The purpose is to experience fear. Fear in the face of certain death.
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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[ Jeez, kid. Way to roast someone alive on your brunch barbecue. ]
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[Even if it's true, okay. It's time for stars now--white and blue for Castor, white and red for Pollux.]
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[ Or my decor. ]
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[The Gemini constellation is well on its way to being recognizable as such. So what if the stars are just blobs of paint? At least they're the right color, the right size relative to their distance from Earth, and in the right places.]
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[ But he's not terribly inclined to stop him, enjoying the look of Gemini from where it's starting to take shape. His gaze drifts off the would-be stairs to Chekov, smile softening. ]
The guys on the network who gave us lab access, they said they'd be getting people trinkets from home in exchange for favors. Have you ever known them to bring back something larger?
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[And he might need his back if Khan is the threat he has been painted as. Unlike some people, he still has to go outside to get to work
and social engagements, you can't ground him.]The new leaders? No one can say. The deities who were here before were willing to trade for anything--items from home, memories, lives, anything--and, even though their asking prices were high, they were honest. The car that I have is from a trade like that. Something bigger... [He shrugs and frowns at Kirk.] The Enterprise would be too large, I think, even if these new leaders are as powerful as the old ones.
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[ Prices. He'll pay pretty much any price, personally, to get what they need. ]
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I don't think that the deities would have allowed that. Nothing that could be used to help us escape was made available, even through trades, and the things that we want the most had prices that no one would pay.
But those were the deities. The new ones, maybe, would be more agreeable than them.
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What kind of prices did they ask, before?
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They would only accept things that we were reluctant to give away. Memories, mostly, and sometimes abilities. These things weren't always taken away permanently.
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[ He rolls up when he warns him, braced on both locked arms. What for, he doesn't know; readying to catch him? Letting him fall on Jim instead of the floor? It's a reflex. ]
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Thank you. [That falls just shy of sincere, but it's nice of Jim to care.] You were going to catch me? Perhaps you shouldn't try that until you have recovered.
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[ Grumbling, he lies back down once Chekov isn't up there. ]
Why don't you focus on the walls instead? Less chance of captain-related injuries by giving me a double dose of guilt.
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Why would you feel guilty? You didn't order me to paint on your ceiling.
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[ In a nutshell. ]
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Speaking of magical quests, are you any better?
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[ Largely because the planet's gone and how often does anyone get stars painted overhead? It's a nice idea. ]
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