NEW HORIZON

By Kidders

AU: Set after the Tesseract scene, alternate take on the medical setting with Cooper.

A/N: I haven't been this excited about a movie since LOTR. And I didn't see it in the theater, drats! I haven't written anything in a very long time, so may be a bit rusty. Don't know if I'll get Coop all the way to Edmunds. I'm not a shipper, though enjoy the efforts of others.

Rating: T, for brief strong language and medical descriptions.

Note about time: I keep the time Coop spent in the tesseract down to a day or so, relative to his focal point. Don't know for sure how much air their backpacks are meant to supply, but for the purpose of this story, not more than twenty-four hours.

Chapter One: Found

He had the killer of all headaches when he opened his eyes. A doozy, in fact. Not helping in the slightest was the added misery of artificial lighting. Trumping the pain in spades so even barely parting his lashes made it feel like tiny knives were slicing through his pupils all the way to the back of his frigging skull. A groan pushed out past clenched teeth, and when Cooper sucked frantically for another breath, oxygen was there, fresh and cool and sweet, not the stale lifeless molecules he'd struggled with right before passing out, but free and fiercely satisfying, air he could almost taste on his tongue when he tentatively tried to wet his lips. Not just air, he realized. Atmosphere. He was no longer confined to a space suit. Since keeping his eyes shut seemed the best approach for now, he slowly breathed in and out, appreciating the freedom he had mostly taken for granted, through the wormhole and beyond, until Mann's planet had harshly slammed home the fact that oxygen was never a limitless commodity during interstellar travel.

Content in the simple pleasure of filling his lungs, Cooper became aware of other sensations. Fingers brushing the inside of his left forearm, something wet and cold, then a sharp sting, enough to make him flinch. Reflex shot his eyes open wide, the halo of brightness from above still gunning full throttle, causing him to gasp as tears burned a cloudy film over his line of sight. Cooper blinked hard, trying like the devil to bring the world back into focus. All he could see was the vague outline of a woman, a woman with red hair.

"Murph?" he croaked, not sure where he was but feeling very lost and alone. Last thing he remembered was being pushed out of the tesseract, left to float in the empty space around Saturn. Hardly any air left. So where the hell was he?

"Oh, you're awake." The woman's voice was unfamiliar, and Cooper felt a hollow pang of disappointment. "Just try and relax. You've been unconscious, but you're safe now. I'm getting an IV started, then we'll try and get you more comfortable. Just keep still, okay?"

"IV?" Cooper fought to broaden his focus, turning his head slightly on the pillow, finally able to pick out the image of what was clearly a hospital room. And the nurse beside the bed, wearing pink medical scrubs, her curly red hair pulled into a ponytail, was putting tape on his arm and giving him a kind smile. Not Murph. Murph wasn't here. But he was. Had his message gotten through as TARS had predicted? "Wh-where…" Cooper coughed, swallowing hard against the parched dryness in his throat. "Where am I? How am I here?"

The nurse, whose name tag read Adelaide, finished hooking up the tubing to his arm. Her gaze narrowed as she assessed him. "The Rangers found you floating in space. Your O2 tank and respirator were almost depleted. Much longer out there and you wouldn't have survived."

"Yeah, been there before," Cooper mumbled, glancing down at himself to register the BP cuff on one arm, needle in the other. He was dressed in a cotton fiber gown, pale blue, similar to the one he last saw his wife… No. He was not strolling down that particular path of memory lane. Staying current, that was the way to go. And current meant answers to his questions. "Nice deflection, Adel, but a bit too vague for my likin'. This place doesn't feel like Earth. Every piece of equipment I can see is shiny and new. So, I will ask again. Where the hell am I? And how'd I get here?"

Adelaide's eyes widened, smile faltering. "You were pulled in by one of the Rangers, as I said, wearing an older style spacesuits we still have on board. It kept you alive, but what no one can figure out is how you ended up on the wrong side of an airlock in the first place. The station's secure, orbiting Saturn as we have been for the last several months, and no one has been reported missing. So we have questions for you as well. Like for starters, your name, and how you got here."

Station? In orbit around Saturn? Cooper sighed, and closed his eyes, tears still leaking from the corners to gather in a curtain over his eyelashes. Shit, he thought, the time slippage…I've been gone so long no one remembers me. An ache flared deep in his bones, his body rippling with strange sensations, almost like pain but distant, a storm cloud gathering on the horizon. So he'd succeeded in sending the quantum data, the station was proof of that…but how long had he really been gone? "My name was on the suit you wrangled me out of," he said quietly, reaching up to gingerly rub his sternum. His chest felt a little tight. Not bad, just weird. "As for how I got here, that's a long story…or a short one, dependin' on your grasp of relativity."

When he looked up, Adelaide's face registered a mix of puzzlement and frank disbelief. "If your name was on the suit…but it just said Cooper."

He gave her a weary smile. "That's my name, just like your station." The last word rolled off his tongue, languidly sardonic, though a touch a pride did warm him from the inside out. "Did ya name it after me, or Murph?"

"You?!" she exclaimed, cheeks flushing a shade darker than her medical uniform. "I'll have you know this station is name for Murphy Cooper, one of the greatest scientists of her generation. Solving the gravity equation was the single most important achievement of the last two hundred years. How could you not know that? Or be so conceited to try and take the credit for yourself?"

Cooper sighed again, his brief surge of energy beginning to fade. "Because Murphy Cooper is my daughter." Swallowing thickly, he hoped like hell he was still correct in saying is and not was. "Because I've been gone most of her adult life. I went off into space and left her here-on Earth, rather-while I journeyed in search of us a new place to hang our hat. My daughter was ten years old, Adel, imagine that…" A fresh slew of tears burned down his cheeks, and he forced back a sob. "I believed I had a chance to save my kids…Tom and Murph…accepted the lies the Professor told me because I wanted to get out there so badly, I took what he said on blind faith. I left a y-year ago, but here it's been e-eighty years or more, and now my daughter's dead for all I k-know, my son's probably gone, everyone I ever knew is long dead now…" His throat was awash in tears, a salty echo of a distant, lost home. "…because time…because relativity is such a fucking curse, I'll never get those years back." He finally met Adel's gaze, managed to see she was listening in stunned silence. "To you…to her…I've been gone over eighty years. And it w-won't be enough that I c-came back. It's t-too late, Adel. I've lost too m-much time." Cooper shut his eyes, chest tight, breaths heaving as he fought for control. "Goddamnit!" he swore, choking on a cough. "Relativity is such,,, such a bitch!" Another cough seized him, and this one hurt, so he curled on his side, sobbing and gasping and feeling somehow he wasn't getting enough air.

"Oh, my God!" he heard Adelaide exclaim. "You're Joseph Cooper. I recognize you now. You were in some of my text books in school. Pilot of the Endurance mission. But everyone from that mission was presumed dead, even back then, due to how much time had passed. And you look the same…" A tone of wonder crept into her voice. "You look the same as the picture in my science book."

"Yeah," Cooper wheezed, right hand closing on the bedrail, needing something solid to hang onto. "Einstein's theory…is a r-real—"

"—bitch," Adelaide finished. "Yes, I'm beginning to see that. Listen, Mr. Cooper, your daughter's still alive. She is on another station, and quite elderly, but I can send word you've been found."

A small smile twitched on his lips, and he nodded gratefully. "Please," he whispered. A sense of relief should have eased the torture breathing was becoming, but it seemed to make it worse. Sweat burst from every pore in his body, flooding to soak the gown and the back of his neck. The fight to inhale climbed its way into an oxygen-starved battle, just like it had on Mann's planet. The ammonia breaching his suit, the ice in his throat burning down into his lungs and searing them dry, and no matter how hard he tried, there wasn't any air, just corrosive fumes constricting around his chest, tighter and tighter. His back arched off the ice as his entire body took up the fight, struggling to find a way to feed the hunger even as his conscious mind was shutting down.

He clawed desperately for the long-range communicator. "Brand, help…help! No…no air…ammonia!" His vision tunneled. Leaving only sky grey-blue above and the cold beneath. No surface…never a surface. Mann was a lying sack of shit, and he was …dead. Mann was dead, and so, Cooper thought, was he. Had to detach, fall into that black hole. "'Melia, we…we agreed…ninety…n-ninety percent." Throat closing up, ribs being crushed by the intense gravity, Cooper was choking and coughing and dying in slow motion. Unlike Lazarus, there was no coming back from this. He coughed long and hard, gasping around the gurgle bubbling out from his windpipe, thrashing his arms and legs, and fighting with everything he had to draw each and every breath. Another cough, and he felt wetness on his lips. "No…n-no…can't br-breathe!"

"Cooper, listen to me!" Not Amelia, who? "I'm going to raise the head of the bed." A mask was pushed over his nose and mouth, and the pressurized airflow managed to pump a tiny quota of O2 into his lungs. Not nearly enough, only taking a slight edge off his panic. "Slow, deep breaths, Cooper. Come on, nice and easy. Work with me."

Easy, deep breaths? Did Adel have a humor setting? Cooper tried to follow the sound of her voice, he really did. The dull roar in his ears was fading to a faint, persistent ding, like the call of his radio in the truck, sending out a signal. Somewhere out there, this all made sense… Like how to go about drowning when there weren't any waves.

Another voice—deeper, masculine, urgent—intruded. "What's the problem?"

"Not sure," responded Adel. "He developed a cough, shortness of air, chest pain. BP bottomed out, and his heart rate went tachy. I think it might be pulmonary edema, he coughed up a little blood, and the O2 sats are falling. I got him on BiPAP, but he's still only semi-conscious. Think this might be a delayed reaction to chemical exposure. The patient mentioned ammonia."

"Well, finding him floating adrift outside the station, who knows where he's been and what he could've been exposed to. Since he dropped the ammonia clue, and the symptoms fit, I'd say your differential is sound, Ad. Start him on nitrolingual and enalapril. Give a slow morphine drip for the anxiety and air hunger. Let's see if we can get those sats up without a ventilator."

"Right away, Dr. Bishop."

There was a flurry of noise and movement, then suddenly Adel's voice came close to his ear. "Cooper, I'm giving you something to help you relax. It'll make breathing easier. Just go with the flow, okay?"

He wanted to voice a protest, to say that going with the flow when you were slowly suffocating was easier said than done. Case in point: no water, no waves, no Ranger, so how the hell was he supposed to flow with anything? But the chaos of thought was lost in the sudden warmth coursing through his body, making his lungs stop screaming for oxygen, allowing coiled and tensed, abused muscles to finally start to unfurl.

"Cooper?" echoed the surprised sounding doctor.

Yeah, Coop mused blearily, that's my name. Don't wear it out.

To be continued…

Note: The doctor and the nurse I'm borrowing both appeared in the movie. I used the nurse with the red hair because she spoke, while the other one only laughed. Plus, it would remind Coop of Murph. The medical scene was the one thing I felt was lacking in the script, so I decided to change it and make it more painful and emotionally charged for Cooper. Since I couldn't read the ID badges, I decided to give them names of my own choosing, based on previous sci-fi shows I enjoyed. Kudos if you can guess where they're from. Thanks for reading!