A/N: This is a tragedy with a somewhat happy ending. That's all I got this time. Anyone who's reading this and usually reads Sunshine, I will have more out by in a week at most, but finals for me are this week…sooo…
Disclaimer: I apparently just like putting these boys in pain. No profit is being made from this.
+ststst+
Jim wakes up, and he knows that it's not okay.
He knows it's not okay, because he can see himself. He's on the table - or at least his body is, his chest is open and there's blood everywhere, soaking the green of the operation clothes. He's pallid, still, and as he wafts closer, around Chapel, and closer to Bones, who's muttering under his breath with a hopeless hopefulness that stings, he can see his internal organs. He can see his heart, and his lungs, bright reds and pinks, faltering faltering…falter-…
It's not okay, because even as Bones demands come on, Jim! Come on! Jim's heart is beating erratically, trying, wanting, failing.
He tilts his head to the side, feeling detached as that lone organ, his heart, stops. It doesn't beat anymore and the scanners blare the alarms. He's dead. He feels a sort of acceptance in this. It isn't happiness, but just an oh, I'm dead moment that washes over him like warm water that he is submerged into. Just how it is, no argument, no struggle. It's just the end.
He reaches out with little hesitance, his mind sluggish. He wonders what he'll feel like, little more than skin and bones, nothing magical to keep his heart beating, his lung breathing. Just epithelia and DNA, hardly anymore than dirt and water. His skin feels real, still warm and elastic, but he, himself as the conscience being, feels less than real. He makes contact with his body, but there is no feeling in his fingers. He can feel the warmth radiating off of his corpse, but it is lackluster, almost an afterthought.
A specter, that is all he is, he realizes with a muted sense of disillusionment. He is dying and dead, stuck in a half-life. He is unable to move, to take his hand away from his own body.
Hands are still submerged inside his useless corpse, grabbing his heart and massaging demandingly.
"Don't do this to me, Jim. Don't do this!"
He looks up, eyes focusing on Bones, and noticing only now that there is a light exuding forth from his chest, valiant purple like the color of angry bruises, deep and almost painful to look at, yet still exhilarating in its own way. It bursts and recedes with each word Bones speaks, demanding, trying to keep hope.
He wonders if it's worth it.
Jim looks to Chapel beside him, her eyes and hands working just as fast as the doctor's. She radiates a soft orchid hue, pulsing in tandem with her own heartbeat. Her clear blue eyes, which he can make out just under the light emanating from her core, flicker hurriedly between his body and the doctor who still orders life back into him. She knows what he knows and what the doctor knows.
It's not okay.
He blinks. Looks back at Bones, and for a moment, Bones meets his eyes though the doctor doesn't realize it.
It's over.
Bones pulls his hands out of his chest, holding them up in front of him, his eyes trapped and haunted. The light coming from within him fades ever so slightly, the color of forget-me-nots in the fading light of sunset. Beneath Jim's palm, existence shifts. He is suddenly himself, if slightly dulled by the lack-of-the-life that courses through his incorporeal form, and the corpse beneath him fades into a different realm. He is the real one, and the thing on the operation table is nothing.
He removes his hand, lazily, almost wistfully, and turns to the woman beside him, still with an orchid pink haze. He places his hand on her, mildly confused when she too feels unreal beneath his palm. More than that, he's repulsed when he feels the overwhelming grief on her, sharp on his tongue like the tang of vinegar. She is sad, sad for him, and he feels disgusted by it.
He can't feel sad for himself. He can barely feel anything by himself, only understanding the dulled, primal senses that make up what can only be described as the soul.
He pulls his hand away, as if burned, but in reality her skin no longer holds temperature, no longer cold, no longer hot. She is just there, like felt beneath his fingers. She is not real. Only a ragdoll made of flavorless orchid-colored cloth.
+ststst+
Jim remembers his chair, and imagines himself in his chair, but here, in this world where he is not in this world, it seems wrong. He's dead, and the imaginings of himself in that seat, almost austere and monotone; the imaginings of himself alive in that seat are like bile to his muted senses. He no longer belongs there. That seat is meant for someone greater, someone alive, who can feel the coolness of leather under burning skin. The fact that he can not is almost a sign that he should never have been there in the first place.
It is wrong that he should even try to remember his time in that chair.
What's worse is that no one else sits in his chair.
The Vulcan…
Jim looks to the corpse still sitting at the science station, seeing what he had once called his dearest friend ensconced in rose-red light, like the sunset of a planet long since vanished.
…Spock. That is his name.
Spock will not sit in the captain's chair, though he is, by all rights, this ship's rightful captain. He commands from a post which should be relinquished to another, and stands behind the chair that he should be settling in.
Jim can see it, before his eyes. Spock sits in the chair, stiffly, composedly, and it looks right, much better than Jim ever did.
However, it is too soon for these creatures of thought and mitosis. The chair goes unlabored. It sits in the center of the round room, empty and lifeless as he is, while these breathing humanoids of another realm mourn someone who feels no regret at the fact that they mourn. They grieve for a person who lives as a ghost before their eyes. As that ghost, he feels nothing for them, nothing but pity and sadness that they still think of him with a wistful mind. He feels repulsion for the fact they waste away precious seconds of their already short lives thinking of him.
He looks around the bridge and already they look older. No longer the close friends that he held dear to him, they are only bodies with expiration dates ticking closer to death with unstable clocks. They all burn so brightly now, with colors that he had never even dreamed of, but he can see the colors waning, slowly but without doubt. Time ticks steadily, but their lives wax and wane in co-ordinance with fate and chaos.
Slowly, he drifts around the circular room, resting briefly by each of living beings, the ones he used to laugh with, fight with, and love with. He can't do any of that now, and all of theirs is muted by the weight of his absent presence. They feel him, because the souls that radiate through their organs and cells can feel him, the leftover soul of the corpse they sent listing into space. They feel him, though they are unaware of it. Their souls and minds do not connect, not the way that Spock's soul and mind do.
And his presence keeps their sadness and grief fresh.
He would leave if he could. Perhaps that would relieve them of their lingering grief. He is not there for them, though. He's there with his ship. He can't leave without his ship, and his ship can't come with him. Not yet.
The Vulcan…Spock glides gracefully to his feet, the only sign of tension displayed in the jerky way he snaps his shirt free of wrinkles.
He saw how the Vulcan's sunset-red body blazed at the thought of his ship, of Jim's ship.
The katra and the soul are not unalike, the difference being that the katra can sense others far better than the soul can. In a Vulcan, the katra and the mind work together. Spock is not ignorant of his inability to leave, nor is he oblivious for what he is waiting for.
The Vulcan looks around the room, eyes passing right over the ghost that lingers at the corner of his mind.
"I will be taking a short lunch. Lieutenant Sulu, you have the conn. Lieutenant Uhura, please inform Doctor McCoy that I will be joining him shortly."
He wanders over to where Spock has just vacated, feeling the flumes of anger still wafting around the console. He doesn't care that his once-friend is angry. It isn't his fault, and if it is, he can not be blamed for it.
He cannot leave without his ship.
+ststst+
Time moves differently for Jim, going backwards and forwards and sometimes just not at all, so long as it is within the time after he has died, and before his ship comes with him. A few of them return to a semblance of their normal selves. He watches them as he would have watched a movie in his other life. He can see the way they regain life, visibly straightening like a flower towards the sun's light, and he compares it to the way they were, sometimes putting their past and current images side by side.
Some make progress, while still lingering in their grief. A few do not move on at all.
The room is clean and sterile, as it always is, as it always will be. Jim moves around the beds, touching the fabrics and materials that have no feeling to his fingertips. Stale, like cardboard, all of it. He looks to the door that hides the one who moves on, not away from him, but away from those who do.
He sees the doctor sitting at his desk and staring into an old holopic that glows in a dull green that almost reminds Jim of swamplands that he saw in that other realm, before he was a form drifting through time with a lack-of-life life force pulsing out from his free flowing form. His color, once deep purple and bright and fading, is dull lavender now with intermittent shines of gray. His face is without inflection, blank and emotionless, even more so than the specter observing him.
Jim drifts around the desk, closer to the doctor who looks up almost as if he knows Jim is there, but unable to find him. His eyes, more brown than green, unlike how they used to be, cast around the room, before they stare straight through Jim. His hand, both in his lap, holding onto a hypo—Jim remembers those—and he tightens its grip on the cool metal of it.
Jim knows what it is. Sees it clearly, and he reaches out wrapping around the other's hand, and he can feel the dissatisfaction and longing wafting around the both of them, the impatience. He pulses into the doctor.
Not yet, Bones. Just wait.
The hypo falls to the floor with a muted clatter in Jim's ears, though it is apparent that it is too loud for the doctor by the way his face tightens in pain, with anguish. He presses his face into his hand, shaking. His misery guilt agony fills the room and Jim leaves just as that woman…the one who lies with the Vulcan enters the room, dark forest green light almost blinding her humanoid form from his eyes.
She has moved away from him.
The doctor is coming after him.
+ststst+
He doesn't like to linger on the day he realized his existence, but he feels a certain longing to see the doctor before he started turning gray. He likes the dark purple of midnight skies that the doctor once had before his heart failed against all orders it was given.
It's awkward, seeing as he doesn't like or feel much anymore. Souls are primal; they don't have wants or dislikes. They just have being and waiting. Usually there is no middle ground, no emotion, no reaction, no sensation.
He still returns to his deathbed…or perhaps his release-bed.
Still stares at the doctor as he demands life back through Jim's body, demands that he be more than flesh and bones and a soul that can't leave without its ship. He still watches that vibrant purple as it already begins to fades to sunset violets that mourn the fading sun.
+ststst+
The Vulcan still feels anger towards his presence, though Jim doesn't notice it so much anymore. He recognizes the deep flumes of desert sand red spiking when he enters a room, notices how it turns crimson if he thinks too much on his ship or wafts too close to the doctor's now completely colorless form. Jim doesn't know what the Vulcan wants from him. It's not like he has a choice in the matter.
Jim is in the observation deck, and he feels the echoes of another life surrounding him when he—enjoyed? appreciated? loved? – calmed at the sight of points of light rushing towards and away from him. He remembers whispers of conversations with people he once loved but hardly knows the name of anymore. He remembers touch, and sometimes thinks he can still feel the soft fabric of the plush chairs when he reaches out for it.
It's nothing anymore.
"I know you are present in this room…Jim."
The Vulcan stands at the entrance of the deck, the door whishing closed behind him, cutting off all light in the room save for that angry blood-red glow. Jim sees him, just as he sees the stars that rush flow stand still beside the window. His fury is luminous, fuller than the feelings of his other human counterparts who Jim can only feel when he's close to them. Its no wonder Vulcans hide their emotions.
They are too much.
"You must leave." The Vulcan's voice used to carry little to no inflection, but Jim finds himself able to hear many things he shouldn't, just as he is unable to hear many things that he should. What would have been a calm statement of fact is now an enraged order, a demand that he relinquish his hold on them all, on his ship especially.
Would you leave her?
The Vulcan stiffens blood red flaring outwards for a single moment, katra infuriated at the insinuation that has just been made at its expense and mind catching up just as quickly.
"She would not wither for me…"
'…the way your ship does for you.'
"Nor would I want her to. You are being unreasonable. You need not wait here. It is unappreciated."
That very well may be, but Jim still cannot leave without his ship.
+ststst+
He has been in these quarters before, not while in this realm, but before when he was made up of mitosis and chemical reactions. It was that person's room, his other self, his body's room. No one sleeps in it now; his belongings are still in their place, forgotten by time and crewmembers until the dock with Earth again. Until they can be returned to his brother.
Only one item is missing.
A holopic that exudes dull moss green light, the color of which he remembered seeing in a swamp somewhere when he felt more.
+ststst+
Jim hovers at the corner of the doctor's desk watching the man through the wall dividing them. The doctor looks around. Only one patient on the cardboard bed and she sleeps with a serenity that makes even Jim just a little bit jealous. The doctor looks more than jealous, staring at her supine form. He shakes his head.
"Nurse Chapel, I'll be in my office. Can you keep an eye out for an hour or so?"
The hypo sits innocently on the desk before Jim, having been laid out that morning by the man, having been contemplated. The answer has been chosen, Jim knows. He watched as the last gasping breath of lavender extinguished, leaving the doctor with nothing but a murky gray aura that spoke of sorrow and exhaustion. Gray souls extinguish fast in that realm, die out all together if forced to continue on.
The doctor picks up the injector, stares at it with a painfully beating heart even Jim can feel, a heart that is trying…wanting…failing…
It is painful for a life to come to this. Jim knows it must be by the precious saline water that escapes from that fragile human body, departs from eyes, mostly brown, hardly green. The doctor shakes his head again, tightening his grip on the hypo. His eyes move up to where Jim is, seeing him for the first time since he left his body in that realm.
The transition is already happening, just as it did for Jim and his body. The soul is already one step away from the body, still stuck in that realm, but knowing it won't remain there for long.
Its okay, Bones. It's time.
The doctor plunges the needle into his own neck and Jim waits, actually feels seconds tick too slowly for the first time since his body died. The man stares at the holopic for a minute, closer to two, and then he leans forward, crossing his arms over his desk and laying his head down on them.
For the first time since Chapel, he brushes across Bones' slowly relaxing shoulders feeling the sharp relief build and then fade just as suddenly. The light surrounding Bones body floods with color, returning to the deep luscious purple of the moments before Jim died.
The light becomes solid beneath his touch, warm and inviting.
It's only then that Jim notices that he burns as brightly and vividly as Bones does.
I knew you'd wait for me.
+ststst+
The holopic on the desk flickers and dies out, extinguishing the picture of two men as Jim and his ship, his anchor, his Bones flash out of existence.
+ststst+
InnocentGuilt