Your Broken Cartography
Fandom: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series
Rating: FRT, for language and violence.
Pairing: Chekov/Sulu
Length: ~2,500 words
Summary: Pavel is injured on an away mission, and Hikaru is sent to pilot the shuttle to rescue him.
The communicators still work.
The transporter won't. They can't beam down or up again without getting scrambled by the dense ionosphere. The away team only got down to the surface by shuttlecraft, and are reliant upon Chekov and his old-fashioned cartography to navigate them back to the landing zone to leave.
But the communicators are quantum, and work just fine despite the plasma cloud surrounding the planet, so the bridge crew can hear every agonizing moment with perfect clarity. Mhasalkar’s furious breathing. Cowden’s panicked sobs. McDonald saying, "He's gonna die, oh my god, there's too much blood," and Security Officer Mathis shouting, "I don't see them! Jesus, fuck, I can’t see them! We've got to get out of here!"
The desperate, wet, gasping sound when Pavel breathes.
The bridge is a flurry of activity and shouted updates. Spock is scanning the planet’s surface, attempting to identify their position; Uhura is replaying the audio feed to figure out what happened. The Captain is trying to hold the away team together by force of will alone: to shock Mhasalkar and Cowden out of their stupor, to keep Mathis calm, to get McDonald to do her fucking job and keep Pavel alive.
Hikaru does-nothing.
He stares at Pavel’s bio-monitor screen, which is flashing red and warning ‘Severe Trauma: Medical Assistance Required.’ Pavel’s heart rate pitches wildly, and his oxygen-saturation drops, and Hikaru feels like his own nervous system is tethered somehow with Pavel’s, quantum-entangled, because his own heart is thundering in his ears and he can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.
The audio channel from Pavel’s communicator is open on his console, and Hikaru listens to every frantic, shallow pull of air, to the raspy quality of his breath as Pavel chokes around his own blood. Hikaru would be sick, if he knew how, but he doesn’t. So instead he swallows it all down, every toxic second, because it’s all he can do.
He doesn’t know how to do anything except continue to exist in this interminable, devastating moment.
Pavel makes a noise: high-pitched, keening, a terrified, trembling whine, and it rips through Hikaru like a physical blow, shriveling in his gut. Hikaru never wanted to know Pavel could make that sound. He can’t live in a world where Pavel could be made to make a sound like that, so Hikaru just-shuts down.
He can’t.
He can’t.
This is what dying feels like. Not the things that Pavel is feeling-because Pavel suffering can’t be allowed to be real, in this universe or any other-but having to listen. To sit here, with his hands gripping bone-white at the edges of the console, and count out the breaths that are rapidly thinning, the choked sobs, the tremulous whimpers of shock and grief that Hikaru never ever wants to hear again, except that he would gladly listen to them a thousand times over just to know that Pavel is the one making them.
He bears witness to all these things, knowing-knowing-that he can’t soothe him. He can’t push the damp curls off Pavel’s forehead and kiss his brow and shush these horrible sounds and tell him everything will be alright, that he loves him and that this is not their end and they still have so many amazing things to see and do together, and to say it all until Pavel believes it.
Pavel is lying in the dirt somewhere on this alien planet, alone and afraid, and Hikaru-
This. This is Death, lodged in his chest and rattling his rib bones and laughing at his frail, pathetic heart.
"Sulu. Sulu! I need you to fly down there and pick up my away team. Can you do that? Lieutenant Sulu, look at me. I need you to go down there and bring Chekov back. Can you do that for me?"
“Aye, sir.”
Pavel wasn’t even supposed to be on the away team.
Santiago from Geosciences was supposed to be the cartographer. Hikaru had seen him pouring over topographical maps in the briefing room, talking excitedly with Commander Spock and Ensign Cowden, making notes of the best survey locations. But he reported to medical just an hour before scheduled departure with a fever-the flu-and since the advance reconnaissance team had found no evidence of hostile lifeforms, and since Pavel had assisted in selecting a landing zone and preparing the topography maps, he was assigned as replacement.
They hadn’t walked to the transporter room together. They hadn’t kissed goodbye, or done any of the thousands of other things Hikaru would have done if he’d known.
Hikaru had been on shift, and so he’d just waved and smiled as Pavel disappeared into the turbolift.
“No evidence of hostile lifeforms.”
Right.
They don’t patch Pavel’s comm transmission to the shuttle.
The security team is briefed by Kirk and then put into direct communication with Mathis, who is the commanding officer of the away team. Doctor McCoy is in constant audio contact with Ensign McDonald, the field medic, who is certainly working on Pavel, and Hikaru assumes by the fact that he’s still shouting directions that Pavel isn’t dead yet, but he can’t hear any of her side of the conversation.
From the cockpit, Hikaru speaks only to Commander Spock, who sends him all the available data on the atmospheric currents and thermal gradients he’s flying through, and Lieutenant Darwin. Darwin sends him coordinates for the extraction point and, a moment later, a suggested course correction banking past one of the planet’s violent Hadley convection cells to boost the shuttlecraft speed.
Hikaru feels like he’s made of stone. He stares at the nav-marker blinking and hovering over the terrain map like it’s his still-beating heart, somehow displaced from his chest. If he can just get it back, maybe he will come alive again.
If he can’t, it won’t matter.
There’s no landing zone at the extraction point; it’s dense jungle. Security suits up in repelling gear, and Hikaru hovers the shuttle just over the tree canopy as they disappear into the foliage.
“He’s still alive,” McCoy offers into the silence, “But it’s-bad.” Hikaru feels disconnected from his news, as though they’re talking about someone he doesn’t know. McCoy watches him with an unreadable expression, and Hikaru feels blank, too. Mechanical and flat. “I’m going to have to start working on him as soon as he’s in. And I don’t know whether to ask you to fly steady or to fly fast.”
Hikaru nods. “I can do that.”
“Which?”
“Both.”
McCoy looks skeptical. “You weren’t so steady on the way down.”
“I didn’t have Chekov on the way down.”
Hikaru is the best pilot in all of Starfleet, but a pilot is only as good as his navigator. And Pavel- Pavel is his navigator. Pavel is he best damn navigator in Starfleet. So if Pavel needs him to fly fast and true, Hikaru will. He will. He doesn’t know how to not give Pavel what he needs.
The security team signals that they’ve made contact with the away team. Hikaru primes the engines.
Cowden and Mhasalkar are both onboard first, breathless from exertion but largely unharmed except for some scrapes and bruises. Then Dodson and Stefan, and Lundgren, and Mathis, with some kind of long-stemmed, calcified dart buried in his shoulder. McDonald is bleeding from gash on her forehead and has tear-tracks cutting through the grime on her face.
And then-Pavel.
Pavel, whose hair is matted with blood and grime, whose skin is waxy and grey. He sags lifelessly onto the floor, unresponsive to all the activity around him. There are almost a dozen of those darts riddling his body: his chest, his neck, his hands. It tears through Hikaru bodily, violently. That someone did this to Pavel. Pavel. Who never looked at the universe with anything but awe.
Those eyes are open, now, and unseeing, and Hikaru- Hikaru-
Hikaru shuts down again. Like a bulb has burnt out inside him. Or maybe exploded.
Pavel’s first away mission was on Kalathia-5. He was part of the science detail sent to take readings and perhaps speculate on the formation of the planet’s anomalously strong internal magnetic dynamo. Hikaru had not, at that time, recognized the nature of his feelings for Pavel, and-out of a misplaced spirit of ‘brotherly protectiveness’-he’d volunteered to be part of the security detail.
To Hikaru the planet was depressingly dull. He preferred flora and fauna to barren, irradiated rocks. And while an aurorae event on Kalathia-5 would have been truly spectacular, they had arrived during the nadir of the Kalathian solar cycle and would have no opportunity to see one.
But to Pavel-who had spent so many months with only the Enterprise to explore-everything was remarkable. He dissolved into raptures at each scientific turn, marveling at the temperature of geothermal events and the polarity layers embedded in soil samples. Hikaru had trailed after Pavel for hours, just listening to him babble.
Toward the end of the expedition Chekov was called over by two of the other science officers, Simmons and d’Avie, to verify some tricorder readings. “We’re not sure what it is. It appears to be a signal of some kind. A periodic transmission.”
Pavel had hummed interestedly, and peered over the tricorder. His face lit up. “Oh! Oh! I know this! May I?” He’d fiddled with the modes on the tricorder until a crackle of static burst out, and then tuned the signal slightly. An ethereal, electronic kind of chirping erupted from the speaker.
“Is this-music?” Simmons asked. “This planet doesn’t support life. How-”
“Not music, no. It’s-mmm, what do you call it? ‘Whistler,’ I think? Yes: whistler waves. From lightning in the atmosphere. Very cool, yes?”
The tricorder sang out another series of pinging chirps. “They’re kinda creepy,” d’Avie confessed.
Hikaru had silently agreed. But Pavel stood next to him, beaming up at the sky in unrestrained awe like the universe was made of nothing but boundless cosmic wonder, and Hikaru couldn’t help himself. He wanted Pavel to stay that way forever: never afraid, always smiling out into the black and so sure that everything staring back was good and bright and amazing.
So instead Hikaru had said, “No, I think they’re beautiful.” And Pavel had grinned at him like he knew, even before Hikaru did, that Hikaru was actually talking about him.
There are eleven of those darts buried in Pavel: darts with long, hollow stems like straws, designed to let the lifeblood seep right out of you.
Pavel needs Med Bay, and he needs a pilot that can get him there. He needs steady and fast; he needs faster; he needs right now.
So Hikaru gives it to him.
“Lieutenant Sulu, you are off-course. I repeat: You are off-course.”
“I’m not. Captain-“
“Your course heading is vertical.“
“It’s the shortest path, sir.”
“Fuck! Sulu, you can’t lose it, you-“
“It’s the shortest fucking path! We break the ionosphere, you beam them off this shuttle.”
The surgery lasts eleven hours.
Pavel’s heart stops three times. Hikaru actually cries the third time, in big, useless jags, even though McCoy gets it going again, because he’s so hollow inside. He sinks to the floor and presses his forehead to his knees and cries-and cries and cries and cries, so long that it aches-because Pavel has already gone. He’s gone and he’s taken Hikaru’s heart with him, but left his body behind.
“Don’t leave me,” he sobs, and he doesn’t know whether he means ‘don’t leave’ or ‘take me with you,’ or if there’s a difference anymore.
One of the nurses gives him something, and Hikaru doesn’t sleep, but he drifts emotionlessly for a while.
When he’s finally allowed in, they’ve washed the dirt and the blood from Pavel’s face, and he’s so pale and ashen without it that he doesn’t look real. Hikaru’s hands hover over him, unsure whether he’s real or safe to touch at all. He didn’t think he would be able to, for so long, that he’s afraid.
He draws a chair up beside the bed.
Pavel’s heartbeat is steady, and slow; his breathing is measured. McCoy says he’s passed through the worst of it. Hikaru thanks him, and McCoy only scoffs and leaves.
Hikaru is quiet for a long moment, simply staring. He reaches up and brushes Pavel’s curls out of his eyes, tucks back some of the loose ones over his ear. He lets his fingers skim over Pavel’s face, and the bandages on his chest, relearning this land. Finally he takes Pavel’s uninjured hand in his own, cradling it like it is something precious, because it is.
“Please,” Hikaru asks. His voice is toneless and broken, so in this respect, he and Pavel are alike: they are both unrecognizable. “Please. I don’t know how to follow you, sometimes. I don’t know how to go the places you go. I want to, Pavel, but-“ He shakes his head, and runs his thumb over Pavel’s knuckles. “You have to show me the way, alright?”
Hikaru holds Pavel’s hand against his heart, as though he could summon him back with this. The empty chasm in his chest where nothing lives, unless Pavel will come back to him and make his heart work again.
“Please,” he whispers again, softly. “Show me how to see the universe like you do.”
Hikaru sleeps with his head by Pavel’s shoulder, and dreams of starfields and erupting nebulae and great galaxies that pinwheel beneath him. Pavel unfolds the universe like a map and plots Hikaru a course connecting their two hearts, and Hikaru flies.
Optional, unplanned coda.
NOTE: Written for Chulu Week 2013, Day 3 Challenge: "Angst."
Rating: FRT, for language and violence.
Pairing: Chekov/Sulu
Length: ~2,500 words
Summary: Pavel is injured on an away mission, and Hikaru is sent to pilot the shuttle to rescue him.
The communicators still work.
The transporter won't. They can't beam down or up again without getting scrambled by the dense ionosphere. The away team only got down to the surface by shuttlecraft, and are reliant upon Chekov and his old-fashioned cartography to navigate them back to the landing zone to leave.
But the communicators are quantum, and work just fine despite the plasma cloud surrounding the planet, so the bridge crew can hear every agonizing moment with perfect clarity. Mhasalkar’s furious breathing. Cowden’s panicked sobs. McDonald saying, "He's gonna die, oh my god, there's too much blood," and Security Officer Mathis shouting, "I don't see them! Jesus, fuck, I can’t see them! We've got to get out of here!"
The desperate, wet, gasping sound when Pavel breathes.
The bridge is a flurry of activity and shouted updates. Spock is scanning the planet’s surface, attempting to identify their position; Uhura is replaying the audio feed to figure out what happened. The Captain is trying to hold the away team together by force of will alone: to shock Mhasalkar and Cowden out of their stupor, to keep Mathis calm, to get McDonald to do her fucking job and keep Pavel alive.
Hikaru does-nothing.
He stares at Pavel’s bio-monitor screen, which is flashing red and warning ‘Severe Trauma: Medical Assistance Required.’ Pavel’s heart rate pitches wildly, and his oxygen-saturation drops, and Hikaru feels like his own nervous system is tethered somehow with Pavel’s, quantum-entangled, because his own heart is thundering in his ears and he can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.
The audio channel from Pavel’s communicator is open on his console, and Hikaru listens to every frantic, shallow pull of air, to the raspy quality of his breath as Pavel chokes around his own blood. Hikaru would be sick, if he knew how, but he doesn’t. So instead he swallows it all down, every toxic second, because it’s all he can do.
He doesn’t know how to do anything except continue to exist in this interminable, devastating moment.
Pavel makes a noise: high-pitched, keening, a terrified, trembling whine, and it rips through Hikaru like a physical blow, shriveling in his gut. Hikaru never wanted to know Pavel could make that sound. He can’t live in a world where Pavel could be made to make a sound like that, so Hikaru just-shuts down.
He can’t.
He can’t.
This is what dying feels like. Not the things that Pavel is feeling-because Pavel suffering can’t be allowed to be real, in this universe or any other-but having to listen. To sit here, with his hands gripping bone-white at the edges of the console, and count out the breaths that are rapidly thinning, the choked sobs, the tremulous whimpers of shock and grief that Hikaru never ever wants to hear again, except that he would gladly listen to them a thousand times over just to know that Pavel is the one making them.
He bears witness to all these things, knowing-knowing-that he can’t soothe him. He can’t push the damp curls off Pavel’s forehead and kiss his brow and shush these horrible sounds and tell him everything will be alright, that he loves him and that this is not their end and they still have so many amazing things to see and do together, and to say it all until Pavel believes it.
Pavel is lying in the dirt somewhere on this alien planet, alone and afraid, and Hikaru-
This. This is Death, lodged in his chest and rattling his rib bones and laughing at his frail, pathetic heart.
"Sulu. Sulu! I need you to fly down there and pick up my away team. Can you do that? Lieutenant Sulu, look at me. I need you to go down there and bring Chekov back. Can you do that for me?"
“Aye, sir.”
Pavel wasn’t even supposed to be on the away team.
Santiago from Geosciences was supposed to be the cartographer. Hikaru had seen him pouring over topographical maps in the briefing room, talking excitedly with Commander Spock and Ensign Cowden, making notes of the best survey locations. But he reported to medical just an hour before scheduled departure with a fever-the flu-and since the advance reconnaissance team had found no evidence of hostile lifeforms, and since Pavel had assisted in selecting a landing zone and preparing the topography maps, he was assigned as replacement.
They hadn’t walked to the transporter room together. They hadn’t kissed goodbye, or done any of the thousands of other things Hikaru would have done if he’d known.
Hikaru had been on shift, and so he’d just waved and smiled as Pavel disappeared into the turbolift.
“No evidence of hostile lifeforms.”
Right.
They don’t patch Pavel’s comm transmission to the shuttle.
The security team is briefed by Kirk and then put into direct communication with Mathis, who is the commanding officer of the away team. Doctor McCoy is in constant audio contact with Ensign McDonald, the field medic, who is certainly working on Pavel, and Hikaru assumes by the fact that he’s still shouting directions that Pavel isn’t dead yet, but he can’t hear any of her side of the conversation.
From the cockpit, Hikaru speaks only to Commander Spock, who sends him all the available data on the atmospheric currents and thermal gradients he’s flying through, and Lieutenant Darwin. Darwin sends him coordinates for the extraction point and, a moment later, a suggested course correction banking past one of the planet’s violent Hadley convection cells to boost the shuttlecraft speed.
Hikaru feels like he’s made of stone. He stares at the nav-marker blinking and hovering over the terrain map like it’s his still-beating heart, somehow displaced from his chest. If he can just get it back, maybe he will come alive again.
If he can’t, it won’t matter.
There’s no landing zone at the extraction point; it’s dense jungle. Security suits up in repelling gear, and Hikaru hovers the shuttle just over the tree canopy as they disappear into the foliage.
“He’s still alive,” McCoy offers into the silence, “But it’s-bad.” Hikaru feels disconnected from his news, as though they’re talking about someone he doesn’t know. McCoy watches him with an unreadable expression, and Hikaru feels blank, too. Mechanical and flat. “I’m going to have to start working on him as soon as he’s in. And I don’t know whether to ask you to fly steady or to fly fast.”
Hikaru nods. “I can do that.”
“Which?”
“Both.”
McCoy looks skeptical. “You weren’t so steady on the way down.”
“I didn’t have Chekov on the way down.”
Hikaru is the best pilot in all of Starfleet, but a pilot is only as good as his navigator. And Pavel- Pavel is his navigator. Pavel is he best damn navigator in Starfleet. So if Pavel needs him to fly fast and true, Hikaru will. He will. He doesn’t know how to not give Pavel what he needs.
The security team signals that they’ve made contact with the away team. Hikaru primes the engines.
Cowden and Mhasalkar are both onboard first, breathless from exertion but largely unharmed except for some scrapes and bruises. Then Dodson and Stefan, and Lundgren, and Mathis, with some kind of long-stemmed, calcified dart buried in his shoulder. McDonald is bleeding from gash on her forehead and has tear-tracks cutting through the grime on her face.
And then-Pavel.
Pavel, whose hair is matted with blood and grime, whose skin is waxy and grey. He sags lifelessly onto the floor, unresponsive to all the activity around him. There are almost a dozen of those darts riddling his body: his chest, his neck, his hands. It tears through Hikaru bodily, violently. That someone did this to Pavel. Pavel. Who never looked at the universe with anything but awe.
Those eyes are open, now, and unseeing, and Hikaru- Hikaru-
Hikaru shuts down again. Like a bulb has burnt out inside him. Or maybe exploded.
Pavel’s first away mission was on Kalathia-5. He was part of the science detail sent to take readings and perhaps speculate on the formation of the planet’s anomalously strong internal magnetic dynamo. Hikaru had not, at that time, recognized the nature of his feelings for Pavel, and-out of a misplaced spirit of ‘brotherly protectiveness’-he’d volunteered to be part of the security detail.
To Hikaru the planet was depressingly dull. He preferred flora and fauna to barren, irradiated rocks. And while an aurorae event on Kalathia-5 would have been truly spectacular, they had arrived during the nadir of the Kalathian solar cycle and would have no opportunity to see one.
But to Pavel-who had spent so many months with only the Enterprise to explore-everything was remarkable. He dissolved into raptures at each scientific turn, marveling at the temperature of geothermal events and the polarity layers embedded in soil samples. Hikaru had trailed after Pavel for hours, just listening to him babble.
Toward the end of the expedition Chekov was called over by two of the other science officers, Simmons and d’Avie, to verify some tricorder readings. “We’re not sure what it is. It appears to be a signal of some kind. A periodic transmission.”
Pavel had hummed interestedly, and peered over the tricorder. His face lit up. “Oh! Oh! I know this! May I?” He’d fiddled with the modes on the tricorder until a crackle of static burst out, and then tuned the signal slightly. An ethereal, electronic kind of chirping erupted from the speaker.
“Is this-music?” Simmons asked. “This planet doesn’t support life. How-”
“Not music, no. It’s-mmm, what do you call it? ‘Whistler,’ I think? Yes: whistler waves. From lightning in the atmosphere. Very cool, yes?”
The tricorder sang out another series of pinging chirps. “They’re kinda creepy,” d’Avie confessed.
Hikaru had silently agreed. But Pavel stood next to him, beaming up at the sky in unrestrained awe like the universe was made of nothing but boundless cosmic wonder, and Hikaru couldn’t help himself. He wanted Pavel to stay that way forever: never afraid, always smiling out into the black and so sure that everything staring back was good and bright and amazing.
So instead Hikaru had said, “No, I think they’re beautiful.” And Pavel had grinned at him like he knew, even before Hikaru did, that Hikaru was actually talking about him.
There are eleven of those darts buried in Pavel: darts with long, hollow stems like straws, designed to let the lifeblood seep right out of you.
Pavel needs Med Bay, and he needs a pilot that can get him there. He needs steady and fast; he needs faster; he needs right now.
So Hikaru gives it to him.
“Lieutenant Sulu, you are off-course. I repeat: You are off-course.”
“I’m not. Captain-“
“Your course heading is vertical.“
“It’s the shortest path, sir.”
“Fuck! Sulu, you can’t lose it, you-“
“It’s the shortest fucking path! We break the ionosphere, you beam them off this shuttle.”
The surgery lasts eleven hours.
Pavel’s heart stops three times. Hikaru actually cries the third time, in big, useless jags, even though McCoy gets it going again, because he’s so hollow inside. He sinks to the floor and presses his forehead to his knees and cries-and cries and cries and cries, so long that it aches-because Pavel has already gone. He’s gone and he’s taken Hikaru’s heart with him, but left his body behind.
“Don’t leave me,” he sobs, and he doesn’t know whether he means ‘don’t leave’ or ‘take me with you,’ or if there’s a difference anymore.
One of the nurses gives him something, and Hikaru doesn’t sleep, but he drifts emotionlessly for a while.
When he’s finally allowed in, they’ve washed the dirt and the blood from Pavel’s face, and he’s so pale and ashen without it that he doesn’t look real. Hikaru’s hands hover over him, unsure whether he’s real or safe to touch at all. He didn’t think he would be able to, for so long, that he’s afraid.
He draws a chair up beside the bed.
Pavel’s heartbeat is steady, and slow; his breathing is measured. McCoy says he’s passed through the worst of it. Hikaru thanks him, and McCoy only scoffs and leaves.
Hikaru is quiet for a long moment, simply staring. He reaches up and brushes Pavel’s curls out of his eyes, tucks back some of the loose ones over his ear. He lets his fingers skim over Pavel’s face, and the bandages on his chest, relearning this land. Finally he takes Pavel’s uninjured hand in his own, cradling it like it is something precious, because it is.
“Please,” Hikaru asks. His voice is toneless and broken, so in this respect, he and Pavel are alike: they are both unrecognizable. “Please. I don’t know how to follow you, sometimes. I don’t know how to go the places you go. I want to, Pavel, but-“ He shakes his head, and runs his thumb over Pavel’s knuckles. “You have to show me the way, alright?”
Hikaru holds Pavel’s hand against his heart, as though he could summon him back with this. The empty chasm in his chest where nothing lives, unless Pavel will come back to him and make his heart work again.
“Please,” he whispers again, softly. “Show me how to see the universe like you do.”
Hikaru sleeps with his head by Pavel’s shoulder, and dreams of starfields and erupting nebulae and great galaxies that pinwheel beneath him. Pavel unfolds the universe like a map and plots Hikaru a course connecting their two hearts, and Hikaru flies.
Optional, unplanned coda.
NOTE: Written for Chulu Week 2013, Day 3 Challenge: "Angst."