Spirk - Yours

Chapter 18

Kirk woke up in his quarters.

He did not know what the date was. These days, he barely cared.

Each new morning, each new mission was starting to feel like the same endless nightmare, repeating over and over and over again.

A new planet. Surveys to perform, away missions to lead. Reports to write. Systems to catalog. The emptiness followed him everywhere. Days blurred together in Kirk's mind, his sense of time completely lost and not a light in the dark to mark it's passage.

On this particular morning, he was on the bridge of the Enterprise. They were carrying out another star charting mission—some remote region of the galaxy which would have held some interest to the person he used to be. Everyone was performing adequately and everything was under control.

Except.

Something was off.

Today, something felt...

Different.

A noise nearby suddenly roused Kirk from his musings.

He hurried to answer the hail, stabbing a button on the arm of his chair.

"Kirk here."

"Captain, it's sickbay," McCoy's voice drifted over the comms. "Jim, you'd better get down here."

And somehow, inexplicably, Kirk knew McCoy was right. He had to get to sickbay.

Immediately.

"Sulu, you have the conn," Kirk announced, then swiftly stood and exited the bridge.

The walk to sickbay seemed to last forever. He drifted through the halls like a ghost, his body slowly fading into the floor and into the bulkheads. But something was waiting for him in sickbay. Something that reached down inside and pulled at him like a magnet, that forced him to remain in existence so long as he could reach the sickbay doors.

And finally, there they were.

"Bones?" Kirk called into the empty room. For a moment, there was only silence. Time itself seemed to hang in the air like fog, thick and heavy with anticipation.

"In here, Jim," McCoy called. Kirk turned and moved toward the sound. He rounded a corner into the other room, and suddenly, there he was.

Spock.

The Vulcan was sitting carefully on a biobed, McCoy standing next to him. Upon seeing the Captain's face, Spock broke out into a wide smile.

For a moment, time seemed to freeze. Kirk stared at the scene before him, unable to believe his eyes. Softly, gingerly, he padded over to the biobed, his feet moving of their own accord, drifting across the floor as if in a dream. Spock leaned toward him slightly, eyes shining with wonder and affection. Kirk opened his mouth, but his lungs would not work. He took a breath, then tried again.

"Bones.... how....." he finally managed to rasp.

"I received a message from him in his quarters about an hour ago," McCoy began to explain, voice gentle. "He told me what happened in engineering. Said he just suddenly woke up in his quarters. When I brought him to sickbay, everything checked out. He's as healthy as ever. I couldn't believe it, but then I noticed a tiny abnormality in the brain's memory processing center. Something had recently been modified, but now it's back to normal. I compared the scans with myself and the rest of my medical staff. We all have the same abnormality. Something must have happened to us after we left that planet. The only explanation I can think of is that we were all experiencing some kind of elaborate hallucination."