Chapter Text
“Did you see where he lived?” Spock lopes after Jim, who is running from bush to tree to fence, probably trying to stay out of sight of the cameras but in all likelihood failing miserably.
“Yeah! Didn’t you?”
Spock hadn’t exactly scrutinized the file. Mostly he’d depended on Jim to look through it and see if he recognized anything. Sighing, he crouches next to Jim behind a bush and raises one eyebrow. “And how do you propose we get into the room, Jim?”
“We can crawl through the window.”
“You don’t think it’ll be locked?”
Jim gives him a look. “You don’t think I don’t know how to pick a lock?”
“Did you have a criminal childhood?”
Now Jim laughs. “You know I don’t know the answer to that question. God, I hope so, though. Wouldn’t that be sick? Maybe my parents erased my memory to make me shape up.” He laughs again, but Spock doesn’t really see how such a hypothesis could be humorous in any way. “Wouldn’t that be a bitch?”
“Yes, Jim, it would.”
Jim’s smile seems wild in the dim light provided by the lamp posts twenty paces away. “I missed you, Spock.”
“We’ve only been apart for a single day.”
“I meant to visit you last night,” says Jim, as if Spock had never spoken, and hurries to the next hedge to crouch behind it. Spock goes after him. “But, you know, I was held up. Bones showed up in my room. And he slept there. I think he broke up with his boyfriend, but he refused to talk about it. Wouldn’t it have been funny if he showed up to visit you, too?” Jim stops talking, and Spock suspects it’s only because a couple cadets are hurrying past the hedge, and if he had continued that train of thought, they might have been caught.
“Are we nearly to the room?” Spock hisses.
“Yes. Nearly there.” Jim grabs Spock’s hand and pulls him further toward one of the dorm buildings—E, if Spock remembers. “He’s in room 248. That’s on the second floor, right?”
“Third,” says Spock. “The first floor would be numbers 1 through 99, and then the second floor would have 100 through 199, and the—”
“So third floor, yeah. Cool. I’ve climbed worse.” Jim sprints off again, and Spock curses.
“Jim! I haven’t climbed worse!”
“But you’ll have climbed exactly the same, and that’s almost as good!”
“Jim, your logic is—”
Jim puts a hand over Spock’s mouth, stopping him from continuing. “There’s security over there,” he murmurs into Spock’s ear. “We’ll wait for them to pass, and then we’ll climb up.”
“I don’t know how to climb, Jim.” Though irritation would have consumed Spock by now if he was with anyone else, all he feels is mild exasperation. He takes Jim’s wrist and pulls it away from his mouth. “You expect me to be able to climb three stories with no experience?”
Jim smiles at him. “It’s okay, Spock. I believe in you.”
“Jim.”
“And if you need help, I’m here for you.” He flashes another smile—a smile that makes Spock’s stomach do a curious little flip. “I’m an expert climber of walls, you know.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
The security guard’s moved on; Jim leads Spock around the corner and jumps upward, taking ahold of the windowsill and using it to pull himself to a stand on the ledge. “Just follow my lead.”
Spock repeats this action with little effort.
“You liar. You said you’ve never done this before.”
“I haven’t,” Spock whispers. “I am just copying your technique, just as you told me to do.” He points to the next ledge some feet above them. “Do we do the same thing here?”
Jim’s eyes narrow. “Yes.”
There’s something in his voice, but Spock pays no mind to it. He looks up, bends his knees, and then leaps; though he falls short, he’s able to kick off the wall to give himself the extra height he needs. When he’s safely secured, he looks back down at Jim, who’s staring at Spock with his jaw nearly touching his chest.
“I was joking!”
Spock can’t resist the urge to give him a triumphant smile. “Go on, Jim. Impress me.”
Jim’s mouth curves into a not-so-serious scowl. His eyebrows draw together in concentration. And then he’s moving, scuttling up the wall not unlike a spider, using misplaced bricks and thorny vines to haul himself closer to his destination. He’s standing next to Spock only moments later, lightly panting, his eyes bright with the thrill of it all.
Spock has the sudden idea to take Jim in his arms then, to hold him, to—what? Kiss him? The thought alone is ridiculous; carrying it out would be nothing short of embarrassing.
“Shall we continue?” he asks instead, taking hold of the wall to steady himself. Jim grabs his shoulder to try to help, but it just makes Spock feel shakier.
“Of course. You want to go first again?”
This time, Spock employs a mixture of his and Jim’s techniques. He leaps up again, grabs hold of a jagged brick sticking out of the wall, and uses it to propel himself further. Jim gets onto the window sill at about the same time and they grin at each other, breathless.
“You’ll be an expert yet,” says Jim. He bends downward and pulls on some gloves before he grabs at the window, sliding it open.
“You’re sure this is the right room?”
“Sneaking into everyone’s rooms has given me an intricate knowledge of these buildings’ layouts.”
“But you’re not sure which floor is which.”
“Hey. I was close.”
“We could have found ourselves in some poor unsuspecting student’s bedroom!”
“Oh, nonsense. And, if we had, we could have just apologized and moved on. It’s happened before.” With the ease only one with practice could emulate, Jim slides through the open window and into the room. Spock has to take a moment to question every choice he’s made in his life that’s led him to this before he follows.
The room is dark. Slowly Spock’s eyes adjust, and he makes out a pair of empty beds, an old desk, a busy wall littered with documents connected with strings. Jim fumbles with his PADD just inside the window, trying to find a sort of flashlight, so Spock moves past him to the desk and its wall of papers.
“You’re right.” He keeps his voice low. “This room is Kevin Riley’s. It’s cleaner than I thought it would be.”
“Cleaner?” Jim’s finally found the flashlight feature on his PADD, and he uses it to illuminate the room. “He wasn’t murdered here, if that’s what you thought. I think it was in the courtyard.”
Spock wets his lips. “How did he die?”
“Stabbed. The reports say that it looks personal.” Jim spots the desk and comes over to inspect it and the wall. “What is all of this?”
“I’m not sure. It seems like he was trying to find something.” Spock’s gaze travels along the strings and the papers they connect. Some are newspaper clippings, some journal articles, some photographs, some handwritten notes. “Or…someone,” Spock adds. He feels uneasy. The quiet pleasure he’d felt standing next to Jim on that second-story windowsill has completely dissipated, replaced with a slow, haunting feeling that reminds Spock of the ghost stories with which Amanda tried to scare him.
“Who are these people?” Jim’s light moves with his eyes. His mouth moves too, forming the names silently, but it seems no epiphany is coming.
Then.
Then Jim says, “These…faces,” in an oddly faint voice. “Spock, I think—”
He crashes down without warning. Spock dives after him, taking Jim into his arms, lifting him off the floor. Jim’s entire body is convulsing. His eyes dart back and forth underneath his eyelids. His hands grasp for something that isn’t there. A few times he utters a moan of a name—something with hard syllables, but a name Spock doesn’t recognize.
“Jim.” Spock touches Jim’s face. “Jim, Jim.”
Jim’s gone, at least for now; he’s unreachable. Spock closes his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I hope, one day, you can forgive me.” His fingers land on Jim’s qui’lari and Jim’s mind submits immediately to him. It catches Spock off guard; when he’s done this before, the other participants opened their doors slow, unsure, but Jim yields without any such qualms: if his mind has doors, he kicks them open at Spock’s request, and a jumble of images pours into Spock’s consciousness.
He knows immediately that this was a mistake.
A full-blooded vulcan might have had no problems helping Jim—would have had no problems interpreting the images that came so readily from Jim’s mind. But Spock is only half vulcan, and his mind is so much weaker for it, and everything Jim gives to him threatens to overwhelm.
He gets a schoolyard. A field of wheat. A chaste kiss. The shock of fear. Adrenaline. Elation. Hunger. Excitement. Terror. Hatred. He sees a group of children, huddled together, cheeks stained with dirt and blood and tears. He sees a man and a woman arguing—screaming. He sees a sun setting over a long stretch of rows and rows of corn. He feels despair in his chest, swallowing him up. He wakes in a hospital and blinks at a nurse. He falls asleep in a humid cave, curled into another boy’s side not for warmth but for comfort. He—
No. He is not Jim. He is not Jim. He is Spock. He is Spock, and he is vulcan, and he grew up on Vulcan, in and out of hospitals, knowing death intimately but never once fearing it. He is Spock, and he never felt the horror that seemed to have rooted itself in Jim’s mind when Jim was only a child. He is Spock. He is Spock. He is Spock.
It is this assurance that saves him—and his mind—in the end. He holds onto it—clings to it—and uses it to pull himself and Jim out of the rush of memories.
“Jim.” They’re back in Kevin Riley’s room, and Jim’s name is the first thing to fall from Spock’s lips. He looks down, looks at Jim’s face, presses their foreheads together. “Jim, please wake up.”
Jim’s eyes flutter. “Spock,” he mumbles. Spock helps him up and he shields Jim’s eyes from the wall. “Where are we? What’s—” He swallows a few times and blinks hard.
“We can talk about that later,” Spock says. “For now, let’s get you out of here.”
[]
He's cold.
He's cold.
He's cold.
He's cold.
He's cold.
He's cold.
He's cold.
Oh, god, he's so cold.