Orbit Slowing…
Captain Kirk woke with the feeling that he had forgotten something important – That he had been just on the verge of a major realization long-promised, but elusive…
He blinked at the ceiling, its plain pearly grey glow the same as ever. Just the same: Just as blank and mysterious as always in the lights-out dimness of functioning-monitor-midnight on the Enterprise. He looked over. There was a pale light shining past the partition: Equipment working, but sleeping – Much, it seemed, like his mind.
Nothing urgent - except that threshold-of-revelation waking-dream feeling of 'this, I should know.'
The room was spinning slightly and somehow that seemed apt, too.
He closed his eyes, tried to think of something else. The last reports he'd reluctantly skimmed, the latest readings, proposals from Scott to improve warp efficiency… Try though he might, he could not keep his mind from skipping back to that sensation of something fleeting only just-glimpsed.
Opening his eyes, he communed with the ceiling – or tried: It was still calmly ignoring him. With a sigh, he sat up, reached back, flipped on the small bedside lamp.
Bones had brought him home, put him to bed, provided him water and the necessary. At least he could remember all of that – at least he hadn't been that far gone.
Bones had been kind: Left him a hangover remedy to take, "in case, kid," instead of administering a scorn-laced anti-intoxication hypo. Somehow Kirk had been spared a McCoy-patented Stinger – verbal, and medical.
Somehow he'd done something right.
No, clearly Jim hadn't been too far gone.
He popped the remedy into a mouth dry and thick-tongued, drank off the glass of water. He sat in one place, unmoving, for a long moment, while the room's orbit slowed, then halted, in a hardly-noticeable tapering-off. He looked around the room, again: It was behaving itself, no longer defying any laws of physics; and his head didn't pound when he tried to imagine a cool level voice explaining exactly which laws those might be.
The ceiling still didn't respond to a head-leaned-back blink: It was just as blank and mysterious as always, keeping its cool pale pearly secrets to itself.
He lowered his head to his pillow, still looking at the ceiling, trying to decide whether – if he went to sleep, now, for the remaining hour or two left before dawn – it might reveal that something his sleeping brain had glimpsed, but failed to grasp. He blinked, blinked again – waited…
…and, with a sinking feeling, rolled out of bed, and pulled on some clothes.