SHIP WARS: TEAM PIKEONE: PROMPT 6 ENTRY

[taraljc]

Title: In The Startled Ear Of Night
Summary: "Pike holds onto One's face, or faces, and feels astonishingly safe. Like a man in a desert, being led to water by a guiding star." (What does it mean, in the end, to see across the gaps between worlds?)
Ship: Pike/Number One
Canon: AOS
Author(s)/Artist(s): possibly_thrice
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Improbable intersections of realities.
Disclaimer: Star Trek and all related elements, characters and indicia © Paramount Pictures / Bad Robot / Spyglass Entertainment 2009. All Rights Reserved. All characters and situations-save those created by the authors for use solely on this website-are copyright Paramount Pictures / Bad Robot / Spyglass Entertainment 2009.



It starts like this:

Aboard the Narada, Pike dreams.

In the dream he has no body. He floats in an unknown sickbay at waist-level. Boyce is there, and another doctor he doesn't know, and they loom over him, and because his eyes do not move in their sockets he is forced to stare at the strange doctor's crotch while the two of them talk. He remembers the prickly embarrassment he felt when he was a child, short for his age, recognizing the adults who largely composed his world first by their thighs and second by their faces. The embarrassment that came with not being a complete person. With not seeing the world that other people saw.

He feels it now. It's a nakedness. The shame of it.

They are explaining what happened, but it is difficult to understand because their voices rise and fall on a frequency wholly separate from the natural rhythms of speech, so that some sentences are a mere static-y murmur and others wash right through him, too loud to take apart. But he understands, in the way of dreams, that they have taken his body away and put it in a box, because his body was rotting after overexposure to gamma rays. They have not buried it, though, in accordance with her wishes, not while he was still sleeping.

Would he like it to be buried now?

but before he can answer he is dragged from his uneasy slumber by a tap to the forehead.

Nero smiles down, the tattoos on his face distorted, solid lines of ink separating into stitches as the skin stretches.

“Time's up,” he says.

Pike doesn't immediately understand what he's talking about; he opens his mouth, though, and hears the numbers come out in a long stream, like a school of small shining fish. Out into the waiting dark. Driven out, he supposes, by the nameless sea-creature hiding in the hollow around the base of his spine. He remembers then. What he is here for.

When it is finished, he vomits: most of it stays in his mouth, because the straps are too tight to allow him to roll onto his side. Nero wades away through the shallow water surrounding the block, wordlessly, and for a few minutes Pike thinks he is going to suffocate on his treachery. It's a nice thought. But one of the crewmembers, one who he hasn't had the pleasure of being introduced to under torture, enters a regrettably short while later, his expression unreadable, and undoes the strap across his chest and hauls Pike up and pounds him across the back so hard he blacks out again.

After that he dips in and out of consciousness.

The dream picks up smoothly where it left off.

-now?

And Boyce kneels down in front of him, the familiar eyes easing into his field of vision, which makes a nice change, although not that nice because Boyce is tired, and shaking, his outline slightly blurred. He says: one beep for yes, two for no, and Pike can see the Narada's ribbed ceiling through Boyce's face, and now under the shame there is the guilt, the horror, and under that: more shame.

Boyce comes into focus, then. Don't do this to her, he says.

Her?

Oh.

Her.

The distractions-the other emotions-these dissolve.

No, Pike tells them, with flashing lights and stupid beeps, no, do not bury me, do not cover my treachery and my confusion and my self-pity and my loathing for what I have done with your dust. They nod. They take the box with his body in it and put him in the box with the rest of what he was, like an Egyptian pharaoh, essence bound and buried with its erstwhile embalmed organs for company, and then they roll him out of the sickbay and through empty corridors and into the sharp evening air of San Francisco, and somewhere else, on the slab in the bowels of the Narada, he twitches in his restraints, his eyes half-open, rolled up in their sockets, only the whites exposed to the rest of the world.

She's there, waiting in the parking lot. The landscape of groundcars with rain-spangled roofs that squat in their slots like sleeping dogs in a kennel feels new and wrong and faintly fantastic because he can see only directly in front of him. He gets panels of the world rather than a complete three-dimensional scope reconstructed inside his lost head: the only reason he doesn't get seasick with every degree of rotation that slides in a new field of view, separate from the one that preceded it, is that she's there. She doesn't crouch, like Boyce did: she kneels. Her loose dark hair is blown up around her head, and for a moment he thinks the low stars of dusk are shining through it in places, his frozen eyes fooled by all the secret gleams of the abandoned lot.

She doesn't flinch as she examines the box they have put him in; instead, she grows measurably more still. Her limbs motionless. The core of her a stone.

He wishes he could say her name. And the translation system they hooked into the nape of his neck (maybe a symbol of the slug? he thinks, blearily; but no, because he gave up the codes against his will, damn them, there was no translation of secret wants involved) misinterprets the wish. Beeps once for yes. The flash of light catches her face from below, inverting it, pulling strange shapes out of the dim blue shadows of the parking lot. The underside of her sharp nose. Her lip. The space between her eyebrows and her eyes.

Pike gets it, then. She's not One. Or she is, but she's not his One. Her bone structure is the same but the way the meat hangs on it is not.

She looks from Boyce to the other doctor. They are silent. She looks at him and it is her, whatever she looks like. He knows by the way her fragile smile warms what is left of him, resting atop his radiation-poisoned body, the bits peeking out from the box.

She reaches forward and runs her thumb over his dead cheek. Or so he assumes. For all he knows there is a hole there in the flesh and she stuck her finger right through it. He doesn't care. He thinks it'd be better, even, if the flesh were stripped away: if the body he no longer has any claim on were just bones and ragged scissored-up nerves, maybe he could get back inside it, and this would go easily, as it always does when it's just her body and his body and the electricity of moving at all, and moving together in particular-nothing more.

He falls awake on the thought. It's a long fall.

And shortly after, Jim Kirk slides in and saves everything that is left to be saved. And Pike, the Pike outside of the dreams: he helps. Not with his broken mind but with his, yes, his sore muscles, his reflexes, the quickness and the grace of killing (killing, as it happens, the same Romulan who cleaned his mouth out for him earlier).

They run, or shuffle quickly. Kirk shouts “Two to beam up” and in the fraction of a second that it takes for Pike's substance to come apart into points of light and empty space, Pike holds onto One's face, or faces, and feels astonishingly safe. Like a man in a desert, being led to water by a guiding star.

He sleeps for sixty-three hours, during which McCoy performs small miracles on his nervous system and the Enterprise limps home.

Or, to look at it another way, he spends sixty-three hours awake, and in a box.

The One of the dream takes him back to the apartment that has been prepared for him, inside one of the Academy buildings. She introduces him to a young Vulcan who looks nothing like Spock did at that age (and Pike, the Pike who is dreaming, not the Pike being dreamed, he wonders where that thought comes from, because he didn't know Spock, at that age, wouldn't for years yet) and who will ensure that should he want to be transported somewhere he will be (the assumption being that he won't), and also take him for a walk twice a day, and also do the maintenance for the life support system in the box.

Unless, One adds, I am there to do it.

Pike signals: yes. One. And the Vulcan looks at her, and looks at Pike (it is no longer possible to take them both in in one glance, of course), and nods. He excuses himself very quietly.

She stays up all night with him. She doesn't talk much, and invariably when she does she is inaudible, or else saying syntactically precise nonsense. Sometimes she has crying jags. Her pointed nose reddens and her eyes redden with it, bundled blood vessels unravelling into long red threads through the milky sclera, two long clear trails of mucus running down over her upper lip on either side of the cleft. While he beeps no, no, no, two beeps, pause, two beeps, pause, two beeps, and it sounds like a heartbeat magnified, cutting up the silence.

He's never. Been this focused. It carries him through the excruciatingly long seconds, his concentration on her.

If he tries hard enough she will surely hear his thoughts, he thinks, once or twice.

Around five o' clock a.m., she unfolds from where she sat curled against the wall.

"We're going for a walk," she says.

There is some fuss involved in sneaking out, but it's like it never happened, once they are scraping along steep streets in the night's heavy calm. The streetlamps have not yet shut off: they trail tissue-y skirts of orange light, dividing up what dark precedes dawn. Old rain glints here and there, like the eyes of insects. And in the miles they cover they see only one other pedestrian, an old woman with a concave dark liverbrown face and an enormous straw hat, who glances at Pike's last remains and crosses to the other side of the street. The woman's vertebrae are stacked neatly in supple well-insulated columns, and the delicately calibrated interlocking structures of knee and hip and abdomen all work without flaw under the merely-sunburnt skin to carry her away from Pike's obscene, discordant presence, this the evidence of dismantlement, of a man reduced to broken parts and a buzzer.

And yes, he is envious (more envious even than he is of One because once he had all the wholeness of that woman, but he never had One's, knows he never could have had her balance) and he is angry and he is ashamed, like a child navigating a crowd whose hips are level with its head.

But they pass under another curving lampstem. The bulb dyes her yellow-and-black, and she is so bright. And, he sees, she is getting angry also, angrier, and better at it, than he can be in these plastic confines, this half-world.

So he lets her do it. He gives it to her, his living rage, and keeps the colder, congealed emotions, which belong to limbo and twilight, for himself.

She leads him on over the cracked sidewalk. Up hills and down hills. The sky turns the pale blue-gray of shadows on snow. Her eyes, in the changing light, turn with it.

It's almost seven when they get back to his apartment, doors opening around them, the city . She tells him she has to go. She'll be back at noon. He says yes. She asks him if he'd like to read about what's been happening on the Yorktown and he says yes to that too and she hooks him up, but when she's closed the door behind her he stares at the wall mostly.

Without her he can't really do it. The existing thing. Mostly, he isn't there.

Pike, the real Pike, chases other dreams. But he feels the absence of the other him. Like a ghost.

It goes like that for those three days. Turning off when she goes off to be her own woman again. Turning on when she comes back to be the center of his small, small universe, not quite human but terribly solid, her gravity immeasurably great.

And at the end of the three days, she turns on all the lights-

he doesn't open his eyes immediately, because this time the rousing is gentle, planned, induced by a careful balance of stimulants and tranquilizers, so he comes to on his own terms. He considers the darkness of his shut eyelids and the strobing faint phantom-shapes that appear when he squeezes them tighter for a full minute first.

Then he looks.

Lopsided green eyes and a really remarkably bad shave staring down at him. Gloved hands. Metal.

“Captain,” McCoy says, and Pike thinks Yes? and waits for the beep and then rearranges his thoughts and says, “Yes?”

“How do you feel?”

Pike doesn't know what to say. He's still adjusting back to the fact of feeling at all. He shrugs.

McCoy's mouth twists in a shadow of sympathetic amusement. “Yes, I expect it still hurts pretty badly.” Pike wonders vaguely what his face must look like if that was what McCoy read there: he is only now realizing that he does, in fact, hurt, all over.

McCoy runs a few quick tests, prodding and drawing samples, asking questions and flicking cards. He looks pleased, or at the very least satisfied, by the results. “They'll want to debrief you,” he says. “Should I tell them you're not ready yet? It's not exactly a lie.

Pause.

“If you do go, you'll be going in an autochair.”

Pike says: “Might as well get it over with.”

And it isn't that bad. He drifts through it, his tongue working without input from his brain, and to his surprise and faint relief they do not really press him about the things he should by rights be pressed about. His betrayal. Et cetera. It is possible that they pity him, but he doesn't try to dig that out of their words.

When they're done with him, he wheels outside, the nurse McCoy sent with him trailing on behind, her eyebrows drawn together and her faux-hawk bristling angrily at his back. It's mid-afternoon, but it's also the same parking lot, and for a moment the sense of time folding in on itself is so intense he gets dizzy, doubles up in his chair.

One isn't there, of course. In her place is a mess of physical stimuli he could care less about: the ache and the softness of the cushion under him and the heat on his skin. He can turn his head where it rests an inch from his knees, and track with his eyes the flock of pigeons that fly up from the gutter when a flitter zooms past, their wingfeathers spread in trembling dark gray fans, blocking out the sunlight.

The nurse, whose name, he remembers now, is Chapel, catches up with him. She touches his hunched shoulder and says, soothingly, “Sir?”

He glances up at her and grins, or at least bares his teeth, at a point somewhere behind her stubbly shining scalp. “Let's go,” he says.

She is in the middle of turning his chair around. She hesitates. “Go where?”

“How about to the desert?” he says.

“What? What desert? Sir, I-”

“It's where I grew up,” he interrupts her.

She tenses, and then she untenses, and sighs. “Please come this way, sir,” she says.

Pike nods without really hearing. He lets her roll him off, and as they go he flexes his feet inside his shoes, feeling his knitted socks shift on his sweaty soles, because he can do that, and he breathes in the heat and makes plans for not going to the desert, because he can do that.

She'll come. To his apartment. He'll have an apartment, if not that apartment. Maybe. Probably.

She doesn't come in the week following, though. Isn't there to see him surrender his ship.

The promotion ceremony ends with a lot of senior officers mildly drunk, but Pike is not, unfortunately, among them; he hasn't been cleared to metabolize ethanol yet, so he's cradling a glass of cloudy fruit juice in his lap, hell, between his legs, his knuckles pressed into the sloping inside of each thigh. Captain Kirk's face is a flat fleshy oval with no features at all except for the dark spots of the eye sockets, and the in-this-light-almost-golden haze laid over the top, gel melted under the heat of many fluorescent lights and the hair rising. He stands an auditorium's width from Pike's corner, at the center of a circle of other young people wearing nervous laughter and new uniforms, and Pike hates him a little, but absent-mindedly.

He raises the glass to his lips and drinks some of the juice. It is bitter and sharp in his mouth, the citrus edge like bile. He puts the emptied hand on the cushioned arm rest, where it opens and closes restlessly, without consulting his brain. An odd inversion of the dreams. Sensation without control.

“Admiral,” says an old voice nearby.

He looks at his fingers, tapping the cushion. No one responds to the voice.

He realizes.

“Yes?” he says, wheeling around.

The old voice belongs to an older Vulcan. Pike compresses the urge to apologize or wince or beg absolution into a little ball and closes his empty hand around it.

“How can I help you?”

The Vulcan visibly attempts a smile, which is unnerving, and Pike gets the idea that his failure has more to do with grief than learned impassiveness. “In a sense, you already have, Admiral. It is-good to see you. Here. As you are.”

A sinking feeling in his gut, and a suspicion. He got a (mildly garbled) explanation of what occurred while he was out of commission, and it was a mix of the absurd and the unspeakable, and he knows that nose.

“You're the other Spock.”

“I am,” Spock says.

There is a brief silence. It fills with the sounds of those around them. Snatches of conversation. The shifting soft noises of people that are uneasy in their clothes, in the bright spotlights and deep geometric darknesses of a too-large room.

Spock's throat works. The knuckle-shaped knob of his voicebox moving under the loose folds of skin. “You were my captain, you know. In the universe I came from.”

“Oh?” says Pike. He pays partial attention, but his mind is pulling out words from the sentence before last. See you. Here. As you are. The dreamspace. As you are and as you aren't. “Well,” he says, and breathes deep of the still air, which has been conditioned to chilliness and then warmed back to room temperature by body heat, and is without taste or texture in his lungs. “Did... something happen? To me? There?”

Spock looks at him and the dark soft eyes sharpen.

“Yes,” he says, slowly.

“Is it very likely to cheer me up?”

A flicker of open amusement. And also curiosity. A searching look. “It might,” Spock says. “But I doubt it.”

He tells Christopher Pike the life story of the Christopher Pike he knew.

Pike-listens.

Eventually, he says, “So then you left me with these Talosian-things? The illusionists? The dream-makers?”

(He knows, as he says it, that it is pointless, this seeking an explanation for the window he has been given into what does not happen, will not happen, happened. Dangerous, too. He knows that if he tries to take the hint of a theory further it will turn to ashes in his mouth.

And yet.

He wonders if, somewhere, he is dreaming this. Whether it comes as a relief.)

“I did,” Spock says.

“Hm,” Pike says. “Did you by any chance ask someone? Before you kidnapped me?” he asks.

“Your Number One,” Spock says. “She thought it better than the alternative.”

He holds Pike's gaze with calm desperation. Pike wonders whether a mutual desire to be absolved cancels out.

“Ah,” he says, sipping his juice, and tries to smile, and fails. Spock bows his head. They sit on the edge of the celebration, are still sitting when the celebration is done. Wrapped up in speculation and regret, two sides of a flipped coin at the summit of its arc.

Dreams. Goddamned dreams. Or dream, singular.

Yes.

Where were they?

At the end of three days. The last night before she is due to go on her next mission, she turns on all the lights in the apartment. They crackle to life, stripping the shadows from the walls.

She positions herself until she is directly in front of him, and she unzips her boots, first, peels patent leather from her bare calves. She is deliberate about lifting each leg enough that he can watch. There are short sparse hairs on her pale shins. The top of each bare foot is ridged with greenish veins.

Next, she slips out of her slacks, reminds him of how the slenderest part of each leg widens into a shapely thigh, paler than the shins, the planes of them shivering. She drops to her flushed knobbly knees, hard, the impact making her breath hitch, but she does not pause before pulling off her sweater. The blue-gray wool sliding off cotton in heavy folds.

It is not a performance, exactly. Her elbows at right angles over her head and she gets a little tangled, and she has planted her knees firmly, almost half a meter apart. She is not easing into any dance.

Nevertheless the air might burn if anything but her were to move.

When the sweater is a pile on the floor she unbuttons her creased dress shirt. Her tapered fingertips look pinker against the clean white weave of the fabric, the small smooth ivory buttons. The central seam gapes into a wide V that loses its shape as the bottom opens up. She shrugs off one stiff shoulder-line at a time, tendons taut in her neck, each clavicle forced forward by turn. A sudden shine, a sinking of one bone under flesh and a rising of the other ridge.

He can't see her face; it's somewhere beyond the curved fringe of what is left of his lashes, which is the upper bound of his sight.

She unclips her bra, and then crosses her arms across her front and pulls it off herself tenderly, letting her small breasts fall limp against her ribcage. The dark rosy nipples are only just beginning to stiffen in the cold almost-burn of the emptiness and the want that compose the atmosphere. The Pike who is dreaming is tempted to catalogue the differences he sees between this One and his One. The Pike who is being dreamed stops him. Strangles the desire while it is still more or less subconscious and One eases her underwear down over the jut of her hips. Down down down, lace catching on the dark hair between her legs but on and down.

This is not a performance. An offering or a sacrifice or revenge, maybe.

If I could give you this, she says. Still she does not lower her head to let him see her face. She frames her belly with her hands, the webbing between thumb and forefinger slick with sweat. There are tears dripping down over her cut-off jaw and onto the column of her throat, but she does not move like weeping. The play of muscles under her white skin is subtle, arrhythmic, not at all ragged around the edges. No heave or gasp. She is so lovely, and the beauty expands with every passing second, like a globe of light.

She shatters it into knives of brilliance when she finally curves towards him, chin tucked into her chest, and having shown him all he has lost, her body and his also because his is mapped on every cubic inch of her, every ounce of her, she shows him what he thought, for a little while, dreaming, he could keep. The eyes. A wild regretful gaze. Her sometimes-company.

If I could, she says. But. Not this, Chris.

For a little while he was wrong.

Walks, fragile smiles, nights crying with his metronomic pleas for company. Staying sane, staying human in his afterlife, because she was there. It wasn't anything like what he wanted, of course not, but it wasn't a choice, and there was a joy in that. The simplicity of being pushed around. In a box.

But gods make guiding constellations out of dead women and she isn't dead.

She kisses the bubbled raw streak on his cheek, her face so close that it ceases to register as a face to his eye, and disintegrates into shadows, light, liquid, the pebbled blue of her left eye's iris around the shrinking pupil. Again. Again.

The dream leaves first, this time.

One-his One, or the One who owns him-arrives at his apartment and wakes him from a later sleep that has the hollowness of dreams that refuse to be dreamed any longer.

They go out to the balcony in silence. It has a good view of the city, the lights scattered over dark hills, but they do not appreciate it much. She grips his hand: their palms are pressed tightly together, and the matched hollows form a pocket of trapped air. He can feel a callous he doesn't remember on the heel of hers, a thick tough patch of glossy pale red spread unevenly over the pillow of soft flesh.

“Are you going to tell me I'm an idiot?” he asks.

“I thought about it,” she says calmly. “On the way here. But you weren't, particularly. It wasn't genius, your plan, but there weren't many better ones to be enacted in those circumstances, and most of them required imagination you don't have.”

“I'm going to save up the memory of you saying that for days when the world can do nothing but depress me.”

“Use it today, then,” she says, pivoting to look at him.

“Say it again, I need to get the nuances of phrasing down.”

She laughs like bells, which is to say, like metal on metal, ringing through the sweet cold. Her eyes are dry and it occurs to him that her hand is light in his, flat, delicate. As is she: more slender than the other One, and flickering, unsteady as a candle flame about to be blown out.

The future is like this: they will argue in the morning, seriously, and say vicious things, and have inventive sex, and she will be there for longer than three days; a few weeks, perhaps, as long as she can given certain constraints, helping him heal. And then, in the end, she will go again, and their trajectories will coincide wherever. And he will continue to find his way, for the most part, without her. And he will survive, as a person, when she is (to him, for him, the part of her that is bound up in him) a subspace comm and a soreness in his heart, farther away than any star visible to the naked eye.

Here and now, he pulls her down to him. The kiss is deep and sweet and terribly familiar. In its heat, in the span of it, they could be anyone.

Anyone at all.