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Thevo, Jim decides, is not a particularly pleasant world.
In a purely aesthetic sense, he has never met a planet he didn't like, or at least couldn't grow to appreciate in some way - live somewhere long enough, even if it is only a half-life by proxy, spent in orbit and gleaned from scans and samples and late nights hanging around the science department and medbay when the planetrise is too bright to ignore, and you'll wear grooves into it, like water on granite. The comfort afforded by those routines, the corona of an off-world star or the tumbling juggernaut of three moons, every other day-night cycle, is a fondness all its own. It is an inevitable and inescapable intimacy, and Jim slips into it as though giving way to gravity every single time.
Gravity isn't something he particularly wants to think about right now, though, precarious as his current situation is.
"Jim," Bones says, somewhere to his left, and Jim shakes himself alert. "Jim, I think the cuffs are getting loose."
"Good!" Jim says, brightly, and then has to scramble to explain. "I mean, we can pull ourselves up then, right?"
Not remotely. It's bullshit, and he knows it, but the cliff face is uneven and jagged where it pushes at the small of his back, and his feet have been swinging back and forth into variously pointy bits of rock, and he can't imagine Bones is having a much better time. Bones can bitch at the cliff all he wants, and there's no way that'll change a thing. If he bitches at Jim, though, he might feel better. Small mercies.
"No," Bones says, an edge of panic in his voice. "It means that I can swing across and smack my face into the goddamn cliff, and then maybe I'll pass out and I can die in peace, how's that sound to you?"
"Not great," Jim admits. "You're so supremely grumpy. It would be a waste."
The Thevians, as it turns out, have their own variant on the Prime Directive, though they don't waste their time with hearings and court martials and all that sort of fun stuff. They do go in for suspension, though in a much more literal sense than Jim would prefer. Apparently the story of Prometheus exists on more than one planet - and he'll have to write that bit up, see if there's perhaps some precursor myth there to do with the origin of complex lifeforms or something. Fortune may favor the brave, but society seems to favor dangling the brave from great heights and waiting for scavenger birds to do their dirty work. Appearing in the countryside in a shimmer of transporter gold must have been a little too close to stealing divine fire for the Thevians, who hadn't seemed willing to chance it either way. They'd cuffed both of them to the same cliff, at least, which had been comparatively considerate - close enough to rail against their fate together, but not enough to do anything about it - and they'd only used three sets of shackles. Jim tries not to put too much weight on his left arm, lest he drag Bones' hand against the rock face.
Jim's wrists are going numb. The worst of the chafing is around the bottom of his thumb, where the bone juts out in a way Jim really hadn't noticed until now. At first he'd tried to gain purchase on the cliff face with his feet, but they'd taken his boots, and eventually he'd realized that it wasn't sweat from the binary sun making the rock slippery, but blood from his sliced-open soles.
Bones has had his eyes closed for a good two hours, ever since the sky started getting light again.
The first twelve hours had been hell - the wind had whipped around them, jostling them around like garden chimes, and Bones had been sick at least twice. Jim had wrapped his fingers around as much of Bones' wrist as he could and held on tightly enough to bruise; Bones has been making sure to put pressure on the inky purple-black marks ever since, and Jim keeps holding on. When the sky had finally darkened, they'd scanned the sky for the telltale wink of moonslight off the Enterprise bridge, to no avail - its geostationary orbit apparently held it on the other side of Theva.
"It's definitely getting loose," Bones says, and there's a tiny metallic noise, like the elastic ting of a paperclip when it gives way to metal fatigue and splits. "Jim. Jim."
"It's all right," Jim says, "I've got you, I promise," and he thinks of a story he has heard ad infinitum, of a man and a cliff and the hungry, hungry tigers, patient and perversely genteel. Tigers that chase you are easy to avoid. Tigers that wait for you to fall will always win, in the end.
Eat the strawberry, he thinks, and Bones is breathing fast now, loud enough for Jim to hear over the whip-rush of the wind, the early morning mountain gale, visible in swirls of rock dust lit up by the first rays creeping over the horizon, loud enough for him to do something legendarily reckless, suicidally poetic. What else can he do, when Bones is making noises like that and the blood has drained from his face like that-
"I've got you," he says again, and digs his feet back into the rock, feeling the skin split, presses himself flat, and shoves hard with the hand that isn't holding Bones'. He has barely enough room to press his lips to Bones' knuckles in an open-mouthed kiss, tasting ash and aridity and dust, once, twice, and that's the jingle of metal, bright and unmistakeable and far too light, far too cheery, like bells in the morning. For such a small noise, it cuts through the rush of blood in Jim's ears and the way Bones has taken a peaceful breath for the first time in far too long. It seems to be the only noise in the world. He's pushed himself too far, and the shackles are coming free of the cliff face, pins and connecting chainlink jangling merrily -
- and there it is, the blessed tingle of transport, as Jim holds tight to Bones and the world sways sickeningly. Someone in the sky is looking out for us, Jim thinks deliriously, and presses another kiss to Bones' hand, even as he spins, even as the cliff gyrates and changes places with the ground. The sun tips over the horizon and the sky spins a golden-thread cocoon around the two of them and the roar of the wind, the tigers that wait, fade into welcome silence and perfect light.