He was dreaming.

It was a strange dream; part nightmare, but not in majority.

He would suppose, later, that it was only natural for him to be left with a vague sense of looking back at what he had once, in comparison to what he'd just shared.

Hikaru Sulu appeared in front of him, an apparition. Dark eyes, and not in the sense of their color; they stared him down and he stared back.

'Karu slipped the earpiece from behind his ear, and Harold flowed to him. Reaching up to put a hand to the side of his neck.

Their foreheads pressed together.

Eyes remained dark as they locked with Harold's own. Searching each other.

Sulu squinted; on Harold it was an expression of confusion. On Sulu, it was more ominous. Angry.

Shame colored his mind. He wasn't sure whose it was, but Harold insisted with a fired-off thought it shouldn't be his.

Hikaru tried to press it back on him; he met a wall.

Harold sighed; the light of it floated from his lips, touching the apparition and banishing it.

Hikaru Sulu snapped to nothingness like a popped bubble, and Harold's hand touched nothing, falling back to his side.

He was underwater; hair a mess above him, dim light shifting through the surface. He was fighting to swim upwards but found he breathed water as easily as air.

And in a second he was landed on his old couch, joint in hand. It tasted pungent and burned his lungs like the first few times he'd tried it. Kumar was somewhere, he wasn't sure. Maybe down the hall. He could hear his voice; he couldn't make out the words. They were fuzzy, like filtered through water.

Harold sighed, smoke tendril curling in the air.

Scotty was on his lap, making a face.

"Sorry." Harold waved away the smoke, notching the spliff behind his ear, still lit.

He leaned in to kiss his husband and found himself shotgunning an inexplicable lungful of smoke into Scotty's mouth, taken away on the inhale, his mind failing to note the improbability of that.

It was a long kiss. Echoing longer than the words should. Shared breaths.

He curled Scotty to his chest, cradling him as he breathed out. A cloud of vaguely rainbow-cast smoke mingling above their heads.

They were naked. There was some reason why they shouldn't be; wasn't Kumar here? Harold cracked open his eyes.

Oh.

They were home. Sort of. Old-home, a familiar bed from one reality thattaway. Bob snaked around them; little green vines wrapping them together at the hips and the chest. They rocked, all motion and sweat and love, vines meeting and entangling and wrapping them still tighter. There was no more smoke or smell of pungent fire. Just their own scent and the vague filter in of the dust of someplace abandoned months before.

They came, and Harold shut his eyes to it, letting it throb like a heartbeat through their living, moving vines.

Harold sighed. Everything went quiet.

It was dark, warm, wrapped up and covered over and safe.

He breathed.

The little dust devils of thought settled. His mind shifted on to the next dream.