Spock stepped into the corridor. The door had closed behind him, and it was just he and Kivuli. It was eerily silent in that hallway, his heels clicking to a stop, and then, nothing but the hum of the ship. He stood there for a moment. Considered his situation. The obscurity of what happened to him in his quarters.

He looked down at Kivuli. She stared back up at him with her deeply aware brown eyes, eyes that didn't exactly look like just another creature's eyes, eyes that looked up at Spock and he knew someone was looking back at him. She was a soul he did not have to work to connect with. They simply were as they were, a mutual understanding that didn't require a single word.

In the silence and the stillness, he could feel the individual muscles in his body. More fatigued than they ought to be, though not frightfully so. The matter between his ears throbbed with pain, but not enough for him to visibly react. His condition was more than stable; but it was still unfounded. Baseless. Things do not happen for no justifiable reason.

He did not stop staring at her, and with a slight pinching of his brow, began to stare at her differently.

And he thought about the vivid images that he had beamed down upon on planet Lyro. He thought about the citizens of a wise and curious race. He thought about how every single one of them was dead, and how quickly their entire population had succumbed. He did not think about regret in that fact, nor sadness nor pity nor sorrow. He instead thought about how the facets of it, of that grave-ridden place, did not make any logical sense and they hadn't the moment the Enterprise arrived. And he always knew they hadn't, and it was not until now that he realized it.

Kiv blinked up at him.

Then the ship jolted and his knees buckled beneath him, the alarms screamed down the walls, the lights flickered violently, and Spock felt the floor growl with the reverberation of an explosion.

—

Kirk was barely on the bridge for more than ten minutes when the entire ship shook with rage, the deck rumbling violently beneath his feet and tossing his frame into the communications console. He yelled for Chekov to throw the shields up, the sound of the explosion almost drowning his voice, but the shock in the order was heard and mutualized by all. Where, how, why, who?

"Sulu, report!" managed Kirk as he fumbled to his feet and grasped the captain's chair. The helmsman lifted himself to his scanner, his eyes flitting across it rapidly.

"Sir, it was a photon torpedo blast, decks 6 and 7 are hit, back by the stern."

"No immediate casualties reported, Captain," interjected Uhura quickly, her hand up to her earpiece. Kirk nodded as the tremors of the ship steadied. It was still again. Kirk's eyes dissected the view screen, searching, but he saw nothing. An attack from the invisible.

"That ship?" he guessed with a huff. Everyone sat in silence as they awaited clarity, but Uhura spoke again after several moments of silence.

"It's Klingon, sir," she said, her voice flat. Kirk whirled around to look at her.

"What?"

"I just intercepted their comms…it's Klingon."

"What in God's name are the Klingons doing out here? Sulu, what's their position?"

Just then a ship, seeming to come out from behind a star-dropped curtain, floated before them on the view screen. It's hull seemed to be made of steel scales, the jagged wings of the body pointing outwards and down like a bloodthirsty bird of prey, hunting and ready to snap the rabbit's neck. Kirk straightened himself and snapped his fingers at Uhura absently.

"Lieutenant…"

"They're already hailing us, sir…"

"On screen, on screen, ship's channel."

And then there was a Klingon. Something icy shivered down Kirk's spine.

"Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise," snarled the Klingon. Kirk's face hardened.

"Commodore Barot, you have broken the Alliance peace treaty with your attack on this Federation ship, you have flippantly disregarded section 1A which transparently states your trespassing of the neutral zone, and therefore have declared—"

"On the contrary, Captain," he hissed, his lip curling. "You and your ship have stolen goods of the Klingon Empire. We have retaliated in defense of this reprehensible act."

"What kind of sh—" he bit his lip and growled in his throat. "What are you trying to pull, Barot? We have no stolen goods, there is nothing of yours we could possibly want."

"Save us both the time, Captain. Save us war. Or I will destroy your ship—justly— and your face will go down in history as a traitor to the Federation. You will be responsible for the loss of 400 lives, you will be the person their families damn in their prayers while they grieve, and your selfishness will overcome any obscene accomplishments prior to the destruction that you are about to face."

"Commodore Barot, you are speaking as if you are the offense. May I remind you of the rogue Klingon cargo carrier that dared drift past the neutral zone and point their weapons at a Federation ship, or do you recall?"

The Klingon's face twitched in fury and he glared at Kirk through his brow.

"Leave," Kirk said in a fervent whisper. "Turn around. Do not trespass those barriers again."

"Unfortunately for you, Captain, my sensors can detect our stolen weapon. My sensors can detect the loss of your shields. Your lies are pointless."

"What weapon are you talking about?" clipped Kirk, his hands hitting the top of the chair he leaned against with every word.

"You are telling me you will not relinquish what you've taken?"

"I have nothing to return, Barot."

The Klingon did not seem disappointed to hear the continuous denial, and Kirk knew his words meant nothing. Barot's cold eyes did not leave Kirk's when he said, in a hideous mutter,

"Fire it all."

And the Klingon's face disappeared and the ship was pummeled with wave after wave of ricocheting blasts, the entire bridge quaking as if a celestial being reached down and shook it like a trivial packet of sugar, and the very air itself seemed to vibrate. Kirk heard the shouts of the crew, their fight to stay upright absolutely futile, and he himself fell down to the floor with a hard thwack. He clamored right back up, his hands gripping the captain's chair like a lifeline, attempting as he could to fire back, but the bridge itself was the Klingon's target and the blasts were too great and too frequent to give him time to stand.

They were unprepared…they didn't know…Klingons, an enemy, was the last thing they expected to see out here…

And for a brief, terrifying moment, Kirk thought his crew was lost. The Klingons did not have enough fire power to rip the entire ship apart, no, but if they had the bridge, they had the ship. The men and women he so cherished, who he cared more for than anything in the universe, would be dead. Utterly and thoroughly destroyed, just like that planet.

Every single one of them.

And then it stopped as quickly as it began, and in order to see, Kirk swiped away the blood running into his eye and leapt over to the command console ready to punch in his retaliation while he still could—

And the Klingon came back on screen and stared at him with a look of confusion and malice.

"Where are you sending it?"

"Commodore Barot, you absolute maniac…!" Kirk yelled out in outrage, his face contorted with both blood and hatred. "You've lost your goddamned mind if you think I have anything of yours or if you think you're going to kill my crew over it!" His voice reached a volume louder than he'd reached in a long time. The engineering console sparked behind him and hissed. Kirk's eyes were venomous. The Klingon opened his mouth, beginning to say,

"There is—" but then a voice behind the Klingon, presumably one of his own crew, cut in, "Commodore, they've gone to lightspeed! We're losing the signal!"

And the Klingon met Kirk's eyeline one last time, their gazes locked, and the transmission was suddenly cut. The Bird of Prey was visible for hardly a second before it zapped away.

Kirk was frozen in shock for a moment. The crew members rustled on the ground, some lifting themselves, others helping the ones who needed it. Kirk blinked and fully registered the blood running down into his eye, and then his body was no longer frozen. He wiped away the red liquid and looked around at his officers. Chekov was unconscious on the floor, Sulu's arm was limp at his side but his other arm was attempting to rouse the young man, Uhura was all the way over by the science station, shaking but seemingly unharmed, Marques' hand was trembling as she tried to hush the crackling engineering console, and Kirk himself felt the familiar pressure on the side of his head that hinted towards a mild concussion.

He heard static come from his command chair comm, then Doctor McCoy's voice.

"Jim! What the hell is happening up there!"

"Bones…we, we were just attacked by the Klingons. I need a med team up here, Bones, I've got injured officers."

"I heard the transmission, but the Klingons?! What in Mary are they doing out here? What'd they attack for?"

"I don't know, Bones! Just get up here, please, stat."

"Five minutes."

Kirk huffed and rested himself against the chair as his adrenaline slowed. He called out to Sulu, but the helmsman just shook his head as his attempts to wake Chekov failed. It wasn't more than three minutes before McCoy burst through the door with two nurses in tow.

Chapel was able to wake the navigator with a shot of a hypo, and Kirk's shoulders loosened at the sight of his opened eyes. McCoy sent Chapel back to medical with both Sulu and Chekov, checked the rest of the bridge over, and then the older man stepped up to stand beside Kirk. He ran a tired hand over his face.

"I'm gonna need to check that out," he said with a nod towards Kirk's head. Kirk just nodded. He felt McCoy's eyes run him over.

"Spock already go check out the hit decks?" McCoy guessed. Kirk turned to look at him with a scrunched brow.

"What do you mean? He was with you."

"No, he said he was coming up to the bridge."

Kirk kept eye contact for several moments before hitting his comm button.

"Kirk to Spock."

There was no reply. Kirk pursed his lips as he channeled the comm to Spock's quarters.

"Kirk to Spock."

There was no reply. He was about to channel the comm ship wide, thinking perhaps the Vulcan had been caught somewhere in the middle of the ship when it was rocked with the blasts, but then he heard Uhura's voice, attempting to remain placid but holding a twinge of haste, relaying,

"Captain…a shuttlecraft has just been registered as missing."

It was like the clap of thunder. As if a net filled with boulders was lowered into his stomach. The realization hit Kirk quicker than he could take his next breath, like the string of an instrument strummed with a single finger, the noise coming down upon him in less than a blink, and he knew. The scattered pieces of what he once thought were separate puzzles, magnetizing together to form a sickening picture he couldn't have before imagined or guessed. Kirk knew.

And he looked over at McCoy, and the doctor took a step back at the look in his eyes, and asked,

"What, Jim? What? What?"

Oh, dammit. Deep, deep resignation lined the captain's body. Oh, dammit. Kirk felt like he needed to vomit, and McCoy put a hand on his shoulder and gave him a little shake, because then, with a look at Kirk's face, the doctor knew too, but he didn't want to know, and he wanted Kirk to say something different to him than what he feared he would, and he asked him in hopes for a different answer,

"What is it, Jim? What? What?"

What?