tampered | The purpose is to experience fear. Fear in the face of certain death.

Entry tags:

The purpose is to experience fear. Fear in the face of certain death.

When: 17th onward!
Rating: Gross sickly stuff.
Characters: Jim & you!
Summary: Catch-all log for Jim's friends! After the 16th when he felt ill, Jim's Augmented blood has started to fight back like it did during the two weeks he was out cold after dying in a decontamination chamber. His organs will be starting to slowly fail, blood (both his own and Khan's) will be coming up, and he's generally confined to his bedroom in his and Bones' apartment. As time goes on, his condition will be deteriorating until his essence rite is performed. Please put the date of your visit in the subject header! Forward/Back-dating and Prose/Action are all fine, as are video/audio/text which can be directed here for all personal calls while Jim is sick.
Log:

[ He finds himself thinking of Christopher, more than anything. Of the last time he saw him, specifically, in the Hall of the Missing. Of not being able to let go of him for so long and crying like a son lost in the thickest of woods, longing to find his way home only to briefly find it and have to turn back into the darkness once more. Chris had held him, kissed his hair like a father, soothed Jim in a way he had never had to before, but then again neither of them had died and been torn apart in such violent ways until the Augment came into their lives. Even in death, he's still been there when Jim needed him.

He stares out of the window in his room, propped up against pillows as coughs rumble in the pit of his chest, looking at the City below where the horizon meets a fake, beautiful sky. If he lets the migraines take over for long enough his senses go haywire and a drowsy kind of tactile memory swims under his fingers and into his nose, of an admiral's uniform scented with aftershave that soothes his anxieties almost as effectively as the real thing.

"It's going to be okay, son."

He wishes he could find a bar to drown his sorrows in. Chris always, always found him when he was at his lowest point in backwater dives.

And then on occasion, during his more painful moments where there's no one around to hear his muffled crying into a pillow or witness the sheets crumpling in his fists, his thoughts drift to the decontamination chamber. Jim wakes himself up several times after passing out with Spock's name on bloodied lips and hopes to God he hasn't started doing anything as embarrassing as crying out in his sleep to betray his fright; he has the use of his lungs still, unlike his final moments where he hadn't been able to tell his friend a wealth of things that suddenly seemed so important. Look after the crew, you're the captain now. I'll miss you. I don't want to go, stay with me. It's shameful, but a couple of times he calls for Bones just to have his company, terrified under a firmly schooled expression that he'll die in the here and now, well and truly alone.

If he had been given diagrammatics on his condition in the form of a vessel's specifics, he would have written it off by now. It's as if the effects of his descent into the warp core are being clawed out of his body in slow motion by the deepening fever-tide, leaving Jim to hate every minute of having survived. Which is counter-productive, he knows, because he very much wants to live. ]

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He wonders, at first, whether she's going to voice her disappointment with him (falling ill in the face of duty is something Jim is certainly annoyed with) yet what she says makes a smile tweak the corners of his mouth. Rolling his eyes briefly, he stubbornly offers her something else to focus on besides the fact he's uselessly bed-ridden, an arm curled around his middle while the other rests near his comm units.

"Don't bet against my ship," he grumbles, tipping his head toward Janeway. "Or me."

Doing my best, he leaves unsaid.

"On the contrary," she counters, "I'm betting in favor of you. In command school, we studied your career in great detail, and if there's one thing I learned from those James T. Kirk specific courses, it's that you have an impeccable habit of coming out on top in face of impossible odds."

Janeway closes her tricorder, setting it aside. "As for your ship, well, there are plenty of letters left in the alphabet. I don't think they'll stop making ships named Enterprise any time soon."

Edited (i can't type today) 2013-07-18 20:10 (UTC)

"That was another Kirk."

It isn't especially like Jim to brush off compliments. His defenses are lower than usual, aching somewhere around his stomach in a way that makes him wonder if he'll be able to keep down water later and I hate not being able to think past this pain. He inhales slowly so as not to start off another coughing fit, gaze lingering somewhere around her waist. Maybe he can play off his emotions as a by-product of his exhaustion.

"As long as there's one of me in every reality that gets his ship, I can live with that."

"Multiple James Kirks, multiple Enterprises..." Janeway scoots closer, propping her arms up on her knees so she can rest her chin in her hands. "Don't make me give you a lecture on the nature of quantum realities, Jim. That will only result in giving us both a headache, and the coffee here isn't near enough to raktajino levels for me to deal with giving myself a temporal theory migraine."

Edited (i /really/ cannot type today) 2013-07-19 02:16 (UTC)

Smiling, his chuckles remain locked in his chest but his eyes crinkle in amusement.

"On behalf of all Jim Kirks, someone get us the hell out of bed so we can make ourselves useful finding Captain Janeway a decent pot of coffee. Boldly shopping where no one has shopped before." Mild coughing stirs, but he keeps it down. "There's a place in San Francisco, a small shop. I got supplies for all-nighters there while at the Academy, you'd like it. They had this African blend that had me up for two days straight."

"If it's the same shop I'm thinking of, it might still be there in my time," she says with a smile, an unspoken promise to tie him to that bed if he tries to get out of it delivered in the form of a look instead of words. Some threats don't need to be spoken.

"I hope so, it got me through Tactical for a term. I couldn't stop seeing strategies in everything in case it was a surprise assignment."

Looked like an idiot for a few months, too. He remembers the Academy fondly, even having smashed enough work into three years not to have to go through a fourth. Jim works best when faced with a problem to solve. Usually.

He tilts his head to see her better, mood sobering. They need to have a Talk, even if it's just a cursory one.

"Kathryn, if I don't get better from this, I know you'll do everything you can for my people."

She recognizes this talk. It's one she's given countless times before, although it was always to Chakotay, Tuvok, or the Senior Staff at large instead of another captain. A person in her unique predicament doesn't have the luxury of having another commanding officer to saddle with those reigns should the time come, just the people below her who she knows are more than capable of seeing things through in her absence. She understands where Kirk is coming from and why he feels the need to say these things to her.

"Of course." But all the same, she feels the need to contradict him and stand in defiance against this confounding illness. "But, you will. That doctor of yours is a brilliant man. He'll think of something -- we'll think of something. I'll personally go knocking on the new regime's doors if I have to."

"They seem like jerks to deal with. I'll try not to hoist that responsibility off on you."

He keeps his tone light, but there's gratitude in his eyes. It's something that needed to be said for the pure sake of getting that reassurance. If there's any captain who doesn't feel the same devotion to their crew, Jim can't see them as existing anywhere. Not in this reality or another.

"Besides, Bones would kill me if I died again."

"I've dealt with far worse, I assure you." The Kazon were worse than the Borg in some respects, with regards to not taking her seriously because she was a woman, whereas the Borg recognize the threat she presents and treat her as a formidable opponent. Of course, she had rather enjoyed making Culluh and the rest of the Kazon-Nistrim eat their words.

Captains who don't share that sentiment need to be knocked down a few ranks until they learn the value of the chair they sit in and the people who depend on them. In that respect, she doesn't envy Kirk and the position he was given fresh out of the Academy. She appreciates the time it took for her to rise up the ranks, how she was forced to stand back and watch and learn from her superiors, to have being under them to reflect upon in times of crisis now that she's captain of a starship herself. That's--

Wait.

"Again. What do you mean, die again?"

He really is assured by that, funnily enough. The smile he wears seeps away as Jim freezes and closes his eyes, sighing slowly when he realizes what his big mouth's gotten him into.

"Damn." He isn't thinking straight, not with the migraines and pain-killers blotting his thoughts here and there, and that isn't something he would have otherwise let slip. Not like that. "I told you I wasn't very well when I arrived here. That wasn't exactly accurate — or it wasn't accurate enough."

Wondering how to go about explaining, he opts for the easiest route. Implying is going to be a lot better for everyone rather than spelling out an exact chain of events.

"Have you ever heard of a man called Khan?"

At the drop of a hat, her expression and overall mannerisms shift dramatically, but with the ease of someone doing something as simple as turning the page of a book. She goes from relaxed and full of kind smiles to sitting up straight in her chair, stern and steely as if she'd just called for red alert and was preparing to engage someone in the heat of battle.

"Why?"

Her reaction says enough.

"It's a long story, but in the process of trying to destroy the Enterprise he knocked out our central grid, it sent us into Earth's gravitational pull. The warp core was misaligned."

Lips pursing, he slips into a narrower scope of explaining, one he would use during debriefings.

"There was no time to go through the necessary procedures so I redirected the power myself once the manual override was hit. People were falling, screaming ... It was a mess. Nacelles were getting torn off like sticks." Wetting his dry lips, he stifles a cough. "I went in there and fixed the ship so she wasn't dead, but I couldn't get in and out fast enough. I got as far as the decontamination chamber where Spock met me on the other side and let me know that it had worked, I was so out of it I could barely tell."

The furrow on his brow is deeper than he means for it to be, professionalism taking a back-seat in his eyes if not his tone.

"The serum that Bones synthesized to bring me back later was made from Khan's Augmented blood, he tells me it repaired my irradiated organs after my body resisted accepting it. I woke up here right after he'd implemented the stuff back home, the first few days in the City were ... not a lot of fun. Kind of threw up in that fountain." A blue gaze sweeps up to meet Kathryn's. "He hasn't said anything, but it's obvious he thinks I'm relapsing. Frankly, I think that assessment's not too far off the mark."

She has question, most of which pertain to Earth's defense systems, and why nobody on the ground was doing anything about a starship caught in the planet's gravitational pull, but those aren't the questions to ask. They aren't the ones that Kirk needs her to ask, so she remains silent as she listens, absorbing every detail he's willing to provide her with. True to her nature, she remains completely unreadable while doing so, even upon hearing that he died in the decontamination chamber.

That was Spock in her time. Spock was the one who died saving the Enterprise, who was subsequently brought back to life -- though by a rather indirect series of events. Nobody made the decision to revive him, to harness the blood of an augment, but let him go in peace as she's done to more members of her crew than she likes to think about (but will continue to beat herself up about well past the day they cross the threshold into Federation Space).

Janeway nods, duty bound to respond in the way protocol demands and not the way she ultimately would like to.

"Like I said -- I will personally appeal to the City overlords if that's what it takes to get you through this."

"I don't plan to die so easily this time, Captain. In fact, if you'll pardon my language, I'm thoroughly fucking tired of it."

A smile slants on his lips, more for her benefit than his own. The sentiment is true enough even if he wishes he could believe it, having tasted his own mortality once it's hard to forget.

"Have you ever gotten sick?"

She holds up a hand and shakes her head as if to say she doesn't mind the use of more colorful language. Perhaps she would've scolded him for it without any regard for embarrassing him in front of his crew were all Starfleet personnel present in the City assembled here, but in the privacy of this room, speaking captain to captain, it's left untouched -- approved of, even.

"This badly? Once. Three years ago, during our second year in the Delta Quadrant. I had a rather violent reaction to an alien insect bite."

He'd feel exactly the same way were the situation reversed. On a personal level, he makes exceptions a lot more easily for people.

"An insect bite? I hope that wasn't owing to the size of it."

"Hardly." For a moment, she thinks back to a time when she'd had her uniform stuffed in a drawer, pips set aside while she traipsed through an alien landscape, setting up traps and spending every waking moment obsessing over that damned insect. "It was barely bigger than a mosquito, but even those were once considered deadly on Earth. The prognosis would have been grim, had my Chief of Security not disobeyed my orders and contacted the Vidiians about a cure. While their medical knowledge is considerably more advanced than hours, the Vidiians are notorious organ harvesters -- nasty habit of beaming aboard ships and ambushing away teams in the name of taking a liver, a heart, stealing your skin with the intention of wearing it."

There's something alarming, near disturbing, about how coolly she's able to deliver such lines. How desensitized she is to the horrors the universe has to offer.

"You can see why I was against the idea of having my crew put themselves in harm's way on my behalf." Our, technically. She wasn't the only one bitten, but there is a reason she doesn't usually talk about this particular point in their journey.

Edited 2013-07-22 00:19 (UTC)

Jim's expression might as well translate to finding more than his current affliction unsettling. Downright disgusting, even. It makes him want to ask how Kathryn can talk about such a race without any inflection, but ... well, the Delta Quadrant, etc. He won't presume to imagine what that was like.

"I can, but after getting to know you a little better I can also see why they disobeyed your orders." Professional as she is, Jim hasn't seen her to be without compassion in measured doses. Again, he's reminded of Chris while talking with her. "Why did the Vidiians harvest organs?"

"The Phage. A virus their people were afflicted with over two thousand years ago. It caused their bodies to rapidly deteriorate, and somewhere along the line, they lost sight of themselves and turned on other cultures, stealing their healthy organs, skin, and bones to affix to themselves in order to prolong the inevitable."

She'd take being compared to Captain Pike as a huge compliment, if he ever voiced as much.

"You didn't barter a lung or a kidney for their help, I'd hope. They don't sound like the kind of people with low price-tags on their assistance."

They sound, in all honesty, like people Jim would have a hard time sympathizing with. To put it mildly.

Oh, she does. She really does. It is extremely difficult to have sympathy for a race that is, sorry to say, past the point of saving. They've gone from a society in need of saving to a space-fairing menace, pirates at best who live only for themselves and have little regard for people whose lives they're destroying in the name of salvaging their own.

"No. There was one Vidiian, a physician our doctor had befriended, who was willing to provide assistance."

For Denara Pel, there is respect and understanding, but for the rest of the Vidiians... they can rot in hell for all she cares.

"Bully for them, at least one of their entire race owned enough braincells of their own not to tear them out of other people." He pauses and tilts his head, all traces of the flirtation and buoyancy he employs as personal deflectors gone. "I'm glad you got better, and in one piece too."

"There are many who would disagree with you," but some of Kathryn melts back in through the holes in Captain Janeway's mask. It's enough for her to smile a little at that sentiment.