I do not own House of Leaves. I suggest you all read it however. Fever, by Meiko.

"What the hell happened!" Bones growled.

"I have no idea! One minute he was welding in quadrant four, the next he had these two holes seared through his arm!" The shaking Machinery Specialist answered. He was quaking with fear. The man with red-hot burns straight through skin and bone was his brother.

"Did you see what burned him?" Bones maneuvered the wounded man's arm into a more comfortable position, dully noting the ridiculously hot temperature of the man's skin. The man's arm was red and swollen, the skin surrounding the two perfect holes puffy.

"He's not bleeding…" Talking to himself was done out of habit. He found it helped him work more efficiently. He's struggled with ADD for quite some time, not nearly as severely as Jim, but certainly to an extent. He is often plagued with rogue thoughts and as a result, a wandering mind. It keeps him awake. He'll curse to himself and attempt to think blankness, but eventually he'll give in to yet another sleepless night and throw off his sheets to rise and fix himself a strong drink in the hope of shuteye.

"Nurse Chapel! Come here!" He twitters around the outskirt of a stretcher, adjusting its settings to the needs of-"What's his name?" "Murin Adams"- Murin's condition. Christine hurried in, pushing her nurse's cap straightly on. "Why is it mussed in the first place!" Bones thought, agitated.

"Help me lift him over. And back the hell up! If you want me to help the kid I need operating space. Damn it!" He swore as they knocked the kids arm on an IV and he moaned loudly. They gently placed him as comfortably as they could despite the trauma to his arm and wheeled him into the operating room.

"Look at the wounds, Doctor. No bleeding."

"Really. Because, I, being a doctor, failed to notice my patient wasn't bleedin, Nurse.'" She gave him a withering stare.

"Don't you think there are more important things to worry about than the state of my headdress? Don't be petty, Leonard." He clucked angrily and she admonished him with a wave of her hand. He pretended to be professional.

Chapel experimentally dripped a droplet of healing salve on the burn. It fizzled and evaporated. She looked at Bones and lifted her eyebrows. "It also appears to have clotted. The blood is congealing, causing the pain and we might need to treat him for infection, but he has lost little to no blood. As if the metal, or poison possibly and most likely, was not only an inflammant but also of healing substance." Bones paused his busywork to process her words.

"A double edged sword."

This was unexpected. And probably had something to with Uhura. He whirled around and got to work.

***

After Sulu and Chekov had done all the damage possible at the bar, they drunkenly waved adieu to the beautiful, mysterious ladies of the enterprise and Chekov, for once, walked Sulu home because he himself was incapable of doing it alone.

Oh, the irony.

"See you, tomorrow Pavel, always a pleasure!" Hikaru was hanging off Chekov's shoulders like an affectionate monkey.

"You, my friend, are wery, wery drunk." Chekov laughed and gripped Sulu's arms forcefully as he weaved.

"Yes, you could probably say that." Sulu slurred, stumbling slightly. "I just want a pretty lady to love, you know?"

"I know." Pavel smiled reassuringly down at his best friend.

"I mean, c'mon! I'm a freaking pilot! Girls dig pilots! We sometimes wear…..cool goggles."

"Uh huh." Chekov chirped supportively.

"AND! And, I can fence! Awesome, right!" Pavel pulled them up next to Sulu's door panel and leaned him against the wall, still muttering forlornly to himself about, "the one who got away" or some such thing.

Americans.

"Vat ees your passcode?"

"I can't tell you! You'll be able to sneak in all sneaky like whenever you want!"

"I just vant to put you to sleep."

"Lies!"

"Please!"

"Sneaker! That's what you are!" Exasperated, Pavel dropped down onto one knee, eye level with a floor ridden Sulu and placed both hands on his friends shoulders.

"Leestin, I swear on the fencing code of…all fencing codes I vill never sneak into your room vhile ve are friends or you have permission to burn all my Russian books."

"Woaahhh. That is a serious promise. I know how you feel about that literature. Like your girlfriends." Blushing, Chekov knew he did not mean it rudely.

"Yees, it is serious." Pavel nodded his head solemnly. Sulu dramatically looked both ways in the hall to assure their privacy. Then he leaned forward and whispered something in his ear. Sighing in relief, he opened the door and they gimped their way into the room.

***

Kirk slept deeply and happily. Peaceful oblivion. He dreamt of his mother. Murmuring into the nightshirt of unconscious listeners, he apologized over and over again. His dream clouded and he could see the faces of women, beautiful women and the less fortunate women he had given the cold shoulder, and like the closing of the curtain to signal a finale, an end, they in turn turned away from him, and he saw only shoulders, the small of their backs, the nape of their necks, because he deserved no less.

He stared into the great emptiness of jilted affection, his fear, his enemy, a nightmare and awoke with a gasp. Breathing deeply, he collapsed against the pillow, the bed sheet billowing around him and he lifted his hand to catch the falling cloth.

***

"What's goin' on with my finest welder, eh? We need him down there!" Scotty burst into a somber atmosphere like a loud fart. Unwelcome. "What? What's with all the long faces?" He commented to an alien nurse with a particularly angular facial construction. She gave him a condescending glare and pointedly ignored him. He shrugged and trotted over to Bones.

"OYE!" Bones did not start or turn to him and curse. Couldn't be good when he earned that reaction. The pretty blond nurse pulled him aside with a delicate touch.

"He doesn't do well with being clueless. He's pretty much in his own world now." She apologized on his behalf because she understood the twists and turns, the questions without answers and the helplessness of being the finest doctor in Starfleet and not having even the slightest inkling of what was going.

"Well, please enlighten me, what's goin' on?" Scotty was worried about Murin. They'd been buddies since the fleet's training years, since their toddlerhood, to say, as engineers and Murin and his brother, Rajiv, had communicated with him even during his sentence in Delta Vega. They were named after the royal Indian princes and in a night of complete drunkenness and buffoonery, they had admitted to being royalty themselves. He could not have his princely best mate die today. That was not on his agenda, and he certainly didn't want to deal with any more friends getting hurt. It seemed to be a rising trend on the Enterprise.

"Murin isn't responding to any medical treatment. His burns have catalyzed his entire body's aging process. He is getting years older in minutes. Anything we do to try and help seems to speed it up. We can't even touch him. But believe me, we are doing all that is possible to try and solve the problem." Here she paused to rub his arm, eyes radiating comfort and ease. He liked her immediately and did find himself strangely sated. He nodded and crumpled into a chair beside Rajiv, who was cradling his head in his hands.

Scotty stood again and made his way to Murin's bed. Bones made no move until he was close enough to catch a glimpse behind the curtain when suddenly his arm shot out and he pushed him back.

"I'm sorry, medical personnel only right now. It's pretty disturbin'."

But it was too late.

Scotty had seen the grey hair and the frightening fast flash forward morph of his friends skin as it molded itself into kneaded bread folds only old age can bring. He stumbled back and brought his hand to mouth, proceeding to vomit into a trashcan near the door. Wracked with dry heaves, he began to cry as his own fear of aging and death and loss overcame him.

Aren't we all scared of growing old, shrinking into the role of whithered prune and fading from life?

***

Spock briskly took the halls as he hastily hurried to his apartment to finish what had heatedly begun twenty minutes earlier. Nyota hips bucking against him, her mouth sucking the tips of his ear as his fingers explore the crease of her firm buttocks, the feel of the cottony sheet contrasting with her satin soft skin. It was, of course, illogical for these physical interactions as they aspired neither to procreate nor eternally bond, but he had to admit it, it felt inexplicably pleasing.

He gracefully managed to greet a few cadets in the hall without alarming them at his insatiable lust. It was a great success no one died of a heart attack because he was fairly certain he had accidentally smiled at a female. The clatter of her belongings signaled she noticed but he was too intoxicated by hormones to respond or offer help.

He entered his quarters and called for Nyota. No one answered. He passed the wrecked living room and poked his head in his room, the bathroom, embarrassingly, even the closet.

He could not find her. He stood silently in the middle of the dark living room. He shifted his foot and it crunched on the glass. He did not make a move to leave, to close the door, to turn on the lights. He walked over to his couch and sat down, eyes black and fists clenched.

"Muss es sein?" He pronounced in perfect German, a tribute to the language he now knew thanks to Nyota. "Muss es sein…"

***

Chekov tucked an already snoring Sulu into his bed and tittered disapprovingly. Hikaru did not drink much but when he did, he was even more a lightweight than him! He exited his room, "Lights 0%. Alarm clock set." He skipped down the hall, waving enthusiastically to other cadets.

"Heelo!" "Hi!" "Good night!" "Vat are you doing avake! It ees sleepy time now!" He continued this way until he passed an old professor who gave him a menacing look. He did not say hello to that man. He tried to look stern and nod seriously instead. He was graced with a returned minuscule nod. He made it to his own room. He sat down on the bed with a relieved sigh.

Ah. To be alone. He stopped smiling and closed his eyes, merely breathing for two minutes. When he felt some of his stress strip away, he leaned back in his bed. He picked up his current novel, "House of Leaves", a Terran novel and extremely terrifying. The story of a Terran man, Will Navidson, who discovers something terribly wrong; their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. The novel is greatest piece of Earthly fiction he has ever gotten his greedy hands upon. He begins to read…..

"To get a better idea try this: focus on these words, and whatever you do don't let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page. Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can't see it, something is quietly closing in on you, so quiet in fact you can only hear it as silence. Find those pockets without sound. That's where it is. Right at this moment. But don't look. Keep your eyes here. Now take a deep breath. Go ahead, take an even deeper one. Only this time as you exhale try to imagine how fast it will happen, how hard it's gonna hit you, how many times it will stab your jugular with its teeth or are they nails?, don't worry, that particular detail doesn't matter, because before you have time to process that you should be moving, you should be running, you should at the very least be flinging up your arms-you sure as hell should be getting rid of this book-you won't have time to even scream.


Don't look.


I didn't.


Of course I looked.


I looked so fucking fast I should of ended up wearing one of those neck braces for whiplash." Chekov stopped reading and breathed deeply, exhaling slowly again. That passage was very heavy.

"Wery heawy." He said quietly, closing the book. It struck him that the thing Johnny Truant was speaking of was not really a monster, but in a garbled and indirect reference, space itself. Space, deep emptiness wanting you, wanting your life force, going for the jugular, going for the gold. He tossed the book away from the bed, suddenly very afraid.

Well, good luck sleeping now, Russian boy.

He stood abruptly and left the room, too frightened to be alone.

No one was in the halls. He needed a face. He scurried quickly down the hall, looking for a face, continually greeted with an empty corridor until he smelled something great.

"Vat ees that?!" His nose lifted and he was led willingly towards the mouthwatering aroma.

And he bumped, chest to chest, into Lieutenant Uhura.

And as he jolted her, she was jolted with two thoughts; firstly "He looks hungry. Yum." Which was of course Khalil and then her own, "He looks scared."

***

Well, not much happened here for Uhura, that is coming! Just felt I needed to give some other characters some attention. I don't like neglecting them because every character has so much life, so much vibrance! So here it is, as it is. I hope you enjoyed. Please review!

Also, "Muss es sein" means, "must it be?"