Per Ardua, Per Aspera

by azephirin

Summary:

Somehow they are alive.

Notes:

Written for where_no_woman's Best Damn Drabble Fest in the 'Verse and originally posted here. In my head, this story links in with "Where My Secrets Echo," but that's pretty much only in my head. Title borrowed from "The War in the Air," by Howard Nemerov.

More than once, she's been certain she was about to die, but this is the first time she's been sure she's already dead.

As it happens, she's wrong again.

"Lieutenant Gaila?" says a female voice, and Gaila's eyes blink open. She's in a bed. There's a pretty blond woman standing beside it, smiling like she's happy to see Gaila.

This doesn't look like any kind of afterlife, not that Gaila ever really believed in one. This looks more like...a hospital.

"Am I...not dead?" Gaila asks after a moment. She tries to sit up, but it hurts, and the woman catches her before she crashes back down onto the mattress.

The woman lowers her gently back down and takes a seat in the chair next to the bed. "You're very much alive," she says, "but you were badly hurt. You've been in an induced coma for several weeks. You're going to be fine—you're just going to have to rebuild your strength after being in bed for so long."

Gaila carefully doesn't think about the irony of that statement.

"I don't understand how I'm not dead," she says. "And who are you?"

"I'm sorry; I'm Christine Chapel. I'm a nurse. We have a friend in common—Nyota Uhura."

"Nyota!" Gaila exclaims, and tries to sit up again; again, she fails, and collapses back into Christine Chapel's surprisingly strong grip. "Is she—"

"She's fine—not a scratch on her. May I let her know you're awake? She's been here every day—she'll be very relieved."

"Every day?"

"Her and Jim Kirk. I'm sure he'd like to to know, too, if it's alright with you."

"Oh," says Gaila. "Uh, yeah. That's— It's alright with me."

"I'll comm them right now," Christine Chapel says. "And Dr. McCoy is going to want to look at you." She smiles again, and maybe it's a trick of the light, but it's suddenly apparent how tired she looks—stress lines at the corners of her soft lips, dark circles underneath her striking green eyes. "It's good to see you again, Lieutenant Gaila," the nurse adds, and then leaves.

This is all well and good, but Gaila still has no idea how she got here.

Bones McCoy bolts in a few minutes later, haggard and red-eyed and basically looking no better off than Christine Chapel. Gaila knows his qualifications, but it's categorically impossible for her to think of him as Dr. McCoy: She's known him for too long as Jim's roommate, cranky and protective and far too attractive to have sex as seldom as he does. He's careful as he examines her, scanning her with the tricorder and checking her limbs, lungs, pulse, and skull with light fingers. When he seems to be satisfied, Gaila asks, "Can you tell me how I got here?"

"You don't remember?"

She shakes her head.

"You were in an escape pod," Bones says. "Somebody had sedated you—there was a hypospray jab in your neck and an anesthetic in your system."

"I don't— I think I would remember getting to an escape pod."

"I'm pretty sure you didn't get yourself there. Like I said, you were sedated, and—well, we can discuss the extent of your injuries later, but you had a broken pelvis and spinal fractures. It seems unlikely that you made it to the pod on your own."

"I didn't want to," Gaila whispers. "I was trying to fix the warp cores. To get us out of there, because I knew the whole crew wasn't going to make it to the shuttles. I remember— I remember feeling the ship get hit again, and that's it. I guess I must have fallen?"

"You fell, and from my best guess, about half the engineering rig came down on top of you. Somebody pulled you out and threw you in a pod—at least, that's the best I can figure."

"So are there others, from the Farragut..." Gaila trails off.

Bones sits down, and she finds herself reaching for his hand. He sighs. "Not many. Most of the shuttles either didn't make it to launch or were shot to pieces as soon as they did. Because you stayed behind, you got out fairly late in the game, probably late enough that the Narada had bigger fish to fry."

It strikes her as a simple truth: "I shouldn't be alive," Gaila says.

"Hell," Bones says, closing his other hand around hers, "I wouldn't be alive—none of us would—if Jim Kirk hadn't managed to provoke a Vulcan into throwing a temper tantrum and firing his fool ass onto an ice planet. But I do believe"—and now he's looking at her seriously—"that you were not intended to escape a brothel and the damn Orion Syndicate just to get taken out by some unhinged time-traveling Romulan on a mining ship."

Suddenly, unexpectedly, uncontrollably, Gaila starts laughing. Bones stares at her, but doesn't drop her hand, and when she finally calms down, she says, "I'm sorry. It's just...of all the ways I ever expected to die, an unhinged time-traveling Romulan on a mining ship really wasn't it."

"And you were right," Bones tells her. "The Enterprise blew the unhinged Romulan to kingdom come, and here you are in San Francisco."

There's a pause.

"We are just too pretty for the gods to let us die," Gaila says solemnly.

This time, Bones laughs, pleased and genuine. "Lord knows you are, Miss Gaila." His comm beeps, and he glances down at it. "That's Christine—Lieutenant Uhura's here. I'll send her on in and leave you alone—we can talk another time about what needs to happen over the next few weeks."

Probably a lot of therapy, physical and otherwise—Gaila decides to put it out of her mind for the moment. She squeezes Bones's hand before he gets up, and he gives her one of his rare smiles before leaving to let Nyota in.

Somehow, miraculously, they are alive.