CHAPTER TWO:
DISILLUSIONMENT
A/N:
Yay! I got this out quicker than I thought! Here's chapter two!
I'm hoping to have the next out tomorrow night, if I'm not tired from homework and school.
Thank you to everyone who has reviewed, as feedback is appreciated and welcomed!
Disclaimer - Chekov belongs to JJ Abrams, Gene Roddenberry, Anton Yelchin and Walter Koeing.
Lily belongs to me.
Chekov's Pronunciation of Lily:
Lee-lee.
Ensign Chekov, respond.
Ensign Chekov, if you perceive any notion of movement, raise your right hand.
Let me handle this, Commander Spock. I have a way with words…
Chekov, if you don't wake up right this instant, I'm going to shove a tricorder the size of a yardstick where the sun don't shine.
"Please, in the name of all things beautifully Russian, do no that…"
The first of all things taken into consideration of Chekov's surroundings was that they were blanch and incandescently white, the blurred edges of the walls emanating a vehement radiance, which he doubted was relative to the settings, but the slight fever that burned throughout his wearied system. Shapeless faces appeared in his line of vision, both suspended over him in a manner that suggested worry, perhaps even agitation, by the way their postures seemed taut, even sharp-edged in his unstable perception.
A blotted, flesh-colored object, though ostensibly harmless by its gentle prodding and probing, deliberated his temperature and tapped on his lips, so that his mouth, stiff from lack of use, parted and lay exposed fto the mercy of the appraising white-gloved fingertips. Yes, that was what they were. Fingers. Same callused, bone-structured familiarity, and the fact that they seemed to harbor a caustic and impatient personality all their own indicated that they weren't just any competent and practiced pair of hands – they were the property of Bones McCoy himself.
"He'll be fine, Commander," Bones muttered as he frowned, his voice dismantled from its usual intensity as he devoted all focus to the hypospanner in his hand. "A treatment of antibiotics should regulate his system, and he can return to his obligations tomorrow. That is, if he doesn't wiggle his way into another compromising situation before this treatment is completed."
"My utmost gratitude, Doctor McCoy, for your patience," Spock replied dutifully.
"Yeah, right. If that's what you'd call it…"
Bones' steadied hand descended toward the uncovered portion of vulnerable flesh on Chekov's arm, hypospanner still clenched between inexorably steadfast fingers.
Chekov's distorted sight, impaired by sleep and bewilderment by the sudden onslaught of sterile medical gloves and the doctor's mordant conduct, gradually returned to its natural astute clarity. He blinked, merely overridden by relief to find the recognizable stoic countenance of his commanding officer and the habitual scowl of the acerbic doctor, beloved by all, despite his otherworldly talent to achieve pessimism and temper. The boy couldn't have been happier to see anyone else –
"Commander, were is she?"
Spock's otherwise composed features gradually melded together, his brow gathering into an analytical, speechless mark of question. "She, Chekov?"
"Da, Commander. My podruga, Lily...where is she?"
Bones administered the injection into the oblivious boy's arm, and meanwhile Chekov gazed up at his commanding officer with searching eyes, bright and penetrating with anticipation. Spock was unnerved by the sudden manifestation of Chekov's seemingly conspicuous delusions and the strength of their appearance. He turned to Bones, who was unaware of the situation at hand as he prepared to inject the second dose of treatment.
"Doctor McCoy, have you any recollection of such a patient?"
"No, sir. I don't know a Lily, nor do I ever want to know one."
Chekov's chest began to heave, desperation and hysteria filling the hollows of gaping doubt and trepidation in his eyes. Spock observed with hardly a depiction of normal reaction toward the boy's panic, and Bones was otherwise engaged in the delicate activity of administering medication. He realized he would receive no direct answer from either of them, only vague side-steps and insinuations. She was either dead, dying or had never been discovered, lying beneath the half-naked body of the hypothermic boy, desperate to save her, while they had only been too adamant about his life to inquire after the existence of another.
"I am having to see her, comman'der. Request permission to enter the Sick Bay?"
"Request denied. You must recover not only your physical health, but mental as well, if you are to return to homeostasis in the proper manner. The only logical way to do this is to rest, as the body will mend itself and any additional damage it might have received upon your capture."
"I must see her, sir. It is a matter that is great importance!"
"Sir, there is a girl under medical watch in the Sickbay. Her identity, as of yet, is unknown, brought in two days ago, a few hours after Chekov," Bones laid the emptied syringe on the medical tray beside him, suddenly aloof as he conjured vague memories of the situation. "But I don't know-"
That had been enough for Chekov. It hardly mattered whether the next words that escaped the doctor's mouth were 'dead', 'alive' or 'she might not make it'; it was the verifiable fact that she was here, on this ship, swathed in warming medical gauze and attached to an incubator. Still drawing breath, still with beating heart, and her live, malleable flesh, not yet consumed by rigor mortis. It meant his promise had not been condemned, his honor uncompromised, and his companion, with whom he'd suffered long hours of potential frostbite and mind-numbing, ice-tarnished consciousness…was still possibly alive.
Without a moment's warning for his fellow crewmen, Chekov threw back his stiff coverlets and bounded for the door, the coverlets fluttering behind him like coattails caught in a malevolent breeze. He darted past the human obstructions impeding his duty to his mission, nearly triggering a staggering collision with one unfortunate man who had a thick mound of PADD's balanced in his arms.
"Excuse me, sir, I must get through! Pardon me, sir! Pardon me!"
He skidded around an uncalculated corner. It was the same one that he had swung around with the exuberance of a newborn colt countless times but, in his mindless rush, could never account for in his burst-full memory bank, which seemed inept in cases such as these, and he abandoned reason of doubt and calculation altogether in his purposeful scurries.
"Lily!" He slid into Sickbay, hearing the muffled, impending thud of persistent footsteps resound behind him.
Chekov discovered his lack of isolation in the vast expanse of white-burnished room, glossed in a sanitary haze, and the consistent blips of life perforated the walls, made them jump and contract and move with the rhythm of pounding hearts. Despite his indecency, and the possibility that any one of the comatose, or otherwise unconscious, patients might awake at any given moment, the reckless boy tore off the blanched sheets with his eyes, searching, aching for the assurance that his friend had not died, while he had been allowed to live, to prosper.
He arrived at the last cot, peeling back the bland sheets to find Lily's tranquil face, washed and polished in tendrils of undiscovered dreams, and the white sheets seemed to pale in comparison to the ashen consistency of her pallor. His heart slowed, his veins ceased to pulsate with the toxins of adrenaline racing throughout his system. He suddenly felt so incomparably weary, but his expression glowed.
"Ah, praise Hashem, she's ali-"
"Stop!"
It was Bones, at least that was unmistakable amongst the clamor of heightened pulses and cries of distress that erupted from the surrounding roused patients. The doctor leapt at Chekov, soaring across the short amount of space that separated them, cutting through it like knives through crepe paper. His face was devoured by the same panic that had thoroughly infested Chekov's own pounding heart, racing mind, swollen lungs…only moments before.
But Bones was so much larger than slender, gawky Chekov, and the impact was so ferocious and breathtaking that his head whirled violently and stars erupted in flashes of blinding light before his eyes. His lungs felt as if they had deflated, and he couldn't breathe, not with Bones' hulking figure crushing him into the hard, unyielding floor.
Like Spock, whose iron-wrought expression seemed as stiff as the expanse of floor beneath him, becoming more rigid with suppressed ferocity every step he took. Bones lifted himself off the restrained adolescent and glowered at him, dauntless with undulating rage. His eyes flashed vehemently.
"Are you out of your Russian mind?" He quipped, but behind the irate remark, small imprints of apprehension pocketed themselves in the hollows of his mind.
"You have only just recovered from hypothermia. Have you any idea what you could have done to yourself? You could have broken something, ruptured a vein, hell, you could have smashed your head against the wall and hemorrhaged!"
"I had to rush, sir, it was my only hope for finding her…"
"That's not what I meant, kid," he growled, standing up and yanking a disoriented Chekov up with him, resuming his full height. "Don't be so literal."
Spock halted before the heaving couple, one eyebrow lifting from its impassive repose. It rose into a perfect arch, and not a pigment of skin was lifted out of place. He seemed almost stone-like in his stance, a statue of polished, flesh-hued marble.
"It is just this condition that the Vulcans used to teach their younglings," Spock stated coolly. "To convince them the liberties of an emotionless world. Reckless human sentiment is hardly engaging in the face of illogical danger and defeat."
"Commander," Chekov insisted. "I had to see her! Request permission for amnesty, sir!"
"Return to your cot, Ensign. And do not remove yourself from its comforts until you are fully regenerated and able to return to your duties. When you have recovered, you will inform us the details of your capture," He turned, unremittingly stony, to Bones. "Assist Chekov to his cot and administer the appropriate tranquilizer to ensure he remains there."
"Aye, commander," Chekov remarked, and bowed his head as he allowed Bones to usher him out of the room, his arm within the vice grip of the frustrated doctor.
But before he disappeared from the room entirely, he risked a glance over his shoulder, just to assure himself she was there, and would be when he awoke. And maybe she'd hope he was alive too, anticipating his survival, his escape from the horrors of numbness in the ice world.
Just like he had hoped for.
His insides began to squirm uncomfortably, and one weakened hand clenched urgently over his stomach.
Chekov groaned. "You have crushed my insides," he sputtered. "Now I am to die."
"Shut up," Bones snapped. "Maybe you should have thought of that before running buck wild through the corridors, like some loony escaped from the nuthouse."
Out of all the useful information Chekov had required as an Ensign aboard the USS Enterprise, it was learning that recovery was insufferably dull which seemed the most vital part of information of the bunch.
At first, after he had revived from his drug-induced stupor, he wasn't quite sure what to do. He spent the first half hour plucking loose strings from the coverlet, disposing of them carelessly as he flung them to the floor, sighing half-heartedly when the task lost its former shine and grew tiresome, uninteresting. A search around the room provided him with an hour's gratuitous form of entertainment in counting the tiles on the ceiling. But as time wore on, and he passed five hundred, this diversion faded into the lackluster environment of his indifference, and he relinquished the cause as he searched for something even mildly amusing to pass the weary hours with.
His chance arrived with the appearance of Bones, who'd come merely to administer necessary medication and confirm vital signs.
"Dr. McCoy, might I have a read?" Chekov beseeched as the doctor pressed a steady finger to his wrist, counting quietly to himself. "Or something to waste hours. Mne skuchno!"
"I got something for you, something that might take a while," Bones replied languidly, and looked up at him. "How about you count how many light years it will take for you to grow some vigilance and subtlety? Maybe then we won't let another helpless species go extinct looking for your sorry Russian ass."
Chekov had frowned at the insult. "Just a minute now, doctor. Russians are known for the wigilance and poise, and that is what I am!"
"If what you say is so damned true, then start acting like one," he'd said. "I know this is hard for you arrogant, brazen foreigners to understand, but maybe, if you don't act like an egotistical fool all the time, you'll spend a lot less time in a dripping prison cell and more time helping people, which is why you joined Starfleet, isn't it?"
"Of course why, doctor! Why else would I leave my Russia for?"
"Escapes me, Chekov. Women too hairy in Russia for you?"
"Russian women are lovely." Chekov had argued.
"I'll get you a PADD if you'll pipe down," he'd relented. "You're hurting my American ears with all that feigned foreigner's superiority."
Though Chekov was painfully aware of Bones' disapproval of his youthful rashness and the fact that he was notorious for getting captured on missions, he was also entirely grateful that the doctor had not abandoned him there without so much as a dust mite to keep him company. Despite the bitter, biting cold and the likelihood of death under such harsh conditions, and though he adored the Enterprise and her captain, Chekov could not help but wish he were back on Delta Vega. At least there he would have a companion, and a bit of conversation to pass the fitful hours and restless musings.
The thought flitted through his mind, as he thumbed meditatively through a defining volume on the Klingon species, that if he were on Earth, it would have begun to grow dark, little edges of dark blue velvet trimming the horizon as it slowly sunk into the last fractures of a faltering red-orange miasma. He missed sunsets and sunrises, even though, during the earlier stages of adolescent youth, he'd been under the spell of sleep and wistful wanderlust to take heed of the climbing and falling of the sun, or any of its frivolities for that matter. Now that he didn't have it anymore, he wished so ardently he could have it back, if even for a day. Just once.
"Hello there…" Said a voice.
Chekov was startled out of his concentrated brooding. In fact, he had been so bewildered by the suddenness of the voice's appearance, that he lost all train of thought and even dropped his book in the midst of his frightened jolting.
He looked up to find Lily, her pale-blonde curls frizzy with sleep, and her eyes weary and rimmed with shadows. She held her short fingers over her mouth, but no matter of concealment could dismantle the trace of a smothered chuckle hidden by forceful fingertips.
"I hope I didn't scare you," she admitted, leaning against the automatic door as it closed behind her. "I have a bad habit of sneaking up on people."
"I will be alright, Miss Lily," Chekov grinned, endeavoring to hide the ambush of a flush, spreading like wildfire across his cheeks, and feeling just as intolerably hot. "I was only just thinking for you."
She raised a questioning brow. "Oh really?" She laughed. "It looked as if you had all your thoughts wound around that book there…." Her mirth faded, and a wide-eyed look seized her features. "Not that I'm jealous, no. That'd be silly. Being jealous of a...you know, a book."
It was his turn to laugh, and he was in no mood to turn down such an offer of hilarity. "It newer crossed my brain that you were jealous, nyet," he assured her, then tilted his head inquiringly as she sat down in the chair beside his bed and he bent down to retrieve his book, where it lay in a display of rumbled pages. "Actually I was going to ask – what are you doing here?"
She began to wring her hands, watching them with sheepish eyes, as if apologizing to them. "Actually, I wanted to um….I wanted to say thank you. For saving me," she confessed. "It was awful brave of you."
He flushed again, and cursed his energetic skin for its blushing and blundering. "Ah, it wasn't anything. Anything to save a pretty girl."
Something of a giggle erupted from the dainty confines of her throat, and she looked up at him from beneath her dark lashes.
"Alright, so I am not as suave as the keptin," he said. "I am making practicing. I must get it down someday!"
"Pavel," she replied. "Your captain can have all the smooth-talking charm he wants. It's heart that counts, and you have an abundance of it."
"Keptin Quirk 'as more than enough heart, Miss Lily-"
"I'm sure he does," Lily shrugged, her shoulders lolling awkwardly throughout the motion. "But I saw yours first."
She reached forward and gave his chest a soft pat, vitalizing her point. The place her hand touched burned slightly through the cotton-thin material of the medical gown, a soft burn, almost like the heat of the sun brushing against bare skin.
"So," she said, gesturing to the book in Chekov's lap with her eyes. "You like xenoarchaeology?"
He glanced nonchalantly at the book, and in a self-important manner, shrugged his thin shoulders. "Of course, I am into more than science, but…science, it is my calling."
"Like what?" She asked.
"Motorcycles…they are so fast! Like riding on the wind!"
"Motorcycles, huh? So there is a bit of a teenager in you yet," she noted, smiling as she did so. "What else?"
"Mathematics, especially Calculus. Wery interesting. And history. Especially that of the greatest civilization known to man."
"And what is that?"
"The Russians, of course, my dear girl!"
She shook her head, laughing at his obvious egotism. "You are one silly boy, Pavel Chekov," she wagged a finger at him, the smile in her eyes never wavering. "But I must say, you are more than enough of a friend to allow me decades of amusement."
Chekov brightened at the thought of camaraderie. "You think of we as friends, da?"
She cocked her head to the side. "Of course I do. You saved my life and managed to make me laugh in the process," she said. "How else would I think of you?"
"A uh – special Russian pet?"
She laughed and shook her head. "No, no silly. You are most definitely my friend. And since it is late, I must be getting back to bed. I am sure the doctor will be coming in to check on me soon."
"I come and eh see you tomorrow, nyet?" He asked, watching as she rose to leave, abandoning her seat to cold, sterile air.
"I certainly hope so," she said, lingering by the door. "In fact, I'll be looking forward to it."
"It will be promised, then," he assured her. "I will be there."
She admonished teasingly, "You make a lot of promises. Are you sure you can keep them all?"
Reciprocating her teasing manner, Chekov inflated his chest pompously, placing his hand over his heart, as if swearing oath. "A Russian never makes promise he does not keep."
"I'm sure they don't," she chuckled, shaking her head. She looked back at him. "I will see you tomorrow, Pavel. Goodnight."
"Goodnight, Lily." He called after her, and his voice tapered off as she disappeared into the corridor, the door sliding shut automatically behind her.
And as soon as she was gone, the last of her presence dissipating from the room, Chekov could not help but notice his heart had slowed. Not in a way that indicated fear, but that rushing sort of sensation that gushes through one's system, igniting one's body into a burst of energy, like fireworks.
With his source of amusement gone for the night, Chekov picked up his book again from his lap and continued hopes of not only impressing Spock, to revitalize his image of honor and vigilance when it came to his duty for the Enterprise…
But also in dire hopes of impressing Lily.