'A friendship that will define you both. A great cost.'
"How do you chose not to feel?" His brilliant blue eyes stared up at me. Already fading. Already losing the life within.
Emotions. I could feel them. All those years of denying any kind of emotion would finally take their toll. I gritted the teeth. The endless, dull pain growing in the pit of my stomach, the resting place of my soul.
I could not be weak. I had to be strong. For him. For Captain James Tiberius Kirk.
There was a raging torrent of emotions flying around my head, smashing into each other and intensifying them as the chain reaction caused a nuclear explosion of anger, grief, horror and most of all, heartbreak.
I blamed myself. I blamed myself for not being able to save him. I blamed myself for not being able to open the door.
"I do not know. Right now I am failing." A single, solitary tear ran down my face. I hadn't cried when my mother died. But this was different. This was... This was Jim. Jim who would not be here in a matter of seconds.
That tear. That single tear, held every emotion a man could possess in his lifetime. The tear was human by its very nature.
"I want you to know why I couldn't let you die. Why I went back for you." The expression on his face was more distressing than anything. He was fighting. Fighting until the last second. Always wanting the last word. Fighting with his last ever breath. But that was Jim. That was Jim all over.
"Because you are my friend." The last words to ever enter his ears. The last he would hear.
It wasn't supposed to be Jim. It was never supposed to be Jim. I had to stop it. I had to stop him from dying. Stop him from feeling pain. Stop him from believing that he still had a chance of survival. He couldn't survive that. Nobody could.
I put my hand up to the cold glass that separated us. Would always separate us. Even when his body was retrieved. He spent the last moments of his life alone. I made the Vulcan salute. I hoped that it would bring him some kind of comfort. Jim copied the salute.
I stared at him. Into him. Through him. I wondered what he was thinking. How terrified he was. How alone he felt. Even with me there.
I couldn't blink. I was clinging onto the last ever images of James Tiberius Kirk I would ever get to see. But I wasn't sure that that was how I wanted to remember him. He was going to die a hero. He had saved the ship. But he was still dying what he believed to be a coward's death.
'The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.' Or the one.
Jim took his last breath. And then he was staring at a world he was no longer a part of. His hand fell away. But he was falling through endless white space before it had even fallen to his side.
I let out the breath I was holding in. With it poured all of the things I could have said to Jim. All the things I was going to tell him when the time was right. But there was no time. His clock had struck its final chime.
My raging fury was like that of a hunter: silent for a few seconds, but then all at once it tore its way into my numb and pained body screaming the name of the man who was single-handedly responsible for his death.
Khan.