"-and it's amazing, really, how often archaic solutions can work to fool modern technology."

Len doesn't move. Len lays on his back and looks out with half-shut eyes that probably aren't actually seeing anything.

Pavel keeps talking, because it's all he knows to do.

"I have conducted a few unofficial studies into the matter - one I even got Mr. Spock's assistance on. He finds it as interesting as I do, though his interest tends more towards the anthropological. He tends to focus on how societies with disparate technologies can coexist, and how the less evolved cultures aren't necessarily weaker."

He reaches over and takes a stale corner of dark, coarse bread. "Mine and Scotty's focus was always on the technological," he says as he holds the bread up to Len's mouth. "On how the most advanced computers can be fooled by methods so archaic that they're not even considered by the designers of that technology."

Len turns his mouth away from the touch of the bread.

Pavel sets the bread back on the plate. "It's a shame I never knew before how fascinated you are with outdated methods of medicine. You could have contributed, I think, to our discussions about technological advances and how limiting they can sometimes be."

If Len won't eat, it leaves Pavel with a free hand. He contemplates Len for a moment, the stiff line of his body - not his hands, Pavel can't even bring himself to look at the flattened and misshapen ruin of his hands - and decides that perhaps simple comfort is the best way to go.

So he slips his hand through Len's hair, the slow and easy stroke that he tends to fall back on when he's lost for any real ideas. Len doesn't move, doesn't acknowledge it. But it makes Pavel feel a little better.

"For example," he goes on, pretending that Len is paying the slightest bit of attention, "this building we are in. There are circuits around the ceilings, the entrances. I noticed when we were first brought in and assumed it was some sort of simplistic alarm system in case we or any of the other prisoners these rooms were built for escaped. But I've formed another theory through the last couple of weeks."

He pauses and then goes on as if Len asked him to, gave his semi-interested 'mmm?' or something of the sort.

"Well, we are still here. I have no doubt that the Enterprise is somewhere in orbit, looking for us. But they haven't found us yet. Since Kirk is our captain we can rule out that the delay is due to diplomatic efforts. He would never wait so long on something like diplomacy. And so I've decided that the wiring throughout this building serves another purpose: to jam our ship's sensors. To hide our presence here. It's the only thing that makes sense - the Enterprise is more than capable of detecting human life forms on a planet full of aliens, they should be here with phasers in hand to get us out."

Len turns his head again now that the food is safely gone. His eyes are slits, staring back up at the ceiling, at nothing.

Pavel swallows down a rising wave of emotion - pity or helplessness or despair, whichever it is that wants to escape now - and goes on speaking as calmly as he can manage.

"So you see how even the flagship of the Federation is stymied by something as rudimentary as sensor jammers. It is a prime example of the things Spock and I and Mr. Scott have discussed. He would find it fascinating. Spock. I have to say that I find it incredibly frustrating. If one of us could simply step outside of this building, the Enterprise would be able to detect us."

"Des..." Len swallows and rumbles with noise like a groan. "He's...outside."

"Des...Lieutenant Desmarais?" Pavel frowns at that, at the reminder of a man he should have thought much more about over the last weeks. "How do you know?"

"Told me. Buried him. A hundred..." Len licks his dry lips.

Pavel reaches for the water pitcher, removes his hand from Len's hair to pour a small bit into his palm.

Len accepts the water, though most of it slides down his chin. "Hundred other bodies outside. Prisoners. He's the first...alien." He rumbles, another groan of a chuckle.

Pavel nods, feeding him another handful of water. "I suppose I should have guessed." He frowns, blinking out at the wall as Len swallows a few more drops of water. "That is frustrating in quite another way."

"Mmm?"

He shakes his head - it's a heavy enough weight to know how easily they could be found if only he could get a message to the ship. He doesn't need to share that burden with Len.

Poor Desmarais should be a reminder, at least. Though things are horrid here, they are both still alive. That should count for something.

But he doesn't bother voicing that platitude either. Even without looking at Len's dead hands limp on the floor, he knows Len wouldn't find any comfort in the idea.

Len, he has little doubt, would switch places with Rene if he could.

He only tolerates her watching eyes for a few minutes before he speaks.

"You may as well come out with it."

Christine blinks at him, trying for innocence and failing spectacularly. "Out with what? Have you ever known me to censor myself around you?"

"Yeah," Len answers tersely. "Since the day I woke up here instead of on that planet."

Her innocent smile fades.

Len gestures his free hand at her, obediently continuing the monotonous task of squeezing a rubbery ball with his other hand. "Odds are Pavel's going to show up here. Get it out of your system before he's around to hear it."

She raises an eyebrow and smiles faintly. "Sounds to me like you've got a good idea of what I'm going to say already."

"You let Jim beat you to it," he confirms. He looks down at the little orange ball, watches his fingers tighten and release around it. Tighten and release. It's a really old-fashioned way of building up strength in the hand and wrist, though of course this ball has sensors and arrays that are feeding information to the computers with every squeeze, and that's relatively modern.

"He didn't do a bad job, either," he says when she doesn't take him up on the offer and start bitching. "Actually got me thinking about things."

"Oh yeah? Remind me to think about giving him a little credit for that."

But that's all she says. Len looks up at her after a moment, eyebrows raised.

She looks back at him, calm. "It's not my place to say anything."

"And that's ever stopped you before?"

She considers that. "There's a point. But it's stopping me now, Leonard. As long as you're thinking about it, I'm happy. You're too smart and too good a man to make the wrong choice, especially when the health of such a young man is at stake."

He blows out an annoyed breath and squeezes the ball.

An instant later his eyes fly back up to her and his hand goes slack. "Wait a damned minute here. The health of a young man? What are you talking about?"

She hesitates. "I thought you said the Captain already-"

"-gave me a speech about how hanging on to the kid is impeding my recovery, and everything between us comes from trauma, nothing more."

She frowns. "I see."

"You've got something to add now, I take it? You want to tell me how I'm hurting Pavel, because I don't see it."

"Jim is a good captain, but he's got a blind spot a mile wide whenever you're involved." Christine sits back, looking uncertain. "I'm not the ship's psychologist, but whatever gets said to me in that context is private all the same. You know I can't tell you about anything Ensign Chekov has said to me."

"Yeah," Len meets her eyes, firm. "But he sure as hell didn't tell you I was hurting him somehow. You can have your confidentiality, I know that kid."

She stays quiet for a moment, reaching out and taking the forgotten ball and holding it out across the table.

Len grabs it, annoyed, and squeezes the damned thing for all he's worth.

"Mr. Chekov hasn't told me anything," she says slowly. "He's made no complaints about your behavior."

"Of course not."

"And I'm not a clinical psychologist, as everyone seems fond of reminding me. But I know a few things, Len. I took the same courses you did, at least until our specialties changed our class loads. And I can tell you something that's generic enough that it doesn't threaten any kind of doctor/patient privilege: when a person is weighed down with guilt over someone else's pain, they have absolutely no choice when that Someone Else comes to them for help."

Len thinks about that, brow furrowing. "You're saying the kid is codependent?"

She frowns. "I'm speaking in generalities, Len. Generally speaking, a sense of guilt can be as hard to defy as a direct order. I'm saying that if someone takes on enough responsibility, the idea of free will loses its meaning."

So. She's not saying that Pavel's codependent, she's saying he's a slave to Len's needs.

Len snorts and looks back at the ball, at his hand.

He's known since they first woke up back on the ship that Pavel needs him as much as he needs Pavel. Maybe he didn't stop to think that neither of those needs are particularly healthy.

But Jesus. It's so fucking sick of Christine and Jim to be dissecting their behavior when they're only a few weeks out of a cell. How can they begin to tear apart Len and Pavel when Len and Pavel aren't anything like back to normal yet?

They talk like this is how things are now. Like things have settled into some harmful pattern that they want to rescue Len and Pavel from. But nothing is settled yet. It hasn't even begun.

Pavel was right. Of course he was right, the kid's a fucking genius. He knew that everyone around them would cast them as Survivors and monitor their recovery. That just because the scars were healing and his fingers could wrap around a ball he ought to be his old self again in all other ways.

"Len."

He glares up at Christine before he can school his expression.

She regards him, patient and calm in that way that's always made her such a good fit in his Sickbay.

"You can convince yourself that the entire universe outside of you and that kid are all wrong about something, but if it's two people against the universe than isn't there a better chance that it's the two people who are wrong?"

Len drops the ball back on the table, because if it stays in his hand it's going to get thrown.

"No one is claiming that you or Pavel are bad guys. Believe me, Len, I know you, and I know that kid wouldn't hurt a fly. But people can do things that are out of character when they're trying to survive something horrible, and you two are still in survival mode."

But he's not, he wants to argue. He's not leaning on Pavel the way he did in the cell. He doesn't fear everyone around him, he doesn't need Pavel to stand between him and the doorway anymore.

It isn't survival mode, it's just how things have changed because of the survival mode he was stuck in for so long.

The problem with the rest of the universe, he figures, is that what happens to two people doesn't affect that universe in the slightest. Sulu and his ironic Buddhist sayings can go on about the wings of a butterfly causing famine on Ganasus Prime, but the fact of the matter is that if Len and Pavel had died in that cell the universe would still be going on, inexorable as always.

The universe isn't affected by two people, so if the universe holds on to some fact that two people argue with...no, he's not inclined to say it's the two people who are wrong.

Maybe that's the problem: no one's wrong. The two people are just trying to recover, changed by something that didn't so much as register out in the universe.

Pavel told him once, in that cell, about some poem or something that he read. He talked about it after the Maalox fucked up Len's hands, after he lost his head, so the memory is unsteady. But Len remembers him talking about it.

The gist was that some guy's looking up at the stars, knowing that the small lives of he and every other human being don't affect those cold, distant stars in the slightest. But then he goes on to realize that if one of those stars suddenly extinguishes, he wouldn't even notice its passing. It would just be one less light among millions.

Len seems to remember that the justice of it was what Pavel seemed to like. There's truth to it, anyway, and Len thinks about it now, with Christine staring at him in quiet sympathy.

There is nothing so huge that the entire universe is affected by its happening. What happened to Len and Pavel might only affect the two of them, and so it's up to the two of them to decide what sort of impact it will have, and how they need to react to it.

Maybe Pavel is a textbook case of guilt-induced codependency. Maybe Len's a classic case of trauma, of unhealthy attachment. But textbooks are as cold and distant as stars, and they're not suitable judges.

Then again.

Jim and Christine aren't textbooks. They're not spokesman for the bigger universe. They are friends. They were affected by what happened. Not as directly as Len and Pavel, but affected all the same.

So he can't ignore them as easily as he wants to.

And he can't deny that he's not exactly impartial. Jim is probably right: if he were the doctor in this situation instead of the patient, he might feel as doubtful as Jim that Pavel knows what he's talking about when he says 'love'. If he were in Christine's shoes he might wonder if some harm was being done to Pavel, being leaned on so heavily when guilt is already weighing him down so hard.

Maybe, in the end, it's Christine and Jim who are right. Maybe they're just close enough and just far enough away that they can see something horribly obvious that Len is just too fucked up to notice.

He lays there...he doesn't know how long. Time is this weird tunnel around him, gray and illusory. He might pass out, might fall asleep, might be awake, but it's all this same painful black blur that he can't grasp on to.

His hands are gone. He can hardly force his eyes to open, can hardly emerge from this weight that has settled all around him.

There's a voice above his head, that's how he knows he isn't with Them. The rise and fall of quickly-spoken words have faded, with the hours and the passing out and the waking up, into a slower kind of monotone, but Len doesn't mind. As long as he hears the sound of it, as long as he knows he's with Him and not with Them, he isn't inclined to be picky.

He just wants this to be over. His hands are gone, his life is shot. They take him out to hurt him, to make him scream and watch him cry and hear him beg, and then they put him back in this...istasis/i chamber, like he's being preserved for the next round.

It's beaten him. He can't do it. This pain, this fear, this dread of what else they'll do now that they've done the worst thing they can...it's won.

He can't focus on Pavel, and in the back of his mind he almost feels sorry for the kid. If Len's mind is gone that means the kid is all alone here, and that's probably a scary thing.

The next time he hears the screeching grind of the door opening, he can't even manage a reaction. How can hurt him badly enough that he'll even feel it anymore? Why should he be scared?

The only worse thing they can do now is kill him, and he's almost rooting for it.

He is rooting for it.

Or maybe he's just telling himself that, because when heavy footsteps come in he shuts his eyes and thinks, in a startlingly lucid, loud voice, take Pavel.

Take the kid. He's still healthy, he'll scream when you hurt him. I can't anymore. He'd be more fun, take him. Please, please take him instead.

He thinks it, and he means it, and for a few ticks of breath he can't even feel guilty for it.

But before they can come close enough to grab him, the droning voice Len has been holding on to for hours suddenly chokes off, and the pillow slides itself from under Len's head.

"No."

That same voice, only not a monotone anymore. Loud, and firm.

"You're not going to touch him."

Len's eyes open. His vision is cloudy and he's so fucking tired he can't make his eyes focus, but he can see Pavel standing there, standing over him.

He can see the oversized gray lumps of the Maalox facing him,

Pavel speaks again, clear and strong. "You have done enough, you're not taking him again."

The Maalox hiss and click in their ugly language. One of them strides forward and simply pushes Pavel away.

The kid stumbles against the wall, catching himself on his hands, and the Maalox move to Len.

"I said no, merzavci! Don't touch him!"

Pavel pushes off the wall and plows into one of them. He barely makes the broad Maalox stumble.

Len shuts his eyes hard for a moment, forcing them to focus. He tries to push himself to sit up, but with his arms completely useless he can't manage it.

He watches, though, from his awkward spot on the floor. He watches Pavel growl and yell and fling his thin little self at the guards like a shaft of wheat grass that wind sends batting into a tree trunk.

The Maalox mutter between themselves, and one of them comes around to grab Pavel by the arm and throw him a little more forcefully into the wall.

Len knows it's useless. The kid could never fight them off, and they've been so focused on Len this whole time that he can't make himself believe they'd suddenly switch to using Pavel as a punching bag instead of him.

But he watches, because Pavel is fighting for him. It's what he tried to avoid at first, when he still thought there was a chance they would go for the kid. It's what his brain has been crying out for for days, though he doesn't want to admit that.

And as he watches he knows it's useless. He might want the kid to demand to go in his place, but the Maalox aren't going to go for it.

He might want someone, anyone, to suffer instead of him, but...

But he doesn't want this. He doesn't want it to be Pavel.

The guard barks something at Pavel, some command, some order to stay back or knock it off. When the guard turns back to Len, Len ignores him.

He watches Pavel push himself off the wall a second time, watches him move on unsteady feet to the abandoned platter of molding greens. Watches the kid pick up that platter and hurl it at the guard's back.

That does get a reaction. The guard lets out a sound that would have made Len laugh any other time - it's kind of like the indignant sound Jim makes when someone turns him down at a bar.

The guard wheels and scrapes a soggy mass of leaves off his sleeve and shoulder and stares at it.

The other guard makes a rumbling sound that Len pegs as laughter, and he moves to his pal's side. They go back and forth for a minute in their always hurried-sounding language.

And then, abruptly, they both head for the door.

Len's head tilts up, lifting off the floor in shock as they go. The door squeals shut behind them.

They're gone.

Len's eyes go to Pavel, who stands there against the wall with fists clenched, breathing hard, looking wild and ragged and just as surprised as Len feels.

He can't take his eyes off the kid as Pavel moves, stumbling over to Len and dropping down on his knees, graceless and heavy.

"I should..." Pavel stares from Len to the door, and his eyes are huge. "I should have fought them. Every time."

Len swallows. He hasn't spoken in days but words come up that want to be said.

Pavel doesn't let him. He sinks down, a hand reaching out limply and falling on Len's leg. "I will. From now on, I swear."

"Kid..." is all Len gets out, and his voice is rusty as a nail.

Pavel breathes in and out, deep, like he's a step away from bursting into tears. He stares at the closed door.

He won't stop them even if he fights them. This...Len wants to be hopeful but he can't, he knows this is a fluke. They were surprised, and the food, and they won't let something like that deter them again.

If Pavel fights he'll just get himself hurt. Len wants to tell him that, wants to go back to the old self-sacrificial Saint McCoy he was when he landed in this cell however long ago.

But as little as he wants to see Pavel hurt, there's something about having this kid fight for him that has cleared some of the cotton from Len's mind. There's something about a thrown platter of food that has lifted some of the heaviness of despair from him.

Hell if he knows why, but he feels like he can hold on to the feeling. He feels like there's a part of him that's still worth walking out of here alive, no matter what else they do.

Pavel recovers from his own shock slowly, twists himself back under Len, the ever-faithful pillow, and slowly his voice starts up again, revving slowly into some story about one of his old school mates from Russia.

Len doesn't focus on the words - his coherent patches are too unreliable to bother - but he shuts his eyes and rests against Pavel's lap and lets the sound of Pavel's voice drift down to him, constant and soothing.

"Don't you ever knock?"

Pavel stops in the doorway, caught by surprise.

He walked through the door without pause, yes, without asking for entry or receiving permission. But it's nothing he hasn't done a dozen times in the last week.

Len looks back at him, sitting in his armchair with a padd on his lap - still catching up on the medical journals, no doubt. He is scowling.

Pavel isn't thrown off by the scowl, but the greeting has him lost for an answer.

Len looks down at the padd, his scowl easing.

"How's the training going?" he asks after a moment, soft, like an apology.

"It..." Pavel hesitates. He steps in far enough that the door can slide shut behind him, but stops there.

He hasn't had to think about this, this understanding that he simply has access to Len wherever he is. He has taken it as a given that he and Len...that they should stay close. Of course others have tried to prevent it, to bar him from seeing Len, but those are outside obstacles that he fights without thought.

He is instantly and entirely thrown off, having this form of objection, of stipulation, coming from Len himself.

"It is redundant," he says after a moment. It's easy to make himself talk, he's gotten so used to it that silence feels unnatural.

He studies Len, confused and uncertain, even as he answers. "We run through exercises that any first year student at the Academy could complete. But Hikaru insists, and if I refuse they will want me to resume my duty shifts."

Len stares at the padd. "Yeah, well, that's not a crazy idea. You're okay, you should get back to work." He doesn't move, doesn't look at him. His voice is flat when he speaks. "You belong on the bridge, kid. I'm sure as hell going to get my ass back into sickbay as soon as they let me."

The implication, as Pavel hears it, is that Pavel doesn't belong here. Not in this quarters, not without knocking.

Pavel is lost for a response.

He has only stalled resuming his shifts because he has to be here for Len. He thought that was understood. He thought Len knew.

"For Christ's sake, stop looking at me like that." Len stares at his padd. "I'm not kicking you out, I'm just saying. Things need to...they've got to go back to normal."

And this isn't normal. It isn't how things used to be.

With that thought, Pavel understands.

He lets out a relieved breath, trying to calm his own nerves, and moves further into the room. He slips around the narrow coffee table, not scared anymore.

Len's gaze slides to him as he approaches, but moves away again. "Hey, kid, I'm serious. We should talk, okay? It's not-"

"We will talk," Pavel answers simply, "when you begin to speak your own words, and not Captain Kirk's."

Len tenses, and Pavel knows that he's right. The captain has been talking to Len, telling him the sort of things he was telling Pavel earlier.

Pavel sits, not waiting for invitation because this is Len, and he doesn't need invitation. He sits on the overstuffed arm of Len's chair, reaching out and slipping his fingers through Len's hair as he nods at the padd.

"What is your research today?"

Len hesitates, and Pavel lets him. He lets Len battle this out in his own mind, struggling against whatever fears and doubts Kirk has implanted in him.

With a small, almost frustrated sound, Len relaxes back and leans into Pavel's touch. He sighs out a breath, the tension sliding off of him.

"Some Andorian researcher thinks he's got a vaccine for Crain-Patlok Syndrome," he says, sounding much more like himself.

Pavel smiles. "And you think he does not."

"There's three different papers in this frigging journal about it, and they're all ignoring the basic and not-unimportant fact that vaccines only work if a body's cells can identify and remember the pathogens that cause a disease, and Crain-Patlok is incurable so far precisely because it mutates so radically so quickly." Len grabs the padd and drops it on the coffee table with a growl. "Idiots think one successful course of tests means a damned thing. First time the virus mutates the vaccine will fail."

"Do you want me to go away?" He asks the question now because if he doesn't he might grow too scared of it. And Pavel hates leaving things unsaid.

Len looks up at him. "What?"

Pavel regards him, steady. "Do you wish me to knock before I enter? To spend less time here? To go back to the old times, when I would see you for physicals and perhaps at meals, and never speak to you?"

Len's throat works.

"Is that what you want?" Pavel studies him.

"No." The word comes out hoarse, like it clawed its way from Len's throat. But he shakes his head and says it again more naturally. "No. But maybe what I want isn't the most important thing here."

Pavel considers that. "Maybe not. In fact..." His throat works, but hopefully his nervousness doesn't show through.

Pavel is still himself even after everything they have gone through: it's simply not his way to put off an important matter, to get caught up in idle distraction.

They have to deal with this, with Kirk and Chapel and all the people who stare at them as if they're permanently marked by the Maalox. Pavel has to know that another conversation with Jim isn't going to change Len's mind again.

So he looks at Len steadily, though he's entirely out of his depth and pushing something he doesn't want to risk.

"In fact," he keeps going more calmly than he feels, "what you want is definitely not the most important thing here."

His own mind calls him a liar. But he has a point to make here, and sometimes lying is acceptable.

He stands up, slipping his fingers free of Len's hair, and moves around the coffee table to Len's small replimat.

"Do you remember when you said to me that my being hurt wasn't an acceptable alternative to your being hurt?"

Len sounds wary. "It's the truth, kid."

"It is your truth," Pavel agrees. He programs himself a cup of tea from the replimat, and then a coffee for Len. "And that is why your opinion, and what you want, aren't the most important things right now. Because you made your opinion the most important thing in that cell, and so...it is my turn to be most important now."

He turns back to Len, cups in hand.

Len's eyebrows are raised. He accepts the coffee silently.

Pavel moves back around the table but sits on the couch instead of giving in to his constant desire to be as close to Len as possible.

"You said that it was unacceptable for you to let them hurt me, because it isn't your wish to see harm done to anyone. The implication, Len, is that you think I am perfectly content watching someone else get hurt instead of me."

Len blinks in surprise. He leans in and sets the coffee on the table beside his glowing padd. "I never said anything like that."

"It is harder for you to watch someone suffer than to suffer yourself. What you chose..." Pavel looks away from Len's eyes, because it's against his overdeveloped instincts towards Len to want to accuse him of anything.

"What you chose was selfish. You made my choice for me, because it was the easiest choice for you." He draws in a breath. "You didn't want to watch an innocent suffering. And so you forced me to have to watch an innocent suffering. It was selfish, Len. It was good and noble and unbelievably brave...and it was selfish."

He can't lose Len. He can't let this ship and Kirk and the gossip and recovery take Len from him. He can't let Len cast him aside because Len thinks it's best.

He can't let Len make his choice for him this time.

Pavel grasps his steaming tea cup, though it is uncomfortably hot against his fingers. "And so," he says to his cup, "I think it is my turn to be selfish. I think that right now, what I want is most important."

"So what do you want?"

Pavel looks over at Len.

Len's mouth is tilted upwards. Not enough to call it a full smile, but enough that Pavel can sigh out a little of his worry.

"I want us to go on as we need to," he says carefully. "Not the way that others think we ought to. I don't think it's asking too much, really."

"Sure doesn't sound like it." Len leans in and holds out his hand.

Pavel smiles, prying his hand from his cup and reaching out, accepting the grasp as a peace offering. "Besides," he says more cheerfully now that Len is back to himself, "I love you. I shouldn't have to knock on your door."

Len chuckles and squeezes Pavel's hand.

But as he does, Pavel sees something troubled swirling again behind his eyes. Len doesn't say anything, doesn't withdraw, doesn't lower his gaze. But there is something behind his expression.

Something that tells Pavel that this is far from settled.