He has learned to take stock of as much as he can before his eyes ever open. It helped him when the days began to blur together, when he would doze at random times and wake up never sure about what he would find. And it helps him now, in the comfortable warmth of a sickbay bed.
He hears Len breathing, raspy and with the slight catch that says his lungs aren't entirely back to what they were. That sound is the first thing he has taught himself to listen for, and the most important.
After he registers that and reassures himself that Len is here, near to him and still breathing, he can take stock of other things. The softness of the cot, the sheets over him, the warmth of the air. The beeps of machines around them and the hum of a starship in the very walls around him.
Pavel opens his eyes and squints into the light. He looks to Len – there, calm, awake, unthreatened – before he looks anywhere else.
There's no one sitting on the edges of their beds. No one napping on the chair that's taken up a permanent spot between their jammed-in beds and the wall.
They're alone.
It's the first time since waking up here that there is no one watching. Hikaru and Kirk have gone. No nurse is staring them down, no doctor. Nobody.
Something inside of Pavel relaxes, some small little twinge he hasn't even noticed until it smoothes away.
He rolls carefully on his side – they won't take the IV out of his arm yet – and lets his focus go where it most wants to go.
Len shifts after a moment, dropping his head to the side to look back at him.
Pavel meets his eyes, and after a moment he smiles. "So now," he says, his voice rasping against his throat, "we get over it."
Len's mouth twitches. He pushes onto his side even more gingerly than Pavel did, sucking in a pained breath but smiling back at Pavel when he settles down.
Their beds are much too close. The nurses glare at Pavel as if it's his fault every time they have to squeeze between them. But Kirk must have said something, because no one has actually tried to push them apart, much less order Pavel out of what should be a one-bed room.
Pavel can reach out without strain and touch the sheets bunched around Len, and he does. His fingertips slip down the sheets without grasping hold, an absent kind of touch.
Len watches him. "You..."
Pavel watches his own wandering fingers. "Mmm?"
Len flashes another small smile. "You're so quiet," he finishes. "Haven't been quiet in weeks."
Pavel makes a face. "Doctor's orders," he admits. "M'Benga says I've hurt myself with the talking." Well, he did a fair amount of yelling, screaming, shouting, singing. And he kept it up, as Len says, for weeks. He fell asleep in mid-word and woke up with sentences already forming on his lips.
He doesn't mind. The rasp in his voice is new, and scratchy and unpleasant, but he doesn't mind that either. It might never go away, so he may as well start accepting it.
"There is scarring in my throat," he says, lifting one shoulder in a faint shrug. "And when Hikaru finds his sense of humor again I know that I can count on being teased for talking myself into permanent injury."
Len's eyes drift down to Pavel's mouth, his throat, as if he's talking about visible wounds. His smile fades. He hesitates, shutting his eyes and settling against the pillow as if to sleep.
"I'm too big a coward to ask about my hands."
Pavel hums to himself, unsurprised. Len has miraculously fallen asleep every time M'Benga has come in, and he hasn't once asked Kirk or Chapel about these particular injuries.
"The doctor seems doubtful that you'll recover entirely," Pavel says matter of factly, because Len is scared but he is also obsessing. He can't look at his arms, much less the bandages over his hands. And Len speaking about them just now means he wants to know.
"He is waiting for you to recover more before going after the smallest of the bones that they...broke." Crushed. Destroyed. Ground into fragment and powder.
He can't think of this, he'll lose his calm.
"But he replaced several of the larger bones before either of us woke up. You've lost no muscle control," he says calmly, his eyes on Len's pale face and closed eyes. "The danger is in the nerves."
Len's eyes are too tightly closed to be casual, but he nods. There can't be anything in those words that he didn't already know.
"The doctor thinks that it will take so much work for you to regain normal function, he refuses to even speculate on the odds of your recovering enough to perform surgery again." Pavel smiles to himself. "I have a different theory, of course."
"Yeah?" Len's voice is rough. His eyes stay closed. "What's your theory?"
"Leonard McCoy has always specialized in performing miracles. He has brought crewmen back from the dead, helped them recover from crippling wounds without a single sign anything was ever wrong. He will not fight less hard for himself than he does for others. Because he is too good a doctor to deprive his crew of his services."
Len's eyes open slowly. He looks across the small gap between their beds, looks at Pavel as if searching out the lie he must be telling, or the flattery he must intend.
Pavel of course is not lying, and he doesn't flatter. Len knows him, he knows that he values honesty to the point that it has lost him friends and stirred others' anger.
Pavel smiles against his thin pillow. "You did not survive those creatures in order to give up on your life. I know that, I'm just surprised that M'Benga doesn't seem to."
Len doesn't smile, but the lines around his eyes and mouth ease.
It's good enough to warm Pavel, who has never known a better feeling than making Len smile.
Pavel had one task in that cell, on that planet. To keep Leonard McCoy alive. He wasn't particularly good at it, that task, but in the end they are out and Len is alive, and so he wasn't so bad at it either.
No one assigned Pavel this task, he took it upon himself. For a lot of reasons that aren't worth thinking about ever again, but for one good reason that he is sure of now. A reason he used to imagine was a possibility, but now is as good as any cold, hard fact of physical science.
It is also a fact worth voicing. Pavel looks across the gap at Len's face, at the terror about his future that his eyes can't hide.
"I love you," he says, another matter-of-fact presentation of facts unasked for, simply because he thinks Len ought to know it.
He is a little surprised when Len simply nods. As if of everything he's said, that is the least surprising.
Len's arm slides out from under the sheet. He swallows and drags his eyes downward to look at the bandage making his hand so shapeless and heavy.
Still, he reaches out with that arm, and the edge of the bandage covering his fingertips brushes Pavel's chin before stroking, light and unsteady, down the line of his throat. His possibly permanently scarred throat.
Len seems a little more at peace then, meeting Pavel's gaze. "I know."
The kid is unnerving, yeah, Len's thought that from the start. But it turns out he's a hell of a good research partner.
He's got endless patience for minutia, he doesn't mind reading the same things again and again. He doesn't mind when Len gets into testing mode and has to repeat the same steps over and over and over and over with frustratingly small variation.
The routine of medical research can drive people nuts. Even Desmarais is going a little stir-crazy, and he's not even conducting the tests. But Chekov dives in again and again, with no sign of his enthusiasm fading.
There aren't a lot of nurses with this kind of patience, much less recruits from other departments. Then again the kid is into science, and pals with Spock, so surely this isn't his first foray with mind-crackingly dull experimentation.
"Doctor..."
Also, unlike other recruits who have been forced to assist Len in testing in the past, this kid is actually right about being able to bend some of his knowledge to Len's aide. Len has learned already to pay attention when the kid speaks, and he does now.
He looks up from the blood samples he's been studying for the last hour. "Mm?"
The kid is frowning at his padd, brow furrowed. He doesn't answer, just sets the padd flat on the worktable in front of him and bends over it, eyes moving back and forth rapidly.
Len waits, but the kid seems to be back in his own world. He looks back down at his blood samples, but sighs. None of it's doing any good. Test after test, change after change, and the cells in these samples are still dying out so fast he can watch it happening.
He frowns and pushes away from the table, standing up and stretching aching shoulders, wincing at the stiffness in his neck. He's still rolling his shoulders as he makes his way around his little lab space to the worktable Chekov's hunched over.
"What's up, kid?"
Chekov looks up at him with frowning eyes. "Something is wrong."
Len raises his eyebrows. "Besides the race of aliens dropping dead around us?"
The kid sighs, for a moment unnervingly Spockish. "Yes, besides that. You have noticed the uniformity in the blood samples the Maalox have been providing us, yes?"
Len nods. "But that's the thing about alien physiology, kid. Just because it all looks the same to me doesn't mean there aren't a thousand difference I just don't know to look for."
"But there are!" Chekov straightens and turns the padd, pushing it across the table at Len.
Len pulls it in obligingly, and sees some sort of spreadsheet laying out data in columns. It's science, not medicine, and he looks across the table at Chekov balefully.
The kid just leans in, not letting him off the hook. "The lines are different samples we have received. The columns are separate elements of information we have been watching - the first is white cell count, the second is oxygen levels in the cells, the third time after exposure before all oxygen has dispersed and the cells have died, and so on. The important thing is..."
Len holds up a hand. He scans the data now that he can understand the way Pavel's charted out the information, and it only takes him a moment to spot what the kid's seen.
"Huh," he says, casting a look over at the trays where the Maalox-provided blood samples are labeled and waiting for further testing.
"You see." It isn't a question. Chekov leans in closer, tapping the padd as he talks. "Over half of the samples we have tested have numbers so close that they are almost indistinguishable. Perhaps a third of the samples are different, and all of those samples vary from each other as well."
Len frowns. "Almost like..."
Chekov nods, confident somehow that Len must be on the same page.
Len thinks about those numbers. "About a third of the samples we're working on we've collected from the bodies of the dead. The rest were brought to us."
"Exactly!"
Chekov's answer is so bright that it draws Len's focus up.
Fuck. Science gets the kid going, that's obvious. His face is all but glowing, his eyes green and sparking bright as he looks at Len. There's excitement all over him, and interest. All shining from that young, open face of his.
The kid never fails to make Len feel older and grittier than he already is, but despite himself he's drawn to it. Seems like it's Len's curse to always be around golden, beautiful people. Weird world.
He clears his throat, his mind obediently chirping at him: sewenteen.
"All the samples that the Maalox have been bringing us-"
"-are all from the same person," Pavel finishes happily. "This is why your work is stalling. There is no new data to learn when we are running the same tests on the same person's blood. You see, some of the less degraded samples we pulled from the dead actually show some responsiveness to your tests. There is a cure here, and you may well be close to it! But this person, the one providing the samples, may not be compatible."
"Right." Len pushes away from the table, from Chekov and his bright eyes and open face. He looks to the door, knowing that the men the aliens have left there as 'assistants' have become bored by the work but still must be right outside.
Well, hell. If they're having to rely on the Maalox for supplies to help their work, than he's going to have to let the Maalox know just what's slowing them down. It's probably an innocent mistake, maybe the Maalox figure it's best to drain one person dry than a lot of already-sick people.
He's gonna have to convince them otherwise, and fast.
He's out the door so fast that poor bored Desmarais has to run to catch up to him.
They take out Pavel's IV and Chapel brings him a steaming bowl of soup, and Pavel looks so baffled by it all that it almost makes Len smile.
Pavel's sitting up in his bed by then – besides the starvation there wasn't much wrong with him. Superficial injuries from the fights he picked with the guards, but they were always happier to focus their energy on Len.
This is the last step before they discharge him, Len realizes, watching him sitting there with a spoon in his hand and the bowl on a tray in front of him.
Then it'll be Len's turn. Without his guard dog here, with his worst injuries healed and the threat of system failure or death now gone, all the things Len hasn't let himself think about yet are going to take center stage.
Christine stands by, watching, but it's Len that Pavel turns to with those wide eyes. "I'm not hungry," he says.
Len lays on his side, watching the kid. He smiles faintly. "Yeah, you are. You're so damned hungry you don't even remember what it feels like. You're way past a rumbling stomach, kid."
Pavel considers that. He turns to the bowl and sighs, trailing the spoon over the surface of the soup. "They will let me go soon."
"That's a good thing," Len says instantly, even as an acid-wash of nervousness churns through his guts.
Pavel glances over. "I am a navigator on a starship," he says slowly.
Len waits, but understands when Pavel doesn't speak more.
Him? He's a doctor. Three weeks in a cell on a planet and that concept seems utterly foreign to him. Three weeks, not even a full month, and he's forgotten what it means to be anything but a prisoner.
What does that say about him? Should he be relieved to know that Pavel feels the same bewilderment about returning to his life?
Once the kid is out there, once he's run the simulators a few times with Sulu and is back in the groove of his job, it'll be like riding a bike. He'll slip right back into it. Len? If he could jump back into his old work as fast? Might be the same.
Moot point. He can't jump back in. Pavel's going to get out and get busy getting over it, and Len is going to be stuck in this bed, in these bandages, with no fucking idea...
"You didn't listen to me before," Pavel says suddenly.
Len looks over. "Mmm?"
Pavel pushes the tray away from him and slips his legs over the bed. He pushes to his feet, sliding into that small gap between their beds though he might be the only person in the world thin enough to fit there right now. He sits down on the edge of Len's bed.
Christine makes a warning noise from her silent guard by the door.
Pavel turns a cold-eyed look on her, but sighs and reaches and slides the tray of soup closer to him so that he can eat where he is. He picks up the spoon, dips it in, and shoots her an are-you-happy-now look.
Christine watches them warily, but she doesn't move in.
Len doesn't make any move to intercede for the kid. He just watches, letting the little show distract him from his morbid thoughts.
Pavel turns back to him as he draws the spoon from the soup.
"I said," he goes on as if Christine never existed, "you did not listen to me before. I can hear your thoughts, you know. I've learned to. When I was being so loud in that cell, you were just as loud as I was. Only you don't realize it."
Len smiles faintly. "You can read my mind, huh?"
"Clearly. You scream when you think, Len." Pavel smiles and leans in, tilting the spoon towards Len's mouth as naturally as he finger-fed him strange stale alien food in the cell.
And naturally as he did back then, Len eats. He's had this soup before, the bland mineral-loaded Starfleet-sanctioned Recovery Broth. It tastes just as great as it sounds, but it's warm and filling and he is a bit hungry.
Pavel watches him approvingly, eyes as bright as ever. "You are thinking that M'Benga is right and that Pasha is wrong. That you aren't going to get your life back." He leans in with another steaming spoonful.
Len sips from the spoon, eyes on Pavel's face.
Christine makes some other sound behind Pavel, like something's going on here that she doesn't like, but Len doesn't pay it any mind.
He regards Pavel, drawing some small comfort from the confidence on his young face. "Some things people just don't recover from, kid," he says quietly.
"You think I don't know that?" Pavel dismisses the words with a gesture of the empty spoon in his hand. "I will tell you why this is not one of those things. Because M'Benga has not so much as unwrapped your hands yet since he first operated, so he is speaking of injuries he knows nothing about. But me? I speak of a man I know a great deal about. And so it's obvious that my opinion should hold more weight than his."
"Yeah? Is that your scientific opinion?"
Pavel grins back before taking the most smug sip of a soup spoon that Len's ever had the privilege to witness. "All my opinions are scientific. It comes with being a genius."
Len laughs softly around his next spoonful of soup.. He swallows the broth and sits back, leaning against the pillow. It's funny, but just as often as he's certain that his life is utterly ended, he can also feel entirely sure that everything is going to be fine.
Like Pavel says, his hands aren't even unwrapped. He is still half-looped with painkillers. He hasn't even started recovering yet, really.
It's a little dumb to be so cynical so fast, right?
With Pavel there, stretching out a carefully-leveled spoonful of broth and watching him eat it as if Len is the most important thing in the universe, it feels entirely absurd to be the least bit doubtful about his future.
"It's the Empress."
Those words are the only warning Pavel gets. He looks up from the slide he's studying, blinking in surprise at the anger in Doctor McCoy's voice.
His surprise becomes alarm a moment later, when he sees that McCoy is being pushed through the door by several of those unhappy-looking Maalox, and that more than one of them are holding devices aimed at the doctor's back. Squarish little black metal things, but the way they're holding them tells Pavel that they're weapons.
McCoy isn't even looking at them. He lets himself get pushed through the door but then he's walking on his own, his face creased with anger, his dark eyes light with it. Fury, like he so often shows. A righteous anger.
Someone has not done the Right Thing. Pavel does not need a genius IQ to figure out who that someone is.
"They won't let us have anyone else's blood," McCoy goes on, his hands fisted, his brow set in hard lines. "Because they don't give a shit who else lives or dies. Not when their precious Empress is dying."
Pavel looks from McCoy to the armed aliens, uncertain. Should he back away from the table? Keep working? Are the weapons what it took to get McCoy to give up his argument, or are they here for another purpose?
Where is Rene? He left with McCoy, running to catch up after McCoy left so abruptly. But he isn't here.
Pavel looks from the Maalox to McCoy, unsure.
McCoy is perhaps a little more angry than his usual righteous-anger fits. He grabs a glass case, the slides of a dozen samples that they thought were all different before realizing what the Maalox were doing.
He turns to the aliens at the door, waving the case. "This isn't gonna save her life! I can't do anything with this! I have to have more if you want any of these people to live."
He looks like he wants to throw the glass case at the silent figures, but he's too good a doctor to risk it. There is disease in those blood samples, after all.
"Shit!" McCoy turns back to the table and slams the case down hard enough to rattle the samples inside. "A fucking week we've wasted here. I'm not wasting anymore. Either you let us help your people or we're getting the hell off this rock!"
Pavel is aware that most human vernacular, profanity and the like, won't translate the Maalox language through the very basic translators Nyota was able to program for them. But there is no mistaking the doctor's tone.
He is suddenly very nervous looking from the doctor to the aliens. He even opens his mouth to voice a mild objection to the doctor's confrontational attitude towards these beings they are alone on a planet with.
But his mouth closes, and he looks over at the research they have done so far. Test after test of flawed experimentation. Wasted time. How many of these aliens have died since they arrived? How many will die before they can get their research on the right track and actually have a chance at finding a cure?
His anger is less intense than McCoy's. His annoyance is for the wasted time, the flawed science. Every theory they have come up with in the last week is incorrect, useless.
Pavel feels the injustice of not doing the Right Thing much less strongly than McCoy does. But he will not object to McCoy's anger.
He regards the aliens again. They are a small, unfriendly and unsophisticated planet, and he and McCoy are Starfleet officers. They will give in to what McCoy asks for, or the Enterprise will cut its brief side-mission short and will pick them up sooner than scheduled.
"Doctor?" he asks quietly, hushed, scared to intrude in whatever this is. It feels bigger than his experience, and he doesn't want to make anything worse. "Where is Lieutenant Desmarais?"
McCoy's glare doesn't ease. "These overbearing shitheads grabbed him when he drew his phaser. He's okay, kid."
Pavel doesn't relax. McCoy doesn't sound very convinced of those last words.
The aliens at the door, like the ones constantly watching over them since they started their work, remain quiet and mostly impassive. But another comes through the door after a minute, and he is familiar.
Their diplomatic contact, the Speaker for the Empress.
He rumbles something in that strange staccato language, and the translator in Pavel's ear tells him the man is saying "You are the to be of help to her," which rough as it is still speaks amazingly highly of Nyota's skills at linguistics and a new language she was exposed to for a matter of days.
McCoy answers fast. "We can't help her, I told you. These tests keep failing because her case is too advanced. There is no help for her anymore. But there is help for the thousands of others who are dying."
"No there is others the. You are the to be of help to her."
"She is already dead, god damn it!"
Pavel hisses in a breath at the way the Speaker recoils. "Doctor..." he says quietly. "Are you sure this is what we should be doing?"
McCoy shoots him an incredulous look that eases when he seems to see that Pavel means the question without recrimination. That Pavel is actually sincerely uncertain.
He hesitates, shooting a look at the Speaker, who is now in angry, hissing conversation with the other guards. They speak too fast for the translator to pick up.
He looks back at Pavel and shakes his head. "We can't do anything else, kid," he says, and the words sound like an apology.
Pavel doesn't need that. He trusts McCoy. He is in over his head, he has no experience telling him how to move and what to feel about the way the Maalox are suddenly talking about them, but he does trust McCoy.
He can only hope the doctor has some bigger plan in mind, because at this moment things don't seem to be going particularly well.
Hikaru seems nervous as he stands in the doorway and watches Pavel look around.
Pavel isn't sure why he should be nervous, or if Pavel's own behavior is contributing to it, but he can't bring himself to worry about it. It isn't in his nature to temper his reactions, and Hikaru is his best friend because Hikaru has always accepted him on his own terms.
"I thought about coming in to dust a little before bringing you here," Hikaru says, grinning through his discomfort. "But. Starship. You know. Not a lot of dust floating around. Thought about watering your plants, but then I remembered that you weren't me."
Pavel laughs at that softly. Hikaru has tried repeatedly to convince him to place a plant or two in his quarters, but Pavel hasn't given in yet. Which he is glad of now, because he would have thought about it back on that planet. He would have had visions of a poor leafy green thing sitting abandoned in the dark, shriveling for want of food and water. Dying unnoticed by the world just outside the door.
He moves past the photographs of his father and brothers, the old picture of his dead mother. He trails his fingers over the spines of books crammed into the small shelf that's all he can fit in his little room.
He looks in vague interest at the crumpled uniform on the floor, laying just where he left it over a month ago, when a late morning kept him from tidying up before his first away mission.
He remembers excitement.
He was nervous, his stomach churning with fear but his body, his mind, moving at double-time to prove himself.
He checked his seams so carefully before he left this room the last time. He fussed with his uncooperative curls for minutes before rolling his eyes at his reflection and telling himself sternly that the mission didn't hinge on his hair being acceptably tidy.
Remembering it now, Pavel smiles to himself. An entire lifetime has been lived between those memories and this present, and he smiles at his old foolishness the way he smiles to think of the first star charts he ever drew as an overly precocious five year old.
His hair, his seams, he focused on those not because he thought they affected the mission, but because he didn't want any reason to draw the displeasure of one Doctor McCoy.
A different man entirely than Pavel's Len, of course. But Pavel is a different man than that boy making faces at himself in the mirror.
He leans down and picks up that crumpled uniform, ignoring the flash of light-headedness that comes when he straightens again.
For a moment he can't remember what he does with his dirty clothes. He frowns around him, the small bed, the small shelves. The only door is a bathroom, but there's no...
Ah. Of course. He smiles and moved to the wall, pressing his hand on the panel to slide open the recycler. With an amused smile he drops the uniform inside and the panel slide closed.
It's a strange thing. This room with its cramped space, its four walls, could be just another cell. But there are books to read, computers to supply him whatever he wants, and a recycler to take away the things he rejects.
And there is no Len.
Quite a different kind of cell.
He draws in a breath, amused by his tour of his old life but ready for it to be over.
He turns to Hikaru and speaks, though he's not supposed to except in emergencies. "We can go back now."
Hikaru blinks. "Go back where?"
Pavel tilts his head, unamused just like that. "Hikaru. I'd like to go back."
Hikaru steps in, brow furrowed. "I...sorry, Pasha, back where? Back to sickbay?" He lowers his voice, studying Pavel with those dark, worried eyes. "You remember they discharged you?"
Pavel nods – of course he remembers. But they didn't discharge Len. Nothing is over. Nothing has changed.
Hikaru searches him warily, the way he searches plants from alien planets that he is unfamiliar with. Hikaru is more aware than most that the flora on a new planet can be as dangerous or moreso than the fauna, that is why he studies it so gravely.
Pavel smiles to think of himself as a dangerous plant, but the smile fades because he too easily pictures again that fictional plant left to wither and die in this very room.
"Why don't we go get something to eat?" Hikaru says after a moment, sounding unsure. "You think you can handle the mess right now?"
Something to eat. Pavel nods. They tell him he needs to eat more, and the soups they bring in sickbay aren't nearly adequate to help Len recover.
He smiles at Hikaru, who continues to give him the dangerous-plant look even as he smiles back.
The door closes behind them with a horrible grinding rusty sound, and Len tries not to notice how hard the kid flinches when it clangs shut.
He speaks fast to cover his own worry, and his even stronger sense of guilt. "Look...kid."
Chekov turns to him, dinner-plate eyes set in scared white skin.
Len stamps down at that guilt, and when the voice in his head tells him seventeen it's not in the snide way that means he needs to curtail a wayward train of thought. This time the seventeen chimes low in his mind, like an epitaph.
He clears his throat fast. "Before you have a chance to freak out here, kid, I gotta tell you I've been in worse spots before. A hell of a lot worse. This isn't what it feels like, okay? It's all...it's diplomacy."
"Diplomacy." Pavel nods tersely, the fear undiminished.
"Right." Len waves a hand, turning away from that fear to check out this place they've ended up in. "Hardly even unusual."
"Where is Rene?" The question spills out, fast, like the kid is scared of hearing a particular answer. "Will they bring him here? What have they..."
"Diplomacy," Len says again sharply. He tries not to think of that soft-spoken security officer and his little goattee, his pretentious accent and the way he mocked Len for mocking it.
Desmarais is fine, wherever they hauled him off to. There's no alternative that makes sense.
"When we don't call in and report this evening," he keeps going, though he couldn't have said if it was for Pavel's benefit or for his own, "Jim'll get the ship back here without hesitating. He'll have these idiots eating out of his hand before morning. This kind of thing...it's politics. No hick planet wants to start a war with the Federation."
Pavel sags against the wall. He doesn't answer, he doesn't seem particularly relieved. But he stays quiet.
Len looks around, but there's not much to look at. The place is medieval, like so much on this planet. No windows, no bars. Stone walls, stone floor, stone ceiling, and a small dip in the floor in a back corner with rusted bars going across a hole maybe the size of Len's hand wrist to tip. A drain of some kind.
Better not be the kind he's thinking of.
He snorts to himself, folding his arms over his chest. There's nowhere for air to come in, except that little drain, but it's about ten degrees colder than it was in the drafty hallway outside.
It's not the worse spot he's ever been in planet-side, but it doesn't feel like a real fun place to kill an evening.
Time for those instincts to kick in, Jim.
Len sighs and looks back at the kid, ready to get his half-assed pep talk going again if it's needed.
Chekov leans against a wall, hugging his arms across his chest, obviously feeling the cold too. He looks over when he feels Len's eyes, and it's hard to tell if he could use the pep talk or not. Len can't read the kid yet, not entirely, though he's better at it thanks to the last few days than he was before the assignment.
Well, hell. Nothing wrong with distraction either way, is there?
He moves to the wall across from Chekov, slipping down the stone to sit against the wall. He stretches his legs out in front of him and crosses his ankles, and it's almost nice to be idle after five days and nights of research and theory.
"So," he says, his voice sounding too loud after the silence. He clears his throat, dropping the volume a little with a crooked smirk. "What makes a genius Russian kid want to join Starfleet?"
Chekov looks over at him, incredulous.
Len shrugs. "Got something better to do right now?"
Chekov blinks, thinks about it. He smiles faintly, nervous, and slips down to sit cross-legged on the stone floor. "Then I wonder if you're actually interested in an answer or just filling the silence?"
Len chuckles. "Can't I be both?"
Chekov - well, if they're gonna play hostage together he can allow the kid a first name: Pavel smiles back. "Quid pro quo, then, doctor. If I bore you with my Russian childhood will you answer the great mystery of why a man who despises technology and the universe as a whole joined Starfleet himself?"
Len flashes a wry grin. "Never made a mystery of that answer, kid, it was the-"
"Doctor."
He hesitates, eyebrow arching.
"Your ex-wife is not the queen of earth."
His eyebrows hike even higher up.
Pavel looks almost admonishing. "There were other places you could have gone after a divorce without leaving the planet. This is why the truth is a mystery – because you tell such a silly lie and most people accept it."
"Huh." Well, it's not Len's favorite topic and he doubts he's gonna spill his guts to the kid, quid pro quo or not.
Still. He can't help a chuckle. "Jim told me before we came down to be extra careful with his precious navigator. He thinks you're scared of me. I'm starting to think he's a complete idiot."
"An idiot with disproportionately strong diplomatic skills, though, yes?" Pavel smiles. "The captain thinks that I fear you and you think that I want you to fawn over me and tell me I'm a genius."
Len grins. "So you're saying Jim and me are both dumbasses, is that it?"
Pavel blinks wide, innocent eyes at him. "I would never say such a thing about my superiors. But if you choose to put those words into my mouth, who am I to argue?"
"So if you're not scared and you don't give a shit if I fawn over you or not...what's the truth?"
"What the truth always is – something in between." Pavel shrugs.
Damn it, but Len's kind of starting to like the kid. Used to be he was all bright eyes and sewenteen, but the last few days have taught Len a lot more about him.
He's fucking smart, and he's sharp. Two different types of intelligence, but it's rare that people are strong in both. Plus he's got balls; that's something Len always appreciates in other people.
Pavel smiles after a moment. "I will tell you stories of my path to Starfleet, then? And you will tell me of your ex-wife and why she was able to drive you from your planet. And we will pass the time while Captain Kirk practices his diplomatic skills."
Len sits back, gesturing airily for him to proceed. And hell, maybe when the kid's done Len will see his part through after all. Maybe he'll talk a little about Joce, about his kid. Get the genius eccentric Russian perspective on the whole thing.
Maybe he's a little too interested in what the Russian perspective is towards things. He's supposed to be distancing himself from this weird lonely hormonal attraction. He's supposed to be sewenteening himself, not encouraging it.
But Christ, he's sitting in a prison cell freezing his way through an evening, waiting on Jim Kirk to swoop in and get him out.
He should be allowed to indulge himself for a night.