Anomaly
Summary: Kirk meets a woman nobody else can see. He might also just be hallucinating.
Genre: Mystery
Pairings (implied): KirkxMcCoy, SpockxUhura
Disclaimer: None of those cuties belong to me, unfortunately.
Author's Note: 'tis happens when I spend internet-less time watching and re-watching and re-watching my meager Dvd collection. Also, gotta love Memory-Alpha.
The first time he saw her he was pretty sure he was hallucinating. He was hurt and in pain, even with his ridiculous pain threshold. There was adrenaline pumping through his veins and some sort of medication rampaging through his body, thanks to Bones' recent hypo – no thanks for its deliverance though. He had been awake for roughly 70 hours by that point, had fought against two hostile armies on a ridiculously hostile planet, broken his arm twice, fractured his other shoulder, gotten shot, stabbed and hanged – exactly in that order, though he got saved after dangling on the rope for about one second – before having to direct a battle from his captain's seat, negotiating a peace treaty with the same bastards who had done all the previously mentioned things to him in the first place and getting into a fight with Bones about his karma – and diet.
Which was why he silently demanded to be given some slack, not that hallucinations were common for him, but they were bound to happen at some point in his crazy life. However, he would have expected something more...profound. Like his father telling him wise words, maybe even Pike instead of his father, he wouldn't mind that much. Or another traveler from the future with news that would barely score a 5 on his scale of weirdness-that-happened-everyday-to-people-named-Jim-Kirk.
What he did not expect however was the sleek, silver clad woman staring at him from a tiny gap in the hallway. Her gaze was intent – and silver – as she watched him approach though the hallway, accompanied by his nagging XO and CMO and a gushing Pavlov. Truth be told, he was mostly listening to Pavlov shouting off random numbers and observations he had made, which – in Kirk's opinion – were far more interesting than the constant accusations and admonishments from the other two. Of course his attention jumped straight to the woman, looking as much out of place as she did. She didn't react, didn't move at all as they passed her, only followed him with rapt eyes.
What convinced him of her being an illusion was that nobody else seemed to have reacted or acknowledged her. So he firmly pushed the whole thing out of his mind.
.
(He was Jim Kirk and he was damn good at denial. He deserved some sort of medal for his accomplishments in that regard.)
.
When he saw her again he was stepping onto the observation deck after a particularly harsh battle against two Klingon warbirds. He was tired, but not exhausted enough to find sleep yet so he had snuck out of his cabin and sought the solace of the observation deck, knowing that it was the middle of gamma shift and the majority of all people who weren't required to run his ship were fast asleep. So when he stumbled upon her sleek silver form he hesitated, his mind suddenly dragging forth the last time he had seen her. She wasn't actively watching him, but gazing out into the stars instead, allowing him to study her in earnest.
She was wearing a seriously tight body-suit, making his inner self whistle in appreciation – because damn, she had two really nice... - well, she was certainly nice to look at. Short hair, bleached to some unnatural white color and pale skin. Strange, odd and almost definitely a product of his insomniac brain.
"Shouldn't hallucinations been more...interactive?" he asked out loud into the silence of the deck. The woman turned slowly, revealing her curious face and eyes. Damn, they really were silver, his memory wasn't flunking. However, as her face came into view his entire conception of her changed. Suddenly she no longer looked healthy and perfect, instead there were scratches and cuts along her suit and a large bruise along her jawline. Reflexively he moved towards her, sudden anger erupting within him.
"You're hurt," Brilliant line Jim, truly. "Do you need help? Are you alright?"
She didn't answer him, yet she also made no other move. He hesitated a step away from her, letting his outstretched arm fall down again. Right, she wasn't even real, he really shouldn't worry so much. And yet...
/Be more careful next time, please./
Her voice was...was she even human? Hollow, edged, like the well done, yet not perfectly manufactured electronic echo of a woman's voice. Why couldn't his imagination create something that made more sense than that?
"Careful with what exactly? I mean, I do get that you are just something out of my brain, so it must be some unconscious thing, yet if you would just kindly give me a little help figuring it out, you know, some small hint maybe? Because yeah, that would really help me out here."
But she just kept staring at him, uncomprehending and unmoved. Once he was certain he wasn't going to get an answer he stepped away from her and towards the stars, throwing up his arms in defeat.
"Fine, be that way. If you are so unhelpful, you can just disappear right away, I don't need uncooperative hallucinations."
He knew he wasn't being nice but he simply didn't have the patience at the moment. He wanted peace and quiet and solitude and time to reflect and maybe – hopefully – some calm.
When he turned his head to check for her reaction, she was gone.
.
(He didn't worry, of course he didn't worry, he didn't work like that. But sometimes, especially when he was alone, he caught himself returning to that moment on the observation deck, where the strange girl – hallucination! – told him to be more careful. With what?- He sometimes wondered.)
.
He saw her again after yet another brush-in with death but she was merely a silver apparition, hovering on the edge of his vision. And before he could concentrate and acknowledge her, he lost his consciousness. When he thought about it later, he couldn't help but wonder if maybe she was the grim reaper, waiting for the time he would finally run out of luck. Patiently waiting to collect his soul.
.
(Sometimes, when he thought about her, he felt a deep, innate fear of failing her. As if on some subconscious level he had already understood it all and, like the jerk his mind was, it kept the truth hidden from his self. What he did know, was that she was important...somehow.)
.
The fourth time they crossed paths he was in the middle of a fight on-planet, working with rebels against some corrupt government. He was sneaking through dark and damp cellars and almost yelled out loud and almost shot her when he rounded a corner and almost ran into the sleek silver woman. She looked fragile for once, almost see-through, her face contorted in deep concentration.
/I need you. Come back - please - hurry./ she said in her strange chromatic voice, the only real inflection in the 'please', driving home the fact that she was actually pleading with him.
He just stared at her uncomprehendingly.
"Come back where?" he hissed in the silence, trying to avoid an echo. "I don't even know what you mean, you are fiction, part of my-"
She flickered then, her gaze turning almost fearful, her attention focusing on something he couldn't see. Her mouth started moving but he could only hear static, except for s single word.
/...Enterprise../
And she vanished as if she had never existed. Jim hesitated; he moved to the wall, trying to blend in with its shadow. He actually thought about this...this warning. She obviously wasn't real, he was pretty sure he did actually fire a shot out of his phaser when he ran into her but it didn't even touch her. And she sounded and acted like some cyborg, mechanical and emotionless, pretty similar to his own XO. And yet he couldn't help feeling so connected to her, as if there was some deep hidden meaning in her existence that he simply wasn't aware of but knew that it was there. And by now even his gut was telling him that he needed to get back to his ship.
So he followed her plea – listened to this strange hallucination – and beamed back to his ship.
As it turned out, he got back just in time to save his ship – and crew – from three perfectly planned and executed attacks; a lethal bomb near the ship's core, a particularly nasty virus getting loaded into the ship's computer and a dangerous party of cloaked mercenaries that were sent to completely wipe out the remaining officers that hadn't gone planetside.
.
(He told anyone who asked that it had been a gut feeling to return to the ship.)
.
By the time he met her again he had thought about her a great deal, and come to the obvious conclusion.
"You are a manifestation of my subconsciousness, created by some sort of interference when we passed by some unknown planet," he blurted out as soon as he saw her slim form standing in the darkness and silence of the observation deck. It seemed to be a favorite spot of hers, which only reinforced his theory - after all, it was his spot.
She tilted her head and looked at him strangely.
/I am Enterprise. I thought you knew?/
His eyes widened and he actually stumbled as he drew closer to her.
"What, what? What do you mean? You are- you can't be my ship. I mean, my ship is here, around us. It's...big! And...shiny and awesome and perfect. You are...you are human, well, at least you look fairly...human."
He stopped in front of her and reached out. Where his hand went through what looked like her body, his skin sparked prettily and arced with white little lightning streaks that raced along his arm with warmth and a feeling akin to a tickle. He was immediately captivated by the shiny new phenomenon, suddenly eager to play around with this new discovery.
/I am Enterprise. I have always been Enterprise. This...ship...is I. I am this ship. You...might want to call me its physical manifestation./
"You make it sound so normal."
/It is normal. Every ship has a manifestation. It's you who isn't normal. Nobody should be able to see me./
She tilted her head the other way.
/No other member of my crew has been able to see me before. You are an error in the universe's coding, Captain James T. Kirk./
"Great, so now I am the strange one? Story of my life."
.
(In the end, they talked. He learned a great deal more about his ship than he ever though possible. Bones occasionally eyed him oddly when he trumped off towards the observation deck in the middle of the night and he was pretty sure that Uhura and Spock were discussing his odd behavior – especially odd given him being Jim Kirk. But nobody said anything about it and they eventually got used to it.)
.
"You know, it actually isn't that bad, being different."
They watched the stars together, lost in the beauty and solitude the darkness offered. The distant lights twinkled merrily and he knew that she loved them with a fierceness that paralleled his own.
/I never said it was, Captain./
And he thought that maybe sitting there - with her - could certainly count as a positive perk of being an anomaly.
~Leena