6street

Title: Codependent (with the dead in a dead language)
Author: 6street
Rating: R
Warnings: none
Word count: 2566
Prompt: - Star Trek XI: Hikaru Sulu/Pavel Chekov, co-dependence/friends-with-benefits, "night after night, no questions asked"
Summary: Returning to an Academy with most of its cadets gone, Sulu and Chekov find unexpected comfort in one another.

Note: For echoinautumn.
Originally due Nov 5 (oops).
Bonus points to anyone who gets the musical reference in the title!

--



The Academy had offered free psychological counseling to all of its cadets after the Narada. Later, Sulu and Chekov confessed to each other that Dr. McCoy had approached them both and said, “I hope you go to the psych center soon, kid. If anyone needs his head shrunk after what happened up there, it’s you.” In the end, neither of them had gone.

Sulu was spending twice his usual hours in the botany lab, taking care of the dead cadets’ plants. Chekov had volunteered for the morbid task of sorting through personal effects to send back to families. Even though classes were suspended for the first weeks back on Earth, there was enough work to be done.

They didn’t speak for eleven days. (Later, they admitted to each other that they had both kept count.) For a while, Chekov spoke to no one at all, and ignored all the attempted comm links that poured in from Russia. He even avoided the Enterprise crew so he wouldn’t have to witness Commander Spock’s grief—by now invisible to everyone else, but Chekov felt certain he could see it in every movement and glance.

On the eleventh day, they were alone in a dining hall designed to seat two thousand. Sulu was washing a crop of Cadet Douglas’s newly ripened Andorian bushberries, and Chekov was sorting through the bagged and sanitized contents of Cadet Littell’s quarters on the Intrepid.

“I never thanked you,” Sulu began awkwardly, standing with the bowl cradled in his arms.

“Please don’t.”

“I heard you were cataloging. At 0400 hours?”

Chekov frowned up at him. “Yes. It is not as if I have to be up for class. And you are here, too.”

“Time, tide, and fragaria andoria wait for no man.” Sulu sat across from him, setting down the glass bowl of bushberries. “They’ll be spoiled in a few hours.”

“Are they so delicate?”

“Raised on Earth they are. I don’t think they’re worth the bother, but—Lou had rigged this crazy monitoring system for them. He got alerts to his PADD every fifteen minutes about their temperature and soil pH level. Last year he made the whole botany lab get up at 0600 to eat them at their peak. And you know the worst part? They’re vile. Just terrible. Sour, and adding sugar only makes them worse.” Sulu began to laugh.

“But you will eat them anyway?”

“Lou would be so angry if I let them go to waste.” He picked up one of the marble-sized, fuchsia berries and rolled it between his fingertips, staining his skin with its vivid juice. “Want to give me a hand?”

“Yes, I have to see if they are really so bad,” Chekov said bravely, reaching out and plucking a berry from the bowl.

On the count of three, they ate their first berries—Sulu grimaced and Chekov gagged. When Chekov finally managed to swallow and began to complain bitterly, Sulu just tossed another berry into his open mouth with unerring aim. Chekov whimpered and made a face like he was sucking on a hundred lemons at once, but they both took another and another, working their way through the heaping bowl and laughing and comparing their pink-stained tongues and fingers.

Sulu ate the last berry with great ceremony—“Here’s to you, Lou, you horrible bastard”—and then fetched them as many glasses of water as he could carry.

“Thank you,” he said lightly, gulping down water. “I thought I was going to have to eat them all by myself.”

“Your tongue would have shriveled up and dropped out.”

“Probably.” He grinned through berry-pink lips. “Can I help you with yours?”

“There are protocols to follow,” Chekov explained, pushing a bag towards him, “but it is mostly common sense. Look for Starfleet confidential material, evidence of criminal acts. Anything else, separate into priority one—highly intimate artifacts like journals or photographs, priority two—personal effects of potential sentimental value like clothes or books or toys, and priority three—generic items like hairbrushes or phasers.”

“It all gets sent to the family?” Sulu asked, hesitating to open the bag.

“Every last tissue and cotton swab, if they do not contain Federation secrets. One cannot know what might have memories for the family.”

“I don’t know if I’d want my mom getting my journal if I died.”

“I can tell you a secret, yes? I read all the journals and listen to all the logs first. It is not protocol, but I do. Sometimes I take things out, too, which is unethical, I know. But I imagine someone’s bereaved mama reading that entry about sex, or deep secrets, or awful things, and I think if I were dead, I would not want my papa to know all my secrets, and so I take things out.”

Sulu looked down at the inlaid wooden box in front of him, the pearl earrings and little toy elephant inside it. “I think I’d like all my belongings to be burned. This is morbid.”

“Do you have a document for in the event of your death?” Chekov asked, matter-of-fact.

“No.” Sulu tried not to think that if Chekov hadn’t been so fast, so brilliant, it would be his personal effects he’d be combing through in the middle of the night.

“Guess how many Academy cadets had one,” Chekov said, his face lighting up at the prospect of quoting statistics at him. “Two percent, Sulu, two. Ninety-eight percent of us thought we were immortal.”

“Did you have one?”

“No.”

“Do you have one now?”

“Not yet.”

They stayed in the dining hall until 0600, when the first of the breakfast crowd arrived. (Predictably, Commander Spock was there; he nodded gravely to them and Sulu thought he could feel Chekov cringing from across the table.) Then they scooped up Cadet Littell’s personal effects and retreated to Pavel’s room, where they admired her jewelry, cooed over pictures of her cats, and read her journals out loud to each other.

“I’m so sick of Mom always trying to make me pick sides between her and Dad--what do you think, Sulu, should that stay?”

“Keep it, her mother probably needs to hear that. Oh--Ricky gave me a pair of crotchless underwear and I acted like I was so mad but I was really pretending—I wore them all day under my uniform skirt and got soaking wet. I’m editing that out.”

Chekov had to muffle his laughter in his pillow.

“Is this disrespectful to the dead?” Sulu wondered aloud, lying down next to Chekov and placing the stuffed sehlat Cadet Littell’s boyfriend Ricky had given her between them.

“This is the most respectful thing I can think of,” Chekov answered seriously, nuzzling the sehlat with his nose. It smelled faintly of perfume. Cadet Littell had been an engineering major, and Sulu had never spoken to her, but he thought he recognized the face in the photographs, maybe from the library or the dining hall.

Chekov’s eyes closed. Sulu briefly considered leaving, but somehow the very idea required herculean effort, so instead he shut his eyes and enjoyed his sour mouth from Lou Douglas’s prize bushberries and the scent of Portia Littell’s perfume.

--

When Sulu awoke, he expected to feel awkward—in bed with Chekov, a man (a boy?) he hardly knew, cuddling a dead girl’s stuffed toy, waking up at 1500 hours as if time had lost all meaning. Instead, he felt rested for the first time in perhaps years.

Chekov was already awake, huddled up next to him and poring over a book of poetry from Cadet Littell’s boyfriend.

“Good morning,” he said cheerfully.

--

The next day—although it didn’t really seem like day or night anymore—at 0400 hours, Sulu checked the dining hall, just in case. Chekov was there, sorting through a pile of isolinear chips.

“Cadet Russell Okoye, command track, audiophile. I think he had excellent taste in music,” Chekov said, by way of a greeting.

Sulu stared at him for a long moment—the dark circles under his eyes, his untamed curls, all alone under the bright lights of the dining hall. “Let’s go listen,” he suggested.

They didn’t make much headway in sorting his belongings that night, but they sprawled in Chekov’s bed and listened to Andorian post-post-melodic punk and read Cadet Okoye’s unsent letters.

The modest Academy bunks were not designed for two, but Chekov was loose-limbed and flexible as putty, so Sulu lay on the bed and Chekov poured himself around him, arching and draping and somehow fitting perfectly.

That night, Chekov learned that Sulu snored, and he experimented with rolling him onto his side or front like a ragdoll to see if that would quiet his breathing. Sulu was a heavy sleeper and just kept snoring. For some reason, Chekov was reassured by that.

--

The next night, Sulu skipped the dining hall and went straight to Chekov’s quarters, where they talked for five hours about a holovid series about SpaceFleet officers they had both watched obsessively as kids. They didn’t mention any of their dead classmates, instead laughing about the exploits of the lovable maverick captain and confessing their childhood idols. Sulu laughed until Chekov hit him when Chekov admitted he had owned a full SpaceFleet uniform set and worn it to bed every night for a year.

--

Classes began again, and all that changed was the appointed hour for Sulu to arrive at Chekov’s room, from 0400 to a sedate 2300.

“I’m the only one left in advanced warp mechanics,” Chekov said one night. “I do not understand why they still teach it. Professor Tranh shows up in uniform and lectures at the podium, using the microphone, and I sit alone in the auditorium. It is terrible. I am afraid he will set out 47 final exams at the end of term.”

Although they had never discussed it, they only met at night—night after night, no questions asked. During the day, Chekov still kept to himself and avoided the Enterprise crew. Sulu spent most of his time with Uhura, nervously discussing the news (“The Vulcan colony planet won’t be suitable for habitation for another year”—“The Romulan Star Empire won’t formally disavow Nero’s actions”—“They say Starfleet recruitment rates are less than 20% what they were last year”) or Kirk, fantasizing about ships, promising each other they’d be stationed together, reliving each moment of triumph as if that could blind them to all the empty seats everywhere.

But nights were theirs. They never discussed anything of import. Sometimes they played 3D chess (Chekov always won) or watched old holovids, occasionally in Russian with Chekov’s halting, laughing translation. Mostly, they lay in bed and lazily nosed at each other, talking about whatever came to mind. Different kinds of swords. Why Andorians are blue. The ideal configuration for helm consoles. How they took their tea (Sulu straight, Chekov with lemon and gobs of artificial honey). Chekov sleepily babbled, halfway in English, about theoretical temporal mechanics.

They talked about their families often, although Chekov’s father still called every day and Chekov still did not answer.

When Sulu finally brought Chekov to his family’s house only a short distance from campus, Chekov recognized his sisters on sight and had to try hard not to laugh about the stories he wasn’t supposed to know.

Aki, the eldest, used to fence with Hikaru using their mother’s rolling pins, and was now massively pregnant and still quite likely to swat at Hikaru whenever he passed by.

Mitsuko, seventeen, had thick black eyebrows like caterpillars and Hikaru’s habit of clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth while she was thinking. She had been planning to apply to Starfleet Academy her whole life, and at age five had insisted for months on end that everyone call her Admiral Sulu. After the Narada, she had decided she’d like to study anthropology at UC Berkeley instead.

Mari, the littlest, was mortally offended when Chekov called her Marie instead of Mari, but immediately forgave him when he nicknamed her Masha instead.

Mrs. Sulu had attempted to make borscht to please Chekov, and although he had never liked beets, he ate three bowls and thanked her so profusely she blushed.

That night, when everyone else was finally asleep, Sulu crept down the hall and stole into the guest room. He burrowed under the covers next to Chekov, who clutched at him fiercely and whispered, “Thank god, thank god.” Their foreheads pressed together, their legs twined, and Chekov clung to his waist so firmly that he left bruises.

Before they left the next day, Mitsuko caught his wrist and whispered, “I’m glad you’re alive, Hikaru.”

--

“He’s the last one,” Chekov said, spreading out the plastic bags. “Conrad Bloom of the Intrepid.”

Sulu packed their luggage for the Enterprise while Chekov catalogued Cadet Bloom’s belongings. He folded Chekov’s new uniforms in neat squares, trying to think about Chekov wearing them on the bridge, not about Chekov somehow performing his own postmortem, cataloguing his own personal effects to send them to some lonely town in Russia.

“On the ship, will we still--?” Chekov asked.

“Still what?”

“Be—friends. That is not the right word.” Chekov scowled down at Cadet Bloom’s high school football trophies.

“I don’t think I could end this if I tried,” Sulu laughed lightly. “I’m folding your underwear, Chekov, I think we’re beyond friendship.”

An hour later, when Sulu lined up Chekov’s luggage by the door, Chekov finally set aside the neatly organized bags, all that was left of Cadet Bloom. They tumbled into the unmade bed together, Chekov nuzzling his shoulder eagerly. “Our last night here,” he said unnecessarily.

“You should call your dad before we leave Earth tomorrow.”

Chekov stared up at him, then nodded faintly. “Stay.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“I do not care if it is a good idea. Stay.” Chekov stood and began to set up his console for a video conference, with the grave expression of a man marching to his own funeral.

Sulu fidgeted nervously in the background of Chekov’s video call, making his bed and setting up a stasis field for the transport of the potted wild chamomile he had given him. The face on the screen bore a strong resemblance to the younger Chekov, especially around the deep-set eyes, and Sulu couldn’t help but wonder if Chekov would eventually be able to grow such a magnificent beard.

The entire conversation was in Russian, so Sulu wasn’t sure what they discussed. Chekov and his father shouted at each other a lot, but by the end of the call, Chekov had a tiny, genuine smile.

“Are you glad you did that?”

“Do not be so smug,” Chekov grumbled, elbowing him.

That night, they lay for the last time in Chekov’s narrow bed. Chekov buried his face in Sulu’s neck and didn’t speak all night.

It had been less than two months since the Narada, and Sulu couldn’t imagine spending a night without Chekov ever again. Staring up at the ceiling through Chekov’s curls, he wondered if this was healthy, or if he should have taken Dr. McCoy’s advice. Then Chekov mumbled something incoherent and grabbed a fistful of his shirt, rubbing his cheek against his chest, and Sulu forgot how to doubt anything.