Title: Long Day's Journey into Night

Author: Nemo the Everbeing

Chapter 6

oOo An hour earlier oOo

The first thing Leonard McCoy noticed was the intensity of the lights. The second thing he noticed was pain.

"Spock . . ." he gasped, feeling the words grate in his throat. "Spock!"

"Whoa!" a voice said, and garbled protests clamored for attention. Hands held him down, and his eyes flew open.

"Spock!" he gasped.

Above him, Jim Kirk, Jeffrey M'Benga and Christine Chapel swam into focus. "Easy, Doctor," M'Benga said. "You're barely patched together as is."

"Where's Spock?" McCoy asked. "I was . . ." he remembered that Christine didn't know about Spock and him and stopped. Looking around, he said, "I was visiting him."

"What happened, Bones?" Jim asked.

McCoy closed his eyes. "We were talking . . . and then we heard something. A hissing. Gas in the vents. It knocked me out. Where's Spock?"

"Not here," Kirk said.

"Where?" McCoy asked.

"We don't know."

McCoy struggled to sit up, but was universally pushed down by three pairs of hands. "I have to . . . I've got to . . ."

"You can't," M'Benga said. "You're far too weak to do anything."

"But," McCoy looked to Kirk, "Jim, I have to find him. God only knows where he is or what's happening to him."

Jeffrey shifted on his feet and asked, "Nurse Chapel, could you help me look over the charts in the next room?"

"But . . ." Christine said.

"Come on, Nurse," he urged. "Let them talk."

When they were gone, McCoy immediately grabbed Kirk's wrist. "Jim, I can't feel him. The last thing we ever did was argue. I hit him. He told me he regretted getting bonded and I hit him. And now he's gone, Jim."

"What do you mean?" Kirk asked, staring at his doctor.

"In my head," McCoy said. "I can't feel him in my head."

Kirk's expression clouded with ill-concealed fear. "Is he dead?"

"I don't know. I just feel empty."

Kirk grabbed his shoulders. "Bones!" he said. "I need you to concentrate. Maybe he's still here but blocked. Could you find him?"

"I don't know, Jim! Especially after that gas, I feel pretty odd, and my telepathy's no good even at peak health." Oh, God. Spock was gone, and had left hating McCoy, and thinking McCoy hated him. He said that he bonded to the doctor because there was no other choice. But he hadn't wanted to. For a month, he had fooled McCoy into thinking that he had, but it had been a ruse. Pity, maybe. Oh, God . . .

Or maybe not. Maybe it had been the heat of the moment which made Spock say what he said. Maybe, in his own Vulcan way, he had been just as angry as McCoy. Lord knew that the doctor said things he didn't mean during those moments. Spock had been so cold, though. So direct and cutting.

Jim shook him. "Bones, snap out of it! Whatever happened between the two of you, you have to put it aside. I need you to find him, do you hear? I need you to try. I know the two of you are connected, so reach out and find Spock."

"Jim, I can't even feel the connection!"

"So, find it!"

"It doesn't work that way. It's either there or it's not. I don't have control over these things."

"Well, you'd better get some control," Jim said, "because you're the only hope of finding him."

"I don't know if I can, Jim!"

"Look at me," Kirk ordered, and they stared one another down. "Do you want to find Spock in a hall somewhere? Green blood all over the walls, soaking into the carpet? Do you want that?"

"Of course not."

"Then do something. Stop making excuses and find him, because you can, and he'll be dead if you're too afraid." His voice dropped. "Bones, I've seen men do extraordinary things when they have to. I know you don't like whatever mental abilities this bonding has given you, but for his sake you must stop being afraid. Use what you've got, and don't go half-measure with it."

McCoy slowly nodded. He didn't know where to even begin, but he closed his eyes and concentrated on Spock, every detail, every hair. Every inflection and everything which made the man uniquely Spock.

McCoy searched mentally, barely knowing how. It was like groping in the dark. He reached out with nonexistent fingers, trying to find Spock, trying to locate his lover, his bondmate, his husband. It was like trying to find a missing arm, searching for it throughout the entire ship.

Was this what he should be doing? He had no clue. It seemed right, but was it all just in his imagination? What was the difference between imagination and honest psychic phenomena? What if he got this wrong? What if he thought he found Spock but it was just his own desperation? There was nothing else he could try. Jim was counting on him. Spock was counting on him. Leonard McCoy was not a hero, but now he had to be.

Jim had said to stop being afraid. Jim had said that his mental abilities were enough to find Spock. Jim could be wrong about a great many things, but the man's intuition was second to none.

So Leonard searched the ship. He wasn't searching with his eyes, but with strange little tendrils slipping through the Enterprise, touching . . . touching . . .

He looked up and gasped. He felt his eyes snap open, but couldn't see. He felt himself connected to everything on the ship. Every machine, every brain, every soul. He must have done something wrong. This wasn't what should happen. It was too much for his mind to contain. It was too vast. Too many foreign thoughts assaulting him from every direction, deafening, roaring, drowning him. Where was Spock in all this? How could he possibly hope to find the Vulcan, let alone find himself? Who was he?

"Oh, God," he breathed.

Somewhere, Jim was calling, "Bones? Bones! What are you doing?"

He couldn't listen, though. Didn't even know who this Bones was. All he knew was that somewhere in this morass, there was a man named Spock, a man who meant everything to him. A man he had to find, no matter what the cost.

A feather brush. A tingling along his tendrils. He groped in that direction.

The black curtain descended as though it were made of lead, crushing Leonard's mind, dropping between him and Spock. The Vulcan was gone, and every tendril of McCoy's mind was on fire. He was dying.

A sharp pain, more urgent and tangible suddenly broke through his concentration, shattering the onslaught. The pain came again, and suddenly he saw the sickbay, losing contact with the other minds on the ship.

Jeffrey was standing over him, his hand raised got another slap. On the other side of the bed, Kirk knelt on the floor, shaking. Christine was in a chair near the captain, her head between her knees.

For a long moment, he couldn't for the life of him understand where or who he was. He knew these people, but didn't know how. Then, he remembered. He was Leonard McCoy, and he had just tried to use his full mental abilities. "What . . ?" he managed. Jeff slapped him one more time. "Goddammit, Jeff!" he shouted. "What the hell happened?"

"You went into a Vulcan telepathic trance," Jeffrey said.

"I'm not Vulcan," McCoy said. "How did I do that?"

"It probably has something to do with your . . . unique condition," Jeffrey told him. "I brought you out of it with a traditional Vulcan technique."

"Slapping me? Slapping me is traditional?"

Jeffrey shrugged. "It worked, didn't it?"

McCoy shook his head. "This whole thing is crazy. Why is Jim on the floor?"

"Because your trance connected you to both him and Christine. When you experienced something, they felt the echoes of your feelings."

McCoy shook his head violently. "Not even a Vulcan could do that. Not without physical contact and a full mind-meld."

"But you can."

Jim had pushed himself to his feet. "Did you find Spock?"

McCoy nodded. "He's alive, but there's something with him."

"Something?"

"Yeah. Something extremely powerful. Humans don't have that kind of, well, most humans don't have that kind of power."

"You do," Christine said, staring at him. "How?"

"I'll tell you when I figure it out."

"This thing," Kirk said, pulling them back on track, "what was it?"

"Something huge, at least in my mind. It was like a black wall, or some sort of smothering cloud." He shrugged. "Of course, that's what it looked like telepathically. Lord knows what I look like when I'm incorporeal."

"You're blue," Christine whispered. "Blue and warm. Until the pain it was almost nice to have you in my head."

"Thanks," McCoy said.

"Could you locate him in the ship?" Jim asked. "Think, Bones. Where is he on the ship?"

McCoy concentrated. "Jim, I don't know."

"How can you not-?"

"It doesn't work that way, Jim!" McCoy snapped. "I was everywhere. I was the ship. When I found Spock, it wasn't in a place. It was . . . I don't know. It was in me somewhere."

"Where?"

McCoy gritted his teeth. "In my spleen, Jim. How the hell can I locate Spock if I thought he was in my spleen?"

Kirk sighed. "I don't know."

"You're sure he's alive, though?" Jeffrey asked

"I know it."

Jeffrey didn't ask more. He and McCoy knew that if Spock were dead, the shock of severance would kill McCoy just as surely. A Vulcan could barely survive the death of a bondmate, and a human had far less mental control. He would die without the contact. It would be the complete shutdown of a vital organ.

Kirk didn't know the details, but he nodded anyway. He could intuit what he didn't know.

Christine was the only one in the room who had no knowledge of McCoy and Spock's bonding, and so she was the only one who didn't even have the bare minimum of data to understand what was happening. She simply sat and watched, a frown line appearing between her brows as she stared at McCoy. She was grasping for something just outside her reach, but couldn't quite catch it.

"He's alive," McCoy repeated, more to convince himself than anything else. "And I'm going to find him."

"How?" Christine asked.

"By psychically hunting down that black wall, I'll find Spock."

"It was killing you," M'Benga said. "If I hadn't gotten to you and brought you out of the trance in time, you would be dead. And you'd probably have taken the captain and Christine with you."

"That's why I need you to find me everything on Vulcan psychic abilities and practices that you have, Jeff," McCoy said.

M'Benga frowned but knew better than to debate an issue with the stubborn southern doctor.

"What do you intend to do?" Kirk asked, eyeing McCoy suspiciously.

McCoy met his gaze and felt something strange whispering through him. It wasn't often he felt extreme rage, but this felt vaguely like it. Still, it wasn't precisely the feeling. It was old, a power he had never felt, a hatred and danger that was completely alien.

Alien. That was precisely what it was. It was Vulcan, a feeling which humans were not meant to experience, predating Surak. Hell, it was the reason Surak had imposed such a strict code of logic in the first place. McCoy growled, "I'm going to kill it right back."