Fellowship & Fairydust

Epsilon Canis 4.

‘Kiss me,’ she said.

Spock looked down at her, at first startled, and then faintly apologetic.

‘Miss Chapel,’ he said in a rational tone. ‘I know that you have lost a good deal of blood. I do not, however, expect you to die imminently.’

‘Well, that’s reassuring,’ she said, her voice retaining some of its dry sarcasm despite its weakness.

‘I do not intend to let you die at all,’ Spock said firmly.

His eyes were fixed on the wound across her side, not on her face. She had noticed over the time she had known him that if there was one thing Spock could not do, it was to look into the eyes of a friend, and lie to them. Spock was a champion of evasion.

‘Well,’ she said slowly. ‘When we get back to the ship I’ll have to recommend that Dr McCoy up your paramedic rating, because you’ll deserve it.’

Spock’s eyebrow rose very slightly, and then he nodded. ‘I have always suspected that McCoy has rated my abilities too low,’ he said smoothly.

‘Mr Spock,’ she said in a steady voice. ‘If you thought I was going to die in the next few minutes, would you kiss me?’

Spock exhaled. Talking to her was necessary to keep her conscious, to stop her from slipping into shock – but he had expected to be able to direct the conversation more than this.

He shook his head minutely. ‘No, Miss Chapel,’ he said. ‘I would not do you that disservice.’

‘You call it a disservice,’ she queried. Astonishing how brave a near-fatal wound could make one. ‘Why?’

He looked directly at her now, his dark eyes fixed on her own. ‘If I were to kiss you merely to pacify your feelings, when I felt nothing in the matter, I would be doing you a disservice.’

She laughed softly, despite the pain that it brought her. ‘Sometimes, Mr Spock, delusions are kind, soft things,’ she said. ‘They don’t always hurt.’

He did not reply – only stared intently at her wound, attempting to focus his mind on the best way to treat it. He had not lied. He had no intention of letting her die. Intentions, however, were not always enough.

After a moment she said, ‘And would you only be pacifying my feelings? Would you feel nothing?’

Spock’s lips parted. He seemed about to speak, then he turned away, taking another tamponade out of the medical kit and exchanging it for the swollen, blood-soaked one in the ragged gash in her side. He was intent on her wound for a moment, his hot fingers deftly packing the tamponade against the worst of the bleeding, and then holding it there. For much of the last ten minutes he had been sitting with his hands pressed firmly against her exposed flank, trying to staunch the bleeding, and she had lain there half-dazed by pain-killers, wondering about the cruelty of fate that meant the longest that his skin had ever been in contact with hers was when she was bleeding to death.

‘Not to death,’ Spock said.

She started. She still had the presence of mind to know that she had *not* spoken that aloud.

‘Mr Spock,’ she said quietly. ‘Are you listening in to what’s in my head?’

Spock seemed to catch himself, looking startled. He almost drew his hands away from her, then remembered the vital service they were performing, and reapplied the pressure.

‘I am sorry,’ he said sincerely. ‘The contact provides a conduit for your thoughts. I did not realise…’

‘So,’ she said persistently, steering the subject back to the original topic before he could start on a new one. ‘Would you only be pacifying my feelings?’

He turned the same exasperated look on her that she had seen his father turn on his mother when she had tried to elicit feelings from him, only a few weeks ago in the Enterprise sickbay.

‘The question is quite irrelevant,’ he said with patience so great that it betrayed his impatience. ‘I am not about to allow you to die.’ He moved one hand to pick up the medical scanner, already sticky with her blood, and he let it warble over the wound. ‘Your bleeding is lessening,’ he said. ‘Blood pressure rising. Heart rate stabilising.’

This time her own eyebrow rose. ‘Mr Spock, you forget my profession,’ she said steadily. ‘I hear the noise of that scanner in my dreams. I don’t need to see the readout to know that it’s picking up a drop in body readings, not an increase.’

Spock sighed. ‘I have always been told that confidence in one’s ability to live is at least as important as medical treatments.’

‘Well,’ she said slowly. ‘I have no intention of letting myself die either, Mr Spock. It would be a sad end, wouldn’t it? Bleeding to death after being attacked by an alien creature on a nondescript planet, in the arms of a man who feels nothing for you.’

Spock caught his breath at that, a moment of hurt flickering in his eyes.

‘Miss Chapel,’ he said firmly. ‘The fact that I control my feelings does not mean that I have none. It merely means that I do not always allow myself to act on them.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she murmured.

She suddenly felt overcome with dizzy exhaustion.

‘Mr Spock, I’m – a little cold,’ she said faintly.

He looked at her with that piercing gaze again, assessing the rate of her breathing, the pulsing of her blood in her neck, the pallor of her skin, all in that one glance.

‘Of course,’ he said quickly, stripping off his uniform shirts without a second thought. ‘It is not warm in here.’

Her legs were covered by no more than sheer tights that had been laddered and torn in the attack. He laid his blue overshirt swiftly across them, still warm with his body heat, and then placed his black undershirt over her torso.

‘No, I’m – I’m – ’ she faltered.

How to tell him she was cold because she was slipping into shock, cold from blood loss and pain, when her lips would barely move and her brain would barely form the sentence? But he knew. Of course he knew. No matter how much he thought it a disservice to deceive her, he was attempting to deceive her now. He was trying to hide from her the fact that she was dying. A brief, bitter flash of humour speared through her. Here he was now, naked from the waist up, tending to her with the utmost devotion, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on her face. What she would have given up for that… But to die for it?

As she slipped away she felt the sensation of something soft and hotter than her own blood, touching her forehead, and some incoherent sound passed her lips, and Spock’s voice spoke even as everything else faded away, saying something quiet, and reassuring, and completely unintelligible.

((O))

Enterprise.

‘There now,’ a voice was saying. ‘There you are. We’ll have you patched up in no time.’

‘Oh… I…’

Something seemed to have happened to her ability to speak. She could barely think. She could feel pressure on the wound in her side – an annoying, relentless interference – and she wanted to tell whoever it was to stop it, but she couldn’t form the words.

‘Don’t try to talk now,’ Leonard was saying in the warm, reassuring, Southern tones he reserved for the sickest of patients. ‘The pre-meds are doin’ their work. You’ll be in and out of surgery before you know it.’

There was a hand on her shoulder. A hot hand, the heat sinking through her like a balm. And that deep voice saying;

‘I trust you will be able to save her, Doctor.’

‘Oh, she’ll be fine,’ Leonard said. She recognised that tone too – the too-glib assurance covering a sense of uncertainty, spoken a little more loudly than necessary. ‘You did everything right, Spock.’

‘Doctor,’ that deep voice said, in a more insistent tone.

McCoy replied this time in something closer to his normal manner with Spock.

‘If you stop holding me up, Spock, and let me get this woman the transfusion and the surgery she needs, then she’ll be fine,’ he said sharply.

And that hot hand abruptly left her shoulder, and she was being wheeled to – somewhere, and…

((O))

‘You kissed me,’ she said.

The room was empty but for her and Spock. There was no one to embarrass him in front of. But still an expression of consternation flickered across his features before he recovered his equanimity.

‘Miss Chapel, to what are you referring?’ he asked smoothly.

A smile spread across her face. Easy to smile now, in the warmth and safety of sickbay, with the operation behind her, and the wound healing across her flank, and the memory of hotter-than-human lips touching her forehead.

‘You kissed me,’ she repeated. ‘You thought I was going to die, and you kissed me, right here,’ she said, touching her fingers to that place on her forehead that still seemed to feel the pressure of his lips.

Spock looked away, and then looked back at her again, in utter confusion.

‘I – er – I believed you to be quite unconscious at that point,’ he began, an unusual stammer touching his voice.

That response only caused her smile to broaden.

‘Then you weren’t just pacifying my feelings,’ she pointed out to him. ‘You, Mr Spock, kissed me when you supposed that the only person to be conscious of it was *you*. What would provoke such an action, Mr Spock?’

His name felt like an exquisite delicacy in her mouth, almost as if she was tasting a gourmet meal that she had prepared herself. His look of discomfort only enhanced her enjoyment.

‘I did believe you were in imminent danger,’ he said eventually, as if he was confessing the greatest of sins. ‘I – did not wish to let you leave me without – ’

Her smiled changed to something softer as she reached out to touch her cool hand to his hot fingers. She still felt astonishingly weak and shaky, but she had strength enough for that.

‘Thank you, Mr Spock,’ she said.

He looked away briefly, another unnamed emotion flitting across his face, but he did not move his hand from hers.

‘Dr McCoy has strictly limited your visiting hours,’ he said, his gaze fixed on the orange blanket somewhere in the region of her knees. ‘He allowed me five minutes to appraise myself of your condition. No more.’

She nodded.

‘Dr McCoy is probably right. I am exhausted.’

Spock nodded, withdrawing his hand from hers and getting to his feet. At last he let his eyes rest on hers again.

‘Would you permit me to visit tomorrow, when you are stronger?’

Now her smile was nothing more than pure joy, brightening her face like sunshine.

‘Oh, I would be very glad to permit that, Mr Spock,’ she said warmly.

Spock gave her the smallest of nods, and then, with pure Vulcan control, turned away from her and left the room. Christine let muscles relax that she had not realised she was holding tense, sinking back into the soft bed and closing her eyes in exhaustion. The smile stayed on her face long after she had fallen asleep.