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I.
In the dark light of Spock's quarters, something in Kirk ignited as the figure cloaked in shadows and smoke turned to greet him. All wrong, his brain whispered to him. Spock was dead. Spock's body was launched into space in a steel shell.
"Jim."
An imposter in that place. Using his voice. His mannerisms. Someone's idea of a terrible, cruel joke. Kirk was not a killer, at least not intentionally, but in that moment, he felt the heat of that implacable madness. His mind dipped into the supernova of wrath and despair he'd kept banked since walking into the heart of his ship and on the other side of that chamber. Whoever was responsible—whoever thought playing with him in that way was wise—he wanted them dead, for the audacity, the insult of his memory, more than Kirk had ever wanted anything.
He knew it wasn't Spock. It was Kirk's own grief-sick mind working against itself. The voice, the presence in the room—Kirk tasted the grit of salt and regret on his lips. He marched in with the mind to throttle whoever was in there. So quickly the cool numbness of grief could be swallowed into nuclear fury. His hands reached out. He grabbed flesh, warm and alive. His nails bit into the fabric around the figure's shoulders.
He drew short.
It wasn't Spock, as he knew it wasn't. It wasn't Spock's ghost, even if he wished it was. He knew that from the moment he stepped inside.
It was McCoy.
In the dim room he clutched McCoy as though the floor were falling under him, his throat seizing without words as McCoy gazed sightlessly above Kirk's head. Blue eyes in the blink of one eye. A familiar and haunting dark brown in the other.
"Jim," said McCoy, but the voice didn't belong to the doctor. It was something else; terrifying and impossible. "Jim, you must bring me home."
Not him, Kirk thought as horror gripped his heart and squeezed, that's not him. That's not McCoy at all.
II.
Between the splitting migraine (which, McCoy found out later with great chagrin, was actually Spock's katra settling after it was squeezed into his human-sized brain that wasn't designed for Vulcan soul magic in the first place, goddammit), half a dozen hypos of Lexorin, stealing the Enterprise, fighting Klingons, blowing up the Enterprise, and then getting Spock's soul scooped out of him and thrown back in its rightful place, McCoy hadn't had time to breathe. Let alone take a look at himself in the mirror. That seemed rather shallow while they were pulling off the greatest starship heist in Starfleet history and … all the other unfortunate events that followed.
He hadn't done much in the aftermath besides dozing on some dastardly uncomfortable Klingon futon (did Klingons not believe ergonomics to be honorable?) and trying to keep whatever pieces he had left of his sanity intact.
As they coasted towards Vulcan in a stolen Klingon bird of prey he only took stock of his reflection in the warped metal panels of the ship. He looked thin and weary and old. He felt less old and mostly foolish when he snuck into the room where Spock rested just to watch his body breathe. Mercifully it seemed Spock had no memory of the conversation that followed the fal-tor-pan, given the blankness of his gaze. His eyes fell over McCoy as impersonal and distant, like meeting the eye of a stranger on the street. Though Spock did something almost like a double-take as he was led away by his parents, and the faintest sense of recognition stirred in the air before he vanished from view.
It'd been a damn long—and astonishingly bizarre—week.
He hadn't been given much of a chance to pause or so much as shower with all the urgency. Therefore he was completely unprepared when he walked into the fresher at the monastery, McCoy blinked back at his weary reflection. His five o'clock shadow was more like an eleven-thirty shadow. The sag of his skin was especially depressing—not that McCoy was one to give into vanity, but—and made him look a decade older than he was. The bags under his eyes, especially, given the—
Given that he—
His—wait.
His eyes. The eyes staring back at his old, weary self of his, were not the baby blues he'd been born with and lived wearing for the past 58 years. Something else was there. Something, or someone, who still hadn't asked to be invited in.
"Something's wrong," McCoy announced as he burst into Kirk's borrowed Vulcan monk quarters. Kirk was sleeping on some horrific slab of wood and launched upright at McCoy's tone.
"Bones," he started, batting away McCoy's insistent hands. "What now? What?"
"They've done something to me," McCoy hissed. "Something's—Jim, they've done something—!"
He wasn't even sure how to finish the thought without sounding crazy. Though he was sure Kirk would forgive him. He'd only just survived getting Spock's soul absorbed and then un-absorbed without so much as a by-your-leave.
Kirk's face moved in a complicated series of movements that McCoy's shaken and stretched-thin attention couldn't follow. "You mean the katra transfer? Sarek said you might need some time to rest, maybe you should try—"
"My eyes, Jim," McCoy demanded, pushing back at Kirk until they both nearly toppled onto the bed. He peeled back his eyelid with one hand and pointed with the other. "Look at 'em, there's something—"
"Ah," Kirk said, hesitating as he drew out the sound. His fingers encircled McCoy's wrists and drew them into his lap. Restraint, or comfort, McCoy was unsure. "Yes. I did … I thought it might've gone away after all this."
"What the devil are you talking about?"
"Sarek mentioned that"—and Kirk hesitated again there—"sometimes there's … leftovers."
"There's what."
III.
"Breathe in."
Lungs. Air. Inhale. Full. Fuller. Filled.
"Out."
Exhale. Lungs. Without air. Empty. Empty, empty, empty.
"Again. Arms out."
The body reflected at itself moved unhurriedly. The palms opened, fingers barely separated, and lifted above the shoulders. Not unconfidently, but not with great confidence either. The body did as it commanded. Thoughtlessly and without question.
Re-asserting yourself, someone told him. Reminding your body of control. Visible cues first to establish the connection between the physical and the fragmented mind embedded in the flesh. A first step. (If there were more steps, the body did not remember them.)
It was thin, the body. Pale without sun but wrinkled from another lifetime that existed carved into the scars and lines of the skin. The hair was dark and slightly damp from the permeating mist in the air. Thin wrists that shivered when a gust of dry air rattled through the cavernous holding.
Water trickled in the distance and glinted as it wetted the walls. The body could smell it. Sense it. Cold, pure, and tasting of iron. The color red, alien blood.
"Right."
The other arm joined his left above his head. The color green. Burning. Something out of reach. The hand trembled. Minor tremors, at first, and then more violent, as though the self-weight pressed down as heavy and humid as a storm. The teacher made note of it but repeated the command. Again.
Again. Again.
His own dark eyes watched the body in the watery reflection. Brown, but dulled by non-recognition.
Within them small flecks of blue twinkled back. A sound like laughter. Blue eyes, a human man, a soft smirk. Something warm in his abdomen, pulsing. A flash of something else like longing settled under his ribs. It soothed and hurt in equal measures.
"Give attention to the words. Nothing else. Do not force the memories."
The body stilled at the command. Breath in. Breath out. Lungs. Air.
Sand lingered on the tongue of the body. A body that belonged to a ghost, or so the body was told. The body did not remember. The ghost, too, did not seem to remember the body. That did not trouble either, for neither knew why it would be troubling.
The others that came—those others from outside, beyond the rock and water of the cave—seemed troubled.
The body tried not to concern itself with the others. Their eyes and thoughts were filled with ghosts. They looked at the body and wanted something from it, something the body did not know how to give. They wanted the ghost under the body's skin that did not exist. If it did, at one time, the body did not remember it.
There were a lot of things the body did not remember. The body tried not to find that troubling; and rarely, if ever, succeeded.
"Breathe, Spock."
Lungs. Air.
Breath in. Out.
Again.
Again, again.