(no subject)
TITLE: and wrote my will across the sky in stars
PAIRING: Chekov/Sulu
RATING: R-ish for themes
LENGTH: approx 2500
DISCLAIMER: These men belong entirely to someone else.
WARNINGS: implied sexual assault (though nothing graphic)
SUMMARY: A prisoner taken, a threat made. Wars are fought by young men, and there are ways that 'I love you' was meant to be said.
A/N: This is for rubynye, based on a request which she...didn't make here. The title is from a poem by T.E. Lawrence. The whole IO and the Queen of Spring thing might make more sense if you've read after that long kiss I near lost my breath.
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom
"Oh, shit," he whimpered, his teeth against his lip, his back arched as tight as it would go. Sulu's hand shifted, hiking his leg higher against Sulu's hip and pushed deeper, wound him tighter, stroked his ribs with his fingers and kissed pouting, damp lips and pressed his nose into the curls above his ear.
He couldn't he couldn't he couldn't he could and
"Oh, fuck."
Sulu grinned breathlessly.
"That's it. That's it, baby. Come on."
He didn't know where he was supposed to go. He pushed one hand into Sulu's hair and pulled his head back so that he could look straight into his eyes.
"I fucking love you," he said, and then he said it in every other language he knew, I love you over and over, every single way that he could think of, and every way that it was ever meant to be spoken.
He thinks of it later, and often, when he's down and done in the dark. He lies there, cheek pressed to the stone floor, which is warm because the whole planet is burning up and he mourns for the loss of the uniform of which he was so proud and then he closes his eyes and he thinks about the man who loves him. Who still loves him. He can feel it. He knows it. Once, he went to see an aunt, his mother's sister, on the south coast of Australia and he saw the Southern Cross for the first time. He went back to Russia and he took the memory of those stars with him, even when he couldn't see them in the dark sky.
It's a little like that, only now he is the dark sky.
Somewhere, Sulu still loves him. Of this much, he is certain.
His bones ache from changing. He is twenty three years old and he hasn't grown in a long time, but the Queen of the Spring, the new Spring, she loves her toys and her potions and he has been poked and prodded and pulled and pushed and spread and sprawled. On his ribs, a line of bruises like love-bites. He pushes trembling fingers into his hair, almost surprised to feel it short. He licks split lips and swallows, his throat swollen and sore. He thinks about his Mama and his Papa (and, here, he allows a trickle of tears down his nose, to the corner of his mouth). He thinks about them skating on the Neva and his father falling and shattering bone, and how he limped for the rest of his life. He hopes that Sulu will love him always, even if he limps. In the hallway, he hears voices. Somewhere, he hears her laughing.
He closes his eyes and whispers it into the dirt.
Ya lyublyu tebya. Kimi o ai shiteru. Je t'aime. Te Amo. Please come.
*
ENTERPRISE
They limp, they all but crawl and it's fucking maddening. It hurts Scotty the worst, probably, the way the ship was torn open like that from somewhere inside. He strokes his hand along interior walls and whispers to her, barely sleeps and, somehow, they get her airborne again, get her out of the atmosphere and onto the trail. Kirk has taken on this serious, tight expression. Purple bruises under his eyes. He talks to Pike, who, probably, is the only person that understands. He can't gather her into his arms. He barely sleeps either.
And Sulu has his own pain.
So none of them are sleeping.
"We shouldn't have been there," says Kirk for about the fifth time, when Sulu's busy correcting a course laid in by a navigator who shouldn't be there, who knows neither ship nor pilot well enough to be sitting that chair.
"I must remind you, Captain, that Starfleet is a peace-keeping armada and there was war on IO," says Spock, calm as anything, and the shitty thing is that he's right, and Chekov is the price that they paid for doing their damn job.
On the third day out of IO, the ship's computer is finally up and running at optimum efficiency and they find him, hiding in a steel drum. He's barely more than a child, dirty and skinny, uncomfortably reminiscent of Chekov the first time Sulu set eyes on him, only his eyes are edge to edge Ionian green. He holds out the paper with a trembling hand and Kirk takes it, but doesn't even have a chance to read it as the trembling gets worse and worse until the kid collapses and there isn't a thing that McCoy can do, even though he's right there. Green foam trickles from the corner of his mouth.
"Shit," says Kirk, with feeling, staring down at him and the scariest thing in the world is how hopeless the Captain looks right there. "Shit."
On the bridge, Gamma shift, everything still, everything quiet, and Sulu finds himself sitting in Chekov's chair. Other people have been sitting in it in the last couple of days, but it's still Chekov's, and it always will be, even if Chekov never sits in again. Based on hear-say and gossip picked up by Uhura in transmissions (she's as tired as the rest of them but she's always busy, always working, like if she can hear something, if she can catch something, she can save them all. Why not? It's happened before).
On Chekov's side of the console, a legal pad and pen, the first page covered in equations. He carefully tears that page out and tucks it into the back of the pad. Chekov might need it when he comes home. For a long time, he doesn't even know what to write so he just sits there, tapping his pen against his teeth with one foot up on the console and, outside, the stars are all ever-changing and yet every one the same. under the desk, a stuffed rhinoceros with three legs. He doesn't set Tolstoy on the console; that would feel like admitting something.
He isn't ready to admit to anything yet.
*
They put him back in cuffs, which is the first mistake they've made, but it's all that he needs. They put him back in cuffs, lips split, fingers sore and swollen from being stamped on but not broken, though. He tugs at pants sagging low around skinny hips and he squats and roots through the ruins of his communicator, left there to taunt him. Look at your toys, and look what we have done to them. It doesn't matter than it's ruins. What matters, is this: that they put him back in cuffs and, because they did that, they left the door ajar, meaning to come back soon, and he can do this. He can. He is twenty three years old, the son of Marta and Andrei, who did brave things together, and he is a Starfleet officer, and he is tired of crying in the dark. He knows that this can be done.
Picking the lock is easy. His bare feet make no sound on warm, sandy stone. He limps, slightly, but as a child, he learned to run and he kept on running even when it hurt. On the night of the marathon, his feet bled and his Papa said that he had never looked more like his mother, like Marta Niklovna. He thinks of Captain Kirk, the bravest man that he's ever met, and he thinks of Hikaru Sulu, the only man that he ever loved. He thinks of his running mother, and he thinks of his gentle father, His father always said that he was lucky because, when Andrei Chekov was a young man, there were no wars that needed young men to fight them.
One, two, three and he swings the heavy chain and it connects with a sickening thud below the guard's ear. Like that, he kills his first man. He barely has time to bend down and start fumbling with the buttons on the man's coat, because he's still half naked and it's not that he's cold but he's an officer and he loved his uniform so much and God knows what's happened to it. She used it to wipe the blood from his face on the first night. He barely has time to think about these things. He feels the explosion almost before he hears it. It rocks him back off his heels and he ends up sprawled on the floor and he sees fire and black smoke in the blue sky above the plaza. His heart throbs in his chest.
Ya lyublyu tebya. Kimi o ai shiteru. Je t'aime. Te Amo. Please come.
The guard has a gun. Chekov takes it and his body's already running while his mind is trying to remember exactly how.
Chaos in the plaza. The hub on IO is a beautiful city falling into vines and seed. Bright flowers twine around the crumbling pillars. Banners flutter in the breeze. He can't bring himself to look at the stage in the centre of the white stone square. The throne tipped on it's side. Fire and smoke everywhere. Gold and red and blue. He's so grateful that he almost swoons but then another guard is in front of him and he shoots and the guard falls and, just like that, it's a war that young men fight. A blow catches him in the jaw and snaps his head back and he tastes blood and ash. He turns his head and spits and then he straightens, stretching his neck and he lashes out with one hand. His bruised fingers make a fist. His whole body hurts and a hand drags his head back by his hair and that's when he sees him, blood across his face, sword in hand. His heart throbs and he thinks about stars again. There's this moment, the light flashing off a blade moving too swiftly to be believed, where Hikaru doesn't see him and then he looks up and Chekov knows that he sees him.
He's seen and saved and the joy, the rush of burning joy in his chest hurts almost as much the sudden pain.
Her eyes are gold edge to edge and she's laughing as she carries him down to the ground. Her hair is bloody, sticking against her pale cheek, and her eyelids are dusted with glitter. It's her laugh that he's dreamed about, when he's dreamed, his laugh and the way she looks at him, the way she touches him. He dreams about when she changed him and then pushed him back, crawling across him and pressing kisses against a body that wasn't his. He sinks down, all strength gone out of his legs, the aching centered between his ribs, but spreading, and she sinks down with him, and she's kissing the side of his face.
He can hear someone shouting his name. Not the full name, not Pavel Andreievich, but the shorter name. The secret one.
The phaser misses him by inches, but it doesn't miss her, and the wound smokes and he ends up with his head against her full breast and, when he closes his eyes, the shot is burning on the inside of his eyelids.
Electric blue.
Arms are lifting him and his breath catches in a sharp sigh.
"Oh, shit," he whispers, his voice barely there as he's pulled into a familiar lap and, all around them, the men shouting, fire burning, the ways of war. He turns his face, presses his nose again a uniform shirt and drags a breath in, breathes in the familiar scent of Sulu's skin and his hand tightens, holding on tight. "Oh, fuck."
"That's it. That's it, baby. Come on."
He can feel himself slipping and he holds on, grips Sulu's arm so tightly that his knuckles go white, and Sulu's brushing his hair back from his face and whispering things, and, every other one, Chekov understands as an I love you. A beautiful woman with golden hair tumbled around her face and a Starfleet logo on her breast leans into his line of vision, frowning. Her eyes are so, so blue.
"You hold on to him, Sulu," she says, and then she looks over her shoulder, and all that Chekov can make out is her outline against the sky. "You hold on."
He does his best.
He tries but it's so hard and, overhead, the sky is so, so blue and he can't make out one star.
But they have to be there.
They were always there.
*
"How long is this going to take to wear off?"
Kirk sprawls in the command chair, one long leg hooked over the arm, blond hair tumbled across his forehead. His uniform shirts don't fit, so he's in a t-shirt. He combs his fingers through long hair and chews on his bottom lip and Sulu tries not to stare at the swell of breasts or the long, uninterrupted lines of thighs. It should be hilarious; the same happened to him at the hands of the Queen of Spring after all, but, somehow, this time it isn't funny. Kirk does make a beautiful girl, though.
McCoy shrugs and pushes one hand through his hair irritably.
"I don't know, Jim. A week? Maybe two?"
"What? I..."
His shift ended, Sulu slips off the bridge before this argument starts again. He all but walks down the hall with his eyes closed. Exhaustion setting in; too many days in sick bay, not moving. Keeping a watch. He's already tugging off his shirt as he slips into the bedroom without turning the light on. In the bed, a skinny body, curled on his side, three legged rhino tucked under his arm. In his sleep, he stirs, whimpering and Sulu lowers himself down onto the bed and kisses his temple, and lies still beside him until he quietens. The stab wound between his ribs barely left a scar, but there's nothing that McCoy can do for bad dreams. Eventually, Chekov stills and Sulu settles. Under his cheek, a scratchy piece of paper. He reads it by te light of his PADD and then he folds it, carefully and tucks it into the book that he's reading.
He folds one arm around Chekov and pulls him closer, and his fingers brush against the barely there scar, which is white and puckered and looks almost like a star.
*There`s fire of love inside me, burning,
You've hurt the heart and soul of mine,
Keep kissing me: your kisses, darling
Are sweeter than good myrrh and wine.
Now cling to me, come closer, dear,
And let me sleep in quiet, here,
Until the sunrise breaks the day
And night-time shadows flow away.
- Pushkin
PAIRING: Chekov/Sulu
RATING: R-ish for themes
LENGTH: approx 2500
DISCLAIMER: These men belong entirely to someone else.
WARNINGS: implied sexual assault (though nothing graphic)
SUMMARY: A prisoner taken, a threat made. Wars are fought by young men, and there are ways that 'I love you' was meant to be said.
A/N: This is for rubynye, based on a request which she...didn't make here. The title is from a poem by T.E. Lawrence. The whole IO and the Queen of Spring thing might make more sense if you've read after that long kiss I near lost my breath.
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom
"Oh, shit," he whimpered, his teeth against his lip, his back arched as tight as it would go. Sulu's hand shifted, hiking his leg higher against Sulu's hip and pushed deeper, wound him tighter, stroked his ribs with his fingers and kissed pouting, damp lips and pressed his nose into the curls above his ear.
He couldn't he couldn't he couldn't he could and
"Oh, fuck."
Sulu grinned breathlessly.
"That's it. That's it, baby. Come on."
He didn't know where he was supposed to go. He pushed one hand into Sulu's hair and pulled his head back so that he could look straight into his eyes.
"I fucking love you," he said, and then he said it in every other language he knew, I love you over and over, every single way that he could think of, and every way that it was ever meant to be spoken.
He thinks of it later, and often, when he's down and done in the dark. He lies there, cheek pressed to the stone floor, which is warm because the whole planet is burning up and he mourns for the loss of the uniform of which he was so proud and then he closes his eyes and he thinks about the man who loves him. Who still loves him. He can feel it. He knows it. Once, he went to see an aunt, his mother's sister, on the south coast of Australia and he saw the Southern Cross for the first time. He went back to Russia and he took the memory of those stars with him, even when he couldn't see them in the dark sky.
It's a little like that, only now he is the dark sky.
Somewhere, Sulu still loves him. Of this much, he is certain.
His bones ache from changing. He is twenty three years old and he hasn't grown in a long time, but the Queen of the Spring, the new Spring, she loves her toys and her potions and he has been poked and prodded and pulled and pushed and spread and sprawled. On his ribs, a line of bruises like love-bites. He pushes trembling fingers into his hair, almost surprised to feel it short. He licks split lips and swallows, his throat swollen and sore. He thinks about his Mama and his Papa (and, here, he allows a trickle of tears down his nose, to the corner of his mouth). He thinks about them skating on the Neva and his father falling and shattering bone, and how he limped for the rest of his life. He hopes that Sulu will love him always, even if he limps. In the hallway, he hears voices. Somewhere, he hears her laughing.
He closes his eyes and whispers it into the dirt.
Ya lyublyu tebya. Kimi o ai shiteru. Je t'aime. Te Amo. Please come.
*
ENTERPRISE
They limp, they all but crawl and it's fucking maddening. It hurts Scotty the worst, probably, the way the ship was torn open like that from somewhere inside. He strokes his hand along interior walls and whispers to her, barely sleeps and, somehow, they get her airborne again, get her out of the atmosphere and onto the trail. Kirk has taken on this serious, tight expression. Purple bruises under his eyes. He talks to Pike, who, probably, is the only person that understands. He can't gather her into his arms. He barely sleeps either.
And Sulu has his own pain.
So none of them are sleeping.
"We shouldn't have been there," says Kirk for about the fifth time, when Sulu's busy correcting a course laid in by a navigator who shouldn't be there, who knows neither ship nor pilot well enough to be sitting that chair.
"I must remind you, Captain, that Starfleet is a peace-keeping armada and there was war on IO," says Spock, calm as anything, and the shitty thing is that he's right, and Chekov is the price that they paid for doing their damn job.
On the third day out of IO, the ship's computer is finally up and running at optimum efficiency and they find him, hiding in a steel drum. He's barely more than a child, dirty and skinny, uncomfortably reminiscent of Chekov the first time Sulu set eyes on him, only his eyes are edge to edge Ionian green. He holds out the paper with a trembling hand and Kirk takes it, but doesn't even have a chance to read it as the trembling gets worse and worse until the kid collapses and there isn't a thing that McCoy can do, even though he's right there. Green foam trickles from the corner of his mouth.
"Shit," says Kirk, with feeling, staring down at him and the scariest thing in the world is how hopeless the Captain looks right there. "Shit."
On the bridge, Gamma shift, everything still, everything quiet, and Sulu finds himself sitting in Chekov's chair. Other people have been sitting in it in the last couple of days, but it's still Chekov's, and it always will be, even if Chekov never sits in again. Based on hear-say and gossip picked up by Uhura in transmissions (she's as tired as the rest of them but she's always busy, always working, like if she can hear something, if she can catch something, she can save them all. Why not? It's happened before).
On Chekov's side of the console, a legal pad and pen, the first page covered in equations. He carefully tears that page out and tucks it into the back of the pad. Chekov might need it when he comes home. For a long time, he doesn't even know what to write so he just sits there, tapping his pen against his teeth with one foot up on the console and, outside, the stars are all ever-changing and yet every one the same. under the desk, a stuffed rhinoceros with three legs. He doesn't set Tolstoy on the console; that would feel like admitting something.
He isn't ready to admit to anything yet.
*
They put him back in cuffs, which is the first mistake they've made, but it's all that he needs. They put him back in cuffs, lips split, fingers sore and swollen from being stamped on but not broken, though. He tugs at pants sagging low around skinny hips and he squats and roots through the ruins of his communicator, left there to taunt him. Look at your toys, and look what we have done to them. It doesn't matter than it's ruins. What matters, is this: that they put him back in cuffs and, because they did that, they left the door ajar, meaning to come back soon, and he can do this. He can. He is twenty three years old, the son of Marta and Andrei, who did brave things together, and he is a Starfleet officer, and he is tired of crying in the dark. He knows that this can be done.
Picking the lock is easy. His bare feet make no sound on warm, sandy stone. He limps, slightly, but as a child, he learned to run and he kept on running even when it hurt. On the night of the marathon, his feet bled and his Papa said that he had never looked more like his mother, like Marta Niklovna. He thinks of Captain Kirk, the bravest man that he's ever met, and he thinks of Hikaru Sulu, the only man that he ever loved. He thinks of his running mother, and he thinks of his gentle father, His father always said that he was lucky because, when Andrei Chekov was a young man, there were no wars that needed young men to fight them.
One, two, three and he swings the heavy chain and it connects with a sickening thud below the guard's ear. Like that, he kills his first man. He barely has time to bend down and start fumbling with the buttons on the man's coat, because he's still half naked and it's not that he's cold but he's an officer and he loved his uniform so much and God knows what's happened to it. She used it to wipe the blood from his face on the first night. He barely has time to think about these things. He feels the explosion almost before he hears it. It rocks him back off his heels and he ends up sprawled on the floor and he sees fire and black smoke in the blue sky above the plaza. His heart throbs in his chest.
Ya lyublyu tebya. Kimi o ai shiteru. Je t'aime. Te Amo. Please come.
The guard has a gun. Chekov takes it and his body's already running while his mind is trying to remember exactly how.
Chaos in the plaza. The hub on IO is a beautiful city falling into vines and seed. Bright flowers twine around the crumbling pillars. Banners flutter in the breeze. He can't bring himself to look at the stage in the centre of the white stone square. The throne tipped on it's side. Fire and smoke everywhere. Gold and red and blue. He's so grateful that he almost swoons but then another guard is in front of him and he shoots and the guard falls and, just like that, it's a war that young men fight. A blow catches him in the jaw and snaps his head back and he tastes blood and ash. He turns his head and spits and then he straightens, stretching his neck and he lashes out with one hand. His bruised fingers make a fist. His whole body hurts and a hand drags his head back by his hair and that's when he sees him, blood across his face, sword in hand. His heart throbs and he thinks about stars again. There's this moment, the light flashing off a blade moving too swiftly to be believed, where Hikaru doesn't see him and then he looks up and Chekov knows that he sees him.
He's seen and saved and the joy, the rush of burning joy in his chest hurts almost as much the sudden pain.
Her eyes are gold edge to edge and she's laughing as she carries him down to the ground. Her hair is bloody, sticking against her pale cheek, and her eyelids are dusted with glitter. It's her laugh that he's dreamed about, when he's dreamed, his laugh and the way she looks at him, the way she touches him. He dreams about when she changed him and then pushed him back, crawling across him and pressing kisses against a body that wasn't his. He sinks down, all strength gone out of his legs, the aching centered between his ribs, but spreading, and she sinks down with him, and she's kissing the side of his face.
He can hear someone shouting his name. Not the full name, not Pavel Andreievich, but the shorter name. The secret one.
The phaser misses him by inches, but it doesn't miss her, and the wound smokes and he ends up with his head against her full breast and, when he closes his eyes, the shot is burning on the inside of his eyelids.
Electric blue.
Arms are lifting him and his breath catches in a sharp sigh.
"Oh, shit," he whispers, his voice barely there as he's pulled into a familiar lap and, all around them, the men shouting, fire burning, the ways of war. He turns his face, presses his nose again a uniform shirt and drags a breath in, breathes in the familiar scent of Sulu's skin and his hand tightens, holding on tight. "Oh, fuck."
"That's it. That's it, baby. Come on."
He can feel himself slipping and he holds on, grips Sulu's arm so tightly that his knuckles go white, and Sulu's brushing his hair back from his face and whispering things, and, every other one, Chekov understands as an I love you. A beautiful woman with golden hair tumbled around her face and a Starfleet logo on her breast leans into his line of vision, frowning. Her eyes are so, so blue.
"You hold on to him, Sulu," she says, and then she looks over her shoulder, and all that Chekov can make out is her outline against the sky. "You hold on."
He does his best.
He tries but it's so hard and, overhead, the sky is so, so blue and he can't make out one star.
But they have to be there.
They were always there.
*
"How long is this going to take to wear off?"
Kirk sprawls in the command chair, one long leg hooked over the arm, blond hair tumbled across his forehead. His uniform shirts don't fit, so he's in a t-shirt. He combs his fingers through long hair and chews on his bottom lip and Sulu tries not to stare at the swell of breasts or the long, uninterrupted lines of thighs. It should be hilarious; the same happened to him at the hands of the Queen of Spring after all, but, somehow, this time it isn't funny. Kirk does make a beautiful girl, though.
McCoy shrugs and pushes one hand through his hair irritably.
"I don't know, Jim. A week? Maybe two?"
"What? I..."
His shift ended, Sulu slips off the bridge before this argument starts again. He all but walks down the hall with his eyes closed. Exhaustion setting in; too many days in sick bay, not moving. Keeping a watch. He's already tugging off his shirt as he slips into the bedroom without turning the light on. In the bed, a skinny body, curled on his side, three legged rhino tucked under his arm. In his sleep, he stirs, whimpering and Sulu lowers himself down onto the bed and kisses his temple, and lies still beside him until he quietens. The stab wound between his ribs barely left a scar, but there's nothing that McCoy can do for bad dreams. Eventually, Chekov stills and Sulu settles. Under his cheek, a scratchy piece of paper. He reads it by te light of his PADD and then he folds it, carefully and tucks it into the book that he's reading.
He folds one arm around Chekov and pulls him closer, and his fingers brush against the barely there scar, which is white and puckered and looks almost like a star.
*There`s fire of love inside me, burning,
You've hurt the heart and soul of mine,
Keep kissing me: your kisses, darling
Are sweeter than good myrrh and wine.
Now cling to me, come closer, dear,
And let me sleep in quiet, here,
Until the sunrise breaks the day
And night-time shadows flow away.
- Pushkin