Chapter Text
Kirk is on the bridge when it happens. He's been on the bridge for twelve hours, throughout the record-breaking ion storm and the attempt to get the away team back. He's been watching Sulu the whole time, waiting to see if he'll need to relieve him, because Chekov is one of the crewmen they're trying to recover. Sulu seems competent enough, aside from a slight shake in his hands, and he's got little more to do than sit at his station while Scotty tries to work out a solution.
"Captain." It's Kirk's personal comm, not the ship-wide, which is strange. Kirk looks over at Spock, who raises an eyebrow.
"Yeah, Scotty?"
"You'd better come down here, sir."
After two years of working with Montgomery Scott, Kirk has learned to recognize the moments when he shouldn't bother arguing, and they've never meant anything good before. He looks up at Sulu, who is half-turned from the conn, his lips parted.
"I'll be right there," Kirk says to Scotty. He turns to Spock, and steps close. "If this – if it's –" He jerks his chin toward Sulu, and Spock nods in understanding.
"I will remove Lieutenant Sulu from duty if necessary, sir."
"Good. You've got the bridge. It's probably – it might not even come to that. Just –"
"I am experiencing the same unoptimistic feeling, Captain."
Kirk can see a sudden softness in Spock's eyes. It's subtle, but noticeable enough to someone who has spent the past two years learning to read Vulcan facial expressions. He tries not to take it as a sign that Chekov, Harrison and Jimenez are gone. He tries not to feel it in the walls of the ship as he walks through her hallways, noticing a new quiet, a kind of stunned suspension of the usual hum of the Enterprise all around him. When he arrives at the transport bay, he finds Scotty and Lieutenant Arnett not at the console but standing in front of the empty platform, staring. They look like schoolboys who have just seen a dog get run over by a train.
"Gentlemen," Kirk says, and he hates the sound of his own voice when they turn to him with their stricken faces, their open hands.
"Captain," Scotty says.
"Tell me." Kirk really did see a pair of schoolboys watch a dog get run over by a train, back in Iowa. It was one of the sonic speed, cross-country bullet trains, going so fast it was like the dog had never been there at all. One of the boys was his brother and the other was his best friend, and they'd both consoled him while he sobbed and beat the ground with his fists. It had been his dog.
"They're gone, sir," Scotty says, his voice narrowing with each word. "We lost them."
*
Kirk fully expects Sulu to jump right over the initial stages of grief and on into anger, and it's almost a comfort when he does exactly that. Kirk gives him a one on one briefing on the disaster, in conference room 34-A, and Sulu tells Kirk that he's incompetent and lazy and wrong about Chekov being gone, then throws a chair at the wall.
"Give me a suit," Sulu says, panting, his hands around the edge of the giant conference table like he's got enough adrenaline pumping through him to lift it over his head and throw it straight through the wall. "Give me a suit, I'll go get him, I'll do your fucking job for you –"
"Hikaru, he's gone." Kirk is still in stage one: shock. He'll have to tell Jimenez's wife after he's finished with Sulu, and then he'll call all the parents, then there are the memorial services to plan, speeches to write. It's helpful to think about protocol, not the last time Chekov turned from the conn to flash him that bright smile, his face full of trust and admiration. Kirk's eyes water, and he stares down at the table.
"You don't have a body!" Sulu screams, pounding the table with both fists. "So this bullshit proclamation that he's gone means nothing to me. If you want to leave these coordinates, fine, go, but I'm staying, because he's coming back, and there'd better be a fucking ship here waiting when he does."
"Hikaru, it's impossible," Kirk says. He's afraid to meet Sulu's eyes, but he does, and he sees what he expected to: pure hatred, blame. The three of them had a special bond because of what happened on the drill, and the way Chekov saved them both. They were the points of a perfect triangle, Sulu and Chekov the sturdy base and Kirk at the top, leading the way. They were two of his best friends. He always knew that if he lost one of them, he would lose both.
"You're a fucking coward to take Scotty at his word," Sulu says, and Kirk can hear the anger draining away, the conviction behind his words beginning to slip. He'd rather face ten thousand vicious insults than what will come next.
"Maybe Scotty can explain it better than I can," Kirk says. "But I – Scotty knows this technology, Sulu. You know that, Chekov knew that –"
"Don't you dare fucking talk about him in the past tense!" Sulu shouts, stomping over to Kirk. He grabs him by the front of his shirt and yanks him up out of his chair: insubordination. That's when Sulu notices, maybe, that Kirk's eyes are wet.
"Hikaru, please," Kirk says. As soon as they walked into this room he knew he couldn't be Sulu's captain, not now; this is no place or time to pull rank. He wishes that he had taken a different approach, because he feels so small, and he knows that's not what Sulu needs from him, now or ever.
"If there was anything I could do." Kirk touches his chest. He would offer his beating heart to bring Chekov back if he could, and the same goes for Jimenez, and Harrison, who he barely knew. But Chekov first, if he's honest. "You know I would do it, Hikaru, you know I would."
"Goddammit." Sulu throws Kirk back into his chair and crumples to the floor. He sits there for awhile, breathing hard and looking around the room with thick confusion, like he's just pulled himself up from the ground after a head injury.
"No, I just," Sulu says, and Kirk slides down to sit with him on the floor. "I just, I would know, Captain, I would." He looks up, and his eyes are still dry, which is not a good sign. Something in him is slipping away for good. Kirk saw it happen to his mother when Sam died.
"I just." Sulu puts his hand on his chest, tapping it, trying to communicate something. "I would know, I was – inside him, and he – if he died, I would die, too, I would be dead, I don't have – oxygen, I can't, I wouldn't be able to breathe, I wouldn't – I wouldn't be here."
"Hikaru." Kirk scoots closer, cautious, aware that the anger stage is not over and that it will come back tenfold as soon as Sulu musters the energy. Sulu doesn't seem to notice his closeness, just hyperventilates, his fingers scratching at the carpet like he wants to tunnel beneath it, to hide until this is over.
"It can't be real because – because I'm still here," Sulu says. "I can't still be here, I would be gone, he would have –" He looks up at Kirk, his face clear of everything for a moment, like the beach before a tidal wave.
"He would have taken me with him," Sulu says, and then he tries to smile, maybe, but his lips just shake.
Kirk stays in conference room 34-A for another thirty minutes, Sulu's head in his lap, letting him shudder until his bones rattle, which is when Kirk knows that it's clinical shock. He motions for Bones, who has been waiting outside the whole time. Sulu whimpers at the press of the hypospray before it's even pricked him. It sounds like some kind of perverse expression of thanks, and when his face goes calm Kirk knows that he's hoping to never wake up again.
*
The next few weeks don't make much sense to anybody. Kirk feels half-alive, shuffling between the three memorial services, video calls with sobbing relatives, and official statements about the incident. Bones gets mad at him for forgetting to eat, then prescribes sleeping pills, which Kirk doesn't take. He deserves to suffer the long nights, and he spends most of them thinking about Sulu, who didn't come to any of the memorial services, not even Chekov's. Sulu still refuses to acknowledge the fact that Chekov is gone forever, but Kirk gets the feeling it's a formality at this point, that Sulu doesn't really believe in the delusion anymore. He's on his second week of bereavement leave, essentially catatonic, spending every day, all day, in the dark in Chekov's room, in his bed, under the blankets. Uhura has been able to force him to eat only a couple of times, and Bones has hypo'd nutrients into his system on the days when he wouldn't even lift his head from his pillow.
Kirk goes to see Sulu once a day. He thinks of the room Sulu has retired to as the Temple of Chekov, and sits by the side of the bed scrolling through his memories of Chekov while Sulu sleeps, or lies behind him in silence, pretending not to know that he's there. During most of these visits Kirk thinks about the first time he realized that Chekov and Sulu were in love. The three of them were on an away mission with Spock, exploring a settlement on a remote planet that had been inexplicably evacuated. It was eerie, the empty buildings and the abandoned vehicles, the quiet. At one point, a Bytharian parrot flushed out of a tree and everybody startled, even Spock. Sulu jumped in front of Chekov like he was ready to take a bullet for him, and Chekov laughed, blushing and shoving Sulu a little as the parrot flew away. Sulu looked down at the ground, smiling, humiliated, then he looked up at Chekov, and what Kirk saw between them was a thing he had never believed in before then.
"Captain, I believe the time has come to make a decision about Lieutenant Sulu," Spock says after three weeks. Kirk doesn't respond, just slouches in his chair, chewing on his thumbnail. They are approaching the last space station outpost they will be conveniently close to for months. It makes sense to evaluate Sulu now, to find him either fit or unfit and act accordingly. It's only logical.
"I'll speak to him," Kirk says, though no one has spoken to Sulu since that first day, when all he would say was that Chekov wasn't dead, that he couldn't be, even if Scotty could prove that he'd been dismantled instantaneously by the worst sort of transporter malfunction. Blown away like dust. Kirk keeps having nightmares, and he doesn't want to think about what Sulu dreams of when he manages to sleep.
Kirk goes to Chekov's room after his shift, and Sulu is there, as usual, in the bed, turned away from the door. He must get up to use the bathroom when he has to, but Kirk hasn't personally seen him move for weeks. He forgoes his usual place on the floor and sits on the end of the bed, sighing. Chekov's things are still laid out across the room just as they were when he left on the away mission: piles of crumpled clothes on the floor and empty cups on the bedside table. Every detail of the room is a sharp pin in Kirk's heart now, and to Sulu they must be like swords, things that slice him in half and keep him from standing.
"Listen," Kirk says. His voice feels stale in this room, though he's done plenty of talking elsewhere, since the transporter incident.
"I've got to make a decision about what do with you," Kirk says. "I'd like your input."
Sulu doesn't stir, but Kirk knows he's awake. There's a certain smell in the room that might be described as death.
"So," Kirk says. He feels thirteen years old again, sitting by his mother's bed in the stolid air of her bedroom, post-Sam. "Do you even want to stay?"
He doesn't really expect an answer, and he flinches when Sulu speaks, his voice muffled by Chekov's old pillow and scratchy with disuse.
"Yeah," Sulu says. "Here. This bed. The sheets, they still smell like him."
"Well." A couple of weeks after Sam died, Kirk's mother slept out in the yard, on her back, staring up at the stars. Kirk brought her blankets so she wouldn't lose her toes to frostbite. He rubs his hand over his face and sighs.
Two weeks ago, there was a party for Scotty's birthday, particularly rowdy, lots of whiskey that had been brewed in the engineering room, the good shit. Sulu and Chekov came together, Sulu got drunk and laughed too loud, hanging on Chekov's shoulders for most of the night, telling anyone who came near that Chekov was the smartest guy he'd ever met, for real you guys, and that he felt inadequate in comparison. Chekov drank his share of whiskey but remained perkier than anyone there, reaching back to rub his hand over Sulu's ear while Sulu rocked him in his arms. He had an uncanny ability to attend to Sulu and ignore him at the same time, talking with Scotty about the new engine coolant system or with Riley about Bytharian pigeonball, never taking his careful fingers from Sulu's ear, never needing to give him anything more. Kirk has never seen anyone mourn something like that before; he was too young to know what was going on when his mother lost his father. He keeps getting snagged on the kind of mourning he does know: a mother losing a son, also mourning the fact that she still had one, and that she had to try to want to stay alive for one when the other was gone.
"This is where all his stuff is," Sulu says. "So. I want to stay here."
"In the bed? Because. I need you on the bridge, Lieutenant." Kirk has resolved to be professional. The way he handled things in the conference room didn't help anybody.
Sulu is going to take a long time to respond to things now; that's clear. Kirk touches the blanket on the bed that was Chekov's, imagining that it's ectoplasmic, something that truly connects Sulu to wherever Chekov has gone. He feels like he's not allowed to be here, though he has clearance for every inch of this ship, within reason. He doesn't remember what it was like to know what was within reason. It's not like the three who were vaporized by the ion storm are the first crew he's lost; he's been losing crew since before he actually belonged here, that man named Olson who still screams in his nightmares, and in Sulu's, too. They told each other that once, marooned on Victus-4, where there was the possibility of freezing to death. They told each other a lot of things that night, and never spoke of them again. Kirk told Sulu about his brother, how he died, things he hasn't even told Bones, who doesn't know that Kirk had a brother. Sulu told Kirk that he was afraid everyday, constantly, that Chekov would grow bored and leave him. Neither of them really thought they were going to die, but the cold unlocked something in them that made them start talking as if they were sure that they would.
"I can still fly the ship," Sulu says. "I mean." He turns over onto his back, and Kirk looks at him, but not into his eyes. "I don't know what else I would do." Sulu is looking up at the ceiling in a way that makes Kirk want to check it out, to see what's going on up there, but it feels like another thing he's not allowed to access in this too-quiet room.
"You'll have to go through psychological evaluations before they'll let you back on the bridge," Kirk says. "Pretty extensive."
"They?"
"The Federation. Hikaru. There's protocol. Plus, you know. It's not like I won't recommend you for, uh. Counseling."
Sulu looks at him then, and Kirk can still taste the name on his mouth: Hikaru. He doesn't call him that often, and probably nobody has since Chekov died. It's almost as bad as saying Chekov's first name, a thing too firmly attached to what's gone, like everything else Sulu has, something too soft for the way the world has become.
"Counseling," Sulu says. He doesn't seem to have any real opinion about it, based on his tone. Another thing to add to the list of signs that are not good. Kirk is waiting for Sulu to get angry again, and if it doesn't happen soon Sulu might not feel anything else again, ever. Not the way he used to, anyway.
"You remember," Kirk says. "What I told you about my brother."
What a cheap thing to say, and what timing; he hates himself for it. Sulu just stares at him, blinks.
"Why do you think I let you in here?" he says.
*
Kirk spends a lot of time with Bones, a fellow insomniac. For all his ranting about Kirk taking this or that to help him sleep, Bones doesn't really make much of an effort himself, and they drink coffee with whiskey long after their shifts, playing War with an old fashioned deck of cards, because apparently Bones played it with his father when he was a kid, whenever thunderstorms knocked the power out. That's what it feels like, this aftermath: something bigger than all of them that came and took the light away.
"So, Sulu is scheduled for his first counseling session tomorrow," Bones says while they're staring down at their cards, satellite jazz playing in the background. They're in Bones' office, and sick bay is as silent as a tomb outside the half-open door.
"I want to meet with the therapist," Kirk says. He had to talk with one after the Nero incident. It was a formality, and he mostly just got congratulated, his heart hammering his chest the whole time. She didn't ask him the questions he feared, and he felt betrayed by the ease of it, and relieved, of course.
"It's Drexel," Bones says. "He's pretty good. But you know I don't believe in that horse shit."
"Yeah, Bones, I know."
"I don't believe in time healing all wounds, either."
"Sure. Does anybody?"
"Jim." Bones gives him a merciless look. "We might be kidding ourselves here. You remember Carlton."
Carlton was a gamma shift communications officer, and his wife served on the Nautilus until she died on an away mission. Upon hearing the news, Carlton destroyed his room and locked himself in one of the virtual reality chambers on the recreation deck, replaying one of the goriest battle simulations over and over, until Scotty finally figured out how to override the hack he'd configured. Carlton's hair was white when he came out.
"Sulu is not Carlton," Kirk says. Sulu actually has the potential to come up with some far worse reaction, but it wouldn't be as graceless, or as public. Even when Sulu threw that chair in the conference room, he did it with a kind of dignity that he couldn't shake if he wanted to.
"Sulu is a kid," McCoy says. "He's twenty-four years old."
"Yeah. Only four years younger than me." And Chekov was four years younger than Sulu. Twenty years old. Dead.
"Jim, c'mon. That's years you're talking about, fine. But we both know he's lived something of a – sheltered existence, compared to yours. No offense."
"None taken." Kirk has been reading about Sulu's sheltered existence lately, to better equip himself as a captain dealing with a grieving crewman, and as a nosy friend who wishes he already knew the things he's been reading in Sulu's public and privileged files. Sulu grew up in San Francisco and has three older sisters, but everybody knows that. Kirk never knew, until he started snooping, that Sulu's father is a research biologist and his mother is a fairly accomplished pianist. He never knew that Sulu was valedictorian of his elite high school, or that he founded the Hybrid Orchid Society at the Academy. Sulu wanted to be a botanist until he took a flight class during his sophomore year at the Academy, just because his roommate was taking it, just for an elective. Kirk wished he had been there as he read a note from a professor about how flight changed Hikaru Sulu forever, how he found himself in it.
Kirk was there to watch his pilot find himself in Chekov. He saw that first hand, from the very beginning, after Sulu thanked him on the transport platform and they walked toward the bridge together, their legs shaking so hard they felt like alien appendages that didn't really belong to them. Kirk was standing behind Sulu when he stopped at the transport console, where Chekov jumped to attention, trying to chew away his triumphant smile.
"You?" Sulu had said, panting the word out, and Chekov nodded, his smile breaking free, making him look about twelve years old. Sulu and Kirk were both still standing there, catching their breath, as Chekov sat down with his brand new confidence and tried to beam Spock and the elders off of Vulcan. They stood there and watched him realize, just after he'd gotten his first taste of secondhand invincibility, that he was never going to have that feeling back again. Too shell-shocked to look away politely, they were the only ones who saw the way Chekov's face changed when Spock's mother was gone.
"Well," Kirk says to Bones. "What do you want me to do? He told me he wants to stay. He's given this mission two years of his life, he at least deserves a chance to finish it."
Bones grunts. "You're the one who's going to have make the call, Jim."
"No shit."
Bones looks up at him with that sudden sympathy that cuts Kirk in half. Kirk never knew his father, and Bones is hardly old enough to qualify, but Kirk's best approximation of how it feels to know that kind of heaviness coupled with security has been his relationship with his best friend.
"You alright?" Bones asks, sounding like he doesn't expect a real response. Kirk shrugs.
"Sometimes I think I'd feel better if it was my fault," he says. "I can't figure out why. Maybe the guilt would be easier to deal with than – whatever this other shit is."
"Maybe you need some therapy, too," Bones says.
"But you don't believe in that horse shit."
"I'm talking good, old-fashioned electroshock, you troubled son of a bitch." Bones winks and throws his cards onto the table. "I'm spent. You want a sedative before I go?"
"Keep asking me that every night, see if my answer ever changes."
"Well, how about evacuating my fucking office if you're going to keep ignoring my advice?"
"Advice." Kirk scoffs. He's not even sure what he means. He's gotten maybe three hours of sleep in the last two days. The cards on the table look like a language he used to be able to read, something that doesn't make sense now. He doesn't want to leave Bones' office, with the green desk lamp and the pictures of his smiling daughter. He hates his own gaping quarters, and wants a room like the one that Chekov had, an ensign's bunk with no windows and a sonic shower.
"Jim, something's gotta give," Bones says, helping him up. It's a kindness, the way he guides Kirk out of sick bay, but Kirk suspects he also just wants the soppy mess of his captain away from his clean medical sanctuary.
"Sure," Kirk says. "But I still don't see what difference medicated sleep is going to make."
"It would be some sleep, would be the difference."
Kirk shrugs and waves Bones off, heading for his quarters. He thinks about stopping by Chekov's old room on the way, knowing that Sulu will be there, under those unwashed blankets, but he's too tired to make himself believe that being there would make any difference. Sam mourned their father for most of his childhood, and he was always telling Kirk that he didn't understand, since Kirk had never met the guy. When Sam died, Kirk's mother went someplace where Kirk couldn't follow. He should know by now that haunting around someone who's lost something that he's never known himself doesn't do anybody any good.
When he reaches his stateroom, he stands around for awhile feeling like he's forgotten to do something important. To make himself feel better, he sends a message to Sulu's PADD, not sure if he's even touched the thing since Chekov died.
Eval tomorrow. Don't forget. Try to act sane if you want to stay.
*
Sulu passes all of his evaluations, and Kirk realizes afterward that he didn't really expect him to, though he also didn't expect Sulu to leave. He doesn't know how to act when Sulu returns to the bridge, stony-faced at the conn and avoiding the new alpha shift navigator's eyes. Kirk selected Chekov's replacement personally, with more consideration placed on how Sulu would react to him than the guy's actual navigation skills. No one would have come close to Chekov in that department, anyway. The new navigator's name is Blanton and he's in his mid-forties, fat, kind of a dickweed. For this transitional period, Kirk basically just sought out the farthest thing from Chekov that he could find. Even the female candidates had more in common with his dead navigator than Blanton does.
"So," Kirk says, setting his tray down across from Sulu's at lunch. "First day back."
Sulu looks up from his tomato soup as if to say, Fucking . . . really?, and Kirk grins, though he feels stabbed. He's afraid of Sulu lately. Anybody who's grieving has always made him ragged with nerves.
"I don't know," Kirk says when Sulu just stares. "It's got to be weird." In the past, he's avoided this kind of thing, any sort of confrontation about the mourning in question, willing to take his cue and pretend that nothing was wrong until a full scale breakdown was in order, but that never really went well.
"This is autopilot," Sulu says. "Okay?"
"Okay. Sure. You want me to leave you alone?"
"Do whatever you want, Captain."
Kirk doesn't go. He eat his turkey sandwich and sneaks glances at Sulu as he spoons tomato soup into his mouth, fighting the urge to compliment him on voluntary eating.
"So, next week," Kirk says. "The Pytharian system. I was thinking – there are a couple of key away missions, if you're interested. Some really interesting vegetation, I bet."
Sulu laughs, his eyes on the film over his soup. When he looks up at Kirk, it's like taking a sword through the chest, but the accusation in his eyes isn't even as sharp as Kirk wants it to be.
"Whatever you want, Captain," Sulu says. Getting called 'Captain' doesn't usually bother Kirk this much, but maybe he's thinking of the way Chekov used to say it. Maybe Sulu is, too. "Just – put me on all the away teams. You think I – give a fuck?" He laughs. "Sir?"
"Sulu." Kirk doesn't know what to say. He's never been in love the way that Sulu was – who has? If he's honest, he's finding it kind of perverse, the fact that Sulu is still existing now that Chekov is gone, though it's admirable, too, the way that he was able to fool the ship's counselors into allowing him to stay.
"Look." Sulu shakes his head. "I had two things. Him, and flying this ship. It's just a default, staying here. It's the only other thing I had. So, I. I don't care what happens now, and you should take that into account – I didn't give the therapist that impression, 'cause I don't want to leave. But, Captain, I respect you, and you should know: I don't give a fuck anymore about what happens to me, but I – I need something to – if I don't fly this ship I'll die."
He stares at Kirk, not pleading with him, not even completely connected to what he's saying, if the dullness in his eyes means anything. Kirk wants to hide Sulu in a big coat, to let his pain incubate until it's something he can use to move forward. Right now, he's just uncanny, the raw, numb look in his eyes making Kirk uncomfortable. Kirk tugs at his collar and rubs his pickle through the mayonnaise that leaked from his sandwich.
"Listen," Kirk says. "When it comes to flying this ship, I'm your biggest fan. You can stay as long as you can convince those therapists to keep you here."
"See, Captain," Sulu says, smiling, looking sick. The bags under his eyes look like they weight fifty pounds each. "That's why I'm staying. Because you know I'm fucked up forever, and you're still – you still want me here." He laughs down at his soup. "And, uh. Maybe I know why."
"Don't," Kirk says sharply. He never should have told Sulu, or anyone, what happened with Sam. It's a weapon that can only be used against him. Sulu shrugs.
"Hey," he says. "I'm kind of, uh. Uncensored, right now. If you can't handle it, maybe you should go sit with someone else."
"Yeah," Kirk mutters, but no one else seems willing to brave the Lone Sulu table, and Kirk doesn't want to leave him to his own devices. He eats his mayonnaise-flavored pickle and narrows his eyes a little, because he thinks Sulu will appreciate it, in the state he's in. Sulu grins, unrecognizably.
"It's like dying and still hanging around," Sulu says, his eyes locked hard on Kirk's. "That makes you strong, right? Because nothing matters anymore."
"Sure." Kirk stares at Sulu, trying to catch something in his eyes that Kirk can hold on to. Sulu ducks it effortlessly, smiling with his privilege, the ruin that Kirk couldn't possibly understand.
They sit in silence for awhile, Sulu with his tomato soup and Kirk with his turkey sandwich. Kirk feels thirteen years old again, floundering, and that's the selfish angle he's going to have to work or ignore, Chekov's death bringing it all back home.
"What are your plans?" Kirk asks. "For after your shift?"
Sulu snorts. He looks at Kirk like they know each other well, which wasn't really true before the last three weeks, and Kirk's mind goes to the place that made it so.
"Right," Kirk says. "In Chekov's bed, in the dark. Okay." Maybe Sulu expected Kirk to try to talk him out of it. "Whatever. I was going to invite you to kick my ass at basketball."
"Basketball?" Sulu stares at him, blinks. "You think I want to play basketball?"
"No. I expected you to turn me down."
Sulu actually holds his gaze for awhile, which is progress, or, anyway, Kirk wants to think that it is. When Sulu laughs darkly and looks down at his soup, Kirk wants to believe that this is progress, too. He's fixated in the sense that he wants to be suffering for Chekov like this, too, just like he wanted to suffer for his father the way Sam did, and like he wanted the same thing when Sam died, when even his own fathomless grief could never match his mother's.
"Captain," Sulu says. "I barely know where I am. That's not true when I'm on the bridge, even though he's not there. That's why I need to stay here, where I can sometimes be on the bridge, and the rest of the time be in that bed. If you can understand that and allow it, great. If not, uh. I'll make myself so scarce you'll never hear from me again."
"Will you wash the sheets at least?" Kirk says. "Eventually?"
Sulu looks up at him with surprise, and Kirk wants to explain to him that he's specially equipped to deal with this, that he's been the only one who thought of the cleanliness of the sheets before.
"Washing the sheets would defeat the whole purpose," Sulu says. He looks like he's surprised to be speaking this particular language with someone who will actually be able to translate.
"I know," Kirk says. "That's why I'm asking. Eventually, will you? Or will you take, you know. The other road." He shrugs. Sulu doesn't seem to want to be coddled.
"I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it," Sulu says. He looks around the mess, and Kirk watches him, the way he looks at the others now. He's become another species, and everyone avoids him as politely as they can, asking him if he needs anything before hurrying away.
"Well, I'll be here," Kirk says, "Either way." Because it's the only thing he's ever known to say. Sulu stirs his soup, far away from him now. They don't speak for the rest of the meal.
Kirk plays basketball alone, the gym quiet around him, huge and empty except for the huff of his breath and the skitter-slap of the ball. He makes a couple of pretty good shots and wishes someone was around to witness them, but the gym is always empty at this hour, closed to anyone without special permission.
Bones shows up eventually, when Kirk has worn himself out. Kirk is lying on his back on the floor, still breathing heavily, and he turns his head toward Bones when he appears to frown down at him. Kirk shrugs.
"Goddammit, Jim," Kirk says, before Bones can. Bones doesn't appear to be amused.
"I will bring a bio bed in here if I have to," he says. Kirk laughs, and sits up with a groan.
"This is my workout, Bones," he says. "That was yoga."
"Uh-huh. Dammit, Jim, don't make me drug you against your will. You need sleep. You don't look well."
"Trying to appeal to my sense of vanity?" Kirk stands up, grabs the basketball and makes one last dramatic shot. It bounces off the rim.
"You're pushing the limits of my patience, Jim," Bones says. "I do have the authority, as your CMO, to make executive decisions about your health if I determine that you're engaging in self-harming behaviors."
"That's a little extreme, don't you think?"
Bones stares at him for awhile, and Kirk begins to get the feeling this is serious. He looks over at the basketball, which is still rolling, and watches it until it bumps softly against the wall.
"I mean," Kirk says, drunk with exhaustion. "I'm not even the one that this is happening to, right?"
"This is about more than losing your officers, Jim. Something's going on, something else. You've been – pretty unhappy."
"No, I haven't."
"Dammit, Jim, don't act like a child!" Bones grunts and starts to walk away. Kirk follows him, swimming through the hard yellow light over the basketball court, feeling like he's being pulled on a string, a little toy with wheels.
Bones won't speak to him, so he goes back to his quarters and takes a shower. His legs are like rubber, and he sits down in the tub, falling asleep with his head tipped back against the wall. He probably isn't out for long, but who can tell. He wakes himself up with a snore, turns the water off, dries quickly and slumps into bed. His bed has come to feel like a soul-swallowing enemy, so he drags his PADD in for company and types a message to Sulu.
Hey, Lieutenant, I almost forgot to congratulate you on a really excellent first day back. If you're asleep right now you can disregard this, but if you're awake maybe you want someone to talk to?
Also, question: I was accused of being unhappy this evening, do I come off that way?
He hits send because he wants to get rid of the words, not because he wants Sulu to read them. Two minutes later his PADD buzzes with a new message. He really doesn't think it's going to be a reply from Sulu, and checks the name in the From field twice before he lets himself read the message.
You come off like you really want everyone to think that you're happy. Which, yeah, gives most people the impression that you're not. Beyond that, I personally can't really tell.
Kirk snorts, refusing to absorb that. He types up a reply quickly, afraid that he'll lose this little Sulu window, picturing him in the dark of that room, hiding under the blankets with his PADD.
So you are awake. Hey, do you want some sedatives, to help you sleep? 'Cause Bones seems to have a surplus – he's constantly trying to shovel them down my throat.
The next response comes less than a minute later. Kirk knows because he counts the seconds.
I don't want to sleep.
Why the heck not
Because waking up and remembering is like finding out all over again.
Kirk doesn't know how to respond to that, and feels guilty for not having seen it coming. He decides to go with being a hypocrite.
You can't just stop sleeping, Lieutenant
Sometimes I pass out
I can't have you flying when you're not rested enough to function
But I am. And plus. You're awake, too.
Kirk laughs and thinks about going to Chekov's room. He could lie on his back on the floor and they could have this conversation in person, in the dark, without having to look at each other, just with less typing, plus the sound of each other's voices. But he knows Sulu doesn't want him there, in the Temple.
I miss him, Kirk types. Dangerous, but true. I know it doesn't compare with whatever you're feeling, but everything looks duller since he's gone. It's like the universe was promised something and that thing was taken away.
When his brother died, Kirk wanted to take everything he saw in both hands, shake it, and ask how it had the nerve to exist when Sam was gone. Especially himself.
Sulu's response takes a long time to come, and Kirk's heart pounds while he waits. He's afraid he's scared Sulu off, but ten minutes later he gets a long message.
he used to do this thing before bed where he'd type a detailed account of what he wanted to dream about and then in the morning he would write about what he actually dreamed and how successful or not he was at manipulating his subconscious mind and he believed that dreams are the closest thing to heaven that actually exists like that's how good he was at this and how much faith he put in himself you know to just take on the whole universe with his bare hands but he did it in this fucking sweet way, this dream journal kind of way, he just took such good care of himself he never skipped a run and working hard like that made him so happy he would come back here with this big dumb smile and he loved the idea that he wasn't just a dweeby scientist but an athlete too though he wasn't much of one outside of running I mean I tried to teach him how to fence and he had no hand eye coordination. So anyway I've been reading his old dream journal, it goes all the way back to when he was five years old and I pretty much sob my fucking face off every time I look at it, not because it's touching (though it is) but because I both can't stop reading it and know that I'll eventually get to the end.
Kirk reads this three times, his fingers shaking with the effort not to ask Sulu to tell him what five-year-old Pavel wanted to dream about. It takes him a long time to type his actual response.
And what do you think heaven is?
It's a risky question, a delicate subject, but for some reason Kirk feels confident that it will actually comfort Sulu, that he's the type who believes that people go on somehow. Still, the minutes that pass as he waits for Sulu's response make him nervous.
It's where he is. That was true while he was alive, too. Have you ever been in love
The lack of punctuation makes Kirk think it's not a real question, or that Sulu already knows the answer, the way Kirk knew that Sulu believes in heaven.
Nope
It's like you can't even believe you have hands. Cause you get to touch this person. You can't believe you had hands all along and never realized what they were for, what they were capable of
Kirk is still trying to formulate his response when he gets another message from Sulu:
sorry, I'm kinda stoned
Kirk laughs. It's a phenomenally good sign, the return of an appetite for self-destruction. At least it's some kind of appetite.
Got enough for me? he sends, and then, quickly, because he's afraid Sulu will say No, don't come:
Just kidding
There's a pause that feels like literal silence between them, and Kirk supposes that it is, but for a moment the awkwardness makes him feel like they're in the same room.
I wish I wanted to die, you know? Sulu sends. Because that would be easier. But I can't kick the habit of wanting to live and wanting to have him here with me, living. It's like I want to stop dying, because that's what it feels like, every second
Kirk still can't come up with any real response outside of Can I come there and sit with you, but he doesn't send that.
Every time one of my crew dies, I wish it were me, he sends. Do you believe that? Do you think I really mean it? He asks himself these questions pretty much every night.
I think you would take a phaser blast for any of us, Sulu responds. But maybe that's not really the same thing?
EXACTLY Kirk sends back, before he can reconsider the capslock. He laughs at himself, flushing with embarrassment in the dark, his aquarium gurgling in the next room, glowing through the open doorway. There's another pause before Sulu's next message, and Kirk realizes why when he reads it:
If you ever want to get fucked up with me and talk about how to differentiate between intangible things, we could do that.
Kirk is smiling pretty widely as he types out his response: How stoned can you really be if you're spelling "differentiate" and "intangible" correctly, Lieutenant, come on
He waits for glorious recognition of his wit, and gets this instead:
For some reason Pavel couldn't spell the word 'lieutenant.' He had some kind of mental block against it. He'd have to use the autocorrect on his PADD.
This is kind of impossible to respond to, and Kirk wants to return to the discussion about getting fucked up together, guiltily.
Well, he had a very impressive grip on Standard for a non-native speaker, Kirk sends, wincing.
Not really. He was very stubborn, and he wouldn't give up particular phrasings, even though he knew they were wrong. Like "shrimps," he would always order "shrimps" instead of shrimp. He knew it was wrong and he thought it was cute or something, he was really vain about how cute he was sometimes. But then he'd turn around and be totally oblivious, and that was when he was painfully adorable and people would get nosebleeds, like this one time he came to the botany lab and I was showing some assistants this blathe root specimen I had, and when I gave it a dropper of fertilizer it made this little mouse-like noise and Pavel, who was there, irritating me actually, goes, 'oh, Hikaru! Did you hurt it?' and he wasn't being self-aware at all, and he had his hand over his mouth and his eyebrows were doing that arching thing, and everybody kind of died and I was proud because he was mine, I was the one who could touch the small of his back and tell him no, the plant was just fine
Everybody really loved him, Kirk sends. It's true, and Kirk wants to be able to enjoy these stories, but for some reason he isn't. Maybe they would be better told in person.
I'm gonna go, Sulu sends.
Get some sleep.
Maybe.
There's nothing for awhile, and Kirk isn't sure if he should send some sort of cheesy goodnight message, but as he's deciding not to, setting his PADD aside, a new message arrives.
Please don't try to talk to me about all of this tomorrow.
Kirk stares for awhile, feeling like he's just been clawed across the chest. He should know by now not to take other people's grief personally, but that's always what he's done best, seems like.
You got it, he sends.
*
For awhile, all the good signs dry up, even the vague references to drug use. Sulu stops making references to anything that isn't directly work-related, and either skips his lunch break or goes to his room to eat. At night, he still retires to Chekov's old room, and almost every night Kirk has to fight the urge to send him PADD messages or stop by and knock on the door, but he avoids the temptation, disappointed with himself all night long but proud of himself in the morning, which matters more.
Kirk starts having a lot of sex again, not enjoying it like he used to. He leans more toward men than women for awhile, then he fucks a Korean engineer with sturdy hands and switches back to women in a half-aware panic. The women have a tendency to rub their hands all over his back while they're getting fucked, which never irritated him before, but when he pins Ensign Roth's hands over her head that feels wrong, too.
Jerking off is even worse. He can't believe how often he used to do it.
Five months after Chekov, Jimenez and Harrison died, there's a biology-focused away mission to Crinthia-07, and Kirk suggests that Sulu should volunteer. He doesn't really expect him to take up the recommendation, and is surprised when he gets Sulu's official request. He removes Spock as the lead officer and reassigns the position to himself.
"Captain," Spock says when he reaches the bridge that morning, and Kirk sits especially low in his chair, knowing what's coming. "Excuse me, but I noticed that I have been removed from the exobiological expedition to – "
"Sorry about that, Spock," Kirk says, glad that Sulu isn't on the bridge yet. "I just think I should personally oversee this one."
"May I ask why, sir?"
"There are some – potential personnel complications," Kirk says. He's not looking at Spock, just staring straight ahead at the conn. Lieutenant Tifton is swiveling in the pilot's chair, checking the lift for his relief.
"What sort of complications, sir?" Spock asks. The lift opens and Sulu walks forward, barely nodding at Tifton as he begins briefing Sulu on what happened during gamma shift. Kirk gives Spock a look, and Spock raises an eyebrow.
"I believe I understand, Captain," he says.
"I thought you might."
The mission is nothing special, but it's the first one that Kirk has personally overseen in awhile. There are things he should be more concerned with on the ship, diplomatic intricacies and delicate circumstances that he probably shouldn't have left in the hands of Spock, but none of it holds the sort of life or death appeal that this does. Sulu's return to off-ship duty is like facing down a reckless alien king or clawing his way out of an icy grave on an inhospitable ice planet. It's the sort of thing he's thrown himself into face-first since the beginning of his service: potentially ruinous, full of impossibly treacherous complications, and apt to be considered a no-win situation. That's Sulu in general, since he lost Chekov, and Kirk is magnetized to this diagnosis, waist-deep in trying to disprove it.
Exobiology has never interested him much. He sticks close to Sulu and nods a lot, encouraged by Sulu's stoic observations about plant life, because at least it's some type of verbal communication, a representation of Sulu's desire to continue on professionally if nothing else. The other two officers on the mission are Jacobs and Lyanthol, two women from sciences who seem a little too pleased to be away from the ship together, reminding Kirk of Sulu and Chekov when he first took them on away missions. They were like the kids in high school who seemed to know something that Kirk didn't, who recognized it in each other's eyes. Kirk fucked half the kids in his grade and still didn't get it, desperate to know.
On the first night, they make two tents on a cliff that overlooks a valley full of the sentient Blarse plants that they're chiefly interested in studying. Jacobs and Lyanthol share a tent, and Kirk could possibly make a remark on their giggling, but he's never really been that kind of captain. He let Chekov laugh like that when he shared away mission tents with Sulu, and maybe that's why Sulu is sitting at the highest point of the cliff, his legs dangling over the edge. Kirk sits down beside him and sighs, trying to sound like a wise old man who can offer him pithy advice about how to get on with his life. Hearing himself, he realizes that he sounds more like an exhausted Labrador retriever.
"Well," Kirk says when Sulu says nothing, offering no sign that he's even noticed Kirk sitting beside him. "All I got is something that might make you hate me."
Sulu looks at him, and it's something, anyway, a real response to stimuli. Kirk hasn't seen much more for the past few months, aside from what's absolutely necessary on the bridge. Kirk shrugs, willing to be a jackass if it shakes Sulu out of this potentially permanent paralysis.
"What?" Sulu says. In his grief he's achieved a kind of innocence that Kirk can only admire from afar. Sulu is twelve years old for all intents and purposes, only as angry as he is sad, his eyebrows arching softly.
"This is all I got," Kirk says, holding up his hands. "And I don't blame you if you hate me for it. Okay, but – ever since we talked? I've been keeping a dream journal, you know. Like you told me about."
He doesn't mention Chekov's name, because that would be out of bounds. All of this is really out of bounds, but Kirk has a theory that it's the only thing that will work: pissing Sulu off. Sulu's eyebrows knit slightly, which is a good sign.
"And it's not really working," Kirk says. "But I didn't expect it to, so maybe that's the problem. Not that I don't have faith in the basic concept, it's just that I know I don't have that kind of power over my mind. You know, they used to call me 'genius-level' because of how I scored on tests, but they never outright called me a genius. There's a distinction, I guess." He looks over at Sulu, trying to figure out if he should keep talking or throw himself over the cliff. Sulu's face is frozen, eyebrows still arching. He looks surprised, but not horrified.
"Well," Kirk says. "Have you ever tried it?"
Sulu looks up at the planet's three moons. He seems so much younger than Kirk, more than four years. Kirk watches him, wondering how often Sulu thought this about Chekov: so much younger, he's so, so much younger than me. The overwhelming need to protect the other person stems from that, certainly.
"Uh," Sulu says. "No, I never tried. It was kind of. His thing."
"Right!" Kirk was willing to be crushed, or sacrificed, or so he thought, but this is still not what he wanted from this conversation, which was painstakingly planned. "I'm getting that. So, anyway. That's all I got."
"All you got?" Sulu looks at him, and there's no forgiveness there, but he's not exactly chastising Kirk, either. He looks vaguely confused, like he was interrupted in the midst of living one life and asked to live another. Kirk knows something about that, not as much as some people, but maybe enough to fake his way through the rest.
"All I got," Kirk says. He looks down into the valley, which is Earth-like in its dark dampness, its offering nothing-ness. "I mean. You know what I mean."
"Captain."
"Well, Lieutenant. Nobody else is going to throw themselves onto the flames."
"The flames, sir?"
"Don't pretend like you don't know that you're, you know. This fire that anyone who gets near you has to throw himself onto."
Sulu laughs, which was the goal, maybe, but he still sounds far away.
"You're drunk, sir?"
"No. I'm on duty. And I've been sleeping, lately, so I can't blame insomnia. Are you sleeping, Lieutenant?"
"Sometimes." Sulu reaches over to put his palm against Kirk's forehead.
And that's when Kirk knows. He thinks of a movie he saw as a kid, an ancient artifact touching another ancient artifact, a cave lighting up with blinding light, natives screaming with recognition.
"You don't feel feverish." Sulu takes his hand away. "For a minute there I thought you'd been exposed to some pollen."
"No," Kirk says, slowly, coming halfway back to life. "If I'd been affected by pollen – you know. I'd be humping your leg or something."
"Right. So, your dream diary." Sulu looks like he wishes he could get angry about this flippancy, or like he wishes he could even consider it to be flippancy, but he's too tired to do either.
"I don't know," Kirk says. "Mostly I want you to tell me what he wrote."
"Oh." Sulu looks down at his hands, and only then does Kirk see that he's holding a little flower, one of the wispy things that grows in the grasses here. It's got dusty white petals and only the faintest scent, like old-fashioned laundry detergent.
"But you don't have to," Kirk says hurriedly.
"I know."
"Well. I know you know."
Sulu smirks, twirling the flower between his thumb and forefinger. Behind them, Lyanthol – or maybe Jacobs – lets out a peel of laughter, muffled by the walls of their tent.
"When he was a kid he wanted to dream about getting candy," Sulu says. "Because his parents wouldn't let him eat it. He drew pictures of it in the margins, lollipops and stuff. If it worked he would write these triumphant tracts about how he'd outsmarted his parents." Sulu laughs and throws the little flower over the cliff, down into the dark. "Well, whatever. Real people should be warned against falling in love with people who could never last."
"No, he was supposed to last," Kirk says lightly, and he does feel kind of drunk. It's possible there's a property to these grasses that has not been identified. It would account for Lyanthol and Jacobs' somewhat reckless coupling in the tent behind them.
"Then when he was a teenager," Sulu says, ignoring Kirk. "He would write about these crazy sex fantasies. Like he gets locked in the school with his physics teacher after doing extra credit, or the track team gets gassed by anti-inhibition potion and they have an orgy in the locker room. He was really creative, in a kind of frightening way, and, uh. Well, reading this, in hindsight, kind of illuminated some things. Captain, are you sure we're not drunk?"
"We're something," Kirk says. "But I don't think it's bad."
"Oh. Well, later it was all about academic glory, and sometimes that coupled with sex fantasies, and sometimes both of those in combination with candy. But he was such an innocent, you know, I think that's the definition of an innocent, someone whose most indulgent, debase fantasies you can examine and find this sort of – straight line from basic desire into creative expressions of such."
Sulu leans back to lie on the grass and looks up at Kirk, who is thinking about calling in an emergency team, about ninety percent sure they're all compromised. He lies down on the grass beside Sulu and lets out his breath, staring up at the stars.
“What about after he met you?” Kirk says. “I mean, at the beginning.”
“After he met me,” Sulu says. He's looking up at the stars like he's reading his answer there. “At first it was mostly about saving Spock's mother. He wanted to stop having nightmares about not doing it. He was angry with his subconscious, making demands, and it wasn't working. So he switched back to sex dreams for awhile. Weird stuff about orgies on the bridge. And then, eventually, me.”
“You.”
“Yeah, he'd start asking himself to dream about kissing me. Telling me things, confessing. I'm sure he never wanted me to see that part of the journal – probably any of it, but especially that part. We could have lived together forever and he never would have wanted me to know.”
“Why not?”
“'Cause – you know. You can be in the most intimate relationship of your life and you still withhold some things.”
“Actually, I wouldn't know.” Kirk lifts his communicator to call for help, but maybe this is not so much an emergency as an inconvenience, or a supreme convenience, if he looks at it another way. He didn't intend to drug Sulu in order to get him to open up, but it's a bold move that he should have considered.
“Take this for example,” Sulu says, lifting a hand. “Maybe you've never had a romantic relationship like this, fine, but Bones, your best friend. Does he know everything about you?”
Kirk snorts, though he doesn't have a particular answer in mind. Then, no, of course not: Bones doesn't know that one very important thing that only Sulu knows, because of the last time they sat at the edge of something together during an away mission. He doesn't know that Kirk had a brother.
“Are they still making you go to counseling?” Kirk asks.
“No.”
“Good.”
A huge gust of wind comes and blows through the grass, sending a thousand tiny flower petals hurtling over the cliff, twisting into the air like a god's sneeze.
“Bless you!” Kirk shouts, his wooziness peaking and then spiraling away quickly, down into the dark with the flowers.
“Me?” Sulu says.
“No,” Kirk says. “Never mind. Bad joke.”
Lyanthol sticks her head out of the tent and Sulu and Kirk arch their backs to look at her. She's got her hair down, long black ropes that fall around her bare shoulders.
“Everything alright out here, Captain?” she asks.
“Sort of,” Kirk says.
When they get back to the ship they analyze the grass along with the other samples taken from the planet's surface. Kirk takes a personal interest and stands over Sulu's shoulder in the botany lab, watching him work. Sulu is stone-faced again, the set of his shoulders asking Kirk not to talk to him about any of this. Kirk obeys, wearing a science officer scowl as Sulu isolates the mild strain of blax-908 in the flowers' genetic structure.
“For a human, inhaling a moderate amount of the pollen is like drinking three glasses of wine, basically,” he says as he makes his notes. Kirk laughs.
“Lyanthol and Jacobs must have been snorting the stuff, then.”
“All they did was have sex,” Sulu says a little sharply. “It's –” He stops himself before saying It's not like you never got laid on an away mission.
“Just a joke, Lieutenant,” Kirk says, slapping Sulu's shoulder. Sulu flinches and leans over his samples. Kirk gets the hell out of there.