Chapter Text
Part Three (Cont’d)
Merchant ship Bounty
Stardate 52049.2
Natasha Kinsen should have been uncomfortable. Deeply uncomfortable.
But she wasn’t uncomfortable. She was way past uncomfortable. Given everything that she’d been through, uncomfortable was a dot to her. Because she was fully aware that regardless of where it may seem like she was, she was actually in the medical bay on the Bounty.
She was sick. And she was running out of time.
And everything else that was happening, wherever it seemed like she might be, was just a random moment from her own memory. She wasn’t really on Wrigley’s Pleasure Planet, or Archanis IV, nor was she at her family home in London, or in San Francisco, or New Berlin.
She wasn’t even where she thought she was now.
Which was actually reassuring. Because as far as her memory was concerned, right now she was onboard the Bounty, mere hours after she had first come aboard.
Specifically, she was inside Jirel’s cabin. Shortly after she had made what she was now sure had been the mistake of choosing to seek a night of companionship with the Trill after her rescue from six long months alone on a desolate planet in the Kesmet system following the Navajo’s destruction.
When the previous memory of her childhood back in London had started to fade and her headache had intensified, she was sure she was destined for the same memory onboard the Navajo all over again. But this time, instead of forcing herself out of that memory when she was in it, she had managed to avoid it altogether. Somehow.
If she had been fully in control of where her mind was taking her, she probably wouldn’t have chosen this particular moment as an alternative. Especially given who she was sharing said memory with once again.
Fortunately, the good news was that she was well past being uncomfortable.
“All I’m saying, doc, is that this is now two of these memories of yours where I’ve ended up in bed with you…”
With a sigh, the mostly comfortable Natasha forced herself to look at the latest incongruous form she was tasked with interacting with. Namely Sunek’s face on Jirel’s body.
This time, she hadn’t needed to explain any of the context to him. The familiar ship, the spots on his newly adopted body, and the fact that her night with Jirel had quickly become common knowledge on the Bounty meant that it didn’t take all of Sunek’s Vulcan intellect to piece it together. And once pieced together, he had reacted to her latest unintentional moment of oversharing with a typically Sunek-ian level of immaturity.
But she was determined not to feel uncomfortable. Because she wasn’t uncomfortable. So, instead, she decided to give as good as she got.
“I mean, if we’re keeping score like that, you’ve also ended up dead in two of them.”
Sunek’s grin faltered slightly as he mulled this over.
“Touche,” he nodded eventually, switching his attention to glancing around the cabin, “So, this is the time when you—?”
“Scratched an itch. Yes. Let’s move on.”
She took a moment to reluctantly take in the memory. Remembering how she had chosen this cabin based on a simple coin toss in her search for a moment of companionship. How brash a wannabe space captain he had initially been, and still could be. How awkwardly he had jumped to the wrong conclusion about that night, and how she had had to let him down, not entirely gently.
But she also thought about what Sunek had told her. About how Jirel was now apparently watching over her back on the Bounty. And how strangely comforting that felt. Not for the first time, she struggled to square all of that together in her head.
Still, there were significantly bigger issues to worry about.
“I’m dying, aren’t I?”
For once in his life, Sunek seemed to think before he replied, not entirely sure how to respond. At the very least, the doctor’s sudden moment of frankness served to pull him right back into the serious side of their situation, all thoughts of trying to cheekily discuss this latest personal memory entirely forgotten.
“Well, you’re, um…yeah,” he managed in response, “How could you tell?”
She sighed again and stared down at her toes poking out of the end of Jirel’s bedsheet. She felt oddly becalmed for someone who was dying. “Just a hunch,” she offered back, “The memories have been…I don’t even know how to describe it. Breaking down. Bleeding into each other.”
She didn’t go into any more details as far as which one in particular was bleeding across her other memories most strongly. Even given all that Sunek had already seen of her private side, she was praying that she could keep the Navajo’s final moments from him.
“How do you mean?” the Vulcan asked.
“Just…some parts of my memories are starting to get mixed up with the others. And it feels like I’m jumping between them a lot faster.”
Sunek considered this for a moment, then nodded. “Well, I didn’t wanna say anything, but it is getting harder to…find you in here. Like I said, first time, I just initiated the meld and ended up in one vivid memory. But this last time, I had to do a bit of…searching.”
Natasha forced herself not to think too much about what that meant. About how many of her other memories he might have already seen. She rubbed the side of her head as a sharp needle of pain lanced through her temples.
“You ok?” Sunek added, “I mean, aside from the whole…dying thing.”
“Just a headache.”
“Heh. If I had a slip of latinum for every time I’d heard that when I was in bed with a girl, I’d—”
One of her patented withering glares stopped the Vulcan’s latest train of thought.
“—Not the time. I know.”
As the pain in her head increased, she started to wonder whether this was it. Whether this was how she was destined to die.
Right here. In bed with Sunek. Again.
No, she decided to herself with renewed conviction, there’s no way that it ends here. She swivelled back to the uncomfortable mash-up of Bounty crew members next to her with an altogether more determined look in her eyes.
“Ok, Sunek, I need more information. What’s changed about my lifesigns? My brain patterns? What about the Son’a? Anything?”
Sunek paused in the middle of his inspection of yet another set of borrowed fingernails, these ones considerably less manicured than most of the others. “Ok. Right. Yeah. The Son’a? Klath and Denella are working on that. But we need to buy some more time. We gave you the antipsychotic, just like you said—”
“The promazine?”
“—That’s the one. Gave you that, and your brain activity seemed to stabilise. I guess.”
“You guess?”
Sunek shrugged Jirel’s shoulders. “All the readings on the medical computer dropped back from the redline. Even the spikes around the hippocampus seemed to calm down. Everything looked good.”
Natasha couldn’t help but feel some detached amusement at the roundabout way that Sunek/Jirel was leading her to his conclusion. She always assumed this sort of medical report was something that doctors like her developed over years of training.
“But then…?”
“But then, I guess, something else happened,” the Vulcan shrugged, “Weird readings, lots of alarms, and your lifesigns took another nosedive.”
She suppressed a sigh, sitting up in the cramped bed and glaring at Sunek intently, trying to will some more detail about the situation back in reality out of him. “What sort of weird readings? Give me something to work with here—!”
She flinched as another stab of pain lanced through her head. Sunek watched on with a surprisingly sympathetic look.
“I don’t really know,” he sighed, “Neither did the computer. But it was similar to the first sets of readings we got. Just, I dunno, more intense? Like it was—”
“Like it was spreading,” she whispered.
“Um, I guess?”
Her brain, or whatever passed for her brain in this sort of context, kicked into gear. She realised with a sense of dread what was happening.
“The toxin,” she continued, “It’s spreading. We tried to stop whatever it was doing in my brain with the antipsychotic. But…what if that was the wrong call? What if that was stopping it from spreading further, somehow?”
“How?” Sunek asked, slightly perplexed.
“No idea. But the diagnosis was all wrong. The promazine is only treating the effects, not the cause. I think all we’ve done is speed up whatever else the toxin is doing to me.”
“Oh. Whoops?”
She didn’t react to that assessment. Because she already knew what this all meant. It meant that she’d made the wrong call. And she might be about to pay the ultimate price.
“The antidote, Sunek. How long?”
The Vulcan looked back at her with a rare serious expression. She didn’t even really process how odd it was to see a look of stoic solemnity on this particular Vulcan. “Honestly?” he sighed, “Denella and Klath are getting the materials now. We hope. After that, we’re still gonna need a couple of hours for the computer to do its thing and get the whole thing prepared for you.”
“Ok. So I need to hold on for that long.”
“Might help,” Sunek offered, still without any overt humour.
She drew the bedsheets up around her and chewed her lip thoughtfully. The headache flared up again.
“Stop the antipsychotics,” she said eventually with a firm nod, “Hopefully that’ll slow down the spreading. And go back to Plan A.”
“Right,” Sunek nodded, before adding, “Um, which one was Plan A, again?”
“The cordrazine. Give me a bigger shot of the stims than last time. Start with 20 ccs, and give me a second shot if you need to.”
Sunek studied her face, seeing something underneath the overt determination of her plan. “You sure?” he asked warily, “Given what happened last time we did that, it kinda sounds a bit…suicidal?”
“I’m dying,” she pointed out, “Feels like we’re at the point where I’ve got nothing to lose. Besides, this isn’t a treatment. We’re getting that from the Son’a. All this is gonna be is the best way to keep me alive for long enough for you to give me the antidote.”
She paused for a moment to hold back the latest wince-inducing lance of pain in her head.
“Last time, the cordrazine gave my lifesigns a shot in the arm, and seemed to slow the toxin down. That’s what I need right now.”
“So,” Sunek mused, “Instead of letting the toxin kill you, we’re gonna let the stims kill you?”
She mustered a wry smile. “At least this way, I’m in control—”
“Warning. Structural integrity failure in progress.”
The sound of the Navajo’s computer filling the air sent a fresh shiver down her spine, and a fresh stab of pain through her skull.
It was happening again.
On the other side of the bed, the Vulcan/Trill hybrid seemed entirely oblivious to what she had just heard. And she still wanted to keep it that way. “Go, Sunek,” she urged, “Now.”
Sunek took one last look around the latest memory she had unwittingly shared with him. But she was still way beyond being uncomfortable. At least about this particular memory. She was far more uncomfortable about the memory she was heading for.
The red alert sirens got louder, as she put all of her focus back into trying to end up anywhere but the corridors of the Navajo again. Just as she had done to get here.
She thought she saw Sunek’s mouth move, as if he was saying something else to her, but she couldn’t hear him any more.
And before she could try to say anything back, everything started to blur…
* * * * *
If he’d felt somewhat useless before, Jirel definitely felt useless now.
With Sunek in the middle of his latest meld, the Vulcan positioned next to where Natasha lay in the middle of the medical bay, and Denella and Klath away on the Son’a vessel they had intercepted, he was still in exactly the same place. Uselessly worrying himself sick about the safety of their unnervingly tranquil patient.
Once again, he had found himself holding her hand. He was still self-conscious about the act, but had passed the point of caring too much if he was caught again doing something quite so curiously irrational.
He wished that the readings on the medical computer would improve, even as they were slowly growing even weaker. He wished that they had never altered course for the Son’a, and had kept their focus on reaching a proper trustworthy medical facility.
Above all else, he just wished he could talk to her.
And then, something curious happened. For reasons that he couldn’t entirely rationalise to himself, even as it was happening, he started talking to her. To the woman lying unconscious on the bed in front of him. The one who was still clearly in a deep coma.
“Hey,” he heard himself say to someone who couldn’t possibly hear him, “You’re gonna be ok, you hear me? We’re gonna fix all this. Trust me.”
He stifled a smile at those words, even as the entirely somnolent Natasha offered no reaction from where she lay. The coma still preventing her from responding to his words.
“Heh,” he continued, “Remember the first time I asked you to trust me? When we were after the Jewel of Soraxx, trapped in the middle of some weird ancient temple full of booby traps? We were staring death in the face, so I fixed you with my best space captain look, and asked you if you trusted me. And you just flat out said no. I mean, what was I supposed to do with that? I was trying to be a big hero!”
He mustered a chuckle. The woman in the coma remained understandably silent.
“Guess you had me down as an idiot right from the start. Which is probably accurate. But…you know what?”
The woman in the coma didn’t answer. Which was fine. He’d meant the question rhetorically.
“We got through those booby traps. Somehow. We got through all that. Somehow. And we’re gonna get through this as well, ok? Somehow. So, if you—I mean, I’m pretty sure you can’t, but—If you can hear me saying this then…please, trust me, ok?”
He paused, not entirely sure what sort of reaction he was expecting to get from the woman who had been entirely unresponsive to stimuli for the last eighteen hours.
In the end, he didn’t get any reaction. Which he figured was the reaction he should have expected. Still, apparently undeterred by the slightly farcical nature of the one-way conversation, Jirel felt his voice starting up again.
“Also, I guess I have something else to tell—to say to you. In case you don’t—I mean, you’re definitely gonna wake up, ok? I just went over that. I was very clear about—”
He took a moment to contemplate the added ludicrousness of him not even being able to talk to her about his feelings when she was in a coma.
I am really bad at this, he sighed.
“It’s just—And I know you don’t feel the same way. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, about how I feel, and I think—I mean, I’m pretty sure that I—”
The door to the medical bay opened, and Denella and Klath hurried in, both looking a little more bruised and bloodied than the last time Jirel had seen them. He instantly shut up and let go of Natasha’s hand, swinging back around to them with all the casual innocence of a teenage Ferengi getting caught with his hands in his father’s tin of imported beetle snuff.
“I wasn’t talking to her.”
Denella gave him a mildly amused look as she strode over to the medical computer, while Klath merely looked at him with confusion.
“What?”
“Um,” he managed, “Nothing. I was just—I wasn’t doing anything. That’s all.”
Klath’s look of confusion deepened.
“I remember when I used to think you were cool,” Denella couldn’t help but chime in.
Jirel suppressed a wince and deflected the Orion’s quip by gesturing to the state of the pair of them as a means to move the conversation on. “What the hell happened to you?”
“The Son’a drove a hard bargain,” Denella offered, as she held up the small container she was carrying, “But we got what we needed.”
“They gonna make things any more difficult for us?”
Even as she began to unpack their supplies, Denella’s mouth curved into a slightly satisfied smile. “They could try,” she replied, “But we’re warping back away from them, and Ahdar Lit’eh is going to be without his weapons for a while.”
“Huh,” Jirel nodded at his engineer, “An encryption program?”
“A bat’leth,” Klath replied with a proud nod, indicating that it wasn’t just Denella who had the proficiency to sabotage another ship’s weapons controls.
In different circumstances, Jirel would have allowed himself a moment or two of further banter with the gruff Klingon, whether Klath had wanted to or not. But he made do with a nod and a smile before joining Denella at the computer.
“You sure we’ve got everything for the antidote?”
“Bit late to go back now,” she replied as she finished unpacking their somewhat ill-gotten gains and placed the vials into the medical computer’s prep area, “Just got to hope the computer can work through the recipe.”
Jirel bit his lip with worry as the Orion tapped the computer’s controls. “How long?”
“Little bit longer every time you distract me.”
The Trill reluctantly took the hint and took a step back. He contented himself with the fact that things were starting to move in the right direction.
And then a familiar voice chirped up from behind him.
“Might wanna hurry that up.”
The trio of conscious Bounty crew members turned to see Sunek, post-meld, gesturing down at Natasha on the bed.
“Things are getting worse in there.”
Jirel left Denella at the computer and stepped over to the Vulcan. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means she’s running out of ideas. She’s asked for another hit of stims.”
Sunek idly reached over to a hypospray sitting next to the bed and double checked what it was filled with. Just as he was about to press the cordrazine to Natasha’s neck, Jirel reached out and grabbed his wrist.
“Why would we do that?” he growled, a little too intensely, “It nearly killed her last time!”
Sunek raised a quizzical eyebrow. While Jirel was hardly causing his Vulcan physiology any pain with his grasp, his harsh tone was doing some minor damage to his feelings. “This is what she wants us to do. She knows it’s dangerous, but she thinks it’s the only hope we’ve got of slowing down the toxin’s progress. And she knows if we don’t do this, she’ll be dead before we’ve got our antidote.”
The frankness of Sunek’s comments carried enough weight to cause Jirel to grind his teeth.
“That’s what she said?”
Sunek nodded. But he hadn’t needed to. This had been another rhetorical question from Jirel. He knew that Sunek wasn’t messing around. Slowly, Jirel released his grip around the Vulcan’s wrist and allowed him to proceed.
Even though the entirety of the Bounty’s usually talkative crew were present inside the medical bay, the only sound in the room was the hiss of the hypospray.
End of Part Three