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
( ... )
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 29 2009, 00:00:27 UTC
Kirk can see every moment of it. Nero's words paint a picture in his mind, describing a place he has never seen. He could have started to speak in Romulan and Kirk probably would have seen the same imagery. The pain of it is now distant, even when the combs bite into bone. The pain is insignificant compared to what it had been when his hand had been broken, his fingers, or the tattoos into it.
"Who?" Whispered very quietly, voice slurring. Who did Oren tell?
The further the drug gets into his system, poisoning his blood green, getting behind his eyes. The world was turning green.
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 29 2009, 00:48:21 UTC
“Everyone.” The word bled out, an answer trickled alongside the marks on Kirk's skin. “No one believes...no one but Spock.
“Spock believes Oren.” The comb lifts and no marks follow. No marks for the living alongside the dead. “Tells him that he can stop Hobus. Oren's shikaen do not believe Spock, do not trust him. Spock has sworn on the life of Oren's star, on the life of his unborn son, and Oren swears on the lives of their families, on his own.
“Decalithium is rare, and they waste precious time to gather it. They betray their homes, their honor, and give it to thaessu hands on Vulcan.” The light is shining in his eyes. It glinted off the dampness of the grates, and Nero squinted against it, blinking and turning to face the unmarred floor beside Kirk's head. The human's hair is matted with blood and the denaturing dust from the crates. It smells like the compactor on the Narada and Nero backs away just slightly, unconsciously wary of the combining fumes.
“They do not give Oren the red matter, the Vulcan's do not trust that he
( ... )
Re: Shifting colors.kirktasticSeptember 29 2009, 01:22:03 UTC
All at once, even through the drugs, he knew. Memories that are not his but are. He has experienced them, many times over, flickering past his consciousness. But these in particular he had experienced first hand, so to speak, in the mind meld.
Oren is Nero.
It clicked into place with a heavy thud, making Kirk's body jerk like Nero had placed a tazer against his skin. He sucked in a breath, trying to breath out words, "He meant it, meant it, tried to convince them, why would he give his help and take it away, he meant his promise!"
His voice cracked on the last word, caught completely in the moment trying to scramble out the words running lose in his brain before he lost them again. Images conflict - Nero's story and Spock's memories.
Re: Shifting colors.mirror_brightlySeptember 29 2009, 01:59:28 UTC
“Tried?” Nero asked low and even, his face twisted as his eyes came open. He repeated himself, low and hard as they focused on the human before him. Nero's voice dropped alongside the comb as the marks completed themselves, his hands fisting in Kirk's wiry, matted hair to twist the human's head parallel with his shoulder. “He did not promise to try.”
“That wave he tried to convince them to allow him to attempt to stop,” Nero seethed, every other word flooded with his hate. “It overloaded every living organism on my homeworld, let them dangle lifeless and still.
“I watched it while Spock tried, while he talked.” Nero's hand shifted in Kirk's hair and he dropped the human's head, suddenly disgusted by the feel of it. “The wave shattered the stability of Eisn, broke it apart in tongues of fire and radiation. I watched while it burned our world apart, as it ripped the oceans from the land and melted everything I ever knew into ash.”
Nero rose as he spoke, his eyes narrowed on Kirk. “Watched as my star....my....Mandana....” The breath
( ... )
Re: Shifting colors.loyalty_everSeptember 30 2009, 03:40:55 UTC
This was not good. It was another of his captain's--elsewhere moments. He had seen it gathering, the tension coiling tight under Nero's skin.
Ayel bit his own tongue. He should have taken over the tale, should have started out Ael is born in Ramnau, to the son of a son of miners, and this hard, hot life is all he knows, until... But he is not yet dead, if never again Ael, and this halted his tongue, stayed his hand.
The Standard clattered out of Nero's mouth as if bitten free, hard and brittle. "Cut him loose. How doesn't matter. Get him out of my sight."
"Hrrau joaie." Ayel felt ice creeping under his skin as he stood, bending close against Kirk. It was better to have his feet under him for this
( ... )
Re: Shifting colors.kirk_georgeSeptember 30 2009, 04:03:28 UTC
George finally was able to focus long enough to wriggle his arm free, pushing up against the restraints. Something snapped, and he was able to breathe freely, move freely. Without thinking he scooped the gun Nero was wearing up, and turned to fire at Ayel, who was the biggest threat right now. Had to protect Jim. Jim had the actual information, was his son. Needed to protect him
( ... )
Re: Shifting colors.loyalty_everSeptember 30 2009, 15:00:03 UTC
There was a hard whine and a sharp, loud sizzling crackle. He snapped around to follow it and his shoulder exploded in light and pain. The bolt struck with such force that he spun, twisted off-kilter and slammed back against the crates.
Ayel screamed. Rage, outrage, and agony burned everything green. Overcharged! Hope it fries him. He stepped forward, clutching the wound with his good arm, but his knees refused to hold. He let go, spread his hand to keep from landing on his face, and hot liquid slithered out between his fingers, stained the grates.
It was dark, and seeping slow. Missed the arteries. He would live.
He tried to move the arm. Hot nails marched down the bone, driven in by steel jackboots as his fingers twitched, clenched, spasmed, and fell uselessly still. Nerve damage.
"After him." It was a hard, hateful cough--his? Yes. Ayel was talking to himself outside his head, again. That wasn't good, he knew it wasn't. He pushed with his right arm, scrabbling to get vertical, and landed hard on his backside instead. Not going
( ... )
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 ( ... )
Reply
"Who?" Whispered very quietly, voice slurring. Who did Oren tell?
The further the drug gets into his system, poisoning his blood green, getting behind his eyes. The world was turning green.
Reply
“Spock believes Oren.” The comb lifts and no marks follow. No marks for the living alongside the dead. “Tells him that he can stop Hobus. Oren's shikaen do not believe Spock, do not trust him. Spock has sworn on the life of Oren's star, on the life of his unborn son, and Oren swears on the lives of their families, on his own.
“Decalithium is rare, and they waste precious time to gather it. They betray their homes, their honor, and give it to thaessu hands on Vulcan.” The light is shining in his eyes. It glinted off the dampness of the grates, and Nero squinted against it, blinking and turning to face the unmarred floor beside Kirk's head. The human's hair is matted with blood and the denaturing dust from the crates. It smells like the compactor on the Narada and Nero backs away just slightly, unconsciously wary of the combining fumes.
“They do not give Oren the red matter, the Vulcan's do not trust that he ( ... )
Reply
Oren is Nero.
It clicked into place with a heavy thud, making Kirk's body jerk like Nero had placed a tazer against his skin. He sucked in a breath, trying to breath out words, "He meant it, meant it, tried to convince them, why would he give his help and take it away, he meant his promise!"
His voice cracked on the last word, caught completely in the moment trying to scramble out the words running lose in his brain before he lost them again. Images conflict - Nero's story and Spock's memories.
Reply
“That wave he tried to convince them to allow him to attempt to stop,” Nero seethed, every other word flooded with his hate. “It overloaded every living organism on my homeworld, let them dangle lifeless and still.
“I watched it while Spock tried, while he talked.” Nero's hand shifted in Kirk's hair and he dropped the human's head, suddenly disgusted by the feel of it. “The wave shattered the stability of Eisn, broke it apart in tongues of fire and radiation. I watched while it burned our world apart, as it ripped the oceans from the land and melted everything I ever knew into ash.”
Nero rose as he spoke, his eyes narrowed on Kirk. “Watched as my star....my....Mandana....” The breath ( ... )
Reply
Ayel bit his own tongue. He should have taken over the tale, should have started out Ael is born in Ramnau, to the son of a son of miners, and this hard, hot life is all he knows, until... But he is not yet dead, if never again Ael, and this halted his tongue, stayed his hand.
The Standard clattered out of Nero's mouth as if bitten free, hard and brittle. "Cut him loose. How doesn't matter. Get him out of my sight."
"Hrrau joaie." Ayel felt ice creeping under his skin as he stood, bending close against Kirk. It was better to have his feet under him for this ( ... )
Reply
Reply
Ayel screamed. Rage, outrage, and agony burned everything green. Overcharged! Hope it fries him. He stepped forward, clutching the wound with his good arm, but his knees refused to hold. He let go, spread his hand to keep from landing on his face, and hot liquid slithered out between his fingers, stained the grates.
It was dark, and seeping slow. Missed the arteries. He would live.
He tried to move the arm. Hot nails marched down the bone, driven in by steel jackboots as his fingers twitched, clenched, spasmed, and fell uselessly still. Nerve damage.
"After him." It was a hard, hateful cough--his? Yes. Ayel was talking to himself outside his head, again. That wasn't good, he knew it wasn't. He pushed with his right arm, scrabbling to get vertical, and landed hard on his backside instead. Not going ( ... )
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