Overwhelmed by pain and rapidly losing blood, Spock is gamely resisting the need to pass out. His vision fades as he's jostled and recovers once he is allowed to settle, in and out as he is moved. He cannot identify any one injury, nor separate them in his mind, yet he must remain awake.

Given the manner of his "landing", if he enters a comatose state, it is unlikely that he will ever be located again. Any reasonable person would presume that crash had taken his life, Captain Pike included, and a shattered Romulan corpse would be indistinguishable from his own. Without Starfleet medical intervention he may never recover.

Maintaining his consciousness is therefore less a preference and more a strict requirement.

Eventually he is placed upon a biobed, a fact he becomes aware of only once his eyes adjust to the lights directly above him. He recognizes neither the interior structural design of the ship, nor the faces of the people above him. His only solace is that they are, at least, humans. He is familiar with human ingenuity and stubbornness and that familiarity comforts him somewhat.

The doctor above him is focused and moving swiftly--it is the look of a man familiar with triage. He has seen it on both Dr. M'Benga's face and Christine's. Spock's attention drifts but, somehow, through the smothering haze of agony, he feels the brace of a hand against his lower abdomen. For a flicker of a moment, he can detect the thoughts of the human working on him. He lacks the ability to speak at the moment, but he has retained some movement. Spock manages to move his hand and catches the doctor's wrist in a vice-grip.

There is shrapnel in his lower abdomen, he cannot feel it but he can see it through the surgeon's eyes. He intends to cut it free and suture his large intestine and abdominal wall to staunch the bleeding. Spock cannot speak, but he can share some of his fragmented thoughts--that piece is extremely close to his heart. His heart is in his lower abdomen, right beneath the surgeon's hand as are his major veins and arteries. Cutting into that section hastily will unquestionably result in his death.

Spock does as instructed even as his ribs object. With concerted effort he manages to release the surgeon's wrist. His stillness adheres to the letter of the instruction, though it is largely due to an inability to move rather than any effort on Spock's part. The desire to close his eyes and pass into unconsciousness is considerable but the danger remains. He settles instead for staring up at the bulkhead.

He has been provided no pain medication nor anaesthesia. He is grateful for the latter but the former does not occur to him until the surgeon resumes. The new pain is sharp and excruciating but, oddly, not much worse than the pain he is already in. The pointed nature of the shrapnel being removed and sutures being set actually makes it easier to remain awake. Tracking their progress ends up being the only thing Spock can focus on.

Spock's endeavors to remain awake are becoming clumsy and failing to meet his current need. The surgeon and his nurse work quickly--or perhaps they don't--it is difficult to hold onto a sense of time at the moment. The sutures are holding his abdominal wall together very securely. It feels too tight to mean anything else.

When his vision is once again eclipsed by the human doctor, Spock finally catches the title he's using. It's confusing for a moment, but he doesn't have the focus to devote to it, not when other questions follow. Only medical supplies rated for humans--Spock's effort in thinking plays out over his face, brows dipping as he concentrates.

Spock can't quite see where his hands are, not without a point of contact, but when he clumsily swings his arm he does connect with a limb. There is no urgency this time to necessitate force, and that's fortunate because he's lost enough blood that force isn't an option any longer. His fingers find the skin of the Doctor's forearm and--how does he communicate this?

The first thing his mind supplies is a conversation from a very long time ago, muted by time and distance. He'd fallen and broken one of the bones in his shin. He was too young to recall which, specifically, but the memory is warped by the pain. At the time, it was the worst he had ever felt. He was focused on his leg, how he felt small and lonely, dwarfed by the adult sized biobed in ShiKahr. His father was offworld, his mother was there and she was arguing with a doctor about what medication he could and couldn't have.

The doctors protested her intervention and she almost began shouting, demanding they look up her files for all the blood culture tests they'd run before he was born. When she was finally frustrated enough, she demanded a specific drug be synthesized, one that had cleared all the tests against his blood. The doctors argued it was too strong for a child but she refused to hear it, declaring their reluctance to use established factual evidence as illogical.

She got her way and he had no adverse reaction--dragging the name out of his memory is a challenge; he wasn't skilled in English or with complex human words at the time. It was something like Marh-fun. Morfin? It was a human drug. He'd not needed anything like it since. The rest of the memory is a haze, but certainly not a painful one.

Spock's perception goes dull and soft once the doctor provides the medication pulled from that decades old recollection. Whether from blood-loss or the release from pain, Spock finally reaches the end of his ability to grasp at consciousness. It slips away from him like something tangible and, once he's out, all of the tension in his face and limbs collapses and melts away.

His unconsciousness is largely without interruption. He doesn't dream, save for fleeting vignettes that appear and vanish without leaving any lasting impact. It is impossible to know if he has failed, if he has fallen into a coma or healing torpor, and the Enterprise has left him, presuming his death. He cannot hope it is otherwise, not in senseless sleep, but the darkness of his mind lessens as he rests, fading from looming oblivion to simple eigengrau.

When Spock awakes his last moments of consciousness are burned into his perception. Though his sleep was without issue, this is not unlike waking from a nightmare, still caught in the tangle of his previous pain. He draws a sharp, gasping breath and lurches upright, eyes open and unseeing. He regrets the dramatic movement immediately as his everything goes white, as his blood rushes from his skull. He doesn't swoon but it's a near thing.

It takes several excruciating seconds to for his mind and vision to clear. When they do, he is assailed by the sounds of the monitor behind him alerting to his spiking heart-rate. The sound is unfamiliar, but he cannot quite place why.

Spock is, to put it mildly, disoriented. The only thing familiar about this place is the doctor before him and, frankly speaking, "familiar" is something of a stretch. He reclines as the man presses him back, however, as there is no logical sense in disregarding his expertise now. His assurance, however, pulls the splintered totality of Spock's attention in an instant.

"The Enterprise?" Spock repeats.

This? His gaze darts quickly around the streamlined room--the angular utilitarian design is reminiscient of the Enterprise, yes, but this is not a room aboard the ship. This man is not one of the crew.

"How long was I incapacitated?" he asks with something like dawning horror. It does not occur to him that the time between his arrival in this sickbay and now, by necessity, could not be significant. The human alongside him does not appear to have aged.

Nine hours?

The sheer impossibility of that answer has Spock reeling. His expression dips with concentration as he works to backtrace an explanation for how he ended up here. He recalls the Romulan attack vessel, the escaping ship, the collision and crash, and even the majority of his own surgical intervention. The parts are sequential but somehow disparate. Spock cannot begin to decode them, not until he names another ship.

"My ship? The Sh'Rel?" Spock repeats, his attention shifting again to the man at his side. Spock requires time to parse all of this out, but this man had definitely saved his life. Spock could provide what answers he had in the meanwhile, regardless of his lingering disorientation.

"Impact with the Romulan vessel and the subsequent emergency landing resulted in the total destruction of both crafts," Spock recounted. "I--this is the ship that was fired upon?"

It seems likely.

"We are currently...or I was in low orbit over the moon of R-3472, researching anomalous readings. I am uncertain where we are at present."

The more information Spock recieves, the more apparent the actual underlying strangeness of the situation becomes. He had not possessed quite enough pieces to assemble the parts into a whole, but with the descriptions of 'his ship', Spock gets a firm grasp on the astronomically unlikely nature of his current situation.

Had he not experienced multiple concurrent timelines himself, he likely would not have been able to make the mental leap required to reach the accurate conclusion.

"I...suspect that you have mistaken me for someone else," Spock answers diplomatically and regards his medical tricorder. It seems similar enough to what Spock is accustomed to.

"May I?" he asks, gesturing awkwardly for the device.