Chapter 4

He picks at the bandage with a bitten-down nail. There's something intimate, vulnerable, about a needle in the crook of an elbow - the skin is delicate and traced with veins under the white gauze, and Jim looks forward to ripping away this weakness.

Footsteps create a precise path of sound down the hallway, and Jim is faux-sleeping under the covers by the time the door clicks open.

"I know you're awake, you infant."

Jim gives his best look of innocence, yawning widely and obnoxiously in Bones's face.

"You'll go home this afternoon, but I'm on duty then until late. I wouldn't let you go because I just know you'll break yourself open if you're alone, so the hobgoblin'll take you home. At least I know the stick up his ass won't let him do anything but follow doctor's orders."

Jim laughs, anticipation burning down the line of his spine. Bones gives him a skulking look, leaning back on one foot almost nervously.

"C'mere."

He spreads his arms like an open wound, inviting healing as much as he's offering it. The Doctor gruffly goes into them, acting rough but really his hands are feather-soft on the still painful expanses of his skin. Jim feels irritation at being treated like a being of porcelain and glass, but says nothing.

Bones ruffles his hair as he leaves, muttering darkly over the huff of his breath. Jim smiles his best friend out of the door.

They make him leave in a wheelchair.

"Spock…" He whines into the warm afternoon air, "Why I am in this thing? You are aware I can walk, right?"

"It is standard procedure, Captain."

Jim flings his head back dramatically, gazing sulkily up at his Vulcan. "I thought that was for pregnant women, or women who've just had a baby. Do I look like a Mom to you?"

"You do not resemble a female, however your protective instincts, especially towards those younger than you, could be considered maternal."

"Oh, is that how we're playing this? Have you seen yourself when someone gets dodgy around Chekov, or when someone kidnaps me, or hits on me, or I hit on them? You're like a crazy Dad with a shotgun."

"I am neither insane or a father, and I do not own a shotgun."

"Ha! So you admit it, you do get all pissed off when someone chats me up! Like that Deltan ambassadorial aide, when she was all like 'Oh Captain Kirk, maybe you should help me get settled in, if you know what I mean.'"

At that, Jim winked to prove his point, voice almost painfully dripping with innuendo. Spock looked at him doubtfully.

"Vulcans do not get 'pissed off', and Idalia's preposition displayed a serious breach in misconduct."

"Bull. Shit." Jim enthusiastically kicked open the hospital doors from his wheelchair, proudly savouring Spock's exasperation.

The wheelchair ramp forms a languid slope down to the hospital carpark. Jim feels Spock shift his weight back slightly, effortlessly compensating for the pull of gravity. He pouts and leans into the momentum.

"Faster, Spock, faster!"

To his surprise, Spock obliges, letting the chair gain speed as he increases his pace behind it. It is, of course, a controlled fall, but Jim laughs bright as happiness. His hand lifts, lazily gliding up and down the same way as he did as a child, undulating in the wind outside the car window.

"May I inquire as to what you are doing?"

"People do it all the time in cars, especially when it's a hot day. There's just something about sticking your hand into the breeze and learning about air-resistance, drag, that kinda thing, even if you don't know what it's called. I s'pose that's how a lot of kids learn, by having fun at the same time. Figuring out the wind. Playing with aerodynamics."

They go back to Jim's place, and Spock takes a book out of his hover-car before they enter. It's something Jim hasn't read in a very long time, and he can't help but lean over Spock's shoulder, propping himself up on the back of the armchair. He sighs and hands it over with graceful irritation, stalking to the bookshelf with a familiarity that Jim finds somehow charming.

Spock sits back in the armchair and Jim stretches out along the couch. He breathes in deeply the comfortable silence, and then begins to read.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

...

Rasping breaths struggled against the burn of his entire body, sweat staining his skin even as he keened awake. He was going to die.

He knew what this was. He was going to die.

Jim stumble-whirls out of bed and down the hall, limbs cold and hot and disjointed, and already the room was spinning and he was spinning the other way. Bile is retched into his mouth, vomit following in sour waves. He falls hard against the toilet, porcelain cold-burning his skin, and Jim throws up, and gasps, and sobs, and understands that he isn't dying because he's already died.

The panic does not leave. It does not prickle across the back of his neck, it bites jaw-deep at the nape, ravaging down his spine, making his body judder and shake and crack. Jim falls back against the wall, legs hunched, forehead pressed to his folded arms, watching phosphenes starburst in time with the nausea.

"Jim! Are you alright?"

Jim flails his arm - get away - even as Spock steps helplessly forward.

"What do you need? You must tell me."

"Hold-"

The word cracks, ashamed, in the air.

Spock is silhouetted against the light of the hallway, angel-pale skin, slim-hipped silk pajamas, staring right at him with those dark bedroom eyes. Jim buries his face in the back of his forearms warding off his weakness (warding off Spock) with his shaking jagged edges. A warm presence sits ramrod straight beside him, then tentatively slow, Spock leans against him until they are connected thigh to shoulder, the heat anchoring him down.

"Don't…" He tries to mumble, shivering at every reason why this is a bad idea.

Even so, Jim shifts closer to that incalescence, bursting into coughs at the change of position, curling further into himself, into Spock. The Vulcan runs a burning hand up and down his back, sliding on the sweat-slicked skin, and Jim wants to cry for this kindness. Jim is seized by an urge to pull Spock's arms around him. To lie against the shelter of his heat-radiating body. To press his face to Spock's chest to hear his heartbeat, except it won't be there, and he daren't lay a hand just above the curve of his hipbone, so he lets the rise and fall of Spock's breathing rock him to sanity instead.

Spock moves his arm back down to his side. They stay like that for a length of time that Jim can't count. Spock must be uncomfortable with this broken human trying to pull himself together through willpower and stolen body-heat. But if he is, all he does is let Jim press closer as Jim breathes and breathes and breathes.

"I'm so sorry - you had t-to see th-at."

"Do not apologize for that which you cannot control."

That voice is like cool velvet, and Jim is thankful for these small miracles.

"You didn't have to… you still don't."

"I did. I do."

Spock's scent is familiar, desert-hot and spiced, offset by the smell of clean laundry, a sweet-fresh-spice-warmth. Jim can feel his heart in his mouth, hot and heavy and beating in the cradle of his tongue.

"What did I do to deserve you?"

Spock does not answer the question, but he turns his head dangerously close to the flare of Jim's hair.

"Is this the first time that you have had a panic attack?"

"No…" He breathes out. "But not for a long time. I thought I was dying. Again."

Spock tenses.

"Hey, you okay?"

There is a melancholy pause.

"Your death was not easy for any member of the crew."

"That's not an answer."

The Vulcan's lips thin, and he forces out the words without once looking up from his knees.

"Your death was not easy for me."

Jim sad-laughs, tilting his head towards the sky.

"The way Scotty tells it, 'not easy' is an understatement."

"It was not the Lieutenant-Commander's place to disclose such information." Spock snaps, scorched-earth, and stands to leave.

Jim goes frantic with panic - he catches Spock's arm.

"No! That was tactless. I didn't - I'm sorry."

Spock pulls himself away and strides to the door.

"Did you know that I've never had a nightmare?"

He pauses in the doorway, and that's when Jim knows he's got him.

"Panic attacks, night terrors, insomnia, whatever self-destructive behaviours you could think of, yes. But never nightmares. Never."

"Not even as a child?"

"Not even then. I mean, I dream of course. There's some pretty weird shit in my dreams. But nothing that counts as a nightmare."

Spock comes to stand in front of him.

"And then last night, I dreamt of that day. I dreamt of dying. Of burning with radiation in every muscle, every bone. But instead of falling and dying like a coward on the floor, I was banging on the glass. You were there. Just… crouching there, just like I remember it. And you looked so sick. So sad. I could see t-the tears. I hit the glass. I hit it and hit it and hit it, but I couldn't, it didn't break, and your hand was pressed against the glass.

"I was so weak and everything hurt and the last thing I heard was a scream."

Jim feels tears at the back of his throat, the edges of his eyes, and looks up at Spock.

"I don't think that scream really happened. I don't remember it. But I woke up sweating and gasping, and I thought 'I didn't die. That was dying.' It...it sounded like you."

Spock opens his mouth, and the pain makes him look so young. He closes it slowly, because there is nothing to be said that Jim isn't already realising.

"Spock…?"

Jim teeters to his feet, feeling as if he's stumbling onto something huge and dangerous; bigger than the blood drying like tear-tracks down his face as Pike lays the entire universe down on the table, there for the taking; better than throwing himself off every edge he can find, tasting adrenaline and lovers' sweat on his shit-eating grin; more beautiful than space glittering and infinite, than stars colliding and blazing in the aftermath.

Jim slips his arms around Spock, one through the tense loop of Spock's arm, folded neatly behind his back, one over the elegant curve of Spock's shoulder, and he fists the slick material, trembling into an embrace. He tilts his face into the juncture of his neck, inhaling the scent of Spock's fear, and thinks - not everything. not yet.

Spock does not return the gesture, but he does not push Jim away, and that means more than perhaps any words can ever say.