On Gossamer Wings
Fandom: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series
Rating: FRT, for language.
Pairing: Chekov/Sulu
Length: ~3,500 words
Summary: Pavel is mortal. Hikaru is not. Their love transcends.
It’s the scarf that catches Pavel’s eye.
His world is featureless, grey: faded concrete buildings and muddied snowbanks and the long march of indiscriminate, weather-beaten faces that flood the sidewalk. Pavel has walked this route to work a thousand times before, and the colorless landscape has never had anything to offer him. But today, as if by some act of divine providence, Pavel glances up from his tea and sees a flash of sunlight dance in his periphery.
It’s a scarf: woven in brilliant golden yellow the color of sunrise.
Pavel’s eyes follow it, marveling at this wonder that has brought life to his bleak landscape. The owner is moving away, but Pavel sees dark hair, a thick black coat, and that scarf trailing behind him like a banner drawn wild in the wind. That scarf-with its untempered color, untouched by this dreary world-burns like a firebird against the sky, igniting something that has lain dormant within Pavel for so many years.
It's a siren song, and Pavel feels himself being swept out to sea in its wake, and he goes willingly.
“Wait,” he calls out to the man’s retreating back. He has no pretense to stop him, no excuse that would sound sane to any ears, even Pavel’s own. But he has to. It’s a raw and elemental need: to know the man that would wear this scarf. “Wait, please!”
Pavel reaches out and catches his shoulder, and the man turns beneath his hands. Their eyes meet. Pavel’s thoughts falter and shudder out of him, and that first, electric moment of connection sparks into a breathless eternity between them.
Pavel is staring into starlight.
He sees the bursting creation of stars, and the slow pinwheeling of galaxies, and the endless, unfathomable expanse of space in those eyes. It’s like standing on the edge of infinity. Pavel trembles. He trembles, and this man-inside whom something encompassing and unearthly and beautiful exists-trembles alongside him. Somehow they are experiencing this moment of revelation together, held pinned in place by their mutually reflected awe, and it's frightening, and gripping, and they neither can look away.
“Who-“ Pavel breathes. Because he needs to know; he needs.
But someone collides with his shoulder. Pavel spills tea down his shirtfront in a long, scalding streak, and he only looks away for a moment, but the enchantment is broken. When he looks up the man has gone.
Pavel cranes to see between the crush of bodies on the busy sidewalk, searching. He needs just another glimpse. Just one more, he pleads, even as he knows that once more would never be enough, that he could spend entire lifetimes staring into those dark eyes and never drink his fill. But the crowd thins, and the man is gone as though he had never existed, except for this:
There’s a puddle of golden fabric lying on the ground-a scarf. Pavel picks it up and runs his fingers through the soft weave. He’s almost surprised to find that he can touch it, that it doesn’t dissolve into a shower of light beneath his hands. He presses the fabric to his cheek and breathes in, and though it’s ridiculous to think so, Pavel is certain that he knows exactly what it smells like.
It smells of stardust.
Pavel wears the scarf all day, and it’s like being wrapped in sunshine.
The smell clings to him. It’s slightly earthy and slightly electric, but mostly just clean: like newborn stars, still full of vigor and radiance and promise. It fills his head with wild daydreams of swimming through space, and he imagines his arms spread wide, soaring over galaxies and banking around black holes and letting his toes skim the tops of nebulae. He’s so dizzy with it that he can’t focus on work at all, and he leaves early with a stack of journals under his arm, hoping that he’ll find his focus at home.
He doesn’t.
His apartment looks sterile in a way that it never has before, and Pavel feels removed from everything in it. Something fundamental has shifted in his world; it’s like he’s been blind all his life and now he’s finally been shown color, and nothing will ever look the same again. He eats, and cleans, and makes a half-hearted attempt at reading the journals, but it feels meaningless in comparison to that snatch of sunlight that’s draped and waiting on the coatrack.
Pavel pulls out his own scarf and lays it beside the stranger’s. Pavel’s is a black tartan, worn threadbare by all the years of use since his mother gave it to him, and he loves it dearly, the way that he loves anything that reminds him of her. He runs his fingers through both, feeling the softness of their respective fabrics and comparing them, but Pavel can't find any reason why this scarf is superior to any other, except for the obvious reason that it was his.
He twines the scarves together, as if they, too, feel the loneliness of their separation, and then-embarrassed by his own foolish sentimentality-retires to bed.
He lies awake for several hours that evening, staring out the window at the black sky and the dizzying, spinning dance of the stars. When he closes his eyes, Pavel sees those eyes staring back at him again: dark and fathomless and yet somehow warm, looking as awestruck with the idea of Pavel as Pavel certainly felt in return.
He wonders where the stranger is now. He wonders if it is possible for man to know the stars the way that he had seemed to, or if it was all in Pavel’s imagining, a product of so many long, lonely nights with only his engines and equations. Above all, he wonders if the stranger is thinking of Pavel as Pavel is thinking of him, or if-as must surely be the case-Pavel is just as featureless and uninteresting to him as everyone else seems to Pavel.
He has to see him again. This man who can rekindle so much hope and wonderment in Pavel-he has to know whether there was something real behind those eyes, and whether there is a possibility for Pavel to share in it.
He rolls onto his side and stares out the muted warmth of the scarf, made dim but not dull in the darkness, and reaches a decision.
The night air is frigid, full of the seeping cold that has haunted Pavel all his life, but today he has been made warm again by possibility. He steps out onto his small balcony overlooking the city and-running his fingers through the soft fabric one last time-ties the stranger’s scarf off onto the railing. It whips gently in the wafting breeze, waving down to the street below like a beckoning arm. Pavel arranges a thick, glass-ensconced candle beneath it, giving that golden fabric some light to shine, and thinks, Let him see. Let him see it and come to me.
A gust of wind cuts through him, chasing down the back of his exposed neck and chilling him to the bone. Pavel wraps his arms around himself and looks up at the stars.
Or if he can’t come to me, let him at least be warm.
Pavel dreams.
In his dream, there’s a man standing silhouetted on his balcony. His face is turned away; he is only visible limned in guttering candlelight, but Pavel knows-in the way that you know things in dreams-that his eyes are mirrors reflecting the endless cosmos that cartwheel above him.
The man reaches out so softly, so hesitantly, to touch a length of golden fabric that’s become tangled on the balcony rail. He treats this fabric with reverence, as though it has been made a precious and sacred artifact by the time it spent near to Pavel's skin. He lets it wash against his fingers, then pulls it up and cradles the fabric against his face.
Pavel asks, in a voice thick with sleep, “What does it smell like?” But the candle goes out.
It must be a dream, because the golden-yellow scarf is still there in the morning, arcing gracefully on a lazy breeze. Pavel tries not to let his disappointment show.
He occupies himself with searching for his own tartan scarf, which has curiously gone missing.
Pavel tries to return to his routine.
He drinks his tea, and never sees anyone of note while walking to work, and buries himself in his research with at least an imitation of his usual enthusiasm. No one at the laboratory comments on the fact that Pavel’s old tartan scarf has been replaced with a soft, warm yellow instead, or that the same scarf can be seen hanging from one of the hundreds of indiscriminate apartment balconies any evening the stars are out.
He wants to convince himself that he imagined it all. It isn’t healthy the way he’s become fixated. Sometimes he’ll turn his head too quickly and imagine that he’s seen a flash of dark hair in his periphery, but there’s never anything there, and his heart beats itself into a wearying frenzy every time. But the smell is the one thing that Pavel can’t explain, can’t rationalize away: how it will drift across him when he’s alone-faint, otherworldly-and his stomach will twist savagely in his gut, and he’s torn his office apart half a dozen times trying to root out the source, but there’s never anything more than shadows.
So he doesn’t stop wearing the scarf, because he can’t quite let go of that hope. But he tries for normalcy, and patience.
He’s working late one evening-from home, brewing tea on the stove and puzzling over some unoptimized fuel-mixing rates-when it happens: the quality of the air changes, just ever so slightly, and the hairs on the back of Pavel’s neck rise, and, finally, like an exhalation of held breath, the faint taste of stardust.
Pavel knows that if he looks, now, there will be nothing there, so he doesn’t look. Instead he stands with deliberate slowness and begins to methodically dim all the lights in the apartment until there’s only flickering flamelight from the candle. This is safe, he thinks, and-holding his breath-Pavel slowly turns and glances up at the wall.
There is his shadow: gangly, and still awkward from youth, his curly hair mussed from so many hours dragging his fingers through it in frustration.
And beside his shadow: another one.
Pavel lets out a shaky laugh, and can’t contain the relieved smile that washes over his face. So he didn’t imagine it. He’s very careful not to turn his head, not to scare this fragile moment away as he studies the shadows on the wall. The second shadow is taller than his own, and its posture is more dignified. It’s staring forward, too, as though he’s just as afraid to look at Pavel as Pavel is to look at him.
They’re standing close: seemingly shoulder-to-shoulder. Tentatively, Pavel reaches out until the shadows of their hands are touching. The shadow’s fingers convulse.
“Hello,” Pavel whispers into the silence. The second shadow doesn’t speak, but its shoulders move as though it, too, is breathing in this moment. Hesitantly, Pavel continues: “Can I-look?”
The shadow doesn’t answer with words, but Pavel feels a real touch at his hand, and when he looks down there’s a solid hand, and an arm, and a whole full-bodied person standing beside him, looking down and gently twining his fingers with Pavel’s. The stranger looks surprised by his own boldness.
There’s a black-tartan scarf, familiarly threadbare, wrapped around the man’s neck, and Pavel reaches up slowly, gently, to touch it, understanding now the reverence that he’d seen the silhouette on the balcony show before. This scarf has been made a sacred thing by virtue of being worn by this person. Pavel gently tucks the ends of the scarf in, close, and the stranger’s eyes follow this movement and then slide up to Pavel’s face.
The smile that Pavel gives is radiant, beaming, like the sun brought down to earth. Happiness swells in his heart in such abundance that he's certain it will spill out of him and fill the room with light.
“You’re wearing my scarf,” Pavel says.
The stranger shrugs, looking a little guilty and self-conscious, but also hopeful.
“I’m glad.” Pavel twines the fingers of their free hands together. “I didn’t want you to be cold.”
The stranger doesn’t speak.
Pavel is reasonably sure that he avoids the written word by choice, preferring to communicate through looks and gentle touches, but that the lack of verbal speech is involuntary. Pavel asks him for his name and the stranger moves his mouth in answer, and then huffs in frustration when no sound comes out. They spend several minutes assembling an (at least passingly decent) facsimile of his name by guessing the syllables piecewise.
Hikaru. Pavel says it over and over again to himself, grinning more broadly each time. Hikaru, Hikaru, Hikaru.
Hikaru resolutely avoids answering any of Pavel’s most meaningful questions. ‘What are you? Where did you come from? Why are you here?’ Instead, he prods Pavel into speaking about himself, and Pavel spends an hour talking about his work with rockets and his hope to one day reach space. Hikaru seems enchanted just listening to him speak, which makes Pavel feel both embarrassed and deeply gratified.
The apartment turns chill as they talk. Pavel pours them both hot tea and brings a blanket out from the bedroom so that they can tuck their legs together underneath it and keep warm. As an afterthought, he steps out onto the balcony and retrieves the scarf from where he’d again tied it. He tries to give it back, but Hikaru firmly refuses. The third time that Pavel protests, Hikaru takes the scarf from him and wraps it around Pavel’s neck, tucking the ends into his sweatshirt with the same deliberate carefulness that Pavel had shown.
Pavel watches this with stunned awe.
Before he can help himself, he asks, “Why me? Why would you-“ His voice goes hoarse with emotion, and then breaks. He swallows thickly. “Why would someone like you ever see me? I’m--nobody. Nothing.”
Hikaru looks at Pavel with a pitying smile. His mouth moves, silently, and then pinches in frustration when Pavel doesn’t understand. Hikaru retrieves the candle from the kitchen table and places it between them. He presses one hand to Pavel’s chest, where his heart lives, and then takes that same hand and lifts the candle. He cradles both hands around the flame like it’s a precious thing, then he lifts those hands up to Pavel’s face and hovers them to either side of his head.
“I’m like a candle?” Pavel asks.
Hikaru huffs a sigh, and then leans forward and kisses Pavel’s forehead.
Pavel goes to work, but he must leave his head behind, because he doesn't have a thought for science all day. He doesn’t need rockets to see space, anymore; he looks at Hikaru and knows the universe. He floats through the hours thinking of the feel of Hikaru’s hand in his own, and how his breath smelled like a meteor shower, and the crooked way he’d smiled when Pavel asked ‘Why?’ like, ‘Are you stupid? Can’t you see how perfect you are to me?’
Pavel doesn’t know how to not love Hikaru, so he won’t even try. He’s perfect. It’s all perfect.
Everything is perfect.
He’s mugged on the way home. They take the money in his wallet, and then put a gun to his chest, and shoot.
“Hikaru,” Pavel cries. “Hikaru.”
And he’s there. He’s there, between one breath and the next, kneeling beside Pavel and hovering his hands like he doesn’t know what to do with them, doesn’t know where to put them that won’t cause pain. He’s pale-faced, horrified, and when Pavel looks into his eyes this time he doesn’t see starlight, he sees star death; he sees the end of everything in a fiery mess of gravity and friction and shattering, world-rending force.
Hikaru takes Pavel’s hand and cradles it against his cheek. Pavel tries to draw back, because he’ll get blood on Hikaru’s perfect, flawless face, but Hikaru won’t let him. His mouth moves in a constant litany, saying nothing that Pavel can hear, but he doesn’t have to hear it to understand.
“I’m so sorry.” Pavel swallows thickly, his mouth dry. He swipes his thumb against Hikaru cheek, bloodstains be damned. “I’ve ruined you, haven’t I? I never should have stopped you in that street. If I hadn’t, then you’d never- Then you’d never have to feel this.”
Hikaru shakes his head, forcibly, puts both hands to Pavel’s face and leans over him and cries in great, silent jags. No, he shakes his head, no.
“I love you. I love you. And I’m sorry that I’ve ruined you. But for me-” Pavel swallows again, his voice thickening with grief. “Hikaru, you have to know that for me it was worth it. Even for just- We didn't have enough time, but it was worth it.”
Hikaru kisses Pavel’s brow, and shakes, and kisses him again, and he takes Pavel’s hands in his own and presses them to Hikaru’s chest, where he can feel his heartbeat. I love you, I love you, I love you. Then Hikaru sits up, away from Pavel. He looks stricken, and also determined, and he stares down at Pavel with a small, anguished smile on his face and starts to pull.
Something is happening. Pavel can feel heat blooming in Hikaru’s chest, sickly hot, too hot, and Hikaru’s face twists in pain. He howls out a long, silent note, and Pavel blinks up at him, horrified. “No, no, Hikaru what are you doing, Hikaru, stop.” But Hikaru pulls, and the heat emerges from his body in the form of glowing bright, purple-blue gossamer. It’s like a galaxy in liquid form, and it coalesces out of Hikaru’s chest in a sticky web, and Hikaru’s pain pitches in a tidal wave and his scream breaks through and shatters.
The sound echoes, then fades, and Hikaru collapses in on himself in a hunch of shoulders. But when he looks up at Pavel he’s smiling beatifically, indifferent to the pain that must be writ through every inch of him. He says, “Pavel.” And then again, “Pavel. Pavel. Pavel.”
“Hikaru, no,” Pavel cries, pleading with him to undo this thing. “What have you done. What have you done.” Because he didn’t want this, he never wanted this. Hikaru has ripped out some part of his self, and it’s strung there between their tangled fingers, and Pavel can’t, Pavel can’t, he would rather die.
“You weren’t meant for the ground, Pavel,” Hikaru says, and he leans down to press a dry kisses to Pavel’s open, gasping mouth. “You were wasted here."
"If I weren't meant for the ground, God would have given me wings."
"Maybe that's why I’m here. So that you can have my mine.”
“I don’t want them! Hikaru, no!” Pavel is dying; he’s dying, in more ways than one. His frustration salts his skin, and he beats his fists against Hikaru’s chest, weakly, desperate that this will not be the last thing he sees.
But Hikaru still smiles. “We are ageless, Pavel. We are infinite. Don’t you feel it? We are meant for so much more. I was so afraid, at first. I thought- But don’t you see? The very last stars to light this universe will be singing songs to us. So don’t be afraid.” Hikaru smiles, through his own tears, and kisses Pavel again. “Because this is not our end. There is no place you can go-no course you can chart through the whole sky-that I will not follow, to be with you.”
Tear tracks stream down Pavel’s face, and he swallows, thickly. “Okay. Okay, then I will-” His voice trembles. He sniffles. “Then I will wait for you.”
Hikaru kisses him, and then he presses that ball of gossamer heat into Pavel’s chest, and Pavel rattles and comes undone.
“I wanted to live this life with you.”
“The next one. The next one.”
Somewhere, someday, Pavel Andreievich Chekov reaches over the console and shakes hands with Hikaru Sulu. They smile at each other, like, ‘Space, huh? Pretty crazy.’ And Pavel thinks, privately, that the command gold is very flattering on him.
CREDIT: This was written for star-ensign as part of Follower Appreciation: Holiday 2013. The request was: "Star-crossed lovers AU. One character is an angel, the other a human. They find each other and fall in love. And it´s christmas time!" Title comes from the song "Just One of Those Things," written by Cole Porter, which is in no way thematically related to this piece.
NOTES: This one was hard for me to write. I struggled, and I think it really shows, even in the finished product. The narrative is dense, and unwieldy, and the plot is probably horrible. I apologize for not pulling together something better, but I simply ran out of time. (I'm also going slightly cross-eyed from staring at the computer, so this is probably laden with typos.)
Rating: FRT, for language.
Pairing: Chekov/Sulu
Length: ~3,500 words
Summary: Pavel is mortal. Hikaru is not. Their love transcends.
It’s the scarf that catches Pavel’s eye.
His world is featureless, grey: faded concrete buildings and muddied snowbanks and the long march of indiscriminate, weather-beaten faces that flood the sidewalk. Pavel has walked this route to work a thousand times before, and the colorless landscape has never had anything to offer him. But today, as if by some act of divine providence, Pavel glances up from his tea and sees a flash of sunlight dance in his periphery.
It’s a scarf: woven in brilliant golden yellow the color of sunrise.
Pavel’s eyes follow it, marveling at this wonder that has brought life to his bleak landscape. The owner is moving away, but Pavel sees dark hair, a thick black coat, and that scarf trailing behind him like a banner drawn wild in the wind. That scarf-with its untempered color, untouched by this dreary world-burns like a firebird against the sky, igniting something that has lain dormant within Pavel for so many years.
It's a siren song, and Pavel feels himself being swept out to sea in its wake, and he goes willingly.
“Wait,” he calls out to the man’s retreating back. He has no pretense to stop him, no excuse that would sound sane to any ears, even Pavel’s own. But he has to. It’s a raw and elemental need: to know the man that would wear this scarf. “Wait, please!”
Pavel reaches out and catches his shoulder, and the man turns beneath his hands. Their eyes meet. Pavel’s thoughts falter and shudder out of him, and that first, electric moment of connection sparks into a breathless eternity between them.
Pavel is staring into starlight.
He sees the bursting creation of stars, and the slow pinwheeling of galaxies, and the endless, unfathomable expanse of space in those eyes. It’s like standing on the edge of infinity. Pavel trembles. He trembles, and this man-inside whom something encompassing and unearthly and beautiful exists-trembles alongside him. Somehow they are experiencing this moment of revelation together, held pinned in place by their mutually reflected awe, and it's frightening, and gripping, and they neither can look away.
“Who-“ Pavel breathes. Because he needs to know; he needs.
But someone collides with his shoulder. Pavel spills tea down his shirtfront in a long, scalding streak, and he only looks away for a moment, but the enchantment is broken. When he looks up the man has gone.
Pavel cranes to see between the crush of bodies on the busy sidewalk, searching. He needs just another glimpse. Just one more, he pleads, even as he knows that once more would never be enough, that he could spend entire lifetimes staring into those dark eyes and never drink his fill. But the crowd thins, and the man is gone as though he had never existed, except for this:
There’s a puddle of golden fabric lying on the ground-a scarf. Pavel picks it up and runs his fingers through the soft weave. He’s almost surprised to find that he can touch it, that it doesn’t dissolve into a shower of light beneath his hands. He presses the fabric to his cheek and breathes in, and though it’s ridiculous to think so, Pavel is certain that he knows exactly what it smells like.
It smells of stardust.
Pavel wears the scarf all day, and it’s like being wrapped in sunshine.
The smell clings to him. It’s slightly earthy and slightly electric, but mostly just clean: like newborn stars, still full of vigor and radiance and promise. It fills his head with wild daydreams of swimming through space, and he imagines his arms spread wide, soaring over galaxies and banking around black holes and letting his toes skim the tops of nebulae. He’s so dizzy with it that he can’t focus on work at all, and he leaves early with a stack of journals under his arm, hoping that he’ll find his focus at home.
He doesn’t.
His apartment looks sterile in a way that it never has before, and Pavel feels removed from everything in it. Something fundamental has shifted in his world; it’s like he’s been blind all his life and now he’s finally been shown color, and nothing will ever look the same again. He eats, and cleans, and makes a half-hearted attempt at reading the journals, but it feels meaningless in comparison to that snatch of sunlight that’s draped and waiting on the coatrack.
Pavel pulls out his own scarf and lays it beside the stranger’s. Pavel’s is a black tartan, worn threadbare by all the years of use since his mother gave it to him, and he loves it dearly, the way that he loves anything that reminds him of her. He runs his fingers through both, feeling the softness of their respective fabrics and comparing them, but Pavel can't find any reason why this scarf is superior to any other, except for the obvious reason that it was his.
He twines the scarves together, as if they, too, feel the loneliness of their separation, and then-embarrassed by his own foolish sentimentality-retires to bed.
He lies awake for several hours that evening, staring out the window at the black sky and the dizzying, spinning dance of the stars. When he closes his eyes, Pavel sees those eyes staring back at him again: dark and fathomless and yet somehow warm, looking as awestruck with the idea of Pavel as Pavel certainly felt in return.
He wonders where the stranger is now. He wonders if it is possible for man to know the stars the way that he had seemed to, or if it was all in Pavel’s imagining, a product of so many long, lonely nights with only his engines and equations. Above all, he wonders if the stranger is thinking of Pavel as Pavel is thinking of him, or if-as must surely be the case-Pavel is just as featureless and uninteresting to him as everyone else seems to Pavel.
He has to see him again. This man who can rekindle so much hope and wonderment in Pavel-he has to know whether there was something real behind those eyes, and whether there is a possibility for Pavel to share in it.
He rolls onto his side and stares out the muted warmth of the scarf, made dim but not dull in the darkness, and reaches a decision.
The night air is frigid, full of the seeping cold that has haunted Pavel all his life, but today he has been made warm again by possibility. He steps out onto his small balcony overlooking the city and-running his fingers through the soft fabric one last time-ties the stranger’s scarf off onto the railing. It whips gently in the wafting breeze, waving down to the street below like a beckoning arm. Pavel arranges a thick, glass-ensconced candle beneath it, giving that golden fabric some light to shine, and thinks, Let him see. Let him see it and come to me.
A gust of wind cuts through him, chasing down the back of his exposed neck and chilling him to the bone. Pavel wraps his arms around himself and looks up at the stars.
Or if he can’t come to me, let him at least be warm.
Pavel dreams.
In his dream, there’s a man standing silhouetted on his balcony. His face is turned away; he is only visible limned in guttering candlelight, but Pavel knows-in the way that you know things in dreams-that his eyes are mirrors reflecting the endless cosmos that cartwheel above him.
The man reaches out so softly, so hesitantly, to touch a length of golden fabric that’s become tangled on the balcony rail. He treats this fabric with reverence, as though it has been made a precious and sacred artifact by the time it spent near to Pavel's skin. He lets it wash against his fingers, then pulls it up and cradles the fabric against his face.
Pavel asks, in a voice thick with sleep, “What does it smell like?” But the candle goes out.
It must be a dream, because the golden-yellow scarf is still there in the morning, arcing gracefully on a lazy breeze. Pavel tries not to let his disappointment show.
He occupies himself with searching for his own tartan scarf, which has curiously gone missing.
Pavel tries to return to his routine.
He drinks his tea, and never sees anyone of note while walking to work, and buries himself in his research with at least an imitation of his usual enthusiasm. No one at the laboratory comments on the fact that Pavel’s old tartan scarf has been replaced with a soft, warm yellow instead, or that the same scarf can be seen hanging from one of the hundreds of indiscriminate apartment balconies any evening the stars are out.
He wants to convince himself that he imagined it all. It isn’t healthy the way he’s become fixated. Sometimes he’ll turn his head too quickly and imagine that he’s seen a flash of dark hair in his periphery, but there’s never anything there, and his heart beats itself into a wearying frenzy every time. But the smell is the one thing that Pavel can’t explain, can’t rationalize away: how it will drift across him when he’s alone-faint, otherworldly-and his stomach will twist savagely in his gut, and he’s torn his office apart half a dozen times trying to root out the source, but there’s never anything more than shadows.
So he doesn’t stop wearing the scarf, because he can’t quite let go of that hope. But he tries for normalcy, and patience.
He’s working late one evening-from home, brewing tea on the stove and puzzling over some unoptimized fuel-mixing rates-when it happens: the quality of the air changes, just ever so slightly, and the hairs on the back of Pavel’s neck rise, and, finally, like an exhalation of held breath, the faint taste of stardust.
Pavel knows that if he looks, now, there will be nothing there, so he doesn’t look. Instead he stands with deliberate slowness and begins to methodically dim all the lights in the apartment until there’s only flickering flamelight from the candle. This is safe, he thinks, and-holding his breath-Pavel slowly turns and glances up at the wall.
There is his shadow: gangly, and still awkward from youth, his curly hair mussed from so many hours dragging his fingers through it in frustration.
And beside his shadow: another one.
Pavel lets out a shaky laugh, and can’t contain the relieved smile that washes over his face. So he didn’t imagine it. He’s very careful not to turn his head, not to scare this fragile moment away as he studies the shadows on the wall. The second shadow is taller than his own, and its posture is more dignified. It’s staring forward, too, as though he’s just as afraid to look at Pavel as Pavel is to look at him.
They’re standing close: seemingly shoulder-to-shoulder. Tentatively, Pavel reaches out until the shadows of their hands are touching. The shadow’s fingers convulse.
“Hello,” Pavel whispers into the silence. The second shadow doesn’t speak, but its shoulders move as though it, too, is breathing in this moment. Hesitantly, Pavel continues: “Can I-look?”
The shadow doesn’t answer with words, but Pavel feels a real touch at his hand, and when he looks down there’s a solid hand, and an arm, and a whole full-bodied person standing beside him, looking down and gently twining his fingers with Pavel’s. The stranger looks surprised by his own boldness.
There’s a black-tartan scarf, familiarly threadbare, wrapped around the man’s neck, and Pavel reaches up slowly, gently, to touch it, understanding now the reverence that he’d seen the silhouette on the balcony show before. This scarf has been made a sacred thing by virtue of being worn by this person. Pavel gently tucks the ends of the scarf in, close, and the stranger’s eyes follow this movement and then slide up to Pavel’s face.
The smile that Pavel gives is radiant, beaming, like the sun brought down to earth. Happiness swells in his heart in such abundance that he's certain it will spill out of him and fill the room with light.
“You’re wearing my scarf,” Pavel says.
The stranger shrugs, looking a little guilty and self-conscious, but also hopeful.
“I’m glad.” Pavel twines the fingers of their free hands together. “I didn’t want you to be cold.”
The stranger doesn’t speak.
Pavel is reasonably sure that he avoids the written word by choice, preferring to communicate through looks and gentle touches, but that the lack of verbal speech is involuntary. Pavel asks him for his name and the stranger moves his mouth in answer, and then huffs in frustration when no sound comes out. They spend several minutes assembling an (at least passingly decent) facsimile of his name by guessing the syllables piecewise.
Hikaru. Pavel says it over and over again to himself, grinning more broadly each time. Hikaru, Hikaru, Hikaru.
Hikaru resolutely avoids answering any of Pavel’s most meaningful questions. ‘What are you? Where did you come from? Why are you here?’ Instead, he prods Pavel into speaking about himself, and Pavel spends an hour talking about his work with rockets and his hope to one day reach space. Hikaru seems enchanted just listening to him speak, which makes Pavel feel both embarrassed and deeply gratified.
The apartment turns chill as they talk. Pavel pours them both hot tea and brings a blanket out from the bedroom so that they can tuck their legs together underneath it and keep warm. As an afterthought, he steps out onto the balcony and retrieves the scarf from where he’d again tied it. He tries to give it back, but Hikaru firmly refuses. The third time that Pavel protests, Hikaru takes the scarf from him and wraps it around Pavel’s neck, tucking the ends into his sweatshirt with the same deliberate carefulness that Pavel had shown.
Pavel watches this with stunned awe.
Before he can help himself, he asks, “Why me? Why would you-“ His voice goes hoarse with emotion, and then breaks. He swallows thickly. “Why would someone like you ever see me? I’m--nobody. Nothing.”
Hikaru looks at Pavel with a pitying smile. His mouth moves, silently, and then pinches in frustration when Pavel doesn’t understand. Hikaru retrieves the candle from the kitchen table and places it between them. He presses one hand to Pavel’s chest, where his heart lives, and then takes that same hand and lifts the candle. He cradles both hands around the flame like it’s a precious thing, then he lifts those hands up to Pavel’s face and hovers them to either side of his head.
“I’m like a candle?” Pavel asks.
Hikaru huffs a sigh, and then leans forward and kisses Pavel’s forehead.
Pavel goes to work, but he must leave his head behind, because he doesn't have a thought for science all day. He doesn’t need rockets to see space, anymore; he looks at Hikaru and knows the universe. He floats through the hours thinking of the feel of Hikaru’s hand in his own, and how his breath smelled like a meteor shower, and the crooked way he’d smiled when Pavel asked ‘Why?’ like, ‘Are you stupid? Can’t you see how perfect you are to me?’
Pavel doesn’t know how to not love Hikaru, so he won’t even try. He’s perfect. It’s all perfect.
Everything is perfect.
He’s mugged on the way home. They take the money in his wallet, and then put a gun to his chest, and shoot.
“Hikaru,” Pavel cries. “Hikaru.”
And he’s there. He’s there, between one breath and the next, kneeling beside Pavel and hovering his hands like he doesn’t know what to do with them, doesn’t know where to put them that won’t cause pain. He’s pale-faced, horrified, and when Pavel looks into his eyes this time he doesn’t see starlight, he sees star death; he sees the end of everything in a fiery mess of gravity and friction and shattering, world-rending force.
Hikaru takes Pavel’s hand and cradles it against his cheek. Pavel tries to draw back, because he’ll get blood on Hikaru’s perfect, flawless face, but Hikaru won’t let him. His mouth moves in a constant litany, saying nothing that Pavel can hear, but he doesn’t have to hear it to understand.
“I’m so sorry.” Pavel swallows thickly, his mouth dry. He swipes his thumb against Hikaru cheek, bloodstains be damned. “I’ve ruined you, haven’t I? I never should have stopped you in that street. If I hadn’t, then you’d never- Then you’d never have to feel this.”
Hikaru shakes his head, forcibly, puts both hands to Pavel’s face and leans over him and cries in great, silent jags. No, he shakes his head, no.
“I love you. I love you. And I’m sorry that I’ve ruined you. But for me-” Pavel swallows again, his voice thickening with grief. “Hikaru, you have to know that for me it was worth it. Even for just- We didn't have enough time, but it was worth it.”
Hikaru kisses Pavel’s brow, and shakes, and kisses him again, and he takes Pavel’s hands in his own and presses them to Hikaru’s chest, where he can feel his heartbeat. I love you, I love you, I love you. Then Hikaru sits up, away from Pavel. He looks stricken, and also determined, and he stares down at Pavel with a small, anguished smile on his face and starts to pull.
Something is happening. Pavel can feel heat blooming in Hikaru’s chest, sickly hot, too hot, and Hikaru’s face twists in pain. He howls out a long, silent note, and Pavel blinks up at him, horrified. “No, no, Hikaru what are you doing, Hikaru, stop.” But Hikaru pulls, and the heat emerges from his body in the form of glowing bright, purple-blue gossamer. It’s like a galaxy in liquid form, and it coalesces out of Hikaru’s chest in a sticky web, and Hikaru’s pain pitches in a tidal wave and his scream breaks through and shatters.
The sound echoes, then fades, and Hikaru collapses in on himself in a hunch of shoulders. But when he looks up at Pavel he’s smiling beatifically, indifferent to the pain that must be writ through every inch of him. He says, “Pavel.” And then again, “Pavel. Pavel. Pavel.”
“Hikaru, no,” Pavel cries, pleading with him to undo this thing. “What have you done. What have you done.” Because he didn’t want this, he never wanted this. Hikaru has ripped out some part of his self, and it’s strung there between their tangled fingers, and Pavel can’t, Pavel can’t, he would rather die.
“You weren’t meant for the ground, Pavel,” Hikaru says, and he leans down to press a dry kisses to Pavel’s open, gasping mouth. “You were wasted here."
"If I weren't meant for the ground, God would have given me wings."
"Maybe that's why I’m here. So that you can have my mine.”
“I don’t want them! Hikaru, no!” Pavel is dying; he’s dying, in more ways than one. His frustration salts his skin, and he beats his fists against Hikaru’s chest, weakly, desperate that this will not be the last thing he sees.
But Hikaru still smiles. “We are ageless, Pavel. We are infinite. Don’t you feel it? We are meant for so much more. I was so afraid, at first. I thought- But don’t you see? The very last stars to light this universe will be singing songs to us. So don’t be afraid.” Hikaru smiles, through his own tears, and kisses Pavel again. “Because this is not our end. There is no place you can go-no course you can chart through the whole sky-that I will not follow, to be with you.”
Tear tracks stream down Pavel’s face, and he swallows, thickly. “Okay. Okay, then I will-” His voice trembles. He sniffles. “Then I will wait for you.”
Hikaru kisses him, and then he presses that ball of gossamer heat into Pavel’s chest, and Pavel rattles and comes undone.
“I wanted to live this life with you.”
“The next one. The next one.”
Somewhere, someday, Pavel Andreievich Chekov reaches over the console and shakes hands with Hikaru Sulu. They smile at each other, like, ‘Space, huh? Pretty crazy.’ And Pavel thinks, privately, that the command gold is very flattering on him.
CREDIT: This was written for star-ensign as part of Follower Appreciation: Holiday 2013. The request was: "Star-crossed lovers AU. One character is an angel, the other a human. They find each other and fall in love. And it´s christmas time!" Title comes from the song "Just One of Those Things," written by Cole Porter, which is in no way thematically related to this piece.
NOTES: This one was hard for me to write. I struggled, and I think it really shows, even in the finished product. The narrative is dense, and unwieldy, and the plot is probably horrible. I apologize for not pulling together something better, but I simply ran out of time. (I'm also going slightly cross-eyed from staring at the computer, so this is probably laden with typos.)