Fic: The Plebe, Chapter 18

[elliewood]

The Plebe, Chapter 18
WTF -- The Virgins in the Garden

 

The unexpected whine of phaser fire triggered a cascade of reactions on Pike’s part, the first being disbelief as one of the parka-clad strangers dropped to the deck of the porch. Stunned into momentary stillness, he watched as Finn went down next, his legs scrabbling against the thin layer of ice on wood as he tried to extricate himself from beneath the bulk of the second man, suddenly still and graceless as he toppled at another trill from Spock’s weapon. The confusion gave way to full-blown irritation at the sight of Spock, his weapon held high, loping across the snowy yard toward the cabin; obviously, they would have to review the meaning of keep them forward.

“Marquez, Saha. Hold your position and signal for backup. Advance on my mark only.”

Expecting assent, he didn’t wait for the tiny flash of light on his communicator that indicated it but moved immediately toward the cabin’s deck, his line of approach as direct and overt as Spock’s had been; there had been no answering fire from the cabin, and none appeared forthcoming in response to his panting, crunching course through the calf-deep snow. By the time he reached Finn, struggling weakly to disentangle himself from the dead weight on top of his, Spock had already kicked in the cabin door, the sound of his weapon discharging again clearly audible from the interior.

“Goddamn it.” He shoved the body aside with his foot and held his hand down to Finn to pull him to sitting. Finn's face, his mouth strangely florid against the paleness of his cheeks, tilted toward the open door beyond.

“He’s inside,” Finn panted. “They’re hurting him. Hurry.”

Pike nodded and entered, his own phaser raised to sweep the room. His eyes flicked toward the still form of Pat Finnegan, lying half off the sofa in an ungainly sprawl, the charred hole in his chest cauterized before it could begin to bleed, Spock’s phaser lying discarded at his feet. Spock himself was standing nearby, his back to Pike, motionless.

“Spock, what the hell were you—”

The dark head turned slightly and twitched upward toward the staircase. “They proceeded in that direction.”

He nearly slipped from the melting snow that dripped off his boots as he darted up the curving stairs to the second floor. The door to the first bedroom was open, a neatly made bed and side table the only furnishings in the otherwise empty room. Across the hall, another door, this one closed; Pike pushed it open with one shoulder, his weapon steady in the hands that arced it around the room. Another bed, this one with a duffel bag lying open upon it; he backed toward it, his eyes still scanning the room until he reached the open bag it to glance down inside it. Books, underwear, and a pair of flannel pajama pants that seemed to glow in the duffel’s dark interior. He tore one hand off his phaser and pulled the pajamas aside to reveal an open communicator.

AAAA

A small bathroom at the end of the short hallway was also empty; Pike made a second sweep around all three rooms before moving back to the staircase. “No one up here,” he called down. “They must have beamed out.” To his communicator he barked, “Move in.”

No answer or movement from Spock as he stared at what lay before him. From his vantage point at the top of the stairs, Pike could now see that it was Jim, seated in one of the dining chairs, a strange array of wires attached to his head.

“What in God’s name is that?”

Pike’s breathless query seemed to galvanize Spock out of the oddly immobile tableau; he reached one hand forward to place it on Jim’s left shoulder, then snatched it away as if the contact had burned him. Pike grimaced at the unnatural flexibility of the joint, the sound of bone grating on bone, then realized with a shiver that Jim hadn’t reacted at all, not even blinked.

“What’s wrong with him?”

There was no reply as Spock dropped to one knee and placed his hand on the side of Jim’s face, the thumb lightly tracing the bruised swelling on his lower lip. the fingers at first hesitating, then growing more urgent as they pressed themselves to his cheek and temple. Pike saw his mouth form the unspoken word.

No.

The other hand followed, searching the opposite side of Jim’s face with an urgency that bordered on panic, and Pike felt his own anxiety sweep like a claw through his gut.

“Is he all right?”

The security personnel entered behind them, the thuds of their footfalls as they sped up the stairs giving way to the growing drone of a ship’s approach. Spock took no notice as his fingers left Jim’s face to comb through the sweat-soaked hair, tugging off each wire and tossing it aside before returning his hands to cup Jim’s jaw in his palms. His face was a frozen mask.

“Spock, what is it?”

“Sir.” It was Marquez at his side. “The second floor is clear.”

“Right. Wait for backup out on the porch. Try not to let the cadet see —” He jerked his head toward Commodore Finnegan’s corpse, his own eyes still fixed on Spock.

“I don’t think that matters. Sir.” Marquez’ voice held a note of regret. “The cadet is dead.”

The denial that rose to Pike’s lips died as he raised his eyes to where the security guard was pointing toward the open door of the cabin. Through it he could see Finn looking toward them from his seated position on the deck, propped between the dead body of his assailant and the deck’s rail. He watched as the unnatural color he had noticed earlier took form, a slow flood of blood from his mouth that oozed lazily out one corner and down his jaw to pool at the collar of his shirt.

“Secure the area.” It would be a while before forensics could arrive to verify what his eyes already knew to be true. “Don’t contaminate anything.”

Marquez nodded and stepped out to where Saha crouched next to Finn. “Don’t touch him,” Pike heard her say, and Saha immediately pulled his hand away from the curved handle of the knife that protruded from Finn’s back.

He followed Finn’s sightless gaze to where Spock still knelt, his hands framing Jim’s face, his eyes closed in anguish against the eyes that, like Finn’s, stared at nothing, and in the thick silence among them that not even the roar of the ship landing on the snowy field outside could penetrate, Pike thought wildly that he would gladly slide a knife between Barnett’s own ribs, his life yet an insufficient exchange for the two boys they had just lost to his incompetence.

 

***

 

Childhood betrothals between Vulcans are outwardly a simple affair, a cordial agreement between two compatible families to be negotiated by an agent that Amanda had laughingly called a matchmaker but that Sarek, and Spock as well to some degree, recognized in a way she could not as the most crucial of linchpins to the entire process. For it was not just a promise to be extracted from the parents and their extended families that would unite their houses but also the bond to be created, the joining of their offspring’s minds that would ensure, once they had each attained their majority, their unfailing interest in one another. While Spock was already quite knowledgeable about, and therefore unfazed by, the sexual aspects of this interest, it was the concept of the mental bond that caused him rather more anxiety.

“It is not a simple matter for anyone,” remarked the marriage broker to the seven-year-old Spock when he voiced his concerns. “And you have an immediate disadvantage in your Human parentage. It will be rather more difficult for you to maintain the meld. Difficult, but not impossible.” She tilted her head to examine him, then placed one hand on the side of his face. “Slow your thoughts.”

An elementary process. She nodded in satisfaction. “Now I will open my mind to you. Observe the effect in your own mind.”

Spock felt the muscles of his back tighten in trepidation; he had attempted this before, a clumsy child play-acting with his mother, and the unchecked flood that had crashed through his brain when he touched Amanda’s face had thrown him to the floor in an agony of mental distress. But this time there was nothing, at first anyway, the peaceful dark of his own mind undisturbed by the expected intrusion of another’s. Then the darkness gradually lightened to the green of a small grassy field ringed with trees, the alien landscape of his mother’s home planet beneath the blue of a calm, cloudless sky. A few meters away, its nose twitching in curiosity, sat a small brown rabbit; it approached him at his beckon to sniff cautiously at his feet. He bent down to pick up it up and was delighted to feel its thought

I greet thee

before releasing it to scamper back into the trees.

He didn’t care that he smiled then, a grin that broke through his reserve. The marriage broker seemed pleased as well.

“What did you observe?”

“An Earth landscape. With a mammal that Mother calls a ‘bunny.’”

Even with his eyes closed, he knew that she nodded. “It is advisable to construct a framework upon which to segregate and categorize the thoughts of another. We all contextualize that framework differently. If that setting pleases you, use it.”

Over the course of his childhood and coming adolescence, Spock would receive multiple reminders of the regrettableness of his father’s choice of a bride. But at that moment, sitting in Sarek’s study with the matchmaker’s fingers on his face, he was thankful for the Human part of himself that created such a vibrant reality from the thoughts that gently flowed into his mind at her touch, those thoughts translating themselves into the calm eyes of fawns and mice that approached him from the forest’s edge and the fluttering of birds’ wings overhead, each one weightless and beautiful as they came to him in turn, to alight on his fingers or sit patiently at his feet. It had been his expectation that all subsequent melds would be as satisfactory. But the joining with T’Pring a few weeks later had been completely different, her thoughts a series of cool, closed volumes in an airless library, and it occurred to him later that evening that perhaps the formality of that contact was to be the rule rather than the exception. The marriage broker must have been unusually kind in making her thoughts so congenial.

Or so he had thought until the incident two nights ago, when he had inadvertently touched the cadet’s mind. That contact, though brief and unintended, had given him a view into a world he never could have imagined from his limited experience with the minds of others, an endless panorama of land and sea and sky, thunderous storms and pastoral calm, sun and clouds and stars all overhead in an intoxicating, impossible coalescence. The uninvited entry was an unforgivable breach but one, if he were to be honest with himself, he yearned to repeat, the longing to explore those dizzying vistas a tormenting, ceaseless itch in the base of his brain.

But where he had been tantalized by so much before, now, there was nothing.

The ground beneath his feet bore the unmistakable marks of some unnatural defilement, the sterile soil salted white and raked into curious parallel grooves, a few uprooted and shredded stems the only remnants of the lush landscape he had glimpsed but once. The sky above him was also white — not the gravidity of an imminent snowfall but the blank whiteness of light that, scattered about by the colorless earth beneath it, had nowhere else to go.

Cadet?

Nothing in response, just the sighing of a breeze that carried neither scent nor sound on its breath, nothing but the rush of the air itself, a corpse that stubbornly breathed on.

James?

He called out loud and listened to his own voice die away, not even an echo possible in this expanse of nothingness.

JAMES!

His mind screamed out the name, his full-throated cry awkwardly loud in the silence of this mind, and the answering stillness was horrible. He waited an eternity in the blankness.

Until finally

spock i am here come find me

a tiny thread of thought like a winged seed on the wind. He answered it with his own.

I am here

And saw Jim standing before him, one shoulder at an odd angle, his hands hidden in the pockets of his jeans. Strange; he had never visualized the mind’s owner during a meld, only the mind’s processes, and it occurred to him with a sickening lurch that the image could simply be a manifestation of his own hopes. He addressed it anyway.

“Cadet, I am here. I have come.”

The amber eyes were not blank now but discerning, suspicious. “They’ve already tried, you know. To trick me.” He spoke the words aloud through the bloodied mouth,

They shall pay

his voice sharp with disbelief.

Spock shook his head and held his hands out in a stance that he hoped inspired trust. He saw none. “They will harm you no longer, I assure you.”

“Or they could just be telling me that, knowing I wanted you

spock i am here come find me spock i am here

to come for me. They tried a lot of things.” A visible shiver ran through the slender frame as the hands pushed deeper into his pockets.

“Commander Pike and I received the signal from your communicator. We came at once.”

"You're lying. I never had a chance

SPOCK COME FIND ME

to use my communicator."

"Nonetheless, it is truly I. It is no trick."

“Yeah. Well.” The disbelieving face turned from Spock to look downward as he scuffed the powdered earth with the toe of one boot, watching the white dust settle back over it. “Whatever it is you want from me, you’re a little late.”

Spock felt a moment’s disorientation at the realization that the logic of the cadet’s mind had already defeated him; there would be, could be, nothing he could say that Jim would not ascribe to the knowledge gained by his captors’ ruination.

They shall pay with their own blood

He did not yet know true despair but felt himself close enough to its edge to grasp the wrists that barely protruded from the jeans pockets, a deliberate echo of their last meeting here.

“It is well, child. Do not fear.”

His action may have taken the cadet by surprise, or perhaps the revelation that followed was intentional. Either way he felt a sudden coldness at the sight of Jim’s hands, pulled now from the safety of his pockets, filthy with dirt and drying blood, the nails broken, some torn off completely. He smiled a little ruefully at Spock’s alarm.

“I told you, you’re too late.”

“Did they do this to you?”

They shall pay with their own blood I swear it to you I swear

The figure before him shook his head and looked down again at the blanched ground beneath their feet, the vast space around them from which everything had been stripped, down at the once fertile earth now scored with those curious parallel grooves, each the width of a Human finger. The coldness became an iron weight in his side.

“You did this, to yourself? You damaged your own mind?”

Grief overwhelmed him at Jim’s silent nod. He pulled on the ruined hands to bring them to his face and wished for the relief of weeping, though he could not.

“Why would you do such a thing?” His voice was a cracked, alien sound. “How could you?”

He did not see the distrust in the golden eyes melt into unshed tears. “I had no choice. They wanted me to tell them something, and I couldn’t. This was the only way.”

“But I…we were coming for you. There was no need. Truly, there was no need for you to do this.” He pushed the fingers tighter against his face, trying to force his thoughts into the emptiness around them, trying to make him believe. But the cadet’s next words smashed the iron in his side into a million pieces of ice.

“I didn’t think you’d come, after what happened the other night. I knew you were angry. I wouldn’t blame you for hating me.”

Oh gods of our ancestors have pity on a fool

“No. That is not so. I…”

He could not bring himself to explain further, unsure whether he even understood it himself.

“It’s all right.” The hazel eyes averted themselves for a moment

he turned around and left me

as his hands gently disentangled themselves from Spock’s. “I’m not so crazy about myself either. Thanks for trying, though.”

he said he was my friend and he left me left me with them

“Cadet. You are mistaken.” He clutched at the wrists that tried to pull away from him. “Of course I do not hate you. I admit to being vexed that you did not take my advice to avoid Cadet Finnegan. I was angered…”

He found, even here, that he still could not go on. Jim’s half-smile unknowingly censured him.

“Turns out you were right. First chance he got, he sold me out.”

i trusted him but he turned away from me he walked away he left me with THEM

He heard his own voice, stronger now. “No. Hear me.” He enfolded the broken fingers within his own and drew them back toward his chest, forcing them to feel the vibration of each word. “Your trust was not misplaced. He did not abandon you.”

“But he did. He told me he had to, if I didn’t cooperate. I watched him leave. He was the only one who could have stopped them and he...he left me, he turned around and walked away.” And at that the tears finally spilled over, the anguished cry of a betrayed child.

Spock gripped Jim’s hands tighter and shook his head. “No, Cadet. He must have used your communicator to signal us, he warned us as we approached. He gave us the signal to attack.” A moment’s selfish hesitation gave way to what needed to be said. “He cared for you, deeply enough to give his own life, and that of his father, for yours.”

he did…?

Yes.

Stillness then, for so long that Spock began to fear he had failed. But then Jim drew in one ragged breath and exhaled to crumple toward the ground, hitting the dead earth with his knees and pulling Spock down with him, to fall forward into his waiting grasp and bury his face against Spock’s shoulder in the silent sobs of heartbreak. And around them the air finally breathed too, ruffling their hair and swaying the slender tendrils of the plants that started to rise cautiously around them, others joining them little by little to dot the white ground with the pale amber green of new growth.

 

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