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Chapter Text

The One Who Is Fire

Part 1

The refugee camp was poor, barren; freezing enough to make human teeth chatter and turn Vulcan blood chilled and heavy. Leonard felt the cold seep through the uniform as he followed Kirk in the main, cramped tent, crawl in his veins like a rolling fog. That cold had nothing to do with the unforgiving weather of Qyshag Four, or the dead of a winter that would have wiped out humanity in a handful of decades. It had much more to do with the blond man walking in front of him, burning like a golden flame of outrage; with the tight set of Spock's shoulders at his side, and the knot of guilt tightening in his guts.

Here, here we are, he thought, barely able to breathe. Here we are, I did it. Congratulations Leonard. You did it.

As always.

"Jim..."

"Don't Jim me." Kirk threw his gloves on the makeshift metal table on their left, dusting with a powder of snow the heap of medical supplies and PADDs abandoned on it. The tone was sharp, bristle – crackling with the icy rage that had the Federation enemies learn to fear that blond Terran brat. Leonard had never heard that voice directed at him – never, never, never. "McCoy, you had any idea what kind of diplomatic mess you could have just put us in with your stunt?"

Leonard said nothing. He took off his goggles, looking down at his snow-caked boots, at the spot on his chest where all the pain seemed to be flowing and coagulating.

A sudden thud – the Captain's protective helmet slapping against the table, a sharp request. "I asked you a question, Doctor."

"Jim..." Leonard breathed. "I, I didn't mean... you know I know the stakes, I know how it works –"

"No Bones," Jim cut him off, "apparently no, you don't." He was swirling around, fists clenched, teeth bared, pale with cold and rage and something deeper that had Bones wanting to shrivel to a nothing and disappear in thin air. "We've bargained for six fucking months to obtain this meeting. You have any idea how secretive the Qyshag are? No Federation vessel has ever come this far. No Federation vessel has ever had this chance. Then you come in, and think you should stand up against injustice like a damn martyr, and can't shut the hell up –"

"They were... they were people Jim." Leonard curled fingers around his arms, feeling them shaking under his touch. He cleared his throat, but nothing but a cracked whisper came out. "Young... young people. Kids. And they were so scared. You saw their faces. I cannot let them... and when they, when they said what they were going to do..."

"And you really think I was gonna let two hundred teens get murdered like this?" Jim slammed his fist against the table, snow and metal and PADDs shuddering at the impact. Leonard flinched. Spock's face showed nothing, but the line of his back seemed to grow a bit straighter - ready to intervene. "Those are their rituals. Their traditions - they would show strength through a threat but never carry it out. The Kahashag wouldn't have permitted it. And instead..." Jim trailed off, breathing hard. He racked one hand through his hair, brushing the blooming bruises on his forehead. Bile rose in Bones' throat.

"Instead, you got into a fistfight. You got half the delegation in a fistfight. With the Kahashag 's First Nephew nonetheless."

Leonard kept his eyes off his friend, not daring to stare into his face – to behold the whole of his bruises and the whole of his rage. Biting down on his split lip, he found himself thinking that in different circumstances the whole thing would be simply incredible. Comical even. The pacifist doctor of the USS Enterprise, professionally annoying admirals and commanders with his pleas for mercy and humanity and nonviolence, slamming into the formidable general of a warrior world and taking a swing at their face – my God, Scotty would have laughed his ass off for ages. But there had been nothing to laugh about it. There had been nothing to laugh about the panic, and the screaming fear in those kids' eyes, the fierce anger in the punches taken and thrown, the grunts of his companions thrown against walls and brass tripods in the Kahashag's Tent. He had seen Spock putting himself between a spear and Chekov's delicate frame, the warrior who had pushed Kirk's face against the ground hard enough to risk concussion. And it had been his fault. It has all been his fault.

The realization had caught him so hard to suck the air out of his lungs. He had been so shaken he had barely felt the warrior's elbow crashing him against one of the pole tent.

Standing in front of his two best friends, Leonard dug fingers in his biceps, the shaking growing. He was so cold his bones felt like glass, ready to turn into dust - every breath harder and harder, as if air was failing him. He shuffled closer of a step to his best friend, met his eyes for the briefest moment.

Air seemed to trickle away faster.

"Jim..." He licked his lips. He realized he had forgotten what he was going to say. The spot at the center of his chest was burning, growing tighter. "Jim, I..."

"Yes, doctor?" His Captain sneered.

He forces himself not to flinch again. That tone was too harsh, too raw. He'd seen Jim calculate rage, show dramatic indignation to confuse enemies and annoy superiors, but that was not of that. That was the real thing. C'mon, Leonard. Show some balls.

"Jim... let me fix it," he finally got out with a gulp. "There are still people who need help here – injured people, refugees... the Kahashag may be gathering power, but civil war is still raging in some regions. We may not be able to intervene politically, but... these people, this camp..." Bones turned to the open flap of the tent, gesturing to the stark white mountains jutting upward behind the camp wall, the smokes and voices rising from the spread of huts around them. "... I can still help them."

There was more, but he didn't say it. I need to help them Jim. Let me do it, please, for the love of God, let me do it. Let me show myself I can still do something right.

Let me show you.

Leonard knew the exact moment Kirk's gaze slide to him. He felt it make his skin prickle, pushing against his ribs like a physical force, a mighty rumble of stars. He stayed under it scrutiny, and endured, and closed his eyes when his captain finally leant back and took a breath to speak.

No, not to speak.

To laugh.

Jim started to laugh, high and wild and colorless, and Leonard’s chest caved in like a man dying in open space.

"Help?" Jim clenched his jaw so suddenly they heard it clack. "We could have helped to end a war, Bones. We could have made sure there were no more refugees, no more casualties to take care of."

Leonard had nothing to say, and too much. He opened his mouth, closed it. "I, I couldn't –“ he rubbed one hand across his face. “I couldn’t let it…”

"I know," Jim said, a touch of softness in his voice. "Believe me, I know. I understand. But we... we could have done so much more than give some aspirins and help a hundred of people." He ran fingers through his hair, but this time the gesture was less sharp, less savage - more Jim. "We could have helped a whole world. We're not kids with big plans anymore Bones. We're officers- diplomats."

"I'm not a kid," Leonard breathed out.

"No Bones," Jim said, eyes lingering on him, taking note of the cuts on his face and his shivers and his faults, "no, you're not a kid."

Silence fell – heavy and unwelcome. The wicked winds of this land were taking strength – howling down gorges and sharp-edged clefts and carrying to them the smells of desperate people mourning their dead and patching up wounds. It was then Spock stepped forward – putting himself directly between Leonard and his captain, shielding him from his blue blue eyes. He must have shuffled closer during their conversation, one inch at each sentence.

Their shoulders brushed as he moved.

"Captain," Spock said, voice a quiet, soft thing, " if I may take the liberty, I think there can be a chance for success."

Kirk's head whipped to stare at him. "What do you mean, Spock?"

Spock took another step toward him, cocking his head to the side, clasping hands firmly behind his back. Kirk leant in to hear him better, face tired but full of alertness. It hurt to look at this - at their confidence. Leonard tore his gaze off them and would greatly like to slap himself in the face.

"The Kahashag seemed displeased with their Nephew's behavior," Spock said. "They sent the guards to settle the fight - but to prevent both parties from getting heavily injured, not to help their people. We know they have worked to reform Qyshag rituals even since conquering the throne, and that on the other hand their First Nephew has never hidden their displeasure with their relative's interest in the Federation." Spock paused for the time of a heartbeat, head turning sharply to the side. His gaze was a different touch from Jim's, but Bones recognized the weight of his attention as it flickered to him. " The Kahashag is a highly reasonable being, Jim - highly cunning, highly perceptive. I have reasons to presume that if we could organize a private meeting with the Kahashag, we could still achieve an alliance. I think if we expose facts in the clearest, most sincere way, Doctor McCoy's... slip in protocol would not prevent the success of our mission."

Leonard didn't think any of them missed the slight pause in Spock's words – lightning-fast like a computer-code error, made and corrected. Somehow, it made breathing a bit more bearable. Jim too tilted his head – crossing his arms, propping one hip against the table. "You think we still stand a chance?"

"Affirmative.” Things must be real bad if Spock wasn't even pretending not to know the expression.

Jim clasped his lips. It took him exactly three beats of Leonard's agitated heart to decide – to trust him "Okay Spock," he simply said. "Okay, I get it. How likely is this thing to end with my and/or our heads on a spear outside the Kahashag's tent?"

"Less than thirty percent, Captain."

Jim sighed. "We've done with worse." He pushed himself off the desk, but despite the spots of discolored skin on his forehead and the flushed-from-cold tip of his nose it was obvious he was feeling better. He clasped hands against his waist, and Leonard knew he was seeing plans and statistics, loopholes and tactics - the careful dance he was once again called to play to take all of them home.

"All right," he said, "I suppose we can give it a try. Spock, we're taking Scotty and Roberts with us - definitively need an anthropologist for this thing. Make sure we bring some security, too. I have no intention of witnessing other incidents or getting my brains scrambled some more. " Kirk faltered, face turning slowly to the far end of the tent where he was still standing. Leonard repressed a whimper. He counted the seconds of hesitation, each echoing like a gong in his stomach. One. Two. Three...

Kirk cleared his throat. "Meanwhile, Bones, you.... you stay here. Set up an emergency point, see what you can do. You can ask Christine to come, and to send more stuff, if the storm loosen a bit."

Leonard nodded, dazedly. Of course, of course. He couldn't expect anything different - the solution was obvious. Leonard too had known it, but some masochistic part of him had still needed to hear it spelled out. He felt his throat close, his heart giving a single, painful thump , and he clawed at every scratch of strength he could find in himself to summon an answer: "Yes, sir. I will, I will do my best."

The crack in his voice was unmistakable, and in fact even Kirk seemed to flinch - to feel awkward. Embarrassed. Leonard's mind filled with the memories of all their missions together – clear and sharp like the ancient surgery tools he's seen in museums – all the times Jim, who was totally Jim and not one ounce of Captain Kirk had had to physically drag him away from his study, arguing all the way to the transportation room, grinning over his shoulder as Leonard raged and cursed and followed. Back then, Jim had begged him to come - now, he was trying his hardest not to have to order him not to.

I'll always follow, Jim, Leonard would like to say now, I'll always follow you, to Hell and return. You know this?

Kirk was squirming on the spot. He took a breath, and stepped forward, and God forbid he was going to say something else, to crack his heart a bit more–

"Jim," Spock said suddenly, "I would rather stay here with the Doctor."

Jim stopped. Scrunched his eyebrows. "Here?"

"Yes," Spock nodded, nodding to the camp outside. "We know the weather of this planet, and how especially in its Northern hemisphere the storms are wildly unpredictable. A storm may hit with little to no warnings, and we've established communications ground-space wouldn't work in such conditions. If the doctor gets cut off emergency supplies from the ship and finds himself in a medical emergency, he could use the assistance of a generally trained scientist such as myself."

Spock's tone was smooth, unreadable - so unreadable, actually, to turn slightly suspect. Leonard was tired, his own bruises splattering arms and cheeks and pulsing under his skin, and he was once again having troubles breathing through the dead cold knot sitting under his ribs, so he was in no mood to inspect the subtleties of Vulcan vocabulary, but…

But he said he would stay. Bypassing the occasion for surely invaluable cultural investigations.

And called himself a generally trained scientist, Leonard mused in a vaguely detached way. No way he really said that. Must've misheard it. I'm probably losing it.

Jim looked taken aback, and not particularly pleased. "Spock..."

"You don't specifically need me on this mission," the First Officer replied. "The Qyshag are a warrior people – they value strength, intuition, charisma. The only competence actually vital to this is yours."

Jim didn't answer right away. He paced across the tent, the heavy thump-thump-thump of his reinforced boots mingling with the faint cry of the wind, till he swirled on his feet and stared at Spock. There again that silent discussion of theirs, the questioning - the immediate trust. The grip on Leonard's lungs grew so hard he had to fumble for the metal table’s edge to keep upright.

Another sigh. "All right," he heard Kirk say, "then I'll leave you both here, and take the diplomatic team with me. We'll use the beam to get to the Kahashag and I hope it won't take too long, but in any case, I'm leaving a couple of red shirts with you. Keep the communicators close. And let’s hope the weather holds."

"Acknowledged, Captain." Some of the tension in Spock's shoulders seemed to seep out - his long fingers pressed less fiercely in each other on his back, his face less pale, less pinched. Leonard hadn't realized how on edge Spock had looked till he saw his body uncoil in that minimal way of his.Does it make him uneasy? he found himself thinking. Does me and Jim arguing make him - nervous? The thought was lost before it could sink, especially because Jim was still talking.

"Then we should leave right now," he was saying, crossing the tent to retrieve goggles and gloves, "Before getting to work, Spock, take care of those bruises. I know Vulcans are tougher and all, but you've still gotten slammed into a wall by a seven-feet tall hulk three times stronger than the average human." One glove on, whisper of fabric. "You too, Bones."

Leonard jumped hard - nearly lost his footing. The world had grown hazy and bright around the edges. "M-me?"

"Yes, you," Kirk said, one step from sharp, "I've seen the Second-in-Command of the First Nephew throw you to the other side of the tent like a freakin' dodgeball. And your face shows it."

Leonard's hand automatically ran to purple ridges spreading across his temple.

"You - you should let me check you too Jim," he sputtered. "Just, just a second..."

"No Doctor," Jim interrupted him, "There's no time. There are people needing assistance, and I want you to be able to do it. But let me do my job."

My job. The word got stuck in Leonard's throat, hard to swallow. Not our mission, not our anything... my job.

It took effort to lift his head. It took effort not to shake – not to beg. He had begged with Jocelyn, cried - and it hadn't helped. It hadn't helped a damn bit. "So, you – you need anything else?"

Kirk's gloves cracked on his knuckles. "No, Bones," he said, "I'm good."

Bones swallowed – coughed again. There was white noise in his ears, shivers down his spine. "Then I. I should go checking the hypos."

It had all come out more jumbled and rushed than he would like, but he didn't give either Spock or Jim time to react or comment. He swirled on his feet, fumbling with the straps of his jacket, and rushed to the flaps leading outside. Five steps Leonard. Five steps, three, and then you're out, and then you can crumble.

He came to the fifth step before giving in to the temptation. He turned slowly, the swirling winds of the mountains already burning his cheeks, and finally met Jim's eyes - let them vivisect him, once again. "Good luck, Jim," he whispered.

Then he was out.

***

Jim found himself beaming on the outskirt of the Camp, and was already feeling the migraine pushing tendrils between his eyes.

He rapidly scanned his surroundings. He had half-expected one of elongated, extremely-sharp sword of the Qyshag pressed against his throat - but apparently, he was to be pleasantly surprised in that regard. The ruddy tents of the Kahashag’s army stretched to the horizon, their scale-covered hounds resting by their glinting banners, people milling around and arguing and joking and dragging each other in the shadowy crevice of a private alcove. Living. Regularly.

No legion waiting to rip off their limbs, no roaring warrior cry or forks thrown at the outsiders – a youngster even ran into Roberts’ leg, welcomed his steadying touch on their arm, and scampered off with a giggle. It was way better than he expected. Predictably, the guilt gnawed at his guts in a heartbeat.

Maybe I shouldn’t have treated him like that.

James Kirk had had to deal with guilt all his life: you don’t run from something so hard if you aren’t scared of it. This time, though, he almost welcomed it - the chest-clenching feeling, the bile rising in his throat, the clear, extra-sharp screenshot of Bones as he’d last seen him, glazed-eyed and ashen-faced. Kirk was one of the few people who had seen Leonard McCoy cry. He knew the signs.

And I did it , Kirk mused, sighing. Fuck, I nearly made Bones cry. Bones. He could count on the fingers on one hand - hell, on three fingers - the things he was sure about life and love and truth, and Bones figured prominently in at least two of them.

Being angry at him didn’t feel right. Being a simple captain with him didn’t feel right.

And the worst thing, Kirk thought miserably, as finally a band of armed soldiers emerged from the camp to trudge up the wind-whipped slope they had appeared onto, was that Spock reprimanded him too. Well, it had not been a real reprimand, of course. There might not have been curses or frantic hand-wavering rants or Southernly-vibrant dammit, jims sprinkling words like powdered sugar, but in its own way the message had been clear. Unmistakable.

Don’t give me that look, Spock. You know I’m right.

The Doctor acted by his own moral code, Captain, Spock had replied as he waited for Kirk to finish preparing himself and go collecting his team. As he always does.

Kirk had turned to look at him, still struggling with one of his boot’s clasps. You told me multiple times that personal beliefs should be reined in by logic, he had told him, throat suddenly closed. You told me diplomacy could become a wicked thing if not controlled by reason.

But that’s my way, Jim , Spock had said, face as solemn and old and wise as Sarek’s. This is our way. Not the Doctor’s. And there is value in this…. difference. There has always been.

We’ll patch this up when we get back, Kirk decided, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as he tried to evaluate the contingent’s size and slap his best Cocky Captain Grin on his face at the same time. We’ll patch this up when I get over this. We’ll work it out, for sure. He would just like a bit more time to mope on the whole thing. He would just snatch one, two more hours to be angry about it. Because Bones had messed up, and Kirk had been angry, rightfully so - and tired, so damn tired. Years of wandering around the Americas and rascal life had not prepared him one bit for the pressure and the adrenaline-pumping dances of diplomatic missions, nor for the crushing feeling of alien eyes pointed on him and waiting for a word that could seal peace or unleash war. He had never been so consistently, continuously terrified as in the months since he took over the Enterprise command. On top of that, Jim had discovered with a mix of joy and dismay that he actually liked the people he was in charge of, and cared for them, and was proud of them, and all that love and pride and care thudded behind his breastbone like a second heart every time he was debating the signing of an alliance or choosing the members for the exploration team. He could feel it even now, as he glimpsed Giotto’s men’ hands subtly inching closer to the phaser, as he noted how young Roberts’ face looked in this light. And earlier that day, when Bones punched the First Nephew and he thought everything was going to Hell – that his people were in danger…

God, he could almost see Pike smirking knowingly at him, the bastard.

Bones surely got this - he did, had told him for months to slow down. So, he’d understand why he acted like a dick – he’d forgive. James Tiberius Kirk gave himself another half-second to linger on the idea, and tremble at the possibility his best friend wouldn’t – then the Qyshag soldiers were there, and it was time to act, and Jim silently slipped under Captain Kirk’s skin.

“Chief Pardan,” he greeted, “I didn’t expect a general to come collect us. I’m honored.”

Chief Pardan was a huge Qyshag, and seemed the living embodiment of the warrior values Spock had told him were valued the most in their culture. They were, also, one of those precious, formidable individuals whose brand of beauty seemed to defy any cultural bond and physical expectation. Kirk watched as their full, nicely-shaped lips pressed thin, as their silvery eyes scanned him – azure skin pale with tension. They were fit, and clever, and had taken an immediate dislike in Kirk’s half-staged bravado, all perfectly good reasons that made them even more attractive. If they weren’t the Kahashag’s recognized lover, Kirk had thought upon meeting them, maybe things could have also turned even more interesting.

This had been before, though. Now neither part was in any shape for flirting. “Follow me, Captain,” Pardan commanded, in a softer tone that somehow resulted more ominous than any previous growl. “The Kahashag is waiting for you. We must not waste time.”

Kirk groaned. That didn’t sound good - not one bit. He nodded, and waited till both his and Pardan’s group started down the slope to rub his hand against the blasted point between his eyes. He hoped his brains would at least wait the end of the day to leak out of his ears.

They marched swiftly through the camp-city, Pardan’s banner-bearers drawing a neat path in front of them. Hushed whispers followed them, people peering from behind the tents’ flaps, elbowing each other as they passed. Kirk felt hundreds of eyes burning his back, some with hatred, some with excitement, some – luckily the most part – with the easy, voracious curiosity of that clever people. They trudged forward, and young Roberts’s face looked even younger in awe, and the Kahashag’s tent suddenly appeared in front of them.

It was the second time in the day they came to see it, but even Kirk felt himself tense with a twinge of marvel. Sheer, boy-in-front-of-dinosaurs marvel.

The leader of the Qyshag did not have a mammoth tent, or a stone palace so high you can barely see the sky peering from between its spires (Kirk had seen those on some worlds, and admired them, and secretly judged them tacky): no, that wasn’t the Kahashag’s style.

The tent was average size, with the dragon-shaped silver banners and the resting pack of scaled beasts of every other Qyshag tent, but it was bright azure in color. For the Qyshag blue was the color of might, of gods, of the rare scrap of serene sky peering through the clouds in their ever-lasting snowstorms: it was the color of spring and hope, and therefore no one but their leader was allowed to use it. You’d think a giant baby blue tent, especially if crafted in the surprisingly gauzy fabric the warrior people favored, wouldn’t be too impressive: but Kirk had traveled far enough and deep enough in space to know better. Spock’s green blood splattering the fluffy blue flaps of the Kahashag’s tent would forever stay with him as one of the most terrifying thing he had ever seen.

Pardan led them down to the entrance, and flapped aside the fringe-rimmed curtains. Inside, Jim’s nostrils burnt with scents – the sulfurous smell of the burning tripods, the strange mint-like aroma of the Ka’rt brewing in the large kettle hovering on the hearth in the middle of the tent. Contrasting with the spartan, wooden furniture, holo-screens buzzed with figures and maps in an alcove on the left.

Pardan and his people plastered against the tent wall. Taking off his goggles, Kirk knelt, smirk gone.

“Kahashag,” he said, “Leader of the Hunt, Child of the Sky, I have come here to ask for your forgiveness.”

The figure standing in front of the screens turned to him, slowly. In the flickering light Kirk glimpsed elongated, pupil-less eyes, feather-like hair – the blue embroidery spiraling up the sleeves of their tunic. In the Qyshag mono-sex world differences in build and features came entirely from genetics and environmental conditions: the Kahashag was built for speed, with an angular, charming face. The lightening-shaped scar spreading across their face – gnawing on the poor remnants of their right eye – gleamed softly as they moved. It was said that blow had nearly crashed their skull, and brought them to the edge of death.

The head of the Qyshag who struck the blow was still stuck on a spear outside the tent, mummified and frozen in an eternal scream.

“Captain,” they said. They were smiling, but there was something pinched about their face. “I wondered how long would it take you to come back and try to woo back my favor.”

“I would never try to do such a thing as wooing you, Kahashag,” Kirk said, and meant it. He took a deep breath. “But I do presume we are both aware of the immense advantages that would come from making an alliance between our people, and how letting a single accident compromise – “

“Do not presume to know what I’m aware of ever again, Gar-yu,” The Kahashag snarled, using the word Qyshag used only with toddlers and particularly dull beasts. “Your people attacked my guards, my Heir , during an encounter where we had been assured no harm would come to either part. Blood was spilled, Captain.” Their eyes flashed. “I find especially unbecoming that it was one of your blue-clad one who started the fight. Those who wear Blue should treat their honor with more respect.”

Kirk bit down on his lip, hard enough to feel a flash of pain. The words struck, hard, mixing with guilt, mixing with rage. A snarky remark rolled on his tongue, ready to tumble out.

His lip was nearly bleeding. “My man is a healer, Kahashag,” he said, wanting desperately for Spock to be here and do this in that brazenly irreproachable way of his, “upon witnessing your ritual, he was… perturbed. He acted without thinking. He acted by his principles. He will be honored to come here and give his apologies personally, if necessary.” Jim’s mind jumped to the image of Bones’ pain-stricken face, his sad, sad eyes as he wished him good luck, and his heart gave a twist. “I… I know he’s already regretting his actions.”

“Mh, a fat lot of good would it do me now, wouldn’t it?” The Kahashag started pacing, hands clasped firmly behind their back. Their voice had turned into something freezing and mortal, and Kirk felt Roberts quietly jump out of his skin next to him. “The damage is done. My people knew the outsiders attacked our soldiers – the Gods know how chatty they all are – and they know they had hit no less than the next Ruler in the line of succession.” They stopped in front of Kirk. He stubbornly kept his eyes on their fur-lined boots. “In other times, I would have had the right to slaughter you all and throw your skin to my hounds.”

They paused. Jim swallowed. He heard his heart hammering, and knew the Kahashag could hear it too.

“…But, this is not other times,” they finally said. Jim’s head jolted upward so fast it left him dizzy. “This is a new time, and I’m not my ancestors. And most importantly, my Heir is a perfect idiot.”

Jim felt hopeful and dumb at the same time. “Uh then – uh – then you won’t, uh, slaughter us?” he managed to get out.

“No,” the Kahashag said, turning on their heels and walking to the large, azure-clad cushion resting by the kettle. They plopped down on it, snapping their fingers, and an attendant rushed out of the shadows to serve the Ka’rt in its slender glasses. “My people will still expect me to, and I hate to disappoint their expectations. But my people are also a bunch of too-independent, bloodily prideful beings, much like your Terran. The Offering ritual has deep meaning, but I don’t think it should really imply a dozen of scared kids anymore. “The Kahashag smirked, gesturing to the ring of cushions near theirs and at the waiting glasses. “Moreover, I do like your potty-mouthed Healer. Pretty thing, that one.”

Standing slowly – hoping passionately his hands wouldn’t shake too much in the aftermath of adrenaline – Kirk took his place on the cushion opposite from the Kahashag’s and motioned his team to do the same. The Ka’rt glass the attendant pushed in his hands was unbearably hot – but the purple liquid within had the slightly-salty, honeyed taste he had already appreciated. “I… I may hope in f, then?”

The Kahashag made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “Yes. I’d ask for your delegation to come here, kneel and ask for mercy – I’ll scream a bit, curse a bit, and meanwhile I will talk to my generals. They’re clever, when not blinded by ambition – they’ll see the wisdom in our alliance, and my people too, in time. I may also request a couple of your people to stay here for a while, as a token of good will. They will be treated most appropriately, I assure you. I would suggest a couple of scientists, if possible – they would be free to roam my country as they like.”

The Kahashag’s eyes flickered with a different kind of light, and Kirk’s shoulders lost another two degrees of tension. He knew that light, seeing it in the mirror at an almost daily basis. Despite the prohibitive condition of their planet the Qyshag’s technology was complex and advanced, but the Civil War that was only now coming to an end had left the country scattered with refugees’ camps and torn from inside. Help and supplies would surely speed their recovery – and satisfy their natural curiosity too.

Kirk was feeling literally hollowed by relief.We can make it out of this, he thought somewhat drunkenly, we can actually, truly walk out of this in one piece. Even his crippling headache was receding, reduced to a dull thudding somewhere in his skull. He realized he had not really believed it till this moment. He had declared it, assured his companions while patting shoulders and giving encouraging grins, but never really believed they would make it. It scared him, how often a leader had to lie for the sake of his people – and how easy it had already become to him.

I need to tell Spock, he mused , I need to tell Bones. I need to apologize – to hug him. And then all will be well – all will be right.

Still.

Still, there was something off in the Kahashag’s words. Kirk inspected their gaunt, intelligent face, the slight creases around their eyes.

He shuffled on the cushions. It was as if a cold hand had gripped his guts, running up his spine – a caress of foreboding. “…There’s a but, right?”

The Kahashag downed the last of their Ka’rt, pressing their lips in a tight line. “There is indeed,” they said. “You won’t have to guard yourself from my guards, or from my generals – but I cannot guarantee the same for my nephew. Bar’leen is young, and brash – and they have never accepted the idea of submitting our leadership to a wider alliance. I have long thought they’re not the fit choice for succession either, although the custom says so, and they know it.” They leaned forward, staring into Kirk’s face. “If I was you, Captain, I’d keep as alert as possible as long as you stay on the surface of this planet.”

Kirk swayed, and the salty-sweet taste of Ka’rt started crawling back up his throat. The cold grip was tightening, spreading in his chest, curling around lungs – thrumming in time with blood and headache. Woosh, woosh, woosh. Danger, danger, danger. “Do you fear he’d try to challenge your title?” he heard himself say, as if from a great distance.

The Kahashag shook their head. “No – my nephew’s not stupid, they know they would not have enough support, and that the Northern countries are still with me. But he’d try to remark his position, to present themselves as the paladin of traditions and old ways. I fear they’d go after your Healer, to make an example out of him.”

Kirk stopped breathing. The pulse in his head, his body, everything dimmed, buzzing with the horrible, horrible white noise he connected with failing engines and falling down in flames and silence.

They’re coming. Coming for Bones. No, it didn’t make sense. It didn’t make any sense, and yet the cold grip was still there, and Kirk felt more terrified than he had ever felt in his life.

The Kahashag’s face got closer. “Have you put him somewhere safe, Captain?”

Kirk opened his mouth to talk, but the words wouldn’t come. Air wouldn’t come. All he could think of, all he could see was the barren, wind-whipped refugee camp, Bones and Spock busy with the injured – the ragged profile of the MURA circling it. Half-torn in battle and never rebuilt.

Have you put him somewhere safe, Captain?

“Oh God,” he whispered, chocked, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” A whining, pitiful sound echoed in the tent, and it took seconds to realize it was him. “ Bones.”

He didn’t need to say anything else for the Kahashag to understand. The leader of the Qyshag hissed, sharp teeth flashing in grimace, their eyes narrowing with a very human-like worry. Among the bewildered looks of both their people and Kirk’s, they rose to their feet, Pardan already moving to stand beside them. “I have not seen Bar’leen since yesterday evening,” they said to Kirk, “I don’t know where they are. How long ago did you leave your Healer?”

“H-half an hour, I think,” Kirk stuttered. He raked his hands through his hair hard enough to sink nails in the flesh, leaving hot trails of pain in their wake. “No – forty minutes, top. Or maybe… forty, forty-five.” I didn’t look at him. I didn’t wish him good luck. “I, I don’t know – “

“It’s not time to grieve yet, child,” the Kahashag’s voice cut through the white noise – firm and curt and soft. “Now I need you to concentrate. Your Comish needs you.”

Comish. It was the Qyshag word for friend, lover, companion – the-one-who-is-fire. In a world where flame means life in a night of cold death, there was no higher title, no deeper bound. He didn’t know how the Kahashag knew what Bones meant to him – he didn’t question it. Yes, he simply thought, yes, he is – Spock and Bones, they’re my Comish. Oh God, they are, they are.

Kirk looked up from his hands, still frozen around the glass of liquor, and swallowed. He swallowed everything, the fear the cold hold and the panic, and reached for the crystal-clear spot in his soul that made him a good captain, and found it.

“Okay,” he said, and his voice trembled, but held. “Okay. I’m going back right now. Can I leave my Anthropologist team here to conduct negotiations?”

The Kahashag’s face revealed nothing. He knew they were perfectly aware of the words he had not said. His experts were clever and brilliant, but untrained - if things got nasty, he didn’t want them in the line of fire. He couldn’t take that too.

“Of course,” they answered with a nod. Kirk sprang to his feet, the movement so sudden he felt it jolt all the way through his body, and his people parted for him – the Anthropologists with worry behind their clever, clever eyes, Giotto’s men checking phasers they didn’t bother to hide anymore. The air turned electric, crackling with poorly-bottled energy – with violence. Kirk sketched a bow and stalked to the flaps of the tent, feeling as if oxygen was escaping him more at every step. His body felt wrong – he was lightening, he was pure speed and rage, and yet he had never been so heavy. He slapped the communicator open to call the Enterprise. He turned to the Kahashag just before storming out. “I’ll try to, keep, the damage, to a minimum,” he breathed out, the pauses all wrong and jumbled on his tongue.

The Qyshag’s silvery eyes looked filled with mist. “You’ll do what you have to do, Captain,” they said. It was neither an order, neither a statement, but something in between.

“I’ll do,” he said, and then was out, communicator crackling in his hand, the order to Scotty already half-formed on his tongue –

James Kirk froze on the spot.

White. Pouring from the sky, swirling around him, covering everything as far as the eyes could see – white, and grey, and blue. The wind howled, louder and deeper than any wind Kirk had heard on his Earth, and the ground seemed to shake in response. The snow was everywhere, already seeping in the cracks of his parka, making his eyes sting despite the goggles resting once again against his nose. High above, the heavens were blazing with angry bolts.

A snow storm. A snow storm, large enough to swallow villages and caravans, powerful enough to cut communications from their ship – and to last hours. Days.

The communicator hissed pitifully in his hand, statics stretching on and on in the dark between them and their people. He couldn’t contact Scotty. He couldn’t make him beam them at the camp. Kirk screamed, and roared in rage, and shuddered hard enough to make his own heart stumble.

We’re stuck, he realized, we’re stuck. And they could be coming for Bones.

In that moment, the communicator beeped. Kirk stared at it, before punching in the answer code, breathing hard. “Kirk,” he croaked.

“Captain.” It was Spock’s voice. There were muffled sounds on his end – a rasping breath, a half-cry. Spock spoke again, hoarse, and urgent, and – and shaking. “You need to come back immediately. The Doctor has no more time.”

***

Leonard put back down the spent hypo, smiled at the kid and their now healed forehead, and felt Spock’s eyes slide off his back as soon as he turned enough to glimpse him on the edge of his vision.

Ridiculous , he thought, utterly ridiculous. He tried his hardest to muster some indignation, some flicker of annoyance, but the words sounded sloppy to his own ears. It made him surprisingly sad, not being able to get properly pissed off with Spock – as if he was disappointing expectations, as if the world was a little more off his axes. But he couldn’t do anything about it.

He was moving, he was talking, he was healing, but the truth was that Leonard had stopped functioning the moment James Kirk had stepped out of that camp.

He coughed, turning just in time to shield the kid with his hand. No need to add Terran germs to recovering injuries. Precise and pitiless, Spock’s head snapped again towards him, scanning his whole body with critical eyes. Leonard had spent the whole hour coughing: he knew there had to be something wrong. He would check on this, later. Later.

I would like for you to scan yourself more attentively, Doctor, Spock had whispered to him earlier on – gently cornering him against the makeshift medical supplies cabin and waiting for an answer and not commenting one word about the mad shaking which had rattled Leonard’s body since Jim left.

It’s not necessary Spo –

I’d recommend it nonetheless, the First Officer had replied. And then: please, Leonard.

That had been a low blow. The Leonard thing was a novelty they had carried with them since the day Spock had half-died on him, and it was raw and fragile, and they both cherished it way more than they would ever admit. Leonard had sighed, and given up, and said he would do it. But the fact was, Spock didn’t understand. How could he think about that in a moment like this? How could he think at all? If he stopped one moment, he’d not be able to start again. He knew it. He’d seen it – multiple times.

He had lost Jocelyn and Jojo and his job this way.

“Are you all right, Doctor?” Leonard felt a light tug on his sleeve. The little Qyshag’s solemn eyes were rivaling with Spock with the effort to carve holes through his shirt.

“Fine as ever, Karr,” he nodded, and watched the kid light up with pride when he realized Leonard remembered their name. “Now chop chop – off to your parents.”

Karr’s face beamed, one hundred percent kid despite the sharp fangs bared by his smile, and trotted off – brushing against Leonard’s legs as he ran back to the tents. He recalled how hard they had clutched to their parents when he had approached, ten minutes ago, blood and snow caking their tiny pointy face – so scared and hurting Leonard had heard his two hearts beat against his fingertips as he tried to determine the size of their wounds.

Thanks for the children, he said, to the sky and the space and whatever any creature in the universe could believe in, tiny formidable bastards.

He pushed himself off the ground, and swayed, hard. He felt nausea clutching his throat – suddenly there was no air, and the world dimmed and glittered around the edges, as it had done before in front of Jim. It was over so fast Leonard didn’t even have time to feel afraid. He tried to suck in air again, forcing his lungs to work, and chocked, and coughed, and he was breathing again.

He leant against the tent pole at his back – hands gripping the cold hard metal a bit more desperately than he would like to. His pulse felt strange, fluttery. Knowing very well the flash of blue and white twenty feet from him was Spock inspecting him once again, Leonard let his gaze sweep over the camp to throw off suspicion. He couldn’t deal with Spock right now – with his precise, inescapable questions, his perceptive eyes. He could especially not deal with the Spock of their Leonard moments.

Outside the camp, the winds had picked up. They had set a protective shield around the tents – keeping outside snow and dust and preventing the cold from growing unbearable, although he was concerned with Spock still shivering despite its two parkas – but the situation still felt disastrous. The air was filled with screams, soft sobbing, with the sounds he remembered from every war hospital he had visited. The Qyshag were a brave people, but those were civilians, scared and recovering. He had treated roughly a quarter of them and almost every life-threatening case, and Spock, bless his soul, had taken care of easier stuff he could either mend there or send up to the Enterprise. Still, there were so many, so many.

The thought of all the civilians and injured behind their little camp, and that he might be the reason they wouldn’t be able to help them hit him like a punch in the guts – filling his veins with ice and his head with noise. It took him off-guard, as every proper regret does.

Will Jim ever forgive me?, he wondered. The injured were moaning, the snow thickening and howling. Does it matter?

He could feel Jim’s deep blue eyes staring at him, wild and hurt. They had felt powerful enough to see through his skin, though his ribs, straight to the heart pounding underneath. Leonard pressed a hand against his chest, where the knot was still burning and spreading tendrils, and was nearly surprised in not finding a bleeding hole.

The voice sounded near, soft. The touch on his shoulder, even gentler. “Doctor?”

Leonard jerked as if he had been electrocuted. He saw Spock retreat slightly, the flash of hardness – of hurt – in his pleasantly unreadable face, but everything still felt so far and glazed, echoing in strange way. He blinked, hard.

“What – what is it, Spock?”

“Doctor, you’ve grown consistently paler in the last five point three seconds.” Dazedly, Leonard looked from Spock to the spot he last remembered seeing him, twenty-something feet on the right. Five point three secs. Must be the time it took him to get here.

“Just… tired,” he gasped. He pushed off the pole, forcing himself to stay upright – to straighten his spine. The ribs on his right side gave a white bolt of pain – all the way from his side across his chest. Leonard clawed at his breastbone, and coughed, louder.

Spock tilted his head to intercept his eyes, and Leonard realized he had bent over without realizing it. On his face was what he was pretty sure qualified as the Vulcan equivalent of a Human the Hell You Are.

“What was that?” Spock asked curtly.

“Ribs,” Leonard breathed out. “When the guy – threw me against the pole – must’ve bruised some. Broken… a couple.”

Spock said nothing for a long moment, but some terrifying transformation seemed to morph his face, making his cheekbones sharper, his eyes darker, his features more alien than he had ever seen them. He showed teeth in a grimace, brows scrunched hard. For a moment, another Spock, the wild lost soul of Vulcans, flashed across him like GIUSTAPPOSTI holograms.

He’s angry , some part of Leonard realized, connecting the points, finally noting how close Spock was standing, how he hunched down to put himself between Leonard and the rest of the camp. He’s really angry.

“Doctor McCoy,” Spock got out in a clipped, urgent tone, “you broke a conspicuous number of ribs and didn’t think it would be proper to share the information?”

“I’m a doctor, in case you haven’t noticed,” Leonard replied. He was waiting for his breathing to slow down, but it wasn’t happening. “I know the risks.”

“Broken or fractured ribs could puncture organs in a human biological system – lungs, heart. Even the slightest jolt could lead to extremely severe complications.”

Leonard scoffed, and nearly coughed again. “We’re not that breakable – “

“I disagree,” Spock said, in the tone that had sent his classes crying in the Academy bathrooms. “As a matter of fact, Humans are very breakable, as you put it. You have stated it yourself, on multiple occasions.”

Leonard closed his eyes for a long moment. Let Spock throw his fit, then. Let him be angry – all rageful and primal with his righteous indignation. He didn’t understand exactly what Spock was angry at, or who – and the suspect he could be angry at him stung, quite badly.

“Look, I’ll ask Chris to run a full scan as soon as we’re on the Enterprise, okay?” It felt like floating. Leonard focused on his breathing, in taking in enough air to talk. The dimness was back, and he was having a hard time thinking, and yet Spock wasn’t relenting. He saw him clasp his lips, still so close.

“It is not enough, Leonard,” he whispered, and Leonard wanted to punch him for the softness that hobgoblin bastard was capable of. “It is essential that you run a scan now. You’re barely able to stand, your shaking is growing more severe, and you’re increasingly confused. You should sit and analyze your conditions before they could develop into – “

Leonard jumped back. Curled fingers into fists. “ For the love of God, Spock,” Leonard snapped, voice shaking, “I can’t sit down – I need to work. I need to fix this – I need to fix this.”

“Overexerting yourself would lead to no advantage – “

“I don’t care about advantages,” Leonard screamed, talking through gritted teeth. “I disappointed him Spock. I disappointed – Jim.” The last word got out like a sob, and it unraveled everything. Time seemed to go fast-forward – moving thousands of times too fast. He thought of Jim, of Jocelyn, of Jojo, and the knot in the middle of his chest grew so impossibly large it felt as if his ribs were being crushed down by a giant hand. Suddenly his pulse was thrumming in his temples, in his throat, drowning sounds and voices. A coughing fit throbbed through him, and Leonard coughed it out in his hand, angrily. “I disappointed Jim, Spock. I can’t… stop.”

Silence. When he met his gaze, Leonard actually hoped that Spock had finally, finally understood what he was saying. His friend’s face had grown paler in a way that had nothing to do with cold. His eyes went wide, lips parted. But he was not looking at Leonard. He was looking at Leonard’s mouth, and he moved closer – delicate fingertips pressing against his arm.

“Leonard,” Spock said, “your lips are blue.”

Leonard blinked, bringing one hand against his lips – finding them cold. And in that moment, he finally, finally understood the expression on Spock’s face. It was the expression he had seen after Vulcano, every time Jim or Nyota left for a mission with more than a manageable twenty-percent of risk – the face he wore while waiting in the Captain’s chair, muscles coiled and lines tight enough to keep everything from spilling out.Worry, Leonard thought distantly, I’m scaring him. I’m scaring Spock.

Something seemed to explode in his chest, and his lungs simply stopped. Leonard gasped. His heart gave a painful, desperate thud. The world swirled, dimmer and fading.

“Doctor McCoy.”

Spock was saying something, talking, but he couldn’t hear him. The roar in his ears was too loud. He staggered back, clutching at his collar – but it was too late, too late.

“Doctor McCoy.”

“Spock,” Leonard croaked, faintly, to tell him that everything would work out or that he was scared, he didn’t know. Then there were just his knees buckling under him, a whoosh of air – strong arms around his shoulders, pain, a voice calling his name, again and again.

Dark.

Chapter Text

The moment the doctor collapsed in his arms, eyes rolling back in his head and legs turning to wet rags under him, Spock thought of his mother.

It was so raw and so instinctive it nearly knocked the breath out of him: so utterly human, he would have felt blood rush to his cheeks in shame if his father was to witness it. But Sarek was half a galaxy away, and here were just him and his captain and his Doctor, and he remembered Amanda as he had lastly seen her – with her maddeningly old-fashioned watering cain rolling on the ground, reaching out for him as their world cried and collapsed around them. Along with the image, Spock felt the thought jolt through him – ringing hard enough to make his teeth shake in their sockets with the impact.

No – not him too. It was a roar, a prayer, a command. Not him too.

Then the world sucked him back in, and time was tickling by again, and Spock found himself reaching out and catching Doctor McCoy, his colleague and his rival, one of the few scientific minds that could actually rival his own, the most unnerving riddle of cultural incompatibility he had ever met. Spock heard someone calling the doctor’s name, with a strange, tensed voice which sounded like glass about to crack. He belatedly realized it was him – three point six seconds too late.

Three point six seconds he had not employed to assist him.

“Doctor McCoy,” he called again, consciously this time, “Doctor McCoy, please talk to me. Talk to me.”

But the doctor was unconscious. it was obvious even to his relatively untrained eye. His head lolled, awkwardly propped against Spock’s shoulder – and letting his keen eyes sweep over his face, the First Officer noted with precise dedication the dark shadows under his eyes, the unnatural pallor of his skin – the beads of cold sweat blossoming on his temples. The symptoms rattled him more profoundly than they should. Despite his blood and its side effects, though, Spock was a Vulcan – trained as a Vulcan – and so he acknowledged the fear, and grabbed it, and pushed it at the bottom of the sea of calm clarity they both needed in this moment. Spock adjusted his grab on the Doctor, calmed his own heartbeat, and he was ready.

McCoy’s breathing felt erratic against the bare skin of his neck: too shallow for his race, gurgling with a rasping quality that made Spock think of air blowing down a rusted vent. He glimpsed McCoy’s hand – fingers turning bluish around the edges – still resting on the collar he was trying to loosen, and understood. He ripped the clasps of McCoy’s parka open. The Doctor took a deeper breath, still gurgling, less shallow. Spock slipped fingers under his collar, pressing them against McCoy’s neck. The Doctor’s pulse pumped against his sensitive fingertips, fluttering and wildly irregular. Spock thought of the previous minutes, of the way the Doctor had kept coughing, how he had grabbed at his chest while he was persisting with his inquiries.

He had done wrong. He had missed the signs. Spock cast a rapid glance at the Doctor’s lips, pale as a corpse’s, and knew he would spend long hours going over the three point sixty minutes he had failed to see the signs.

Not him.

Voice reached them. Something tugged at Spock’s shoulder – and he caught himself just in time not to stiffen and lash out against possible danger, shoulders already curled protectively around the Doctor’s limp form. A petite Qyshag child was standing beside him, wide eyed and solemn, their pointy face trained on McCoy like iron powder attracted by a magnet. Spock’s mind distantly recognized them as the last patient McCoy had treated before their conversation.

“What’s happening to Healer Leonard?” they asked. There was a shaking quality to their voice.

Spock knew other cultures prefer to shield their younglings from death and pain; he did not know what the Qyshag costume was on the matter. But he remembered being a solemn, curious child himself, so he turned to them, fingers still monitoring the Doctor’s struggling pulse, and simply told the truth. “He is not well,” he said, “He could have gotten more hurt than we had previously thought.”

“Do you know what it’s wrong with him?”

“No,” Spock said sincerely. Resting the Doctor’s head against his chest, he slipped his arms under him – left arm under his shoulders, right under his knees – and stood in one fluid motion that made him distantly grateful for his Vulcan stamina. A ghost of a thought – wondering what the Doctor himself would say at being swept off his feet like the heroine of one of those early twentieth-century cinematographic representations the Captain seemed to favor. He didn’t let himself dwell on it. Acknowledge, push down, move on. “But I will know.”

As he lifted him the Doctor didn’t move; he didn’t even stir, and his head bobbed weakly against Spock’s uniform – arms dangling at his sides, very still and very pale.

The child didn’t say anything. They just moved closer, and brushed their hand against McCoy’s fingers, almost hesitantly. “Yes,” they said, “cure him. Please.”

Spock didn’t promise anything. But he nodded, taking account of their words and their small, worried face, and turned on his heel, and started for the main tent as fast as he could without rattling the doctor too much. He speeded through mud and patches of ice, makeshifts bonfires and clutters of personal belongings piled beside tents, and eyes, dozens of acute silvery eyes following him and his burden – too clever to step in his path or slow him down with questions. He pushed the tent’s flaps open with his shoulder, and ran to the large metal table he and the Captain had talked by only that morning, and laid the doctor down on it. Spock tapped the light they had clasped to the main pole of the tent, directly over the table: it crept to life under his hand. In the stark, white glow the doctor’s body looked even paler, somewhat smaller. His breathing was growing shallower again – the rasping sound suggesting lungs struggling, blood and fluids mixing with oxygen where they shouldn’t.

For a tenth of second, Spock curled his hands around the edge of the table. He summoned everything he had ever read on human physiology, all the texts he had studied thanks to the Doctor and his own curiosity – spreading them in his mind like on a holoscreen, listing symptoms, checking options.Pulmonary system, then, Spock’s mind diligently supplied, cardiac too? – unknown. To determinate. He ruled out any previous illness – the last all-crew physical had confirmed the Doctor’s excellent health, as puzzling as it could be with his excessive predilection for caffeine and Vega-Seven pastries.

Most logical conclusion - trauma. Spock recalled their fight in the Kahashag’s tent, the details sketched in silver lines against his mental holoscreen, and he saw it. The Doctor, knuckles bruised from his own blow and eyes widened in realization, and the First Nephew, grabbing him by the shoulders and throwing him across the floor. Against one of the tent poles.

The Doctor had hit it with his left side.

It all took him less than seven seconds – yet it was with a blood-pulsing hastiness that Spock reached out for the Doctor’s parka and threw it open, and proceeded to do the same with the layers underneath – uniform and thermic shirt and black undershirt – till he exposed the skin of his chest under the harsh light of the table.

When he looked at it, Spock felt something approximating a vertigo.

The Doctor’s – Leonard’s – flesh was matted with bruises: large, spreading bruises, deepening with the dark purple of rupturing blood vessels. They drew a web up and down his ribs, tendrils of red and violet, a parody of watercolors. Disappearing around his sides. Insisting over his heart.

Spock fumbled for his tricorder – holding it tight enough to feel tiny cracks breaking the plastic under his grasp. He ran it over Doctor McCoy’s body. The results tweeted back, flashing with red lights.

If it wasn’t against any logical and physical law Spock had devoted a good portion of his youth to, he would say the earth had positively shifted under his feet – tilting at an unnatural angle that made the cold slightly less bearable.

His hand pulled his Communicator out of his pocket before he realized it. He punched in the Enterprise coordinates, and as he waited for the connection buzz to fade away and Mister Scott’s voice to respond he was already moving towards the medical supplies heaped on their cots. “This is First Officer Spock,” he spelled in the receiver. He found the doctor’s medikit, unclasped it. Oxygen – he needed oxygen. “I require an emergency transportation for severe medical conditions – and a medical team at the ready. Immediately.”

He waited for an answer, for Mister Scott’s acknowledgement of the order – for one of his Scottish convoluted expressions of dismay, too. Nothing came. The contact buzz was still sizzling through the communicator, stretching on and on in the dead void. It didn’t take Spock any longer to understand, but he tried again, because the scientific method required evidence that could not be argued with.

“Mister Scott…?” he asked, pumping the words with the last, quivering flicker of hope he possessed. His fingers found the oxygen mask in the Doctor’s medikit – clasped it tightly. “Mister Scott, answer me.”

Nothing. In a starting coincidence of events, a low, raucous thunder echoed high above their heads, in the skies past the tent’s pole and the light and the protective shield set around the camp. The shield. It must have prevented them from noting that the wind was rising again. It must have prevented them from knowing a storm was coming.

Spock closed the communicator. He knew, with utter clarity, that no help would come in time.

He then knew that the doctor was dying, and he was the only one who could prevent it.

Another thunder – a rumble of charged clouds and snow rolling down from the mountain peaks. From the table, the Doctor coughed, one, two times. Spock grabbed the oxygen mask and was back at his side, slipping it precisely over McCoy’s head and clasping it on his gaping mouth. A pressure on the right code and the little generator buzzed to life, pumping oxygen through its tube. It didn’t seem to work, though. The doctor was still shaking, eyelids fluttering, arching against the table like a startled animal. His heartrate was beating so fast Spock could see it feather through his neck’s skin. Given how irregular it had been, Spock had to slow it down, or it could well lead to cardiac arrest. Seizure. Conditions past his medical expertise.

Again, his mother came to him. Half-memories surfaced among his precise diagrams and scenarios – mundane child sickness, phlegm clustering his chest and his throat, a calloused hand brushing his forehead as Amanda whispered soft in his ears. Physical contact.

Spock adjusted the flow on the screen of the oxygen generator, leaned in, and started to thread his fingers through the Doctor’s hair. The touch was hesitant, uncomfortable. Each brush left him with beads of McCoy’s sweat on his skin, the echo of his pulse. An impression of his mind seeped inevitably through the contact, colors, thoughts, jumbled fear. Spock clasped his lips tighter, and kept running his hand through the doctor’s hair, and found himself talking.

“Breathe, Doctor,” he said, as if they were in their laboratory on the Enterprise, sharing a spartan meal in the quiet hours when the ship was sleeping and they somehow worked at their best. “You’re being given oxygen. It will become easier – but you must keep calm. I’m here. You must keep calm. Breathe. Breathe.”

Spock had never comforted anyone: that was the Doctor’s field, not his, not even the Captain’s. Still, slowly oh so slowly, he realized his words were actually helping. The doctor’s exposed chest was still rising and falling alarmingly fast, but his pulse didn’t show any more through the skin – didn’t thud as hard as before against Spock’s touch. He kept brushing his hair, and droning on and on with that simple, quiet command – breathe – and the Doctor somehow kept breathing, till he stopped trashing on the table and his face didn’t seem as pained as before. Breathe. Breathe.

Spock looked at his companion, still so pale he could count the veins in his throat, but alive, and felt drained in a way that didn’t depend in the least from physical exhaustion.

The communicator still rested in his parka pocket, where he had shoved it after closing the call with the Enterprise. He flipped it open, searching for the right frequency – his own blood pulsing rhythmically in his temples. The communicator hissed, rustled with statics.

“Kirk,” the Captain said.

“Captain.” Spock searched for words. He breathed deeply. “You need to come back immediately. The Doctor has no more time.”

The captain’s silence on the other side was brief, and deafening. Spock knew him well enough he could picture him as if Kirk was standing there in the tent in front of him – his eyes widening, fingers curled, lips white with distress. He heard him curse softly, the echoes of his feet – stomping through snow and hard earth and gaining speed. “Keep him alive, Spock,” the captain panted, voice rough, “whatever it is, keep him alive. Protect him. They’re coming.”

Alarm ran down Spock’s spine. “Who’s coming?”

“Protect him,” Kirk said again, “Spock, they will – “

A thunder rumbled above them, air vibrating with its electricity. The Captain’s voice got lost in a jumble of synthetic STRIDII, wavered – and suddenly the communicator frizzled and heated against Spock’s face. He closed it and tossed it on the cot on his left just before it could burn his chin. It sputtered some more, engine humming low and buzzing through the cot’s blankets, and then it died.

They were alone. The last words the Captain has spoken echoed in Spock’s mind. They had not sounded like an order. They had sounded like a plea, which was larger and graver a thing. A second shiver ran down Spock’s spine.

He had not realized how grounding the Captain’s presence had been till it was gone.

In that moment, the Doctor’s eyes snapped open. They looked glazed and tired – but perfectly alert.

“Where…” Doctor McCoy licked his lips under the oxygen mask. He blinked, as if the simple gesture took a great amount of energy. His voice was clear, though hoarse. “…Where are we?”

“The main tent,” Spock answered, ignoring the way his own pulse jolted when he heard him speak. “You collapsed while we were still discussing. You’re experiencing difficulties in breathing doctor. I’ve not been able to – “

“Cardiac… tamponade,” the doctor rasped out. His hand trembled against the cold metal slate of the table, and he shakily raised it – tapping his chest. “It’s. Cardiac tamponade.”

Spock’s eyebrows arched. “You diagnosed yourself, doctor?”

McCoy nodded. “You bet… your green ass I did.” He closed his eyes with a sigh, and Spock felt the sudden need to keep him talking. It seemed disquietingly reasonable to expect him not to open them again.

Spock didn’t argue his diagnosis. He didn’t even think about it. He simply opened the right categories in his memory, drawing up physiology diagrams, snippets of explanation the doctor had provided him in their time together. “Cardiac tamponade is a clinical syndrome caused by the accumulation of fluid in the pericardial space,” he said, “resulting in reduced ventricular filling and subsequent hemodynamic compromise.”

He waited for the Doctor to answer for three point seven seconds. He reached out and pressed his thumb against his wrist pulse point, to assure himself everything was still functioning. Finally, McCoy gave a nod. “That… that’s the one,” he wheezed. He coughed, but he was blinking – eyes neatly trained on Spock, filled with a focus that was inherently McCoy. “Pretty… nasty business. The… the communicators fried, right?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t time to remark how “fried” was a rather crude description of the difficulties in communications they were experiencing.

“Figur’d you’d have already beam’d me up if you could.” A thunder growled above them, charging the air with electric restlessness. The doctor let out a pained gasp, clutching at the skin above his breastbone. A shiver, stronger than the others, jolted through him, like circles reverberating in the water.

For the first time since he woke up, the doctor looked scared.

“Then you’ll… you’ll have to do it, Spock,” he said, very softly, as if to keep his voice from cracking. “A pericardiocentesis.”

Spock went completely still. He didn’t let go of McCoy’s wrist. “Doctor…”

“The storms here can go on for hours,” the doctor said, staring up at the lamp bathing him in the clean white light of operating rooms. “I… can’t last hours like this. I don’t…” he gasped, and pressed his hand harder against his chest, knuckles white and fingers more and more bluish. “… I don’t think I have minutes.”

Spock had rarely experienced inadequacy. In the few occasions he had, it had been a thing of intellect, and puzzlement, and rarely a thing of closed fists and barely contained rage. This time it was closer to alarm – to fear. It was uncharted territory, and the territory was Leonard’s body, not a stranger’s, not a fellow crewman’s, and even if Sarek’s ghost seemed to hover his shoulder reminding him how it should not, it did make a difference. It did change everything.

“Doctor…” Words died on his tongue, lingering in the space between the two of them, between his fingers and McCoy’s hand.

I won’t do it. can’t do it. I don’t know how.

The doctor found his gaze. He rolled his wrist on the table, till his palm rested against Spock’s, and gave a single, gentle tug at his cuff. “I’ll… guide you, Spock,” he whispered, warm and firm and sincere. “You’ll… do great. I promise.”

Spock didn’t believe it. He knew there was no basis for such a statement, how serious the prognosis was. He could quote studies on life-threatening injuries treated in hostile contexts and countless statistics of survival and recovery. He also knew what the psychological technique Doctor McCoy was employing was called: reassurance. It had not fooled Spock when his mother had used it – reassuring him the children in his class would love to play with him, and doing nothing to make Spock hold her hand less tightly – and it would not fool him now. Spock knew, finally, that he should say all these reasonable things, and admit his ignorance, and refuse to do it. Still, he couldn’t.

He might not believe the doctor’s words, but he believed him. So, Spock nodded.

“Tell me what to do, doctor,” he said. And added, in his mind, with the perfect certainty his people yearn for all their lives: If I fail, I will never forgive myself.

The doctor sighed, turning back to stare at the tent roof. Spock watched as part of the tension seeped off his shoulders, his spine – as he braced himself. “You’ll have to perform the pericardiocentesis, Spock,” he explained. “We need to drain the fluid out of the pericardial sac before the pressure… crushed it further.” He coughed, a long, rasping cough that rippled through his whole body: the ribs under his skin shifted with the movement, and Spock thought he glimpsed the jagged end of one of the broken ones poking against the flesh. He was suddenly, keenly reminded of the vulnerability of human bodies – of how crushable they had always felt beneath his hands.

Spock forced himself to nod.

“Local anesthesia,” he offered, “surgical needle.”

“Exactly,” breathed the Doctor. He licked his lips, closed his eyes, opened them again. They looked more distant than before. “Get… my medikit. Should have everything inside.” He flickered his hands towards the corner of the tent, weakly. “The second hypo from the left. And the… the long black box. The needles are there.”

Spock sprinted across the tent and retrieved the medikit. He counted seconds in his head as he unclasped its locks, found the tidy row of hypos, selected the right one and grabbed the long black box too. He rushed back to the doctor, lining his findings on the table surface. The glass of the hypo gleamed softly in the white light. Inside the box, more hypos, and Spock unrolled a length of black sterilized plastic-fabric with a series of sleek silver needles strapped to it. Titanium. Spock let his gaze wander over their elongated tips, gravely.

Five seconds.

“Which needle, doctor?” he asked softly.

Doctor McCoy’s pale, pale lips curved upward, laugh lines and dark shadows of exhaustion CRINKING around his eyes. “The longest son’bitch you can find, Spock. That’s the… right one.”

Spock had expected it. Somehow, the thought wasn’t as comforting as it should have been. A gust of wind whipped through the flaps of the tent, rustling between the table’s legs, making hair and clothes flutter. Spock realized he had almost forgotten how cold it was, outside, across Qyshag Four’s wasted, hauntingly ancient lands. Inside the tent, it was growing stifling hot. Spock’s body was, at least.

“Spock. Breathe.” The doctor was shivering. His skin felt cold, clammy. Somehow, that grounded him enough to murmur an answer, and took out the anesthetic hypo, and checking quantities and pressure and sterilization.

“I should offer you the same advice, doctor,” Spock said. Doctor McCoy coughed, but it seemed a cough born out of an aborted laugh and not out of a punctured heart. The First Officer pushed back the folds of the doctor’s clothes, exposing as much skin as he could – the red tendrils burning angrily under his fingertips. “Where?”

“As close to the interested area as possible,” Doctor McCoy said.

“Acknowledged,” Spock said, and before the doctor could realize what’s happening, he pushed the hypo against the left side of his ribcage – gently, and directly over the artery – and pushed the plunger of the syringe.

Doctor McCoy gasped. He writhed on the table, and let out a chocked whimper, and Spock pressed his lips tight enough to discolor them. Then the doctor cursed, quietly but wholeheartedly. The First Officer exhaled a discrete breath of relief.

“Fuck,” Doctor McCoy panted, “ya sneaky… sneaky weasel goblin. No offense.”

“I was under the impression that surprise-induced adrenaline tends to diminish the discomfort of hypospray injections,” Spock answered, voice almost smooth. “You told me yourself.”

“I’m stupid.” The doctor’s words were slightly slurred – his eyelids fluttering. Spock snatched up the tricorder and ran it across his chest in one swift motion. The machinery buzzed, and elaborated, and when the results scrolled across the screen, Spock went extremely still.

Never numbers and figures had scared him so deeply.

The doctor seemed to sense Spock’s thoughts with troubling precision. “That bad, uh?”

Spock put down the tricorder, setting it on a low, continuous scanning. “Heartrate of 120 BPM, blood pressure 80/50 mm Hg, compromised left ventricle,” he listed, in clipped, irregular tones he didn’t recognize as his own. He tried to control it, but couldn’t. “Abundant swelling in the chest cavity. Survival rates – “

“Spock,” McCoy stopped him. He reached out with one hand, shakily, looking gaunt and exhausted and frail. “’m still here. Everything still… beatin’. Workin’. Ya’ll do great. Great. Please.”

The Doctor coughed, whimpering, and for a long, time-stopping moment it sounded as if he was drowning in his own body. But he got through it, and gritted his teeth, and turned to defiantly stare at the white light hanging over him. “Now take the sterilized hypo in the box, and insert the son’bitch needle, and suck this thing out of me.”

Spock said nothing. But he reached out, and followed the Doctor’s orders. The needle fell into place with a light click as he checked the plunger. The doctor nodded in approval, but took care not to look at the glinting titanium tip. “Now,” he said, slowly and firmly, “rest the needle against the left side of my chest – right there, yeah. Set the tricorder to monitor my readings through the whole procedure. You’ll have to insert the needle at an angle of thirty-forty degrees to the skin, near the left xiphocostal angle, aiming towards the left shoulder. Push till you reach the pericardial sac, and pull out the liquid. Then you’ll… set a tube to complete the draining.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Spock.”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“It won’t be nice,” Doctor McCoy said. He was not looking at him. He was shaking, and his voice trembled. He suddenly looked very small, and very young.

The tricorder whirred. A holographic projection of the doctor’s chest materialized over it, muscles outlined in blue light, veins and arteries in the bright red of human blood. Spock moved to the other side of the table, eyes on the readings, and delicately rested the tip of the needle against the doctor’s bare chest. He could feel his heart racing, each pulse reverberating through the hypo and his fingers and his arms.

“It will work, Leonard.”

Then Spock slipped the needle under THE skin, a precise, fluid thrust, and the doctor started screaming.

Spock knew the anesthetic had been effective: it was not his first time employing a hypo, and he had never encountered difficulties before. But the local anesthesia enabled the patient to stay conscious, and to preserve a certain degree of sensitivity in the area – as it was necessary at the present time. Moreover, the doctor’s body was already weak, and had endured a condition of stress and pain for the better part of a day. Their technology could do many things, but not everything. Spock knew Doctor McCoy could feel the needle trudge on, slice through muscles and skin and ribs, aiming for his heart. A flush of heated blood rose to his cheeks – burning in purple as he extended back his head, teeth bared, eyes widened. The tricorder beeped, flickered with alarm. McCoy was thrashing against him, limbs so weak they shook with the effort of rising on his elbows. Spock grabbed his shoulder, delicately. It felt like holding back a youngling, a thin-boned bird. The doctor cursed, and sobbed, and mumbled prayers as the sobs continued, but Spock kept him still, and didn’t tear his gaze off the holo-map of McCoy’s chest gleaming in red-and-blue light in the air above the table.

He was nearing the area. He pushed further. The hologram needle in the projection hit the pericardial sac and slipped through, and in the real world Spock felt a tug of flesh resisting the pressure. The doctor gasped, and whined a long whine, child-like in its desperation.

Spock swallowed, and started pulling the plunger back. A wet popping sound, the holo-map glittering with readings. The doctor screamed again, so hard and raw Spock feared he would scratch his throat.

Liquid was dropping in the hypo, pinkish from blood.

“’m sorry…” the doctor was whispering, softly, brokenly. “Spock… Jim. Jimbo. ‘m sorry… please – “

The hypo vial filled with more liquid. A sob.

“Please, stop. Please…”

The vitals on the tricorder holo-map were screaming, the pure chaos of a body in agony. The red globe representing the doctor’s heart, glowing like a carbuncle in the light, was palpitating madly, casting red flashes, painting the tent in crimson like a bloodied battlefield.

“Stop. Stop…”

In that exact moment in time and space, S'chn T'gai Spock would frankly declare, with no trace of deceit, that he would give anything and go anywhere in the known universe to meet the doctor’s desire. But he couldn’t, and therefore he adjusted his gentle grip on Leonard’s shoulder to prevent him from injuring himself, and kept pulling the plunger back, and didn’t stop until a second wet popping sound echoed down the needle in his hand and the holo-map twinkled with green light.

Decreasing heart distress. Decreased liquid in the pericardial sac. Reduced pressure. Reduced risk.

As if from a great distance, Spock saw himself reaching for the medikit on the other side of the table. He watched himself as he rummaged through its contents, found the sterilized organic plastic purse of the surgical tube, extracted it, and skillfully connected it with the needle base as he took off the hypo filled with bloodied fluid. The world felt utterly still, utterly silent. Spock punched the right code in the tube small engine, and waited for it to start whirring, taking the place of his fingers and efficiently sucking out the remaining fluid.

Then Spock took a step back, staggered, and had to clasp hands around the cool edge of the metal table to keep his knees from buckling under him.

There was a shift on the table before him. The doctor took a deep, wheezing breath, the tube whirring softly at his side. He brushed it with shaking hands.

“Doctor…?” Spock asked.

“Fine,” Doctor McCoy croaked, “Fine. You?”

“I completed the procedure,” Spock said, and that was the only thing he could be sure of in that moment.

“Yes,” the doctor said. He didn’t probe further. “The tube… be done in, a minute. Take it off. There’s an incorporated healing component already… no need to, stitch.”

It was obvious talking pained him. Spock nodded to the instructions, controlling his own breathing, surveying his patient. A part of his mind still registered the sounds around him – the winds howling around their shield, the chattering of the camp refugees, a couple of voices yelling. They seemed peculiarly less real than the increasingly constant beep of the doctor’s vitals.

“Spock… Jim knows what’s goin’ on?” Leonard asked, suddenly. Spock read something in his face – irradiating from his eyes, the tight line of his mouth, pushing against him with a nearly physical force. Spock knew what it was. He had encountered it, in his time with humans, and studied it, and still, it caught him off-guard every time he was confronted with it. Emotion – raw and undiluted.

There were so many shades of feeling – so many shades of grief and hope – in Doctor McCoy’s expression Spock felt his head spin.

“I managed to contact the captain when I first brought you in the tent,” Spock said. “I – communicated him the gravity of the situation, but then I lost the signal.” Past their tent, the sky gave a crack of lightnings, a low rumble deep enough to reverberate in the ground. “The storm is probably compromising ground communications too.”

The doctor stiffened. “Did he – “he started to ask, and then caught himself. That physical, nameless emotion jolted through him. “Will he… will he come Spock?” he finally said, “will he come to get us?”

“He will try everything in his power to do so, doctor,” Spock said, with certainty.

The doctor licked his lips, eyelids slipping closed for the briefest moment. One point one second, Spock’s mind offered. “Good,” he whispered, “good.”

Spock swallowed. He focused back on the left side of the doctor’s chest, as he checked the readings on the tricorder and the surgical tube. The draining was completed – until they reached Medbay, they would have to repeat the process every half an hour. He pulled the tube out of Doctor McCoy’s chest with the gentleness he would have used with a newborn child, or with a fragile sparkle of unknown alien life. The doctor hissed through his teeth. The voices from the camp were rising in volume – Spock recognized children’ squeaks, a rustle of feet shuffling through packed snow.

Doctor McCoy turned to him, searching for his eyes. “Spock?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks,” he rasped, and with his blood-drained lips and his bare exposed chest and his pinched face, he smiled. “You’ve got… a good bedside manner.”

Spock didn’t grin back – but he tilted his head to the side, leaned closer over him.

“You’re very welcome, doctor,” he said, and something in his voice made Leonard’s smile grow.

In that moment, Spock became aware of several things happening at the same time. He heard voices screaming, shrieks and cries, and a new sound – the roar of one of the Qyshag long, silvery rifles. He saw the tent’s flaps slapping open, and shapes framed by the stark off-white sky, and phasers and rifles glittering in their hands as they rose them. He reached out for the phaser strapped to his parka, knew it was too late. Finally, he felt himself sliding in one fluid motion in front of the table, between the rifles and Doctor McCoy, just before a burning flash of pain crashed over him.

The blow hurled Spock across the tent, slamming him against the makeshift pile of their supplies. Corners of PADDs and hypo boxes dug in his back. Warmth trickled down his temple. I’m losing consciousness, he had time to think. I didn’t see them coming.

He heard a laughter. He heard a cry – the doctor’s voice. Spock pushed, trying to get back on his feet, brushing the handle of his phaser. But he couldn’t. The world swirled in front of his eyes, and then he knew no more.

***

The badlands stretching between the Kahashag’s army and the Enterprise refugee camp were vast, bare, and cruel. Aragark, the locals called them: Winter’s Maw. And a muzzle they seemed indeed, a great, white-and-grey winter beast’s muzzle – a mouth of wind-whipped ice and jagged rock outcrops reaching for the line of mountain peaks severing the continent, looming against the sky like blue-white fangs ready to snap shut over the unfortunate travelers trying to pass them. As the sleigh kept flying over the packed snow, made half deaf from the furious flapping of the blankets in the storm winds and the panting of the Kahashag’s hounds, Captain James Kirk recalled there was a myth, about those mountains. A Kahashag’s Nephew, strong as winter and beautiful as the trembling springs of their world, falling in love with a beast God descended from the mountains. For love, the God disobeyed his kin’s laws, and joined the rows of their lover’s soldiers against the opposite faction, and saved them: they had swallowed a whole army, with that mouth and those teeth. They had been banned, the beast God from the mountains – and turned into stone and ice for their sin: but their lover had never forgotten them, and built them a sanctuary in the mountains that had been their teeth, and a gallery stretching through them and to the harsh valleys on the other side, so their people would never forget the God who had sacrificed themselves for a mortal.

Kirk recounted himself the whole story, trying to visualize the exact page of the informative PADD he had scrolled through half an hour before beaming down on the planet, the illustration of one of the Qyshag’s superb tapestry going with it. He had always taken comfort in history, although he rarely admitted it. He genuinely enjoyed the pleasures of a rascal life, the bragging, the parties, the sex - they were all good and interesting things, and if done right, beautiful things too. But history was comfort: there was a place, within the captain, that he slipped into every time he opened a report on a civilization’s costumes or saw some antique artifact conserved in a case, a place that smelled like Mom’s old paper books and calm, and where Kirk could glimpse a version of himself that in another universe could have very well been real. A simpler, quieter man, always with a purse full of PADDs and a coffee shop cup in hand, maybe teaching. He would never live that life – he was not the right James Kirk for that – but, sometimes, he needed it.

Right now, teacher James Kirk and stories of gods and heroes were all that could keep him sane.

The communication with Spock had died scarcely five seconds after he had been contacted. It had been more than enough to have Kirk running like a madman through the camp, muttering half-orders and half-things that sounded crazy to his own ears, heartbeat jolting through him so hard he felt it in his fingertips. The Kahashag and his own men had retrieved him forty feet down the path cutting through the camp. He had not been able to say anything, and hadn’t needed to. The Kahashag had clasped their slender hands on his shoulders, to keep him upright or to prevent him from sprinting away, he couldn’t tell, and they had communicated Kirk they had already ordered to prepare the sleighs. They were going to the refugee camp, to intercept the First Nephew’s band. General Pardan and a choice of their people were coming with him.

The Qyshag had long since autonomously discovered warp drive and flying technology, and had used it to the sleek, heavily carved sleighs their ancestors had ridden about the continent for centuries. Still, they had not gotten rid of the nightmarish, black-green beasts that had pulled the sleighs before engines – and that Kirk had come to think of as the unfortunate love children of a dog and a dragon. At first the choice had puzzled him, and he had chalked it up to tradition: now, he saw what a superficial idiot he had been. The storms didn’t mess exclusively with ground-space communications and the such, but with any warp or electric technology too: the phasers and the Qyshag rifles still worked, for convoluted technical reasons one of his team’s security member had uselessly tried to explain him. The bottom of it was, sleigh engines were deeply unreliable in a weather like that, while the hounds were perfectly equipped to carry them through snow storms and icy winds. Scarcely ten minutes in the crossing, the soldiers of the Kahashag had deftly hitched the beasts to the sleighs, and now they were flying over the plains. Kirk was riding in General Pardan’s sleigh: he had insisted on standing on his feet, hands clasped around the railing and eyes peering at the white sky stretching endlessly over them, before a bump in the glassy ground made him nearly tumble out of the sleigh. Pardan had stretched out one arm and forced his butt on the seat next to them. Kirk hadn’t made a peep ever since.

He wasn’t sure he could stand anyway. Now that the first burst of numbing, electric energy had started to seep through the pores of his body, the panic was really setting in. He was cold, and angry, and felt floppy like a felt plushie thrown at the bottom of a toy chest.

Spock’s voice was shaking. Shaking. The thought kept not making sense to Kirk’s mind, the words simply not stitching together. He had seen Spock calm, focused, excited – mainly thanks to Uhura and field specimens – and angry too – mainly thanks to Kirk’s own skills – but never shaken. Never uncertain. Spock’s call had felt keenly close to a cry for help, and that, paired with the labored breathing he had heard in the background, was threatening to rip Kirk’s heart out of his chest.

What the Hell is going on? He asked himself, as the Qyshag hounds’ paws stomped on the ground and the God’s teeth grew larger before them. What the Hell is wrong with Bones?

James Kirk was good at details. Perks of a nearly eidetic memory, who Leonard had sorely envied for the whole of their academy days. He recalled his conversation with Bones, their fight, every frame, every stance he had seen on his friend. There had been signs that something was wrong: face so pale, dark circles under his eyes – circles that had not been there that morning, and how the fuck he didn’t note that – and his gestures, too. Kirk remembered how he had kept wrapping his arms around his chest, brushing it with his hands, as if Kirk’s words were actually twisting a blade in his heart. He saw the signs, but he was no doctor, and therefore he didn’t know what they meant. And that, somehow, was worse than everything else.

Kirk clasped his lips together, feeling a telling tightness in his throat he had not felt since he was eleven. The Qyshag had not tear conducts – crying would leave ice burning on your face.

Pardan cried an order and whipped their hounds. The sleigh jolted on its hinges, surging forward. The mountains were close now – edged in snow and greyish patches of ice, stone of the pure blue of an ocean. Around them, the sleighs of the Kahashag’s soldiers burned with colors, purple and red and green and gold, gilded carvings glinting soft as snow from their sides.

“We are nearing the pass,” General Pardan told Kirk, voice muffled by the cloak they had wrapped around their mouths for protection. Kirk casted them a look through the goggles. “We’ll be on the other side in ten Terran minutes.”

“How much time before we’re at the camp?” Kirk asked, feeling his words crumble midway like a kid’s sand castle. In his mind, the minutes were tickling by at an obscene pace, leaping forward in treacherous jumps. They could have been in the badlands for five minutes, or a day; they could get to the refugee camp in time, or hours too late. They could find the First Nephew already there. They could find their tent on fire, Spock injured, and Bones –

“Half an hour, captain,” Pardan answered. Kirk saw their handsome face through a glazed film, and realized the tightness had grown worse. Now his eyes felt burning, and the softness in the general’s tone said it was showing.

They rode on, towards the sanctuary build deep in the mountain. Kirk swallowed, and it was that softness that prompted him to talk.

“I… I have no damn idea what to do, General,” he said, in a small, small voice, even smaller there before the Winter’s Maw. “Those two men, those two in blue… I can’t do this without them.” Being a captain, sailing space, being human. He wasn’t sure which of those things he meant. “And if I’m late – if I left them, and I’m late…”

He couldn’t go on. He bent his head, and clasped his lips even tighter, tight enough they started to hurt and his teeth ached. For a long moment, the General said nothing. Kirk thought of the colorful sleighs, of that people with no tears to shed, and for one of the few times in his time roaming the universe, he felt lonely.

“Then pray, Captain,” Pardan finally said. Out of the corner of his eye, Kirk saw them turning to look at him. “If I feared to lose the people dearest to me, I’d do anything to get to them, like you’re doing. And I would pray.”

“I don’t believe in your gods, General,” Kirk said softly.

“You believe in mountains, and in loyalty, and in the love between creatures,” Pardan replied. “That’s more than sufficient.”

Then they nodded to something before them, urging Kirk to look. He looked.

They had reached the mountains, and in the mountains, high above the ground, was carved a gate. The gate shone with polished stone, with veins of silver and azure running through it, and towered over their sleighs with its simple, elegant lines. Behind it gaped a cavern – darker and blacker than anything Kirk had ever seen, deeper than space itself. The Qyshag soldiers bent over the sleighs, turned on the torches and lamps perched on the front. They looked like a small pack of stars valiantly trying to assault a moonless night.

The Aragark’s Gate, the sanctuary built by the Kahashag’s Nephew in the name of their lost lover, did not bear a single statue or a single letter: it simply existed. It was more than enough.

Kirk stared at it, and shivered under his parka, as General Pardan said to him: “Pray to the Gate, Captain. We’re entering the mountains. We’re entering the true dark. I’ll do the same.”

Cries and cracks of whips, hounds barking, and inside they went. The Gate rushed over them, each pillar wider than the camp Kirk had set with his men. The air grew colder, older – whispers of rock and dripping moisture weaving about Kirk’s ears like spiderwebs. The sleighs’ lights bobbed down the road, spreading and twinkling. The hounds’ roars echoed off the stone wall of the mountain pass. It was a strange moment, a powerful, raw moment, and Kirk really imagined they were riding between the fangs of a beast God, that the wind slashing through his clothes was a breath, the low rumble in the ground a heartbeat.

Kirk curled his hands around the sleigh railing, closed his eye, and prayed to the God of the Mountain. Save him, he thought, save them – let them hate me, let them forget me, fight me, but save them. Let them get on with their lives and never see me again – but let them live. Because I am not sure I could bear a universe without Spock and Leonard McCoy.

The mountain stayed silent. Kirk opened his eyes, because he was a Captain – he needed to see the road, no matter how black and deep. The sleighs rode on, through the caverns at the bottom of the world, in the darkness.

***

The First Nephew was tall, like all the Qyshag he had seen, with long, feather-like hair and wide shoulders. They had narrow hips and sharp, chiseled cheekbones, but there was something cruel in the curve of their lips. The First Nephew carried a long blade at their belt and a rifle in their hands and was flanked by no less than five warriors, standing silently by the flaps of the tent. The First Nephew had hands strong enough to crush his skull like a ripe pomegranate.

Leonard tore his eyes from the limp heap of Spock on the ground, and turned to glare at them, breathing heavily and lying half-naked on the table.

He had never thought death would come being as pale as snow.

“Healer,” greeted Bar’leen, rightful heir of the Kahashag’s chair, “Such a pleasure to find you here. I would hope you have no intention to try anything, or your friend would find himself skinned and hung out in the winds before you could blink.”

Leonard said nothing, focusing on the effort of keeping his lungs inhaling and exhaling. He had gasped as the phaser blow had hit Spock and sent him crashing against the pile, and that had been enough for oxygen to get stuck in his throat – sending him in a coughing fit that made even thinking difficult. For a long, horrifying moment he had feared it would rip open the needle hole in his chest, spoiling Spock’s work.

He felt a hysterical laughter bubble its way up his throat. Even in this time and age a patient who had just underwent a pericardiocentesis could scarcely move – let alone defending themselves from a perfectly-trained team of heavily-armed warriors.

“What – what does this all mean?” he asked. His voice sounded weak and muffled by the oxygen mask, a pitiful thing. He could almost see the predatory gleam flashing across the First Nephew’s face – the exquisite pleasure of smelling fresh blood, an easy kill. A prey.

Leonard felt his head spin. Spock, he thought. Buy time. Protect him.

“You didn’t really think I would let you walk away after what you’ve done this morning, did you?” The First Nephew strolled in the tent, gliding forward with easy, dancer-like strides. The operating-room-like light above the table revealed the bruise around their right eye. “You insulted me, Healer. You hit the heir of an empire, and disrespected their name – a whole people. You outsiders and your foolish, shameless arrogance.” Step, step. “My estimated Kahashag could have decided to crawl at your feet and forgive, but this doesn’t mean I would do the same. Or that my people would do the same.”

The First Nephew was two four feet from the table, now. With a surge of raw, primal horror that left him nearly dizzy, Leonard realized they were coming closer – close enough to touch him. He backed towards the opposite side, desperately, and cried when the movement sent a bolt of pain jolting through his chest.

The First Nephew stopped, their belt tinkling against the edge of the table. Leonard saw them stretching a hand, and something cold and excited making their beautiful face ugly. Fingers brushed Leonard’s cheek, nails grazing the skin just light enough not to hurt, and he flinched.

“What do you want?” he hissed, with as much Kirk-ish brashness he could muster.

“Your death,” the First Nephew answered smoothly. “Your exemplary death, to be more precise.” Their lips curled upward, baring black gums and needle-like teeth. It was the first time since he had met the Qyshag that Leonard imagined those teeth closing around his throat. “Although you already look well on your way to the last journey. I smell bad blood, Healer, and sweat, and pain. I can hear your struggling heart from here.”

The First Nephew trailed their nail down Leonard’s throat, feather-passing over his carotid, down to his clavicle, his chest. “You won’t last much longer, even without my help.”

Leonard felt his breath itch, his pulse thundering in his wrists, and he thought a fierce, adamant no. If he BUILT himself in a panic attack his vitals would go all over the place again, and with no one to adjust oxygen and provide hypos it could lead to cardiac arrest, or a seizure. He could not permit it. If there was a thing Leonard McCoy would not put up with, it was ruining a fellow scientist’s excellent work.

So, he forced himself to take a breath, braced himself against the table – and violently swung to the right.

His head slammed into the Fist Nephew’s. The impact reverberated through his skull. A satisfying, unmistakable crunch told him someone’s nose got broken.

And it wasn’t his.

“Don’t touch me like that ever again, you son’bitch,” Leonard hissed through his teeth.

The First Nephew let out a howl, more indignation than pain, and staggered back clutching their face. They spat out a string of curses, most of which Leonard didn’t understand but had no need to. He slumped back against the table, feeling fainting and lightheaded –

A large hand clasped around his neck, pushing him against the metal hard enough to leave dents. Leonard’s head bashed into it hard, and he squeezed his eyes closed. The hand rammed him against the table a second time, and a third. He saw bright spots dancing before his eyes, the oxygen sucked out of his chest. He tried to claw at his throat, digging nails in the First Nephew’s hand, but his fingers felt numb and their grasp made out of steel.

Leonard gasped, and the First Nephew’s sneering face filled his vision. Blood trickled down their nose. “You little, useless thing,” they roared, and smashed Leonard’s head against the table once more. “you pathetic, crippled thing. I swear you’ll beg before this is over. You’ll scream, and sob in that disgusting way of your kin, and implore me to snap your fucking neck and put you out of your misery.”

Leonard was having a hard time staying conscious. The world seemed to slip in and out of focus, rhythm dizzying, and the colorful spots in his eyes started to turn black around the edges. His hands fell back at his sides, limp as a rag doll’s. There was nothing but the First Nephew’s snarling face, their breathing heavy against his skin. He felt them adjusting their hold, pulling him closer.

“Although you won’t be so lucky, I fear.” The Qyshag snapped their fangs, one inch from Leonard’s cheek. “I won’t let you die before I have the chance to drag your body through my people’ camp, and have you shivering and naked like a maggot, so everybody would see what happens to those who challenge the Kahashag’s throne – to those who dare to touch the High Children of the Sky.”

As they talked, the First Nephew’s voice grew impossibly loud, horrible – echoing in the thunders rattling the sky, the swirling of snow and wind crashing down against their shield, filling every corner and every crevice of their tent, of Leonard’s mind. For a moment, he could hear the roar of a newborn world in their voice – the cry of a planet ravaged by volcanos erupting and sulfurous fogs choking the sky and tsunamis drowning continents, shifting and evolving and growing with agonizing pain.

Then, as sudden as it had come, it was gone. The wrath in the Qyshag’s face waned, the youthful features beyond it resurfacing; they let go of Leonard’s neck, and he fell back against his table.

Leonard gasped, and coughed, and what scratch of strength he still had in his body crumbled in his veins. It was all wrong. It was all going terribly wrong. Spock was still slumped somewhere behind them, unconscious – and how long had he been now, two minutes? Three? – and all he had achieved so far was hitting a most definitively dangerous individual for the second time in a day, and getting half-choked for it. Leonard felt the coldness of the metal against his cheek, his throat pulsing where the First Nephew’s fingertips had left bruises. He swallowed tears.

They would kill him. He could already imagine the First Nephew strangling him again, and this time he wouldn’t stop, till the pain and the panic would grow unbearable and Leonard’s body would simply short-circuit, turn off like a faulty engine. He wouldn’t tell Jojo goodbye. He wouldn’t see Earth again. He wouldn’t see Jim smile at him, just one more time, and Leonard McCoy realized he was scared.

He could still buy his friends time, though. Give Kirk a chance. Save Spock. It would be worth it.

It would always be worth it.

“I… I will give my public apologies to the Kahashag, First of the Riders,” he cracked, using the official title he had learned during the debrief with the anthropology team. “Please… my, my people didn’t mean to disrespect you. They didn’t mean to disrespect anyone. This, this alliance… it could, end the war…”

His words were met by nothing by silence – and Leonard had the sudden, distinct feeling something was extremely wrong.

The First Nephew tilted their head. They leant in over the table, and smiled, purring with a lover’s voice in Leonard’s ear: “And who told you, little thing, that I mean for this war to be over?”

Leonard stopped breathing. The First Nephew smiled wider.

“I’m no fool – I know the Kahashag will never leave their chair to me. I have a debt to them for how they raised me, but with age they have grown gullible – weak. If I hadn’t joined forces with the people of the Copper Deserts and kept the Kahashag busy with this war, they would have already sold us out to your Federation years ago. It was the only way.”

Leonard’s pulse was pounding again. He stiffened, cold rage flooding his body. “You betrayed your people,” he whispered. “You brought a war upon them. All those people, all those children, slain and hurt and homeless… it was all because of you – “

“It was not because of me,” the First Nephew snapped back. “They called it upon themselves. I’m simply being the leader this fair land deserves. My people, they will all see the wisdom of my actions in time.”

They grabbed Leonard’s chin, tearing off the oxygen mask and throwing it to the ground. “But now you know my secret, little thing. It’s one more reason to kill you. Which I would do with great satisfaction.” The grip on his chin twisted, forcing Leonard to look at the Qyshag. Silvery eyes roamed over his body, gleaming softly. Fresh blood. Easy kill. “Still, I’ll be magnanimous. If you come with us now, and willingly, we may not slay the people in this camp and your green-blooded friend right there. We may even let your companions go back to their ship.”

Leonard couldn’t move. He started shivering. He felt his eyes burn and closed them, but it didn’t change a damn thing.

“So, what do you say, Healer?” The First Nephew asked, voice caressing Leonard’s cheek in one long sigh. “Would you do the one sensible thing, just this once?”

Leonard flinched. He could almost hear Jim’s voice telling him not to listen to them, not to let their words sting – but they stung all the same. I’m sorry, Leonard thought, although he wasn’t sure who he was apologizing to. He didn’t know anymore. He was so tired, and weak, and so, so cold.

“I will,” Leonard breathed out. “I will come with you.”

The First Nephew grinned. They clasped one arm around Leonard’s chest, yanking him off the table. He bit down on his lip not to whimper.

“Prepare the hounds, then,” they said to their soldiers. “We leave as soon as they’re ready.”

Chapter Text

Spock woke to a deflagration of sensations. There’s cold, and there’s something hard biting in the skin of his wrists – and a blinding pain that slashed through his chest as soon as he took a breath. He reached out out of instinct, trying to shield himself, but he couldn’t move his hands. Nor his arms. They’re suspended high over his head, straining the muscles in his shoulders, and the biting thing…

Sluggishly, Spock opened his eyes. He was sitting on the floor, leaning against a pile of scattered medical equipment, PADDs and spare tricorders. All was silent. Looking up, he glimpsed a glint of silver where his hands should be – handcuffs, hooked to the tent pole at his back.

Crouched before him, cast in shadows by the white light he had operated Doctor McCoy under, a figure, large and silent and tall.

As his mind gradually cleared, information jolted through Spock. He was in their tent. He had been made unconscious by a stunning shot, probably from a phaser. He had not heard the intruders coming.

The Captain’s words came back to him, hauntingly. Keep him alive. Protect him. He failed. He had not protected the doctor.

Spock’s breath caught in his throat. The Doctor. He blamed the time it took his brain to remember him on the shot aftereffects, and the probable concussion he caused himself banging against the tent pole; still, it felt inexcusable.

With one fluid, sudden movement, one meant to take full advantage of the surprise effect, Spock curled his fists in the handcuffs and hurled his body forward – slashing out with his leg to the intruder’s stomach and giving a sharp jerk to the handcuffs’ chain.

His foot connected, digging its heel in the soft tissue under the figure’s ribcage, precisely and elegantly, and sending them on the ground. He waited for the tell-tale snap of metal.

It didn’t come.

Adrenaline pumped in Spock’s veins. Metal-based restrains had rarely been effective with his physique – easy to bend, easy to break, especially combining Vulcan strength and an accurate knowledge of the weak points to insist upon. He gave a second tug, a third. The tent pole rattled in his socket. Spock’s teeth grated together, bared in the effort.

The handcuffs were not giving in.

The intruder was finally crawling back on their feet, and regarded Spock with a crocked, triumphant grin. Spock recognized the pale blue complexion and the silvery eyes of a Qyshag, as he had suspected, and the red-and-green sashes of an Army’s Lieutenant. Of the First Nephew’s personal army.

A shiver crawled up Spock’s spine, raw and primal. It was too close to a burst of pure instinct for Vulcan’s comfort – but he had spent enough time running and risking his life at the side of James Tiberius Kirk to trust it.

The shiver was exactly like the one he had felt during the captain’s call, and Spock knew it was no coincidence.

“You won’t get out of that anytime soon, my friend,” the Qyshag said. Their eyes crinkled with delight, but they were still wheezing from Spock’s kick. Good. “My liege knew you were harder to tame than the Terrans, and took precautions.” They leant in, tapping one nail against the handcuffs. “ Kardar stone. It had hold giants and gods, in the time before time. The strongest Qyshag would not be able to bend it. I would sincerely suggest you do not waste your energy on it, dev-temeran.”

Pointy-eared bastard. Spock had been called way worse names, and was not impressed. “The Healer,” he said through gritted teeth. “Where is he?”

The Qyshag’s grin grew wider. Needle-like fangs glinted softly in the half-light. “Oh, he’ll be here soon enough, dev-temeran. The First Nephew is taking care of him. Preparing him to leave.”

Once, in a past that sometimes seemed far enough to belong to a completely different being and sometimes so close he woke up still feeling Vulcan’s sun against his skin, Spock had learned to wear his face like a shield. It had not been easy, as Amanda’s genes made his features more responsive than Vulcans’, an ever-changing bundle of emotions that were his schoolmates’ favorite taunt – but as most things he had applied himself to, Spock had succeeded.

Still, the effort he was now putting in schooling his face in a perfect mask of indifference made his muscles ache.

The First Nephew is taking care of him. Spock thought of the doctor as he had lastly seen him, pale and weak on the metal table, smiling at him like it had been Spock who had just endured a painful and poorly-performed medical procedure.

He felt bile rise in his throat. In his mind, the pieces were starting to fall in a pattern.

“A formal apology would not be enough,” he said, softly. “The First Nephew is demanding vengeance for the shame the doctor has brought upon them.” It was not a question. Realization dawned, and for one of the few times in his life Spock wasn’t enjoying it in the least.

“They did tell me yours is a sharp lot,” the Qyshag replied. Spock had to dig nails in his palms to keep from flinging himself against them. The Lieutenant seemed to sense it, and leant closer – pushing past Spock’s comfort zone, breathing heavily against his ear, and that scandalously intimate closeness made him feel covered in filth. “You are right – my liege will take their vengeance out on that half-dead thing of yours. And I assure you that little sickly maggot will wail and crawl and bleed more than you could ever imagine, before we let him croak.”

Spock’s nails sank so deep he felt blood trickle down his palms. He gritted his teeth, thinking of many sensible leverages he could use, talks of Starfleet regulations in case of direct attack to a diplomacy team member, sanctions and long-time consequences. What he heard himself saying in the end, though, was none of those sensible leverages.

“He’s not a maggot,” Spock hissed, whipping his head to stare in the Qyshag’s eyes. “he’s my friend. And if you mean harm to him, you and your liege are nothing but Sha’ jarane.”

Spock watched the Lieutenant’s face go livid, eyes reduced to grey chips of ice. Since he had been informed of the upcoming mission on Qyshag Four, Spock had made sure to get a decent grasp of Qyshag grammar and vocabulary, as it had been his costume since his first diplomatic experiences.

Since he joined the crew of the USS Enterprise, he had started adding to the basic vocabulary a selection of local swearwords as well.

The Qyshag dashed back in one dizzyingly-fast motion, and before even Spock’s reflexes could realize it, they were on his feet, and swinging a kick at his bruised midsection. The blow was sloppy – more anger than technique. Spock bent over, clasping his lips tight not let out a sound. The sudden movement made the handcuffs bit deeper in his skin. It made it difficult to breathe. It had been a profoundly pointless move.

Spock didn’t regret it for a single moment.

“You bastard,” the Qyshag snarled. Spock curled on himself as much as he could manage with his arms tied, bracing for the next kick. “You fucking – “

Suddenly, the flaps of the tent swung open. Rustles and raised voices filtered through it, and then a second Qyshag stepped in – this one taller than the Lieutenant, and fair, and wearing the pure red of the reigning clan. The First Nephew’s chiseled face was significantly less chiseled than the last time Spock had seen him, though, a generous portion of their nose and left cheek covered in bruises.

They were holding someone by the arm, roughly yanking them inside. When Spock’s eyes fell on the First Nephew’s prisoner, he stopped breathing. Every scrap of satisfaction at eliciting the Lieutenant’s reaction, every ghost of anger curling his fists seeped out of his body, and the world lost its detail-filled clarity and tunneled on the figure at the First Nephew’s elbow. For the time of a heartbeat, flickering and eternal, nothing else in the world mattered.

Doctor McCoy was alive and standing, but barely. His face was ashen – skin so pale it shimmered like Terran porcelain. Spock glimpsed dark bags under his eyes, darker than just after his operation, hair damp with cold sweat. His parka and uniform were still sliced and open, baring his chest to the cold: no one had helped him to cover himself. A thin-linked chain, giving the same soft glow of Spock’s handcuffs, tied his wrists together, the opposite end wrapped securely around the First Nephew’s fingers.

Spock could still see the cicatrizing hole left by the tube that had drained the liquid from around Leonard’s heart.

“Doctor,” he said, voice cracking.

Leonard flinched, a shiver rippling discretely through his body. He lifted his eyes, tired and glazed, as if it was taking an alarming amount of strength to focus them on anything.

When he saw Spock, he took a sharp breath. “Spock…”

“Ah, I see our Healer’s friend has finally waken up,” the First Nephew interrupted him, as four more solidly-built Qyshag soldiers stepped in after him and fanned out. Their tone was way too light, way too cheerful. Spock felt their silver gaze fall on him, and considered the misshapen angle of their nose, and didn’t miss the fury tightly-coiled under all that cheerfulness. “I would rather have none of these outsider rats know of my plans, but alas. It means we’ll do without the advantage of surprise.”

As they talked, McCoy’s eyes never left Spock, roaming over his body, growing more alert by the moment. There was competence, in those eyes – and worry. Spock realized the doctor had probably seen him hurled back by a phaser blast, and staying unconscious for a considerable amount of time. Spock was sure he was currently trying to asset his conditions at a glance, spying tell-tale signs of concussions or broken bones. He could barely stand, swaying on his feet with lips the color of fresh chalk, and he was worrying about him.

Spock could almost hear the captain’s voice saying it was such a McCoy thing to do it hurt.

Something twisted in his stomach, and he couldn’t help but give another jerk to his handcuffs.

“Well, Mister Spock. This is your name, isn’t it? First Officer of the brat captain’s ship. I suppose you plan to ask for mercy on you and your Healer’s behalf, don’t you?”

Spock ignored him. He kept his gaze firmly trained on the doctor. “Doctor?”

For a moment, it looked as if the doctor hadn’t heard him – an occurrence that alarmed Spock greatly. At last, he returned his gaze.

“Doctor,” Spock asked again, “how are you feeling?”

The question was careful, guarded. He didn’t want the First Nephew’s soldiers to know more about how severe the doctor’s conditions were than strictly necessary.

“I don’t like being ignored, First Officer,” the First Nephew warned.

Leonard licked his lips, and coughed. He wrapped one bound arm around his chest, protectively. Spock had all the answers he needed in the agony that flashed across the doctor’s face.

The First Nephew’s face betrayed nothing. Without warning, he curled the chain tighter around their hand and yanked it down, hard.

It all happened before anyone in the tent had time to react. The doctor yelled, a sharp, hoarse thing, and fell on his knees. Spock saw the impact jolt through his body, his eyes squeezing in pain.

For three heartbeats that echoed in his ears like thunders, he was certain the cicatrizing lines would rip back open.

It didn’t happen. Spock waited in frozen stillness as the doctor repressed a whimper, and shivered, and coughed. In the end he kept breathing, his tattered shirt fluttering every time his chest rose and fell.

Spock slumped against the tent pole, feeling blood rush off his face fast enough to leave him dizzy.

“Let me make myself extremely clear, Officer,” the First Nephew said, giving a weak tug on the chain. The doctor flinched reflexively. “You try anything, you disrespect me, and he pays the consequences. Understood?”

Spock nodded. “Understood.”

“Very well. Now, I inform you we are leaving, me and the Healer. We can say we… reached an agreement, before you woke up. Since he graciously accepted to come with us willingly, you, your men-in-red, and the good people of this camp would not be killed. Of course, you will not be released before we’re at a safe distance – and all the communication devices and phasers in the camp have been confiscated.” They tilted their head. “You are, however, encouraged to communicate the current developments to your captain as soon as possible. Spread the word, Officer. Tell your people what happens to the ones who dare to think themselves above the heir of the Frozen Lands, above the Children of the Sky. Tell the Kahashag not all their subjects would kneel and offer themselves to your Federation like camp whores. Tell them to fear, First Officer.”

Spock’s colorless face betrayed nothing – but to the trained eye his shoulders knotted under the uniform fabric, and muscles feathered in his jaw. He felt suddenly disjointed from time and space, floating. He didn’t need to look at Doctor McCoy’s pale, guilty face to know the truth.

He did choose to go with them.

Such a McCoy thing it hurt.

“You must know,” Spock said, stiffly and calmly, “you must know we can’t permit this, First Nephew. I believe an appeal to your sworn loyalty to your Kahashag would be pointless by this point, but my captain is currently discussing the treaty with them. Your display of violence will not prevent this alliance. You will be outnumbered, and defeated. Release the doctor now, and there would still be room to prevent a new war.”

The First Nephew grinned, and their features changed. They seemed to glow from within, eyes lighting up, sparkling – in pleasure, Spock realized. In pure, unfiltered delight. “We’re warriors, Mister Spock,” they said softly, and they seemed to grow taller, to fill the whole tent with their grin and their shadow. “My people will respond to his spilled blood. Will respond to war, like moths drawn by fire. And they will rejoice in it. He’ll be the first sacrifice to a new era.”

The doctor bent his head. Silent tears shimmered on his cheeks.

Spock felt completely lost.

The First Nephew would not stop, nor they would be reasoned with. Once they left the camp, and with the storm still raging, there would be little to none chance to know where they were directed. Even with the Enterprise’s scanners at full capacity, a rescue team would be late. They would chase them on a territory the First Nephew had known since childhood, full of caverns and secret crevices and blind spots.

No matter what he, or the captain, or the Kahashag themselves would try, they would never find them in time to save Doctor McCoy.

Silently, the Lieutenant that had kicked him turned, asking their leader for orders. The other warriors joined the conversation. Spock was forgotten.

The Vulcan half of his mind accepted this truth. It grieved for the life that was about to be inevitably lost, and moved to the things that could still be done. He could still wait for Kirk to come, as he was bound to do, and communicate him the latest developments, recommend him to collect all their men, warn the Kahashag of the probable treason of their First Nephew so they would take precautions. He could contribute in employing this tragedy to help in the pacification of this nation, make Doctor McCoy’s death as meaningful as possible. One for the many. A just grieving.

His human half, though. It did not abate so easily. And as details and odds kept falling in place, inexorably, as he watched the Qyshag Lieutenant marching to the tent flaps with the other soldiers and the First Nephew hauling the doctor on his feet, as his own heart boomed in his chest like a trapped thing, the Amanda’s part that lived in Spock grabbed at a thought. Held onto it. And started to shape it into something vaguely resembling a plan.

Spock extended his fingers as far back as he could, rummaging in the jumble of equipment pressing in his back. He lingered on plastic corners and tubes and screens, and finally found what he was looking for. Then Spock started coughing. His head lolled forward, bouncing against his chest. He coughed for so long and with such intensity even the Qyshag warriors fell silent, voices trailing off.

Spock’s eyes were closed, but he heard the clinking of the chain. “Spock!” Doctor McCoy gasped. “Spock – I knew it, he’s injured. It… punctured something. I need to visit him – make sure – “

“You need to do nothing,” the First Nephew growled.

“You promised – “

“I own you nothing, Healer.” A snap of fangs. “And he’ll be all right. He’s not as frail as your lot.”

Spock kept coughing, harsher than before. He shivered.

“He will not,” the doctor roared. He was breathless, wheezing between words – but Spock heard the chain tingle again, a soft grunt, and could almost see Doctor McCoy fight against the First Nephew’s hold – chin tilted high and fists curled.

“And you promised. You promised they all would live – and he may not live if left like this. I will – I will kill myself if you don’t let me visit him. Kill myself and spoil your little ritual. I… I swear to God I’ll do it.”

“You won’t.”

“The Hell I won’t. I’m not that far from that – you said it yourself. I… I just hold my breath a bit too long, and it’ll be done. L-let me visit him.”

The doctor’s voice held no hesitation. Spock swiftly ran through his notions, and confirmed himself that there was a ninety-percent chance it was actually medically possible. Spock couldn’t understand if the doctor was bluffing or not, and it troubled him, because he suspected to know the answer.

The silence crackled and hummed in the room – almost touchable, charged with electricity. Above them, the winds seemed to howl louder, wrapping them in clouds and snow.

It was the First Nephew to give in. The chain bounced off the ground, and they growled in frustration.

“Be quick.”

The doctor said nothing. Spock heard wobbly footsteps moving closer, and a body half-sat and half-collapsed in front of him.

Spock slowly raised his head.

Up close, the doctor’s appearance was even more harrowing. His skin was almost grey in color, and diaphanous, the blue-violet shadows of veins showing through. The bluish tint of his fingertips had spread up his hands, to his lips. Still, the first thing he did as he met Spock’s gaze was smiling. A true smile, genuinely pleased at finding him alert, at finding him alive, a smile promising everything was going to be all right. It was almost more than Spock could bear, and he clutched the small device in his hands to ground himself.

“Spock,” the doctor said, “shhh. It’s okay. Just breath, mh? Tell me… tell me where it hurts.”

Keeping his eyelids half-closed, Spock let his gaze sweep over the room, making sure no one was listening. He licked his lips. “Ribs,” he whispered. “And. The hands.”

The doctor’s eyebrows scrunched together. Spock forced himself to keep breathing. The doctor was nothing but perceptive, and more logical than he liked to declare, so he was bound to realize the oddness of Spock’s words. The handcuffs would leave bruises, that was granted, but nothing requiring immediate medical aid. Or compromising a Vulcan pain threshold.

The doctor hesitated for exactly one point two seconds. Then, even more slowly, he raised his arms, and started prodding at Spock’s wrists to find injuries. He froze.

Spock pushed the small round tracking chip in the doctor’s hands, slumping against his shoulder as if he could no longer hold himself upright. “Slid it in your sleeve, doctor,” he breathed in Leonard’s ear, before the Qyshag could intervene, before they could get close enough to hear, “it’s already on. It’s a tracking chip. Keep it, Leonard.”

Spock heard the doctor gasp against him. The fingers pressed against his own trembled, but they closed around the tracking chip. It disappeared under the doctor’s sleeve.

The adrenaline left Spock in a rush. They said nothing more. They didn’t look at each other.

The First Nephew’s hand suddenly curled around the doctor’s scruff, pulling him back and on his feet. McCoy cried out in surprise. “Enough,” they snarled, bending his head back like he was an unruly beast. “He looks good enough to live. No more games, Healer. We go, now.”

The doctor tried to protest, mumbling about concussions and trauma aftereffects. The First Nephew ignored him, and pushed him before them, towards the tent flaps. They were still holding McCoy by his neck, digging nails in the skin. There were bruises about his throat.

He could still feel the pressure of the doctor’s fingers against his own, and the echo of his mind behind them.

He would have stared until the doctor was out of sight, but a foot slammed in his stomach. He coughed, this time not forcing it in the least, and heard a raucous laugh that could belong to no one but the Lieutenant, and when the bright spots in his eyes disappeared, both the Lieutenant and the First Nephew were nowhere to be seen. And neither was Leonard.

The full impact of what he had done and was trying to do crashed into him.

The tracking chip was a new development of their security department, programmed to keep track of supplies distribution for the cargo ships delivering equipment to new colonies. Their security team had ordered a shipment of them in a desperate attempt to reduce the number of Enterprise missions which ended with the disappearance of the captain, the First Officer and the CMO in any possible combination. Its main feature was that it employed a rather old technology based on electromagnetic fields, similar to the sonars used on twentieth-century war ships. It was unreliable, and faulty. But there was a chance it would work even in this storm.

It was something.

Spock leant back against the tent pole. He saw the doctor’s throat marred in red and blue, his smile.

Keep him safe, Spock.

I am trying.

He kept looking at the tent flaps the doctor had disappeared past for minutes, each of them tickling by precisely in his head.

Till someone pushed them open.

***

When they reached the camp, Kirk knew it. Immediately.

The clusters of refugees were unharmed, still huddled around the synthetic-fires burning by their tents or tending to the sick and the hurt: but he saw parents holding a bit tighter on their younglings, kids sobbing softly, in the quiet way of children who have learnt not to be heard. The snow was still swirling around them, slapping clothes and faces, but silently now. The storm was finally blowing itself out. Or moving past, at least.

Above the shield set around the camp, the sky was a vast expanse of lead, scattered with blue-purple clouds far in the South.

Kirk didn’t even realize he had jumped down from Pardan’s sleigh: he simply found himself marching down the path of packed snow carved through the tents, goggles and scarf already off and dangling from his hand. He felt bile on his tongue at every look he met. The glazed ones or scared ones were not the worst – but there were Qyshag who looked at him with pity, and regret. They scared Kirk more than anything else.

The Kahashag’s soldiers and his Security team were trailing after him, and he heard Pardan asking a refugee what had happened. He realized he had been so out of it he hadn’t thought of doing the same with his own men till now. Goddamit, Kirk, he thought, spinning around and nearly crashing in a couple of Pardan’s warriors as he stopped, get a grip.

“They came in,” the Qyshag refugee was saying. They were small, and nimble – and attached to the stump protruding from their right arm Kirk recognized one of Bones’ regenerative devices, whirring softly. “The First Nephew, in the red and green of war, and their most trusted Lieutenants, too. They came with swords and rifles, asked us to give them McCoy the Healer. They said he had offended the First Nephew, greatly, and the Gods too, and that therefore he should be sacrificed.” The petite Qyshag looked at their hand, face pinched. “We refused, because McCoy did us many a good deed. We don’t think he offended the Gods – his own or ours. But they were trained, the warriors, and armed, and we… we have younglings here.” They made a sweeping gesture with one hand, to the three kids holding on their wais. “We had to protect them. The Captain’s men-in-red tried to stop them, but couldn’t. We let them enter. And they took the healer.”

That’s it. The thought it Kirk like a phaser blast in the chest. He sucked in a gulp of cold air, and tried to fight his own mind, the brasher, lonelier Kirk who sometimes still popped up in his head to speak cruel truths.

That’s it. That’s how you lose him, Jim-boy.

Pardan’s eyes flitted to him. Kirk realized he must have made some sort of strangled sound. He couldn’t care less. He staggered back, and swirled on his heel, and this time he was not marching but running through the camp and to their tent. On his way, he bumped in a spot of red – grabbed Giotto’s shoulder to attract his attention. “I think they’ve knocked our men out,” he heard himself say, “find them – see if they’re still alive. Check the camp.”

He didn’t wait to hear Giotto’s acknowledgment. He sprinted forward, pushing his legs to their limit, and finally reached the tent’s flaps, and flied through them.

He stopped one step in, breathing hard. Inside it was dark. A single light, white and clinically-clean, buzzed over the metal table on the right. There were blood stains on the table.

And there was Spock, slumped against their heap of medical and scientific equipment, hands tied high above his head to the tent pole, and staring at him with the closest thing to distraught Kirk had seen on his face since the day Vulcan burned to its death.

“Jim,” he said. Kirk rushed forward, dropping on his knees before him, fumbling with his numbed fingers. Spock’s wrists were enclosed in handcuffs which were most definitively not made of any regular metal he knew, and which had bitten enough in his skin to swell with green. Spock had fought, nails and teeth. Kirk hadn’t expected anything less.

His First Officer was trying to speak – but Kirk held out a hand and silenced him. “One sec, Spock,” he said, in a voice way raspier than he would have liked, “hold still.”

He rummaged in his parka, under the layers of thermic clothes that had caked with snow during their crossing. He slipped his phaser from his belt, switched it on, and aimed it at the upmost link of the handcuffs, trying to shield Spock’s face as much as possible. The shot was loud, and it left an unpleasant smell of burnt plastic in the air – but whatever the material the shacklers were made of, it shattered. The handcuffs plopped to the ground, broken, and Spock’s arms collapsed at his side. He massaged his wrists with shaking hands.

Spock’s face was still pale, muscles contracted in an expression so perfectly bland Jim was fairly sure it was paining him.

He didn’t bother trying to stand properly. He suspected his knees would buckle under him anyway after Spock said what he wanted to say.

“Captain,” Spock said quietly. “Approximately twenty minutes ago, Bar’leen, the First Nephew, surprised me and the doctor and gained unauthorized access to the tent. I was neutralized and restrained.” He brushed the bruised rings around his wrists once more, and something very human crossed his eyes. “The doctor… consented to follow them and their warriors in exchange of the promise that no harm would be done to the people in this camp. Or to me.”

Kirk swayed, hard. He clasped the tent pole not to fall. He could heart each of his heartbeats throb all the way up his teeth.

“I believe… I believe the First Nephew played a larger part in the Civil War than we had previously understood,” Spock added, slowly, carefully. “I believe he intends to kill the doctor, and use his death to rally up an army to directly challenge the Kahashag’s rule.”

Kirk clenched his teeth so hard they started to ache, to send electric thrills of pain straight to his brain. He desperately wanted Spock to stop speaking and making so much sense. He forced himself not to snap, not to unravel – not yet. But it was hard, so fucking hard.

Somewhere in the back of his skull, the younger, crueler Kirk laughed in petty delight.

I told you so. This is how you lose him.

“How is Bones?” he asked instead.

Spock went very still. They both heard footsteps outside, Pardan and their soldiers’ voices approaching, but didn’t tear their gaze off each other for one second. “During the fight in the Kahashag’s tent, the doctor had sustained more severe injuries than we had thought,” he finally answered. “Shortly after your departure he collapsed, and after my examination and his evaluation, we realized there was a cardiac tamponade. It is a condition – “

“I know what it is,” Kirk interrupted him, harsher than he intended. He remembered a lazy evening in their academy room, Bones half-drunk and blabbering about trauma-induced cardio-pulmonary conditions while balancing a pile of Cheetos on his nose, and felt a pang in his chest.

Spock gave a nod. “We were unable to communicate with the Enterprise. We could not wait. I… performed the required operation. It was successful.” He moved closer. He suddenly leant forward, brushing Kirk’s elbow, eyes wide. “Jim, the doctor is still alive, but his conditions are critical. If he sustains more manhandling, or stress, or both his physique could… it could still very well collapse.”

Kirk knew exactly what Spock meant and wasn’t saying. Die, he told himself, he could still die, suffocating in his own blood, alone and hurting and scared.

Jim felt himself shaking with rage. He welcomed it. He welcomed it, and grasped at it, and realized that if one thing was going to prevent him from falling in a million pieces, it was that anger. He thought of his two best friends, cut off from any help and comfort, one bleeding on a table and the other having to save his life. He saw the way Spock was favoring his left side, in the silent, discrete way of his, and could imagine the way he had been neutralized – while they grabbed Leonard and threatened him and got out of him that foolish, oh-so-Bones promise. Kirk thought about all of this, and descended into his anger, in the calm knowledge that, if it came to it, he would simply walk out of that tent, and hunt down the First Nephew on his own, and tear them to pieces, and not stop till Bones’s heart stopped too. And not even then.

James Kirk had never presumed himself above vengeance.

He looked at Spock’s white, stern face, elfin and terrible in that white light, and wondered if he was thinking very different thoughts.

“We need to get him back, Spock.”

Pardan and the Kahashag’s soldiers pushed open the tent’s flaps. The general approached them, taking in everything with their colorless, clever eyes – and nodded to Spock. “First Officer,” they greeted. Their hand had slipped around the hilt of the curved blade at their side. “We have gathered more information. It was indeed the First Nephew that took the doctor, and they and their own had sleighs, and fresh beasts. A child told me the doctor was injured the last time they saw him.”

“It is true,” Spock answered. “He is injured – severely. We may not have much time.”

Silence. Pardan said nothing, as they usually did, but their face morphed without changing – showing the same stern compassion Kirk had seen before the Pass of the Sanctuary. He couldn’t stand it. Not now.

He rose to his feet, hoping his legs wouldn’t shake. They didn’t. “General, you have any idea where Bar’leen could be taking Bones?” he asked. “I mean, if he wanted to get back at him for the fight he could have simply…” he trailed off, words stuck in his throat.

Pardan shook their head. “They don’t want to simply kill him, Captain. They want to make an example of him – a sacrifice, and a public one. They will return to the Kahashag’s Army, but not to the camp. They’ll go to the Akhramak.”

One of the soldiers flinched. They muttered, softly, “The Blood Stone.”

Kirk knew what they were talking about. There was a stone, two miles from the ruler’s permanent winter camp, red as human and Qyshag blood, on which enemy leaders and criminals and slaves had been sacrificed for ages, and each time the stone would start to hum, a low throbbing sound reverberating through the ground for miles and miles, warning people justice had been brought upon their land. Almost no execution had taken place at the Stone since the current Kahashag seized power – killings taking place mainly on the battlefield – but there were still plenty of Qyshag who remembered them, and would recognize the stone’s humming.

It was all so wrong it sounded like a joke. Kirk let his mind give a brief, startled cry. Oh God – oh, God.

“They will go back through the Pass?” he asked out loud, and felt as if he was contemplating himself from outside, well past his skin.

Again, Pardan shook their head. “No – they’re too clever not to know the Kahashag will have the Pass guarded, ready to jump on them. They’ll go back through the dangerous way. Across the Western Lakes.”

“Why are they dangerous?”

“Because winter is coming to its end, Captain Kirk. The lakes are large, and the sleighs heavy. No one can be sure that the ice will hold.”

Kirk cursed. Turning in one, fluid motion, he slammed his boot against the clutter of PADDs and bags behind him. The air filled with the racket of metal and fabric, as equipment rattled at the impact or rolled to the ground. Kirk kicked at the pile again, and again, and cursed louder. He felt a tightness in his throat, and stopped only because he knew that if he went on he would burst into tears.

“Okay – okay.” He ran a hand through his hair. They were damp with sweat. “Is there any way to beat them to the Stone? Any shortcut?”

“None that wouldn’t get us killed.”

“Of fucking course there isn’t – okay, okay. Then we’ll go after them, across the Lakes. They left roughly twenty minutes ago, we can still catch up with them.”

“There are more than seven lakes, captain,” Pardan replied. “each entangled with the others and full of treacherous rocks and swamps. There are more than fifteen safe trails through them. If we don’t know which of them the First Nephew took, finding them will prove… difficult.”

James Kirk was not breathing. He felt his rage crawl up his throat, nearly choke him. His palms tingled, and he ached to just jump on Pardan and beat the hell out of them, because they had dared to tell him they could not make it, that he was too stupid – too useless – to find Bones. He rubbed both hands across his face, feeling the damp leather of his gloves against heated cheeks. He closed his eyes.

“Fuck,” he whispered, gasping, “fuck fuck fuck...”

“This,” Spock said, suddenly, “this is not completely correct, General. We may know where they are.”

Kirk’s eyes snapped open. He could still feel blood pumping against his fingertips.

“…What do you mean, Spock?” he asked in a breath of a voice, as if speaking too loudly would make Spock’s words disappear.

“Before they could take the doctor with them, I deceived them.” Spock pushed back on his feet, flinching as his bruised wrists bent and twisted, and straightened to his full height. There was a faraway look in his eyes, as if he was seeing things that were not there. “I managed to get close enough to the doctor, and slipped a tracking chip in his hand. It’s part of the new Security equipment – and based on a variation of an old Terran technology, employing electromagnetic waves to reveal objects. It’s still untested, and I do not know how much the storm could compromise its efficacy, but.” Spock hesitated. He licked his lips. “But he took it, Captain. It’s activated. And there’s a chance we can track them down.”

Kirk didn’t answer. He looked at Pardan, met their gaze. He looked at Spock. He let his eyes sweep over the Qyshag warriors, to his own red shirts – to the sliver of cold, leaden sky visible through the flaps of the tent, where the storm was slowly fading into a calm night.

There’s no no-win scenario.

“Then off to the Lakes, people,” he said. “We’re still in the game.”

***

The swamps seemed to stretch forever.

It was cold, here out in the badlands: the storm wasn’t raging as hard as before, but the wind was still cold enough to slap cheeks and drive ice in your eyes. The air burned the lungs: it smelled like snow, and fresh waters, and winter, and it rolled across the plains and the foothill crevices like waves of an invisible ocean.

They had stopped at the edge of the swamps: Leonard saw huge lumps of grey and pale blue and pale green, interspersed with glittering patches of frozen water. They reflected the sky, and the clouds moving through it. There were no animals in sight. All was silent – except for the irregular, rustling cracks of ice, or the slight splash of a patch of snow plopping in the water.

The Lieutenant that had kicked Spock in the tent was crouched by the sloping shore of the first lake, and was scanning it. They had pushed their protective goggles up on the forehead, and squinted as a gust of wind sent a spray of snow across their face.

“The ice’s melting, my liege,” they said. “There’s no safe route, not right across it. We have to take one of the long paths.”

The First Nephew’s face paled with rage, and they got off the sleigh. The chain bobbed and tensed with them, and Leonard felt it tear at his arms – and had barely the time to curl on himself before being dragged down. He fell on the ground, hard, on his left side. The impact exploded across his body. His heart raced in response.

He couldn’t hold back a whimper, but hoped they wouldn’t notice it. He wasn’t even sure he would have the strength to scream properly.

A tug on the chain. His eyes snapped open. He didn’t realize he had closed them.

“Get up, Healer! I’ve already gone through enough trouble for you without having to drag you around like a skinned beast.”

Leonard gritted his teeth. Still, he slowly shuffled one elbow under himself, and pushed against the ice with his bare hands, and somehow, somehow managed to crouch on the ground. The effort nearly made him puke. He looked up, and saw his captor’s sharp fangs bared in a grin.

“Look at you – shaking so hard I hear your teeth chatter,” the First Nephew said. “All blue and white from cold. I do wonder how your lot survived for so long, out in the chilled depths of space.”

Leonard said nothing, but he lifted his chin, staring them in the eye, as he clutched the carvings on the sleigh and initiated the slow, painful process of hauling himself on his feet.

One of the Qyshag generals, a youth with a thin, nervous face and pale tresses tumbling down their shoulders, stared at him. There was pity in their eyes. Leonard stared back until they lowered their head.

They were right, the bastards. His uniform was still shredded, baring stomach and chest where Spock had cut through it. His parka must still be in the tent, forgotten. When the First Nephew’s band left for the badlands west of the camp and he was thrown in their leader’s sleigh like a sack of not-particularly quality potatoes, Leonard had been too busy asking for assurance, for proofs that no harm would be brought upon his companions or the good people seeking shelter. He had gotten a slap on the head for it, and a split lip.

You’re such an ass sometimes, Len. He had touched ice with bare hands for less than thirty seconds, and the skin was already red and smarting – threatening to open splinters. Angry, violent shivers rolled through his body. They had nothing to do with the gentle shuddering easily comforted by a good ol’ pile duvet wrapped around your shoulders and a shot of Romulan mulled cider, and everything to do with a body starting to shut down, and trying desperately to jolt its systems awake. He pulled close the tattered remains of his uniform. There was a blue shade of hypothermia to his fingers, his chest. It seemed to grow at every shiver, closing on his warmth – on his heart.

He thought he had never had so cold in his entire life. If there was still a chance to get out of this mess, Leonard decided, he would straight-up refuse to follow Jim into any mission involving planets with less than semi-tropical weather conditions, his word.

And there is. At that, his heart stumbled for a reason that had nothing to do with fluids and broken ribs. There is a chance. Maybe. Maybe.

Unseen by the First Nephew and their soldiers, his fingers curled around Spock’s device, pressed safely against the inside of his sleeve.

He wasn’t sure if he should chalk it up to delirium, but Leonard could swear he could hear it whirring, sending its signal across miles and miles of ice and rock and snow.

Find me, find me.

The Qyshag were discussing. The First Nephew spat to the ground, and let out a growl, snarling through their fangs. “We can’t take one of the long paths,” they roared. The Lieutenant seemed to be trying to make themselves as small as possible. “We’ll have the Kahashag’s pets on our tail soon enough, they’re bound to know where we are headed to. I can almost feel their filthy breaths on my neck already – we don’t have time for the long paths!”

The First Nephew spat again, and their soldiers flinched. Leonard was still clutching the sleigh railing. The pair of hounds itched to it huffed through their noses with discomfort. He wasn’t sure if it depended on his own alien smell, or their owner’s temper.

“Then what do you suggest, my liege?” asked the young general, their voice almost swept away by the wind.

Bar’leen had their fangs still bared, snarling at the rumbling sky, at the marshes, probably at fate too. Leonard’s hands clasped the sleigh wood so hard the carvings were leaving prints in his palms.

He had met so many people, seen so many tragedies. He could recognize a person who has nothing left to lose.

“We cut through it, then,” the First Nephew said, “straight across the lakes.”

“But the ice – it’s thin, my liege, thinner than it should be to carry – “

“Then we’ll be fast,” snarled the First Nephew. “The storm is almost over – engines should be fully functional soon. We go with the hounds on the first stretch, as they recharge. We use the radar to localize the weakest patches. We power through it as much as we can. But we’ll cut through the lakes.”

The young general was shaking. “It’s madness,” they whispered, and their voice caught midway.

“No, Kvasir – it’s the only way,” the First Nephew replied. “And this is final. Prepare the engines. Check on the power. You all, to the sleighs – now.”

The general, Kvasir, nodded, and shivered.

Bar’leen seemed to take notice of it. They seemed concerned. Leonard’s sight was already growing hazy from the effort of standing, but still he saw as the First Nephew approached young Kvasir, and brushed their cheek.

They whispered something, in the severe, musical accents of the Qyshag language. Kvasir nodded, looking even more frightened. Bar’leen brushed back a tress from their thin, pinched face – and there was infinite care in their touch.

Leonard forced himself to breathe. Fuck, he thought, fuck .

He knew he should keep his mouth shut. He couldn’t.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he blurted out. He had aimed for one of his trademark growls, but his voice sounded more like a desperate wheeze. “You don’t have to carry on with this madness – you do know that, right? There’s still hope. There’s still… a chance.” His eyes flitted to Kvasir. “For all of us.”

The change was immediate, startling. The First Nephew snapped their teeth, head twisting toward Leonard so fast their hair whipped behind them. Gone was the care, the softness, the warmth Leonard had glimpsed. It was his captor all over again, the cruel avatar of a burning newborn world. Their hand curled around the end of his chain, and Leonard stiffened. “Save your breath, Healer,” they hissed. “You really think me so gullible?”

“I’m… not lying,” Leonard gasped. A sudden jolt of pain rushed up his side, and he clawed at his chest, coughing. “You… you haven’t killed any of my people, yet. My-my Captain is fierce, but not bloodthirsty. He would not require your death. You’ll – you’ll still have to respond for your crimes against your people, of course.” As he was saying that Leonard could almost hear Spock’s disapproving voice telling him there was no purpose in antagonizing an individual holding his own fate in hand, but Leonard simply told the Spock-voice to shut the hell up. “But your Kahashag will be just, I’m sure. If you give yourself over willingly, you could still save your soldiers. You could still save the people you care about.”

Leonard didn’t look at Kvasir this time. He didn’t need to.

Bar’leen’s face turned into stone. “It’s too late,” they spat, “and you’re just trying to save your life, Healer.”

“In part,” Leonard said sincerely. “But I’m also… rather opposed to the idea of young people losing their lives for no good reason.”

The Spock-voice in his head sighed. Leonard told it to knock it off, and that it knew he was right.

And if I’m gonna die, I will damn well go down as I please.

He coughed again; when he rubbed his mouth his hands came off smeared with blood. Still, for a moment it seemed as if his words had gotten through. The First Nephew’s face contorted, emotions flashing across it. They turned to Kvasir, to their scared eyes, their lovely tresses. They hesitated.

Something different rippled in their gaze – something close to despair, fierce and bottomless. Beyond hope.

Leonard’s heart plummeted.

He heard them let out a roar, a deep, growling thing of pure anger. The chain tightened around his arms – and suddenly steel-like fingers closed on his nape, bending him backwards, extending his neck almost to the breaking point. His back hit the front of the sleigh with a thud. The hounds barked uneasily.

Leonard felt the First Nephew’s heavy breaths rush against his throat, and gasped.

“It’s too late, Healer,” Bar’leen hissed to him, and him alone. “Do not mistake my words – you’ll die today. Either on the ice or on the Blood Stone. You can’t escape the paths fate decided.” The grip on Leonard’s neck tightened, leaving nail marks. A pause. “No one of us can.”

Then the Qyshag released him. He dropped on his knees, coughing. The First Nephew rounded the sleigh’s side to take the reins. They grabbed Leonard’s arm, and dragged him up beside them.

“Kvasir, go to your sleigh,” they snapped. To Leonard, it seemed to come from an unmeasurable distance. His head was full of booming thunders, beating in his temples, his bones. He realized he was slumping down the seat, his cheek pressed against half-frozen wood.

He closed his eyes. The only thing that still felt real was the small tracking chip tucked in his sleeve.

Through the thunders in his head, Leonard heard the First Nephew call another order, their soldiers answering with yells. The reins snapped like gunshots. The sleigh rattled, and jumped forward, and the scaled hounds roared and growled, and already they had leapt past the sloping shore, and down on the fragile ice of the Lakes. The impact tore a whimper from Leonard. The wind whipped at his face as they rushed forward.

Leonard knew something about those lakes, of that he was certain. Seven lakes, spreading on a territory of miles and miles, standing out in grey-white-green shades against the conference hall holo-screens. Things lurked in the deep of those lakes. Treacherous paths ran across them, hundreds of silent deaths waiting at their edges. He felt himself slip in and out of consciousness, on the cold seat of the First Nephew’s sleigh. Despite the roar of speed and wind, he was sure he could hear the whispers of melting ice – the thousand unseen cracks of snow giving way to water and spring.

It’s coming, he thought, confusedly, the melting ice – it’s coming for me. It rang strange, and perfectly true. He noted he didn’t feel cold anymore, and knew the fact should worry him more. He considered hypothermia. And fever, too. Have I gone delirious?

Possibly. But the cracks and whispers were following them, and they were coming. Hundreds of tiny, silent deaths.

Time passed. Through half-closed eyelids, Leonard saw spots of green and grey rushing past, rocks jutting out of the frozen lake like teeth or crumbled towers.

He wondered what Spock would have to say, about those teeth-towers. He tried to imagine his pale, severe face alive with focus, muttering “fascinating” under his breath, and found he could in fact paint it in his mind, perfectly. He wondered if that was really it. He wondered if he would never hear him saying “fascinating” ever again – and never see Uhura fixing her ponytail at her station, Johanna’s toothy smile, the dawn of some nameless solar system watched from the screens of the bridge by Jim’s side.

Have I gone delirious?

He was still listening to the whispers, and the cracks, and the peculiar heat of fever was melting his bones. It was for all these reasons he didn’t immediately notice the bells.

They were ringing bells, giving the jingle of the small, silver ones his mother used to festoon their Christmas tree with, merry and high and silvery. But his mother’s bells had been twenty, thirty bells at best: now it sounded like there were dozens of them, hundreds of them, coming closer and closer, humming at their back.

Something stirred in the back of Leonard’s mind, pushing past the heat and the fever and the cold. He couldn’t grasp it, though. He couldn’t grasp it, until he heard a whispered curse pass through the First Nephew’s teeth, and the jolt of the hounds coming to a brutal halt.

The reins clacked again. The sleigh swirled on itself, and stopped, facing the lake shore they had left behind.

Leonard pried his eyes open. It took him three tries – but when he did, his heart stuttered. He straightened against the seat. He curled his hands, his frozen, bound hands around the sleigh railing, and if he wasn’t a surgeon, they would be shaking like leaves.

He leant forward, and felt blood flushing his cheeks, and whispered, in a single, trembling breath:

“They’ve found me,” Leonard said. “They’ve really found me.”

The ringing of bells was growing louder, echoing off the sky, the stones, the wind. Roughly two hundred feet in front of them, a red line ran across the expanse of the lake. The line was moving, and as it approached it became apparent it was not a red line at all – but a row of carved sleighs, in purple and green and red and yellow, and there were warriors and weapons on them, the metal of rifles glinting sharply in the pale winter light. Threads of small brass bells curled around their railings, jingling madly.

The Qyshag ride into battle to the sound of bells, Leonard’s mind finally recalled. To confuse enemies, so they wouldn’t know where they were coming from, and to instill fear in their hearts.

Before the others, a single sleigh rode on – with the royal banner of the Kahashag flapping behind it, and painted in the blue that only leaders were allowed to bear.

In it, beside a tall Qyshag warrior, were Captain James Kirk, and First Officer Spock.

The First Nephew roared, in anger and fear. “No no no,” they whispered, more to themselves than to anyone else. “it makes no sense – we should have more time. They shouldn’t know we’re cutting through the lakes – it’s too dangerous – they couldn’t have known it, it would only figure if…”

The First Nephew’s voice trailed off, and their silence felt heavier, a living thing. Leonard felt that silence, their attention shifting to him, taking in every breath and every shiver and the careful, careful gesture with which he instinctively covered the sleeve housing Spock’s tracking chip.

In the same moment, the chip gave a long, chirping beep. And glowed yellow.

The Qyshag said nothing. They ran their nails down the side of the sleigh, chipping the wood. They swirled towards Leonard, and roughly grabbed his arm – yanking it towards them and pushing back the sleeve. He tried to pull it back, but it was too late.

The tracking chip glowed against his palm, humming and exposed.

The First Nephew looked at him with the glazed eyes of a cornered beast. “You miserable maggot,” they snarled. He saw spit spurt from their mouth. “You’ve brought them upon us – you.”

They twisted Leonard’s arm further, and he let out a cry. The First Nephew lifted him, as easily as they would have down with a dead rabbit, and hauled him out of the sleigh. “They may get you back, Healer,” they roared in his face, “but in pieces.”

Leonard sucked in a gulp of air, trying not to flinch. His mind felt heavy and swimming with fever. He half-expected to be thrown across the ice, to crash against the sharp spears of stone protruding from the lake. He half-expected for his shoulder to come loose and pop out of its socket.

Instead, the First Nephew roughly put him back on his feet, and slammed him against their chest. They were still crushing his wrist. A flash of silver flickered in the air, and the cold of their curved blade pressed against his carotid.

***

The sleighs were flying.

Kirk had seen the tundra flash past him in a blur of white and grey, the last spurts of snow slapping against faces and coats in the rushing vacuum caused by the engines. He had thought the sleighs had been fast before, drawn by mighty hounds that would have put to shame a twentieth-century horror movie: now that they had finally managed to turn on the engines, they were unstoppable.

Qyshag engines were different from the one employed in Federation worlds: they were sleeker, smaller, and utterly silent. The only way Kirk could know they were moving was the low humming throbbing through the sleigh husk and up his fingers, and the ringing of the bells draped around the railing. A whole army could come down on their enemies and surround them, in those sleighs, and no one would realize it till they found a rifle pointed at their head – or a bullet hole in their guts. Death could come in silence, on Qyshag. And that’s why to show fairness, or to show power, the largest armies announced themselves with bells.

The ride was exciting, and heart-stoppingly enjoyable: in other circumstances, he had no doubt he would be howling with joy, pestering Pardan to let him lead the thing for the tiniest tiny ride.

Instead, he had ridden in silence since they had sailed off, tightly coiled around the front railing and scanning the horizon. Spock had been at his side for the whole time, the tracking chip firmly clutched in his hands. It let out a long, high-pitched chirp, and Kirk had immediately thought it felt as if that chirp was louder than winds, louder than storms, leading them to Bones and his still beating heart.

Because it got to still be beating. That’s the only way it could be.

When the sleighs leapt effortlessly from the shore and landed on the frozen surface of the Lakes, Kirk’s hands were so contracted and frozen it hurt to flex his fingers. He cast a look at Spock, still sitting, like him, still on the edge of the seat, like him, and with his eyes trained on the screen of his device.

His face betrayed nothing, but there were tiny cracks running across the tracking sensor that had not been there before.

“Tell me something witty, Spock,” he asked, half-desperately, “tell me some of the witty silly things we say when we’re in deep shit and have no idea how to get out, and then we get out nonetheless.”

Spock regarded him as if he was going vaguely mad. Kirk couldn’t exclude it himself. “Why, Captain?”

Kirk’s mouth felt filled with concrete. “Because otherwise I’ll start to think we’re not getting out of this.”

Spock opened his mouth, closed it. He said nothing. Kirk looked away.

Then his First Officer suddenly grabbed his sleeve, pointing at something in front of them.

“Jim,” he said. “Jim, we’ve found them.”

Kirk’s head whipped up, following Spock’s finger. He already knew what he would see. It still hit him like a fist against his teeth.

In front of them, still little more than bright spots of colors against the ice and the rock and the swamps, a small team of Qyshag were waiting by their sleighs – some standing on the lake surface, some still holding their hounds’ reins, some with one foot on the ground and their hands on their blades, hesitating. The First Nephew was standing before them all, their face blazing with pure, unadulterated fury.

Pressed against their chest, slumping against the arm holding him back, was Bones.

Or better, Kirk knew he had to be Bones. He recognized the scraps of blue uniform, his hair, the general shape of him – but put together the pieces simply didn’t make sense. He thought of Leonard, his Leonard, and stared harder, and there was a general wrongness…

“Oh God,” Kirk whispered, voice hoarse, “Bones.”

What have they done to you?

His First Officer’s hand was still on his arm. Jim felt a shiver running up his skin, and didn’t know who was shaking, him or Spock.

They were closer now, and subsequently they had a better view of Leonard as well. There was a Qyshag blade pressed against his throat, hilt clutched in the First Nephew’s knuckles: it pressed just too lightly not to draw blood, hard enough to promise it. Leonard was so pale he edged on grey, eyes sunken deep in purple-shaded sockets – hands bound in front of him, wrapped in thick silver chains. He looked as if he would never manage to stand, without Bar’leen’s arm holding him there. He was wearing nothing but his uniform, and through the tattered remains of blue fabric Kirk could see his chest all the way to the navel. Bruises. Endless bruises, bright red and blue and purple, and cold-bleached skin, rising and falling with each careful breath. They were still far, too far, but Kirk could see him shaking, and that breathing pained him. There was a fresh scar running down his left side, just under the ribs. He knew Spock’s needle had passed through it.

Kirk felt ill.

The Kahashag’s sleighs came to a stop, kicking up fans of glittering ice, and the blade against Bones’s throat ghosted over his skin. He flinched.

For a long moment, out on the barren badlands, no one said anything. Kirk wasn’t sure he would be able to.

He could just stare at his best friend. His best friend, his oldest friend – Bones who nearly threw up on him when sick with shuttle-rattling and grief, Bones who had made sure to wrap him in blankets when he fell asleep on PADDs (finishing his History of Federation homework too, if necessary), Bones who had brought him back from the dead and asked nothing in exchange. Absurdly, Jim ached to fix that uniform, to brush away the smudge of frozen mud on his cheek, tuck back the lock of hair falling on his forehead, as if fixing that would fix everything. Every bruise, every wheezing breath seared in Kirk’s mind like white-hot metal, and he welcomed it – welcomed the pain and the guilt. He felt himself jolting forward, to attack, to save, to apologize, and only Spock’s firm grasp on his arm stopped him.

But Bones saw it. He understood. Good grief, he looked barely conscious, red spots of fever flushing his face, and still he understood. With a mighty effort, he craned his head to look at Kirk. “Jimbo,” he croaked.

“Bones,” Kirk whispered.

“Captain Kirk.” The First Nephew’s voice made him flinch, as if everything that wasn’t Leonard’s broken body – nothing but the mixed, heartbreaking things flashing across his face – had evaporated from Kirk’s mind. It probably had. “I can’t say it’s a pleasure to meet you here. As you can see, we’re rather busy at the moment.” Bar’leen’s silvery eyes flitted to Kirk’s left, where Pardan was still sitting with the reins in hand, and they hissed. “And I see you brought back-up, too. The Kahashag’s whore, no less.”

Pardan’s face stayed perfectly expressionless. Still, Kirk felt Spock stiffening at his side, and even his psychically-useless human brain picked a tightening of forces – a jolt of ice-cold rage throbbing from the general like circles in the water. “Bar’leen, First Nephew of the Kahashag, Second of the Children of the Sky,” they said, sternly, “you are surrounded. You are accused of treason. You have no choice but to surrender yourself.”

Kirk knew, distantly, that he should say something. He was still a captain, he was still a diplomat – he was still James Tiberius Kirk, and his best chances to get his men – all of them – out of this still lay in quick wits and quicker tongue. But his mind felt blank – numbed, every part of it glued to Leonard’s shaking figure. His best friend raised a chained hand to his throat, trying to ease the pressure of the blade. Kirk noted how pale his fingers looked, how blue. They were blue with cold, and he suddenly thought of Bones there, half-naked in front of strangers and snow-spattered winds, and couldn’t hold his tongue.

“You didn’t even give him something for the cold,” he hissed, “you bastards.”

Through the hand still clasped on his arm Kirk felt Spock growing even more stiff, but he didn’t reprimand him. Bar’leen arched their eyebrow. He cast a passing glance at the man they were holding at sword’s edge against their shoulder, as if they had very nearly forgotten about him, and then they curved lips in a grin that managed to make them nightmarishly ugly. “I’d recommend you not to waste too much energy on this one,” they drawled out, “considering in a few hours he’d be dead anyway.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Kirk’s head filled with red and white. He found himself leaping over the sleigh’s railing before realizing it – wind cutting at his face and fingers already clutched tightly around the phaser’s handle. He had never used the death mode, but knew how to engage it – he knew how to set it with a flick of his thumb. He did.

Something like a hard, warm press caught his shoulder, maneuvering him back in a single smooth motion. Kirk hit the carved side of the sleigh with his back. He struggled against the hold, body turned in a tight knot of nerves and tightly-coiled tendons, till Spock’s face shifted in his field of vision. He had never looked so pale. His eyes burned with dark.

Kirk stopped struggling. He was breathing raggedly, and the First Nephews’ grin showed more teeth.

His blood hammered through his body, down to the finger still curled around the phaser’s trigger.

“Do not waste your vigour on this, captain,” called the First Nephew. “I assure you, warrior to warrior - it’d be nothing but a lost battle. Your Healer is doomed, with or without my interference. I can hear his body screaming in this very moment. I can hear his heart fluttering uselessly against my blade.”

Bones shivered, and there was a quaver of fear in his chin. Kirk gritted his teeth. “You piece of shit,” he said, every caution and diplomacy pulverized in his head, “you absolutely piece of shit.”

“Captain.”

Kirk whipped around to bark at Spock to shut up and let him beat the bastard to his heart’s content. Something in his First Officer’s face made the words die on his lips.

“Spock,” he asked, dropping his voice to a whisper, and acutely aware of how much he sounded like a scared child, “it’s bullshit, right? It’s all bullshit?”

Spock grew paler and his eyes darker, a sketch in black and white. “The Doctor’s physique has sustained a disturbing amount of stress in an extremely short amount of time. And that is not considering the original severity of the damage.”

Kirk felt sure he was about to throw up. “Spock,” he urged, pleaded.

“I believe the Doctor still has chances to survive, Jim,” Spock said. He paused. “But I also believe that any more trauma could worsen his conditions behind my medical abilities. Manhandling, hypothermia. He may not survive any of it.”

Kirk’s mouth felt parched.

“But what…” He took a breath, tried again, “how can we know what…”

“We cannot know,” Spock answered softly, “it could be anything. Anytime.”

The wind was slowing down, carrying the cracks and whispers of melting ice. From across the seven-feet stretch of ground separating them, Kirk could feel a gentle stare against his nape, a familiar tug. Leonard was looking at him, chin high. He knew what Spock was saying. Of course he knew. He was the best CMO of the Federation, after all.

“I’m so sorry, Jim,” Bones croaked. He coughed, and swayed on his feet.

Kirk’s chest tightened. “What the Hell are you saying, Bones,” he rasped, and he was one step from bursting into tears, ugly sobs that would leave his face blotched and smeared with snot. He took Leonard’s words, made them his own – sent them in the right direction, this time. I am sorry, he thought, desperately. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.

It’s all right, Bones mouthed, and fuck it, fuck it all, he was trying to smile.

It’s really fucking not, Bones, Kirk mouthed back, with feeling.

“What do you mean to do, Bar’leen?” Pardan was saying. They jumped down the sleighs in one sleek motion, packed snow crunching under their boots. On both sides, soldiers picked up their rifles – freed an inch of blade from their chiseled scabbards. Giotto’s men slipped off their sleighs too.

“I mean to bring the Healer to the Blood Stone,” the First Nephew said. “I mean to show our people what they should remember – what they are losing following the Kahashag and kneeling at their beloved Federation’s feet.”

“This is delusion,” Pardan replied coldly. “This is madness. You are not going to make it to the Blood Stone, child. You have five soldiers. I have twenty. The ice is weak. Give yourself up, now.”

“Never.” The First Nephew snarled, hatred contorting their face. A trickle of blood trickled down Leonard’s throat. “I’d rather die here, fighting, than surrender to that crazy old idiot and the harlot warming their bed. I’ll bleed out on the ice of the Seven Lakes, here and now, if only to show my people the truth of my ways, and to inspire them not to succumb. I’ll die now, for them all, for my gods, for my land.”

A muscle feathered in Pardan’s jaw.

“This is horseshit, you brat,” they roared. “You’re doing it out of ambition, and nothing else. You know you’re too immature and too bloody foolish for the Kahashag’s chair, and couldn’t stand it. You’re drawing blood for no one but yourself, Bar’leen. Do not drag my people or my Gods in this tomfoolery.”

Pardan’s blade was suddenly in their hand. It was sleek, and long, and curved at the end like every Qyshag sword: in the steel-gray light, silver carvings of beasts and scaled spires gleamed off its sides. The blade was beautiful, but the handle was well-worn, and it was clear it had seen many battles, many deaths. The general pointed it at the First Nephew, quietly, and behind them the soldiers shifted on their feet, braced themselves.

On the other side, a young Qyshag with pale, pale hair choked back a sob. Their rifle trembled in their hands.

“I will kill you gladly, Pardan,” the First Nephew snarled.

“So will I,” the general said.

Jim had the distinct impression that time was slipping past like sand through a giant hourglass, and he was trying to slow it down with a child-sized shovel. He was scared – shitless. He was chilled, to the bone, and shaking with helpless energy at the same time.

He had to get Bones away from the bastard before Pardan lost his aplomb and sliced their guts open. He wouldn’t put past the First Nephew to use Leonard as a human shield, or to cut his throat out of pure spite. Maybe he could make a rush for him. Grab him and run before anyone had a chance to realize what was going on – his phaser already in hand. Spock would still be here, on the General’s side – still safe. Maybe he could –

A tug on his sleeve. Kirk turned, and saw his First Officer’s face – still pale, eyes still black. They were fixed on their enemies, but not on Bones, nor on the First Nephew. They were staring at an empty spot on the right side of the field.

Kirk frowned, frustrated. “Spock, what – “

“Something doesn’t add,” whispered Spock, urgently. “Something is wrong.”

“What?”

“Their team,” he said, nodding to where the First Nephew’s warriors were standing by their sleighs. “I counted six of them when we were approaching. Now they’re five.” Spock clenched his jaw. Kirk could feel his gaze dart around, prodding and searching, the muscles in his back shaking with the effort of keeping still. “One is missing. One is not here.”

Kirk shook his head. It was hard to think. He knew Spock was agitated, and knew it was bad, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember how to connect the dots.

One of Bar’leen’s soldier was not there. He was there before. Pardan was about to unleash their people on them, and their soldiers were better armed, faster, stronger. Pardan was still aiming the tip of their blade at the First Nephew’s throat.

Pardan was standing before them, alone – unshielded and exposed.

The answer deflagrated in Jim’s head like fireworks.

In that moment, Bones’s eyes flitted to his side, and widened. He swirled around, struggling against the grip on his chest.

“General,” he cried, “down!”

Surprise flashed across Pardan’s features – but they didn’t hesitate. They dropped on one knee, head tucked behind one arm and blade curved to grant maximum cover. At the same time, an electric boom echoed from their right.

A rifle bullet cut through the air, speeding just above their head, and went to crash in a rocky outcrop ten feet from them, tearing off chunks of it.

Kirk’s ears rang with the shot, the vibration rattling all the way to his teeth. The armies froze. Spock was a statue of steel and marble at his side.

In the deafening silence, Pardan leapt back on their feet, tore something off the bandolier strapped to their chest, and launched it with mortal precision in the direction the bullet had come from.

The small silver knife flied, and embedded in the missing First Nephew’s soldier’s chest with a soft thud. They fell in silence, sliding down the high stone they had hidden behind waiting for their occasion, and moved no more.

Red spread on the ice under them. Kirk smelled blood.

For a heartbeat, everything was still. It looked like a Qyshag tapestry – Bones gasping and wide-eyed, Pardan standing in front of their people, and Bar’leen, frozen with their blade and their hostage – with despair in their silvery eyes.

Then, time restarted with an almost audible pop. And all Hell broke loose.

Bones cried out. Kirk saw his knees buckle, and the First Nephew jumping on him – muscles bulging and fangs bared. Their blade flashed high, away from Leonard’s throat – but their fingers closed on his shoulder, making him scream. Something cracked, loudly. Bar’leen swept Bones off his feet, and tossed him to the ground. He let out a whimper. The First Nephew kicked him in the ribs, forcing him on his back – and slammed their boot against his clavicle.

Leonard screamed, high and raw, and nothing, nothing in the coldest corners and darkest crevices of that oxygen-less, unbearably cold universe would ever make Kirk’s heart break more than that scream.

“Do you really enjoy playing the Hero, Healer?” Bar’leen growled, towering over the limp, bloodied form of Bones. “Do you fucking enjoy ruining my plans? I’ll make you regret it. I’ll make you regret everything.”

Leonard didn’t answer. Kirk and Spock stared at him, not breathing, waiting for his chest to rise. Spock’s words echoed in the back of Kirk’s skull. He wondered if that was it. He wondered if the kick and the manhandling and the blow – the crack of Bones’s shoulder echoing in his bones, in loop – had pushed his body past salvation, made his heart give up.

But Bones sucked in a breath. He coughed – coughed blood, but coughed. He didn’t move and didn’t open his eyes, but he was breathing.

Kirk breathed too. And with a snap, his anger unfolded within him.

“Stay away from him,” he heard himself yell. Growl. “Stay away from him, or I’ll kill you.”

Bar’leen laughed. They took their foot off Leonard’s shoulder, and his left arm stayed limp – something in the angle of it looking very wrong. “You can’t, captain,” they drawled, “you’re not allowed to attack me or mine for vengeance. I know the Federation. I know your rules.”

Leonard forced one eye open. “Stay… stay back, Jim…” he wheezed. “Your… career…”

“Bones, please, shut the fuck up,” Kirk told him, as gently as possible. He bared teeth at the Qyshag. “The Federation may not do anything, fuckface,” he snarled back, “but I will.”

Bar’leen laughed again. Kirk watched them let their gaze sweep over him, and wasn’t sure they were seeing him at all. They took a step back, eyes glazed. “This ends now.”

They raised their blade. Kirk’s heart lurched forward, as if it wanted to leap out and go to help Bones single-handedly, and started slamming against his ribcage.

“No.”

Leonard’s tired gaze flitted upward – enough to glimpse the edge of the blade blazing in the light. His face filled with panic, and fear – and then, then with something softer. Quieter. Acceptance.

“No.”

The First Nephew shook their head – and their blade flashed high, high over their head, ready to slash down. Leonard dragged a chained hand to his chest, closed his eyes. Jim called his name, or maybe it was Spock, or both of them. Leonard took a long, silent breath, as if he was about to jump from the swimming pool trampoline, to see the curtains lift on Jojo’s Christmas play.

A memory. If I don’t make it out there, Jim, said Bones’s pensive, open face talking softly in the half-light of their favorite Terran bar, Take me home. In Georgia. It’s silly, but… put me there. Just in case.

Just in case.

Spock and Kirk were running. Jim felt the weight of the phaser in his hand, the low buzz of it charging. It was too late. It didn’t matter. He still raised it, and took aim, and roared in rage. Bar’leen didn’t care. They laughed. They brought down their blade, swift and unforgiving.

It was then Pardan’s shape rushed past them in a blur of red and azure hair, their own blade a flash of silver gone in the blink of an eye, and Bar’leen’s right wrist erupted in a fountain of crimson blood.

They didn’t scream. The sword fell to the ground, clanging against the ice. The First Nephew watched in horrified fascination at the blood flowing and drenching their sleeve, at the pulsing stump where their right hand had once been.

Pardan gracefully closed the distance between them and the First Nephew, pushing them back, away from Bones, and crushed the bloody lump of flesh of their severed hand under their heel.

Bar’leen did start screaming.

“Maybe they cannot kill you, brat,” Pardan said, very softly, “but I can.”

Then they lifted their free hand, gave a signal, and the moment the First Nephew’s soldiers rose blades and rifles and started shooting, Pardan’s warriors were on them.

***

The problem was, they all had forgotten about the cracks.

He hadn’t, though. He could still hear them, impossibly clear – the cracks and whispers and sighs of the lake, singing their soft wordless song, calling and taunting. Around him there was war, there were people screaming, blood spurting from the stump of the First Nephew’s arm – his friends screaming his name over and over – but right here, on the ground, there was nothing but the song of the lake. Ice melting. Water pooling against his cheek, his nape. And every sigh brought a crack, a vibration reverberating all the way to his body through the frozen expanse, like down the white back of a sleeping beast.

Leonard could feel it under his fingers, in the cold, in the voices of winter and wind.

It’s giving in. The ice is giving in.

Leonard stared up at the tangle of people and blades above him as if from eons of distance. He was weightless, and floating, and scared for Jim and Spock and Pardan too – but he was so tired.

It could have something to do with the pain. It didn’t take a doctor to realize his body was in shock. Air seemed too thin, too cold to make him function – he kept swallowing great gulps of it, his lungs making a rustling sound that reminded him of dried leaves, and he still felt like drowning. His collar was sticky with blood. Leonard didn’t dare to imagine how he looked from the outside. He suspected he would deem himself behind hope, and the thought scared him.

The pain radiating from his shoulder was excruciating. His arm was lying like a limp dead thing, wrapped in chains, nerves numb enough he could barely feel it – barely flex his fingers. He could still hear the loud pop of bones falling out of their sockets under the First Nephew’s boot, breaking and snapping under the pressure. It throbbed at the uneasy rhythm of his pulse. He had tried to loosen the knots in his body, to slow down blood and heart, but it wasn’t working.

The truth was he was burning, burning and dying, sprawled on the surface of a frozen lake, and the whispers wouldn’t leave him alone.

It’s giving in. The ice is giving in.

The First Nephew was screaming, unarticulated and raging. The lake surface rattled with steps, with the impact of swords and bullets. Leonard glimpsed Kirk’s gold head somewhere to the side. His breath itched – but one of Bar’leen’s general was already on Jim, blade drawn, and pushed him back once more. A moment later the general was collapsing in a heap, Spock’s hand still on their neck. Then Leonard lost them – behind a shield of limbs and weapons, people fighting and trying not to be killed. Not seeing them anymore distressed him. Not seeing them anymore was the first thing that managed to seep through fever, blood loss, the cursed ache in his shoulder, and to terrify him.

The ice whined and cracked. It did sound like a voice. Cold water was soaking the back of his shirt.

Leonard pushed against the ground, trying to roll on his side. The broken arm twisted and throbbed. His pulse spiked, stuttering erratically against his ribs. Leonard gasped, black gnawing at the edges of his vision. He didn’t even realize he had fallen back till he felt snow against his cheek.

He wanted to scream. The ice wouldn’t hold. It wouldn’t hold, and he had no way, no fucking way to warn the others.

It’s giving in.

A cry echoed from Leonard’s left.

He twisted his head toward it, blinking away black spots, and stiffened.

Kvasir was standing less than six feet from his arm. He was fighting a soldier - tall, wide-shouldered, wearing the purple-and-saffron sash of Pardan’s forces. Leonard saw Kvasir lift their sword to block a blow, but their hands were shaking so much they nearly lost their hold on the hilt. Pardan’s soldier roared in triumph, and slipped through their guard. Blood spurt from Kvasir’s side. The young General cried out, clasping the wound – but they still had time to see a second blow coming, and put their armored forearm between them and the sword.

From somewhere deep in the battle, the First Nephew called Kvasir’s name.

Kvasir looked so afraid, so unbearably young. Leonard watched them quiver and bent under Pardan’s warrior’s blows. He remembered the compassion in their eyes, the way they had leant in Bar’leen’s caress.

Crack, crack, the ice whispered.

Kvasir lashed out, cutting across the soldier’s cheek. The other Qyshag groaned, bent, and with a growl that exposed all their fangs like polished bone they swirled the sword in their hand, and shoved the heavy metal hilt in Kvasir’s chest. The kid whimpered, fell back. They hit the ground.

The cracks roared.

The ice thundered under Leonard’s back, and with an agonizing shriek, the lake opened under the young Qyshag’s weight.

The water below was impossibly dark – a gaping mouth of churning black waves. Leonard stared, mouth gaping and temples throbbing, as Kvasir’s body sank under the shards of shattered ice.

They disappeared in the water before they had a chance to scream. They came back to the surface a heartbeat later, sputtering and gasping, eyes so wide they looked colorless. They started clawing at the edge of the hole, nails rattling against the snow.

Leonard’s temples were hammering enough to make his body shake. The battle raged on, oblivious. He heard the First Nephew cry again – crying Kvasir’s name, and there was excruciating fear in that cruel voice. Hs eyes never left the kid in the cold dark hole.

Over the roaring of his body, of his own blood, Leonard made a list.

One, he counted. He couldn’t call out for help, and he wasn’t sure it would do any good anyway.

Two . Kvasir was less than five feet from his shoulder.

Three , Leonard thought, clenching his good hand, gulping down fear and pain and fever as something took over and filled his chest with warmth and rightness, three, five feet is a perfectly good distance to cover when crawling like a maggot.

Calling upon every scratch of strength still in his body, Leonard pushed against the ground, and turned himself on his stomach. His shoulder screamed. He blinked away tears. Clawing ice and snow, he started to drag himself toward the hole.

Kvasir was whimpering. Red blood tinged the water around him, and their nails left ridged marks in the ice, as ancient things and old currents started to drag them down.

Leonard crept on, shaking like a leaf with the effort. He felt a jolt through his breastbone, and it hurt, but it was okay.

It was okay, because Kvasir was still clinging to the edge, and when Leonard pushed himself one inch further with his good arm, he was suddenly within reach.

Someone shuffled at his back. Stopped dead in their tracks. “Bones!” cried a voice, anguished and angry. He didn’t listen. He couldn’t listen.

I’m sorry, Jim.

“Doctor!”

I’m sorry, Spock.

Leonard threw himself forward, every joint screaming, and grabbed at Kvasir’s arm.

The pull forward was immediate, and mighty. He found himself jolting across the ice, dragged by the same force holding Kvasir down. Before he could realize what was going on, his arms were already deep in the water. It was colder than anything Leonard had ever touched. It was so cold it burned, filling his veins. The Qyshag hooked their hands around his shoulders, nails digging in the flesh. Leonard let out a scream. They slipped further in, further down, and Kvasir’s colorless eyes found his.

“Don’t let me go,” they pleaded.

“I won’t,” Leonard said.

The ice whined, jolted. It shattered under his chest.

Black water engulfed him. He heard shouts, frantic steps booming closer, curses - then he was underwater, and there was only silence. He felt burning, so convincingly he was sure looking down he’d see his skin covered in flames. The silence hurt, and still he held onto Kvasir’s arms, as they held onto his. Leonard looked up, and saw spots of milky light filtering from above, shadows profiled against it like a saint’s vision. He felt his heart give a single, deafening thud, and all was dark.

Chapter Text

When they got him out of the ice, he wasn’t moving. He was limp, and painfully pale, lips blue and the strange solemn expression of the dead. He wasn’t breathing. His heart wasn’t beating. It would stop three more times, back on the ship, on M’Benga’s operating table, but in that moment Jim Kirk didn’t know anything about this and was simply watching his best friend looking very dead.

He wouldn’t remember how the skirmish ended either. Maybe it was already over when he stopped and saw Leonard slip underwater – or maybe it really ended when the First Nephew fell on their knees, the stump of his wrist drenching their tunic in blood, and wailed at the edge of the hole in the ice by his and Spock’ side. Pardan had taken care of the rest – prevented them all from getting beheaded, too.

At some point, the storm passed too. The communicators cracked back to life. It was the General who picked Jim’s one from the sleigh, and calmly communicated their position and their requests. The med squad beamed down less than ten seconds later, and found Kirk gripping at the jagged edges of ice, weakly grappling with Spock as he tried to prevent him from plunging in and killing himself in the process. While the emergency squad was retrieving Kvasir and Leonard, Christine held him, letting him sob and choke and cry like a scared four-year-old.

Bones – oh please Chris, oh God, don’t let him die, don’t let him –

I have no intention to, Captain.

Now he and Spock were being gently pushed back, and watched from a distance as their Head Nurse and her squad applied things and pressed hypos into Leonard’s pale still body, and they huddled together without even realizing it. He sought out Spock’s sleeve, pressing his arm against his friend’s, and they stood there in silence in the frozen air of the Seven Lakes.

The defibrillator wasn’t working, and suddenly Christine was kneeling at Leonard’s side, hands pressed on his sternum, and was pushing against his chest. Bones’s head lolled at each thrust, like a doll’s head could do, a delicate porcelain doll’s, his broken arm bouncing awkwardly at his side. Jim took in his sunken eyes, his marred chest bending under Christine’s assault, and felt like choking. Leave him alone, he thought, frenziedly, don’t hurt him – he’s Bones. He’s, he’s –

My Comish. He’s the one who is fire.

***

They brought him back. Christine used these exact words, as if Bones had not only nearly died but wandered in some hellish, bizarre land beyond their control, and she and Geoff had had to physically barge in and drag him back by his scruff. Maybe that was exactly what had happened. The image was both comforting and jarring.

They were sitting by his bedside, in the hushed quiet of the Enterprise Sickbay. Both he and Spock were still in their parkas, covered in dirty snow and mud, bruises yellowing and pulsing weakly under their clothes. There was dirt under Kirk’s nails; the wrists peering from Spock’s sleeves were still raw and swollen from his handcuffs.

Still, everything – every bruise and misery and discomfort – all disappeared in front of the thing on the bed.

It may be unfair, but it was easier to think of it as a thing. A thing of plastic tubes and healing pads, loosely shaped like a person. An arm-shaped thing was kept still at its side, cast in a whirring device that flickered yellow lights as it worked, rebuilding bones. Monitors buzzed quietly over the bed, monitoring pulse and oxygen and brain waves, tangles of diaphanous tubes coming out from the thing’s gown.

Still, there were cracks in the illusion. Canyons. Because the scraps of face not covered in pads and oxygen mask were clearly Leonard’s profile, and it was his the hand Jim was holding, and it was the hook-shaped scar he had given himself playing in his Granpa’s workshop at ten the one Jim could see on his wrist. Kirk let his thumb brush against it, and trembled. He let his fingers slide a bit further, against Leonard’s pulse point, and listened carefully.

“I tried my best,” said Spock, suddenly. He was sitting very still, very properly, hands folded in his lap. His eyes, though, had been glued to Leonard’s body since they’d been allowed in the IC room. Something raw and true rippled across his face, a warmth beyond compare, the darkest of regrets. “I tried my best. I followed his instructions. But maybe – maybe if he had been assisted better – “

“Spock,” Kirk said weakly. He knew what he should do. He knew Spock needed reassurance, the inspired words of a Captain and a friend, some certainty in all this chaos. He needed those things, and deserved them. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Tonight, he was only Jim, a foolish kid from Iowa, not sure his best friend would survive the night, and he had nothing better to offer.

Spock stiffened, but understood. He said nothing, but shuffled closer – leaning over the bed, fingers resting two inches from Leonard’s. Kirk decided he was too tired to fight sudden inspiration. Slowly, oh so slowly, he took Spock’s hand, and pressed it beside his own – on Bones’ wrist.

His First Officer’s head whipped back to stare at him, a stirring of alarm. Kirk just squeezed his hand.

For a moment Spock was perfectly still, that agonizing guilt blazing alive, but then his expression softened. He closed his eyes, and bent his head, as if listening, as if praying, and Jim hoped behind hope that it would be enough.

***

Days passed. The Enterprise was still orbiting Qyshag Four, slow and sure on her invisible wings, and a steady trickle of Qyshag started to stream in from the transporter room, to come see the Healer who had defied the First Nephew and saved their lover from the ice. They stared from behind the protective glass of the IC section, or peered in, pointing and whispering among themselves. Spock and Kirk said nothing and arranged themselves on either side of the bed, hovering protectively over Leonard, shooting murderous looks at anyone who tried to come too close. In one occasion, Kirk manhandled a couple of kids – both as tall as he was and twice his size – out of the room; on another, Spock was said to have bared teeth at a particularly preening General, though the expression was gone before anyone else could be sure it had been there.

The Qyshag were not impressed. Was it really this the Healer, the foreigner for whom the Battle of the Lakes had been fought? This poor, broken thing lying in a bed, white and grey as old snow, with swarms of tight-faced people trying to keep its fragile heart beating?

Still, not all of them felt disappointed. There were people who had known him, too – people he had helped, at the refugee camp and in the hollowed-out settlements their delegation had visited before, people who had been cured by his hands and comforted by his words. There were people who knew how strong those pale arms could be, how warm the smiles of those blue lips were, and who left red-ribboned posies of winter flowers by his side, pushed small gifts of warm buns and liquors in Spock and Kirk’ hands, and pressed soft kisses on Leonard’s forehead. There was the wiry Qyshag with the regenerated arm who had debriefed them at the camp, who came with their flock of children and left a small hound carved in bone by his shoulder. There was the child Leonard had healed before Spock confronted him, still silent, still wide-eyed, who stopped by Spock and solemnly thanked him for having taken good care of the doctor. They’re alive thanks to him, Jim realized, suddenly, as a young pretty soldier who Bones had helped in giving birth to their child showed the tattoo of a far star they had given themselves to thank him. All these people, all these lives, all these stories – they’re here, thanks to him. Thanks to Bones.

There was pride in that thought, because it was still he who now stood guard to such a man, and there was fierce guilt too, and Jim held on it desperately, for atonement and for comfort at the same time.

The pastries and the buns stayed untouched, piled on tables and sheets. The scent of the winter flowers – sweet and thick and somehow salty – seeped in their days so deeply Jim could smell it in his dreams.

***

The thing in the bed dreamed, too.

The dream had no words in it, no shapes or stories. Most of the time it was grey fog and nothingness – stretches of not-time and not-color and nothing but a vague buzzing sound, like the afterthought of a storm.

Sometimes, though, there were real moments, shards of real things.

Now he stood on a frozen badland, swirls of flurries whipping at his clothes and his skin. It was deep winter, he knew it, and yet he wasn’t cold – but warm. There was a heat within him, right under his breastplate, a bright spot of warmth that grew and fluctuated like the flame of a candle. He wasn’t alone, and he wasn’t himself – although he couldn’t quite remember who he was. He was clad in furs, and there were jewels around his arms, and azure wool wrapped around his shoulders. Iron and silver pressed on his head, heavy as only crowns could be. He was royalty. He had an army waiting just hundreds of feet beyond him – loyal and ready to lay down their lives for him. He was in love. He was in love with the slight white figure standing in front of him, not quite Qyshag, not quite beastly, but something in between. He sensed clever golden eyes, and fur where hair should be, and a shape that was both slightly taller than him and immense, large enough to gulp down the mountains and all his men. It was impossible, but he wasn’t surprised. Such is the way with Gods.

“Why did you do it, my love?” he said to the Beast God, seeking their hand. “Why you helped me, and devoured my enemies? Now your kin will hunt you, and punish you. Why did you do it?”

The God held him. Their eyes were still gold – the gold of amber and of light trapped in drops of melting snow – and still clever, but there was sadness in their voice. The sweetest kind of sadness.

“I did it for love, dear,” they said, “What else should I have done it for? It is only for love we do such brave, foolish things.”

He smiled. The words rang true, more than they should be. He inexplicably thought of a golden head and a black one, huddled together over him, and felt a pang of guilt and longing in his chest.

“For love,” he said, echoing the God’s words. Then: “But I do not want to go just yet.” He didn’t know where the words came from. He hadn’t thought them. “I still have things to see. Things to do. I have people – “He stopped, and blinked. “I have people who are waiting for me. I can’t stay.”

“No, you can’t,” the God said, golden-eyed and pale as snow, and they leant in and kissed his cheek. “That’s not your time yet, my love. Go back.”

He nodded, and everything faded back in his buzzing grey.

***

The first time he woke up it was just light, and sound. He had a body, of that he was sure – he could feel breathing rushing in and out of his throat, a warm feeling against his cheek. The sounds grew louder. They may be voices – and beeps, and strange whining things. There are shadows against the light. He remembered the ice, the saint’s vision he had seen as chilled waters strangled him, and shivered. He shriveled back, turning away from the shadows, sinking deep in his core. The light fluttered, a faint thundering rising in his ears, and the voice-sounds got almost comprehensible, but he was tired, and sleep claimed him once more.

***

There were more dreams, too. A little girl’s face, freckled and open, with strong dark eyebrows and gentle eyes he knew were his own. She came and went, a blue-and-white baseball cap tucked low on her head, and her presence brought with it a lump of feeling that was both comfort and sadness, proud love and longing. Whatever it was, it was huge. It filled his chest, thumping like the steps of a thousand soldiers, painting the swirling grey in light like it had in his dreams of the frozen wastelands.

Other things floated to him and fed the light. Not faces, though. There was a flash of golden hair, always moving, always blazing. There was a pair of pale hands, clever and kind. Friends in red. A black ponytail bobbing and swirling. A white ship sailing silently through the night, boldly braving the skies. The huge bright thing within him recognized them all, and ached for more, and raged and boomed and sang, keeping him from slipping in the silence.

He dreamed of the white land again, of the army and the golden-haired God, but this time the sky and the earth were flooded with his light, until no one could tell if it was day or night.

***

He instantly knew it. This was not his light. His light was golden and warm, soft like a flame seen through a lantern’s glass. This light was harsh white – demanding. Still, there was a pull in it, in the sounds mingled with it. A familiarity.

He’s here. See – he moved. I saw it. I knew it.

That sound… a voice. A voice he knew. Breathing hurt, and he felt trapped in his skin – and yet there was suddenly a warmth around him, pressing on his skin, his hand. The shadows hovered over him once again, and the rush of air of a breath skimmed his cheek, and if he had remembered how to do it, he would have cried. Another living being, another human – close to him, within reach. Mirage. Miracle.

A voice in his head. Sleep, it said. Build your strength. Try later. Tell them of your miracle.

He nodded, and closed his eyes. It sounded like sound advice.

He was eerily certain the voice was his own.

***

He woke up, and this time it did feel like waking up.

He felt numb, and parched, and exhausted. His lungs burned with each breath. He had no need to try to lift his arm to know his bones would feel like wet paper – weaker than a child’s. But he could feel his heart beating, steady and recovering under the hospital gown, despite Bar’leen, despite the ice, and for a moment his mind filled with the strange image of golden magic, pouring from his chest like sunlight.

The shadows were still there, but now he recognized them. He saw spots of blue and yellow, a shock of black and blond hair that looked distinctly like two heads bent over him. The relief flooded him so hard it left him shaking.

He tried to talk. His throat was burning. He found himself coughing before realizing it. The world faded around the edges, but he grasped at it, held on it with every scrap of stubbornness he could muster from the very bottom of his being. A cool touch against his nape, and someone was lifting his head, pressing a plastic cup against his lips. He recalled another hand touching his neck, leaving bruises, and felt his pulse itch and stumble – but whoever was touching him held him gently, whispered soft things in his ear.

He believed them. He believed every soft thing. He drank a couple of sips, carefully. He leant back against his pillow, the pression of an oxygen mask carefully replaced on his mouth, and felt his head spinning. He was already beat. He needed sleep. No. he didn’t want to. He wanted to stay here – just a bit longer, just a minute.

A face floated in front of him. It was a pale face, with bright blue eyes – red with tears.

“We’ll take care of you Bones,” Kirk stuttered. “We’ll take care of you, I promise.”

“O-okay,” Leonard croaked, and darkness engulfed him.

***

The second time Leonard came to he felt almost coherent, and sickbay was quiet. Jim was curled on a couple of chairs on his right, finally asleep and wrapped in his battered thermic parka like a captain-shaped burrito. Spock was sitting on the opposite side of the bed, a PADD glowing on his knees. He was very much awake. Leonard suddenly knew, with the innate, crude certainty he knew things about those two wonderful idiots, who had covered Jim while he slept.

Spock lifted his clever eyes from the PADD. For a heartbeat, he looked almost shocked. “Doctor,” he whispered, “I – “

He stopped, clasping his lips together. There was the slightest quiver in his voice. Spock rose to his feet with his quiet grace and leant over Leonard. “Do you need any assistance? Water? Should I fetch Nurse Chapel?”

Leonard shook his head, brows pinched together. If he hadn’t been completely sure this wasn’t a dream, he would have said Spock was rambling.

“Y-you… you…” Leonard raised an arm, trying to hook a finger under the oxygen mask. His hand was shaking like a winter twig in the wing. He grabbed at the mask, and pushed it down. Sickbay air rushed into his mouth – recycled, moist, smelling faintly like metal and disinfectant. Delightful.

Spock’s pale face grew even paler. “Leonard, I am not certain interrupting the flow of oxygen represents the wisest course of action at the moment – “

“– Doctor,” Leonard wheezed. Somehow, it effectively shut the Vulcan up. Spock heaved a sigh, letting him know how not satisfied he was with the current development, but he simply the plastic cup from the wheeled table on his right and pressed it to Leonard’s lips. He gulped down a few sips. Water, enriched with mineral salts and enzymes and his own concoction for surgery-recovering patients. It tasted vile.

It still did the trick. When Leonard crashed back against his pillow he was breathing hard, but passing his tongue against his teeth his mouth it didn’t feel filled with cotton anymore. He forced himself to focus.

“Spock,” he rasped, “you okay?”

Spock blinked. Something fluttered across his face, a twisting which looked pretty painful, but when he spoke, his voice was firm.

“We are quite all right, doctor,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “The Captain and Giotto’s team suffered nothing but bruises and superficial abrasions. Both they and Pardan’s soldiers have been taken care of as soon as we reached the ship, and are now fully recovered.” His eyes flitted to Jim’s sleeping form. “The Captain showed signs of exhaustion that prompted me to recommend rest and a regular pattern of meals, but to no avail.”

It wasn’t a real answer, but something else suddenly came to Leonard’s mind. The ice, the battle, Kvasir’s desperate hold on his shattered shoulder – all rushed back to him like a slap across his cheek.

“K-Kvasir,” he asked, voice shaking. “Are they – Are they – did I get… there in time…”

He trailed off, unable to complete the sentence – to make it real. His heartbeat thundered in his ears.

“They are well, Doctor,” Spock answered. “They had suffered a laceration in the abdominal area and a slight case of hypothermia, but nothing extremely concerning. They are young and strong. Yesterday they were already on their feet.”

“Oh,” Leonard wheezed. Keeping his eyes open was becoming an effort. Still, he added with great feeling: “Oh, fuck. Thank God. Fuck.”

“Indeed.”

Leonard cast him a weary glance. “How long… did… sleep?” He considered the weakness in his arms and muscles, the dryness of his mouth. “How… long?”

Spock stiffened. His eyes shone, black and bottomless. “Six days, four hours and seventeen minutes,” he said.

“Oh,” Leonard said again. A second, even more genuine fuck clawed its way up his throat. He examined the serious shade of beard on Jim’s jaw, and, with a pang in his chest, he noticed the purple bags making his best friends’ faces look haunted and older than they had any right to look. He had seen plenty of time that kind of look, but where it rightly belonged – in the mirror, while he worked his ass off in the operating room or in the laboratory to keep his idiots alive.

“Spock…”

“Your heart stopped, Doctor,” Spock interrupted him, brutally. “Four times, actually. Nurse Chapel and the emergency team had to revive you there, on the lake, just after they had extracted you and Kvasir from the water. Scientifically speaking, I would have deemed a recovery impossible. Nurse Chapel told me to have hope and get the fuck out of her way. I trusted her. I had no other choice.” The First Officer’s long, elegant fingers curled into fists, tight enough to show bones through his knuckles’ skin. “The emergency pericardiocentesis had proved effective, but temporary. The manhandling at the hands of the First Nephew accelerated the formation of more liquid in the pericardial sac. Your shoulder was broken. The cold and insufficient covering caused moderate hypothermia. The plunge in frozen water jarred your system into a nearly irreversible shut-down.” Spock’s hands curled even tighter. They were shaking. “Doctor M’Benga said it was a desperate situation. He said not two hundred years ago, Terran medicine wouldn’t have been able to save you.”

“But… but they did it,” Leonard croaked.

“That’s hardly the point.” Spock unclenched his hands. Leonard glimpsed rows of crescent marks oh his palms – old scars where nails had drawn blood.

Concerned, Leonard called on every reserve of strength in his battered body to shift an inch closer to the side of the bed. “If you want to fight, I’d love to, really,” he tried to joke. “Give me a day and I’ll be happy to go back to tearing at each other’s throat like our lives depend on it. You know I love it.”

That was the wrong thing to say. The First Officer flinched hard. “I keep thinking that if I had been better qualified, better equipped, I could have performed the procedure way more effectively,” Spock whispered. Leonard’s heart churned in his chest. “I know there is neither use not wisdom in bestowing on you considerations that are nothing but wishful thinking. I had no intention to. But… I keep thinking that if I had been more diligent and competent I could have saved you some part of the harm. Of the pain. I kept thinking that that if I had had not been so focused on the pericardiocentesis, I could have heard the First Nephew’s squadron coming. I could have prevented them from catching us by surprise, from stunning me.” Spock met his eyes. “From taking you, Doctor.”

Leonard looked at him, wide-eyed, breathing softly in the stale air of Sickbay. There was a hard, tight knot in his throat that kept him from talking. He leant in, and instinctively closed trembling fingers around Spock’s wrist. The First Officer stiffened, but didn’t pull back. “Spock,” he said, “Spock, you do realize that… that i-if it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be here talking?”

Spock said nothing. Leonard squeezed his wrist tighter – stubbornly pressing into his skin his own warmth, his own aliveness. “You have done… more than anyone else could have done. Y-you’re the reason I’m here. The reason I’ll… see my little girl again. Be proud of yourself, you… you green-blooded hobgoblin. Be very proud.”

Spock bent his head. Still, he nodded. Weakly and wobblily, but nodded. “I believe the reason I’ve always failed to educate myself more thoroughly in the field of emergency medical assistance, despite the obvious risks in the Enterprise brand of missions, is that I’ve come to think that if you are there, then there will be no need. You will know what to do anyway.”

Leonard froze. It had been so soft, so unexpected a confession that the words took a moment to register. It felt like a gift. It felt like a gift he wasn’t waiting for at all, and hadn’t realized he wanted. Sleep pulled at him, safe and sweet this time, and he had to blink away tears as he gave a final squeeze to Spock’s hand and let it go.

“You’re still upset,” he mumbled, already half-awake. He didn’t remember when he had closed his eyes. “We… talk more. About It. It’s ‘mportant.”

“Leonard…”

“ ‘mportant,” he growled, bossily, and was out like a lamp.

***

Somewhere between the buzzing grey and his moments of half-awareness, Leonard had come to the conclusion that facing Jim would be the hardest part of the whole thing. Yet, the first time he woke up and found him sitting in twitching vigil on his right, there was nothing hard about it. He simply found himself engulfed in an armful of captain, smelling like stale coffee and unwashed air, crushing Leonard against his chest as close as his army of tubes and sensors would allow.

“Ehy, Jimbo,” Leonard whispered.

“Bones,” Jim chocked out. He had his nose tucked in the hollow of Leonard’s clavicle. He opened his mouth and seemed about to say something, but nothing came out of it. He gave a single sob, and it trembled against Leonard’s skin.

Then Jim let go, and sat back on his chair – clearing his throat.

A strange atmosphere fell on them. Sickbay was wrapped in soft silence. Spock was there, just out of the corner of their eyes, silent and watchful. There must have been a bunch of nurses nearby too, shuffling of feet and rustling of hovering carts and sheets coming from behind the panels of Leonard’s curtained room, but they kept carefully out of the way.

Leonard coughed a bit. He got offered some of his disgusting water again. Spock brushed the button beside the bed and raised it enough to help him in a half-sitting position. Leonard eyed his captain under his eyelids – seeing gaunt cheeks, and the pinched expression he had come to know as Jim’s Migraine Face. He remembered their argument, back in the tent, those ice-blue eyes blazing in frustration and pinning him to the ground like a butterfly.

He felt suddenly cold.

Jim kept silent. Leonard swallowed. He started fidgeting with the hem of his bedsheets.

“Are you mad at me?” he murmured.

“No.”

“Oh,” said Leonard. Maybe some part of him had wanted Jim to say that he was, because mad meant you worried – you cared. The thought felt both childish and dumb, and he pressed his lips together to prevent it from spilling out of his mouth. “Oh.”

Spock’s keen eyes flitted from him to Jim, and back again. He sighed. Had he been human, Leonard felt strangely sure he’d be rolling his eyes.

“What the Captain means, if I may take the liberty,” he said tersely, “is that he is not mad, Doctor, but concerned. Which from my rudimental understanding of human interactions is a quite more gratifying response than anger.”

“Yes,” Jim blurted out, “what he said.” He scratched at his jaw, and pink flushed his cheeks. His movements had had a desperate edge to them, more violence that they should.

Somehow, that eased Leonard’s tension. Jim was upset. That was something he knew, something he knew what to do for. He kept the oxygen mask on and found he could breathe almost easily, and when he lifted his head off the pillow blood thumped in his temples, but reasonably so.

He brushed Kirk’s knee with his right hand.

“Don’t… get all guilt-ridden on me,” he rasped. “There’s no need.”

Kirk’s body went taut as a bow. His knuckles flooded white. “Stop doing that,” he whispered, harshly, fiercely, “Goddammit, stop doing that.”

Leonard frowned. For a moment, he saw real menace in his friend’s face – real rage, in the way he was pulsing with poorly-repressed energy, the way his storm-blue eyes kept darkening and brightening in flashes. Maybe he wasn’t simply upset. Maybe he was really furious. Something dark and upsettingly close to doubt twisted in his guts. He felt his throat close. “Jim…”

“I didn’t see it,” Jim said, voice barely a breath. “I can still tell you every detail of the picture of Orion systems in our second-year’s Solar System Civilization textbook, and I didn’t see you were bleeding internally while I was biting your head off over bullshit. I left you there. I left you there to die.”

The words hit Leonard like a punch. He paled. “I didn’t die,” he objected weakly.

“Barely,” Kirk snarled. He raked both hands through his hair. “When they got you out of the ice… Christ on a crutch, Bones. You have no idea how bad it was. How bad you were. How dead you were.”

At this, Leonard felt himself bristling. He curled his hands in fists against the bed sheets. The discomfort changed, and morphed into something closer to healthy annoyance.

As if called by some invisible Vulcan cue, Spock chose that moment to shoot up on his feet.

“Captain, Doctor,” he said, face unreadable, “with your permission, I shall fetch Nurse Chapel for a debrief on the doctor’s condition, and to check on the bridge crew.”

Both Leonard’s and Kirk’s heads whipped towards him fast enough to make themselves dizzy. “We’re orbiting a planet, Spock,” Jim said. “I think Sulu is more than able to handle that.”

The First Officer cocked his head to the side. “This may very well be the case, Captain – but I’ve concluded there are still issues you and the Doctor have to work out, and that they would be better resolved through a private talk. Therefore, I was aiming to excuse myself and leave you some privacy.”

Valiantly, Jim managed to snap his mouth closed. “Spock, you are you,” he said. “There’s nothing we may say that you can’t hear – “

Spock held up a hand. “This is not what I meant, Jim,” he replied. His gaze turned on Leonard, and a hint of that twisting, mysterious pain rippled across his eyes once again. “But I had a similar…. issue upon the Doctor’s recovery. I had the occasion to speak to him privately. I want to grant you – you both – the same chance.” He looked at Kirk. “So, may I take my leave, Captain?”

Jim’s brow furrowed further. Then he sighed, messed his hair a bit more, and waved him away. “Whatever, Spock,” he grumbled. The fury seemed to have rolled out of him. He sounded more tired than pissed.

Spock didn’t look particularly perturbed by his captain’s glare. He dipped in chin in a discrete bow, and turned on his heel, marching out of the small curtained room. The door of Sickbay Intensive Care closed behind him with a soft whoosh.

Once his back was out of sight, Kirk bent his head between his spread knees, clutching at it with a heavy sigh. He looked exhausted. He looked beat. Still, Leonard’s chest was buzzing with that warm feeling of outrage, and had no intention to let it go.

“Did I look dead, Jim?” he hissed, trying to straighten himself against the uplifted end of the bed. “Dead like a man ravaged by radiations, maybe? Dead like your best friend slumped in a containment room, or laid on an operating table like a goddamn lab rat? Tell me, Jim, that dead?”

In his defense, Kirk had the decency to squirm on his chair. Leonard found he was shaking, and he was positive it had little to do with physical exhaustion. Dammit, he thought, trying to keep his breath in check, dammit it all. It had been more than a year since the whole Khan fiasco, and still the memory burned in his head like fire – hurt like an open wound in his chest.

“It’s different,” Kirk finally said. He wasn’t meeting his gaze.

“It’s not,” Leonard snapped. “You have any idea how many times I saw you nearly dead Jim – how many time I saw that damn hobgoblin out there bleeding to death? I got hurt – I nearly died, yes. I was scared, yes. But I made it. Christine patched me up. It happens. It happens all the time. So stop brooding like you’re the only one who has ever waited by a bed not knowing if you’ll hear your best friend’s voice again.”

By the end of his speech, Leonard was breathing hard – long, shuddering gasps that made his ribs ache and his head swim. He could feel his heart beat through his whole body, and some of the machines at his side were whining in discontent, but he didn’t care. He kept himself upright, eyes burning holes in Kirk’s skull.

“And look at me when I’m speaking, dammit.”

He saw Jim’s jaw work. Then the captain turned to him, defiantly, and Leonard was startled to see the faint sheen of moisture in his eyes.

He mentally flipped through the whole of their memories together – school days, parties, nights spent watching holomovies and drinking and talking. He realized he had never seen Jim cry.

“You really were scared, Bones?” Kirk asked, very, very softly.

The question took him off guard. Leonard blinked, shoulders slumping. He rapidly evaluated the option to lie, give him a tiny white lie that would put his best friend’s mind at ease, but from the look Jim gave him Leonard knew he was already expecting some stunt like this from him. He was screwed. He was cornered. He had no option but the truth. “Well… yes,” he whispered. “I was scared, Jimbo. I didn’t want to die. In fact, I realized I really, really didn’t want to.”

Kirk stiffened, blood rushing off his cheek till he looked whiter than Leonard himself. He reached out, closing one hand around Jim’s wrist before he could tumble head on in one of his guilt spells, and held tight like he had done with Spock just hours before. “Lemme finish. I didn’t want to die, Jim – but I was ready to. And you know why? To save you. To make sure you, the hobgoblin, all of you would be whole and alive. Say what you want, but to me it looks like a pretty damn good reason to be scared.”

Kirk didn’t avert his gaze, and that was a good sign, but he didn’t say anything either – still looking ashen, still looking tortured. Leonard sighed. He leant back against his pillows, taking a couple of deep breaths till his pulse slowed too.

He’d have to say it. There was really no other way.

“You know,” he said, fingers still loosely clasped around Jim’s wrist, tone as conversational as he could muster in that moment, “when I was unconscious, I wasn’t totally unaware. I had dreams, actually. Pretty long dreams. Pretty weird, too. But through them all there was this… sensation.” He tapped at his chest with his free hand. “This feeling, right here – like a great light, a great warmth lodged under my ribs. It seemed to keep me grounded. It seemed to fill… everything. And it’s hard to explain, but I felt it flare, felt it reach out every time I thought about Jojo, about the Enterprise – about Uhura and Spock and you.” He arched his eyebrows, but his voice felt hoarse. “I’ll keep it simple, Jim. I think you are the thing that brought me back here. Back home.”

Jim sucked in a breath. His eyes were wide, impossibly blue. For a heartbeat, he looked so young, younger than Leonard had ever seen him – young enough to be scared of the dark and of loneliness and of a thousand other things the brat Captain Kirk would never be afraid of.

Twin tears, solitary and silent, rolled down his cheeks.

“I’m so sorry, Bones,” he croaked. “I’m so sorry I… told you those things. That I got so angry. From now on you’re allowed to punch any alien jerk you want, anytime you want.”

Leonard’s heart gave a twist. He tried to shrug it off. “It’s all right.”

Jim’s hand shifted in his hold, squeezing his fingers. His skin felt so warm, and Leonard realized he was still shaking slightly. “No, it’s not. I know you’re still hurting. I know it will take a bit to forgive me.”

“Jim – “

“No. I’m a big boy, Len. I can take the truth. And I’m nothing but determined.” Jim grinned, a wobbly, raw version of his snarky smile. “I can’t ask for nothing better than the chance to rebuild your trust, Bones – brick by brick. For the chance to woo you again. Are you okay with it?”

“There’s no need Jim. You know it,” Leonard said softly. I will follow you to the end of the universe and back. The words still rang hard and true, and would always be: no matter how hurt and broken he would be, no matter how badly Kirk would treat him, he would always come for him. The thought scared him a bit.

“I know,” Jim clutched his hand in his own. “But I want to. Deal?”

Leonard felt his body melt against the pillows. Sleep was tugging at him again, making his mind fuzzy, eyelids drooping. Jim’s hand was a pleasant weight against his. He let his eyes slide close, and in the color-spotted dark, he could swear he saw the warm light in his chest beam and shine like a beacon.

“No red roses,” he mumbled. “For your wooing. ‘m more of a white lilies fella.”

“You’re an ass, that’s what you are.”

Leonard fell asleep smiling.

***

Christine must have really pumped him with morphine, because it wasn’t till he woke for the third time that Leonard noticed the small heaps of gifts and flowers arranged by his feet and around his bed. To say he was shocked would be a huge understatement. He was even more baffled when Spock, who had taken back his quiet vigil at his side, informed him of the remarkable crowd of Qyshag that had cheered endlessly at the news of his recovery, and that daily pressed against the Sickbay doors, asking to meet the Healer now that he was awake.

“You saying I’m like a local celebrity?”

“Crudely said, but yes,” Spock had answered. “This is essentially correct.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Many of them owe you their life, doctor. Many know you were willing to forfeit your life to protect theirs, and the existence of relatives, friends, companions. Many know you saved their brightest General, too.”

“I didn’t save anyone,” he had protested. “I told Pardan to watch out and they did the rest. That’s hardly heroic to me.”

“I don’t think that’s exactly the point, Doctor.” Spock had almost fidgeted on his chair, as if looking for the right words. “You have not seen them coming in. I think they don’t want you as a hero, as a warrior. I think they see you as… as a beacon of hope. Of kindness. Something I feel could be quite refreshing after three years of war and violence.”

“Mmh,” Leonard had said, noncommittally. But he had picked up a posy of winter flowers laid on the low table at his left, tied to a dragon-like creature delicately carved in wood, and twirled it in his hands. Engraved on the flank of the creature, he could make out the name of the little Qyshag he had cured at the camp.

Spock had shifted his weight with a rustle of fabric. “If you feel uncomfortable, Doctor, I can tell them to go away. They are a sensible people – I’m sure they would understand – “

“No,” Leonard had cut him off, somewhat shyly. “Let – let them in. If, if they’re so hellbent on seeing me wheeze and cough in this bed, they’re welcome to get their show.” He had felt his cheeks heat up, but hadn’t backed down.

Somehow, it was the right thing to do.

Greeting and smiling at the flow of people who flowed in his room as soon as Spock gave his okay, though, was as awkward an experience as he had imagined. He felt like some unfortunate mix of a Rockstar and a cheap cult leader. These people were still tired, visibly underfed, clad in the makeshift outfits of war refugees, and remembering the crazy cold of their world Leonard felt acutely guilty while lying in his comfy, warm bed and soft pajamas. So, he insisted on brushing their thanks aside with a quick smile and moving to more important questions – asking if they were being fed regularly, how they felt, if that elbow was healing nicely, if keeping their eyes open for too long still made them burn.

Still, there was something in that crowd. All those clever silver eyes watched him with a bright, powerful thing that made his breath itch in his throat. Hope. They looked at him with hope – and gratitude. Old people clutched his hand and cried, thanking him for saving their children, their grand-children. Young parents brought him simple sweets and cups of rice, forcing him to accept them with quiet dignity. He weaved one blossom of winter flowers in his hair, and a teenager Qyshag giggled, blushing in delight. It was confusing, and exhausting, and by the end of the day he felt so drained he could barely keep his head up, but somehow, it was worth it. It had healed things.

Jim and Spock, who had spent the day standing on each side of him like a couple of damn royal guards, immediately noticed how tired he was, and all but jumped up to firmly escort the last of the visitors out of the room. He really needed to tell them to tone the whole over-protective thing down. Every time someone who wasn’t Christine or Nyota came to see him they went stiff and tightly-coiled, looking for all the world ready to jump the poor bastard as soon as they got in a three-feet radius to Leonard. It would grow annoying very soon.

“Spock, be a peach and pass me one of those sugar buns, would you?”

Spock’s eyebrows scrunched together in displeasure. “I do not feel confident in altering the diet Doctor M’Benga prescribed you, Doctor.”

Leonard growled under his oxygen mask. “I am a doctor.” He whipped one finger to his left. “And these are my sugar buns. And I want one.”

“Spock’s right, Bones,” said Kirk, fussing with the results flashing across his monitors. “Christine said we have to raise your blood sugar gradually – your physique may still be too weak to sustain a sudden surge of sugar with no preparation.”

Leonard’s blood pressure spiked, and he heard one of the machine squeak. “How you dare,” he roared, ignoring his own exhaustion, ignoring the concerned looks his best friends exchanged over his readings. “James Tiberius Kirk, I remember times when you were so stubbornly against ingesting any kind of vegetables I was one step from shoving salad down your throat, and now you have the nerve to come here lecturing me on blood sugar?”

“Bones, you shouldn’t work yourself up like this,” Kirk said, alarmed. “It’s not good for you.”

“You know what’s good for me?” Leonard hissed, clenching his jaw so tightly it would leave him with a headache. “Having a goddamn cake. Now. I promise that if I die, I’ll leave Christine a not saying it’s not your fault.”

Jim and Spock exchanged another worried, should-we-humor-our-ailing-friend look over his head. Leonard felt the urge to slap them both, repeatedly. At last they relented, probably to keep him from bursting a vein out of sheer irritation. Spock offered him one of the crisp, spice-smelling honeyed bun his visitors had left him. It was soft and hot against his fingers as he plucked a bit off it. His friends still looked considerably unhappy, both with the cake and his black humor.

Leonard couldn’t care less.

He would wait two more days before guilting them into bringing him coffee, he mused.

***

“Spock, this is completely ridiculous. No way in hell this is gonna happen.”

The First Officer blinked, the very image of innocent puzzlement. “Doctor, if you only stop to consider it objectively – “

“I’ve considered it objectively,” he snapped. “And I don’t like it. I’ll have to start walking sooner or later. I’ve already given up on getting a uniform and not parading around in my pjs, but I can’t stay holed up in this bed forever.”

“It’s only been a week, Bones.”

Jim looked uneasy. Spock too looked uneasy. Leonard wondered, with a half-hearted surge of bafflement, if those idiots had really planned to keep him there for the rest of their five-year mission. Or maybe wrapped in foam and tucked in a cupboard, why not, he thought bleakly. Like Gran’s porcelain dolls. Idiots.

“And that’s why I’m not gonna strolling around on my own,” he replied. “And I’ll keep you dorks by my side. But I need to move, Jim. I need to see how things are working – actually working. And Spock, I won’t be carried around the ship in your arms like the swooning heroine of a regency romance.”

“A regency –?”

“Forget it,” Leonard waved it away. “Point is, not. Gonna. Happen.”

Spock and Jim met eyes over him, flinched upon realizing what they were doing, and rapidly turned back to him as if nothing happened.

They were trying hard, that much he could admit.

Leonard shuffled to the side of the bed. The movement still jarred him to the core – sending bright spots of color to explode in front of his eyes. He swayed, the room thrumming around him. He had to suck in two deep breaths before his vision cleared again.

At some point Kirk had knelt at his side, one hand clasped delicately on his shoulder to hold him steady. He looked worried – not patronizing, not over-protective, just simple, sheer worry. Leonard’s chest gave a pang. He couldn’t get angry at the kid when he looked at him like this.

“We help you get up,” Jim said, “and you hold on both of us. Feel something funny, you say it right away and we go back. Deal?”

Leonard blinked. He raised a hand to squeeze Jim’s. “Deal.”

Kirk smiled, one of those rare, all-powerful smiles that could lit up a whole room on their own, and rose to his feet. He brushed fingers against Leonard’s nape. “Thank you,” he whispered, sincerity ringing in his voice, and Leonard blamed the lump lodged in his throat on his soft Southern heart.

“Okay, Spock,” Kirk called him forward, and they both took position beside Leonard. “On the count of three.”

It was a cumbersome and frustrating process, but in the end, they did manage to get him on his feet. Leonard’s legs felt shaking like a newborn fawn’s, and the simple effort of standing left him winded. He had already tried exercises like this, of course, Christine holding his elbow and alternating with practiced ease insults and praises, but he knew how it works. He had brushed death, multiple times, and his body wouldn’t let him forget it anytime soon. He slumped against Spock’s shoulder, taking comfort in the rock-solid stability of it. The Rec room, he thought. You just need to make it to the Rec Room. Three doors down the corridor. One hundred feet. Do it, and maybe they’ll let you have coffee. The thought nearly brought tears to his eyes

“C’mon Bones,” Jim said encouragingly. “You’re doing great.”

Leonard wasn’t sure those were the words he would have chosen. As they trudged across the floor, he heard himself starting shaking. His pulse throbbed in his head. Air made an ugly, wheezing sound as it rushed down his lungs.

Still, it felt nice to get out of Sickbay – to see the white buzzing lights of the corridor, hear the crackling of ship-wide announcements from the speakers tucked in the corners of the walls. It felt even nicer to realize that his body was still working, slowly and awkwardly, maybe, but working. A couple of lieutenants in Security red strolled past them, and shot him a bright smile when they saw him. He mirrored their smile, proudly. He probably looked a mess, eyes circled in purple and ashen-faced, but right now he didn’t care. He let his eyes sweep from Jim to Spock, and found their eyes shining with the same pride.

“Very good, Doctor,” Spock said in his deep voice. Leonard’s sullen cheeks flushed with satisfaction.

They walked on, down the corridor – passing one room, two, three. The Rec Room doors shuffled open with a swish at Jim’s touch. Leonard’s legs chose that moment to buckle under him. He felt his head spin, body folding inward like a computer suddenly unplugged. He had time to give a small “oh” of surprise, tottering forward, vaguely musing there was no chance in Hell they would give him coffee if he collapsed on his feet.

Instead of slamming against the cold floor like he had expected, though, Leonard found himself pressed on something warm and solid. He let his eyelids drop, as strong arms wrapped around his shoulders and his knees and hauled him up. He leant against Spock’s chest, focusing on keeping his breath under control.

“I nearly made it, right Spock?” he asked weakly, still not sure he could open his eyes without throwing up.

“Most definitively,” the First Officer lied smoothly. There was a rush of air, Spock crossing the room in swift, long strides. Leonard cracked one eye open. Spock bent, lowering him in a chair with utmost care. He didn’t let go until he felt confident the doctor could hold himself up without plunging forward on the floor, and Leonard for his part clutched Spock’s uniform in his fingers for a couple more heartbeats.

“Deep breaths,” said Jim’s voice. He was rubbing comforting circles on his back. “Deep breaths, Bones.”

Leonard obeyed. The sparks and colored spots flickering in front of him finally disappeared, and he felt steady enough to let go of Spock. He repressed the irrational urge to smooth down the wrinkles he had left in the fabric.

“Uh… Thank you, Spock. For the… assistance.”

“You’re welcome, doctor. Besides, it’s not the first time since you’ve been injured that we’ve found in this situation.”

“You mean you already carried me? Bridal-style?”

Spock nodded. “When you collapsed at the refugee camp.”

Leonard gave a long, unhappy whine. Trying to distract himself from the images coming to his mind, he let his eyes roam over the room. This floor’s Rec Room was a square room built in the side of the ship, with one large holo-window at his back, several holo-screen equipped with novels, research material and games, and a scattering of tables, chairs and sofas in the smart white style the Federation fancied. It was mostly used by doctors and nurses in-between shifts: the air always smelled like stale coffee, and Leonard himself had collapsed in those uncomfortable white sofas on more than one occasion. Now it was deserted. All in all, and compared with the gleaming awesomeness of the Bridge or of his own Sickbay, it was pretty unassuming.

Leonard was pretty sure he had never seen a more beautiful place in his whole life.

“You finally understand why I’m jumping out of bed as soon as I can do it without throwing my guts up?” Jim asked nonchalantly, resting his hand on the back of his chair.

Leonard held up one finger. “One, that’s still wrong – if yourdoctor recommends you bed rest, you should stay in bed resting, and not gallivanting around and bleeding all over Scotty’s floors when your wounds inevitably reopen.” He lifted a second finger. “Two, you bet your ass I understand.”

Jim snorted a laugh, and he would probably go on mocking him if the intercom didn’t choose that moment to give a ringing chirp.

The three of them exchanged glances. Kirk leant over the table next to Leonard, tapping the intercom and taking the call. “Kirk here,” he said. “Sulu, is there any problem? Should I get there?”

“No problem, captain,” Sulu said, very, very politely. He sounded as proper and as wary as a schoolboy trying to convince the teacher he didn’t cheat on the math test. There were few things that could make Hikaru Sulu sound like a schoolboy.

Jim arched an eyebrow. “Then what’s up?”

“Sir, the Kahashag had called us,” he said. “They asked for permission to board the ship. They know we are leaving and would like to properly see you and the diplomatic team off.” Sulu hesitated. “And they asked to see Doctor McCoy too, sir.”

Despite himself, Leonard paled. “Me?” he stuttered. His eyes flitted from Jim to Spock. “Why in Hell they would want to see me?”

Jim seemed to be pondering the same thing – brows furrowed, fingers drumming against the back of his chair. He shook his head. “I have no idea, Bones,” he finally said. “But it’s your decision to see them or not – you’ve been through a lot, I’m sure there would be no offense if you say you’re not up to visits from formidable foreign leaders.”

“It’s not that,” Leonard whispered. He found himself wrapping his arms around himself, feeling a sliver of the cold of the Seven Lakes seep back in his blood. He could almost hear the snap of his shoulder under the First Nephew’s boot, the blaze of fangs and blood-red sashes of the reigning family of Qyshag Four. “I know it’s stupid, but…”

“They are not like their nephew, doctor,” Spock said, voice unusually soft. “You have nothing to fear.”

Leonard flinched. Jim and Spock had told him the whole story. He knew he had to thank only the Kahashag for his rescue – that they had sent their best warriors, their lover, on a mission which would very probably end with their only blood heir dead or branded as a traitor. He should feel nothing but gratitude for them.

Jim dropped in a crouch beside him, brushing his hand. “He’s right, Bones. But this doesn’t mean you have to see them. Just know we’re going to be right here no matter what you decide. They’ll have to cut us to pieces before getting to you.”

“That is not very encouraging,” Leonard breathed out, still feeling way too cold.

“Sorry. Still, you know what I mean. You want me to tell them you’re unavailable?”

Leonard pressed his lips together. It was true, he may have some reason to feel wary of Qyshag royalty right now – no matter how irrational his wariness could be. Still, when it came to himself one of the few things he was really proud of was the fact he had never been prejudiced against the strange, baffling people they had met in their voyages, no matter how alien or how different.

He realized he had no intention to start now.

“No,” he said slowly. “No – tell them, tell them I’m up to it. Tell them to come.”

Jim didn’t ask him if he was sure – neither did Spock. They simply nodded, and Jim told Sulu to beam them up, and they fell behind his chair with silent ease, waiting for the Rec Room doors to open.

Over-protective idiots, Leonard thought fondly.

A minute passed. A chiming sound floated to them from behind the doors, and the Kahashag of the Western People of Qyshag Four, Child of the Sky, Joy of the Gods, stepped in the room.

They were as lean and as sharp as when Leonard saw them on the first day of their disastrous rendezvous, scar spreading across their face, feather-like hair long enough to skim the collar of their embroidered purple tunic. A couple of heavy-muscled Qyshag warriors flanked them, practically humming with unspent violence, but their Leader wasn’t carrying any weapon at their waist.

“Captain Kirk,” they greeted, with the gravelly, pleasant voice Leonard remembered from their encounter. Jim bowed, and they gave a curt, deep nod in response before turning. “First Officer Spock.” They too exchanged bows.

The Kahashag’s silvery eye slid off Spock’s face, and traveled down to Leonard’s sitting form. He had expected it, and still felt himself tense. Their gaze felt like a living thing, cold and touchable against his skin.

He braced himself. Sucked in a breath to give his greeting, to say something.

Then the Kahashag bowed their head, deeply. To him.

“Doctor McCoy,” they said, “I have meant to come to thank you in person since I was informed you would live through your injuries.”

The couple of hooligans by their side bowed too, silently.

Leonard still had to remember how to close his mouth. “…Eh?” he stuttered.

The Kahashag smiled, bright and charming, as if Leonard had just said the most captivating thing. “I suppose my visit could come as a surprise.”

It’s one way to put it, Leonard thought numbly.

“But I assure you, doctor: I have nothing but reasons to be in debt with you. I know you have sheltered and healed no less than three hundred of my people, and offered your life in exchange for their safety. You have tried to persuade Bar’leen to give up on his plan and submit to my rule.” The Kahashag clasped their hands behind their back. “Not to mention the fact that you saved the life of Pardan. If my people should be most grateful for the first two of your services, I must confess this is the one I cherish the most,” they said simply.

Leonard ran a hand through his hair, self-consciously. His cheeks flushed pink. Still, something in their words tugged at his mind. Leonard could be weak, but he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t miss the slight hesitation on the First Nephew’s name, the faint lines of tension around the Kahashag’s clever eyes. Suddenly, he doubted they felt as easily relaxed and serene as they wanted others to believe.

Diplomacy wouldn’t ever be his gift. He found himself talking before fully thinking the words. “What happened to the First Nephew, my liege?”

The Kahashag’s smile stayed unwavering, but it looked a bit strained. They gave a sigh. “He lives,” they said. “Like that Kvasir kid. The stump is healing nicely, although Bar’llen would never wield a sword again.”

“Will they face charges?” Spock asked quietly.

“Of course,” the Kahashag said. “Treason, attempted murder, conspiracy. The list goes on. And I’ll have to be hard with Bar’leen. My people need to see that no act of open rebellion would be tolerated. I have no intention to have another civil war, not under my rule.” They swallowed. “I can’t say it would be easy, though. I raised them after all. Sometimes, when I look at them, I still saw the toddler who sat on my knees during the long winter evenings and begged for one more story before going to bed.”

The Kahashag weren’t smiling anymore. For a moment, the pain in those words rang so hard and so alive it nearly hurt. It rippled through the room like waves in a lake.

Jim shuffled his weight from one foot to the other. Spock took a deep breath.

Leonard raised one hand to his shoulder, where Geoff’s scalpel had sewn back together bones and tendons. “Maybe you won’t have to be completely pitiless, my liege,” he said. “Justice doesn’t always have to be hard.”

“My people know no other justice.”

“Your people are clever. They can change.”

This time the Kahashag chuckled, baring needle-like teeth. Still, it looked like some of the tension had eased off their back.

“They are right, after all,” they said. They cast Leonard an amused look. “My people had given you a name, Healer McCoy. I’ve heard it in the camps, in the rows of people who climbed here through the stars to bring you gifts. They call you Shaka’ykar. The Warm-hearted. In a land of bitter winters, a warm heart could well be the most precious gift people could think of.”

Leonard instinctively ducked his head, a blush flooding his face all the way down his neck. He hadn’t blushed so much since high school.

“It kinda fits,” declared Jim, all beaming and proud, making it ten thousand times worse. He squeezed Leonard’s shoulder enthusiastically. “Don’t you think it fits, Spock?”

“It certainly does, captain,” Spock said. Traitor.

Bless their soul, the Kahashag either didn’t notice his burning embarrassment, or graciously chose not to remark on it. Instead, they let their gaze sweep over the three of them, bringing them back to silence. Even Jim stood a bit taller under their scrutiny.

“I’ll be blunt, my friends,” they said. “I owe all of you much. Captain Kirk, First Officer Spock – without you, I doubt I would have been able to help my people and give them the chance to join your Federation. We will always be the Qyshag, the proud people of the ice badlands – but I want our youngsters to be able to be explorers, too, and sailors, and scientists studying worlds and people hundreds of suns from ours. I want them to be able to meet and love and learn from all the civilizations we know live out there. We have achieved much in our land, but we are wanderers at heart – our ancestors were. Sailing off and coming back with new stories and new ways is what they would have wanted for their children.” They gave a slow, purposeful nod in Jim’s direction. “If the Captain hadn’t trusted us and chosen to believe our promises despite my nephew’s choices, we wouldn’t be on the verge of this opportunity. And if it wasn’t for First Officer Spock and his quick wits, our encounter would have been stained with innocent blood.”

Spock sucked in a sharp breath. Through the back of his chair, Leonard could feel him repress a shiver. “If I had let it happen, I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself,” he whispered, voice hoarse.

Leonard had to dig nails in his knees to keep from swirling around and telling that big pointy-eared dork he had nothing to be sorry for.

The Kahashag seemed satisfied with Spock’s answer. They turned back to Leonard, and started rummaging in the pocket of their tunic. “I’ve already explained the exact nature of my debt to you, Doctor,” they continued, “but I hope you’ll be willing to accept a small gift – as a reminder, and a token.”

They smiled, producing from their pocket a tiny, metallic thing. It softly under the Rec Room’s harsh lights. The Kahashag went down on their knee, and as they offered it to Leonard on their open palm, the thing gave a silvery, unmistakable ringing sound. Leonard’s eyes widened. A bell. One of the bell woven in the battle sleighs of the Qyshag army.

“These bells are powerful things,” the Kahashag explained. “To their friends, they mean safety and hope, wondrous hope burning brighter than any other – but their enemies, they can announce ruin and wreckage. They are not to be underestimated. I see a similar power in you, Doctor McCoy.” Asking for permission with a glance, they took one of Leonard’s shaking hand, closing it around the ringing bell. “Take this with you, and know that anywhere you will find someone of Qyshag blood, no matter how far from here, you will find shelter and honor with them. Your Captain and your valiant First Officer will always be allies and comrades – but you, doctor, you will always be a friend to the Qyshag people.”

Leonard swallowed, finding a hard lump in his throat. Still, as he held it, the cold metal of the bell started to warm up, the heat of his skin seeping into it, till it felt like it had always been there tucked in his palm. He retired his hand, gently, and the Kahashag’s smile got wider. They suddenly looked younger, softer.

Even this world has its springs.

“…Uh. Uh, wow,” he blurted out, dumbly. Spock’s eye rolling was almost audible. “T-thank you – thank you. A, a lot.”

The Leader of the Western People laughed, straightening and smoothing down the blue hem of their tunic. “Oh, doctor – you really are something.” Leonard couldn’t decide if he should feel offended or not. “Well, it is high time we bid our farewell. May the Sky Riders see you safe through your journeys, captain – and may the Gods of the Mountains make you whole and strong again soon, doctor. I do hope we will meet again.”

“So do we,” Kirk said sincerely.

The Kahashag bowed once more. Jim and Spock, and Leonard too, albeit awkwardly, mirrored the bow, watching as they spun on their heel, called their guards with a sharp wave of their hand, and prepared to leave. The room doors whooshed open in front of them.

Leonard toyed with the bell still in his hand, making it chirp lightly with one finger. He suddenly found himself remembering one of the half-dreams of his delirium – the great white wasteland, the golden-eyed God, the warmth pouring from somewhere under his ribs, filling the world with light.

Shaka’ykar. Warm-hearted.

He smiled.

Jim’s fingers brushed his arm, eyes bright with concern. “Are you cold, Bones?”

“No,” Leonard said softly, more confident than he had felt in weeks. “I don’t feel cold at all.”