#and increasing talosian control over computer systems lends doubt to chris’ last effort to communicate using his chair

[curator-on-ao3]

Wednesday (Quadruple) Drabble: The Lost and Found

She had been lost before.

Moving as a child from the Illyrian side of the city to the non-Illyrian side, hope for increased safety as consolation for leaving a part of her identity behind.

He had been lost before.

Refusals overridden, his would-be captors gaining control of his computer to falsify assent for a descent into fantasy, life in unreality as corrosive as the battery acid that powered his radiation-damaged heart.

Starbase records made clear Spock’s betrayal and, once Una reached Talos IV, it didn’t take long to locate Chris— his illusion screaming in pain from fire-borne punishment, his true form immobilized in his support chair.

The rage she needed to defeat Talosian mind control came easy.

In the shuttle she’d… procured… Chris declined her algorithm to match his speaking voice, choosing instead to use a computer default, no intonation of anguish or joy, no movement in his scarred face or change to his mechanized, steady respiration as he answered her questions.

“My best guess is Spock exploited that you’d be away from Starbase Eleven for a few weeks. He knew he was disobeying my orders and committing mutiny. He did it anyway.”

“If the Illyrian doctor is willing to try, I understand the risks.”

“Leave Vina behind. She made her alliances clear.”

So it’s at an Illyrian colony far from Federation arrogance or authority that his DNA unfurls and re-forms. Genetic engineering is usually performed before birth, but this is his rebirth, no longer the Christopher Pike who upheld Starfleet ideals but a Christopher Pike who is wary of a Starfleet that would tolerate a sham court martial rather than search for a greater truth.

Is Una reborn, too? Her belief in something greater than herself, in a Starfleet that could, in fact, become what she had hoped it to be in her idealistic younger years, that belief is withered, gone, replaced by allegiance to people, not an organization.

His skin is pockmarked, his voice reedy, gait unsteady. Genetic engineering isn’t a miracle cure.

Her sense of purpose has telescoped from appreciation for differences to appreciation for those who share her values.

Are they still lost?

Isn’t everyone?

But to be lost together… a shuttle course laid in toward a curious-looking cluster of stars, his hand a comfort on her shoulder, her soft hum the music of his naturally-beating heart… to be lost together… is something like being found.

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Christopher Pike drabbles: 3, 2, 1/?