Chapter Text
Day 20 - Hiking || Rough ground, crisp morning air, and sunrises.
Scotty was trying very hard not to think. Survival, first. One foot in front of another. Find the crew. He glanced up at the young and frankly terrifying woman who had saved him, the enigma Jaylah, and tried not to think.
He’d woken up with Leonard a day ago on Yorktown, expecting a day of lazy leave together before he needed to refocus on the supply transfer to Enterprise. Even when a call from the Captain had blasted those plans to hell, he had not expected that a day later, he’d be hiking over rough ground with an alien sun rising over his head. One foot in front of another. He hurt, his body bruised from the pummeling that came with crashing into the ground inside a torpedo, and his shoulder ached from catching himself on the edge of a deadly cliff. Don’t think.
The Enterprise was dead. His fair, beautiful lady! The moment the beasts who had been attacking her tore off her nacelles, he knew her end, despite his desperate efforts to save her. When he had looked up into the sky of this world and had seen the ionized trail that was the mark of a Starship crashing through the atmosphere, when felt the distant impact through the ground of a million metric tons smashing itself bits, he knew. He knew she was dead. She was a love of his life, and he could feel it in his heart. And somewhere deep inside of himself, he wished he had gone down with her, a self-confession that he was going to have to face, assuming he survived this. He felt the agony of it stripping its way through his brain, never the most stable of places, even under Leonard’s loving care. Leonard. God. Don’t think.
There was every possibility that Leonard was dead. There had been no time, no time at all to think of the other love of his life. Not until now, breathing the crisp morning air, trudging behind Jaylah, did he allow himself to face the truth that Leonard was almost certainly dead. McCoy would have been moving through the crew, trying to help as the ship decompressed around him. If anyone had still been aboard the ship, Leonard wouldn’t have climbed into an escape pod. The only hope would have been if Spock had shoved him into one, but that was assuming Spock had still been alive. Scotty’s desperate heart was trying to tell him that there was hope, however faint, that Leonard was alive, but his heart had always been an idiot.
He slipped on the ground, going hard to both knees, and Jaylah glanced back at him sharply. He just wanted to stay there, but she grabbed him under the arm and pulled him to his feet. She looked into his face, and he tried to ignore the flicker of pity in her eyes. She turned away, walking swiftly again. He wearily rubbed his eyes and wished he’d gone down with his ship.
Don’t think! “Are we there yet?” he called to Jaylah.
—
McCoy was trying very hard not to think. He had his arm wrapped around the desperately-injured Spock, hauling him toward who-knew-where. This was a terrible place to be, high in the mountains. They’d left the cave at sunrise, and any other day he would be paused to appreciate its beauty. He usually preferred planets, but he would much rather have been waking up with Scotty on that stupid snow globe in space. His head ached, throbbing from the blow it had taken when they crash landed. He was doing a good job ignoring it, but couldn’t fight back his fears.
In the moments before they’d been taken, he and Spock had gaped up at the decapitated and dismembered Enterprise. And in that instant, he had accepted the awful truth that if Scotty wasn’t dead already, he would be soon. Scores of dead red-shirts had been sucked dry in the hallways, more shot though their hearts, and even more were drifting frozen in space, blown out by a hundred explosive decompressions. The last time McCoy had heard his lover’s voice, a despairing Scotty had been trying desperately to hold the ship together, to pull off a miracle. But there would be none.
Spock stumbled against him on the uneven ground, grunting in pain, and McCoy sat him down to rest. “Do you think anyone else is alive?” McCoy asked softly. It was a stupid and self-destructive question, but he couldn’t help himself.
“If we survived, logically others must have as well,” Spock answered after a pause. It was a kind lie. Their survival had been entirely random and unique. There was no data at all to extrapolate anyone else’s survival. But to admit that would be to admit that Jim and Nyota were likely dead as well.
“Yes,” McCoy agreed. “They made it off. They must have.” He climbed to his feet and pulled out his comm. “McCoy and Spock to Enterprise crew. Come in Enterprise crew. Anyone!” Nothing. Silence. Probably because there was no one alive to answer. McCoy beat back his despair and hauled Spock to his feet. They’d keep walking until they couldn’t, McCoy knew, and for the first time in his life wished for the feel of the transporter grabbing him. But he longed even more for Scotty’s grinning face on the other end.