Fic: Lensflare Lover
Posted on 2009.07.29 at 22:24
Not much preamble here. I've been babbling about this one for a while now.
Pairings: Pike/Enterprise, Pike/Number One
Rating: Mature/ NC-17
Summary: A story about a ship and two captains and the fact that falling in love cuts everyone to pieces, but usually leaves us all alive in the end. (By which I mean that it's an AU *very* loosely inspired by Tanith Lee's "The Silver Metal Lover" where all the ships have avatars and doomed romance is inevitable.)
Word count: 7,301
Warnings: explicit sex and (completely unrelated) severe injury.
Thanks/acknowledgments: Thanks to![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
re_white for the beta and to all the various people who commented encouragingly on my cryptic ramblings about this thing. I hope the suspense hasn't killed it;) Also, an unusual bit of thanks goes to my mom (no website, sorry), who usually doesn't touch my fic with a ten foot pole, but was convinced to look this one over after I edited all the sticky bits out temporarily. She provided some great feedback and, since my opportunities to thank her in fic acknowledgments are bound to be fairly rare, I'll take them where I can.
Notes: Big Pretentious Author's Note at the end.
Spock: The antidote to a woman of Elaas, Doctor, is a starship. The Enterprise infected the captain long before the Dolman did.
McCoy: Well I doubt seriously if there’s any kind of an antidote for the Enterprise.
When they meet for the first time in Nogura’s office, Pike realizes that the Enterprise’s avatar is every bit as nervous as he is. It shows up in the tense, formal silence that blankets the room, and then in the way it shatters when she grins, suddenly, blindingly, over their first handshake. She’s got beautiful eyes, Pike thinks: a startling pale blue that’s just human enough to be unsettling in place of the usual hollow shine of electronics and plastic he’s come to expect from ships’ avatars. And if the thought makes his answering smile a little dazed underneath the relief, she doesn’t seem to mind.
They ditch Nogura as soon as they can by some silent fledgling conspiracy toward insubordination. Pike’s starving: In spite of the fact that it’s his third command post, and the second as captain, he was nervous enough about the first meeting that he forgot breakfast. So they find a small restaurant, and she surprises him for the second time by ordering food.
“I have a non-insignificant organic component.” She explains. “It’s experimental. The biologics will break down more quickly and be more difficult to replace, but they think it should enhance the interface process.”
Enhance the interface process, he thinks, and doesn’t blush. Because she’s right: he doesn’t feel like he’s talking to the sentient presence of his half-finished ship. He feels like he’s having lunch with a long lost friend. The illusion only breaks down when she nibbles thoughtfully at a piece of tempura, then offers the same sunrise of a smile to the food that she shared with him earlier. “This is . . . this is really good.” Then she narrows her eyes. “They’ve been holding out on me in more ways than good company.”
“I’m afraid to ask what they’ve been feeding you, then.”
She laughs. “Don’t worry about it, it wasn’t a priority. But I’ll take meals with you whenever I can, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.” He’ll have to share her with the senior staff eventually, but he doesn’t let it worry him now.
[]
Avatars have a strange and somewhat mysterious history in Starfleet. Technically, they appeared sometime shortly after warp drives did, an unpredicted, spontaneous product of the primitive AIs that became necessary to manage the incredibly complex math needed to keep a ship in one piece while moving faster than light. They initially manifested as part of the ships themselves, but the idea of a sentient ship was so unsettling to so many crew members that the next available generation of spacefaring vessels featured independent units to house the AIs. Mobility became more important as ship size increased, and human crews and programmers promptly began designing AIs that were more and more familiar to their own aesthetic definitions of life.
That’s the official story. But there are older ones, less scientific, dating back to the days of square-rigged sailing ships and wild, uncharted oceans. Captains and crews of Earth history imbued their ships with human presence since the first of them took to sail and, as they changed wind power for warp drives, they found that they weren’t the only far-traveling species to do so. Every warp-capable society the federation has encountered to date makes use of ships’ avatars in some form, and all of them have stories of strange goddesses twining through their oldest legends of travel. Human captains aren’t the only ones with a history of going down with their ships.
[]
Pike has only worked with one other avatar in a command capacity before, as captain of the Yorktown, and there was very little mystery about her. Number One had a long record of exemplary service by the time he met her, and her considerable experience was a godsend for a freshman commander. He easily lost count of the number of times she bailed him out of potential disaster with nothing more than a quiet word or sideways glance.
He hasn’t thought about her for months, not since she shipped out again with a new captain and crew. But he can’t help but think about her now, as he steps out of the restaurant into early afternoon sunshine and watches Enterprise move down the sidewalk a few steps ahead of him. He wouldn’t have called Number One graceful, exactly: no matter how much tweaking the engineers did to the machinery of joints and limbs to make them more passably human, there was always a set of easily visible differences about avatars. Number One carried herself with such a sense of control and subdued authority that it was easy to forget, sometimes, but Enterprise moves in a way that’s almost impossible to distinguish from any other pedestrian sharing the street. If anything, she’s more alive than most of them.
[]
Later that afternoon, they take a shuttle to where the ship proper is under construction in Iowa. There’s still a great deal of it that’s unsafe to move through, but the bridge is intact and sealed. The construction crews have gone home by the time they get there, and she gives him a brief tour of everything they can reach. If her eyes were striking before, they’re radiant here, where she belongs. The unavoidable machine-elements that are visible on her skin look like beauty marks: thin lines of bio-tech tracing over the curves of her cheekbones, the flat metal edges of power-conduits running down the line of her neck to disappear under her collar. Pike looks at the way the precise artificial light complements barely-visible highlights in her pale hair and wonders if a first meeting has ever gone too well before.
On the flight back to San Francisco, they’re both quiet and tired, although fatigue shouldn’t technically be something she experiences. When he asks her, she smiles. “It’s classified, but it’s something you’ll need to know. I do get tired. Without the ship at full capacity yet my power reserves are limited, and the biologics are as prone to fatigue as you are. Once the dilithium chambers are operating, I should be able to override it for as long as necessary, but it hasn’t been field tested yet.” She pauses, then reaches for his hand and presses two of his fingers to her throat, alongside a power conduit. There’s a pulse.
“Real?” he asks. She nods.
“I’m the first ship in the fleet that was born with a heart.”
[]
He knows things about Kelvin and Narada that didn’t make it into his dissertation. They’re quiet, subtle things, but all the more terrifying because of it. He knows, for example, that Narada’s captain was already dead by the time Kelvin found her. He also knows that the Narada wasn’t attacking the Kelvin, specifically: it was simply discharging all of it’s weaponry in such a frenzied, massive deluge of firepower that Kelvin couldn’t help but be hit. He knows that Kelvin’s sensors recorded three beings in Robau’s immediate vicinity during the last minutes of his life, and that all of them registered as humanoid on the scans, even though Robau directly addressed one of them as Nero, the ship’s avatar. He knows that Kelvin’s avatar collapsed on the bridge at the exact moment of Robau’s death, and that all the ship’s systems registered wildly erratic operational spikes and failures for exactly 4 seconds afterwards before they stabilized.
He knows that the last viable escape craft had already left Kelvin’s shuttle bay before the autopilot failed with George Kirk still on the bridge.
And he knows that although the Kelvin’s explosive death crippled the Narada severely, it didn’t destroy her completely.
[]
He starts sleeping in his quarters on board as soon as they’re complete, spends every moment he can spare from academy work helping the construction crews. It’s mindless work, for the most part: fastening panels and bundling conduits and laying flooring, but the crews are glad to have him there after the initial nervousness wears off, and Prize is as well. He comes in especially handy when things go wrong, because nobody has to waste valuable time checking for orders from San Francisco.
Once, when something ruptures in atmospheric control, he spends a tense half-hour with his arms buried to the elbow in a tube of oxygen recycling gel, cold-soldering a separated connector without exposing it to the high oxidation quotient in the air that would destroy it in moments. At one point a drop of sweat falls onto the open panel, dangerously close to contaminating the delicately balanced fluid and setting them back by weeks.
Prize is there a moment later, pushing damp hair back from his forehead, looking over his shoulder to visually check the complete lack of progress she must be able to detect from internal sensors. He allows himself a quick laugh:
“Well, this is awkward.” She smiles and squeezes his shoulder.
“Tickles a little, I won’t lie to you. I think you’re . . . “ Her eyes unfocus briefly, “try the first port again, it should be cleared now.” She’s right, of course, and he finishes up in a matter of moments, pulls his hands free and re-seals the panel. She smirks at him, a new expression, and he realizes that he’s standing in the middle of environmental control dripping blue gunk.
“You’re getting my fluids all over my floor,” she tells him, almost-deadpan. “Somebody’s going to slip in the wet spot.”
He actually throws his head back to laugh, which seems to please her, because she steps around the corner and gets him a towel from a maintenance cart before moving off to wherever she’s needed next. “We’re having dinner with the new first officer candidate,” she calls over her shoulder on the way out. “You’d better shower. We’ll start rumors if you start showing up in public smelling like atmospheric control gel.” He throws the towel after her, but it falls a little short.
[]
Number One wasn’t much for jokes, and at the time, he simply assumed it was because she was an avatar. In hindsight, though, it was an obvious error to assume that her subdued sense of humor was due to a lack of emotion. Wun was brave and kind, gentle or fierce as the situation prompted it, and perhaps the most protective individual he’s ever known.
He remembers a cave-in during a supposedly routine survey mission on some godforsaken asteroid. Three crew members were trapped, injured and running out of air, and the rock was too packed with explosive ore for them to risk using phasers to cut them free. Wun dug the men out with her bare hands, abandoning all pretense of humanity and using her titanium alloy skeleton and polymer musculature to toss broken stone around like popcorn. Everyone was a little subdued on the way back to the ship, and Pike realized that she was embarrassed about the unexpected break in character.
“Number One,” he said quietly, reaching out to clasp her shoulder where she was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, trying to hide the damaged synth-flesh on her hands that had torn away to reveal the metal and circuitry beneath. She looked at him with wide, silver eyes, hair disheveled, and he thought suddenly about a box of antique comic books in his uncle’s attic that he used to sneak away to read during holiday visits.
“You were a regular damn superhero back there.” She looked surprised, then grateful, then a little embarrassed, more so when Lt. Thompson piped up from the emergency medbed in the shuttle where Boyce was splinting his broken arm.
“Yeah, just like whatsername. Wonder Lady.”
“Wonder Woman,” Pike corrected reflexively, and if avatars could blush, he thought Wun would have. That’s how she got her nickname, in a roundabout way, and Pike is fairly sure that she was pleased that the crew finally stopped calling her by her machine designation.
[]
He and Prize take an armed combat class together, and one of the scenarios is a forced boarding. They synch her up with a simulator mock-up, which frustrates her. “They have to suppress the link to the ship for me to interface,” she explains. “I feel . . . a little numb.”
He nods. “We can figure something else out, if you want me to call it off.”
She shakes her head and offers a wan smile. “No, it’ll be alright. There are plenty of situations where communications dampening might be necessary. I need to be prepared for that, too.”
The simulation uses irrationally terrifying boarders. They appear as vague shapes, when they initially come into view, clearly visible but undefined. When they get within firing range, they take on characteristics that are personalized to appear as psychologically threatening as possible to each individual participant. Pike finds himself shoulder to shoulder with Prize in a simulation of engineering, picking off would-be boarders in the bottleneck formed by the main entrance. He can tell which assailants are focused on him, because they feature tentacles and spikes and oddly twisted versions of the bulbous, veined heads of Talosians. He’s limited to hitting whatever he can see with phasers and thrown objects; she splits her attention between her own sidearm and devastatingly inventive use of doors and vacuum seals and environmental controls.
When they’ve finally mown down the last of the attackers, there’s a lull full of heavy breathing before one last creature plummets down at them unexpectedly from an overhead Jeffries tube where it must have climbed during the uproar. Prize sees it first and shoots it coolly and pushes Pike neatly out of the way as it crashes to the floor where he was standing. After a surprised moment, he finds himself looking down at a crumpled form that looks shockingly like HIM. He looks up at her, startled, halfway to horrified.
“Prize . . .” She cuts him off with a gesture, and her eyes are steady, but her hand is trembling.
“It’s not you,” she says quietly.
“It’s me attacking you,” he says.
“It’s you turning on me,” she corrects. He stares at her, lost for what to say, and puts a hand cautiously on her shoulder.
“Prize, I’d never.” She steps closer, around the body, comes up just short of leaning against him.
“I know,” she says, “That’s why it’s the worst thing I can think of.”
He’s not sure what would have happened, after that, if the simulator doors hadn’t opened.
[]
Moving the ship to orbit is a complicated process. They assemble her entire, as far as gravity and scaffolding will allow, then take her back apart in sections that can be towed into orbit and anchored at spacedock for re-assembly. There’s a period of two weeks when the section where his quarters are located isn’t secure, and he spends that time in San Francisco, finalizing plans to be off-planet. Prize stays with the ship, facilitating the first critical stages of re-assembly. When he makes it up to visit on a Saturday, he’s surprised when she greets him in a vacuum suit. He wonders again how much understatement was involved in “non-insignificant organic component.” She smiles at his startled glance. “Don’t worry, all the corridors we should need are secure. It’s just easier to keep it on most of the time than to constantly change in and out at temporary airlocks.”
[]
The first night his quarters are re-secured, he beams up to sleep there. Prize is still busy working when he arrives, and he doesn’t disturb her. The overhead lights in the corridor surge and dim in playful patterns as he passes them on the walk to his door, though, so he knows his arrival hasn’t been missed. Without giving it much thought, he kisses his fingertips before he presses them to the keypad. The key-accepted chime sing-songs cheerfully, and he knows that somewhere in engineering, she’s sharing his smile. He’s tired enough that he falls asleep almost immediately, relaxed and comfortable with the knowledge that he’s where he should be again.
Sometime in the early morning, he wakes, startled, from vague dreams of the ocean. At first he thinks he’s alone, but as his eyes adjust, he realizes that Prize is there, in his quarters. She’s pressed flat to the wall opposite the foot of his bed, watching him with silent, unwavering intensity.
“Prize?” he sits up. The strange immediacy of her face falters, she looks suddenly unsure.
“Chris.” Something about her voice makes him uneasy. He swings his legs out of bed, moves so he’s close enough to see her better.
“Prize, what is it?” She draws a deep breath.
“I don’t . . .” she shakes her head. “I never touch you. You touch me all the time, but I never . . .” He tries to picture the history of their physical contact, and can’t think of many instances when either of them has touched the other, except in the context of work. Then he belatedly realizes that she’s not referring to the avatar body, but to the ship at large. He’s flooded with memories: trailing the tip of one finger absently down a wall panel, holding the stability grip in the turbolift when he didn’t really need to, catching himself on the edges of a door frame to lean through it and talk to someone. He does touch her all the time. He just isn’t sure what it has to do with her waking him up in the middle of the night.
“Prize,” he starts, “You should have said something. I didn’t realize it was—” He forgets what he was going to say because she steps forward suddenly and presses the palm of her hand flat against his chest, over his heart. The look of rapt concentration is back. He’s only wearing light pants to sleep in, and her hand is strange against his skin.
“Something’s wrong,” she whispers and looks at him, something wild pushing at the edges of her pale eyes. “There’s something they won’t tell me. I’m wrong, and they can’t fix it so they aren’t telling me.” He covers her hand with his own, but isn’t sure how to reach out further.
“Prize, why do you think that?” She frowns again and reaches her other hand up to touch him as well, tracing cautiously along his collarbone with careful fingertips. He shivers, a little, and she glances up at him, unsure.
“It’s ok,” he reassures quickly. “Not unpleasant.” And the fact that she didn’t know leaves an ugly, guilty feeling in his gut: he doesn’t touch her, like this, nearly enough. No one does. He waits, watching her, as she traces her hand down over his shoulder and arm, pausing to examine the texture of the hair on the outside of his forearm, then the smooth skin at the inside of his wrist. There are visible-light interface points on the tips of her fingers, he knows, but he can’t feel them and he realizes that they’re actually under her skin. Implanted, he thinks, but that’s not right. The skin is the falsehood here, the external intrusion on the bones of a machine.
Suddenly, he thinks about her wiping tears from her eyes after a bite of overly spiced meat, clearing her throat in the dry mountain air of Denver during a shared weekend of leave, wearing a vacuum suit to interface with the outside of her own self. The first ship in the fleet born with a heart.
“Prize,” he says, “I don’t think anything’s wrong with you.” She looks up at him, all honest perplexity.
“I woke you, though. I shouldn’t have. Chris . . .” She frowns and circles his wrist with the hand touching him there, presses more firmly against him with the other. “I missed you. I don’t want to leave here yet.”
And, as many times as he’ll be amazed at himself in hindsight for not seeing it all coming, he still doesn’t realize the full extent of what’s happening until her eyes flick towards his lips and the small frown-line between her eyes deepens with just that much concentration. So he stands there, stupid with surprise, stays right where she’s holding him as she leans up to kiss him like he’s the world’s most tempting intellectual problem.
It’s cautious and soft, and he wonders a million things about her in the instant before he feels himself kiss her back. She opens her mouth easily to the slip of his tongue, and she tastes like . . . she tastes human, alive, impossible. She steps back against the wall again, breaking the kiss, tugging at his hands. He goes where she guides him, settling his hands on her hips, stepping close enough that their legs touch, inside/outside.
“Prize,” He starts, “your mouth . . . you,” but then he’s at a desperate loss for any other stupid things to say and she’s kissing him again with that hot, living mouth that’s too real and urgent to be the product of anyone’s engineering.
She reaches her arms up over his shoulders, pushes the tips of her fingers into the short hair at the nape of his neck, and he grinds against her, before he can even think about it, pressing them hard against the wall of his quarters. She pushes back without hesitation, hooks his leg so that he can’t stand without leaning on her. The close-woven fabric of her uniform is surprisingly rough against his skin: an insulating weave, he realizes. They’ve bound her in subtle armor, a clever and terrible disguise to keep anyone from knowing how alive she is, underneath. How real.
He searches up her back for a zipper or a catch or any kind of fastening, and she makes a soft sound into his mouth. “—here, let me . . .” He has to move back so that she can do something invisible to her own collar, and the uniform splits along all it’s seams, opening at the shoulders and down the front, separating top and bottom. She shrugs the top off, and the warmth of her crashes over him like a wave. She’s not wearing anything, underneath. Her skin is crisscrossed with a weaving pattern of bio-compatible metals, a webbed armor of plastic and polymer over her ribs, a delicate spidering of circuitry curving across her belly and lower, disappearing at her hip bones into the now-loosened edges of her pants. Her breasts are mostly bare of the enhancements, small and perfect, firmed by cool air or arousal or some combination of both.
He doesn’t realize he’s staring until she makes an aborted, self-conscious gesture with her hands, curling them in to cover some unidentifiable bit of circuitry low on her rib cage. He forces his eyes upwards by tracing the glint of metal up her neck to her face: she’s biting her lip, eyes wide and worried.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly, “It’s easier to repair, this way. If the implants are deeper they’re more painful to replace and—” He touches her quickly, softly, to quiet this strange insecurity.
“That’s not why . . . not what I was thinking about.” He traces the already familiar line of the propulsion circuitry down along her neck to the place where he usually loses sight of it, then kisses her there. “It’s amazing, Prize. It’s . . . you’re beautiful. I didn’t know. I didn’t . . .” she makes a startled sound when he kisses her neck again, and it undoes him more than anything so far.
She helps him get the rest of her uniform off her, makes short work of his own pants as they stumble back for the bed. She turns easily under him, lifting up to be touched and pressing into his hands wherever they move. When he lays a soft line of kisses down her throat and sucks his way gently to one nipple, she clutches his head and bucks and drags his hand down between her legs where she’s slick and hot and God, ready, as ready as he is. He wants to taste her there, feel her come against his mouth and his fingers, take every moment of this and stretch it as far as it will go. But she pulls him up by the hair and drags his hips in against her with strong legs, guiding him with one hand so that his first push into her is deep and undeniable and too good for any words he knows.
Everything about her breathes out amazement; her mouth falls open on a soft, sweet sound and she rocks up into him, against him, around him, all undisguised hunger and reckless want. It knocks the breath out of him. He falls forward, barely catches himself on one shaking arm. Her legs fold more tightly around him and her hands twist up over his shoulders. He feels like he’s breaking, probably sounds like it too. He’s fucking his ship, he thinks with a distant and slightly hysterical part of his mind, but it’s not fucking, not really, not when she whispers “Chris!” when she comes and he says, “god, Prize, yes--” in answer, and they twine together, after, spent and overwhelmed by the strange beauty they’ve made.
She’ll claim to suffer from regular human fatigue, but when she wakes him an hour or so later from a shallow doze to push him onto his back and settle herself over him with leisurely possessiveness, he knows it’ll be a while before either of them get much rest, again. He holds onto her hips while she throws her head back and rocks slowly down onto him, and decides that sleep is really sort of overrated, anyway.
[]
They make an inspired attempt to wear out the bed that first week, not to mention the desk and the couch and the corner of the shower where she can brace her foot on the slip bar. And once, although he’ll never tell another soul, the captain chair, after hours, with the bridge doors locked and a half-sliver of earth glowing bright against the stars on the viewscreen.
[]
He wonders dazedly if it will last, how long something like this can burn before it goes out or explodes. But she shows no sign of faltering, and every day feels stronger, like they’ll be inseparable. And try as he might, he can’t see any way that their professional life suffers. The closer the interface, the more effective they’ll be, and they’re . . . close. So when the fleet flies into hurried and disorganized response to a distress signal from Vulcan, he has no doubt that they’re prepared for anything, maiden voyage or no.
[]
He’s not entirely wrong.
[]
They drop out of warp over Vulcan late, due to Sulu’s nerves, and tense, due to Kirk’s wild-but-logically-sound premonitions. The disaster waiting there for them is enough to shake everyone who sees it right to the core. Pike knows he’ll be sick later, physically and violently ill from the horror and vastness of the destruction they’re plowing through at breakneck speed. But first he has to make sure they all survive until later, and the odds of him actually succeeding are shit enough that they keep his mind almost entirely off grief. His first, utterly shameless instinct is that they have to get the hell out of there, right now, but before they’ve cleared the debris field, Narada’s there, and they’ve taken a brutal first salvo of advanced alien fire.
The ship shudders and rocks, things break and spark everywhere, emergency status reports light up every indicator board he can see. When the Narada hails them, he thinks he’s prepared, at least somewhat, for the monster he’s going to find himself speaking to. He leans on a solid emotional wall of barely-checked rage to counter Nero’s crazed demands with a steady voice, but inside he’s shaking. Nero was a crazy bastard 25 years ago, and he’s done nothing but ferment in the intervening years of hiding and silence.
After he lays down his terms and looks Pike over like he’s a particularly appetizing chunk of meat, he flicks his gaze over Pike’s shoulder unexpectedly and says, “Take a moment to care for your woman, if you must.” Then he signs off, and Pike turns with something painful and heavy twisting up inside him, to find Prize half-collapsed in Kirk’s surprised arms. The black fabric of his uniform trousers and un-ranked undershirt form a stark contrast to the white and silver of her bodysuit, which in turn serves as a pristine canvas for a horrible splashing bloodstain spreading outward from an unidentifiable injury low on her right side.
Pike’s out of his chair before he makes a conscious decision to move, and Sulu’s at his shoulder. Kirk takes a controlled fall to his knees under Prize’s weight, arms around her from behind, cradling her head against his chest and shoulder. There’s blood on her mouth, too, Pike sees dimly, from a split lip and some sort of electric burn across her cheek that looks like it’s probably internal. She fumbles at the fabric of her shirt, still intact over whatever the injury is, and Sulu pushes her hands away quickly, slicing efficiently through the fabric with a short collapsible dagger that Pike mistook for a communicator on his belt.
“The helm’s not responding, sir,” he says while he works, “And we won’t have time to reach the damage manually. She’ll have to do it, but . . .” He finally gets her shirt pulled away from her side, revealing an ugly wound surrounding a smoking, twisted piece of metal.
“Christ,” Kirk bites out, “How’d she get shrapnel in--”
“ . . . Not shrapnel” Prize corrects weakly.
“That’s the control surface for the helm back-up.” Sulu finishes.
There’s a moment of silence, then Kirk says, “That’s an awful lot of blood for a machine body.”
“Not a machine body.” Prize says, quietly, voice sharp with pain. Kirk looks at Pike with shock written all over his face.
“You knew about this?”
“Of course I knew.” Pike snaps, “She’s my ship.” But it’s his own shock and anger talking: he was just as surprised as anyone, and he had longer to find it out and more time to adjust to it. “Sulu, can you fix it?” Sulu looks thoughtful and surprisingly calm in the face of a nasty fleshwound and smoking electronics, his first-day nerves evaporated now that they’re under actual pressure. Pike makes a note to offer the man a commendation if any of them make it out of here alive.
“There’s a replacement part on the bridge.” He says, “But I’ll have to cut this one out. And . . . solder the new one in.” Pike’s stomach turns an ominous flip; if the look on Kirk’s face is any indication, he’s not the only one.
“Do it.” Prize interrupts firmly, openly disdainful of everyone’s delicate digestion, and clearly a little annoyed that they’ve been discussing her biology while she’s sitting right there. “Hold onto me,” she says to Kirk, and to Pike, “You too.”
Sulu looks to Pike for a nod of confirmation before he gets up to retrieve the repair materials. Kirk shifts to a more stable position behind Prize and Pike moves with him, straddling her legs to keep her steady and pressing her shoulders back against Kirk’s. They find a place where she’s held firm between them, all but immobile, and she nods to Sulu, who’s laying a series of wicked looking tools out on the decking by her hip. He sprays his hands with antiseptic then slips steady fingers into the wound and says, “Hold her.”
She screams.
Sulu works fast and, after the first terrible sound, Prize clamps her jaw down until her teeth grind, but Pike can feel every tug and shock and writhe like it’s his own ribs being cut and re-welded. Kirk’s face shows what must be a mirror of his own, and halfway through it all he starts murmuring some wordless litany against her other ear, where Pike can’t quite hear it, and she sobs, once, and clenches her fingers so hard against his shoulder that he thinks it might be breaking the skin, not just bruising.
Then Sulu sits back suddenly and says, “Got it,” with enough explosive force that Pike knows he was holding his breath the entire time. Prize’s grip on his shoulder relaxes slowly, and she draws a shaky breath. Pike forces himself to his feet and offers her his hand; she takes it and, with Kirk steadying her, pulls herself up. They’re all covered in blood. The bridge, eerily quiet until this point, breathes a collective sigh of premature relief.
Nero and the Narada and whatever they’re doing to Vulcan wait, temporarily suspended in the back of everyone’s mind.
“I need volunteers with advanced combat training,” Pike says and the bridge erupts into action again.
[]
He leaves Spock in command and, on some unidentifiable instinct that has something to do with Kirk’s quiet voice talking low through Prize’s pain, names the cadet as first officer. Spock is quietly offended, although Pike trusts him more than enough to be sure he’ll do his job. “Take care of my ship,” he says, “She’s brand new.”
Prize stayed on the bridge, where she’s needed to coordinate what repairs they can manage in the short time they have before they’ll be back in action. He’s doing this to buy her escape, just as much as everyone else’s. He didn’t say goodbye, but she met his eyes steadily from across the bridge, before the lift doors closed, and nobody had to say anything about the fact that he wasn’t coming back.
It’s strange to be dead already, he thinks, but still so in love that all he can hear in his head is the familiar sound of her voice, drowning out the fear.
[]
On the Narada, while he’s learning ugly truths about what an avatar can become when it’s captain dies terribly, all he can think about is Enterprise, bleeding and fighting, where he never should have left her. He thinks about George Kirk and Kelvin and wonders if they were grateful for each other, at the end, even though they were almost strangers until moments before. He thinks about the fact that he left Spock in command, but his mind keeps drifting back to Kirk through the agony. He wonders, now that he has time to think it through, why he rewarded an up-start stow-away of questionable morality with enormous responsibility, on a heartbeat’s decision. Then he thinks, with the incredible vividness brought on by indescribable pain, about a night in a bar in Iowa and a boy who grew up shoulder to shoulder with the shipyards, fighting gravity with his free-flying heart as fiercely as he waded into brawls with his fists.
He wonders if his ship will go down with another Kirk at the helm and if it’s a curse or a blessing that runs in that family. He hopes there’s some way for them to make it, without him, now that he’s seen the grim viciousness of loss written all over Nero, half a being trying to replace the torn pieces of itself by mad imitation.
Nothing they do to him hurts, after he imagines the feeling of Enterprise slipping into warp away from him, and when he feels her come back again with equally impossible clarity, he thinks it’s just a dying hallucination until Kirk pulls him up off the table and the transporter takes them.
[]
He comes to in sickbay, and he’d say he feels more dead than alive except for how intensely he feels it. There are low voices off to his right, breaking through the more distant din of the rest of the over-filled room, and one of them is Prize’s. He needs to talk to her. Make sure she’s ok, check status reports and beg for forgiveness, but his eyes won’t stay focused. He closes them and settles for listening and realizes after a moment that it’s Kirk who’s talking to her.
“—wasn’t time for a real introduction. It’s not what you deserve, and it won’t be for long. If you’d rather direct the interface through Spock . . .”
She interrupts him smoothly. “You don’t need to apologize. You’ve done amazing things, the right things. Chris chose you. I can work with you.” She sounds honest, brave, exhausted. Pike opens his eyes again for a glimpse of them together, propped in chairs to one side of the desperately crowded sickbay. She’s taken a lot of damage, since he last saw her on the bridge, biological and mechanical, mirroring the structural damage that must have stricken the ship proper as well on a much larger scale.
Not that Kirk’s in much better shape. He’s patching her up with a level of skill that shouldn’t be surprising, all things considered, and she’s . . . no. They’re patching each other up. Pike lets his eyes close on the image of her gently dabbing topical regenerator onto the purpling bruise around Kirk’s eye with one hand while he re-connects something carefully under the skin of her other, limp arm.
There’s something so intimate about it that it makes him ache, dull and low in what might be the last remaining undamaged pieces of his psyche. ‘Chris chose you,’ he hears again, and it’s true. He did. The bitterness of the thought is edged with sweet, though: there might be no one in the universe he would trust more with Enterprise than Jim Kirk. He doesn’t think he’s come this far to die in his own sickbay, but as he slips back under, he thinks that it’s good to know that someone will be there for her, if he does.
[]
She comes to see him as soon as McCoy clears him for visitors. She’s still visibly damaged, repairs and fresh scars showing through the still-pristine youth of her features. It doesn’t make her any less beautiful. The admiralty will give the ship to Kirk, because Pike will recommend it, and Prize will agree to it, even though they haven’t talked about it. She’s anxious and exhausted and he realizes, terribly, that she thinks she’s at fault, that he doesn’t want her. He reaches to take her hand, and she lets out a breath that seems to take the last of her strength with it.
“You’re hurt so much,” she whispers, “You let that ship take you, and I couldn’t feel you anywhere . . .” He wipes at tears and murmurs soft, meaningless things into her hair that are probably more true than he wants to think about. When she’s cried herself out, she presses his hand against her face and looks past him in the way that tells him her focus is on the ship. “He came back for you, you know. Spock would have left, but Kirk wouldn’t. He’s crazy. He’s—”
“He’s good,” Pike says quietly, because that’s the cleanest and easiest and truest way to put it. Her gaze returns from wherever it was, and she looks back at him, sad, lovely, steel and white light. “I’m not sure I can take care of him,” she says, finally. “He doesn’t want help with very many things.”
He smiles at that, remembering too much of his own first captaincy to argue with her.
“He’s more fragile than you might know. He’ll need you.”
“What about you, though?” she asks.
“Always,” he tells her, and means it. Later, though, when he’s alone and the numbness everywhere below his ribs won’t let him sleep, he realizes it isn’t quite the truth. He already has everything he could have needed from her, from anyone. They both do. He thinks she knows.
[]
He spends the first month earthside in simple recovery, waiting around for the agonizing process of tissue re-growth to finish before he can start the more serious rehab that will, eventually, put him back on his feet again. On the day they let him move back into private quarters, accompanied by the most technologically advanced motion-assistance device available, he gets a visit from the last person he would have expected. It’s Number One. He’s surprised to see her alive, and she looks unbearably relieved when he smiles. She stays while he eats dinner, companionable and lonely by turns, then surprises him by sharing a drink with him after.
“There was a lot of me missing.” She explains, which is an impressive understatement: MOST of her was missing, torn to pieces in the massacre with the rest of the fleet. It’s something like a miracle that even her avatar survived. But she goes on: “They did a lot of rebuilding, and the Enterprise model was much more successful than they hoped. I’ve got more biologics than I did.” She pauses to spare him a wry look, “I don’t know whether to miss the lost parts or giggle about the new ones.” He hesitates to say he knows exactly how she feels, but he’d be lying to say he didn’t empathize. And he wonders if anyone knows quite how successful the “Enterprise model” really was, or how painful.
“That’s–” he starts, then, “There’s something I’d like to ask you about.” She smiles, knowingly, an expression more subtle than what he remembers from her.
“If she loves him,” she says, “it won’t be for a very long time yet.” It hangs in the air, mingling tangibly with the faint scents of wine and cooking spices.
“I didn’t know,” he says quietly, finally. “Christ, Wun, you should have said. I could have—”She cuts him off with a sudden, soft kiss at the corner of his mouth; she’s a little flushed when she pulls away.
“Please believe me. You were perfect. I had good captains. A lover first, that’s how it goes, and partners after that. But you were . . . you’re the only friend.”
He says her name again, quietly, and when he reaches for her hands, she lets him hold them. The place where her lips touched him tingles, a little, from memory, and he doesn’t need to wonder if she feels it too.
“Chris,” she asks after a while, unexpectedly hesitant after the earlier boldness, “I’d like to stay.”
He squeezes her hands.
“Only if you promise to stay close.”
It’s a relief to let her help him to bed, more like teamwork than the awkward assistance he’s come to loathe, and it’s something he didn’t realize he was afraid of never having again. She tucks herself in beside him, slender and cool under the sheets, perfectly familiar even though they’ve never so much as brushed against each other in a non-professional context before tonight. They don’t make love, but she touches him here and there, curiously, hesitantly, like she thinks he could disappear at any moment. They’ll rebuild the Yorktown, she tells him. They need as much trusted experience in the fleet as they can get, and he agrees.
“They’ll let you come with me if I ask,” she says, and there’s no speculation in her tone, in spite of the fact that admirals rarely command ships of the line. He leans over to kiss her in the dark, still gentle, but not chaste. She tastes like good wine and rare metal, and he thinks it won’t be a difficult taste to acquire.
“Then I’d like you to ask.”
He falls asleep in her arms, feeling her brand new heart beating slowly next to him, and realizes with drowsy, contented surprise that they’ll both be that much closer to whole again in the morning.
Big Pretentious Author’s Notes
This story owes a lot of things to a lot of different works, some in more noticeable ways than others. Primarily, it’s a reaction piece to the unusual circumstances of reading the Silver Metal Lover over the course of several weeks that were also insanely full of Trek reboot fic. The plot itself follows the movie very closely and the universe bears much more resemblance to that of Star Trek than that of SML, but the genesis of the idea would certainly not have come about without Jane and Silver.
The idea of a sentient ship is certainly not a new one, and I doubt that a ship’s avatar is entirely original either, although I can’t think of an instance off the top of my head in which said avatar is a living biological being. I’m vaguely fascinated to think what the Borg would look like in this universe, but that’s really and truly another story, all on it’s own.
There are probably plenty of romance novel cliché’s and sources for feminist objection to be found in the mere idea of a story about a captain and the female embodiment of his ship having a love affair. I went ahead with the story anyway, because . . . if fandom isn’t the proper place to work your tired cliché kinks out with a little bit of an exercise in Epic Space Romance Tragedy, then I don’t know where IS.
I’ve pushed the characterizations of various fictional figures in fairly severe directions, here. The Pike in this story looks a lot more like Jeffrey Hunter than Bruce Greenwood in certain light, and I guess I’m ok with that, in spite of my newfound celebrity perma-crush on the latter. I borrowed the idea that Pike captained the Yorktown from at least one other fic, although I haven’t been able to verify to what degree this is fanon, canon, or otherwise. (If the Yorktown was Your Very Own Idea, PLEASE tell me and I will gladly credit, alter, or remove at your discretion.) We see a lot of Pike’s doubts and insecurities here, and I did a lot of bullshitting to make that happen, because he’s a character who spends most of his screen time being a thick-skinned badass sonofabitch. But I have yet to meet anyone who wasn’t filled to capacity with doubt and insecurity when they’ve fallen in love, and this is, with regard to Pike, the story of a swashbuckling hero finding and losing the love of his life.
Finally, I have to ask the theoretical forgiveness of all the many Enterprise women who I left completely out of this story in order to focus on an utterly made up, god-please-let-her-not-be-too-Mary-Sue-i
Thanks for reading.
Pairings: Pike/Enterprise, Pike/Number One
Rating: Mature/ NC-17
Summary: A story about a ship and two captains and the fact that falling in love cuts everyone to pieces, but usually leaves us all alive in the end. (By which I mean that it's an AU *very* loosely inspired by Tanith Lee's "The Silver Metal Lover" where all the ships have avatars and doomed romance is inevitable.)
Word count: 7,301
Warnings: explicit sex and (completely unrelated) severe injury.
Thanks/acknowledgments: Thanks to
re_white for the beta and to all the various people who commented encouragingly on my cryptic ramblings about this thing. I hope the suspense hasn't killed it;) Also, an unusual bit of thanks goes to my mom (no website, sorry), who usually doesn't touch my fic with a ten foot pole, but was convinced to look this one over after I edited all the sticky bits out temporarily. She provided some great feedback and, since my opportunities to thank her in fic acknowledgments are bound to be fairly rare, I'll take them where I can. Notes: Big Pretentious Author's Note at the end.
Spock: The antidote to a woman of Elaas, Doctor, is a starship. The Enterprise infected the captain long before the Dolman did.
McCoy: Well I doubt seriously if there’s any kind of an antidote for the Enterprise.
-Spock and McCoy discussing Kirk’s unique resistance to long-term biochemical romance in “Elaan of Troyius”
When they meet for the first time in Nogura’s office, Pike realizes that the Enterprise’s avatar is every bit as nervous as he is. It shows up in the tense, formal silence that blankets the room, and then in the way it shatters when she grins, suddenly, blindingly, over their first handshake. She’s got beautiful eyes, Pike thinks: a startling pale blue that’s just human enough to be unsettling in place of the usual hollow shine of electronics and plastic he’s come to expect from ships’ avatars. And if the thought makes his answering smile a little dazed underneath the relief, she doesn’t seem to mind.
They ditch Nogura as soon as they can by some silent fledgling conspiracy toward insubordination. Pike’s starving: In spite of the fact that it’s his third command post, and the second as captain, he was nervous enough about the first meeting that he forgot breakfast. So they find a small restaurant, and she surprises him for the second time by ordering food.
“I have a non-insignificant organic component.” She explains. “It’s experimental. The biologics will break down more quickly and be more difficult to replace, but they think it should enhance the interface process.”
Enhance the interface process, he thinks, and doesn’t blush. Because she’s right: he doesn’t feel like he’s talking to the sentient presence of his half-finished ship. He feels like he’s having lunch with a long lost friend. The illusion only breaks down when she nibbles thoughtfully at a piece of tempura, then offers the same sunrise of a smile to the food that she shared with him earlier. “This is . . . this is really good.” Then she narrows her eyes. “They’ve been holding out on me in more ways than good company.”
“I’m afraid to ask what they’ve been feeding you, then.”
She laughs. “Don’t worry about it, it wasn’t a priority. But I’ll take meals with you whenever I can, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.” He’ll have to share her with the senior staff eventually, but he doesn’t let it worry him now.
[]
Avatars have a strange and somewhat mysterious history in Starfleet. Technically, they appeared sometime shortly after warp drives did, an unpredicted, spontaneous product of the primitive AIs that became necessary to manage the incredibly complex math needed to keep a ship in one piece while moving faster than light. They initially manifested as part of the ships themselves, but the idea of a sentient ship was so unsettling to so many crew members that the next available generation of spacefaring vessels featured independent units to house the AIs. Mobility became more important as ship size increased, and human crews and programmers promptly began designing AIs that were more and more familiar to their own aesthetic definitions of life.
That’s the official story. But there are older ones, less scientific, dating back to the days of square-rigged sailing ships and wild, uncharted oceans. Captains and crews of Earth history imbued their ships with human presence since the first of them took to sail and, as they changed wind power for warp drives, they found that they weren’t the only far-traveling species to do so. Every warp-capable society the federation has encountered to date makes use of ships’ avatars in some form, and all of them have stories of strange goddesses twining through their oldest legends of travel. Human captains aren’t the only ones with a history of going down with their ships.
[]
Pike has only worked with one other avatar in a command capacity before, as captain of the Yorktown, and there was very little mystery about her. Number One had a long record of exemplary service by the time he met her, and her considerable experience was a godsend for a freshman commander. He easily lost count of the number of times she bailed him out of potential disaster with nothing more than a quiet word or sideways glance.
He hasn’t thought about her for months, not since she shipped out again with a new captain and crew. But he can’t help but think about her now, as he steps out of the restaurant into early afternoon sunshine and watches Enterprise move down the sidewalk a few steps ahead of him. He wouldn’t have called Number One graceful, exactly: no matter how much tweaking the engineers did to the machinery of joints and limbs to make them more passably human, there was always a set of easily visible differences about avatars. Number One carried herself with such a sense of control and subdued authority that it was easy to forget, sometimes, but Enterprise moves in a way that’s almost impossible to distinguish from any other pedestrian sharing the street. If anything, she’s more alive than most of them.
[]
Later that afternoon, they take a shuttle to where the ship proper is under construction in Iowa. There’s still a great deal of it that’s unsafe to move through, but the bridge is intact and sealed. The construction crews have gone home by the time they get there, and she gives him a brief tour of everything they can reach. If her eyes were striking before, they’re radiant here, where she belongs. The unavoidable machine-elements that are visible on her skin look like beauty marks: thin lines of bio-tech tracing over the curves of her cheekbones, the flat metal edges of power-conduits running down the line of her neck to disappear under her collar. Pike looks at the way the precise artificial light complements barely-visible highlights in her pale hair and wonders if a first meeting has ever gone too well before.
On the flight back to San Francisco, they’re both quiet and tired, although fatigue shouldn’t technically be something she experiences. When he asks her, she smiles. “It’s classified, but it’s something you’ll need to know. I do get tired. Without the ship at full capacity yet my power reserves are limited, and the biologics are as prone to fatigue as you are. Once the dilithium chambers are operating, I should be able to override it for as long as necessary, but it hasn’t been field tested yet.” She pauses, then reaches for his hand and presses two of his fingers to her throat, alongside a power conduit. There’s a pulse.
“Real?” he asks. She nods.
“I’m the first ship in the fleet that was born with a heart.”
[]
He knows things about Kelvin and Narada that didn’t make it into his dissertation. They’re quiet, subtle things, but all the more terrifying because of it. He knows, for example, that Narada’s captain was already dead by the time Kelvin found her. He also knows that the Narada wasn’t attacking the Kelvin, specifically: it was simply discharging all of it’s weaponry in such a frenzied, massive deluge of firepower that Kelvin couldn’t help but be hit. He knows that Kelvin’s sensors recorded three beings in Robau’s immediate vicinity during the last minutes of his life, and that all of them registered as humanoid on the scans, even though Robau directly addressed one of them as Nero, the ship’s avatar. He knows that Kelvin’s avatar collapsed on the bridge at the exact moment of Robau’s death, and that all the ship’s systems registered wildly erratic operational spikes and failures for exactly 4 seconds afterwards before they stabilized.
He knows that the last viable escape craft had already left Kelvin’s shuttle bay before the autopilot failed with George Kirk still on the bridge.
And he knows that although the Kelvin’s explosive death crippled the Narada severely, it didn’t destroy her completely.
[]
He starts sleeping in his quarters on board as soon as they’re complete, spends every moment he can spare from academy work helping the construction crews. It’s mindless work, for the most part: fastening panels and bundling conduits and laying flooring, but the crews are glad to have him there after the initial nervousness wears off, and Prize is as well. He comes in especially handy when things go wrong, because nobody has to waste valuable time checking for orders from San Francisco.
Once, when something ruptures in atmospheric control, he spends a tense half-hour with his arms buried to the elbow in a tube of oxygen recycling gel, cold-soldering a separated connector without exposing it to the high oxidation quotient in the air that would destroy it in moments. At one point a drop of sweat falls onto the open panel, dangerously close to contaminating the delicately balanced fluid and setting them back by weeks.
Prize is there a moment later, pushing damp hair back from his forehead, looking over his shoulder to visually check the complete lack of progress she must be able to detect from internal sensors. He allows himself a quick laugh:
“Well, this is awkward.” She smiles and squeezes his shoulder.
“Tickles a little, I won’t lie to you. I think you’re . . . “ Her eyes unfocus briefly, “try the first port again, it should be cleared now.” She’s right, of course, and he finishes up in a matter of moments, pulls his hands free and re-seals the panel. She smirks at him, a new expression, and he realizes that he’s standing in the middle of environmental control dripping blue gunk.
“You’re getting my fluids all over my floor,” she tells him, almost-deadpan. “Somebody’s going to slip in the wet spot.”
He actually throws his head back to laugh, which seems to please her, because she steps around the corner and gets him a towel from a maintenance cart before moving off to wherever she’s needed next. “We’re having dinner with the new first officer candidate,” she calls over her shoulder on the way out. “You’d better shower. We’ll start rumors if you start showing up in public smelling like atmospheric control gel.” He throws the towel after her, but it falls a little short.
[]
Number One wasn’t much for jokes, and at the time, he simply assumed it was because she was an avatar. In hindsight, though, it was an obvious error to assume that her subdued sense of humor was due to a lack of emotion. Wun was brave and kind, gentle or fierce as the situation prompted it, and perhaps the most protective individual he’s ever known.
He remembers a cave-in during a supposedly routine survey mission on some godforsaken asteroid. Three crew members were trapped, injured and running out of air, and the rock was too packed with explosive ore for them to risk using phasers to cut them free. Wun dug the men out with her bare hands, abandoning all pretense of humanity and using her titanium alloy skeleton and polymer musculature to toss broken stone around like popcorn. Everyone was a little subdued on the way back to the ship, and Pike realized that she was embarrassed about the unexpected break in character.
“Number One,” he said quietly, reaching out to clasp her shoulder where she was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, trying to hide the damaged synth-flesh on her hands that had torn away to reveal the metal and circuitry beneath. She looked at him with wide, silver eyes, hair disheveled, and he thought suddenly about a box of antique comic books in his uncle’s attic that he used to sneak away to read during holiday visits.
“You were a regular damn superhero back there.” She looked surprised, then grateful, then a little embarrassed, more so when Lt. Thompson piped up from the emergency medbed in the shuttle where Boyce was splinting his broken arm.
“Yeah, just like whatsername. Wonder Lady.”
“Wonder Woman,” Pike corrected reflexively, and if avatars could blush, he thought Wun would have. That’s how she got her nickname, in a roundabout way, and Pike is fairly sure that she was pleased that the crew finally stopped calling her by her machine designation.
[]
He and Prize take an armed combat class together, and one of the scenarios is a forced boarding. They synch her up with a simulator mock-up, which frustrates her. “They have to suppress the link to the ship for me to interface,” she explains. “I feel . . . a little numb.”
He nods. “We can figure something else out, if you want me to call it off.”
She shakes her head and offers a wan smile. “No, it’ll be alright. There are plenty of situations where communications dampening might be necessary. I need to be prepared for that, too.”
The simulation uses irrationally terrifying boarders. They appear as vague shapes, when they initially come into view, clearly visible but undefined. When they get within firing range, they take on characteristics that are personalized to appear as psychologically threatening as possible to each individual participant. Pike finds himself shoulder to shoulder with Prize in a simulation of engineering, picking off would-be boarders in the bottleneck formed by the main entrance. He can tell which assailants are focused on him, because they feature tentacles and spikes and oddly twisted versions of the bulbous, veined heads of Talosians. He’s limited to hitting whatever he can see with phasers and thrown objects; she splits her attention between her own sidearm and devastatingly inventive use of doors and vacuum seals and environmental controls.
When they’ve finally mown down the last of the attackers, there’s a lull full of heavy breathing before one last creature plummets down at them unexpectedly from an overhead Jeffries tube where it must have climbed during the uproar. Prize sees it first and shoots it coolly and pushes Pike neatly out of the way as it crashes to the floor where he was standing. After a surprised moment, he finds himself looking down at a crumpled form that looks shockingly like HIM. He looks up at her, startled, halfway to horrified.
“Prize . . .” She cuts him off with a gesture, and her eyes are steady, but her hand is trembling.
“It’s not you,” she says quietly.
“It’s me attacking you,” he says.
“It’s you turning on me,” she corrects. He stares at her, lost for what to say, and puts a hand cautiously on her shoulder.
“Prize, I’d never.” She steps closer, around the body, comes up just short of leaning against him.
“I know,” she says, “That’s why it’s the worst thing I can think of.”
He’s not sure what would have happened, after that, if the simulator doors hadn’t opened.
[]
Moving the ship to orbit is a complicated process. They assemble her entire, as far as gravity and scaffolding will allow, then take her back apart in sections that can be towed into orbit and anchored at spacedock for re-assembly. There’s a period of two weeks when the section where his quarters are located isn’t secure, and he spends that time in San Francisco, finalizing plans to be off-planet. Prize stays with the ship, facilitating the first critical stages of re-assembly. When he makes it up to visit on a Saturday, he’s surprised when she greets him in a vacuum suit. He wonders again how much understatement was involved in “non-insignificant organic component.” She smiles at his startled glance. “Don’t worry, all the corridors we should need are secure. It’s just easier to keep it on most of the time than to constantly change in and out at temporary airlocks.”
[]
The first night his quarters are re-secured, he beams up to sleep there. Prize is still busy working when he arrives, and he doesn’t disturb her. The overhead lights in the corridor surge and dim in playful patterns as he passes them on the walk to his door, though, so he knows his arrival hasn’t been missed. Without giving it much thought, he kisses his fingertips before he presses them to the keypad. The key-accepted chime sing-songs cheerfully, and he knows that somewhere in engineering, she’s sharing his smile. He’s tired enough that he falls asleep almost immediately, relaxed and comfortable with the knowledge that he’s where he should be again.
Sometime in the early morning, he wakes, startled, from vague dreams of the ocean. At first he thinks he’s alone, but as his eyes adjust, he realizes that Prize is there, in his quarters. She’s pressed flat to the wall opposite the foot of his bed, watching him with silent, unwavering intensity.
“Prize?” he sits up. The strange immediacy of her face falters, she looks suddenly unsure.
“Chris.” Something about her voice makes him uneasy. He swings his legs out of bed, moves so he’s close enough to see her better.
“Prize, what is it?” She draws a deep breath.
“I don’t . . .” she shakes her head. “I never touch you. You touch me all the time, but I never . . .” He tries to picture the history of their physical contact, and can’t think of many instances when either of them has touched the other, except in the context of work. Then he belatedly realizes that she’s not referring to the avatar body, but to the ship at large. He’s flooded with memories: trailing the tip of one finger absently down a wall panel, holding the stability grip in the turbolift when he didn’t really need to, catching himself on the edges of a door frame to lean through it and talk to someone. He does touch her all the time. He just isn’t sure what it has to do with her waking him up in the middle of the night.
“Prize,” he starts, “You should have said something. I didn’t realize it was—” He forgets what he was going to say because she steps forward suddenly and presses the palm of her hand flat against his chest, over his heart. The look of rapt concentration is back. He’s only wearing light pants to sleep in, and her hand is strange against his skin.
“Something’s wrong,” she whispers and looks at him, something wild pushing at the edges of her pale eyes. “There’s something they won’t tell me. I’m wrong, and they can’t fix it so they aren’t telling me.” He covers her hand with his own, but isn’t sure how to reach out further.
“Prize, why do you think that?” She frowns again and reaches her other hand up to touch him as well, tracing cautiously along his collarbone with careful fingertips. He shivers, a little, and she glances up at him, unsure.
“It’s ok,” he reassures quickly. “Not unpleasant.” And the fact that she didn’t know leaves an ugly, guilty feeling in his gut: he doesn’t touch her, like this, nearly enough. No one does. He waits, watching her, as she traces her hand down over his shoulder and arm, pausing to examine the texture of the hair on the outside of his forearm, then the smooth skin at the inside of his wrist. There are visible-light interface points on the tips of her fingers, he knows, but he can’t feel them and he realizes that they’re actually under her skin. Implanted, he thinks, but that’s not right. The skin is the falsehood here, the external intrusion on the bones of a machine.
Suddenly, he thinks about her wiping tears from her eyes after a bite of overly spiced meat, clearing her throat in the dry mountain air of Denver during a shared weekend of leave, wearing a vacuum suit to interface with the outside of her own self. The first ship in the fleet born with a heart.
“Prize,” he says, “I don’t think anything’s wrong with you.” She looks up at him, all honest perplexity.
“I woke you, though. I shouldn’t have. Chris . . .” She frowns and circles his wrist with the hand touching him there, presses more firmly against him with the other. “I missed you. I don’t want to leave here yet.”
And, as many times as he’ll be amazed at himself in hindsight for not seeing it all coming, he still doesn’t realize the full extent of what’s happening until her eyes flick towards his lips and the small frown-line between her eyes deepens with just that much concentration. So he stands there, stupid with surprise, stays right where she’s holding him as she leans up to kiss him like he’s the world’s most tempting intellectual problem.
It’s cautious and soft, and he wonders a million things about her in the instant before he feels himself kiss her back. She opens her mouth easily to the slip of his tongue, and she tastes like . . . she tastes human, alive, impossible. She steps back against the wall again, breaking the kiss, tugging at his hands. He goes where she guides him, settling his hands on her hips, stepping close enough that their legs touch, inside/outside.
“Prize,” He starts, “your mouth . . . you,” but then he’s at a desperate loss for any other stupid things to say and she’s kissing him again with that hot, living mouth that’s too real and urgent to be the product of anyone’s engineering.
She reaches her arms up over his shoulders, pushes the tips of her fingers into the short hair at the nape of his neck, and he grinds against her, before he can even think about it, pressing them hard against the wall of his quarters. She pushes back without hesitation, hooks his leg so that he can’t stand without leaning on her. The close-woven fabric of her uniform is surprisingly rough against his skin: an insulating weave, he realizes. They’ve bound her in subtle armor, a clever and terrible disguise to keep anyone from knowing how alive she is, underneath. How real.
He searches up her back for a zipper or a catch or any kind of fastening, and she makes a soft sound into his mouth. “—here, let me . . .” He has to move back so that she can do something invisible to her own collar, and the uniform splits along all it’s seams, opening at the shoulders and down the front, separating top and bottom. She shrugs the top off, and the warmth of her crashes over him like a wave. She’s not wearing anything, underneath. Her skin is crisscrossed with a weaving pattern of bio-compatible metals, a webbed armor of plastic and polymer over her ribs, a delicate spidering of circuitry curving across her belly and lower, disappearing at her hip bones into the now-loosened edges of her pants. Her breasts are mostly bare of the enhancements, small and perfect, firmed by cool air or arousal or some combination of both.
He doesn’t realize he’s staring until she makes an aborted, self-conscious gesture with her hands, curling them in to cover some unidentifiable bit of circuitry low on her rib cage. He forces his eyes upwards by tracing the glint of metal up her neck to her face: she’s biting her lip, eyes wide and worried.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly, “It’s easier to repair, this way. If the implants are deeper they’re more painful to replace and—” He touches her quickly, softly, to quiet this strange insecurity.
“That’s not why . . . not what I was thinking about.” He traces the already familiar line of the propulsion circuitry down along her neck to the place where he usually loses sight of it, then kisses her there. “It’s amazing, Prize. It’s . . . you’re beautiful. I didn’t know. I didn’t . . .” she makes a startled sound when he kisses her neck again, and it undoes him more than anything so far.
She helps him get the rest of her uniform off her, makes short work of his own pants as they stumble back for the bed. She turns easily under him, lifting up to be touched and pressing into his hands wherever they move. When he lays a soft line of kisses down her throat and sucks his way gently to one nipple, she clutches his head and bucks and drags his hand down between her legs where she’s slick and hot and God, ready, as ready as he is. He wants to taste her there, feel her come against his mouth and his fingers, take every moment of this and stretch it as far as it will go. But she pulls him up by the hair and drags his hips in against her with strong legs, guiding him with one hand so that his first push into her is deep and undeniable and too good for any words he knows.
Everything about her breathes out amazement; her mouth falls open on a soft, sweet sound and she rocks up into him, against him, around him, all undisguised hunger and reckless want. It knocks the breath out of him. He falls forward, barely catches himself on one shaking arm. Her legs fold more tightly around him and her hands twist up over his shoulders. He feels like he’s breaking, probably sounds like it too. He’s fucking his ship, he thinks with a distant and slightly hysterical part of his mind, but it’s not fucking, not really, not when she whispers “Chris!” when she comes and he says, “god, Prize, yes--” in answer, and they twine together, after, spent and overwhelmed by the strange beauty they’ve made.
She’ll claim to suffer from regular human fatigue, but when she wakes him an hour or so later from a shallow doze to push him onto his back and settle herself over him with leisurely possessiveness, he knows it’ll be a while before either of them get much rest, again. He holds onto her hips while she throws her head back and rocks slowly down onto him, and decides that sleep is really sort of overrated, anyway.
[]
They make an inspired attempt to wear out the bed that first week, not to mention the desk and the couch and the corner of the shower where she can brace her foot on the slip bar. And once, although he’ll never tell another soul, the captain chair, after hours, with the bridge doors locked and a half-sliver of earth glowing bright against the stars on the viewscreen.
[]
He wonders dazedly if it will last, how long something like this can burn before it goes out or explodes. But she shows no sign of faltering, and every day feels stronger, like they’ll be inseparable. And try as he might, he can’t see any way that their professional life suffers. The closer the interface, the more effective they’ll be, and they’re . . . close. So when the fleet flies into hurried and disorganized response to a distress signal from Vulcan, he has no doubt that they’re prepared for anything, maiden voyage or no.
[]
He’s not entirely wrong.
[]
They drop out of warp over Vulcan late, due to Sulu’s nerves, and tense, due to Kirk’s wild-but-logically-sound premonitions. The disaster waiting there for them is enough to shake everyone who sees it right to the core. Pike knows he’ll be sick later, physically and violently ill from the horror and vastness of the destruction they’re plowing through at breakneck speed. But first he has to make sure they all survive until later, and the odds of him actually succeeding are shit enough that they keep his mind almost entirely off grief. His first, utterly shameless instinct is that they have to get the hell out of there, right now, but before they’ve cleared the debris field, Narada’s there, and they’ve taken a brutal first salvo of advanced alien fire.
The ship shudders and rocks, things break and spark everywhere, emergency status reports light up every indicator board he can see. When the Narada hails them, he thinks he’s prepared, at least somewhat, for the monster he’s going to find himself speaking to. He leans on a solid emotional wall of barely-checked rage to counter Nero’s crazed demands with a steady voice, but inside he’s shaking. Nero was a crazy bastard 25 years ago, and he’s done nothing but ferment in the intervening years of hiding and silence.
After he lays down his terms and looks Pike over like he’s a particularly appetizing chunk of meat, he flicks his gaze over Pike’s shoulder unexpectedly and says, “Take a moment to care for your woman, if you must.” Then he signs off, and Pike turns with something painful and heavy twisting up inside him, to find Prize half-collapsed in Kirk’s surprised arms. The black fabric of his uniform trousers and un-ranked undershirt form a stark contrast to the white and silver of her bodysuit, which in turn serves as a pristine canvas for a horrible splashing bloodstain spreading outward from an unidentifiable injury low on her right side.
Pike’s out of his chair before he makes a conscious decision to move, and Sulu’s at his shoulder. Kirk takes a controlled fall to his knees under Prize’s weight, arms around her from behind, cradling her head against his chest and shoulder. There’s blood on her mouth, too, Pike sees dimly, from a split lip and some sort of electric burn across her cheek that looks like it’s probably internal. She fumbles at the fabric of her shirt, still intact over whatever the injury is, and Sulu pushes her hands away quickly, slicing efficiently through the fabric with a short collapsible dagger that Pike mistook for a communicator on his belt.
“The helm’s not responding, sir,” he says while he works, “And we won’t have time to reach the damage manually. She’ll have to do it, but . . .” He finally gets her shirt pulled away from her side, revealing an ugly wound surrounding a smoking, twisted piece of metal.
“Christ,” Kirk bites out, “How’d she get shrapnel in--”
“ . . . Not shrapnel” Prize corrects weakly.
“That’s the control surface for the helm back-up.” Sulu finishes.
There’s a moment of silence, then Kirk says, “That’s an awful lot of blood for a machine body.”
“Not a machine body.” Prize says, quietly, voice sharp with pain. Kirk looks at Pike with shock written all over his face.
“You knew about this?”
“Of course I knew.” Pike snaps, “She’s my ship.” But it’s his own shock and anger talking: he was just as surprised as anyone, and he had longer to find it out and more time to adjust to it. “Sulu, can you fix it?” Sulu looks thoughtful and surprisingly calm in the face of a nasty fleshwound and smoking electronics, his first-day nerves evaporated now that they’re under actual pressure. Pike makes a note to offer the man a commendation if any of them make it out of here alive.
“There’s a replacement part on the bridge.” He says, “But I’ll have to cut this one out. And . . . solder the new one in.” Pike’s stomach turns an ominous flip; if the look on Kirk’s face is any indication, he’s not the only one.
“Do it.” Prize interrupts firmly, openly disdainful of everyone’s delicate digestion, and clearly a little annoyed that they’ve been discussing her biology while she’s sitting right there. “Hold onto me,” she says to Kirk, and to Pike, “You too.”
Sulu looks to Pike for a nod of confirmation before he gets up to retrieve the repair materials. Kirk shifts to a more stable position behind Prize and Pike moves with him, straddling her legs to keep her steady and pressing her shoulders back against Kirk’s. They find a place where she’s held firm between them, all but immobile, and she nods to Sulu, who’s laying a series of wicked looking tools out on the decking by her hip. He sprays his hands with antiseptic then slips steady fingers into the wound and says, “Hold her.”
She screams.
Sulu works fast and, after the first terrible sound, Prize clamps her jaw down until her teeth grind, but Pike can feel every tug and shock and writhe like it’s his own ribs being cut and re-welded. Kirk’s face shows what must be a mirror of his own, and halfway through it all he starts murmuring some wordless litany against her other ear, where Pike can’t quite hear it, and she sobs, once, and clenches her fingers so hard against his shoulder that he thinks it might be breaking the skin, not just bruising.
Then Sulu sits back suddenly and says, “Got it,” with enough explosive force that Pike knows he was holding his breath the entire time. Prize’s grip on his shoulder relaxes slowly, and she draws a shaky breath. Pike forces himself to his feet and offers her his hand; she takes it and, with Kirk steadying her, pulls herself up. They’re all covered in blood. The bridge, eerily quiet until this point, breathes a collective sigh of premature relief.
Nero and the Narada and whatever they’re doing to Vulcan wait, temporarily suspended in the back of everyone’s mind.
“I need volunteers with advanced combat training,” Pike says and the bridge erupts into action again.
[]
He leaves Spock in command and, on some unidentifiable instinct that has something to do with Kirk’s quiet voice talking low through Prize’s pain, names the cadet as first officer. Spock is quietly offended, although Pike trusts him more than enough to be sure he’ll do his job. “Take care of my ship,” he says, “She’s brand new.”
Prize stayed on the bridge, where she’s needed to coordinate what repairs they can manage in the short time they have before they’ll be back in action. He’s doing this to buy her escape, just as much as everyone else’s. He didn’t say goodbye, but she met his eyes steadily from across the bridge, before the lift doors closed, and nobody had to say anything about the fact that he wasn’t coming back.
It’s strange to be dead already, he thinks, but still so in love that all he can hear in his head is the familiar sound of her voice, drowning out the fear.
[]
On the Narada, while he’s learning ugly truths about what an avatar can become when it’s captain dies terribly, all he can think about is Enterprise, bleeding and fighting, where he never should have left her. He thinks about George Kirk and Kelvin and wonders if they were grateful for each other, at the end, even though they were almost strangers until moments before. He thinks about the fact that he left Spock in command, but his mind keeps drifting back to Kirk through the agony. He wonders, now that he has time to think it through, why he rewarded an up-start stow-away of questionable morality with enormous responsibility, on a heartbeat’s decision. Then he thinks, with the incredible vividness brought on by indescribable pain, about a night in a bar in Iowa and a boy who grew up shoulder to shoulder with the shipyards, fighting gravity with his free-flying heart as fiercely as he waded into brawls with his fists.
He wonders if his ship will go down with another Kirk at the helm and if it’s a curse or a blessing that runs in that family. He hopes there’s some way for them to make it, without him, now that he’s seen the grim viciousness of loss written all over Nero, half a being trying to replace the torn pieces of itself by mad imitation.
Nothing they do to him hurts, after he imagines the feeling of Enterprise slipping into warp away from him, and when he feels her come back again with equally impossible clarity, he thinks it’s just a dying hallucination until Kirk pulls him up off the table and the transporter takes them.
[]
He comes to in sickbay, and he’d say he feels more dead than alive except for how intensely he feels it. There are low voices off to his right, breaking through the more distant din of the rest of the over-filled room, and one of them is Prize’s. He needs to talk to her. Make sure she’s ok, check status reports and beg for forgiveness, but his eyes won’t stay focused. He closes them and settles for listening and realizes after a moment that it’s Kirk who’s talking to her.
“—wasn’t time for a real introduction. It’s not what you deserve, and it won’t be for long. If you’d rather direct the interface through Spock . . .”
She interrupts him smoothly. “You don’t need to apologize. You’ve done amazing things, the right things. Chris chose you. I can work with you.” She sounds honest, brave, exhausted. Pike opens his eyes again for a glimpse of them together, propped in chairs to one side of the desperately crowded sickbay. She’s taken a lot of damage, since he last saw her on the bridge, biological and mechanical, mirroring the structural damage that must have stricken the ship proper as well on a much larger scale.
Not that Kirk’s in much better shape. He’s patching her up with a level of skill that shouldn’t be surprising, all things considered, and she’s . . . no. They’re patching each other up. Pike lets his eyes close on the image of her gently dabbing topical regenerator onto the purpling bruise around Kirk’s eye with one hand while he re-connects something carefully under the skin of her other, limp arm.
There’s something so intimate about it that it makes him ache, dull and low in what might be the last remaining undamaged pieces of his psyche. ‘Chris chose you,’ he hears again, and it’s true. He did. The bitterness of the thought is edged with sweet, though: there might be no one in the universe he would trust more with Enterprise than Jim Kirk. He doesn’t think he’s come this far to die in his own sickbay, but as he slips back under, he thinks that it’s good to know that someone will be there for her, if he does.
[]
She comes to see him as soon as McCoy clears him for visitors. She’s still visibly damaged, repairs and fresh scars showing through the still-pristine youth of her features. It doesn’t make her any less beautiful. The admiralty will give the ship to Kirk, because Pike will recommend it, and Prize will agree to it, even though they haven’t talked about it. She’s anxious and exhausted and he realizes, terribly, that she thinks she’s at fault, that he doesn’t want her. He reaches to take her hand, and she lets out a breath that seems to take the last of her strength with it.
“You’re hurt so much,” she whispers, “You let that ship take you, and I couldn’t feel you anywhere . . .” He wipes at tears and murmurs soft, meaningless things into her hair that are probably more true than he wants to think about. When she’s cried herself out, she presses his hand against her face and looks past him in the way that tells him her focus is on the ship. “He came back for you, you know. Spock would have left, but Kirk wouldn’t. He’s crazy. He’s—”
“He’s good,” Pike says quietly, because that’s the cleanest and easiest and truest way to put it. Her gaze returns from wherever it was, and she looks back at him, sad, lovely, steel and white light. “I’m not sure I can take care of him,” she says, finally. “He doesn’t want help with very many things.”
He smiles at that, remembering too much of his own first captaincy to argue with her.
“He’s more fragile than you might know. He’ll need you.”
“What about you, though?” she asks.
“Always,” he tells her, and means it. Later, though, when he’s alone and the numbness everywhere below his ribs won’t let him sleep, he realizes it isn’t quite the truth. He already has everything he could have needed from her, from anyone. They both do. He thinks she knows.
[]
He spends the first month earthside in simple recovery, waiting around for the agonizing process of tissue re-growth to finish before he can start the more serious rehab that will, eventually, put him back on his feet again. On the day they let him move back into private quarters, accompanied by the most technologically advanced motion-assistance device available, he gets a visit from the last person he would have expected. It’s Number One. He’s surprised to see her alive, and she looks unbearably relieved when he smiles. She stays while he eats dinner, companionable and lonely by turns, then surprises him by sharing a drink with him after.
“There was a lot of me missing.” She explains, which is an impressive understatement: MOST of her was missing, torn to pieces in the massacre with the rest of the fleet. It’s something like a miracle that even her avatar survived. But she goes on: “They did a lot of rebuilding, and the Enterprise model was much more successful than they hoped. I’ve got more biologics than I did.” She pauses to spare him a wry look, “I don’t know whether to miss the lost parts or giggle about the new ones.” He hesitates to say he knows exactly how she feels, but he’d be lying to say he didn’t empathize. And he wonders if anyone knows quite how successful the “Enterprise model” really was, or how painful.
“That’s–” he starts, then, “There’s something I’d like to ask you about.” She smiles, knowingly, an expression more subtle than what he remembers from her.
“If she loves him,” she says, “it won’t be for a very long time yet.” It hangs in the air, mingling tangibly with the faint scents of wine and cooking spices.
“I didn’t know,” he says quietly, finally. “Christ, Wun, you should have said. I could have—”She cuts him off with a sudden, soft kiss at the corner of his mouth; she’s a little flushed when she pulls away.
“Please believe me. You were perfect. I had good captains. A lover first, that’s how it goes, and partners after that. But you were . . . you’re the only friend.”
He says her name again, quietly, and when he reaches for her hands, she lets him hold them. The place where her lips touched him tingles, a little, from memory, and he doesn’t need to wonder if she feels it too.
“Chris,” she asks after a while, unexpectedly hesitant after the earlier boldness, “I’d like to stay.”
He squeezes her hands.
“Only if you promise to stay close.”
It’s a relief to let her help him to bed, more like teamwork than the awkward assistance he’s come to loathe, and it’s something he didn’t realize he was afraid of never having again. She tucks herself in beside him, slender and cool under the sheets, perfectly familiar even though they’ve never so much as brushed against each other in a non-professional context before tonight. They don’t make love, but she touches him here and there, curiously, hesitantly, like she thinks he could disappear at any moment. They’ll rebuild the Yorktown, she tells him. They need as much trusted experience in the fleet as they can get, and he agrees.
“They’ll let you come with me if I ask,” she says, and there’s no speculation in her tone, in spite of the fact that admirals rarely command ships of the line. He leans over to kiss her in the dark, still gentle, but not chaste. She tastes like good wine and rare metal, and he thinks it won’t be a difficult taste to acquire.
“Then I’d like you to ask.”
He falls asleep in her arms, feeling her brand new heart beating slowly next to him, and realizes with drowsy, contented surprise that they’ll both be that much closer to whole again in the morning.
Big Pretentious Author’s Notes
This story owes a lot of things to a lot of different works, some in more noticeable ways than others. Primarily, it’s a reaction piece to the unusual circumstances of reading the Silver Metal Lover over the course of several weeks that were also insanely full of Trek reboot fic. The plot itself follows the movie very closely and the universe bears much more resemblance to that of Star Trek than that of SML, but the genesis of the idea would certainly not have come about without Jane and Silver.
The idea of a sentient ship is certainly not a new one, and I doubt that a ship’s avatar is entirely original either, although I can’t think of an instance off the top of my head in which said avatar is a living biological being. I’m vaguely fascinated to think what the Borg would look like in this universe, but that’s really and truly another story, all on it’s own.
There are probably plenty of romance novel cliché’s and sources for feminist objection to be found in the mere idea of a story about a captain and the female embodiment of his ship having a love affair. I went ahead with the story anyway, because . . . if fandom isn’t the proper place to work your tired cliché kinks out with a little bit of an exercise in Epic Space Romance Tragedy, then I don’t know where IS.
I’ve pushed the characterizations of various fictional figures in fairly severe directions, here. The Pike in this story looks a lot more like Jeffrey Hunter than Bruce Greenwood in certain light, and I guess I’m ok with that, in spite of my newfound celebrity perma-crush on the latter. I borrowed the idea that Pike captained the Yorktown from at least one other fic, although I haven’t been able to verify to what degree this is fanon, canon, or otherwise. (If the Yorktown was Your Very Own Idea, PLEASE tell me and I will gladly credit, alter, or remove at your discretion.) We see a lot of Pike’s doubts and insecurities here, and I did a lot of bullshitting to make that happen, because he’s a character who spends most of his screen time being a thick-skinned badass sonofabitch. But I have yet to meet anyone who wasn’t filled to capacity with doubt and insecurity when they’ve fallen in love, and this is, with regard to Pike, the story of a swashbuckling hero finding and losing the love of his life.
Finally, I have to ask the theoretical forgiveness of all the many Enterprise women who I left completely out of this story in order to focus on an utterly made up, god-please-let-her-not-be-too-Mary-Sue-i
Thanks for reading.
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