(Mirrorverse) One Down, One to Go

[iron_command]

Everything was ready to go, packaged up as tightly as he could manage without the benefit of having his stronger first officer to help him haul it. Pike had only glanced once across his quarters, many fond memories there. He had a small package to help with those memories tucked into his packs, something that had been difficult to acquire without

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[behnd_blueyes]

Eyes dim with the sedatives McCoy had given him were not dull enough that they didn't register the room's new occupant. Kirk sat huddled on the bed, knees to his chest and arms looped around them, swimming in the uniform that had been replaced but not re-sized. It strained his muscles but he didn't touch the wall unless he had to. The walls were alive. Or something. Hadn't worked that out yet, but he wasn't taking any chances. He'd been careful not to let on how much strength he had regained, until he made it to the door of the iso room one day and was repelled by whatever had eaten that corpse in the brig. They'd covered his hand and he'd screamed silently as they crept up his arm, his vocal cords raw and unpracticed, until he'd stumbled backwards and they flowed back to wherever the fuck they'd come from

[iron_command]

Pike stepped forward, letting the door close behind him. He studied the after effects of McCoy's care as it sat like a shivering pup in the wind on the biobed in front of him. Kirk looked more animal than human, but that was little different than normal. Kirk had an animal's cunning and intelligence, mixed with human knowledge that made him a deadly opponent.

His steps were loud in the silence of the room, only the faint sound from the biobed reading out Kirk's life in the form of statics. Pike imagined to McCoy those sounds were music, speaking to him words that only a doctor would truly understand and only a sadist would enjoy. At least, only in this universe. He well imagined that in the other it would be quite a different story.

Kirk resembled a waif, an animal, but Pike would not underestimate him. An animal cornered such as this was far more likely to lash out without warning. "Kirk."

[behnd_blueyes]

There was something about the tilt of Pike's head, about the unblinking stare, that would always put Kirk in mind of a bar in Iowa. Even when he least wanted to remember that night and everything it had brought. Kirk didn't move. Let him think he was too weak to. Let him think what he wanted. Let him get close enough. He couldn't hear the the beeps anymore. Even if they hadn't wormed their way into his subconscious, the rush of sluggish blood in his ears would have drowned them out.

Let Pike think he'd been beaten. That there wasn't anything left of James T. Kirk in this shell he barely recognized as his own.

"Pike," he drawled, his voice dry as the buzz of the field he'd tried to force his hand through, back when he'd had enough strength to fight being put in the brig. It hurt, deep in his throat, just like everything else did.

[iron_command]

"Better than those sounds you were making when we scraped you off the floor of the brig," Pike drawled right back, confident and strong and controlled to Kirk's angry eyes and curled posture. "McCoy's pulled off a miracle again." There had been a while he was not sure if Kirk would become anything like human again, but McCoy had things well in hand.

"Has he been taking good care of you?" His voice and expression remained neutral, but he knew just what McCoy was capable of. It was almost like a scent in the room left behind, an electrical feeling just at the edge of the consciousness.