There were times when he'd wondered if he'd ever left the Nexus. Times when he'd thought he'd imagined Picard and his death. When he'd died - if he had died - he'd been focused on his friends. Scotty, Uhura, Bones, and most of all Spock who had been and always shall be his friend. After he'd passed, he'd thought he'd been following Spock considering some of the things he had seen, but he couldn't be too sure, as he'd drifted in and out on occasion much as he had back in the Nexus, awakening to find himself somewhere new.
Lately, as he'd followed his friend, he'd felt as if he were being pulled in two different directions. Sometimes he'd catch a glimpse of a desert world, and others, he'd catch sight of over-bright corridors that somehow managed to feel like home to him, though he couldn't say why. Today, he'd found himself in a place that looked like a bunch of engineers had been turned loose in a brewery, a place where theoretical designs from the engineering publications from his youth had been made real.
Something caught his focus, something heart-rendingly familiar. A radiation warning and hands pressed against glass. One half-Vulcan and one human, trying to reach out to the other, to comfort the other, to say everything that couldn't be said in words.
"The ship, is it safe?"
A last exchange between friends, disturbing in its finality even though it had proved in the end not to be forever like they had thought that day. Words of comfort, words of hope for a dying friend, grief. The voice offering them wrong somehow.
A scream of "Khhhhhhaaaaaaaaaan!" filled with rage and fury that went far beyond the anger of a captain stranded away from his threatened ship unable to help his crew who could be dying without him, unable to help the cadets who'd only signed on for a training exercise and found themselves in the middle of an old fight that wasn't theirs.
The voice isn't his.
The world that he'd been drifting through snaps into sharp focus.
Blue shirt. Blue...
Spock.
Beyond the glass behind which Spock had once trapped himself long ago, saving a crippled ship...Himself.
"Jim, I am and always shall be your friend..."
I'm sorry Spock. I'm sorry. You should not have had to face this.