Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 26 2009, 09:18:40 UTC
"No, James," Nero called kindly, his voice swinging like a pendulum as he stepped across the human's torso. "You can't sleep yet."
He waited as the Narada gradually swallowed the echoes of Kirk's struggle, the vehemence of George's cries, and his eyes drifted over the pale, bruised line of the human's back. When all was silence again, calm and deathly under the colored lights, Nero leaned in.
"Ayel," he started low, "ketaen." The room was still and he craned his head to meet his First Officer's eyes. The Romulan was staring at him as though he'd become confused in the last few seconds. Had he? He didn't think so. No...no he could see it in the shifting light, feel it in his ribs.
"Just enough to keep him here," Nero added and his eyes drifted back along Kirk's legs and the span of his side before his head turned to match. Behind him, Ayel shuffled, and Nero rocked back onto his heels, crouched over Kirk. His hand slipped out and ran across the hevam's back, over the mottled pattern of white, heaving pink, and slow darkened reds
( ... )
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 26 2009, 12:06:53 UTC
Kirk's eyes closed again as the pain started again, this time trailing around his back, curling its fingers around his spine and squeezing. It was terrifying, how little he could fight. His arms and legs were not responding - or they were, but could move so frighteningly little as the wire bit into flesh. He wondered if he would have scars there, too, criss-crossing his arms and legs and hands and feet in erratic patterns. If they did scar, they would tell their own story.
Nero was telling him more of the story. The story of his dead crew that had followed him into this battle, that had agreed to ignore logic and take their revenge. He didn't want to hear the story, wanted the lines and swirls and pools of ink to mean nothing except torture. Didn't want them mean peopleNero wanted him to wear those tattoos so the grief would never stop. They would tear apart his skin for the rest of his life. He would carry on that grief
( ... )
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 26 2009, 17:07:11 UTC
Mnhei'sahe.
Nero pulled his hands back, away from the spirals moving up the lines of Kirk's back, whorling black grief, and his eyes narrowed on the human. He was compelled by every fiber of his being to grant Kirk's request, but it turned his stomach, brought his teeth together hard and ground them with a glassy pull.
Lhaerrh twisted up the human's spine, Man'dukar was beside him, as was their wont in life. Nero's hand swept the blood from them, bore them clear to the light. He scowled and bent to bring himself close to Kirk. He folded, near in half, and his throat twisted as he did, holding in his air and his voice.
Re: Shifting colors.loyalty_everSeptember 27 2009, 02:06:36 UTC
He'd tapped the air from the needle--tricky going, with such a small amount, exactly a sixteenth, half of an eighth-dose.
Kirk had to stay awake. This would keep him that way, lessen the pressure on his ribs and ease his breathing, keep him listening.
Ayel had folded himself down near Kirk's shoulder, angling for a spot of white amid the jagged curl of Bhaon's name on his throat. Ayel's way of touching without touching, tracking with the needle and the sign around it. But he never got that far.
Kirk opened his eyes, pressed words across his tongue, and every one of them was like a needle of its own, tapping sharp on Ayel's skin.
His own dead.
The syringe knew its work, hissed and clicked and smoothed the edges from Kirk's suffering almost by itself.
Ayel pushed the thing aside and did not stand.
He waited opposite his captain, keeping their honor by keeping silent.
There were new dead in the room. He had to listen for their names.
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 27 2009, 04:17:15 UTC
Kirk swallowed, wanting to swallow his own words. Wanted them to burn going down because they would hurt less then when they had fallen from his lips. Who. Who.
Thousands and thousands of people had died. An entire class of cadets and then some. His friends, his friends with benefits, past fucks, enemies, teachers, everyone. Six ships. Almost seven thousand people.
Six billion Vulcans. Spock... Spock... his mother, broken...
"Farragut. Truman. Walcott. Antares. Hood. Centaurus." Each word rolled off his lips and felt sour and painful, dragged out kicking and screaming. Six ships. Seven thousand people.
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 27 2009, 04:48:01 UTC
The words fell heavy, rolled through the air like smoke, and Nero remained silent. His breath caught against the backs of his teeth as Kirk's words swirled about. He knew the first from books and captures of old Alpha history. He could see the cut of the hevam letters that formed their names, reflected in green and amber off his main screen. The last, he knew it well.
His grip tightened around the metal of the comb and the bone thin pipe squeeled and cried as he did. It bent, but did not snap, and Nero let his eyes slide shut. The world was silent, was still, and his stomach rolled as the patterns stretched, invisible, between his lids. He would have to intertwine Lhaerrh and Man'dukar with...these names. His breath slithered out and his eyes parted.
"Mnhei'sahe," Nero answered flatly and his eyes followed his traitor arm as it dipped the comb. His mothers, his sister, and Eihva clawed deep as the comb came free. His jaw clenched and he moved it, hovering over the hevam skin
( ... )
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 27 2009, 05:06:17 UTC
The squeal of metal sounds like a death keen to his ears. It seems to echo forever in the large room. A cargo bay, maybe. The pain starts all over again, now at his request.
But now the markings have meaning. The story they are telling is one he actually knows, can connect to, can remember and carry on in his heart. The guilt bubbles up as the hours pass, and one by one, he learns about those fateful few minutes before the Enterprise had dropped out of warp and into a battlefield of shattered metal corpses
( ... )
Re: Shifting colors.loyalty_everSeptember 27 2009, 06:38:03 UTC
Their dead are mingled and Ayel can feel the flesh at the back of his neck crawling.
Kirk is drifting on him, tightened against the pain. That can't happen, not now, with Standard staining where the rest of the design would be, should be. He had damn well better stay awake and watch every stroke of the comb.
The syringe is empty; the cylinder is empty, too. That was the last of the one marked 'somatic'--klivam witch doctors trying to get fancy--but there are others. There are more.
Nero cannot break the tale to give him the order and Kirk must be alert, must be aware.
Begging forgiveness is better than asking permission.
They're laid flat on the next crate over, ugly klivam letters on their casings. He prods them apart; none are the sleek black of the sedative. Two are marked 'coward's path': poison of one kind or another
( ... )
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 27 2009, 12:09:52 UTC
The world was pain. A grief, a guilt he carried under his skin and now stained for the world to see. Fuck, what was wrong with him? Why had he asked for this? Because he hadn't been fast enough. He had failed. Fuck, fuck, fuck these green-blooded bastards and their stories were affecting him. Getting under his skin like the combs and remaining him of his own dead.
Vulcan brings a new kind of pain that nearly sends the world swirling down the drain as the combs dig into the meat of his broken hand. Shattered beyond saving, his mind babbled. Disfigured and crippled.
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 28 2009, 01:52:01 UTC
“Vulcan is a beautiful world. The suns are bright and welcoming, and even from orbit it shows a bright sheen. It is a fitting homeworld, a reserved and aged origin, long lacking in the foolish years of younger planets,” Nero finished and the comb pulled free. Kirk's hand released a slow crack of flesh and the blood that trickled down his arm greyed the lines as Nero finished them, blurred the pattern from Nero's sight. They were obscured by blood-it seemed so fitting, so singular, that Nero hardly noticed the human had fallen silent.
Time slid by and Nero's vision danced across the human's back, his expression twisting hard as he listened. The light was hot and harsh, and Nero leaned, pressing his head against the tepid, clammy human skin. It flared up in spaces, across the lines, in brief stripes of normative warmth, but fell into a cool pallor, rolled like freshdead flesh in others. Nero gritted his teeth against the sensation but then he heard it-the sluggish, lazy heartbeat of the hevam“James,” Nero plied as he picked his head up
( ... )
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 28 2009, 02:19:05 UTC
"...rest?" Kirk burbled out, but it was difficult. Waking was difficult, even with the pain. His eyes searched for Nero's face, just a glimpse at the corner, and shuddered when everything smeared like trailing fingertips through wet paint.
"...hell... do you mean?" He couldn't hear his own voice slurring, thick as syrup. He had to close his eyes again as the world spun green and tilting. His fingertips on his right hand curled into the grating of the floor, clinging to it as tightly as he could because it was the only stable feeling.
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 28 2009, 03:43:02 UTC
"Have you ever seen a subspace alternating wave?" Nero asked, his expression kind as he twisted between Kirk and the light. His eyes narrowed slightly and he pulled back, yellow spilling over his shoulder as he did so. “No...no of course you haven't.” Nero let out a low hiss and the fingers of his right hand gripped the grating beside Kirk's head, leaned his weight above the human. “We could barely handle them, could barely work...” his voice dipped and his smile arched across his face. “Consider this an education.”
His left hand lifted and he cast aside the bent comb. His fingers drifted across the handles that extended, twisted at odd angles and slow curves, from the jar of pigment. His fingers ticked through them, the gentle sound of glass and metal swirled between them, until he came to a comb near the other side of the jar. He pulled it out with careful consideration-the tines were long, curved. It was made up of a piece of the Narada, a titanium chip from a deck panel...one of the original ones. Yes, this was it. The light was
( ... )
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 28 2009, 03:59:27 UTC
Something was different. The tone of Nero's voice had changed, something deep and warm and as thick as caramel, but the words were getting harder to understand. Each tone was heard but the meaning was slipping away. It would take several minutes of listening to realize that Ayel must have pumped him full of sedatives again.
Fuck, fuck. Couldn't escape like this, couldn't think like this.
The world was dissolving again.
Oren. Star. Stars. Space. The concepts floated in his head, became strange things like the spray of the ocean and the wind against his face, heat against his skin and flesh pressed to his. He saw someone in his mind, a young man with bright eyes and a brighter smile and dark hair falling in his eyes and the knowledge of friend. Ael.
Oren and Ael were friends. Best friends, everything friends. Like him and Bones.
Bones...
Bones.
The ocean started to fall from his eyes and stain the grating below his face.
Re: Shifting colors.loyalty_everSeptember 28 2009, 06:26:46 UTC
Vulcan. Every Rihanh child knows this story. It is how they learn to speak.
In the time of war, in the time when all sand ran green, Surak's greatest student broke away from him. Remember the name S'Task! Him you owe your homeworld.
A hundred ships departed. Sixteen ships survived the journey. Survived sabotage and predation--the piracy of outsiders, betrayal in the name of peace--and touched down in a new place on a new, green world. We are not of them. We cannot and must not do as they do. Our lives are different.
Our world is gone.
We are the same.
Nero opens the tale bare on its foundations, ties it to things James knows--the things they have done--and seals it into his skin.
The death of a world all over again.
There is a long quiet after. An unwinding of silence, empty, endless time, with a funeral taste. Kirk doesn't move at all, until Ayel is certain he must be dead, but after a while Nero leans down and breathes a new name on Kirk's skin, a sound that jerks him awake and pulls them both to awareness.
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 28 2009, 11:39:28 UTC
Their story was being passed on. It was to another without green, green blood and the heat of a desert planet still burning in their blood from the distant past, but it was passing on. A way of hearing it that no Terran or Vulcan child would be taught in schools or from their parents' lips. Burned into his mind in imagery more vivid then watching a vidscreen as the drugs overloaded his sensory inputs, burned into his skin.
Kirk lost track of the rest of existence. Nero had his captive audience, unable to concentrate his thoughts on anything else. Ayel would not have been able to touch him like this if the gift was blazing bright in his hands, not because of the pain anymore (Kirk's body knew how to handle that), but the axis-tilting careening thoughts blaring through Kirk's head like someone was shouting through a megaphone.
His lips moved, but no sound came out.
I promised.
Would not stop fighting. Would never stop fighting. Just had to hold on long enough. Just long enough.
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 28 2009, 23:13:05 UTC
The pattern was winding and wide, and somehow Nero had made it halfway down Kirk's forearm before he realized it. It formed itself under his touch, pouring out memories of landscapes and the smells of all things orange. His fingers traced the marks, the winding, stale marks of happiness, and pulled streaks of blood away with careful consideration.
“Hobus,” the name was reverent, hung with a mantle of insurmountability. “Is an erhie-d'recendt, a star so large that it pulls everything into its orbit... planets, stars, and the laylines of subspace bow beneath its grip.”
The mark was small, but dark, and it spread in rings across Ael and Oren at Kirk's elbow. Nero watched it for too long as he eulogized, his comb briefly still-there was much more to engrave and too little space...always too little space.
“To know it is to be Rihann. It is our guiding star, the brightest in the skies...to see it is to know you have come home.” Nero moved and dipped the comb as he prepared to begin again, moving down Kirk's shoulder to mark the helix
( ... )
He waited as the Narada gradually swallowed the echoes of Kirk's struggle, the vehemence of George's cries, and his eyes drifted over the pale, bruised line of the human's back. When all was silence again, calm and deathly under the colored lights, Nero leaned in.
"Ayel," he started low, "ketaen." The room was still and he craned his head to meet his First Officer's eyes. The Romulan was staring at him as though he'd become confused in the last few seconds. Had he? He didn't think so. No...no he could see it in the shifting light, feel it in his ribs.
"Just enough to keep him here," Nero added and his eyes drifted back along Kirk's legs and the span of his side before his head turned to match. Behind him, Ayel shuffled, and Nero rocked back onto his heels, crouched over Kirk. His hand slipped out and ran across the hevam's back, over the mottled pattern of white, heaving pink, and slow darkened reds ( ... )
Reply
Nero was telling him more of the story. The story of his dead crew that had followed him into this battle, that had agreed to ignore logic and take their revenge. He didn't want to hear the story, wanted the lines and swirls and pools of ink to mean nothing except torture. Didn't want them mean peopleNero wanted him to wear those tattoos so the grief would never stop. They would tear apart his skin for the rest of his life. He would carry on that grief ( ... )
Reply
Nero pulled his hands back, away from the spirals moving up the lines of Kirk's back, whorling black grief, and his eyes narrowed on the human. He was compelled by every fiber of his being to grant Kirk's request, but it turned his stomach, brought his teeth together hard and ground them with a glassy pull.
Lhaerrh twisted up the human's spine, Man'dukar was beside him, as was their wont in life. Nero's hand swept the blood from them, bore them clear to the light. He scowled and bent to bring himself close to Kirk. He folded, near in half, and his throat twisted as he did, holding in his air and his voice.
"Who?" Nero prompted, low and sickened.
Reply
Kirk had to stay awake. This would keep him that way, lessen the pressure on his ribs and ease his breathing, keep him listening.
Ayel had folded himself down near Kirk's shoulder, angling for a spot of white amid the jagged curl of Bhaon's name on his throat. Ayel's way of touching without touching, tracking with the needle and the sign around it. But he never got that far.
Kirk opened his eyes, pressed words across his tongue, and every one of them was like a needle of its own, tapping sharp on Ayel's skin.
His own dead.
The syringe knew its work, hissed and clicked and smoothed the edges from Kirk's suffering almost by itself.
Ayel pushed the thing aside and did not stand.
He waited opposite his captain, keeping their honor by keeping silent.
There were new dead in the room. He had to listen for their names.
Reply
Thousands and thousands of people had died. An entire class of cadets and then some. His friends, his friends with benefits, past fucks, enemies, teachers, everyone. Six ships. Almost seven thousand people.
Six billion Vulcans. Spock... Spock... his mother, broken...
"Farragut. Truman. Walcott. Antares. Hood. Centaurus." Each word rolled off his lips and felt sour and painful, dragged out kicking and screaming. Six ships. Seven thousand people.
"Vulcan."
Reply
His grip tightened around the metal of the comb and the bone thin pipe squeeled and cried as he did. It bent, but did not snap, and Nero let his eyes slide shut. The world was silent, was still, and his stomach rolled as the patterns stretched, invisible, between his lids. He would have to intertwine Lhaerrh and Man'dukar with...these names. His breath slithered out and his eyes parted.
"Mnhei'sahe," Nero answered flatly and his eyes followed his traitor arm as it dipped the comb. His mothers, his sister, and Eihva clawed deep as the comb came free. His jaw clenched and he moved it, hovering over the hevam skin ( ... )
Reply
But now the markings have meaning. The story they are telling is one he actually knows, can connect to, can remember and carry on in his heart. The guilt bubbles up as the hours pass, and one by one, he learns about those fateful few minutes before the Enterprise had dropped out of warp and into a battlefield of shattered metal corpses ( ... )
Reply
Kirk is drifting on him, tightened against the pain. That can't happen, not now, with Standard staining where the rest of the design would be, should be. He had damn well better stay awake and watch every stroke of the comb.
The syringe is empty; the cylinder is empty, too. That was the last of the one marked 'somatic'--klivam witch doctors trying to get fancy--but there are others. There are more.
Nero cannot break the tale to give him the order and Kirk must be alert, must be aware.
Begging forgiveness is better than asking permission.
They're laid flat on the next crate over, ugly klivam letters on their casings. He prods them apart; none are the sleek black of the sedative. Two are marked 'coward's path': poison of one kind or another ( ... )
Reply
Vulcan brings a new kind of pain that nearly sends the world swirling down the drain as the combs dig into the meat of his broken hand. Shattered beyond saving, his mind babbled. Disfigured and crippled.
Not Captain material anymore ( ... )
Reply
Time slid by and Nero's vision danced across the human's back, his expression twisting hard as he listened. The light was hot and harsh, and Nero leaned, pressing his head against the tepid, clammy human skin. It flared up in spaces, across the lines, in brief stripes of normative warmth, but fell into a cool pallor, rolled like freshdead flesh in others. Nero gritted his teeth against the sensation but then he heard it-the sluggish, lazy heartbeat of the hevam“James,” Nero plied as he picked his head up ( ... )
Reply
"...hell... do you mean?" He couldn't hear his own voice slurring, thick as syrup. He had to close his eyes again as the world spun green and tilting. His fingertips on his right hand curled into the grating of the floor, clinging to it as tightly as he could because it was the only stable feeling.
Reply
His left hand lifted and he cast aside the bent comb. His fingers drifted across the handles that extended, twisted at odd angles and slow curves, from the jar of pigment. His fingers ticked through them, the gentle sound of glass and metal swirled between them, until he came to a comb near the other side of the jar. He pulled it out with careful consideration-the tines were long, curved. It was made up of a piece of the Narada, a titanium chip from a deck panel...one of the original ones. Yes, this was it. The light was ( ... )
Reply
Fuck, fuck. Couldn't escape like this, couldn't think like this.
The world was dissolving again.
Oren. Star. Stars. Space. The concepts floated in his head, became strange things like the spray of the ocean and the wind against his face, heat against his skin and flesh pressed to his. He saw someone in his mind, a young man with bright eyes and a brighter smile and dark hair falling in his eyes and the knowledge of friend. Ael.
Oren and Ael were friends. Best friends, everything friends. Like him and Bones.
Bones...
Bones.
The ocean started to fall from his eyes and stain the grating below his face.
Reply
In the time of war, in the time when all sand ran green, Surak's greatest student broke away from him. Remember the name S'Task! Him you owe your homeworld.
A hundred ships departed. Sixteen ships survived the journey. Survived sabotage and predation--the piracy of outsiders, betrayal in the name of peace--and touched down in a new place on a new, green world. We are not of them. We cannot and must not do as they do. Our lives are different.
Our world is gone.
We are the same.
Nero opens the tale bare on its foundations, ties it to things James knows--the things they have done--and seals it into his skin.
The death of a world all over again.
There is a long quiet after. An unwinding of silence, empty, endless time, with a funeral taste. Kirk doesn't move at all, until Ayel is certain he must be dead, but after a while Nero leans down and breathes a new name on Kirk's skin, a sound that jerks him awake and pulls them both to awareness.
Oren.Ayel closes ( ... )
Reply
Kirk lost track of the rest of existence. Nero had his captive audience, unable to concentrate his thoughts on anything else. Ayel would not have been able to touch him like this if the gift was blazing bright in his hands, not because of the pain anymore (Kirk's body knew how to handle that), but the axis-tilting careening thoughts blaring through Kirk's head like someone was shouting through a megaphone.
His lips moved, but no sound came out.
I promised.
Would not stop fighting. Would never stop fighting. Just had to hold on long enough. Just long enough.
Until Bones held him again.
Reply
“Hobus,” the name was reverent, hung with a mantle of insurmountability. “Is an erhie-d'recendt, a star so large that it pulls everything into its orbit... planets, stars, and the laylines of subspace bow beneath its grip.”
The mark was small, but dark, and it spread in rings across Ael and Oren at Kirk's elbow. Nero watched it for too long as he eulogized, his comb briefly still-there was much more to engrave and too little space...always too little space.
“To know it is to be Rihann. It is our guiding star, the brightest in the skies...to see it is to know you have come home.” Nero moved and dipped the comb as he prepared to begin again, moving down Kirk's shoulder to mark the helix ( ... )
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