Nobis ✴︎ Pavel Chekov

Chapter Forty Six - Reading

"Irina is here," he mutters as soon as Emory leaves. "It may not go well if Irina found out about Emory like this. You should head back to your room. You have a lot of reading to do."

"Reading?"

"A lot of people wrote you letters after you disappeared. Irina started it I think, she wrote you a letter and left it by your door. Sulu and the captain followed. They put them all in a box for you I think. People needed some sort of closure. They're all people's favourite memories with you, how much they miss you. The ship was really shaken by your disappearance, Pavel."

"Thank you, doctor," Pavel mutters, a little dazed. McCoy accompanies him back to his room. He smiles as Pavel goes in. The box is on his bed, Sulu is still asleep. He closes his door and sits down, wondering where he should start. There are a lot more letters than he expected, maybe around thirty of them. In the bottom of the box, he finds one from Irina, he doesn't know if he wants to read it or not. The envelop is light blue and his name is written on the front in Russian cursive, unmistakably Irina's writing. He opens the envelope carefully and finds a stack of papers, a letter maybe five or six pages long.

'Dear Pasha,' he reads, swallowing a little already.

'I planned to pour my heart out one day and tell you everything, just not like this. Maybe I'll wake up from this nightmare but for now, here's everything I should have told you from the beginning.'

The next six pages go over everything that went on in Irina's head. Every regret, every night she'd stay up crying and even how she felt after they'd kissed both times they got drunk. She writes about how much she wishes she could remember the night they spent when he woke up in her bed. She wishes she could remember how it felt to be affectionate and intimate with him again. Pavel swallows. One of the pages relives her favourite memories of them, a date they went on a month or so before everything fell apart. He stops reading, realising he's getting teary. He puts the letter back into the box, not wanting to read anymore. He remembers getting hung up on her, even after she had cheated on him. Even after she had broken his heart.

Back in the kitchen, Pavel tells himself he has to eat something but can't really bring himself to. He stares at the replicator and sighs, leaning against the bench.

"I'm not used to seeing you here," Sulu admits, giving Pavel a weak smile. "It was awful, I hated the silence, I hated being alone in here. I only came in here to sleep, spent the rest of my time in rec rooms or the botany lab."

"I feel so terrible for what I put everyone through... It felt like a few seconds to me but the damage I caused... It's awful."

"Everyone feels sorry for you Pavel, no one blames you for what happened. Too many people are just relieved to have you back."

"Thank you," Pavel says gently. "I have a lot more letters to read. I started with Irina's but I only made it through the first few pages."

"Good luck. Everyone wrote those assuming you'd never read them. Those letters will be painfully truthful."

"That's what I've found so far. I don't know if I should talk to her about it or not. I think I might just leave it unless it comes up in conversation."

Sulu nods, smiling at him before he goes back into his bedroom. Pavel finishes reading the letter, lying back against the bed and wondering how he's going to get through all of the other letters. Just before he puts Irina's letter down and realises he never read the last line.

'I hope wherever you are now, you're at peace. I love you Pavel. Love, your Russian Queen.'

He remembers the inside joke about her being his Russian Queen. Alec caught him singing 'Ra Ra Rasputin' one time and teased him relentlessly about it. He loved joking about how Pavel was singing about Russia's greatest love machine and told Irina about it, against his wishes. Irina thought it was adorable, asking him if she was his Russian Queen, to which, of course, he replied yes. He'd call her his Russian Queen from then on and she loved it. He almost forgot about it entirely, his brain automatically shutting out most things Irina related after they broke up.

Pavel finds himself walking through the corridors of the ship with 'I love you, Pavel' clinging to his thoughts. There's no use of past tense, it's not unfiltered in any way. He's heard it from her before plenty of times but not since the night he walked in on her. He goes into the mess hall, scaring the absolute shit out of two of his friends on the way. They thought they'd seen a ghost, he apologises and explains the transporter mishap. He still has a lot of people to tell apparently and he doesn't really know to approach it. He finds Scotty in the mess hall and eats with him, a little worried about scaring anyone else.