@dearestblood sent masked mirror for a memory
Spock would have told you it is not logical to attempt to anticipate the process of a ritual you know nothing about. You would have expressed a similar sentiment, though not in so many words. You can't predict the future, so for god's sake, quit fretting. Still, that didn't stop you from assuming that the fal-tor-pan would have been painless in the way that a mind meld is. Disorienting, but easy in the way that it's out of your hands, guided along by those so much more experienced in the matter than you. You started to feel unease regarding your assumption only when they'd begun to express how anciently unfamiliar the whole process is. A little more than that when they'd dropped the convenient little bomb that it might kill you.
Wouldn't be the first time, you had thought, that Spock's Vulcan nonsense nearly got you killed. The dying is of little concern, in any case. You already faced one death the moment Spock went into that chamber, and this wouldn't be the first time you swapped your life for his, either. But you weren't anticipating how much it would hurt.
It felt as though your mind had been yanked from your body, thrown onto the red-tinged stone into so many shattered shards, picked up and shoved haphazardly back into one shape but a shape that was wrong. The memories were there, though not where they ought to be, the edges bleeding where they had been ripped apart from Spock, rubbed raw by grief and confusion. You know you have a daughter but have no idea how old she is; in one memory, she is an infant, in the next she is phoning into the ward you have been thrown in, hysterical with worry. If your mind had been crammed too full before, unequipped to handle a guest, it now felt too empty. You wake up not knowing how long it has been or who you are, drained of all your energy, blinking tears out of your eyes up at the wrongly-colored sky. Spock had survived. Somehow you could feel that more certainly than you could feel your own pulse. You suppose you must have survived, too, though some part of you feels like you're dying all over again when his eyes meet yours at the base of the altar and you see no recognition there.
He will regain them in time, the healers inform you, but they offer no reassurance that you will straighten your own thoughts back out any time soon. Amanda (and Sarek, who in some fashion he must have deemed logical seems as shaken at his son's death-and-rebirth as the rest of you) offers you (and Jim) a guest room in their too-hot dwelling. The rest of the Enterprise - former Enterprise - crew is similarly accommodated. You spend your days sleeping and thrashing in pain in equal measure, never certain of where you are when you awake. You could be in the Academy for all you know. In the sticky heat of an Atlanta summer. In the Vulcan desert where you grew up.
The healers don't know what to do with that. With the pieces of Spock that still seem to linger in your mind, though they certainly try to hunt them down, tearing through every part of your memory with almost careless abandon. The sessions do nothing but make you physically ill; Jim issues the order that they stop after what must be the twentieth time with a crippling headache and a nose bleed, and they seem almost happy to do so, or at least as happy as a Vulcan can get. They don't know what to do with you. The history of humans carrying katras is, essentially, woefully nonexistent, and the fal-tor-pan was up until now only a myth. Perhaps this is normal. Perhaps something went horrifically wrong and Spock will forever be incomplete, some part of his memory lodged in your head. Maybe some part of you is lodged in his. Maybe it's something important, some feeling or plain old basic information like your birthday. You can't remember your birthday. (It comes back to you four days later and is not much of a reassurance. It will roll around again in a month or so and at this rate you will be flat on your back, unconscious and hallucinating dying sehlats for the millionth time over when it happens, which is as good of a birthday as you can hope for when the world is still falling apart).
You grieve. You and Jim, mourning someone who is by all accounts still alive. Slowly, you have been permitted to see him again (you wonder if at first they were worried about your human emotions rubbing off on him; now, there is no other choice - Spock's strongest memories, those that will help him regain what he lost, are tied to the crew and the ship you lost burning up in the Vulcan sky). You find yourself torn in two, wanting desperately to affirm that he's alive again and wounded every time you're reminded that he isn't whole and hardly seems to be making progress. Any dialogue you try to resume falls flat. He no longer understands the way he used to speak to you. You cannot shake the feeling that you've done something wrong, that this was your fault, that you tainted him by holding his mind too close when you had it with you (you couldn't help it, at the time. It was all you had left). He may never be Spock again, not fully, and because you can't resent him for that you resent yourself instead. You imagine Jim must resent you, too. You can still feel echoes of Spock in the back of your mind and you feel guilty every time you allow yourself to cling onto that: Jim has no such opportunity. He spends his days trying desperately to save the rest of you from losing your positions, though there's no point left in serving without the Enterprise, and without Spock, who for all you know may never regain enough knowledge to return to his posting.
You wish you could tell Jim that the connection - whatever it is, this thing lingering in the back of your mind, the sort of almost-Spock you feel at times - isn't doing you any favors, as if that would make him feel any less left-out. That Spock is just as not-himself inside your head as he is outside in his own body. That his response is just as calculated and empty no matter how many times you think I love you, I love you and I loved you and I'm sorry I only said it when you were dead and I need you back. You return to grieving.
