Fic: "Make Me Believe," Star Trek Big Bang, Part 2 of 3
Back to Master Post | Back to Part 1 | On to Part 3
Life got a little better after that. Well, no-it actually got a hell of a lot more difficult, as it was harder not to cry again after that happened and Starfleet captains-or admirals-don't cry. At least not in public. However, the nightmares got marginally less horrific, and Phil and Liz lowered his dosage of whatever it was they had him on to make him sleep at night.
The PTs and OTs determined that he was physically in a condition not to be in the hospital all the time, provided he had a caregiver. They offered to assign him a yeoman to do things like reach high shelves and help him in the bathroom.
The catch, of course, was that the caregiver/yeoman had to be around him twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Chris declined. The therapists rescinded their offer until he could maneuver himself in and out of the bathroom.
Of course, now that he had a goal, he worked harder at his exercises. He wondered if perhaps that had been their goal all along. They were actually mentioning the 'w'-word (walk) around him. He pretended not to hear, but oh, it sounded good.
* * *
A couple weeks later, Phil came into Chris's room and locked the door behind him. "Chris," he said, dropping into the bedside chair, "I made them let me tell you this time."
"Tell me what?" Chris asked, as he set his padd aside.
"They're giving the Enterprise to Jim Kirk."
"They're what?"
"You heard me correctly."
"I don't-" Chris stopped, closed his mouth. He tried again. "What?"
"I think this was a decision almost entirely made by the PR department, yes, but they'll be keeping Kirk's quasi-field promotion to captain and giving him the flagship after she's been rebuilt."
"Oh, God," Chris said. That was-he couldn't even wrap his brain around it, and he wasn't particularly drugged at the moment.
Phil gave him a sympathetic look. "Chris, you know you have to be happy for him when he shows up."
Chris closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. "I know," he said. "Damnit, Phil, I knew she wasn't going to be mine after this, but-Kirk?" Saying it out loud-that the Enterprise wasn't his anymore-drove a knife into his chest, but he ignored that particular pain. Time enough to deal with it later.
"You recruited him to do pretty much what he just did," Phil said.
"I didn't recruit him to cheat," Chris said, nettled. "And who the hell gives the flagship to a twenty-five-year-old cadet who was on probation and hasn't even properly graduated?"
"I don't understand it either, but it's going to happen. There will be a ceremony shortly, as soon as they can put it together, and Admiral Pike will have to transfer command to Captain Kirk."
"Oh, God," he said again. "Thanks for telling me."
"You're welcome. Chris, you know that-"
"-Kirk's going to stop by and ask for my blessing, yes," Chris said, interrupting. "And I'm going to give it to him."
Phil nodded. "Good."
* * *
Jim Kirk showed up a few hours later, at around 2000. Chris had been distracting himself by reading a book on a padd, and bookmarked his place before setting it aside. "Jim," he said.
"Ah, Captain Pike," Jim said, and made a face. "I mean-"
"It's still 'Captain,'" Chris said. "The promotion hasn't gone through yet. How are you doing?"
"Fine, sir," he said. "I, ah-I wanted to talk to you." He was wearing command gold, but there were no stripes at all on his sleeves.
"About the fact that you'll be commanding the Enterprise when she goes out?" Nope, it still hurt.
"Um, yes, that." Jim tapped a quick rhythm on his leg. "I mean, I'm sure I wasn't your first choice-at least not right now, although I like to think that you might have been happy to see me take over the Enterprise from you someday-but if you-" He stood up straight, stilled his hands, and looked directly at Chris. "I'd like your blessing, sir. If you can give it."
Somehow, despite all the noise in his head, Chris managed to smile at Jim and say, "Of course I can give it, Jim, and of course you have it."
Jim's smile was as bright as he'd ever seen it.
* * *
The ceremony was miserable. The admiral's dress uniform was itchy; they insisted that a yeoman push his wheelchair, even though he could push it himself and it was self-powered; there were too many damn people in the room; and he had the horrible suspicion that all of those people were staring at him. Phil reassured him later that they were not, but Chris didn't believe him.
Jim and his crew looked happy, though. Shiny, the lot of them.
* * *
"Well, Chris," Liz said, sitting in her usual chair. "Let's talk about the ceremony yesterday."
"Let's not," he said.
"All right," she said. "We can talk about something else instead."
"Anything," he said, realizing as the word came out of his mouth that it was the wrong thing to say.
"Anything?" How someone who looked about twelve and angelic could be as devious as she was, he had no idea.
"No, not anything," he said, "but anything within reason pertaining to treatment."
"How's your sex life?" she asked, somehow without turning red.
He did, though. "Nonexistent. As you might guess." He gestured at the hospital room.
"What was it like six months ago?" she asked, still actually looking at him.
He did like that she always gave a definite time frame, rather than saying something like, 'What was it like before you were tortured by a crazy future Romulan?' Not that she knew all the details, but still. "Existent." He'd propped himself up in the bed as he always did for counseling appointments, but found himself staring at the ceiling instead of at Liz. "What does this have to do with-anything?"
"Sex has everything to do with anything," she said, which wasn't an answer at all. "I'm going to need a little more than that, no matter how much it makes you uncomfortable."
"Or I could discuss this whole subject with Phil," he suggested.
Liz smiled and finally looked slightly uncomfortable. "Yeah, I suggested that, and he laughed at me and said, 'Oh, no, that's your job.'"
"Of course he did," Chris said, rolling his eyes. "Ask me short, concrete questions, and I'll see about not stroking out from embarrassment at saying this shit out loud."
"Okay," she said. "You're only four or so months out, so this is really a baseline more than anything else. Using six months ago as a standard reference point, how many mornings in a typical week would you wake up with an erection?"
The questions only got more embarrassing as she went on, and they got worse when she veered from sex to relationships. "I don't think everyone's cut out for long-term relationships," he found himself saying.
"You mean you don't think you are," she said, and he nodded. "I don't think that's true. You've maintained more than one long-term relationship in your life."
"For a year or so at a time, sure," he said. "And then it ends, and well . . ." He spread his hands. "I've been told multiple times that I'm married to the 'Fleet, and that's working out just fine for me."
"Is it?"
"Yes," he said, and realized too late that it sounded defensive. Damn. "Look, I'd like to get more regular sex as much as anyone, but it's just not-" He stopped. There wasn't an end to that sentence.
"Not what?"
I hate therapists, he thought, and shook his head.
"Okay," she said. "Tell me about your last relationship that lasted more than a couple months."
Chris shrugged. He could do that. "She was my XO. I'd had a couple previous relationships fail due to being what might be euphemistically termed 'long-distance,' so being on the same ship should have helped. Except it didn't."
"Why not?"
"I don't know. We just-we tried, and it didn't really gel, somehow. It felt like we were speaking different languages, and though we both tried, at least somewhat, to translate, it got to a point where we were both aware something was missing and we couldn't find it. Whatever it was. On paper we were pretty compatible, but . . ." He spread his hands. "Look, all things considered, it's not worth it."
"No?"
"No. Why are you asking these questions?"
It was Liz's turn to shrug. "You seem pretty well convinced that you shouldn't be in a relationship, but you haven't said whether you want to."
Chris sighed. "Um, Liz, I don't know if it's escaped your notice, but I'm crazy and in a wheelchair."
"Stop it," she said, tone mild.
Yeah, he knew he should stop it. They'd had the 'crazy' discussion before, and he was smart enough to know the contents of the 'being in a wheelchair doesn't change much of anything' discussion. He sighed again. "Yes. Sure. Why not. Everyone wants to fall in love and believe that it will last forever, or at least a good long time. It's a rush. It's also a giant gaping hole of vulnerability, and for fuck's sake, I've got enough of those right now. So forgive me for wanting to protect myself until, I don't know, the idea of someone coming down my throat doesn't send me into waves of panic." He deliberately went for the crudest image he could find, even though he knew from experience that she wouldn't even blink.
"Is it important to you, to be able to perform oral sex on a male-identified partner?" she asked, still completely unruffled.
"Oh, god," he said, and buried his face in his hands.
* * *
Chris was absently filling in a crossword puzzle on a padd, an off-duty Phil sprawled with his own padd in the bedside chair, when a chime sounded at the door; it was Dr. McCoy. Chris had seen him a few times since the relief ceremony, but McCoy had largely been absent from Starfleet Medical as he was presumably overseeing the stocking of the Enterprise's Sickbay.
"Dr. McCoy," Chris said. "How can I help you?" The greeting was maybe overly formal, but, well, couldn't do anything about that now.
"Ah, Admiral Pike," McCoy said. "And Dr. Boyce. If you're busy-"
Phil snorted and shifted to sit up properly. "It's not like you can come back later, McCoy. Don't you ship out bright and early tomorrow morning?"
"Well, yes," McCoy said, and sidled a half-step farther into the room.
"We'll both be there," Chris said, indicating himself and Phil.
"Will you?" McCoy said.
"Wouldn't miss it for the world," Chris said, and smiled.
McCoy smiled back, and Chris would have been willing to swear on a copy of the Federation Constitution that he'd seen McCoy smile before, but it really didn't feel like it. Or maybe the smile was just more genuine this time.
Either way, he felt a spark in his chest, warming just behind his sternum.
"Well, anyway," McCoy said, with a cough. "If you're going to be at the launch tomorrow, I won't bother saying goodbye today, or reminding Jim that he should." He coughed again. "Dr. Boyce, if you have any last minute advice?"
"Oh, I'm sure you don't need any more," Phil drawled. "It's going to take you a few years to break in your captain properly, but after that, everything will go more smoothly."
"I resemble that remark," Chris said, and they all laughed.
"Well," Phil said, after McCoy left, citing the need to count vials of serum or something. "That was interesting."
"Was it?" Chris asked.
"He was clearly here to see you."
Chris shrugged. "It's my room. He's my doctor."
"No, he's not," Phil said. "He signed off on that the minute you got back to Earth. If he treats you, which I know he does occasionally, it's because he's on rounds. Which, by the way, he requested over in the ICU. Specifically. Even though he should be in the ER."
"Huh," Chris said. "Well, still. He's got a vested interest in my health."
"Is that what it is?" Phil asked. "And besides, that wasn't the only interesting part."
"Oh?"
"Yeah." Phil raised an eyebrow and quirked a smile. "Haven't seen you react like that since Number One. Then again, you always did go for sarcastic brunettes."
Chris frowned. There had been, what, three brunettes out of the last ten people he slept with? And even though it was a plurality, he wouldn't have called any of them 'sarcastic.' Mouthy, maybe, but . . . Then his brain clicked back on track and he said, "What? Oh, no no no."
"No?"
"No," Chris said, more firmly this time.
Phil raised an eyebrow again.
Goddamnit, he hated when he did that. "No," he repeated again, and sighed. "Yeah, he's attractive, I guess-hell, it's impossible to miss that part-but no. Besides, wouldn't that be Florence Nightingale syndrome, or something? No, wait, the opposite."
"Transference," Phil said. "The word you're looking for is 'transference.' It's only transference, though, if you are, well, transferring emotions."
Chris stared at Phil for a moment. "No," he said. "Transient lust isn't an emotion."
"Well, it's something to think about."
No, it's not, Chris thought, but tried to make a face indicating that he'd consider it.
Phil stood. "Well, I'm out. Alicia's done with court at 1600."
"Say hi for me," Chris said.
"Of course."
"And really, sarcastic brunettes?"
"It's a pattern, Chris," Phil said, and left.
Chris stared at the industrial-strength ceiling tiles and frowned. A pattern? Really?
It probably didn't say that much about him that he actually couldn't remember everyone he'd slept with, but he could remember the longer-term ones: Number One, Lengyel, Rafael, Janeese.
Brunette, brunette, brunette, and, well, originally brunette.
Drily sarcastic, sarcastic (albeit in a gentle way), perhaps not sarcastic but capable of getting in a good zinger or two, and, well, yeah, okay, she'd been sarcastic, too. Especially when she was breaking up with him.
Hell, if he wanted to throw Phil in there, although it wasn't quite the same thing, he could add another.
Well, okay, maybe it was a pattern, but-Not McCoy. For such a long list of reasons, including: ethics, fraternization regulations, logistics, a twenty-year age gap, and the fact that he hated it when Phil was right about things like this.
Also, he could have sworn that McCoy and Kirk were fucking.
(And who wouldn't want to fuck Kirk? Smart-assed golden boy; certainly got enough practice, if campus rumors were correct. Chris had thought about it idly once or twice, but his tastes really didn't run to cadets. The biggest age gap downward he'd ever had, even in one-night stands, was seven or eight years. Well, unless you counted Gyxa, but his planet didn't use Standard years.)
Besides-he frowned down at his legs below the hospital blanket and flexed his toes, just because he could-it wasn't as if he were in the market for fucking anyone, gorgeous and brilliant or not. Rolling over on his side, carefully, using his hands to accomplish what his legs couldn't quite, he closed his eyes and determinedly thought of nothing at all.
* * *
There were a ridiculous number of reporters at the send-off for the Enterprise. Chris supposed he should have expected them, but they were still a surprise. He shifted in his chair, fortunately the hovering one this time, stuffed into the dress uniform again, and looked up at Phil.
Who looked surprisingly relaxed in his own dress uniform, but he, of course, was only a captain, and Chris had liked the captain's dress uniform just fine.
The new Enterprise command crew entered, and somebody said something, but Chris tuned him out almost immediately. He looked at the seven and thought, Were we ever that young?
He didn't realize he'd said it out loud until Phil leaned down and murmured, "No, we were at least old enough to drink and form contracts when we went out there."
Chris smiled. To be fair, they all looked young and shiny in their starched dress uniforms, not just the barely-eighteen Chekov. Kirk had plastered an eager look on his face that would probably make him laugh if he looked at him too long. Dr. McCoy was very much trying not to look bored, and when on Earth had that happened, that Chris could tell the difference between various looks on the doctor's face?
He tried not to think about it too hard; just shook everyone's hand and watched the viewscreen as the Enterprise took off on her first official mission.
Without him.
It was probably a good thing that Phil and Alicia dragged him out for dinner afterward.
* * *
Starfleet Maintenance went to his apartment, on the third floor of Glenn Hall, and installed a whole bunch of extra bars and widened a couple of doors before the therapists would let him call it home again. He finally got to move in a few days after the Enterprise left, and it was such a relief.
Chris puttered around his apartment, all by himself, after he shooed the yeomen and Phil and his PT out, and was happy to discover that he actually could, in his current state of mobility, live alone. It was possibly the best feeling he'd had all week. Or maybe longer than that. He didn't think about it too hard.
He didn't think it was particularly strange that he didn't sleep the first night he was allowed back into his apartment. He'd been used to the hermetically-sealed environment of the hospital, and the soundproofing in the Starfleet-issued apartments left something to be desired. Even though he still tired easily, after he hoisted himself out of the wheelchair and into bed, he couldn't sleep.
Of course, the first thing that kept him awake was that he just couldn't remember if he'd locked the door to the apartment, so he hauled himself back into the damn chair and checked manually. He also checked to see if the windows in the living room were all set to 100% opacity, and that they were locked as well.
They were; everything was locked, but he grabbed a padd that would control the apartment's settings and took it to bed with him. From there, he sighed and pushed as well as he could to get his bed to the corner. Maintenance had carefully moved his bed so that he could maneuver the wheelchair around three sides of it, but it was just in the wrong place.
Moving it took about a half hour, with lots of stops, but it was worth it. Well, sort of. He got back into bed, bundled himself into a blanket, put a pillow on the open side of the bed, and backed against the wall. Reaching an arm out, he grabbed the padd, rechecked the locks, locked the door to his actual bedroom, turned the lights all off, turned one back on, set the alarms to flash the lights as well as play a loud noise, and-
-finally figured out that wasn't quite normal. Well, shit. He didn't want to take the sleeping pills, but he'd always been able to skip a night of sleep here or there, so he turned the lights up a bit more and retrieved another padd that had log reports on it.
By the time morning rolled around, his chest ached, his eyes burned, and his hands were shaking. He'd listened to two or three neighbors go about their usual morning routines due to the fact that he absolutely couldn't not listen, although he didn't need to know what his downstairs neighbor sounded like during morning sex, or that the commander next door insisted on gargling for about five minutes straight. He sat under the spray of hot water for a while and that fixed some of the aching and burning. Coffee (half a cup) helped, too, and he made it to his 1000 physical-therapy appointment with a few minutes to spare.
Chris fell asleep while the massage therapist worked on his lower back but not deeply, and woke up maybe ten minutes later, alone in the room, with the strange ambient music just barely on the edge of his hearing. He felt like his entire body was made of lead, and still wasn't sure he was breathing to the full depth of his lungs, but he could still go on.
Lunch was uneventful; whoever'd picked it up for him managed to stick to the short list of pre-approved food with no variations. What the med center politely termed 'occupational therapy' that had nothing to do with his actual occupation (seriously, who cared that his handwriting was even more illegible than before? no one wrote anything anymore) started at 1400 and lasted until his hands started cramping.
(Goddamnit, he was an admiral now; he wasn't going to have to go diving under engineering panels and rewiring things anymore. Not that he did a ton of that before, but still.)
Another massage, and they sent him off to the pool to sit around and not swim laps until dinner. He powered through dinner, complained to Liz about the occupational therapy for half an hour while she suggested increasingly-impractical things he may wish to have his manual dexterity returned for (needlepoint, really?), and stared blankly at the vidscreen while an old holovid played.
When 0000 came around, he wheeled himself around the apartment, locked and secured everything (only twice), wrapped himself in blankets again, huddled against the wall, and-
-settled in for another night of alternately staring at the ceiling and reading increasingly-more-ludicrous things to distract himself. When he finished Anne of Green Gables at around 0630, he finally gave up, turned the lights all the way on, and went to take another shower.
Phil and Alicia were meeting him for breakfast, and that lasted about fifteen seconds before Phil asked, "How long since you last slept? Goddamnit, I should have checked on you yesterday, but you spent all day in therapy. Come on."
Alicia muttered something under her breath in Spanish that Chris probably could have understood if his brain weren't underwater, and tossed the portable parts of breakfast into a bag she pulled out of her briefcase.
"Stupid," Phil was saying under his breath, and Chris didn't know which one of them he meant. Possibly both?
A blink or two later and they were standing in front of Phil and Alicia's house; a couple minutes after that, Chris was staring at their king-sized bed with no knowledge of how he got there. "Wait, this is your bed," he said, protesting fuzzily.
"I'm well aware of that," Phil said, holding his hands out so Chris could grab them and pull himself out of the chair. When it turned out he didn't quite have the strength to do that, Phil hauled him out by himself, careful to grab his forearms and not his wrists. Ignoring Chris's protests, he sat him on the edge of the bed and ordered him to strip, helping with what he couldn't reach easily.
Chris felt like a rag doll, sort of, but considering his body was behaving like a rag doll and his mind not at all, he couldn't bring himself to care more than a token amount. When he was down to only his undershirt and underwear, Phil helped him under the covers.
"Are you going to be able to sleep now, or should I give you something to help?" Phil asked.
"I don't know," Chris said. "Your house is . . . big."
He had no idea how to explain what he meant by that, but Phil seemed to get it. "I don't know if this will help, but it's daylight and there are only three people in the house: you, me, and Alicia. Oh, and Groucho." The dog had already settled at the foot of the bed.
"That's not exactly how it works," Chris said, or tried to say, but he'd already drifted off.
He woke up once, vaguely, when Phil or Groucho shifted, just enough to realize that the warm, solid weight at his back was best-friend-doctor-trust-him, and fell back asleep almost instantly.
The next time he woke up, Groucho was licking his foot, and Alicia was sitting in the overstuffed chair in the corner, reading a padd and scribbling emendations on it with a stylus. "Stop that," he said, and both Alicia and Groucho looked up.
"Stop what?" Phil asked from behind him, and Chris rolled onto his back. "Are you awake?"
"Groucho was licking my foot," Chris said. "And I don't know if I'm awake yet." He yawned.
"That's fine," Phil said, "but I'm getting up. Groucho, down." Groucho bounced off the bed and out the door, and Phil rolled off and stood at the foot of the bed, stretching. "We've got spare bedrooms," he said, which Chris knew perfectly well as he'd stayed in them on numerous occasions since they'd bought the house twenty years ago. "I'll call your yeoman and get him to move your stuff over."
"Wait, what?" Chris said. "I'm pretty sure I have to agree before you start ordering my yeoman around." He held up one hand before Phil could say anything else. "If you start the next sentence with 'As your doctor,' I'm going to report you for malpractice."
Alicia snickered, and set her padd and stylus to the side. "Just for a few weeks, Chris," she said, "until the hyper-vigilance calms down a bit."
He winced. He hated the clinical term for what he'd been privately calling 'the crazy,' despite Liz's disapproval, almost as much as he hated, well, being hyper-vigilant. Also, he hated the fact that he didn't know if it was going to go away, as he'd always been easily awakened and he'd never done well sleeping in non-secure locations. However, if he said, 'I hate to be a bother,' Alicia would laugh at him and reassure him that he was always a bother and how would this be different? If he said 'no' flat out, Phil would probably shrug and let him not sleep for another two or three days until he agreed.
And fuck it, this was all bullshit and more than anything he'd like his goddamn brain back, even if he couldn't have his body or his ship back. He rolled over onto his side, away from both of them, in a tight ball-well, as tight as he could manage at the moment-and counted breaths. One, two, three, four in; one, two, three, four out. He was pretty sure he'd fall apart if either Phil or Alicia so much as touched him, so he was glad they didn't. They left the room quietly a few moments later.
A few minutes after that, he thought he was neither going to cry nor descend into a panic attack (motherfucking panic attacks). Maybe. He found a shirt and uniform pants, the shirt his and the pants probably actually Phil's as they didn't fit right, but his weren't within reach. The wheelchair wasn't either, but there was a padd on the bedside table and it could control the wheelchair.
Pulling himself into his chair, he thanked whatever architecture gods had influenced their housebuying such that two youngish, able-bodied people had decided to get a ranch without extraneous steps. The wheelchair did hover but he hated the bouncy feeling of going up or down stairs.
It was around 1800; he'd slept for nearly ten hours, and he definitely needed food. That is, if they had anything he could eat. He shook his head. Of course they'd have something he could eat. It was Phil.
Who, as it turned out, was in the kitchen, as was Alicia. "Hey," she said, meeting him halfway and pulling a chair along with her. "May I?"
He nodded-she meant, 'may I invade your personal space?'-and she sat, knees almost touching his.
"I'm sorry," she said, and held out a hand.
He took it and squeezed gently. She was apologizing for triggering him (and didn't that suck? A whole fucking new vocabulary to deal with his new, unwanted brain chemistry. Also, to boot, what a stupid fucking trigger) but instead he replied to her earlier comment. "No, you're right," he said, coughing when his voice came out scratchy. "I'll stay here until you get sick of me."
Phil snorted, and everything was back to normal. Or at least the new 'normal.'
* * *
A week or so after he moved in with Phil and Alicia, he was eating breakfast with them at home when Phil stretched his legs out, apparently, and kicked Chris's chair, which moved slightly.
"Whoops, sorry," Phil said. "Didn't mean to kick you."
"You didn't," Chris said, "just my chair."
Phil frowned. "No, I kicked your leg. I'm sure of it. You're wearing fleece pajama pants, lord only knows why."
"It's cold," Chris said. It was; one of San Francisco's infamous cold summer days. "And I didn't feel it." He frowned.
Phil flipped, instantly, from best-friend-housemate into doctor mode. "Back up," he said, pulling a tricorder from behind the toaster or something, and when Chris did, scanned his legs and then his head. He touched Chris's bare foot lightly, and then a little harder.
Chris shook his head.
"Fuck," Phil said. "To Medical. Don't bother dressing. One of the grafts is fucked up. Why this much later, I have no idea, but-look at me, Chris-I can fix it."
Good god, his eyes are blue, Chris thought absently. Phil wasn't Command, never wanted to be, but when he wanted someone to believe something, he could summon charisma that rivaled Chris's own. Probably would have surpassed it, if he gave a shit.
Phil held his gaze until Chris swallowed and nodded-what else could he do? He trusted Phil with his life and sanity.
Alicia, who had been holding herself perfectly still during this whole exchange-she knew better than to get in between Dr. Boyce and a patient, just as he knew better than to get between her and a witness-stood, and said, "What do you need me to do?"
"Stay here with him for a moment while I call for transport and grab some stuff."
Chris was about to protest that he didn't need a babysitter, but his ears were starting to ring, and when Alicia held out a hand, he took it silently.
* * *
There was something a little bit wrong about having brain surgery so frequently that one didn't need to go get haircuts.
* * *
Once the nerves were reattached, or whatever it was that Phil had done while poking around in his head and neck, the therapists estimated that he was only set back a couple weeks in his recovery. They'd found a new term for what was wrong with him, though-complex regional pain syndrome, which sounded like a load of bullshit but was apparently medicalese for 'your nervous system got fried and now it overreacts randomly.' They kept him in the hospital until they were satisfied with his recovery, but he moved back in with the Cortez-Boyce contingent before too long.
Nonetheless, some days were better than others.
Which was a stupid statement, but that was the only way he could put it when well-meaning acquaintances asked him how he was doing. One day he'd be at PT, thrilled to death that he could walk ten steps without collapsing. Half an hour later, he'd try to eat something like pad thai-a food he liked-and the texture of something in it, maybe the shrimp, he was never quite sure, would send him running (or, more accurately, rolling) to the bathroom to throw up and recover from whatever panic couldn't be suppressed. And that was with the maintenance drugs and cognitive-behavioral therapy and yoga and relaxation techniques and whatever else crap Starfleet Medical could shove down his throat.
Ha. Well, obviously not "shove down his throat" literally, because that was part of the reason he was there in the first place.
The low point, he supposed, other than right after he first got the memories back, and of course after he'd cried all over Liz, was probably when he found himself saying to her, in the low intense tone that was a step below total silence on the 'how pissed is Chris Pike?' scale, "Have you ever lost the only thing that mattered to you in your life?"
Apparently that was the last straw for her, because she carefully put her padd in the pocket of her oversized lab coat, stood to her full height, mere centimeters shorter than he, and said, "You have no idea, Admiral Pike, what I've had and lost."
She left, even though it was her office, and Chris sat in his chair, wondering what the hell to do now. If he'd had his full range of mobility, he'd have gone for a run, probably harder and faster than Phil would have liked, or maybe punched something (a bag, a volunteer, a wall), but those weren't options now.
(To be fair, he probably could have punched something, or put the wheelchair into old-fashioned manual mode and wheeled himself around a track, exhausting his arms if nothing else. He still didn't have a ton of energy, though, and wheelchair-running, or whatever you wanted to call it, didn't have the same kinesthetic feel as a good, hard sprint.)
Predictably, Phil showed up a few minutes later, and let the door close behind him. He sat in the chair Liz had deserted, and raised his eyebrows at Chris.
Chris pressed his lips together and didn't say anything.
"You're an asshole, you know," Phil said, a few silent minutes later.
Chris nodded once, short and sharp.
"Ever occur to you that Liz might have her own story?"
Chris shrugged. Of course it had. He figured if it were important, he'd know about it.
"Her fiance died on the Farragut. And by 'fiance' I mean 'possibly the only other human being in existence who could understand what it's like to be Liz,' being that he was blessed with the same ridiculously high scores on all the standard psi tests. She shouldn't be working with anyone at all, but I begged her to. I thought she was the only one of our PTSD specialists that you couldn't mow over."
"Gary Mitchell," Chris said, putting the pieces together. "I remember him." Mitchell had served on the Yorktown briefly, as a training run, some five or seven years ago.
"Thought you might." Phil sighed. "Look, I'm not trying to make you feel bad-no, that's not true. But I'm trying to make you feel bad about being enough of a jackass to Liz that she came to my office and apologized to me, not anything else."
Well, fuck. "She apologized to you?" Now he felt like twenty kinds of asshole, not just the usual one."Yep."
"What did you do?"
"Told her you were a dirtbag and I'd go kick your ass for her."
Chris might have laughed, except it was obvious that Phil wasn't joking. "I have no idea what I should do to make it better," he said instead.
"Oh, I don't know, apologize?" Phil said.
Chris flushed. "Well, okay, that."
"It's been ten months."
"And what," Chris said, feeling the embarrassment switch back to anger, "I'm supposed to be fixed by now? Sorry, Doctor, I'm not."
"Settle the fuck down, Chris. No, you're not supposed to be fixed. However, on the list of people you're not supposed to take out your bad days on, well, the people who are trying to help you should be near the fucking top." Phil stood, slammed his hand on Liz's desk, and immediately looked contrite when Chris flinched. "Fuck. I'm sorry."
"Yeah," Chris said, heart racing; he took a handful of gulping breaths. It's Phil, he reminded himself.
Phil closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. "Look. You know what you need to do. Do it."
He started walking to the door, but Chris stopped him with a hand to his leg. "Phil. Where is she?"
"My office," he said.
Which was a floor up and half a building over, but not that far. "Okay."
Liz was still sitting in Phil's spare chair, the cushioned one that Alicia had bought him, claiming that she was sick of eating lunch in a hard plastic chair. She looked up when Chris wheeled himself in, the faint hum of the chair probably alerting her to his identity. "Admiral Pike," she said, stiff and poker-faced. Her eyes were red and she was holding a small pile of tissues.
Well, fuck. "Dr. Dehner," he said. She was also Lieutenant Dehner, but he didn't want to imply that he held any power over her. "I came to apologize for my idiotic, thoughtless behavior." God, he sounded stuffier than usual. "I understand if you don't want to see me for a while, but for what it's worth, I'm sorry."
She gave him a watery half-smile. "And now that Admiral Pike has apologized, would Chris like to say anything?"
"Oh, Liz," he said, and held out a hand. "I knew him."
"I know," she said. "He was-he was here on Earth the last few months because of me." She took his hand, and squeezed once.
"Liz," he said again.
"I mean this in the nicest possible way, but go away, Chris. I'll see you on Thursday." She squeezed his hand again and set it in his lap.
That was the date of his next appointment, three days later. "Okay." He patted her on the shoulder lightly and left.
* * *
Time passed, in that way it did. Chris was able to walk across a room, and then in the hallway, and then down the block. Eventually, the PTs offered him a cane instead of the chair, and while he still did a lot of sitting and used the chair in the evenings, he could walk around during the day. His hands still shook most of the time, and random muscles would cramp up, but compared to paralysis, well, he'd take it.
The hyper-vigilance did, as Alicia predicted, calm down, to the point where he could move back into his own apartment. He still spent more evenings than he probably should have chez Phil and Alicia, but if nothing else, Groucho seemed to appreciate the company.
Liz had signed off on him going back to some sort of work part-time about six months after the Narada. The admiralty allowed him to teach a section of tactics, and then two sections, the next semester. He was now, apparently, a professor. Strange.
It didn't necessarily go quickly or smoothly-the number of times in a week that Phil and Alicia and Liz had to remind him not to be an asshole was staggering, especially at first. Even once he officially got out of the chair, it was only for one day out of three, and then one day in two, and then two days in three, et cetera.
And fuck, some of it was hard as hell, especially trying to overcome the food aversions. He got really sick of counseling sessions ending up with him in the bathroom, throwing up what felt like everything he'd eaten for the last month.
"Until you can eat enough to maintain a stable body weight without supplementing half your calories in a given day, no, we can't stop this," Liz said as she rubbed his back after a particularly disastrous session.
"Fuck," he said, and leaned back over the commode for another round.
* * *
The one-year anniversary of the Narada came up faster than Chris had possibly expected. The Enterprise was safely away patrolling a portion of the Neutral Zone; he was surprised, as he thought that for sure they'd want Kirk and the ship herself there for whatever sort of celebrations happened.
On the other hand, they'd never made the Kelvin baby speak at any of the memorials for that ship, so maybe someone in the 'fleet's PR department actually had a heart. The best thing for the Enterprise and her very young crew was for them to continue racking up successes out in the field, rather than being gawked at and endlessly bothered about how they felt about 'surviving.' How they felt about being the youngest crew. How they felt about saving the Federation.
On the other other hand, that meant that he was pretty much the only person on Earth who had been on the Enterprise, so of course he got asked to speak at the ceremony.
At least this time, they were smart enough to get Phil to ask him, rather than sending someone from the PR office or, worse, Komack or Barnett.
"No," he said, even before Phil finished his admittedly-embarrassed request. "Absolutely not."
"I knew you were going to say that. And so did Barnett," Phil said, and heaved a deep sigh. "Which is why he told me to remind you of all the grieving students and parents out there who want nothing more than closure, and that you are the one person who can give it to them." He rolled his eyes.
Chris rolled his, too. "Fuck," he said. It was true: appeals to think of the children! almost always got to him, and Barnett, the bastard, knew that. It was why he'd been able to bribe him into staying on Earth: You'll be helping the next generation of Starfleet officers! The Enterprise had been a pretty big inducement, but he'd been in a pretty good position to get it without having to do his time as a recruiter and professor. "All right. Ten minutes, no more."
"You can tell them that. I wash my hands of this."
Which was how he ended up giving a twenty-minute speech.
He worked on the speech the same way he'd worked on his dissertation: completely academically, forgetting that he'd known the people involved, as if he were reporting on something from the Hundred Years' War. It was a good speech; he knew it, and Alicia agreed.
He delivered the speech as if he were delivering the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. Fortunately, there were only a handful of people in the audience who knew the difference between Chris Pike performing and Chris Pike speaking honestly, and they weren't telling.
He made it through about half an hour of the reception afterward before he left. Phil followed him, thank God, and dragged him to his house rather than letting Chris go to his apartment, and busted open the good bottle of Andorian ice vodka.
Never mind that alcohol (and caffeine, and everything fun in life) was contraindicated by some of the drugs he was on. It didn't count when his physician was the one getting him drunk.
The hangover the next morning was at least as much emotional as alcohol-related.
* * *
The Enterprise was set to return on 2259.220, and it and its crew would be grounded for six months, pending some critical updates. Some of the crew would be reassigned, and the rest would be prepared for the longer mission ahead of them.
As an admiral, even though he wasn't supervising the Enterprise in any sort of way, Chris had access to the ship's logs and official reports. Although he didn't listen to the logs or read reports too regularly-it still hurt sometimes-he did keep up.
Occasionally, Dr. McCoy's name would come up in the reports, and Chris would smile. He didn't think too hard as to why.
* * *
"So Dr. McCoy will be back soon," Phil said one evening over dinner; Alicia was still at the office.
"And the rest of the Enterprise," Chris said, and forked another bite off of his tamale. He tried to keep a straight face, but was afraid he couldn't conceal the way his heart beat faster.
"Somehow I doubt you'll be as happy to see Lieutenant Scott as you will be to see McCoy."
"Lieutenant Scott didn't put my brain back together," Chris shot back.
"So it's gratitude, huh?" Phil leaned back in his chair. "Man, if I had a credit for every time one of my surgery patients wanted to get me in the sack . . . I'd have maybe a credit."
"Shut the fuck up, Phil." He said it with maybe a little too much venom.
"Chris," Phil said, gentler this time. "Consenting adults; I don't give a shit, never have. You know that."
"I suppose here you say something like, 'I just want you to be happy.'" It sounded less bitter in his head.
"Yeah, if you want me to say it."
"Don't need to." Christ, after thirty fucking years, he knew.
Phil smiled, and grabbed the bowl of refritos.
A moment later, though, Chris said, "And I call bullshit on your statistic, by the way. Gotta be a hell of a lot more than just one."
Phil just laughed.
Chris ate a few more bites and watched Phil for a moment, before saying, "You know, Phil, I'm not the only one who lost the Enterprise."
Phil looked up, spoon halfway to his mouth. "Chris," he said, setting the spoon back down, "I was only going because it was you and your dream." He smiled. "I happen to like living in my house, and I wasn't looking forward to giving Groucho back to my niece."
"Oh," Chris said. "Yeah. I knew that. I mean, I suspected. But-"
"Don't worry," Phil said. "You don't need to say it, either."
"Oh, good."
* * *
The Enterprise returned to Earth on a Monday.
Chris stood, cane in his right hand, with Phil and Alicia in the corner of the reception room, nodding at Winona Kirk as she spoke with Admiral Barnett. There was a tasteful mix of Federation and Starfleet dignitaries as well as members of the media and the occasional non-Fleet family member of the ship's crew. He recognized Spock's father Sarek in another corner, although he hadn't known the Vulcan was still on Earth. Also, he would have put half his year's salary on the fact that the girl standing with Winona, maybe ten years old and brunette, with a familiar cast to her face and an even more familiar accent, was Dr. McCoy's daughter Joanna.
Before too long, though, the people of the hour showed up, dress uniforms and all-the command crew of the Enterprise. Admiral Barnett officially welcomed them back in possibly the shortest speech the man had ever given in his life, and then he stepped aside to let friends and family members swarm them.
Chris watched, a fond smile on his face, as Jim hugged his mother; the girl was confirmed as Joanna McCoy as she jumped into her father's arms and hugged him for all she was worth. He didn't recognize the woman in commander's stripes who greeted Lieutenant Sulu, but she was most likely his mother, based on her age and their resemblance. Spock and Sarek bowed at each other.
His overacute hearing caught his name, and he looked up to see Winona gesturing to his corner. "You've been spotted," Phil said with a laugh.
"Oh, no," Chris deadpanned, and grinned as Jim loped over to him, Winona trailing in his wake.
"Admiral Pike, oh my god, you're walking! I mean-" Jim stopped, straightened, and said, "Good to see you, sir. Thank you for coming to meet us. I'm glad to see you in such good health."
"It's good to see you as well, Captain Kirk," Chris said gravely, and then laughed, because Jim's imitation of a sober command tone was just that-an imitation. "Wasn't a year of command supposed to settle you down?"
Jim's bright grin flashed, and he said, "I'm just a little light-headed from the change in elevation."
"Good one," Phil said. "Hi, Winona."
"Good to see you, Phil, Alicia, Chris."
"No, really, Jim," Chris said, after smiling at Winona again, "I've only heard good things about you this last year. Congratulations." He switched hands on the cane and held out his right hand, and Jim took it, giving it a quick downward shake before releasing it.
"Thanks, Admiral Pike. That-means quite a lot, as you might guess." Jim blinked, looked over at his mother for a second, and then smiled again.
Joanna McCoy suddenly appeared between Winona and Jim, and Chris was struck by how much she did resemble her father. The hair was maybe curlier, but the eyes and face shape were definitely his.
"Hey, Jo," Jim said. "Have you met Admiral Pike yet?"
'Jo' shook her head and tried to hide behind Winona.
"Hi, there," Chris said politely. He liked kids-other people's-but unlike Phil, who also had no kids, he never quite knew what to say to them, and ten-year-olds were about the most difficult for him. He had no idea if he was supposed to hold out a hand for her to shake or just avoid all that since he was pretty much old enough to be her grandfather.
"Hi," she said, almost inaudibly.
"Jo? Where'd you-oh, there you are," came a familiar voice, although one he hadn't heard for a full year. McCoy joined their little group and said, "Hello, Commander Kirk," to Winona as he put a hand on his daughter's shoulder. "I apol-oh."
Oh, indeed. Damn, McCoy looked good in the dress uniform, even if there was a reddish line above his collar indicating that he'd been tugging at it. "Dr. McCoy," Chris said, when the silence had stretched on for a few seconds longer than necessary.
"Admiral Pike," McCoy said. "Sir. Good to see you. Thank you for coming to meet us."
"Had to make sure that you hadn't broken my ship," Chris said, trying to joke but probably failing.
"My ship," Jim said under his breath, and that broke the spell.
Chris looked over at Jim and caught a glimpse of Joanna's face. Eyes wide, she looked simultaneously fascinated and horrified. Crap, he thought. "She was mine first, Jim, but I'm glad that you have her now." He smiled, and Jim smiled back. "I still ask Captain One about my ship, and I haven't commanded the Yorktown in, what, five years now?"
"I don't care who Number One has as a CMO," Phil said. "It's still my Sickbay."
Everyone laughed.
Later, Chris had no idea if it was a conspiracy, but he found himself sitting at a cafe-style table with only the company of Dr. McCoy. The silence hovered between comfortable and uncomfortable for a few minutes, and then Dr. McCoy said, "I understand by the rules of polite society, I'm not supposed to comment on this, but as Jim apparently also said something earlier, I'll take my chances. Admiral Pike, it is so good to see you walking again."
"Thank you," Chris said, an automatic response. "Actually," he said a moment later, "I should be thanking you, since I'm sure I never did."
"No need," McCoy said stiffly. "It's my job."
Chris shook his head. "That's not how it works," he said. "You've been in Starfleet long enough-a doctor long enough-to know that."
"True enough," McCoy said. "It doesn't mean I expect to hear it."
"Nonetheless," Chris said, and turned to face McCoy more squarely. "Dr. McCoy, thank you so much. Without your phenomenal skill, I don't know if I'd be alive, let alone walking occasionally."
McCoy blinked a couple of times and swallowed once, hard, before he said, "You're welcome, Admiral Pike."
Chris had the strangest urge to smile, and not in the pleasant-acknowledgment sort of way. No, he could feel the world's goofiest grin trying to spread across his face, and he was only partially successful in suppressing it.
McCoy smiled back, hesitantly, and then he turned, frowning, a moment later. "Is that-Excuse me, admiral," he said, and stood, walking quickly away.
Chris followed his movements and saw-were Jim and Joanna throwing grapes at each other? Surely not.
* * *
When the reception had ended and he and Phil and Alicia were walking out of the building, Alicia said what Chris had been dreading for the last hour. "So, when did that happen?"
"When did what happen?" he asked, feigning ignorance.
"You and the good doctor."
Phil cleared his throat, and Alicia patted him on the shoulder. "You're the best doctor."
Chris snorted, and Alicia rolled her eyes. "Answer my question," she said.
"I thought lawyers never asked a question unless they already knew the answer," he said.
"That's true," she said, "but humor me anyway."
"Nothing happened," Chris said. "Nothing's going to happen."
"Why the hell not?" Alicia asked.
Chris stopped, turned to her, and raised an eyebrow.
"Oh, please," she said, with a dismissive gesture. "You're clearly smitten; he's clearly smitten. Go for it."
"Alicia, dear, you know the only person in existence who loves you more than I do is Phil, but can we please not discuss this?"
She looked as if she were about to say something else, but didn't; instead, she nodded, and said, "Yeah. Okay. How are classes going?"
The conversation turned, but it couldn't block the voice in the back of his head saying, Smitten! on auto-repeat.
Late at night, of course, the questions came back: sure, the voice said, other people may think McCoy looks 'smitten' or whatever, and sure, you look better than you did a year ago, but is there any possible way he's going to want to deal with all the shit that comes with being with you?
And fuck if he could answer that.
Back to Master Post | Back to Part 1 | On to Part 3
Life got a little better after that. Well, no-it actually got a hell of a lot more difficult, as it was harder not to cry again after that happened and Starfleet captains-or admirals-don't cry. At least not in public. However, the nightmares got marginally less horrific, and Phil and Liz lowered his dosage of whatever it was they had him on to make him sleep at night.
The PTs and OTs determined that he was physically in a condition not to be in the hospital all the time, provided he had a caregiver. They offered to assign him a yeoman to do things like reach high shelves and help him in the bathroom.
The catch, of course, was that the caregiver/yeoman had to be around him twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Chris declined. The therapists rescinded their offer until he could maneuver himself in and out of the bathroom.
Of course, now that he had a goal, he worked harder at his exercises. He wondered if perhaps that had been their goal all along. They were actually mentioning the 'w'-word (walk) around him. He pretended not to hear, but oh, it sounded good.
* * *
A couple weeks later, Phil came into Chris's room and locked the door behind him. "Chris," he said, dropping into the bedside chair, "I made them let me tell you this time."
"Tell me what?" Chris asked, as he set his padd aside.
"They're giving the Enterprise to Jim Kirk."
"They're what?"
"You heard me correctly."
"I don't-" Chris stopped, closed his mouth. He tried again. "What?"
"I think this was a decision almost entirely made by the PR department, yes, but they'll be keeping Kirk's quasi-field promotion to captain and giving him the flagship after she's been rebuilt."
"Oh, God," Chris said. That was-he couldn't even wrap his brain around it, and he wasn't particularly drugged at the moment.
Phil gave him a sympathetic look. "Chris, you know you have to be happy for him when he shows up."
Chris closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. "I know," he said. "Damnit, Phil, I knew she wasn't going to be mine after this, but-Kirk?" Saying it out loud-that the Enterprise wasn't his anymore-drove a knife into his chest, but he ignored that particular pain. Time enough to deal with it later.
"You recruited him to do pretty much what he just did," Phil said.
"I didn't recruit him to cheat," Chris said, nettled. "And who the hell gives the flagship to a twenty-five-year-old cadet who was on probation and hasn't even properly graduated?"
"I don't understand it either, but it's going to happen. There will be a ceremony shortly, as soon as they can put it together, and Admiral Pike will have to transfer command to Captain Kirk."
"Oh, God," he said again. "Thanks for telling me."
"You're welcome. Chris, you know that-"
"-Kirk's going to stop by and ask for my blessing, yes," Chris said, interrupting. "And I'm going to give it to him."
Phil nodded. "Good."
* * *
Jim Kirk showed up a few hours later, at around 2000. Chris had been distracting himself by reading a book on a padd, and bookmarked his place before setting it aside. "Jim," he said.
"Ah, Captain Pike," Jim said, and made a face. "I mean-"
"It's still 'Captain,'" Chris said. "The promotion hasn't gone through yet. How are you doing?"
"Fine, sir," he said. "I, ah-I wanted to talk to you." He was wearing command gold, but there were no stripes at all on his sleeves.
"About the fact that you'll be commanding the Enterprise when she goes out?" Nope, it still hurt.
"Um, yes, that." Jim tapped a quick rhythm on his leg. "I mean, I'm sure I wasn't your first choice-at least not right now, although I like to think that you might have been happy to see me take over the Enterprise from you someday-but if you-" He stood up straight, stilled his hands, and looked directly at Chris. "I'd like your blessing, sir. If you can give it."
Somehow, despite all the noise in his head, Chris managed to smile at Jim and say, "Of course I can give it, Jim, and of course you have it."
Jim's smile was as bright as he'd ever seen it.
* * *
The ceremony was miserable. The admiral's dress uniform was itchy; they insisted that a yeoman push his wheelchair, even though he could push it himself and it was self-powered; there were too many damn people in the room; and he had the horrible suspicion that all of those people were staring at him. Phil reassured him later that they were not, but Chris didn't believe him.
Jim and his crew looked happy, though. Shiny, the lot of them.
* * *
"Well, Chris," Liz said, sitting in her usual chair. "Let's talk about the ceremony yesterday."
"Let's not," he said.
"All right," she said. "We can talk about something else instead."
"Anything," he said, realizing as the word came out of his mouth that it was the wrong thing to say.
"Anything?" How someone who looked about twelve and angelic could be as devious as she was, he had no idea.
"No, not anything," he said, "but anything within reason pertaining to treatment."
"How's your sex life?" she asked, somehow without turning red.
He did, though. "Nonexistent. As you might guess." He gestured at the hospital room.
"What was it like six months ago?" she asked, still actually looking at him.
He did like that she always gave a definite time frame, rather than saying something like, 'What was it like before you were tortured by a crazy future Romulan?' Not that she knew all the details, but still. "Existent." He'd propped himself up in the bed as he always did for counseling appointments, but found himself staring at the ceiling instead of at Liz. "What does this have to do with-anything?"
"Sex has everything to do with anything," she said, which wasn't an answer at all. "I'm going to need a little more than that, no matter how much it makes you uncomfortable."
"Or I could discuss this whole subject with Phil," he suggested.
Liz smiled and finally looked slightly uncomfortable. "Yeah, I suggested that, and he laughed at me and said, 'Oh, no, that's your job.'"
"Of course he did," Chris said, rolling his eyes. "Ask me short, concrete questions, and I'll see about not stroking out from embarrassment at saying this shit out loud."
"Okay," she said. "You're only four or so months out, so this is really a baseline more than anything else. Using six months ago as a standard reference point, how many mornings in a typical week would you wake up with an erection?"
The questions only got more embarrassing as she went on, and they got worse when she veered from sex to relationships. "I don't think everyone's cut out for long-term relationships," he found himself saying.
"You mean you don't think you are," she said, and he nodded. "I don't think that's true. You've maintained more than one long-term relationship in your life."
"For a year or so at a time, sure," he said. "And then it ends, and well . . ." He spread his hands. "I've been told multiple times that I'm married to the 'Fleet, and that's working out just fine for me."
"Is it?"
"Yes," he said, and realized too late that it sounded defensive. Damn. "Look, I'd like to get more regular sex as much as anyone, but it's just not-" He stopped. There wasn't an end to that sentence.
"Not what?"
I hate therapists, he thought, and shook his head.
"Okay," she said. "Tell me about your last relationship that lasted more than a couple months."
Chris shrugged. He could do that. "She was my XO. I'd had a couple previous relationships fail due to being what might be euphemistically termed 'long-distance,' so being on the same ship should have helped. Except it didn't."
"Why not?"
"I don't know. We just-we tried, and it didn't really gel, somehow. It felt like we were speaking different languages, and though we both tried, at least somewhat, to translate, it got to a point where we were both aware something was missing and we couldn't find it. Whatever it was. On paper we were pretty compatible, but . . ." He spread his hands. "Look, all things considered, it's not worth it."
"No?"
"No. Why are you asking these questions?"
It was Liz's turn to shrug. "You seem pretty well convinced that you shouldn't be in a relationship, but you haven't said whether you want to."
Chris sighed. "Um, Liz, I don't know if it's escaped your notice, but I'm crazy and in a wheelchair."
"Stop it," she said, tone mild.
Yeah, he knew he should stop it. They'd had the 'crazy' discussion before, and he was smart enough to know the contents of the 'being in a wheelchair doesn't change much of anything' discussion. He sighed again. "Yes. Sure. Why not. Everyone wants to fall in love and believe that it will last forever, or at least a good long time. It's a rush. It's also a giant gaping hole of vulnerability, and for fuck's sake, I've got enough of those right now. So forgive me for wanting to protect myself until, I don't know, the idea of someone coming down my throat doesn't send me into waves of panic." He deliberately went for the crudest image he could find, even though he knew from experience that she wouldn't even blink.
"Is it important to you, to be able to perform oral sex on a male-identified partner?" she asked, still completely unruffled.
"Oh, god," he said, and buried his face in his hands.
* * *
Chris was absently filling in a crossword puzzle on a padd, an off-duty Phil sprawled with his own padd in the bedside chair, when a chime sounded at the door; it was Dr. McCoy. Chris had seen him a few times since the relief ceremony, but McCoy had largely been absent from Starfleet Medical as he was presumably overseeing the stocking of the Enterprise's Sickbay.
"Dr. McCoy," Chris said. "How can I help you?" The greeting was maybe overly formal, but, well, couldn't do anything about that now.
"Ah, Admiral Pike," McCoy said. "And Dr. Boyce. If you're busy-"
Phil snorted and shifted to sit up properly. "It's not like you can come back later, McCoy. Don't you ship out bright and early tomorrow morning?"
"Well, yes," McCoy said, and sidled a half-step farther into the room.
"We'll both be there," Chris said, indicating himself and Phil.
"Will you?" McCoy said.
"Wouldn't miss it for the world," Chris said, and smiled.
McCoy smiled back, and Chris would have been willing to swear on a copy of the Federation Constitution that he'd seen McCoy smile before, but it really didn't feel like it. Or maybe the smile was just more genuine this time.
Either way, he felt a spark in his chest, warming just behind his sternum.
"Well, anyway," McCoy said, with a cough. "If you're going to be at the launch tomorrow, I won't bother saying goodbye today, or reminding Jim that he should." He coughed again. "Dr. Boyce, if you have any last minute advice?"
"Oh, I'm sure you don't need any more," Phil drawled. "It's going to take you a few years to break in your captain properly, but after that, everything will go more smoothly."
"I resemble that remark," Chris said, and they all laughed.
"Well," Phil said, after McCoy left, citing the need to count vials of serum or something. "That was interesting."
"Was it?" Chris asked.
"He was clearly here to see you."
Chris shrugged. "It's my room. He's my doctor."
"No, he's not," Phil said. "He signed off on that the minute you got back to Earth. If he treats you, which I know he does occasionally, it's because he's on rounds. Which, by the way, he requested over in the ICU. Specifically. Even though he should be in the ER."
"Huh," Chris said. "Well, still. He's got a vested interest in my health."
"Is that what it is?" Phil asked. "And besides, that wasn't the only interesting part."
"Oh?"
"Yeah." Phil raised an eyebrow and quirked a smile. "Haven't seen you react like that since Number One. Then again, you always did go for sarcastic brunettes."
Chris frowned. There had been, what, three brunettes out of the last ten people he slept with? And even though it was a plurality, he wouldn't have called any of them 'sarcastic.' Mouthy, maybe, but . . . Then his brain clicked back on track and he said, "What? Oh, no no no."
"No?"
"No," Chris said, more firmly this time.
Phil raised an eyebrow again.
Goddamnit, he hated when he did that. "No," he repeated again, and sighed. "Yeah, he's attractive, I guess-hell, it's impossible to miss that part-but no. Besides, wouldn't that be Florence Nightingale syndrome, or something? No, wait, the opposite."
"Transference," Phil said. "The word you're looking for is 'transference.' It's only transference, though, if you are, well, transferring emotions."
Chris stared at Phil for a moment. "No," he said. "Transient lust isn't an emotion."
"Well, it's something to think about."
No, it's not, Chris thought, but tried to make a face indicating that he'd consider it.
Phil stood. "Well, I'm out. Alicia's done with court at 1600."
"Say hi for me," Chris said.
"Of course."
"And really, sarcastic brunettes?"
"It's a pattern, Chris," Phil said, and left.
Chris stared at the industrial-strength ceiling tiles and frowned. A pattern? Really?
It probably didn't say that much about him that he actually couldn't remember everyone he'd slept with, but he could remember the longer-term ones: Number One, Lengyel, Rafael, Janeese.
Brunette, brunette, brunette, and, well, originally brunette.
Drily sarcastic, sarcastic (albeit in a gentle way), perhaps not sarcastic but capable of getting in a good zinger or two, and, well, yeah, okay, she'd been sarcastic, too. Especially when she was breaking up with him.
Hell, if he wanted to throw Phil in there, although it wasn't quite the same thing, he could add another.
Well, okay, maybe it was a pattern, but-Not McCoy. For such a long list of reasons, including: ethics, fraternization regulations, logistics, a twenty-year age gap, and the fact that he hated it when Phil was right about things like this.
Also, he could have sworn that McCoy and Kirk were fucking.
(And who wouldn't want to fuck Kirk? Smart-assed golden boy; certainly got enough practice, if campus rumors were correct. Chris had thought about it idly once or twice, but his tastes really didn't run to cadets. The biggest age gap downward he'd ever had, even in one-night stands, was seven or eight years. Well, unless you counted Gyxa, but his planet didn't use Standard years.)
Besides-he frowned down at his legs below the hospital blanket and flexed his toes, just because he could-it wasn't as if he were in the market for fucking anyone, gorgeous and brilliant or not. Rolling over on his side, carefully, using his hands to accomplish what his legs couldn't quite, he closed his eyes and determinedly thought of nothing at all.
* * *
There were a ridiculous number of reporters at the send-off for the Enterprise. Chris supposed he should have expected them, but they were still a surprise. He shifted in his chair, fortunately the hovering one this time, stuffed into the dress uniform again, and looked up at Phil.
Who looked surprisingly relaxed in his own dress uniform, but he, of course, was only a captain, and Chris had liked the captain's dress uniform just fine.
The new Enterprise command crew entered, and somebody said something, but Chris tuned him out almost immediately. He looked at the seven and thought, Were we ever that young?
He didn't realize he'd said it out loud until Phil leaned down and murmured, "No, we were at least old enough to drink and form contracts when we went out there."
Chris smiled. To be fair, they all looked young and shiny in their starched dress uniforms, not just the barely-eighteen Chekov. Kirk had plastered an eager look on his face that would probably make him laugh if he looked at him too long. Dr. McCoy was very much trying not to look bored, and when on Earth had that happened, that Chris could tell the difference between various looks on the doctor's face?
He tried not to think about it too hard; just shook everyone's hand and watched the viewscreen as the Enterprise took off on her first official mission.
Without him.
It was probably a good thing that Phil and Alicia dragged him out for dinner afterward.
* * *
Starfleet Maintenance went to his apartment, on the third floor of Glenn Hall, and installed a whole bunch of extra bars and widened a couple of doors before the therapists would let him call it home again. He finally got to move in a few days after the Enterprise left, and it was such a relief.
Chris puttered around his apartment, all by himself, after he shooed the yeomen and Phil and his PT out, and was happy to discover that he actually could, in his current state of mobility, live alone. It was possibly the best feeling he'd had all week. Or maybe longer than that. He didn't think about it too hard.
He didn't think it was particularly strange that he didn't sleep the first night he was allowed back into his apartment. He'd been used to the hermetically-sealed environment of the hospital, and the soundproofing in the Starfleet-issued apartments left something to be desired. Even though he still tired easily, after he hoisted himself out of the wheelchair and into bed, he couldn't sleep.
Of course, the first thing that kept him awake was that he just couldn't remember if he'd locked the door to the apartment, so he hauled himself back into the damn chair and checked manually. He also checked to see if the windows in the living room were all set to 100% opacity, and that they were locked as well.
They were; everything was locked, but he grabbed a padd that would control the apartment's settings and took it to bed with him. From there, he sighed and pushed as well as he could to get his bed to the corner. Maintenance had carefully moved his bed so that he could maneuver the wheelchair around three sides of it, but it was just in the wrong place.
Moving it took about a half hour, with lots of stops, but it was worth it. Well, sort of. He got back into bed, bundled himself into a blanket, put a pillow on the open side of the bed, and backed against the wall. Reaching an arm out, he grabbed the padd, rechecked the locks, locked the door to his actual bedroom, turned the lights all off, turned one back on, set the alarms to flash the lights as well as play a loud noise, and-
-finally figured out that wasn't quite normal. Well, shit. He didn't want to take the sleeping pills, but he'd always been able to skip a night of sleep here or there, so he turned the lights up a bit more and retrieved another padd that had log reports on it.
By the time morning rolled around, his chest ached, his eyes burned, and his hands were shaking. He'd listened to two or three neighbors go about their usual morning routines due to the fact that he absolutely couldn't not listen, although he didn't need to know what his downstairs neighbor sounded like during morning sex, or that the commander next door insisted on gargling for about five minutes straight. He sat under the spray of hot water for a while and that fixed some of the aching and burning. Coffee (half a cup) helped, too, and he made it to his 1000 physical-therapy appointment with a few minutes to spare.
Chris fell asleep while the massage therapist worked on his lower back but not deeply, and woke up maybe ten minutes later, alone in the room, with the strange ambient music just barely on the edge of his hearing. He felt like his entire body was made of lead, and still wasn't sure he was breathing to the full depth of his lungs, but he could still go on.
Lunch was uneventful; whoever'd picked it up for him managed to stick to the short list of pre-approved food with no variations. What the med center politely termed 'occupational therapy' that had nothing to do with his actual occupation (seriously, who cared that his handwriting was even more illegible than before? no one wrote anything anymore) started at 1400 and lasted until his hands started cramping.
(Goddamnit, he was an admiral now; he wasn't going to have to go diving under engineering panels and rewiring things anymore. Not that he did a ton of that before, but still.)
Another massage, and they sent him off to the pool to sit around and not swim laps until dinner. He powered through dinner, complained to Liz about the occupational therapy for half an hour while she suggested increasingly-impractical things he may wish to have his manual dexterity returned for (needlepoint, really?), and stared blankly at the vidscreen while an old holovid played.
When 0000 came around, he wheeled himself around the apartment, locked and secured everything (only twice), wrapped himself in blankets again, huddled against the wall, and-
-settled in for another night of alternately staring at the ceiling and reading increasingly-more-ludicrous things to distract himself. When he finished Anne of Green Gables at around 0630, he finally gave up, turned the lights all the way on, and went to take another shower.
Phil and Alicia were meeting him for breakfast, and that lasted about fifteen seconds before Phil asked, "How long since you last slept? Goddamnit, I should have checked on you yesterday, but you spent all day in therapy. Come on."
Alicia muttered something under her breath in Spanish that Chris probably could have understood if his brain weren't underwater, and tossed the portable parts of breakfast into a bag she pulled out of her briefcase.
"Stupid," Phil was saying under his breath, and Chris didn't know which one of them he meant. Possibly both?
A blink or two later and they were standing in front of Phil and Alicia's house; a couple minutes after that, Chris was staring at their king-sized bed with no knowledge of how he got there. "Wait, this is your bed," he said, protesting fuzzily.
"I'm well aware of that," Phil said, holding his hands out so Chris could grab them and pull himself out of the chair. When it turned out he didn't quite have the strength to do that, Phil hauled him out by himself, careful to grab his forearms and not his wrists. Ignoring Chris's protests, he sat him on the edge of the bed and ordered him to strip, helping with what he couldn't reach easily.
Chris felt like a rag doll, sort of, but considering his body was behaving like a rag doll and his mind not at all, he couldn't bring himself to care more than a token amount. When he was down to only his undershirt and underwear, Phil helped him under the covers.
"Are you going to be able to sleep now, or should I give you something to help?" Phil asked.
"I don't know," Chris said. "Your house is . . . big."
He had no idea how to explain what he meant by that, but Phil seemed to get it. "I don't know if this will help, but it's daylight and there are only three people in the house: you, me, and Alicia. Oh, and Groucho." The dog had already settled at the foot of the bed.
"That's not exactly how it works," Chris said, or tried to say, but he'd already drifted off.
He woke up once, vaguely, when Phil or Groucho shifted, just enough to realize that the warm, solid weight at his back was best-friend-doctor-trust-him, and fell back asleep almost instantly.
The next time he woke up, Groucho was licking his foot, and Alicia was sitting in the overstuffed chair in the corner, reading a padd and scribbling emendations on it with a stylus. "Stop that," he said, and both Alicia and Groucho looked up.
"Stop what?" Phil asked from behind him, and Chris rolled onto his back. "Are you awake?"
"Groucho was licking my foot," Chris said. "And I don't know if I'm awake yet." He yawned.
"That's fine," Phil said, "but I'm getting up. Groucho, down." Groucho bounced off the bed and out the door, and Phil rolled off and stood at the foot of the bed, stretching. "We've got spare bedrooms," he said, which Chris knew perfectly well as he'd stayed in them on numerous occasions since they'd bought the house twenty years ago. "I'll call your yeoman and get him to move your stuff over."
"Wait, what?" Chris said. "I'm pretty sure I have to agree before you start ordering my yeoman around." He held up one hand before Phil could say anything else. "If you start the next sentence with 'As your doctor,' I'm going to report you for malpractice."
Alicia snickered, and set her padd and stylus to the side. "Just for a few weeks, Chris," she said, "until the hyper-vigilance calms down a bit."
He winced. He hated the clinical term for what he'd been privately calling 'the crazy,' despite Liz's disapproval, almost as much as he hated, well, being hyper-vigilant. Also, he hated the fact that he didn't know if it was going to go away, as he'd always been easily awakened and he'd never done well sleeping in non-secure locations. However, if he said, 'I hate to be a bother,' Alicia would laugh at him and reassure him that he was always a bother and how would this be different? If he said 'no' flat out, Phil would probably shrug and let him not sleep for another two or three days until he agreed.
And fuck it, this was all bullshit and more than anything he'd like his goddamn brain back, even if he couldn't have his body or his ship back. He rolled over onto his side, away from both of them, in a tight ball-well, as tight as he could manage at the moment-and counted breaths. One, two, three, four in; one, two, three, four out. He was pretty sure he'd fall apart if either Phil or Alicia so much as touched him, so he was glad they didn't. They left the room quietly a few moments later.
A few minutes after that, he thought he was neither going to cry nor descend into a panic attack (motherfucking panic attacks). Maybe. He found a shirt and uniform pants, the shirt his and the pants probably actually Phil's as they didn't fit right, but his weren't within reach. The wheelchair wasn't either, but there was a padd on the bedside table and it could control the wheelchair.
Pulling himself into his chair, he thanked whatever architecture gods had influenced their housebuying such that two youngish, able-bodied people had decided to get a ranch without extraneous steps. The wheelchair did hover but he hated the bouncy feeling of going up or down stairs.
It was around 1800; he'd slept for nearly ten hours, and he definitely needed food. That is, if they had anything he could eat. He shook his head. Of course they'd have something he could eat. It was Phil.
Who, as it turned out, was in the kitchen, as was Alicia. "Hey," she said, meeting him halfway and pulling a chair along with her. "May I?"
He nodded-she meant, 'may I invade your personal space?'-and she sat, knees almost touching his.
"I'm sorry," she said, and held out a hand.
He took it and squeezed gently. She was apologizing for triggering him (and didn't that suck? A whole fucking new vocabulary to deal with his new, unwanted brain chemistry. Also, to boot, what a stupid fucking trigger) but instead he replied to her earlier comment. "No, you're right," he said, coughing when his voice came out scratchy. "I'll stay here until you get sick of me."
Phil snorted, and everything was back to normal. Or at least the new 'normal.'
* * *
A week or so after he moved in with Phil and Alicia, he was eating breakfast with them at home when Phil stretched his legs out, apparently, and kicked Chris's chair, which moved slightly.
"Whoops, sorry," Phil said. "Didn't mean to kick you."
"You didn't," Chris said, "just my chair."
Phil frowned. "No, I kicked your leg. I'm sure of it. You're wearing fleece pajama pants, lord only knows why."
"It's cold," Chris said. It was; one of San Francisco's infamous cold summer days. "And I didn't feel it." He frowned.
Phil flipped, instantly, from best-friend-housemate into doctor mode. "Back up," he said, pulling a tricorder from behind the toaster or something, and when Chris did, scanned his legs and then his head. He touched Chris's bare foot lightly, and then a little harder.
Chris shook his head.
"Fuck," Phil said. "To Medical. Don't bother dressing. One of the grafts is fucked up. Why this much later, I have no idea, but-look at me, Chris-I can fix it."
Good god, his eyes are blue, Chris thought absently. Phil wasn't Command, never wanted to be, but when he wanted someone to believe something, he could summon charisma that rivaled Chris's own. Probably would have surpassed it, if he gave a shit.
Phil held his gaze until Chris swallowed and nodded-what else could he do? He trusted Phil with his life and sanity.
Alicia, who had been holding herself perfectly still during this whole exchange-she knew better than to get in between Dr. Boyce and a patient, just as he knew better than to get between her and a witness-stood, and said, "What do you need me to do?"
"Stay here with him for a moment while I call for transport and grab some stuff."
Chris was about to protest that he didn't need a babysitter, but his ears were starting to ring, and when Alicia held out a hand, he took it silently.
* * *
There was something a little bit wrong about having brain surgery so frequently that one didn't need to go get haircuts.
* * *
Once the nerves were reattached, or whatever it was that Phil had done while poking around in his head and neck, the therapists estimated that he was only set back a couple weeks in his recovery. They'd found a new term for what was wrong with him, though-complex regional pain syndrome, which sounded like a load of bullshit but was apparently medicalese for 'your nervous system got fried and now it overreacts randomly.' They kept him in the hospital until they were satisfied with his recovery, but he moved back in with the Cortez-Boyce contingent before too long.
Nonetheless, some days were better than others.
Which was a stupid statement, but that was the only way he could put it when well-meaning acquaintances asked him how he was doing. One day he'd be at PT, thrilled to death that he could walk ten steps without collapsing. Half an hour later, he'd try to eat something like pad thai-a food he liked-and the texture of something in it, maybe the shrimp, he was never quite sure, would send him running (or, more accurately, rolling) to the bathroom to throw up and recover from whatever panic couldn't be suppressed. And that was with the maintenance drugs and cognitive-behavioral therapy and yoga and relaxation techniques and whatever else crap Starfleet Medical could shove down his throat.
Ha. Well, obviously not "shove down his throat" literally, because that was part of the reason he was there in the first place.
The low point, he supposed, other than right after he first got the memories back, and of course after he'd cried all over Liz, was probably when he found himself saying to her, in the low intense tone that was a step below total silence on the 'how pissed is Chris Pike?' scale, "Have you ever lost the only thing that mattered to you in your life?"
Apparently that was the last straw for her, because she carefully put her padd in the pocket of her oversized lab coat, stood to her full height, mere centimeters shorter than he, and said, "You have no idea, Admiral Pike, what I've had and lost."
She left, even though it was her office, and Chris sat in his chair, wondering what the hell to do now. If he'd had his full range of mobility, he'd have gone for a run, probably harder and faster than Phil would have liked, or maybe punched something (a bag, a volunteer, a wall), but those weren't options now.
(To be fair, he probably could have punched something, or put the wheelchair into old-fashioned manual mode and wheeled himself around a track, exhausting his arms if nothing else. He still didn't have a ton of energy, though, and wheelchair-running, or whatever you wanted to call it, didn't have the same kinesthetic feel as a good, hard sprint.)
Predictably, Phil showed up a few minutes later, and let the door close behind him. He sat in the chair Liz had deserted, and raised his eyebrows at Chris.
Chris pressed his lips together and didn't say anything.
"You're an asshole, you know," Phil said, a few silent minutes later.
Chris nodded once, short and sharp.
"Ever occur to you that Liz might have her own story?"
Chris shrugged. Of course it had. He figured if it were important, he'd know about it.
"Her fiance died on the Farragut. And by 'fiance' I mean 'possibly the only other human being in existence who could understand what it's like to be Liz,' being that he was blessed with the same ridiculously high scores on all the standard psi tests. She shouldn't be working with anyone at all, but I begged her to. I thought she was the only one of our PTSD specialists that you couldn't mow over."
"Gary Mitchell," Chris said, putting the pieces together. "I remember him." Mitchell had served on the Yorktown briefly, as a training run, some five or seven years ago.
"Thought you might." Phil sighed. "Look, I'm not trying to make you feel bad-no, that's not true. But I'm trying to make you feel bad about being enough of a jackass to Liz that she came to my office and apologized to me, not anything else."
Well, fuck. "She apologized to you?" Now he felt like twenty kinds of asshole, not just the usual one."Yep."
"What did you do?"
"Told her you were a dirtbag and I'd go kick your ass for her."
Chris might have laughed, except it was obvious that Phil wasn't joking. "I have no idea what I should do to make it better," he said instead.
"Oh, I don't know, apologize?" Phil said.
Chris flushed. "Well, okay, that."
"It's been ten months."
"And what," Chris said, feeling the embarrassment switch back to anger, "I'm supposed to be fixed by now? Sorry, Doctor, I'm not."
"Settle the fuck down, Chris. No, you're not supposed to be fixed. However, on the list of people you're not supposed to take out your bad days on, well, the people who are trying to help you should be near the fucking top." Phil stood, slammed his hand on Liz's desk, and immediately looked contrite when Chris flinched. "Fuck. I'm sorry."
"Yeah," Chris said, heart racing; he took a handful of gulping breaths. It's Phil, he reminded himself.
Phil closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. "Look. You know what you need to do. Do it."
He started walking to the door, but Chris stopped him with a hand to his leg. "Phil. Where is she?"
"My office," he said.
Which was a floor up and half a building over, but not that far. "Okay."
Liz was still sitting in Phil's spare chair, the cushioned one that Alicia had bought him, claiming that she was sick of eating lunch in a hard plastic chair. She looked up when Chris wheeled himself in, the faint hum of the chair probably alerting her to his identity. "Admiral Pike," she said, stiff and poker-faced. Her eyes were red and she was holding a small pile of tissues.
Well, fuck. "Dr. Dehner," he said. She was also Lieutenant Dehner, but he didn't want to imply that he held any power over her. "I came to apologize for my idiotic, thoughtless behavior." God, he sounded stuffier than usual. "I understand if you don't want to see me for a while, but for what it's worth, I'm sorry."
She gave him a watery half-smile. "And now that Admiral Pike has apologized, would Chris like to say anything?"
"Oh, Liz," he said, and held out a hand. "I knew him."
"I know," she said. "He was-he was here on Earth the last few months because of me." She took his hand, and squeezed once.
"Liz," he said again.
"I mean this in the nicest possible way, but go away, Chris. I'll see you on Thursday." She squeezed his hand again and set it in his lap.
That was the date of his next appointment, three days later. "Okay." He patted her on the shoulder lightly and left.
* * *
Time passed, in that way it did. Chris was able to walk across a room, and then in the hallway, and then down the block. Eventually, the PTs offered him a cane instead of the chair, and while he still did a lot of sitting and used the chair in the evenings, he could walk around during the day. His hands still shook most of the time, and random muscles would cramp up, but compared to paralysis, well, he'd take it.
The hyper-vigilance did, as Alicia predicted, calm down, to the point where he could move back into his own apartment. He still spent more evenings than he probably should have chez Phil and Alicia, but if nothing else, Groucho seemed to appreciate the company.
Liz had signed off on him going back to some sort of work part-time about six months after the Narada. The admiralty allowed him to teach a section of tactics, and then two sections, the next semester. He was now, apparently, a professor. Strange.
It didn't necessarily go quickly or smoothly-the number of times in a week that Phil and Alicia and Liz had to remind him not to be an asshole was staggering, especially at first. Even once he officially got out of the chair, it was only for one day out of three, and then one day in two, and then two days in three, et cetera.
And fuck, some of it was hard as hell, especially trying to overcome the food aversions. He got really sick of counseling sessions ending up with him in the bathroom, throwing up what felt like everything he'd eaten for the last month.
"Until you can eat enough to maintain a stable body weight without supplementing half your calories in a given day, no, we can't stop this," Liz said as she rubbed his back after a particularly disastrous session.
"Fuck," he said, and leaned back over the commode for another round.
* * *
The one-year anniversary of the Narada came up faster than Chris had possibly expected. The Enterprise was safely away patrolling a portion of the Neutral Zone; he was surprised, as he thought that for sure they'd want Kirk and the ship herself there for whatever sort of celebrations happened.
On the other hand, they'd never made the Kelvin baby speak at any of the memorials for that ship, so maybe someone in the 'fleet's PR department actually had a heart. The best thing for the Enterprise and her very young crew was for them to continue racking up successes out in the field, rather than being gawked at and endlessly bothered about how they felt about 'surviving.' How they felt about being the youngest crew. How they felt about saving the Federation.
On the other other hand, that meant that he was pretty much the only person on Earth who had been on the Enterprise, so of course he got asked to speak at the ceremony.
At least this time, they were smart enough to get Phil to ask him, rather than sending someone from the PR office or, worse, Komack or Barnett.
"No," he said, even before Phil finished his admittedly-embarrassed request. "Absolutely not."
"I knew you were going to say that. And so did Barnett," Phil said, and heaved a deep sigh. "Which is why he told me to remind you of all the grieving students and parents out there who want nothing more than closure, and that you are the one person who can give it to them." He rolled his eyes.
Chris rolled his, too. "Fuck," he said. It was true: appeals to think of the children! almost always got to him, and Barnett, the bastard, knew that. It was why he'd been able to bribe him into staying on Earth: You'll be helping the next generation of Starfleet officers! The Enterprise had been a pretty big inducement, but he'd been in a pretty good position to get it without having to do his time as a recruiter and professor. "All right. Ten minutes, no more."
"You can tell them that. I wash my hands of this."
Which was how he ended up giving a twenty-minute speech.
He worked on the speech the same way he'd worked on his dissertation: completely academically, forgetting that he'd known the people involved, as if he were reporting on something from the Hundred Years' War. It was a good speech; he knew it, and Alicia agreed.
He delivered the speech as if he were delivering the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. Fortunately, there were only a handful of people in the audience who knew the difference between Chris Pike performing and Chris Pike speaking honestly, and they weren't telling.
He made it through about half an hour of the reception afterward before he left. Phil followed him, thank God, and dragged him to his house rather than letting Chris go to his apartment, and busted open the good bottle of Andorian ice vodka.
Never mind that alcohol (and caffeine, and everything fun in life) was contraindicated by some of the drugs he was on. It didn't count when his physician was the one getting him drunk.
The hangover the next morning was at least as much emotional as alcohol-related.
* * *
The Enterprise was set to return on 2259.220, and it and its crew would be grounded for six months, pending some critical updates. Some of the crew would be reassigned, and the rest would be prepared for the longer mission ahead of them.
As an admiral, even though he wasn't supervising the Enterprise in any sort of way, Chris had access to the ship's logs and official reports. Although he didn't listen to the logs or read reports too regularly-it still hurt sometimes-he did keep up.
Occasionally, Dr. McCoy's name would come up in the reports, and Chris would smile. He didn't think too hard as to why.
* * *
"So Dr. McCoy will be back soon," Phil said one evening over dinner; Alicia was still at the office.
"And the rest of the Enterprise," Chris said, and forked another bite off of his tamale. He tried to keep a straight face, but was afraid he couldn't conceal the way his heart beat faster.
"Somehow I doubt you'll be as happy to see Lieutenant Scott as you will be to see McCoy."
"Lieutenant Scott didn't put my brain back together," Chris shot back.
"So it's gratitude, huh?" Phil leaned back in his chair. "Man, if I had a credit for every time one of my surgery patients wanted to get me in the sack . . . I'd have maybe a credit."
"Shut the fuck up, Phil." He said it with maybe a little too much venom.
"Chris," Phil said, gentler this time. "Consenting adults; I don't give a shit, never have. You know that."
"I suppose here you say something like, 'I just want you to be happy.'" It sounded less bitter in his head.
"Yeah, if you want me to say it."
"Don't need to." Christ, after thirty fucking years, he knew.
Phil smiled, and grabbed the bowl of refritos.
A moment later, though, Chris said, "And I call bullshit on your statistic, by the way. Gotta be a hell of a lot more than just one."
Phil just laughed.
Chris ate a few more bites and watched Phil for a moment, before saying, "You know, Phil, I'm not the only one who lost the Enterprise."
Phil looked up, spoon halfway to his mouth. "Chris," he said, setting the spoon back down, "I was only going because it was you and your dream." He smiled. "I happen to like living in my house, and I wasn't looking forward to giving Groucho back to my niece."
"Oh," Chris said. "Yeah. I knew that. I mean, I suspected. But-"
"Don't worry," Phil said. "You don't need to say it, either."
"Oh, good."
* * *
The Enterprise returned to Earth on a Monday.
Chris stood, cane in his right hand, with Phil and Alicia in the corner of the reception room, nodding at Winona Kirk as she spoke with Admiral Barnett. There was a tasteful mix of Federation and Starfleet dignitaries as well as members of the media and the occasional non-Fleet family member of the ship's crew. He recognized Spock's father Sarek in another corner, although he hadn't known the Vulcan was still on Earth. Also, he would have put half his year's salary on the fact that the girl standing with Winona, maybe ten years old and brunette, with a familiar cast to her face and an even more familiar accent, was Dr. McCoy's daughter Joanna.
Before too long, though, the people of the hour showed up, dress uniforms and all-the command crew of the Enterprise. Admiral Barnett officially welcomed them back in possibly the shortest speech the man had ever given in his life, and then he stepped aside to let friends and family members swarm them.
Chris watched, a fond smile on his face, as Jim hugged his mother; the girl was confirmed as Joanna McCoy as she jumped into her father's arms and hugged him for all she was worth. He didn't recognize the woman in commander's stripes who greeted Lieutenant Sulu, but she was most likely his mother, based on her age and their resemblance. Spock and Sarek bowed at each other.
His overacute hearing caught his name, and he looked up to see Winona gesturing to his corner. "You've been spotted," Phil said with a laugh.
"Oh, no," Chris deadpanned, and grinned as Jim loped over to him, Winona trailing in his wake.
"Admiral Pike, oh my god, you're walking! I mean-" Jim stopped, straightened, and said, "Good to see you, sir. Thank you for coming to meet us. I'm glad to see you in such good health."
"It's good to see you as well, Captain Kirk," Chris said gravely, and then laughed, because Jim's imitation of a sober command tone was just that-an imitation. "Wasn't a year of command supposed to settle you down?"
Jim's bright grin flashed, and he said, "I'm just a little light-headed from the change in elevation."
"Good one," Phil said. "Hi, Winona."
"Good to see you, Phil, Alicia, Chris."
"No, really, Jim," Chris said, after smiling at Winona again, "I've only heard good things about you this last year. Congratulations." He switched hands on the cane and held out his right hand, and Jim took it, giving it a quick downward shake before releasing it.
"Thanks, Admiral Pike. That-means quite a lot, as you might guess." Jim blinked, looked over at his mother for a second, and then smiled again.
Joanna McCoy suddenly appeared between Winona and Jim, and Chris was struck by how much she did resemble her father. The hair was maybe curlier, but the eyes and face shape were definitely his.
"Hey, Jo," Jim said. "Have you met Admiral Pike yet?"
'Jo' shook her head and tried to hide behind Winona.
"Hi, there," Chris said politely. He liked kids-other people's-but unlike Phil, who also had no kids, he never quite knew what to say to them, and ten-year-olds were about the most difficult for him. He had no idea if he was supposed to hold out a hand for her to shake or just avoid all that since he was pretty much old enough to be her grandfather.
"Hi," she said, almost inaudibly.
"Jo? Where'd you-oh, there you are," came a familiar voice, although one he hadn't heard for a full year. McCoy joined their little group and said, "Hello, Commander Kirk," to Winona as he put a hand on his daughter's shoulder. "I apol-oh."
Oh, indeed. Damn, McCoy looked good in the dress uniform, even if there was a reddish line above his collar indicating that he'd been tugging at it. "Dr. McCoy," Chris said, when the silence had stretched on for a few seconds longer than necessary.
"Admiral Pike," McCoy said. "Sir. Good to see you. Thank you for coming to meet us."
"Had to make sure that you hadn't broken my ship," Chris said, trying to joke but probably failing.
"My ship," Jim said under his breath, and that broke the spell.
Chris looked over at Jim and caught a glimpse of Joanna's face. Eyes wide, she looked simultaneously fascinated and horrified. Crap, he thought. "She was mine first, Jim, but I'm glad that you have her now." He smiled, and Jim smiled back. "I still ask Captain One about my ship, and I haven't commanded the Yorktown in, what, five years now?"
"I don't care who Number One has as a CMO," Phil said. "It's still my Sickbay."
Everyone laughed.
Later, Chris had no idea if it was a conspiracy, but he found himself sitting at a cafe-style table with only the company of Dr. McCoy. The silence hovered between comfortable and uncomfortable for a few minutes, and then Dr. McCoy said, "I understand by the rules of polite society, I'm not supposed to comment on this, but as Jim apparently also said something earlier, I'll take my chances. Admiral Pike, it is so good to see you walking again."
"Thank you," Chris said, an automatic response. "Actually," he said a moment later, "I should be thanking you, since I'm sure I never did."
"No need," McCoy said stiffly. "It's my job."
Chris shook his head. "That's not how it works," he said. "You've been in Starfleet long enough-a doctor long enough-to know that."
"True enough," McCoy said. "It doesn't mean I expect to hear it."
"Nonetheless," Chris said, and turned to face McCoy more squarely. "Dr. McCoy, thank you so much. Without your phenomenal skill, I don't know if I'd be alive, let alone walking occasionally."
McCoy blinked a couple of times and swallowed once, hard, before he said, "You're welcome, Admiral Pike."
Chris had the strangest urge to smile, and not in the pleasant-acknowledgment sort of way. No, he could feel the world's goofiest grin trying to spread across his face, and he was only partially successful in suppressing it.
McCoy smiled back, hesitantly, and then he turned, frowning, a moment later. "Is that-Excuse me, admiral," he said, and stood, walking quickly away.
Chris followed his movements and saw-were Jim and Joanna throwing grapes at each other? Surely not.
* * *
When the reception had ended and he and Phil and Alicia were walking out of the building, Alicia said what Chris had been dreading for the last hour. "So, when did that happen?"
"When did what happen?" he asked, feigning ignorance.
"You and the good doctor."
Phil cleared his throat, and Alicia patted him on the shoulder. "You're the best doctor."
Chris snorted, and Alicia rolled her eyes. "Answer my question," she said.
"I thought lawyers never asked a question unless they already knew the answer," he said.
"That's true," she said, "but humor me anyway."
"Nothing happened," Chris said. "Nothing's going to happen."
"Why the hell not?" Alicia asked.
Chris stopped, turned to her, and raised an eyebrow.
"Oh, please," she said, with a dismissive gesture. "You're clearly smitten; he's clearly smitten. Go for it."
"Alicia, dear, you know the only person in existence who loves you more than I do is Phil, but can we please not discuss this?"
She looked as if she were about to say something else, but didn't; instead, she nodded, and said, "Yeah. Okay. How are classes going?"
The conversation turned, but it couldn't block the voice in the back of his head saying, Smitten! on auto-repeat.
Late at night, of course, the questions came back: sure, the voice said, other people may think McCoy looks 'smitten' or whatever, and sure, you look better than you did a year ago, but is there any possible way he's going to want to deal with all the shit that comes with being with you?
And fuck if he could answer that.
Back to Master Post | Back to Part 1 | On to Part 3