(no subject)
Title: Fearful symmetry
Fandom: TOS
Author: serenusc (Be3)
Characters: Spock, McCoy - mirror!verse
Word count: around 700
Disclaimer: I don't own anything here
Warning: M'Benga has perished sometime before.
Summary: after a particularly exhausting mindmeld, Spock has to live or die. Episode-based. Un-betaed.
There was danger in intimacy, in willingness to open your Self to another. The closer the connection, the greater the risk.
And there was no closer connection than telepathy. Perhaps, Spock mused, possessing the Other's body could be equally hazardous; but it was really nothing more than controlling the mind.
' - care about his privacy, I'm the Doctor here, and -'
'Come in, Bones. He's not biting today.'
The active party (or parties) had to follow the thread of questioning and never, under any circumstances, deviate from it. To be able to retrace every logical step, however minute, because loss of control meant insanity.
This was why Pon-Farr was so terrible. When a Vulcan survived it, he or she had to come back to their senses, to meld with their own selves - that had changed.
'Slap him harder!'
'No, Jim. He's got to finish whatever he's doing.'
Some people, including Jim, believed that the act took a measure of some magical ability to connect to another neuronal network. It wasn't exactly true, but Spock didn't dispute it, because Jim had tried to learn telepathy and failed. It was better for him to think he lacked something in his 'software', as Dr. McCoy put it.
It was much better, actually. M'Benga had not stopped in time, but taken Spock's words of 'mental discipline' to heart. A human could not keep partitioning the in- and outflow of data into morsels and tracking them for any length of time, because human brains were too fast for that. M'Benga, for all his efforts, would see a flash out of Spock's eyes, and pay for them with days of recovery.
Vulcan brains weren't much better, but they could be trained.
'Put that down, crewman Chekhov, and I won't send you to the agonizer. Not right now, anyway.'
'Ah - Keptin? Of course you'd be here. Okay, okay... But I can't be navigator if I'm not an Ensign, right?'
'Got it in one, crewman. Now please go to the brig. Meditate. Bye.'
And then the dark-skinned man began experimenting with stimulators, and died on the first attempt. The three of them were there with him while he twitched in his restraints.
Spock remembered M'Benga glaring loathsomely at Jim, only a word away from ruining Jim's peace of mind, such as it was.
'Faustian... pride?' asked M'Benga, mouth contorted by a power he had no hopes of conquering.
'Faustian might,' he said then, and the man choked on a laugh.
'Come on, they're going to send me another XO! You can't defect, Mr. Spock!'
'He's still there. He's fighting. You're fighting, aren't you?'
Usually, only a small, easily containable amount of information was extracted. It didn't require a meditation, and one could turn to another task within a second or less. However, there were special cases, when one had to understand something, and they went beyond mere learning of facts.
The special cases became immortalized in history, almost always as failures that led to the investigators' madness. There had been a handful that survived, and a couple of them became prophets.
'Hobgoblin? It's the plomek soup. Or is it plamek? Plaaamek! I don't care! You hear? I don't care how it's pronounced! Come on, take a sip!'
Spock wasn't going to win this one, and he'd known it when he melded with McCoy from the other world.
But - the other world!
They had an Enterprise, and a Kirk, and many other things that were painfully similar and yet completely different. That was the worst problem in telepathy, when you and the Other used concepts denoting, arbitrarily, the same things or the opposite things - you had to absorb the whole set of them and then analyze one by one.
All the while, keeping the views apart.
It was like those ancient legends of shared katras, only this time it happened in real life.
One, two, he thought at the McCoy in his head.
One is one, and two is two, McCoy thought back.
And three is three.
Yes, it is.
'He's muttering! He's coming out of it!'
'Stop. Don't call the Captain yet. Spock? Spock?..'
He didn't answer.
He stared, under closed eyelids, into a round, laughing face of a little girl from beyond Time and Space.
Her name, he knew, was Johanna.
Fandom: TOS
Author: serenusc (Be3)
Characters: Spock, McCoy - mirror!verse
Word count: around 700
Disclaimer: I don't own anything here
Warning: M'Benga has perished sometime before.
Summary: after a particularly exhausting mindmeld, Spock has to live or die. Episode-based. Un-betaed.
There was danger in intimacy, in willingness to open your Self to another. The closer the connection, the greater the risk.
And there was no closer connection than telepathy. Perhaps, Spock mused, possessing the Other's body could be equally hazardous; but it was really nothing more than controlling the mind.
' - care about his privacy, I'm the Doctor here, and -'
'Come in, Bones. He's not biting today.'
The active party (or parties) had to follow the thread of questioning and never, under any circumstances, deviate from it. To be able to retrace every logical step, however minute, because loss of control meant insanity.
This was why Pon-Farr was so terrible. When a Vulcan survived it, he or she had to come back to their senses, to meld with their own selves - that had changed.
'Slap him harder!'
'No, Jim. He's got to finish whatever he's doing.'
Some people, including Jim, believed that the act took a measure of some magical ability to connect to another neuronal network. It wasn't exactly true, but Spock didn't dispute it, because Jim had tried to learn telepathy and failed. It was better for him to think he lacked something in his 'software', as Dr. McCoy put it.
It was much better, actually. M'Benga had not stopped in time, but taken Spock's words of 'mental discipline' to heart. A human could not keep partitioning the in- and outflow of data into morsels and tracking them for any length of time, because human brains were too fast for that. M'Benga, for all his efforts, would see a flash out of Spock's eyes, and pay for them with days of recovery.
Vulcan brains weren't much better, but they could be trained.
'Put that down, crewman Chekhov, and I won't send you to the agonizer. Not right now, anyway.'
'Ah - Keptin? Of course you'd be here. Okay, okay... But I can't be navigator if I'm not an Ensign, right?'
'Got it in one, crewman. Now please go to the brig. Meditate. Bye.'
And then the dark-skinned man began experimenting with stimulators, and died on the first attempt. The three of them were there with him while he twitched in his restraints.
Spock remembered M'Benga glaring loathsomely at Jim, only a word away from ruining Jim's peace of mind, such as it was.
'Faustian... pride?' asked M'Benga, mouth contorted by a power he had no hopes of conquering.
'Faustian might,' he said then, and the man choked on a laugh.
'Come on, they're going to send me another XO! You can't defect, Mr. Spock!'
'He's still there. He's fighting. You're fighting, aren't you?'
Usually, only a small, easily containable amount of information was extracted. It didn't require a meditation, and one could turn to another task within a second or less. However, there were special cases, when one had to understand something, and they went beyond mere learning of facts.
The special cases became immortalized in history, almost always as failures that led to the investigators' madness. There had been a handful that survived, and a couple of them became prophets.
'Hobgoblin? It's the plomek soup. Or is it plamek? Plaaamek! I don't care! You hear? I don't care how it's pronounced! Come on, take a sip!'
Spock wasn't going to win this one, and he'd known it when he melded with McCoy from the other world.
But - the other world!
They had an Enterprise, and a Kirk, and many other things that were painfully similar and yet completely different. That was the worst problem in telepathy, when you and the Other used concepts denoting, arbitrarily, the same things or the opposite things - you had to absorb the whole set of them and then analyze one by one.
All the while, keeping the views apart.
It was like those ancient legends of shared katras, only this time it happened in real life.
One, two, he thought at the McCoy in his head.
One is one, and two is two, McCoy thought back.
And three is three.
Yes, it is.
'He's muttering! He's coming out of it!'
'Stop. Don't call the Captain yet. Spock? Spock?..'
He didn't answer.
He stared, under closed eyelids, into a round, laughing face of a little girl from beyond Time and Space.
Her name, he knew, was Johanna.