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Bandaging hand

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~ on and off for a fair few hours in Paint Shop Pro 9 with a bamboo tablet. I have a huge amount of respect for anyone who can do comic art or the like, because it's sooooo hard, lol. I learnt a few things from drawing this though!

I promised this illustration to my friend Charlotte months ago (ooops, I’m not very quick with this). But hey, here it is now! It’s a drawing of a scene from my fic Home (archiveofourown.org/works/2920… where Spock and Kirk had to go undercover as space pirates for a while. Quoted the relevant scene below:

“Spock, the skin is falling off both your hands! You have to let me help you bandage them.”

Jim hadn’t been able to find any first aid supplies on Quol’s ship, so he’d torn up some strips of cloth, boiled them in water and irradiated them under UV light. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best he could do for now. The strips of cloth were in a large bowl between himself and Spock, who was sitting on his sleeping pallet.

Jim dropped his voice to a whisper, although neither Howard nor Chekov were in the room. “I know how sensitive your hands are. I promise I’ll be as careful as I possibly can.”

It hurt him physically just to look at the damaged skin, knowing how much pain Spock’s injuries must be causing him—pain that was no more visible on the pale face than any other emotion, though. Spock was ruthlessly suppressing the agony Jim knew he was feeling. ‘Pain is only in the mind, it can be controlled,’ Spock had said. But when Jim reached for the bandages in the bowl, Spock drew his hands closer to his body and shook his head slightly. Maybe he wasn’t really willing to test his limits on how much he could keep bottled up, Jim thought.

Jim rolled some of the bandages up into a ball. “See here. You can bite down on this. If the pain gets too much, just let it out and scream. This will muffle the noise. It’ll be days before we get back to the ship, ‘cause we’ve got to make sure we shake those pirates off our trail first.”

The Vulcan held out his raw hands, palms up-turned—they were dark green. Jim felt is heart squeeze in sympathy.

“Alright,” Spock said and opened his mouth just wide enough for Jim to place the bandages inside.

He was as careful as he could be, but Spock’s mask was starting to slip more with each added inch of cloth Jim wrapped around the bloodstained hands.

"I don’t think you know this yet, but we really were only seconds away from being caught by our pursuers. Your decision—it might well have saved our lives.”

The decision Spock had made had been to abort the slow, automated procedure and literally take the injection of the anti-matter rods into his own hands, not even wasting time to look for any safety gloves.

Spock’s hands were starting to shake.

“Nearly over.”

“Nnngh.”

Spock’s grunt was muffled through the gag. His eyes were closed in concentration—then another pained grunt.

“There , all finished,” Jim said.

Spock spat out the bandages.

“Thank you, Jim,” he panted.

He lay down on his back, his arms stretched out to his sides, careful to keep his palms from coming into contact with anything.

Lying down on his own sleeping pallet, Jim curled up with a blanket and watched the rise and fall of his friend’s chest.

“I’ll be right here if you need anything,” he said.
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MrDataTheAwesome's avatar
wow this is super awesome! I love the way you wrote the little story too! :D