just not your Phil Boyce.”
“Explain,” snapped Chris, arms now folded protectively across his chest, his face tight with suspicion.
“Are you aware of the existence of a number of alternate quantum realities?” asked Phil.
“As a theoretical concept, yes,” snapped Chris. “Not as a reality where you can hop from one to the next on vacation.”
“Well, it’s all true,” replied Phil. “And it seems the knowledge is spreading from one universe to the next at about this time in history. I’ve come across from an alternative quantum reality.”
“Oh really.” The sarcasm was heavy in Chris’s voice. “Why exactly?”
For the very first time, Phil had to voice his mission to another living being and he was suddenly acutely aware of how bizarre it sounded. “In my universe, you’re dead. So I came looking for you elsewhere.”
Apparently even Chris Pike, with his quick wit and way with words, couldn’t think of a good reply to that. The two men stood staring at each other. “Look,” said Phil abruptly, “I’ve been through half a dozen universes already this morning and it’s fucking exhausting. Do you think I could sit down for a minute and have a cup of coffee?”
“How do you take your coffee?” demanded Chris.
“Double espresso, black!” snapped Phil, who was still feeling annoyed by the buzzcut idiot in the photographs who had abandoned Chris to drink alone in the ranch. “Don’t even try and persuade me I take it any other way in any quantum reality.”
Chris huffed out a startled laugh. “Fuck me, you’re an opinionated asshole in all universes. Fine. Lead the way to the kitchen.”
* * *
Phil leaned against the big wooden table in the centre of the kitchen while Chris programmed his coffee order into the machine. He looked around curiously while he waited. There were many small differences, different color schemes, different models of equipment, but overall they seemed to have made similar choices here to those they’d made at home, choices that valued comfort over looks and the old over the new.
Mostly he was surreptitiously staring at Chris, still incredulous at simply seeing the man once again moving about in their kitchen, casually dressed in blue jeans and a white t-shirt, with his feet bare. This Chris had longer hair, long enough for his wayward curls to show, curls that his own Chris had cut off years before, when he started getting serious about his position as a captain. Phil had secretly missed those curls and it left an aching twist in his heart to see them again.
He accepted the coffee gratefully when Chris handed it to him, letting himself indulge in one long swallow before settling in the savor the rest of it more slowly. Chris had made himself a latte but he wasn’t drinking it, rather watching Phil closely instead.
“Why are you here?” he asked suddenly, his voice tense once again.
“I told you--” started Phil.
“No, I mean why are you still here. Didn’t you go down onto the planet? Or was there a cure?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” replied Phil cautiously, wary of the building anger he could hear in Chris’s voice.
“Not much of an alternative reality then, is it? Doesn’t sound like you’ve done your homework. Who are you really and where have you come from?”
“We don’t know much about alternative realities,” said Phil carefully, trying to keep his voice neutral and unthreatening. “We’ve only had one set of visitors and that was a bit confusing because they came from the future as well. As far as I know, I’m the first person to travel on from our universe. The knowhow is very new and was mostly put together by you before your death. You had reason to be a bit obsessed about it.”
Chris looked at him uncomprehendingly. It seemed as if Nero hadn’t materialized in this world. Phil felt a pang of jealousy at that thought, although clearly other things had gone wrong. “As far as we know, the universes seem to parallel each other and while things do change when different choices are made, there does seem to be an inertia that pulls universes back towards similar overall outcomes. But honestly, we’ve very little idea at this point.”
“Prove it,” challenged Chris.
Phil thought quickly. “Run a DNA test, you must have a basic tricorder here and presumably you have the records of your Boyce? The base DNA should show up as identical but I assume the selective expression will be subtly different. You know, the genes that get expressed later in life and so are influenced by the environment. Nature will be the same but upbringing won’t. If he was anything like me, there’s a tricorder in that top drawer over there, it was always handy when your nieces and nephews caused havoc in the kitchen.”
“Good guess,” said Chris grudgingly, opening the drawer and pulling out a tricorder. It was a little different to the models Phil was used to but didn’t take him long to figure out. With Chris’s help he pulled up his own medical records. It was a shock to see Deceased stamped across them. He stayed away from the report of his death, some things he’d rather not know. It didn’t take long for the tricorder to analyze his drop of blood and come up with the results. As he’d predicted, the base DNA was identical but the selective expression differed in various minor ways.
“Fuck me,” breathed Chris as he stared at the screen. “You’re telling the truth.” He suddenly slammed the tricorder down on the kitchen counter, ignoring its beeps of protest at the rough treatment and turned on Phil, grabbing him by the shoulders and slamming him up against the wall. “Why didn’t you die?” he demanded. “Why the fuck should he die and you get to damn well live? What makes you so fucking special?”
Phil tried not to let his unease show. He was acutely aware this man seemed just as much a trained combat specialist as his own Chris had been. “Tell me what happened to him,” he said as calmly as he could. Clearly there was no way to avoid learning about his fate in this world.
Chris backed off just enough to let him breathe freely but not enough to let him easily move away. “You know who Khan is?” “Yes, we had the bastard too. It was his attack on Starfleet HQ that killed you.”
“It didn’t happen that way here. He was released from cryogenesis by Admiral Selmarestral--”
“Wait, a Vulcan admiral, really? It was Admiral Marcus for us, trying to stir up war with the Klingons.”
“Marcus?” Chris sounded taken aback. “He’s a decent enough guy and why would we go to war with the Klingons? Half their fleet got destroyed in the fuck-up with Nero, they aren’t a threat, they’re trying to negotiate a peace treaty with us.”
“You got Nero but without the time travel universe jumping bit?” asked Phil in surprise.
“Time travel?” replied Christopher, sounding surprised. “He did have some weirdly advanced technology on his ship but he didn’t say where he got it from. He wasn’t exactly the chatty type and I was hardly in a position to ask many questions at the time.”
“Fuck this is confusing. Okay, go back to Khan,” said Phil.
“Selmarestral decided human emotion was polluting Vulcan culture but they still needed us as allies. He thought Khan would be perfect seed stock for a new non-emotional human race and held his crew hostage to force Khan to co-operate with him. He wanted to engineer a virus that would slowly kill off the weaker humans, and where the stronger humans could be saved by injecting them with blood from Khan and his crew, slowly changing the genetic stock of the human race.”
His disgust at all this was clear in Chris’s voice. “Of course, he completely underestimated Khan. Working with Section 31 resources, Khan was able to do some innovative virus engineering of his own, then steal a ship and release a virus into the Vulcan atmosphere, an extraordinarily virulent airborne pathogen that killed any humanoid it encountered within hours.”
“Hang on, do you mean Vulcan or new Vulcan? Didn’t Nero implode Vulcan here?” asked Phil.
“What? No, he attacked Earth,” replied Chris. “The planet of Vulcan is still there, just quarantined for the next eon due to the virus still lying dormant. He imploded an entire planet? How do you even do that?”
“I’ll tell you about it another time,” said Phil. “So your Boyce was on the surface?”
“No, there was a medical conference being held at the Vulcan spacedock, discussing improved response protocols for humanitarian disasters on Federation planets. Virtually all our medical top brass and many of our Earthside Starfleet doctors were there, when news of the virus came through. Within hours they’d identified it as beyond our ability to control and Starfleet had ordered total quarantine of the planet while we tried to engineer an antiviral response.”
Chris’s curiosity about the alternative timeline had disappeared and he was once again getting steadily angrier as he told his story. Phil watched him warily, ever more conscious that this might look like a man he thought he knew inside and out, but there were all sorts of differences in this universe and he had no idea how those differences impacted this person.
“So you had a bunch of doctors in orbit around Vulcan, told they could nothing to intervene,” said Phil slowly. He could see where this going.
“Exactly,” replied Chris shortly, glaring at Phil as if he held him personally responsible for all this. “And fucking Philip wasn’t having any of it. He never did take orders well. He decided to beam down and talked two-thirds of the doctors there into coming with him, despite it being in explicit contradiction of their orders. So we lost every Vulcan on the planet along with a huge number of our own medical staff.”
Something about the simmering anger he could feel radiating off Chris was making Phil increasingly nervous. “When was the last time you spoke to Philip?” he asked carefully, a sickening apprehension building in his gut.
“We had a massive row over vidcomm when he told me he was going to break orders. I forbade him from doing it, he told me to fuck off and it just got worse from there. We said some unforgivable things.”
Phil watched him carefully, although he could empathize, he also knew all too well how little use empathy could be when you were trapped in a cage of your own making. Chris seemed to have sunk deep into himself, lost in miserable memories. Still, Phil was taken by surprise when Chris suddenly reached out to grab the front of his jacket and then slammed him back against the wall. Chris pushed right up against him, so close he couldn’t focus on Chris’s face any longer. Chris pushed a hard thigh in-between his legs, grinding up against his crotch with deliberate brutality.
“So what is it you want exactly? Seeing as you’ve been so fucking clever about staying alive. Do you want a nostalgic little chat about what it was like in the old days or do you just want to get down to it, and have me fuck you?”
“You don’t want to be doing this, Chris--”
“My name is Christopher” snarled the other man, grabbing Phil by the throat, forcing his head back against the wall.
As he battled to breathe, Phil tried to fight down his rising fear. This wasn’t his Chris, this was Christopher, a Starfleet officer trained to withstand torture and to kill when required, and Phil really had no idea of the psyche that lay behind those skills. He was horribly aware that he was alone in this universe, no one knew he was here and there was plenty of desert bush out back where Christopher could dispose of the body. The vultures would pick the bones clean in short order.
“Fight back, dammit, why are you just taking this? What’s wrong with you?” “I can’t fight you,” protested Phil, trying vainly to push Christopher away from him. “You’re the fucker who’s trained to kill. I just shuffle papers around.”
“No you fucking don’t. You’re always playing hero, running off to disasters on planets, you’re as fit as I am.”
“I’m not. I’m the Surgeon fucking General.”
“What? You can’t be.” In his surprise, Christopher relaxed his chokehold on Phil’s throat. “You despise paperwork and you hate the fat-assed brass.”
“There’s a damned point to paperwork, it keeps the world turning, and I do it well. And the brass exist to stop idiots going off half-cocked. I’m not your guy, he seems like a complete fucking asshole,” snapped Phil, who was sick of being told what he was like when it was all so wrong. He’d decided he didn’t like the sound of Philip at all. “Who the hell thinks it’s a good idea to disobey orders and beam down onto a planet awash with a deadly virus? What kind of fucking officer does he think he is?”
“The kind who’d make Surgeon-General and then go AWOL to hunt down doppelgängers of his dead lover in other universes?” said Christopher, the very blandness of his tone laden with sarcasm.
Yes, well. There was that.
“So you’re not my Philip,” continued Christopher implacably, “and yet you thought you could just march across universes and find yourself some carbon-copy of your partner?”
There it was, the utter failure of Phil’s nonsensical plan, the flaw he’d never allowed himself to acknowledge. The whole compelling illusion that had kept him going for well over a year since Chris had died had crumbled to dust in front of his eyes and all that lay beyond was an unending future of aching loneliness. He slid down the wall until he was seated on the floor and buried his face against his bent knees. It was over.
Looking back he could see how he’d grabbed onto the idea as a crutch. The first weeks after Chris’s death had been spent in a haze of exhaustion, as they dealt with the victims of the destruction of North Beach. As Surgeon-General he’d been pulled into all the crisis meetings designed to assess and mitigate the damage done to Starfleet by the destruction of property and the loss of lives. And on top of it all was the public relations nightmare that was one of Starfleet’s own inflicting this kind of damage on Earth, barely a year after Starfleet had so publicly failed to save Vulcan. Through it all it had felt as if Chris was away on a mission, out in the black as he had so often been, but coming back to Phil eventually.
Then the chaos had finally died down and Phil had had to face up to the paperwork of Chris’s death and the reality of inheriting Chris’s assets. He’d been digging randomly through the files on Chris’s private media account, furious at the man for being dead, guilt-stricken over their last conversation and all that he’d said, horrified at having to live the rest of his life on his own, always avoiding the razor-sharp fear in the back of his mind that he wasn’t sure that he could go on alone. And then he’d found the research into alternate quantum realities and his mind had instantaneously latched onto one all-consuming idea. This was a way to get Chris back.
Now, after many long months of hugging that idea close to him, a comfort blanket through a night of loneliness that stretched on without end, he could see that it had all been as unreal as a passing dream. No human in any reality got to evade the utter finality of death. Chris was gone, not gone on a mission but gone as if he’d never been, dust returned to dust and swept away on the solar winds. Phil would never see him again.
His breath was beginning to hitch as the tears he’d stubbornly refused to shed through all the months of the research into quantum travel finally caught up with him, the frozen core within where he’d locked down all his feelings now thawing to release a tsunami of grief. There was nothing to do other than accept that he was going to drown in it.
Part 2/2