elliewood | Fic: Compeer, Chapter 3

The front door opens into a short hallway leading to a flight of stairs. To his left, he sees a communal area with chairs, a sofa, and a fireplace that radiates welcome heat. To the right, a table bearing various food items. His nose wrinkles with distaste; the oleaginous odor of cooking animal flesh pervades the air.

He carries Kirk forward and up the stairs to the second floor. On the landing to the right, he finds a bathroom equipped with a hydro shower and tub. Shifting the captain’s weight to one arm, he uses his free hand to start filling the tub and allows several centimeters of water to accumulate before he carefully lowers Kirk in the warm bath. The captain does not respond any more to being put down than he had to being picked up; he appears catatonic.

//Captain, can you hear me?//

Straightening, he looks around the bathroom for something he can use to pour the water over Kirk, and finding nothing suitable, he settles for soaking a bath towel in the warm water and repeatedly wringing it out over him as he kneels on the floor next to the deepening bath. White skin gradually warms to pink as small chunks of ice loosen from the captain’s hair and splash into the tub to melt innocuously away. The shivering slows, then stops as Kirk sits huddled in the tub with his knees drawn up to his chest, eyes still clamped shut.

He waits a few minutes more, then shuts off the taps. Delicate tendrils of steam rise from the water's surface. The only sound in the room is a steady drip from the leaking spout.

//What is wrong? Why do you resist contact?//

He leans forward to pull the stopper, allowing the bathwater to drain while he dries Kirk’s back, neck, and hair with another towel. When the tub is empty, he wraps the towel around Kirk’s waist and stoops to pull him out of the tub, a task made marginally easier by the increased pliancy of a non-shivering body but still hindered by its dead weight.

He carries the unresponsive form out of the bathroom and down the narrow hallway, stopping at a door bearing a crudely hand-lettered sign:

JIMMYS ROOM KEEP OUT THIS MEANS YOU NO GROWUPS NO TEENGIRLS

He pushes the door open with one foot and looks around at the child’s bedroom, sparsely furnished with a rumpled twin bed at one end, a bookshelf in which stacks of books compete with myriad other items for the limited available space, a small untidy dresser with a lamp fashioned to resemble an antique airplane, and a toy box out from which model hovercraft and starships spill onto the floor. The walls are adorned with posters and pictures of people and places he does not recognize and that he doubts are all actually real. He wonders at the contrast between the way Human and Vulcan children are raised; his own bedroom had never been so cluttered with nonessentials nor so lacking in organization.

Having indulged his curiosity, he moves toward the small bed and sits awkwardly on it with Kirk, still wrapped in the towel, on his lap. He curls one arm around Kirk’s shoulders to steady him while briskly drying his legs and feet with the other.

//Jim, please. Let me help.//

At last, he feels something in Kirk relenting. The tense body sags against him with a barely audible sigh, the damp head dropping to rest against his right shoulder and the arms unclasping to relax and open down onto his lap. He takes advantage of the opportunity to dry the chest that Kirk had been protecting; then, his ministrations finished, he rewraps the towel tightly around Kirk’s trunk and encircles it with his arms to hold it in place.

//Captain, I must inform you of what is soon to occur. Please open your mind to me.//

Eyelashes flutter on his collarbone. Angling his gaze down, he finds himself apprehended by one impossibly blue eye.

//Spock.//

//Yes.//

//You won’t like what you see.//

He feels a mild disorientation, as though he were falling into that blue pool, followed by a twinge of trepidation. He draws a breath, swallows the sudden nausea that crawls up his throat, and tightens his grip.

//Show me.//

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