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He was finally going home. Two weeks after the Narada incident and he was going home. He no longer had to stare at the sterile hospital walls, waiting for whatever damage that damned slug did to his insides to heal. Home. He could be alone and deal with....everything.
Pike was touted as a hero, or so Starfleet made sure to tell him. They told him he was now Admiral Pike, dressed him up in a fancy white uniform, stuck him in a wheelchair, and paraded him out in front of a hall full of cadets and personnel. Kirk was being promoted. He had to relieve Pike of his duty. This was to be a celebration of the finest Starfleet had to offer; one great captain handing command of the flagship over to someone who will be just as great if not more so.
Pike, on the other hand, had the honor of playing the humble solider through it all. His life was filled with false smiles, and countless "Thank you, Sirs", "It was an honor, Ma'ams", "I was just doing my dutys" and "Anyone in my position would have done the sames". All from a hospital bed or that wheelchair.
All of it served him right, Pike surmised during his ride from the hospital to his apartment, the wheelchair, the looks from other senior officers that conveyed their sympathy and their pity. No one saw him as the able bodied Captain Pike anymore. Instead he was the injured Admiral. He was not a hero. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Heroes were men like George Kirk, his son, Spock, the cadets who died on their first mission.
Pike was no hero. He didn't do anything. Nero beat him. Granted it was with the aid of some futuristic gastropod, but Nero beat him. He wasn't strong enough to handle it. He knew the words were coming out - the subspace frequencies, security codes, childhood memories repressed long ago, and he could do nothing to stop them. It was humiliating.
After Nero got what he wanted, he just let Pike lie there, strapped down to that board, covered in sweat, and whatever the hell the swill was on the floor. The knowledge that something was attached to him, living inside him, was enough to make him want to vomit. In all honesty, he prayed the bug would kill him. It would be so much easier than having to live with the knowledge of everything that went on, the young people who were killed, the three men on the drill. He still didn't know if they made it, and now because of him, his entire planet was going to be annihilated. His fault. Nero wanted him to know pain, and he did.
Jim Kirk saved his ass. He wasn't sure if he should be grateful or depressed. He supposed it didn't matter. He had a slug on his spinal cord, blood full of shit from the same slug, legs that felt like dead weight, how much worse could this get?
He found out when he got back to Earth. Months of therapy were needed, and Psych Evals to see if he could continue in any sort of field capacity. Until then, he would get the humble solider hero worship and the title. The title he didn't earn.
Pike unlocked his apartment door turned on the lights and looked around. It was almost as if a different man lived here before. Academy photos in frames, books and certificates around the walls, his music collection, a copy of his dissertation on the Kelvin. It all seemed so long ago. He felt schizophrenic. How was the man he was supposed to co-exist with who he is now?
He wheeled himself in front of his favorite chair, and did not have the motivation to haul himself out of one chair into another. Two weeks ago, he would have liked nothing more than to sit in that chair with a glass of scotch and contemplate the San Francisco skyline. Now it's just something else he has to do that takes a million times more effort than it did before and he doesn't want to. Instead he wheeled himself back to his bedroom and popped one of those sleeping pills McCoy gave him.
Tomorrow he'll deal with the nightmares, after the memorial service for those that died. He shouldn't sleep peacefully after all this, he doesn't deserve to. And if it were up to him, he wouldn't do so ever again.