Star Trek and all associated characters are not mine.
A/N: Thanks to my beta reader, spocklovescats.
The rating of this fic will change next chapter.
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Chapter 5
Mara grounded her teeth in frustration. Only five days since her departure from Deneva and she felt tense enough to snap in half. It was all Jim's fault. The first three days were amicable, with little conversation. She considered it a good sign that the trip would be uncomplicated. She should have known better.
Delilah had a captain's cabin and one other designed to comfortably fit five individuals. Current arrangements had them utilising both cabins. However, starting yesterday, Jim decided that water showers were just the thing to satisfy his cleansing needs. Her cabin had the only such functioning shower. She allowed him access into her cabin and woke the next morning to the sight of him drying his body with her pink fluffy towel. On their own, her eyes had slid across skin that was unblemished, except for a few small scars and a tattoo on his lower back. As tattoos went, it was simple, a black sword within a red circular band. She noted that even with weight loss, Jim's body still held muscle definition in all the appropriate places.
Later that morning, he commenced a campaign intended to torment her. It was in his every gesture and 'accidental' touch. Mara felt the brush of his fingers against hers, the touch of his leg at her thigh, and his whole body everywhere. With each touch, her frustration increased and if she were honest, so did her arousal. Worse yet, he looked completely innocent on those occasions she managed to catch his eye. She was on to him. She would avoid him, unless it was necessary for them to interact.
The problem was Jim seemed to be everywhere, exacerbated by the fact that the ship was tiny. Mara currently sat on the bridge, going over coordinates; he had plotted into the navigational system. She was aware that the Wai-Shali moved around. Their society was structured to facilitate a nomadic culture. What bothered her was their final destination, an area dominated by enormous binary stars a few years from going nova. The gas and magnetic eddies they threw off could prove disastrous.
Keeping her eyes on sensors, she asked, "Are you sure our course heading is correct? Reports indicated they're currently located in sector P587A. That's three systems off our plotted course."
"Your intel's wrong, and even if there are Wai-Shali ships in P587A, I can assure you, Kali is not there."
"We're heading into a region of space that's dicey to navigate."
"This is why it was chosen."
They lapsed back into silence until Jim started to drum his fingers against his console in a rhythm of some sort. He held a yellowing paperback book in his other hand, although she doubted he was actually reading its contents. The tapping continued, grating against her nerves, until she could tolerate no more. "Would you stop that!"
He stilled, fingers poised above the smooth surface. "Stop what?"
"The finger tapping," she replied, pointing to his hand.
Jim placed his book on the console and swivelled his chair in her direction. A frown of amused concern projected from his face. "What's eating you? You've been worked up since last night."
"I'm fine, now that you've stopped that annoying sound."
Mara watched with apprehensive suspicion as he left his chair and moved to stand behind hers. His hands rested on her shoulders with slight pressure and she stiffened.
"You know, all this pent-up tension is not good. You could make yourself sick."
"Please remove your hands," she said, shrugging her shoulders.
Instead of doing as she ordered, his fingers began to knead at the muscles on her upper back. They pushed and worked at each encountered knot. Against her better judgement, she found herself relaxing under his talented touch. She had forgotten how good he was at this sort of thing. Her body seemed to have remembered, considering the way she found herself leaning into his hands.
"I am serious, Mara, we can't have you sick when you sit down with Kali."
She felt herself stiffen again at the mere mention of Kali. That woman was one of the least stable individuals Mara had ever met. Period. She had hoped never to see her again. Jim's fingers pushed harder into her skin, and she winced as a deep-rooted knot unravelled.
"You're wound tighter than I thought. Why is that? And please don't tell me my finger drumming was the cause."
"Did anyone ever tell you that you can be a pain the ass?"
"Yes, many times." A firm thumb pushed hard, as he continued to unravel her body and mind. "Now answer the question?"
She groaned under her breath, as another muscle untangled and relaxed in pleasure. "Why do you think?"
His fingers brushed aside her hair and moved to her neck. The flesh on flesh contact was electric. "I'm afraid I don't know."
She tugged away from his hands and swung around. Staring up at him, she replied, "You are making me tense. Are you happy?"
"What are you afraid of?" he demanded, his demeanour serious, eyes probing. "Is it that you want me? That you regret what happened between us, and what you did?"
Mara sprang from her chair and stood a few paces from Jim. She curled her fingers inward, suppressing the need to slap him. Somehow, it always came back to her infidelity, which was unfair when they were both at fault. "Why is it always about what I did? What about the indifference you flung my way, when I needed you most? Are we ever going to talk about that?"
"I did the best I could at the time, Mara." He raked fingers through his hair in frustration. "My head was not in the right place."
"Not in the right place!" Mara felt her anger built, as bitter memories from the last year they lived together swarmed her mind. "I lost our child, Jim."
"Don't you think I know that? Not a day goes by that I don't wonder at the 'might have been'."
"I bent over backwards to please you, Jim! Catered to your mood swings and put up with all your shit because you needed someone who would, and then you treated me like I barely existed." Mara felt a hysterical laugh bubble up and spill from her lips. She wanted him to hurt like that day. "José showed me more compassion than you ever did."
Anger flushed his face and he closed the small distance between them. "Don't fucking mention his name to me, Mara."
She was not about to back down. They should have had this fight long ago. "Why not?" She spat. "It's the truth and you know it. Solace with each touch is another thing he offered me."
Mara watched as anger and regret warred for dominance on Jim's face. His hands, which had released her tension earlier, reached forward and grabbed her arms in a painful grip. She stood still, not moving a single muscle. He lowered his head and closed his eyes, as he appeared to be collecting himself. She decided to push ahead. "If you want to give us a second chance, we need to talk about what happened to you."
Jim's eyes snapped opened, his hands dropping away as if she were poisonous. "You've read the reports. You know what happened."
"I read a report that started out vividly, then slip into vagueness. And, you know what else? I read the exact same narration from you, Terrence, Hikaru, and Angela. I stopped reading at that point because I'm sure the others would have said the same. What are the odds that four people would give identical reports on something as traumatic as your capture?"
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Kirk edged away from Mara and sat, slumped in the chair she had vacated. She demanded the very thing he had tried to bury for over two years. Vulcan imprisonment was certainly not the first harrowing event in his relatively short life. However, it had messed with his mind the most. His childhood experiences were more about physical torment; the psychological came second. With the Vulcans, physical and psychological went together.
Mara moved to stand in the space between his legs. Her soft fingers brushed back his hair and tipped his face upward. "I want to know. You need to let it out, if only to me. It's my price for us moving forward."
He gazed up into her eyes, which shone eerily in the bridge lighting. "You drive a hard bargain, Lieutenant Commander."
"Sometimes hard bargains are necessary to procure a wanted outcome."
Kirk heaved a sigh that was both physical and emotional. He wanted Mara back. He now knew he was willing to go to almost any distance to have her. She wanted to know what happened. Fine– he would tell her. The secret had begun to sicken him. "They stripped us of our humanity." Just getting those words out took great effort. It made him wish for a stiff drink.
"What?" she whispered in confusion.
"You heard me. They stripped us of our humanity." Saying it, the second time was easier, so he continued. "When the Enterprise started breaking up under bombardment, I gave the order to abandon ship. Some of us stayed back to ensure the escape pods and shuttles had a chance to get away. Six of us made it onto the final shuttle, only to find ourselves caught by a tractor beam. Once the Vulcans tossed us into holding, we found that eight other crewmembers were already there. I won't bore you with the details of our physical torture, you've read that. What we survivors have never mentioned, is how they got into our heads. They used the right words to see into our darkest fears, and then they exploited them. Can you imagine it, a touch telepath trained in the art of interrogation?"
They were quiet for a bit before Mara softly asked, "Is that why you were so adamant that we increase training in mental control?"
"Yes. Any little bit to give us a chance," he replied, remembering the months of fighting to get the programme going.
"The bastards got to Henderson first. They found every demon that haunted him, and then got him to the point that he easily killed Riley. I don't think he was cognizant of what he did. Doc Boyce didn't survive his second trip to the interrogation chair; we all watched his heart give out. The truly awful part is that everything seemed designed to get at me. They wanted specific questions answered, and they knew damn well, the chief medical officer was not going to have the answers. They knew my fear Mara. They knew I would do anything to save my crew. So, they forced me to watch everything, and then they would ask their questions.
"Days wore on and our numbers dwindled. The questions kept coming, incessant and carefully modulated, a counterpoint to the brutal violence. The worst was hearing Mayweather's screams as Lexi died. It was at that point, I wanted to give them what they sought, even if I had to make it up. The only thing that held me back was the knowledge that I would be dead either way. Hours after Lexi's death, an attack on the ship took out their main power grid. It also knocked out the security fields that held us captive."
Kirk stopped his narrative. The rest of his story was where the real tragedy lay. More than the physical and mental torture, it was what happened after the power failed that haunted him the most. His lips curled in something that was certainly not laughter. "Do you know what happens to people when they are pushed to the brink of their civility? What happens when it gets stripped away?"
Mara's face, set in placid lines, was impassive enough to rival any Vulcan. Nevertheless, as she responded, "They become less than human," her voice shook with a hundred different emotions.
Fuck, he desperately wanted that drink right about now. Instead of running for the booze, he focused on Mara's face and continued. "Eight of us left the holding cells in the middle of the disarray that was the ship losing a fight. With little hindrance, we got their cargo hold. While we ran to the closet shuttle, a lone sub-lieutenant showed up and shot at Roberts. The senselessness of his death and weeks of suffering spurred us into action. As one, we forgot our fear, our desperation. We surrendered to blinding hatred. It was freeing to be in a place where that pure destructive emotion existed all alone.
"She must have sensed the shift in us, because she started backing away prior to our rushing her. In a single moment, higher reasoning gave way, replaced by instinctual animalistic madness. We used hands and feet to tear her apart. When sanity returned, she was a dead bloody mess and Scotty's midsection was injured."
Tears slid down Mara's cheeks and neck, disappearing into her shirt. "Now I understand. It wasn't just the horror; it was also the shame."
He reached up and brushed away the newest trail to leave her eyes. "Shame and a sense of dishonour found the seven of us meeting while we were still in Sickbay. Right then we decided what would be revealed and what was to remain concealed, if not for us, then for the ones who died. We never wanted others to know what a Vulcan interrogator could do to a Human trained by the best to withstand the worst."
"I wish I'd know this, Jim. It could have saved us a lot of misery."
"I don't think any of us have talked about that cargo bay since the day we agreed to gloss over what happened. It was too terrible a thing to admit."
Mara moved to the side of the chair and with a few adjustments, she sat on his lap. Her arms wrapped around his neck, and he pulled her closer, seeking the solace of her solid weight. It was not until she rested her head on his shoulder that he realised he felt different. At first, it puzzled him, and then it came to him in a flash. He felt lighter, less burdened.
"Now we can move forward."
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This was a difficult chapter to write. It went through many versions before making its way to the public.
Please comment, how else am I to know if you're enjoying the ride?