Chapter Text
Rayna woke as she always did, all at once, her mind switching from sketchily remembered ticking over into full and disorienting awareness. She was lying on a low couch made to look like leather, in a small office—she could determine its size to the nearest millimeter if she chose. Two of the walls ended at table height, to be replaced with transparent glasteel to the ceiling. Pavel sat at a desk with his back to her, reading off a datapad.
A faint vibration entered her body through her feet. “Where am I?” she asked.
The chair squeaked when Pavel spun to face her. “Dr. McCoy’s office on the Enterprise. The Sickbay is very full, but the doctor wanted us both nearby.”
“I’m not a real person,” she said. The fact of it tangled her thoughts like before, when Flint had insisted he owned her and Pavel told her she was free. “I never even read Dostoyevsky. My opinions about it are not mine.”
“Read it for real, then,” Pavel said with a shrug, as though it were a simple thing to discover that one’s past was a fabrication.
She rested her chin on her hand and looked up at him. “Could you love me, as I am now? Now that you know?”
Pavel paused for a little too long. His hands moved in front of him as though he were gathering clouds. “I do not feel as I did—”
“Because I am a thing,” she said, resigned to it.
“Because you are baby.” Pavel moved to sit beside her on the couch and caught up her hands in his. “Mr. Spock and I worked very hard to save you—to help you be—born. If you were not worthy, we would not have done this.” He touched her throat, where something warm rested. “You must wear this always. We can make a pretty setting for it, or we can put it inside you to keep it safe.”
She strained to look. The analog capture matrix had been wrapped in loops of thin wire and held to her throat by more wire, which wasn’t the most comfortable. “It has ten petabyte capacity. Plenty of space for you to work out all those complex calculations you did not have to manage before.”
“What happened to me?”
“We call it threshold cascade. It is like a meltdown, like Dr. McCoy and I sometimes have because of--is just because. It is not important. You left the tracks of your programming, your mind did not know what to do. It was destroying itself. Mr. Spock gave you time, and I,” he tapped the medallion, “gave you space.”
“I wished to discuss subdimensional physics with him. I had not expected a demonstration of its practical applications.”
She pondered the scratched tile floor. “It is not comfortable.”
“What isn’t?”
She couldn’t look up at him, so she looked at their twined hands. “I have always known what I was, what was expected of me. Now I find out it was all a lie. Even I am a kind of lie. It is not comfortable to exist this way.”
Pavel scrubbed at his hair. “No, I suppose it is not. Do you wish we had not helped you?”
Rayna stopped to think that through. “No. I am grateful you helped me. I prefer to exist. To experience.”
There was a knock at the door. “Come,” Pavel said.
It was Doctor McCoy, looking less pale than when she had last seen him. He thumped into the chair Pavel had just left, pulled out a scanner, and waved it over each of them. “Still haven’t slept, have you, Chekov?”
“I needed to be sure Rayna was okay.”
“Well if you don’t sleep soon you’re going to be plenty miserable between the Rigellian fever and the aftereffects of jumping into a threeway meld. The antitoxin will save your life but even with it Rigellian fever’s no joke.”
“How is the Captain?” Pavel asked.
“Like hell, but he’ll live. He’s allergic to ryetalyn, surprise surprise. Scotty and Uhura look like they’ll pull through too, though I’m thinking Scotty might need a new pair of lungs. Spock’s crammed onto Uhura’s biobed guiding her through a healing trance because he doesn’t know when to say when and take a goddam nap.” He fixed his attention on Rayna. “How are you feeling?”
She made the effort to look at him directly and think his question through. “I don’t know. I don’t know the names for these things happening in my body and mind.”
The doctor nodded. “Fair enough. You seem stable for the moment, though I’d trust Chekov’s assessment over mine. He’s the programmer.” He settled back into the chair and stretched, joints popping audibly. “We need to talk about Flint.”
The name pinched a snarl into her thoughts. Her hands hurt. She looked down to see them curled into fists. “I suppose.” She looked to Pavel for support. “I suppose we must.”
McCoy continued, “After what he did to the ship, what he threatened to do to us, Commander Spock deemed it necessary to break orbit and leave the system immediately. At present we are a half day away by shuttle. If you wish to return--”
“I do not,” she said firmly.
McCoy slapped his hands against his thighs, nodded curtly, and stood. “Well, that answers that, then. Chekov, I’ve got a nice biobed for you. Rayna, you can stay with him until we find you quarters if you promise to let him sleep. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a husband to watch over until his histamine levels go down. Chekov, say goodnight.” Pavel looked over at the doctor as though he was contemplating refusing him, but in the end, he just squeezed her shoulder and followed him to the door. McCoy paused in the doorway. “You can come with us.”
Rayna followed them out into the sickbay, which was cast in deep shadow, lit only by sparing spotlights. Every bed was occupied, including cots on the floor. They followed McCoy around a corner, weaving between the closely packed beds, to a cot with a portable monitor at the head. Pavel fell into the cot, suddenly showing every bit of the exhaustion he must have been hiding for her sake. For her sake.
Her clothes weren’t designed for sitting on the floor, but she managed without tearing the dress. Dr. McCoy plied Pavel with a couple of hyposprays and snapped a biomonitoring bracelet around his wrist. An alarm went off across the room. McCoy was off to answer it before she could even thank him. She turned back to Pavel and yawned.
He laughed.
“Do I amuse you?”
“It’s just, sleep we both need. But I had not realized that Flint would have made you yawn.”
“Why would he not have paid as much attention to detail as he does with all his creations?” Pavel winced at her tone. She tried to reassure him. “I do not believe I am angry at you.”
His face relaxed, though whether it was because he believed her or because the sedative he’d been given was taking effect, she didn’t know.
“My family calls me Pasha,” Pavel said. “I think I would like it if you did, too.”
The warmth in her chest might not be real, but she appreciated it anyway. “Go to sleep, Pasha.”
*
The ship was running with a skeleton crew, having flown back toward Federation space and parked itself in orbit around a lifeless hunk of rock supporting a small science outpost, far from potential threats. Everyone had gotten Rigellian fever, though only twenty remained in Sickbay. No one was up to working full shifts except Spock, who had moved onto the bridge permanently, it seemed. Pavel did his requisite four hours nodding off at his post, then turned the helm over to Kevin Riley, who looked as pasty and exhausted as Pavel felt.
Rayna met him in the mess for today’s meal selection, chosen to be something Flint would never deign to let her eat. The scientist in him wondered how Flint had managed to create a digestive system that was entirely synthetic and incredibly durable, but also managed to allow her not only to taste food but to process it into usable fuel. The friend in him just enjoyed seeing her expressions when she tried something messy and unhealthy like the chili cheese fries in front of her now.
He nibbled fries off the edge of their shared plate, still too queasy to eat much. “Can I come to your quarters after lunch?” she asked.
“Sure, but I’ll probably just fall asleep.”
“I like watching you sleep.”
If they were dating, which they most definitely were not, that would be sweet. As it was, he wasn’t sure what to think of it. “Do you still have a crush on me?”
“Yes,” she said. “To the extent that I understand the term.”
“I’m still too old for you.”
“I know.” She took the tray to the recycler, took a few moments to greet some of the other members of the crew by name, then offered him her arm. He wasn’t too proud to take it, given that he was much too proud to fall down in front of everyone.
He opened the door to his quarters and was so tired he didn’t care that she saw him kick off his boots and leave them where they lay. The bed was calling to him with a sweet siren song. He flopped onto it. She curled up in his chair. “I wonder if Flint has already started on my replacement.”
“Probably.”
She sighed. “I wish I didn’t miss him so much. I think of him, alone, and I feel like I betrayed him by leaving. But I would have died there. Withered like a flower without water, just like he said.”
“He was the closest thing you had to a father, of course you miss him.”
“But I also hate him for what he would have done to all of you. And for lying to me. My whole life is a story he told. I didn’t do the things I remember. I didn’t study and learn, I was programmed to be brilliant.”
“Are you catching up on all the Russian classics?” Pavel asked.
“Captain Kirk suggested Solzhenitsyn. He said I might find it therapeutic.” She frowned and propped her chin on her hands. “I wish I could just forget. Not everything, just—the end. The look on Flint’s face when he ordered me to love him.” She knelt by the side of the bed to take his hand in hers. “My programming is accessible. You could find the memory and erase it for me. Or Spock could, perhaps?”
“No,” Pavel said.
She pulled on his hand a little when she slumped against the bed. “But it hurts.”
“I know. But that pain helped you grow.” He rolled onto his side to touch the amber medallion at her throat. “You forget that pain, you might forget what you learned from it.”
“How do you live with that kind of pain?”
“Time.” He sighed and rolled onto his back to stare up at the ceiling. “I can still see the look on Mr. Spock’s face when we beamed him up and his mother was not there.”
“What happened to her?”
Pavel’s breath still caught in his throat when he talked about that day. “She died--during transport. I could not catch her in time.”
“What could you possibly have learned from that, Pasha?”
He huffed a bitter laugh. “I was seventeen. I thought I could do anything. It was the first time I failed when it mattered.”
“What did I learn? That I was made to be a toy for a lonely old man?”
“That you are the only one who gets to decide what your purpose is.”
Rayna hugged One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to her chest. “What if I don’t know?”
Pavel gazed at her, dressed as she was in a pair of Christine’s sweatpants, one of Pavel’s Academy sweatshirts, and a pair of striped fuzzy socks from he didn’t even know where. “Rayna Kapec, you have all the time in the world to figure it out.”