Work Text:
Later, Jim will remember it exactly like this:
The sway of a calm sea beneath him. The first golden rays of evening through his cabin window.
They glint off the round, dulled edge of his father's compass, which he has propped up against the wall next to the windowsill. Its familiar face stares back at him, a constant reminder like so many ghosts. It tells him that they're heading straight south. Toward a land of ghosts. He picks it up and holds it, fragile and light, in the palm of his hand, and lets his thumb slide along the dirty bronze circle of the outer rim. His father is why he's taken to the sea, why he was born into it and why his sea legs suit him better than his land legs, why he'll never be content in the city or out in the rustling yellow fields, like other men. Unlike George Kirk, though, who made his living as an honest soldier in the King's Navy, and died the kind of hero legends are told about at home, Jim has drifted to a pirate life. Drifted. He says it that way, imagining a tiny paper boat, carefully folded and then set afloat in the river, left to rush along with the current and then drift out to sea—as if he had no control. Easier, perhaps, to think that way.
From a dissolute life on land to a dissolute life at sea. He turns the compass around and it points south, south, south, the magnetic tick of the black arrow jumping insistently and undeterred. As a young man, he survived on bets and odd jobs and favors owed and returned, and maybe he was looking for his father, then, too. Maybe he was looking for him in the shadow of himself. What he should have known even then is that the sea is where the real ghosts live: unexplained blue lights on the endlessness of an ocean that stretches to the far curve of existence, eerie noises whistling in the wind, precarious buoyancy over dark night waves and the sharpness of every sense in the quiet, solitary dawn. So of course he followed his father to the sea. He followed him to the one place he'd once sworn he'd never go, not out of honor, but out of desperation, need. At the time, he thought: one last favor, one treasure to last a lifetime.
He got used to calling another man Captain. He found his sea legs and a taste for the brine scent of the wind off the water on blustery days.
Maybe he should have been a soldier like the father who died, barely older than he is now, who looked years younger in the only picture Jim still has of him. He never takes the picture out; the compass never leaves his person. How else is he to know where he's going when he loses sight of land? Toward riches—which can only lead to a greater desire for riches. Toward revenge—he had his taste for it once, right after the ship was left to him, and now that need is sated, and only his reputation for it left behind. Toward—
He holds the compass, anchor-heavy, in the palm of his hand.
"Brooding again?" a weary voice says from the open door, and Jim looks up, curls his fingers around the compass as if to keep it secret.
Then he straightens up and leans back again in his chair, easy, one leg stretched all the way out in front of him, and in that movement, he shoves his melancholy thoughts away and takes on the appearance of the confident, young captain again. Open and relaxed, taking up all of the space in his cramped domain. As if Bones would ever be fooled by such a display. "Brooding? Never."
Bones just grumbles something low and quiet under his breath, and makes himself at home, pulling up the chair across from Jim's. "If you're having second thoughts, we can turn around now."
"You don't waste any time, do you?" He's still trying to joke, but his wide grin falters. "Who says I'm having second thoughts?"
Bones shrugs and gestures to Jim's hand. "Caught you brooding over that old thing again."
"There's that word again. I told you—" He opens his hand and lets the compass fall down, still gently, against the tabletop, then stands and turns away, toward the window and the slow-shifting rays of fading yellow light. They stream out between breaks in the dissipating clouds and catch against the planes and angles of his face. "I don't brood."
Bones doesn't answer for a long time. Above them, the ship, rarely quiet, sounds of intermittent stomping feet and shouts. Yet underneath, and he knows that Bones hears it too, he can discern the lapping of the waves beneath them, the slick movement of water against wood.
"George Kirk didn't bury treasure," Bones reminds him. The quiet of his voice sounds like an apology.
"I know. Because he wasn't an outlaw—"
"So you're not going to find him, or a body or a ghost or a vision. No matter how desperately you want to."
Bones never gives any weight to words like outlaw. Unlike most of the rest of them, he lived the life of an honest man once. He still has the air of a simple country doctor about him, even as he patches up stab wounds, bullet wounds, gets his hands bloody in the service of pirates even though he hates the sea.
"It's not about him."
"So, what? We're just chasing legends for the hell of it? Gold and silver's never meant this much to you before."
Jim shakes his head, but the gesture is little more than a short jerk of his chin. He can feel his old friend's eyes on him, watching him, gaze flickering over him like candle flame in the dark.
"You know I wouldn't let anyone else talk to me like that."
Behind him and to the left, he hears a rap of knuckles on wood and a dry laugh. "Ship's surgeon's privilege. What would you do without me, Jim?"
He quirks up the corner of his mouth but doesn't answer, not until the golden light seeps into violent reds and bruise-dark purples, and the sea and the sky shade to different tones of ever-moving shadow meeting shadow.
"It's not about my father." At least, not any more than anything else ever is. "And it's not about riches. I could bury my own treasure five times over. If I wanted to retire, I could take Janice—" He curls his fingers tight around the windowsill. "Only hear the sea on long walks on the beach."
"So it's the challenge? That no one else has ever found it? That most people on this ship, following your orders every day, don't think it even exists?"
"No." He shakes his head again. "It's—it's something I can't explain."
A place. A person. A face he can't see and a warm hand grabbing his forearm, refusing to let go.
He's had nightmares of finding a skeleton in that box, where the grip on his arm is that of death itself ready to take him. But when he wakes, he knows that's fear and paranoia setting in, because every waking vision and every shot of longing through his chest speaks of the sea, and someone he knew once, but can't recall, who loves it just as fiercely as he does. Someone who's waiting out there for him, somewhere Jim has never been that feels like home.
"I can't explain," he says again, and Bones mutters something under his breath, pushes his chair back with a harsh scrape but doesn't leave the room.
The sun has pooled blood-red at the horizon, shading the sky above a violent pink, and leaving the starboard side of the ship awash in fading red and golden light as Jim climbs again to the upper decks. If he strains his eyes, he can just make out the island in the distance. It's half-hidden already in the shadows of twilight, little more than a darker shadow itself at the edge of the sea.
He plans to walk to the bow, to see if he can get a better look, when he hears a rough shout from above: "Captain!"
Jim turns and catches sight of Sulu behind the wheel. He’s framed by a background of full, billowing sails and complex rigging, their pirate flag flying high above the rest. The strength of the wind itself is pushing their boat in the direction it needs to go, so that Sulu barely has to steer but can rest his hands lightly on the bottom edge of the wheel. The wind all but swallows the address, too. Jim climbs up the short stairway, two steps at a time, to stand on the higher platform with him.
"If the wind keeps up, we should be there by mid-morning tomorrow," Sulu says.
Jim just nods. "Good, good." From this vantage point, he truly does feel himself the king of the vessel, or maybe of the whole planet—he’s cutting through the waters as if on a pre-destined path, and the island is always there before him calling like a siren's song. The wind will stay steady and strong. He feels it blowing through his hair, whipping the sleeves of his shirt.
Distracted as he is, he still feels Sulu's hesitation, next to him. "Something else on your mind?" he asks, with a half-glance toward him.
"Just—" He runs the tip of his finger along the smooth inner circle of the wheel, chasing the gleam of the sunset off the deep brown wood. "Do you really think it's out there? The Treasure of the Golden Skull?"
His words are so low that the wind quickly takes them, but not before Jim hears, not before they settle deep in his bones. He doesn't answer right away, though his silence doesn't come from uncertainty. Rather that he's too sure, and he knows his unshakable certitude will only read like the rabid declarations of a madman, compared to Sulu's awed, wary, fearful hope.
“I’ve heard it’s the most valuable treasure in existence,” Sulu adds. The light, dreamlike airiness to his words gives Jim the impression that he is feeling them, rather than hearing. “Riches beyond anything you can imagine...” He trails off, then shakes his head abruptly, and laughs a single, dull, humorless laugh. “If it even exists. Most people don’t think it’s real. They say—the legend is that only two men have ever seen it: the pirate who amassed the treasure, and the one who stole it from him and buried it. Buried the first pirate with it, too, I’ve heard. Buried the man’s skull, which had turned pure gold from the force of his greed, to guard the treasure. And now anyone who is unlucky enough to find the cave it’s buried in, out on a solitary island, behind an abandoned tower cut into a wall of rock, he’ll find the skull before he finds the riches and then go mad. And just like the greedy pirates, he’ll never be seen again.”
The flag above them whips and cracks against the hard gusts, a high and violent sound above the conversations of the men, the movements of the sails, the waves crashing against the side of the boat.
"No one's ever found the treasure chest itself," Sulu continues. He's watching Jim now out of the corner of his eye. "I think there are more people...believe in the terror than the riches."
"And what do you believe?" Jim asks.
Sulu bites down on the corner of the lip, the gesture difficult to discern in the dying light. This is the last flare of it now. Darkness will settle on them soon. "I think the uncertainty itself could drive a man mad," he answers. "Wanting to believe in something so badly and still needing proof. Chasing that proof to the planet's edge."
Jim laughs. It's just the right answer, and it delights him. Nothing like serving with an honest man. He's built a whole crew of them: the most honest pirate ship there is.
"You know what I think?" he says, leaning forward on the top bar of the platform railing. "I think if that treasure chest exists anywhere in the world, it's on that island." He gestures forward into the growing gloom. "Right there. I think if there's anything to find, we're going to find it."
The first time he saw his ship, she was floating serenely in the water at the Riverside docks. Dawn had only recently broken, the spring morning pale and cool, and the sky only recently washed out from golden yellow to a near-white blue. He was twenty-two then, with a black eye and old, dried blood on his shirt, and he stood in the center of the dock, as oblivious of the busy sailors and merchants all around him as if they were of no more importance than the flies that buzzed and flitted past his ears. They jostled him impatiently, elbows and the edges of heavy crates poking at his sore ribs and the still-purple bruises on his sides, but he was too entranced to step out of the way. He had nothing to lose then but it felt like only the world to gain. All around him was the rough talk of men who lived by the sea, and the high caw of gulls; the smell of fish and sweat and sharp salt air pricked at his nose.
He tipped his head back and followed the lines of the ship, from the decks up the rigging to the crow's nests at the top. Her sails were down and she flew no flag. She'd seen a few rough days already, but to him she seemed as new and as untested as he was himself. His lady. Any doubts he might have had the night before of repaying his debt with hard labor disappeared, and when he climbed aboard her for the first time, he knew he wasn't anyone's servant but hers. Hers and the sea.
Now he's standing at the bow again, squinting through heavy morning mist at the island up ahead. This might be a homecoming too. But his instincts are too tangled up in the previous night's recurring dreams, his name in a voice that speaks to him of urgency and poorly concealed fear, his name for once and not his title, and a sense of someone close who can never quite be reached.
He dreamed of the skull again, too: pure gold and deep sunken hollows where the eyes should be, a wretched grin of square gold teeth.
The island appears now not as a vague shadow floating at the horizon, but a massive land of craggy, rocky hills, breaking up the endlessness of the water. Details remain hazy through the fog. He leans forward over the bow, as if this movement alone could cause the low morning wind to rise up again into the previous night's violent, powerful storm.
"Careful there, sailor," a voice behind him warns, and he lowers himself down again onto the heels of his boots. He's smiling before he even turns around.
"Don't want you to fall overboard," Janice adds. She rests her hand subtly just above his elbow as she tucks herself in between him and the side of the ship. Close like this and he can't help but slip his arm around her waist. She's smiling up at him like she sees him, not as the captain but as himself, and it might all be an illusion but it warms the hollow of his chest.
"You make it sound like I don't know what I'm doing," he answers.
"Oh no, old pirate like you?" she teases. "I know you do. Just wanted to get your attention."
"Is that how you think of me? Old?" He pretends to be affronted. Older than her, certainly, and older than his own years, certainly, too. He doesn't understand what she sees in him most days, any more than he understands what she's doing on a ship of surly outlaw men. Keeping them sane perhaps, with a mind too sharp and too steady to be swayed by anything from brutal storms to pirate battles to seaside town holdups—or quixotic treasure hunts like this. Whether she wants him because he's lucky or because he's the Captain, he's never found the need within himself to ask.
"Weathered and experienced," Janice says, and reaches up to trace the lines in his face.
He smiles, but the expression is slight and he feels it as no more than a shadow over his face, like a fast-moving cloud across the sun. "You're going to keep these men in line when I disembark?" he asks, catching her hand in his and squeezing tight.
She tips her head back and pouts at him. "You make it sound like I'm not going with you."
"Because you aren't."
Janice pulls her hand from his grip, the teasing smile of a moment before now fallen from her face, and steps to the side so abruptly that Jim tips forward and has to catch himself with two hands against the bow. "I am," she answers. "If you're left alone, who knows what kinds of foolish risks you'll decide to take. All for the sake of some treasure that might not even exist—"
He grabs her hands again as she gestures, pulls them down and steps closer so he and Janice are nose-to-nose again. "That's what Bones said too," he answers. "When he said he was coming with me. Except I think he used the phrase 'damn fool risks.'"
She's still not smiling, and when he lets go of her hands, she crosses her arms against her chest and points her chin up at him. "You really think you're doing this alone?"
Eventually, yes. Eventually it will be him and a dark cave and a grinning, golden skull, and a treasure, the wanting of which brings madness to the most untroubled men.
"I suppose I don't have any choice," he answers, as if it were capitulation. Then: "Here."
That morning, he'd taken the flowers from the metal tin on the table in his quarters—his version of a vase—and tied the stems together in a knot, then put it in his jacket pocket as if he knew this precise moment would come. He takes out the small bouquet. It's made of three soft pink flowers, with the thinnest and most delicate petals; tied together, they form a complex bloom of overlapping light-rose tones.
Gently, he places it behind Janice's ear, threading the stem into her hair to keep it in place.
"Are you trying to bribe me to stay onboard?" she asks. Her eyes are still narrowed, but her shoulders are relaxing into place, her hands falling back down to her sides.
"Just a gift," Jim answers. "The only one I have to give."
Despite his riches, all of his ill-gotten wealth, they both know that at this moment, he's telling her the truth. She wraps her arms around his waist. He watches over her shoulder as the thick fog shifts, and more of their destination is revealed.
The rowboat rises up on the water and washes ashore, lodging itself firmly between two rocks, so that not even the powerful force of the waves can set it free. As the ocean breaks against the stern, causing the boat to rear and sway, Jim stands up on steady legs, braces himself against the side, and hops out onto the beach. The water reaches immediately up to his knees. Still greedy, the waves drag at him as he wades his way up onto the darkened, golden sand, before reaching their apex, and retreating again into the sea.
Behind him, he can hear Bones grumbling and splashing as he climbs out of the boat. But he doesn't offer more than a glance backwards until both Bones and Janice have trudged their way past the rocks and the farthest reach of the waves, onto the safety of solid, dry land again. They come to stand on either side of him. Bones's question—"What the hell are we doing here?"—dies half-spoken in his throat as he follows Jim's gaze up.
To their left, the rocky beach solidifies into an increasingly solid floor of stone, and from this base rises a massive wall of aged, brown stone, a craggy mountain with a sheer drop from its apex to the sea. At the top, a few spindly trees and other hearty, deep-green vegetation are visible. But the most notable landmark, the only proof that any beings live or ever have lived on this desolate and windy beach, is the tower cut into the side of the mountain wall. A trio of square windows have been chopped into the side, but there is no visible door. A single ornamentation, like a braid made out of stone, loops beneath the uppermost window. The top of the tower rises to a dark, peaked roof.
"Where's the rest of it?" Janice asks. Her voice, though quiet, snaps Jim out of a trance he hadn't realized had overtaken him.
"There is no rest of it," he answers, tilting his head back, watching the tip of the tower jab against the pale, thinly clouded sky. "This is it."
They're silent for another long moment, while the wind picks up again and whistles a harsh and high-pitched tune. Jim feels a shiver pass through him. But it's not his damp and dripping clothes that makes his whole body shake.
"I don't like the look of it," Bones mumbles.
Jim laughs, a harsh bark that sounds even to him like whistling past a graveyard, and slaps Bones on the back and says, "Where's your sense of adventure?"
"No, he's right," Janice insists. She grabs on to Jim's wrist as if to hold him back, but her touch is light, and doesn't stop him from striding across the sand toward the rocks. Behind him, the other two following; he hears no hesitation in their steps despite their unease. "I don't like this place, Captain. It doesn't feel right. It feels like no one's been here before, ever—like that tower shouldn't exist."
"That's just the weather," Jim answers. "Gray sky, bit of a wind... that's all. You said it yourself: there's no one here." He stops up short at the edge of the sand, just shy of the rock floor beneath the tower. This close, the immensity of the structure is almost dizzying, and the shadow it casts makes him shiver again, as it blocks out the last bit of the faint, clouded sun.
"Are you really telling me that this doesn't feel wrong to you?" Bones snaps. "It's not just us. Everyone on the ship has had a bad feeling about this misadventure since the start. It's probably no more than a wild goose chase anyway. And if it's not? 'Riches beyond a man's wildest dreams'—it’s like you said, you don't need riches."
"Come on, Bones, being superstitious is beneath you." He jumps up onto the stone, and as he does, he can feel both Bones and Janice wince. Silly of them. And yet, instinctively, he looks up at the tower again, as if expecting it to react to the movement at its base. "You're a man of science," he adds. "Anyway, what's the problem? If I find nothing, we go back to the ship, no harm done. Is this about wasting time on a useless adventure, or do you believe the legend?"
He turns toward them again, and they drop their eyes down to their feet.
"You believe in it," Janice answers quietly, and flashes her gaze up at him again. "You believe it, or we wouldn't be here. At least the part about the gold. Why are you so sure about that, and not the dangers? How many pirates have died because they're too greedy and too confident, and you want that to be you?" Her voice gains power and volume as she speaks, until she hops up onto the stone by his side. But the rocks are covered with a strange orange substance, like some kind of lichen or alien moss, and as soon as her heels sink down into the soft vegetation, she jumps and immediately stumbles back. The brief moment of uncertainty only causes the high spots of color in her cheeks to darken, and he sees the embarrassment and anger in her face.
He's not angry, himself. He knows exactly what each of them is feeling and doesn't fault them an inch. "Janice," he says, stepping closer to her again, holding her at arms' length with his hands just below her shoulders. "I'm not sure about it. But I don't have to be sure. I'm not in the business of certainty." That’s not quite the truth—he knows, he knows in his gut that this is where he needs to be. "Maybe there's riches on this island or maybe there's danger or maybe there's even madness or death. But I need to know. I don't expect you to go with me." He looks over at Bones. "Either of you. Just understand that this is something I need to do."
Bones crosses his arms tight against his chest. He's trying to close himself off, but Jim can see capitulation in his face. "And where do you propose to start looking?" he asks. The words are little more than a low grumble, but they make Jim smile all the same.
"I'd say that's a pretty good first clue," he answers, letting go of Janice so that he can gesture behind him, to a rotten old bottle lying ten feet away on the stone. Aside from the tower, which seems millennia more ancient even than the scarred and pitted glass, the crawling orange lichen that has tied the bottle to the stone, it is the only sign of life they've seen. And pirate life at that. He keeps his rum locked away in his quarters, in bottles just that shape, but shining new.
"Looks like it's pointing the way, if you ask me," he adds.
He half-expects they'll argue with him again, but though Janice looks uneasy and Bones downright angry, neither one says a word. Jim squares his shoulders and glances up at the tower again. Maybe there is something to his crew's bad feeling.
His skull turned pure gold from the force of his greed, and anyone who makes it to the cave and finds the skull goes mad.
They must think he's been taken over by greed himself. But it's not gold and jewels he's searching for but somehow, on this abandoned island, in this ancient place, something that feels like the other half of himself, something besides the sea itself that sounds of belonging and home.
He starts walking in the direction that the bottle points, deeper into the shadows beneath the tower.
"I still don't like this," Bones says, from several paces behind him.
"Noted," Jim answers, with a cheeriness he knows will drive his old friend mad.
Even though he never asked either of them to leave the ship with him, let alone travel across the beach, up over the stone, or around behind the tower cut into the rock, they do. Nobody argues when they pass around the tower and find a steep, narrow path up the mountainside, the only path available to them, and start to climb.
Jim takes out his compass and sees that they are walking straight south.
The path has only gotten steeper as they continue up, past scraggly vegetation, over outcroppings of jagged rocks. The sun has burned off the morning mist and now not even the fading breezes can cool them as the rays beat down, unrelenting, unceasing. Sweat has gathered at Jim's temples, drips down his forehead and the side of his nose.
Off to the right, the tower still looms. There's no one inside, he's sure there's no one inside, and yet someone seems to watch them from within. He feels eyes upon him from a great distance. He feels like the tower is the destination he has been grasping for all this time—
Imminent heat stroke, he tells himself. Or maybe his crew was right. Maybe he's already lost his mind.
Finally, they reach a plateau upon the mountainside, leading directly to the entrance of a dark cave of unknown depth. The path leads no farther up. If the tower itself is not the destination, then this must be it.
"The cave it’s buried in, out on a solitary island, behind an abandoned tower cut into a wall of rock," Jim murmurs. The legend itself reads like a map he is consulting in his mind.
"Let's go back," Janice says, and maybe it's the heat or the exhaustion of the climb or just the persistent fear that this adventure has engendered in all the crew, but her voice sounds ragged and desperate. Like she might throw herself—or him—off the side of the mountain before stepping foot into the impenetrable darkness of the cave.
Jim turns around to face her, his expression sympathetic and soft. "You and Bones can be my lookouts," he says.
"No. Let's go back. Whatever is in there—it's not worth it."
It's worth everything, he thinks. But she'd never believe him. Perhaps she understands, as he does now, as Bones seems to, from the sad and resigned look on his face, that when Jim disappears into the cave, he will never come back out.
The wide-open mouth of it, the hollow it makes in the washed-out gray of the landscape, the endless black of it like the heights of the sky on a clear night without any stars, all make him think that he's found the ends of existence. The end of all things.
He takes her by the shoulders one more time, kisses her forehead, and says, "I have to."
To Bones he says nothing at all, just shakes his hand so firmly that the long years of their friendship seem to pass between them in the grasp of palm to palm. His friend won't argue. And he's fairly sure Janice won't either, when he turns back toward the cave again, takes a deep breath, and starts to walk inside—
Then he hears her shriek, and whips around just in time to see her launch herself after him, just in time to see Bones grab her by the waist and pull her back.
In the same moment, he hears a loud rumbling, like thunder from the cloudless sky.
He glances up. He still sees out of the corner of his eye, and hears but as if from a far distance, Bones holding Janice back and her cries of incoherent warning. Then the heavy stones above begin to fall. They crash down in front of him, rain down in front of him, cause the ground to shake as they hit the plateau at the end of the path. They keep coming down in an unceasing, thunderous torrent, until the entrance to the cave is completely walled off, with only a few chinks left between the boulders to let in pinpricks of light.
The cave-in takes only a few moments but seems to last a year. In the aftermath, he hears the ringing of the landslide still echoing in his ears. But nothing else. No sound of Bones and Janice on the other side of the wall. He blinks, and feels himself all alone in the stuffy, dark quiet, takes stock of the ragged workings of his lungs and the frantic beating of his heart.
Then he takes out a match and lights it, and makes his way deeper into the dark.
He always knew, without ever having to say it to himself in words, that this part of the journey he would make alone. He gets used to the steady, loud thump of his heart, the sweat on his palms. One hand holds the flickering match flame in front of him. The other is in his pocket, his thumb sliding around and around the compass edge.
When he reaches the back of the cave, he starts to dig. He uses a small trowel from his pocket first, then his bare hands, just so he can feel the crumbing soil against his fingers. The match goes out and he doesn't light a new one. After so long, perhaps hours, in the warm and the black, he feels accustomed to it, almost able to see in the dark like a night creature.
He's been mad this whole time. He's been mad from the start. It's not the skull that causes men to lose their minds but the longing and the need, and the inability to put into words what they are searching for. Maybe the golden skeleton head does not turn a man's mind against itself but only serves as a gruesome reminder of what he has already become.
We're not in the business of certainty.
Well, then what? Adventure? Exploration? Discovery? Not gold, surely. A piece of gold has never made him happy, and if he were to find this treasure chest and open it to discover hoards of coins and precious jewels, he'd scream in frustration and agony—he’d fall into an inconsolable rage, to think he led himself to his own death for so little, in the end.
Eventually, his dirty and ragged hands hit against something as hard as bone. He feels it out. There—two gruesome hollows where eyes might be, a third hollow for a nose—a wide and mocking grin of square, chipped teeth. He tries to pull it up, but it's stuck fast. So he digs lower, frantically shoves clods of heavy dirty out of the way, until his fingertips stub themselves against something else: a wooden object, long and flat, a rectangle with sharp metal corners and bands of metal striping along the top and sides.
Jim sits back on his knees and lights another match. The thin cave air is making him dizzy, and his exertion has long left him out of breath. He has to swipe the sweat from his forehead and from underneath his eyes. He has to take account of himself again, before he can take in the object below.
When he sees it, he could almost laugh. The golden skull is attached, like a macabre ornament, to the top of the treasure chest. The chest itself is surprisingly small. He could carry it easily, all by himself, if there were anywhere to carry it. If he had anywhere to go.
With one hand, he runs his fingertips along the edge of the lid, searching for a lock, testing the heaviness of it. He finds a hollow indent in the center, and, using it for leverage, lifts the top of the treasure chest up. In that moment, he forgets to breathe. The faint light of his single match flame seems to catch on nothing but shadow, and for a long moment, he has no idea what he's unearthed—
Then all that was darkness becomes nothing but blinding white light, and he feels himself losing his balance, losing the ground beneath his feet, losing the last of the air in his lungs—
"Jim."
Someone is above him, calling his name. Someone is holding on to his arm, as if to steady him. Someone was briefly touching his face.
"Jim."
He tries to open his eyes, but only manages to lift his eyelids a sliver. His head is pounding, and something about the light above him is wrong. Instead, he reaches out his hand for the person holding onto his arm, grabs on to him with a surprising strength He didn’t know he had it in him. He still feels like he is trying to drag himself up from somewhere very far away, like the full weight of his body hasn't caught up with his mind.
Or maybe it's the other way around.
"Jim, are you awake?" the voice says, this time with more urgency, an deniable streak of worry shot right through.
"Mmmm," he answers. It's the best he can manage to reassure his friend. His mouth doesn't want to work any more than his eyes do, and his whole body feels heavy and impossible to move. His stomach is rolling with sea sickness. "Were we... on a boat?" he asks, but his tongue is so thick and his mouth so dry that he's not sure the words make any sense.
"The ship is still in orbit," the voice answers, which makes perfect sense and yet no sense at all. I think you mean at sea, he wants to say. But the words come out a groan, as he raises his other hand to his forehead and tries to rub away the headache settling there.
"Dr. McCoy has just beamed back up. We have been trying to wake you for several hours. I believe he is looking for a stronger stimulant."
"No, no, no." Jim waves his hand uselessly through the air. "Don't need that. I'm up, I'm up."
An idea occurs to him, and he rests his palm over his eyes, opens them slowly, and then even more slowly, tries to sit up. His friend does most of the work in lifting him to a sitting position. At first, sitting upright makes the dizziness worse. But after a few moments, he feels better.
He takes his hand from his eyes, letting them adjust to the full light of the room.
Ah, now—now he's starting to feel more like himself again. He glances to his left and finds Spock staring at him with a worried expression creasing his brow.
"I'm up," he says again. "See? I'm okay."
Spock's mouth thins into an impossibly narrow line, and he answers, "I will let Dr. McCoy be the judge of that."
"I'm sure he'd be happy to oblige." He rubs at his forehead again, where the headache is now truly starting to bloom, but despite the heaviness in his body and the strange miasma of images in his brain, he can't help but smile. A strong wave of relief is crashing over him. A sense of homecoming. A sense of being where he is supposed to be.
"What happened anyway?" he asks. "I remember..." He squints, as if trying to search out his recent memories on the far side of the room.
But the room itself distracts him. He's lying on a thin pallet bed on the floor of a pale gray room in the shape of a dome. Behind Spock, a complex computer system stretches across the entire wall. Something about it makes Jim distinctly uneasy. A few incomprehensible patterns of light shine across the interface—it's clearly turned on, and he has the vague feeling he was standing in front of it not that long ago—
When he tries to recall just exactly what he was doing, though, what flashes across his mind are only the strangest and most unrelated images: a ship at sea, a compass with a tarnished edge, a bouquet of soft pink flowers, a leering skull glinting in gold.
"I can't explain it, Captain," Spock answers, and though his tone is almost perfectly neutral, Jim hears the note of frustration in it. "Our landing party was exploring the city, which appears to have been abandoned for quite some time. By the time we reached the outskirts, you’d gone off on your own. You entered this room by yourself. We heard something that sounded like a small explosion, and when we came in, you had passed out on the floor. That was two hours ago, and we haven't been able to wake you since."
"Two hours?" He feels like he's been out of it for days. The headache beats a fraction harder at his temples. He glances at the computer again, and again a shiver of anxiety creeps up his spine. "Spock, help me up. I want to get another look at that thing."
"I am not sure that would be wise," Spock answers, though only faintly, and doesn't hesitate to help Jim stand. He grabs him firmly by the forearm, and Jim grabs onto Spock in turn. Then Spock uses his strength to haul his Captain to his feet, with very little effort on Jim's part at all.
Once he's up, he does need to steady himself on his own.
"You've had more time with this thing than I have," he says, with a confidence he doesn't feel, as he approaches the machine. "What do you think it is?"
"My best guess is an incredibly sophisticated library."
"A library?" Jim shoots him a skeptical look. They're standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the computer, and though it continues to make occasional light beeping noises, it does not otherwise appear threatening. The small screen at the center fizzes with static. Jim has a sudden flash of memory again—sparks shooting from around the screen, large plumes of smoke obscuring the air—but whatever damage the explosion wrought appears to have been minimal. "Seems pretty dangerous for a library."
"Yes," Spock agrees lightly. "Its memory banks are extremely sophisticated. Either it malfunctioned due to age, or it was not intended for use by an alien being. But I believe that, when working properly, it may allow the user not just to read text about, or watch video from, an older era but actually to inhabit the past."
"Inhabit the past?" Jim echoes.
The sunset bleeding pink tones through the window of his quarters; pale rays glinting off the compass edge. The blustery wind from the deck. The shifting fog revealing the island in the distance.
"It is only a hypothesis," Spock adds.
Jim glances at him, and briefly meets his eye.
"I think it's a good one, Mr. Spock," he says. He starts to reach his hand out to touch the machine again, then draws it back, instinctively wary. "The actual past, though?" he wonders, so faintly that he hardly expects a reply.
"Or perhaps more like a re-creation or an example of what the past might have been like," Spock answers. "It's not a time travel device. It might have been used for educational or even recreational purposes."
"Well it certainly sent me on a ride," Jim says, and even manages a faint smile. Spock doesn't return the look, but he does raise one eyebrow, so Jim knows that he's amused.
"Come on." Jim steps away from the computer and gestures for Spock to follow. "I'm not sure this is a mystery worth solving in all its details." He half-expects his First Officer will argue with him on that point, but he seems more than ready to leave the strange, domed room and return to the ship. Jim lets Spock lead the way out. He doesn't trust his still-fuzzy memory to find the correct route through the maze of hallways between the room with the computer and the outside door.
When they do step outside at last, Spock starts to pick his way down a steep, rocky incline away from the building, while Jim stops up short in the door.
"Is something wrong, Captain?" Spock asks. He has to shout to be heard over the forceful, cold wind, and all Jim can think is:
Is something wrong?
He can't say.
Only he's sure, for a moment, with the uncanny certainty of déjà vu, that he's been in this place before, and not so long ago at all. He's been on this gray beach, beneath this hazy morning sun. He's seen these massive rocks strewn with spongy, orange lichen. He's watched these forceful waves crash over the rocks and the sand, fizz and foam white-gray at their edges and then retreat into a sea so vast and so limitless that it might easily cover the rest of the planet, but for the scrap of earth beneath their feet.
And—he takes a few steps forward, balancing carefully on the rocks, and then looks behind him and straight up—he's seen this tower, too. Simple, gray stone cut into a solid wall of rock, with a single decoration, like a braid, beneath the top window, and a dark brown pointed cap for a roof.
"No," he answers faintly. "Nothing's wrong."
He's about to explain, in whatever imperfect words he can find, the jagged bits of memory that are only starting to surface again in his brain, the sense of a long journey that has brought him, at great cost, to just this moment and this place. Then an unexpected movement at the shoreline catches his eye, and he forgets whatever he’d been hoping to say.
It looks like fabric flying in the breeze.
When he turns his head to look, he sees two images at once: Bones and Janice on the plateau just outside the cave, his arms around her and her face buried against his chest—and at the same time something else—a man he doesn't know and a woman he doesn't know, standing barefoot in the sand. The man's hand is tangled in the woman’s hair, and the woman is barely holding herself back from sobbing against his chest. They are humanoid, but not quite human. The woman has three soft pink flowers tucked in behind her ear.
For a moment, his shock leaves him utterly frozen. Then it breaks as abruptly as it came, and he finds himself running with dangerous speed down the treacherous, rocky incline, barely in control of the movement of his own feet. "Hey!" he calls. "Hey, are you okay? What's wrong? Are you—?"
He can hear Spock running behind him, and when he stops just shy of the tide's edge, Spock stops with him.
But there's no one, now, no one in the spot where the man and woman had just stood. And yet a few seconds ago, they'd seemed as real as Bones and Janice were.
Which is to say, maybe not real at all.
What remains are three flowers, floating serenely in the water at Jim's feet. He crouches down in the sand and picks one up, just to reassure himself that it's real. But it's so delicate that it almost disintegrates in his hand, so he drops it down into the ocean again, and the next wave to rise up over the sand washes it away.
"What happened?" Spock asks. "Did you see something...?"
"No." He stands up again, and looks out at the horizon, but all he can see is the steady ripple of gray-blue waves beneath a hazy sky. "No, it wasn't anything. Just the sun playing a trick on me. Are you ready to go home, Mr. Spock?"
"If you are, Captain."
Jim smiles faintly. He is more than ready to go. He pulls his communicator out and calls back to the ship, and in another moment, they have disappeared, leaving only the abandoned beach and faint shimmers of gold in their wake.