Saturn is my favorite movement from 'The Planets.' It is the piece, quite frankly, that inspired me to write this fanfic. It is the longest movement in the symphony at nearly ten minutes, and is beautiful and haunting beyond description. It should not be surprising to anyone that I chose this piece for McCoy. I have pulled out all the stops for this one, as it were. I took great inspiration for this from the TOS episode "The Empath," but it is not meant to be read as a retelling of that episode.
Enjoy this one, because I really, really did!
V. Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
One must stay behind so that the other two can be saved; that is the only terms of negotiation their captors will offer.
He would be an idiot if he didn't realize that the one left behind would not be leaving that planet again.
Not alive, anyway.
It takes him only a breath to make his decision, and he is amazed at how quickly he has become convinced. He can see the wheels turning in the captain's head, and he knows that the man is about to speak, so he grabs him fiercely by the shoulder, leans so close that all they can see are each other's eyes, and speaks low and deliberate and fierce.
No. I won't let you do that.
I am the captain, the man responds with an unusual degree of heat. The decision is mine.
Perhaps the captain's anger has clouded his normally sharp sense for the presence of the hypospray, but the doctor has it jabbed against the younger man's neck before the captain can raise his voice in protest. McCoy reaches out his arms to catch the captain as he slumps, and is easing him to the ground when the first officer is suddenly looming over him.
He expects the Vulcan to refute his actions, but instead a nod of understanding comes his way. The Vulcan indicates that he will remain behind, allowing the doctor to escort the captain to safety.
McCoy knows that what will follow will be difficult for all of them. Still on his knees next to the captain, he glares up at the first officer with an expression on his face the latter can not comprehend.
He jabs the hypospray through the Vulcan's clothes, just below the knee. The first officer has just enough time to snap his head down to glare at the doctor, and he is about to open his mouth to question the man's ethics as his body folds. McCoy eases him down next to the captain, places the hypospray unobtrusively some distance away, and gets to his feet.
He has lived his life already, experienced everything that the two of them have yet to even realize. He can justify it that way, perhaps, because he would rather die than see anything happen to his captain, and, though he admits this somewhat begrudgingly, also to the Vulcan. He can not willingly endanger another life, even if it means preserving his own. It goes against everything he's ever stood for, every decision he's ever made, and even the oath of his profession, which has stood untouched for thousands of years.
He looks over the captain and the first officer, slumped against one another like sleeping children. He feels a pang of an emotion he can not place . . . regret, or something more.
I'm sorry.
Their captors return a moment later, knock him to the ground, and bind him in chains while the captain and first officer remain oblivious. As they drag him from the room McCoy offers one final look at the two men he is leaving behind.
Two lives at the cost of his own.
He's a doctor, not a hero.
Yet he is sacrificing himself to these hostile people so that the others could escape because that was the only thing he could do. He is turning his death into a chance for them to live; instead of trying to prevent death he is approaching it head on, and it just seems so emotional and yet. . . logical at the same time.
The captors take him to a distant room, devoid of external light or any decoration, and attach his chains to another hanging from the ceiling. Without word or explanation they produce an alien weapon he can only liken to a lethal cousin of a cat-o'-nine-tails, and proceed to beat him with the weapon and their fists and their feet until his skin is falling off and his throat is raw for the screaming and he tumbles into unconsciousness from the agony.
He awakens to an all-consuming and empty darkness.
He can not move, can not see, can not hear anything save his own ragged breathing. His uniform shirt has been completely eradicated, and that which escaped the massacre hangs tattered from his shoulders. There are pieces of it on the floor amid streaks of his own blood, but he can barely discern them for the lack of light. He can feel the blood running down his chest and his back, but it is sluggish, as the wounds have begun to coagulate. The nerves in his shoulders spasm at irregular intervals, causing the chains around his wrists to cut deeper into already raw skin. He can not feel anything from the waist down, because he is suspended from his hands several inches off the ground, and the senses in his legs have long faded away.
His head is throbbing with so much ferocity that he can not see straight, but he can remember every detail of his hellish ordeal so vividly that his body spasms out of defense, fresh pain springing from his wounds as if begging of him not to think about it anymore.
He has lost most sensation through his back as his body's natural defense mechanisms shut him off from the intense pain. Or perhaps his reserves are spent, and it is a numbness of a different sort that is creeping up on him, as his sensations are slowly becoming nothing at all. . .
He thinks bitterly about Joanna, about his shortcomings as a father. How he has not seen her for years, has been millions of miles away while she grows up without him. He has heard through the channels that she has professed an interest in joining the field of medicine, just like her father. He allows himself a private smile, but it is one of regret, hollow and dry. The everyday chaos of life on a Starfleet vessel often pushes the memories to the back of his mind, but at the end of the day there is not a moment that he does not think of her. Of the day that he last saw her, when she had fat and incandescent tears trapped at the corners of her eyes and a quiver in her bottom lip as he said he was sorry, turned his back on her, and walked away . . .
He can see her as vividly as if she were right there with him in his agony. She is sitting on his lap, her hands over her eyes and her face twisted in a grimace as he tends to her scraped knees. As the final bandage is in place she peers warily through her fingers, decides the torture is over, and turns to wrap her arms around his neck and kiss him on his cheek, babbling a thank you that brings a smile to his lips as she bounds away.
And Jocelyn is standing at a distance, her eyes wide and thoughtful, and she looks . . . happy. That was back before . . . before it all went wrong.
He bites his lip to dispel the memory, because he can not let himself cry.
His hands are slick with sweat or blood or something worse, and he is beginning to lose feeling in his fingers. He moves them slowly, painfully, and feels the sensation of the ring on his pinkie finger as it brushes against his skin. A shiver, painful and uncontrollable, seizes his body. It is his mother's wedding ring, a small and delicate reminder forever against his skin of the life he is soon to leave behind. He balls his fist as tightly as he can manage and focuses on that simple feeling of the metal encircling the smallest of his fingers until he fears he might cry from the effort, from the memory.
Death is never a comforting topic to linger on. Especially when that death will soon be his own.
He can feel the grinding of his broken bones and the throbbing of his wounds and he knows that his organs are failing. He knows that he is dying not because he knows what dying feels like, but because he knows he has passed the point of no return and that there is nowhere to go from here but. . .
He is dying and there is not a damn thing he can do about it because his arms are chained together in the darkness above his head and he can not think of anything except the pain.
The grating sound of a door jars his attention for only a fleeting moment. It opens, but no light enters the room, and he finds this strange because there is an old saying back home that there would be a light at the end of it all. As fingers of darkness close around him he remarks sardonically to himself that his afterworld accommodations portend to be much less hospitable than he had hoped.
His mind struggles in the final moment. He attempts to speak, but lacks the strength to even open his mouth. He clutches at the last fringes of his sanity, suddenly wishing that it could end in a way other than this. That he would rather live out the rest of his days in this pain and this agony and in this lonesome void of darkness than to have it all end right here.
But at last his struggle is over, and he closes his eyes. The transition from physical to mental darkness is quick and complete.
Slowly and deliberately, thought returns to his brain. He can not describe it as a feeling, but rather a vague idea of being suspended motionless in a great span infinite size, within it and yet above it simultaneously, a paradox of sensation that seems … natural. It flows around him, caresses him with its soft touch, comforts him, sentient and corporeal.
His body seems lost against the backdrop of insurmountable nothingness. He can see nothing, there is no up or down or left or right as if all his sensations have melted together and somehow…it is nice.
Why did you do it, Bones?
He lets the question swirl around him without really hearing it, a dejected vibration of intelligible sound, as if he was listening underwater, that he can feel with his body but not in his brain.
Were you that prepared to accept death?
The final word in the question is able to penetrate his unconsciousness, the Rosetta stone that allows him to understand again, that frees him from his miasma of thoughtlessness.
Death? Is this . . . what death feels like?
It is soft and almost delicate, he decides, wrapped around him like the comforting arms of a lover. It is warm and feels safe. But there is a disagreeable taste in the back of his mouth, something about the situation that does not seem correct. He struggles to focus on it, but the encompassing darkness has made his brain fuzzy and sluggish, denying him coherent thought.
You can't die on me.
He knows that voice.
Not like this, Bones.
The frayed edges of his memory struggle to come to life again. He tries to turn his head toward the voice and realizes that the darkness has him in complete stasis. Realization dawns on him like a flash of light in the distance, and he knows with sudden, chilling clarity why this place seems so wrong.
It is so beautiful and so warm and so endearing that he thought he never wanted to leave.
And it is unwilling to let him go.
Sensations slowly begin to return to his body, as if he is an infant just removed from the womb, learning to speak and to hear and to see for the first time. He struggles against the thick ropes of velvet that attempt to tighten their hold on his very soul. Heat rises in his limbs and he can feel the intense beating of his heart.
This is anger, his brain tells him. You are angry, and you are afraid.
Bones?
The pure sensation of sound returns, and the gentle humming in his ears flutters away. He can hear again, and it is so crystalline and beautiful that he longs to reach his arms out toward it, if only he could find the strength to move.
Something suddenly penetrates his abyss of nothingness and settles on his arm, which is floating somewhere at his side. The darkness around him seems to seethe and writhe at the intruder and swirls away like a wounded animal. He is about to laugh at himself for personifying something so abstract when he suddenly senses that he is shattering through a pane of glass, and he begins to feel again.
It is not pain but a heaviness. It feels like he has been asleep for a thousand years, and for a moment he can not even recognize his own body. He tries to move an arm, but the weight is so ponderous that he can not formulate the thought, and a knot of something boils in his chest as he wonders if he is paralyzed. The only sensation that is so near and so real is his salvation, the feeling on his arm he can not identify. It is warm and soft and so familiar. . .
He focuses on it, draws all his energy toward it, and soon realizes that it is a hand, gently placed, the fingers lightly encircling the area just below his elbow. It is a feeling so sacrosanct that he can not think of any words to describe it, save two.
Thank you.
He shakes away the last vestiges of the darkness and it falls away, sticky and liquid-like. Trapped now between consciousness and unconsciousness, the proverbial darkness and the light, he decides that there is a more important place for him out there.
One eye slides open, but it is a shadow of a movement. The hand clutches at his arm out of reflex and he hears a curse and the shuffling of a body moving in surprise.
Bones? Bones!
His breath hitches in his throat in something that mimics a sigh. He wants to tell the persistent voice to stop yelling, but any form of such communication is beyond him at this point.
He forces his eyes open with an effort he is afraid will kill him all over again, and finds he can see nothing but a blurred and incoherent canvas of color without shape . . . but he can see, dammit. What follows is a cathartic reaction; a shiver runs down the length of his body and his breath is suspended in his chest for a moment before he releases it, low and thready, with the sudden realization . . .
He is alive.
He blinks once, but it is an effort almost beyond him and his eyes threaten not to open again. The fog clears from his brain and he is staring at the ceiling of medical bay, a position so familiar and yet so foreign at the same time.
Holy shit, Bones.
That is the captain's voice, he decides after a moment.
He lets his eyes slide lethargically toward his captain, and it takes several swirling and sickening seconds for his vision to focus on the younger man.
You—
No, don't try to talk.
The captain grips tightly at his arm and with one hand and places the other against his chest. His touch is a light and delicate one that belies his exterior. The expression on the younger man's face suggests that he has spent many sleepless nights next to this bed awaiting the inevitable, and is exhausted and relieved beyond words to find that he was wrong.
Next time, leave the dirty work to me, okay?
He can hear the hitch in the captain's voice, can detect the sheen in his eyes. He will admit that he finds this reversal of roles, with he supine on the bed and his captain looming over him with dark circles under his eyes, oddly disconcerting.
. . . Glad . . . there is . . . a next time.
It takes all his effort to speak the words and they come out as only fragments of sound. His throat burns from disuse and he falls limp as the last word leaves his throat. But it is not back into the outstretched arms of the lonely darkness, rather, into the comforting and healing blanket of untroubled sleep.
The captain heaves a sigh, and releases with it days of tension and agony and fear. His hand lingers on the doctor's arm for a moment, relishing the feeling of living skin under his fingers.
As he gets to his feet, he squeezes at his friend's arm one last time.
Me too, Bones. Me too.
To Be Continued.