Notes:


Spock was woken quite suddenly, by the gentle sound of the ICU door hissing closed. The moment a shadow fell over him, he knew who it was: Nyota's perfume was one he had been intimately familiar with, after all.

"Lieutenant," he croaked through a dry throat, and was immediately hushed as she reached for the ice chips.

"No ranks here, Spock," she murmured, her own voice straining. When he cracked open his eyes - and she hastily dimmed the lights, as McCoy had done earlier - he saw the reason for it, in the tear-smudges on her cheeks and her bruised eyes. "I wrangled everything out of Chapel. I'll apologise later, but I needed to see you. And...and I think you need someone too."

She was right, and Spock was in no mood to deny it. Emotional control was one thing, but even Vulcans would admit to a certain amount of equilibrium being lost in this situation.

He said nothing, swallowing the last of the ice gratefully, but something must have showed in his face, for she choked and leaned forward, bending over him to gather him into her warm arms like a wounded child. In some maternal instinct, she even established a gentle rocking motion, although she barely moved him and didn't dare lift him due to his still-damaged ribs and spine.

He brought his remaining hand up around her back, quashed the sense of sheer shock when his wounded arm tried to do it too, and clung.

"It's alright," she murmured, her voice a very soft cadence in the dim, quiet room. "I'm here. It's alright now; just let go. Let go; I've got you. It'll going to be fine. Let go..."

He didn't, of course. He couldn't give in to those baser urges - to rave and rant and lash out, to express himself in violence that he was no longer even capable of committing. The instincts that years of Surakian teaching could not suppress screamed and battered against the walls of his bruised mind and shattered body, but now - now, at last, and in the worst way - they had nowhere to go. He could not have expressed them if he had wanted to - he was no longer capable of the most basic of movements.

He knew - knew, with Vulcan logical certainty, and with scientific observation and understanding - that his life was over.

And yet...yet here, logic had no such bearing. Nyota could change nothing, no more than Spock himself, and perhaps even less. She could do nothing, and her presence could not possibly make it 'alright', as she kept murmuring. And yet...and yet...

Her voice surrounded him as surely as her arms, buried him as surely as her body pressed to his front - tenderly, but firmly enough to be felt despite the drugs and the pain and the shock that Spock knew he was suffering. She felt warmer than she should, and a voice had no temperature, but that, too, kept the air around him warm and comfortable.

Somehow, she eased things when she should not be able to.

Logic had failed him.

"What do you need?"

The whisper was as it had been the first time she'd said it - low and urging and desperate, almost. Begging him to let her help. Then, he had not known a response. He hadn't known what to tell her.

Now, he knew.

Jim. I need Jim.

"I..."

"Tell me," she breathed, her lips next to his ear, her arms sure on his shoulders. He knew that she would obey his every command now, would try everything to get what he needed.

"I..."

"Tell me."

"I...I need time. I need...to meditate and...to rest..."

Her arms tightened one last time, then she drew back, nodding. She had cried, he noted, while she held him, though he hadn't noticed any noise or movement to suggest it. He wondered if it was that he was withdrawing from the world, or whether Nyota was much more adept at hiding her own feelings that he had supposed.

He honestly did not know the answer.

"Alright," she murmured, stroking his hair. "I'll leave you alone for now. I'll tell Christine that you're sleeping. But I'll be back this evening - I don't...you shouldn't be going through this alone."

She knew.

The thought struck Spock the moment she was gone. She knew that Jim hadn't been here. If anything, it only confirmed Spock's own knowledge - he hadn't been here at all, even before Spock came out of the trance and the coma. Jim had not been to see him.

He clung to his logic, like a child with a blanket, urging it not to fail him.

When he reached the conclusion, he drew it in and accepted it as fact. It could not be changed, and it could not be helped. What is, is.

He slipped into a meditative trance - but found little comfort.


Starships lacked a lot of the comforts of planetside bases. The regular complaints involved substandard replicators that only issued dishes that tasted like wet cardboard, the arid air that sucked the moisture out of your lungs, sonic showers, and the occasional engineering screw-up that resulted in zero-gravity at the least convenient times.

But right then, McCoy would have given his medical license for a door that slammed.

He barged into Jim's quarters just in time to see Sarek's stony face disappear from the screen on the desk, waited just long enough for Jim to turn a surprised face to him, and decked him.

The thump Jim's back made when he hit the floor was very satisfying.

"What the fuck, Bones?" Jim snarled, rubbing his jaw angrily and staggering back to his feet.

"That is well-deserved and you know it!" McCoy snapped. "And believe me, Kirk, if I didn't run the serious risk of beating you bloody, I'd do it again for what you just put me through!"

"You?"

"Yes, me!" McCoy bellowed. "You know what I just had to watch? I'm not a goddamn Vulcan expert like you are, but I know that man well enough to know when he's broken! And I just had to lie to him and pretend that you weren't being a fucking coward, hiding out here away from him like he's got the goddamn plague!"

Jim clenched his jaw and dropped his eyes to the floor.

"You don't get down there now, if not sooner, then you're going to break his goddamn heart! And don't you think enough's been broken?" McCoy continued. He'd had enough, and he was going to express it. If Jim didn't like it, tough: he was going to hear him, if not listen. "He's not fucking stupid, Kirk - he knows you've not been down there, and damn it, he's going to take a damn good guess at why, too! But you know what he's like - he won't blame you, will he? He won't put a single piece of the blame on you!"

Jim opened his mouth to retort, but McCoy plowed on.

"I have a patient in there who needs you, whether either of you will admit it or not! If you have any sense of decency, you'll get your cowardly ass in my Sickbay and sit with him, because if you don't, I have absolutely no doubt that he's not going to get much better than he is right now!"

And McCoy didn't have a doubt as to that. The physical injuries could be fixed, the amputations could be adapted to, but Spock's mental stability? Hell, any patient would be in tatters upstairs after such a blow, and without Jim's support, McCoy knew it could - and would - quickly spiral out of his control. Or, worse, Spock's control.

"I can't."

Jim's low, broken plea stopped the rant dead in its track, and McCoy gaped at him in sheer disbelief.

"What do you mean, you can't?" he snapped.

"I can't do it, Bones," Jim whispered, still staring resolutely at the floor. "I just...I can't. I can't see him like that. He's...he's completely broken and I...I can't see it. I...my last memory of him, he's on that beach. He's...he's everything, and I can't...I can't see that so completely broken."

McCoy stilled, and his voice was dangerously low when he spoke again. "Don't lie to me, Kirk."

"I'm not lying to..."

"If he was everything, I wouldn't be able to get you out of my Sickbay for the world. If he was everything, you'd be there, supporting him - like you should be - and making damn sure your everything recovers as much as he's able. He needs you to do that - you and I both know it. So don't you lie to me and tell me shit like that, because this is proving pretty much definitively that it's not true."

Jim choked, startled eyes finally coming up to look McCoy in the face.

"I thought," McCoy continued dangerously, "that you'd matured since you started knocking boots with him. Thought you'd grown up a bit; hell, I even thought you'd fallen in love, but..."

"I..."

"But, you haven't. You've always been a self-centred little prick, you know that, but this? This is downright selfish. You want to keep your pristine image of him, then you go right ahead. But you keep this up, he'll drop out of your life forever. He's not dead yet, but when that happens, he might as well be dead to you. And hell, if he's as attached to you as I think he is, then it would probably be kinder to kill him."

"Bones!"

"Don't you Bones me," he snapped. "Get your head out of your ass and get down there, before you lose him permanently. Because you will, Jim, mark my words. You keep this up, and sooner or later, you'll lose him."

McCoy's anger was still simmering, low and cold in his stomach, clenching around his guts and spleen - damn, you couldn't usually feel a spleen - until he thought he was going to vomit, but Jim's wide-eyed shock pushed him off for a moment. He hardly dared hope, but maybe he had knocked some sense into the kid.

Literally.

"If you've not been to see him before we reach Vulcan, I'm not lying for you any more," he snapped. "I'll tell him what I just told you. And then you can deal with the goddamn fallout."

He stormed out, with the same silly wish for a slamming door, and stalked back to Sickbay like an angry cat.

This, he supposed, was what you got for letting a goddamn kid run a starship.