Reflections
Aconitum Napellus
2011
(Rated: 12)
This
is a non-profit work of fan fiction. No monies are being made. This
story is based on and uses elements from Star Trek, which is
trademarked by Paramount Pictures and CBS. I do not claim ownership
of Star Trek or any associated characters or the universe of Star
Trek. All other elements are my own.
McCoy had always maintained
that Spock had a thick skull. Luckily Commander Spock of the Terran
Empire was just as blessed as his doppelganger in the other universe
– the universe that McCoy and his companions thought of as the
real, true, good
universe. At least, this Spock’s skull was obviously tougher than
the brittle souvenir animal skull that Kirk had just shattered over
his head. The blow had struck him unconscious instantly, but McCoy’s
hurried ministrations had saved his life. A human would never have
survived.
Unconscious on the examination
bed in sickbay, this Spock seemed little different from his
counterpart. Passive and silent, ashen-faced from the blow to his
head, this was just Spock
as McCoy had seen him in sickbay so many times before. Spock in
fancy-dress, Spock with a fake beard – but still Spock,
with his elegantly pointed ears and angular face and lean,
effortlessly healthy body.
That, either Spock would have
affirmed, was nothing more than an illusion. The brain beneath that
recently healed skull was very different indeed.
The first thing that this
Spock was aware of after the crippling blow to his head was the
absence of the pain that had exploded through his skull and slammed
him into unconsciousness.
I am alive,
was his first conscious thought. And
I am apparently well. How curious.
He could smell the antiseptic
scents of sickbay, and he could feel the imitation leather of the bed
under his back, and the residual ache in his skull where the impact
had been focussed. He was obviously undergoing treatment in sickbay.
He had not been left by his attackers in a crumpled heap on the
floor, and the nascent bleed that he was very well aware had
blossomed in his brain at the instant of the blow had evidently been
halted, and healed.
Again, he thought, How
curious.
A moment of silent attention
to what was around him told him all he needed to know for now. He
could hear and sense the doctor – and only the doctor – in the
room with him. He was agitated and preoccupied, but not particularly
wary. He was not yet aware that his patient was conscious, and he was
standing close by the bed. Spock could feel the pressure of a
hypospray against his arm. Evidently whatever it had contained was
what had brought him back to consciousness – and, the dose given,
the doctor was about to move away from his side. In that moment, the
doctor was at his most vulnerable.
It took only a fraction of a
second for the transformation from passive patient to deadly
assailant. Spock had been bred in a universe full of threat and
deceit, and retaliation had become more of an instinct than a
deliberate action to him. Apparently unconscious one moment, the next
he was rising from the examination table with careful, measured
slowness, in the knowledge that if the doctor attempted escape he
would make it no further than that initial pulse of adrenaline
through his startled limbs.
It would only take the
movement of one hand to the doctor’s neck, and a swift, efficient
twist to the side, and vertebrae would snap like rotten twigs. No
mess. No blood. Just a snap, and an instantly limp and harmless shell
dropping to the floor as the flutter of consciousness left the brain.
He could kill the doctor and locate the captain and the others with
very little loss of time. Killing was an automatic reaction in this
universe. Spock himself had killed dozens of men in his path to
becoming First Officer of the Enterprise.
What was one more corpse to his tally?
But curiosity was ever Spock’s
failing – or ever his saving grace. This time his curiosity was
greater than his instinct for death. He had no more hope of leaving
this question unasked than the doctor did of escaping him.
‘Why did the captain let me
live?’
He was hard against the
doctor’s body, the doctor’s wrist clenched in his right hand, the
doctor’s pulse thudding with human panic against his fingers.
McCoy’s eyes were wide with a fear he had never learnt to mask, his
pupils pinpoints, red human blood spidering through the sclera about
the brilliant blue irises.
Spock’s fingers moved to the
human’s face, burnt onto his skin, pressured the force of his mind
into the human’s weak thoughts. There was no need to say the words,
but he said them anyway. They had become a threat by now. Nothing
terrified humans like an awareness of a travesty about to occur.
‘Our minds are merging,
Doctor. Our minds are one. I feel what you feel. I know what you
know…’
The barriers, such as they
were, tumbled like a child’s sandcastle under the swell of the sea.
The instant he entered the
doctor’s mind time became meaningless. That precise part of his
brain that always counted continued regardless, but here, in the
free-fall of meld, time was a puppet, a malleable thing, something to
be tasted and contorted and looped into his own purposes, and then
tossed away like the rind of a fruit.
He sank himself into the
tangle of thoughts, identifying the most recent memories and impulses
and scrutinising that which was relevant. The doctor’s mind was
easy to prise open. His purpose, his motivations. His bewildered
entry to this world that was so like and so unlike his, and his
desperate need to return to his own, to shepherd his companions back
to where they were safe. Curious, how a doctor wanted so desperately
to deny himself trade…
He shifted his angle, coming
closer to what he wanted.
James Kirk was there – Jim
Kirk this time… Jim,
not James Tiberius... Such a difference that softer, single-syllabled
name made to the man himself. James
Kirk was a brutal, visceral man, led by his passions and little else.
But this Jim
was a strange, glowing, golden version of his own hardened Kirk, not
just a different man, but a man seen through different eyes, all of
his motivations and needs and wants filtered through this McCoy’s
years of observation and friendship.
And it was simple – it was
so beautifully simple. The captain had let him live because – to
kill was an abomination. Even to kill’s one’s enemy…
Spock’s own eyes opened a
little wider at the simplicity of that thought. To kill is an
abomination… To take the twisted strands and knots of a sentient
being’s path through life, and to cut them all off with one sweep
of the blade. What person would cut the thread of a tapestry half
woven, or stop a novel half-written? What sane person would deny the
universe that potential, without thought or purpose?
In the eyes of these men, was
he insane?
His curiosity for these
other-beings from that other-place was billowing out of control. But
no matter… It had taken a fraction of a second to extract that
which he needed to know. He had plenty of time to explore this mind
whose counterpart so fascinated him in his own universe… And humans
were so easy, and so very intriguing… He could not explore James
Kirk’s mind – but this one was here for the taking.
McCoy. He tasted the name, and
every tatter of personality that clung to it. He had never entered
his
McCoy’s mind before, but he knew that wilderness would be nothing
like this. He had sensed the outer edges of his thoughts, of course.
No sense in being a telepath in this brittle universe without making
use of it to gauge enemies and allies and how easily their alliances
would polarise. His
McCoy carried a faint scent of blood and the crackling carapace of a
soul hardened to suffering. This McCoy was soft with pity, jumbled
with sensations of antiseptic and pain carried about because it was
too hard to let it out, and tissues of hope wrapped about dark,
jagged splinters of despair.
So close,
Spock thought.
This one was so close to being
his
McCoy. Spin him about, beat him hard enough and often enough with
life’s evil, and this one would blend seamlessly into his. As
babies, perhaps, gazing milk-mouthed into their mother’s eyes,
there would have been no difference.
He fell into another place.
The timelessness of meld left years and nanoseconds and everything
in-between for contemplation, self-scrutiny, self-loathing. He
recalled his own infancy, standing on the sunbaked clay of a Vulcan
street, the taunts of his classmates cutting into his mind. Returning
home, looking up into his mother’s eyes, seeing that they were not
void of emotion like his father’s and his stepmother’s, but
drained of it.
She was a concubine,
another voice insisted. A
captive, a prostitute. Second best to T’Rea, a prisoner on a
god-forsaken furnace of a planet. A second-best with a second-best
son. No wonder you were always such an insecure son-of-a-bitch.
Insecure… The word drifted
in his thoughts. Was that how this other McCoy viewed that other
Spock? Was that other Amanda also a worn and wearied prisoner on an
alien world?
I’ve never met Spock’s
mother, that other
voice said.
Was there a note of mockery in
the voice? Had this McCoy recognised the hope in Spock’s mind, that
tiny sliver of desire to know that that other Spock had not been born
of lust and political machinations and a loveless union? There was,
perhaps, a little of this world’s doctor in that one. He too
garnered a spark of satisfaction from needling a wound and watching
the patient wince.
You bet I do.
The voice was becoming
stronger inside Spock’s head…
You bet I get satisfaction
from hitting you where it hurts. You’re inside my mind, you
bastard. My Spock
would never do that, in a million years. Never rape a man’s mind
just to satisfy his curiosity, never kill a man to see how it felt…
Never kill…
Those words echoed again in
this Spock’s mind. A life cut short. Potential wasted. A life
warped by cruelty and carelessness. His own life…
The doctor’s laughter was
like a slap inside his mind. The meld had begun as his own, totally
under his own control. His subject, as always, had begun totally
under his own control. But this… This was different. Somehow the
doctor, the good doctor (a phrase that entered his head as uttered by
a beardless, smooth-cheeked other-Spock, that struck him with its
aptness in contrast to his own doctor McCoy) – the good doctor had
turned the tables, had grasped control, had taken advantage of
Spock’s curious need to explore and guided that exploration to his
own ends.
Look at yourself,
the voice hissed inside his head. Look
at what you are. Look at what you’ve been made…
He looked, feeling himself and
exploring himself from the perspective of that other mind. The taste
of meat on his tongue and in his throat… The curious feeling as he
compressed his grip on a neck and felt life leave a body… The
suppressed pleasure he gained when striking his clenched fist against
bone wrapped in flesh, when triumphing over the weak and the stupid…
All that’s an anathema to
my Spock,
the voice hissed, a snake inside his head, a venom coursing through
synapses and reordering everything that had previously been natural.
His other self lived in a
controlled peace, rather than a controlled hatred of the world around
him. Logic was a tool, not a weapon…
So how about it, Spock?
The taunting note was still
there, but it was an honest question.
How about saving lives
instead of ending them? How about doing some
good in this world?
