Harold Lee didn't know it, but his dream had been real. Well. Montgomery Scott had not in fact been sent to Harold Lee's temporary bed from the heavens, but the images that had passed over his mind were of a man he would meet years later.

Centuries, in fact.

It didn't register, those first few months of knowing Scotty, that Harold had seen him before. Nor had the name seemed especially familiar, though in his terrorized, exhausted sleep Harold had known it for the duration of their cuddle.

Still. There were nights.

More nights than before, if only because Harold still found himself awake now and again, eyes drawn compulsively to the door as a momentary, irrational, coursing fear spiked through him that someone might still come and take his fiance back. He would push the fear aside and opt for a blurry, barely-lit mapping of his lover's face.

It was then that he thought he could catch it. Vestiges of something he had no right to remember, something lost to fitful sleep and terror and the relief of a brief respite before taking up the mad, crazed bolt toward the slim chance of freedom. Out of place, out of time.

He fought to pin it down. It was as though there was something under lock and key in his mind, trapped under frosted glass or encased in imperfect crystal. A faint outline, blurred color and detail that he could give no focus or try to touch but only ever glance off.

It wasn't the only thing his mind had seen fit to bind in rock and hide from him. Protect from him, or perhaps from the universe.

He couldn't reach it. So many turning points, and he couldn't reach them. How the hell had he gotten on that ship in the first place? For that matter, how had he come to find himself on a beach where anything could be handwaved, and not questioned it? Harold had just... been there, he never thought a thing of it. As natural as breathing.

And there's a phrase he's used before.

But he hadn't just been there. He was there, and now that Harold looked back, he was different. Something stripped from him, something added in its place, he knew now that what he was in the first days of the beach was not what he'd grown to be in the days that lead him there.

Oh. And that realization did mess with him. He twitched at the thought. Had someone else been inside his head? Had Hikaru done something, changed something in him? Some little sabotage? Why had he been so willing to throw himself down and beg for affection? What new element had left him so pathetic that hadn't been present the days before? It didn't feel so different as to be not-him, but it was... out of balance. Skewed. Dialed up beyond any reasonable level, for no good cause. Where had it come from?

His mind had encased it into that stone and hidden the answer from him. Around it had been built the person laying now in a bed beside his lover. What would Harold Lee have been without it?

Would he have come this far?

His crystal, apparently, loved company. Buried inside it, too, was that very same mental connection that he now worried had locked these things away from him. Hikaru Sulu had appeared on their beach, and when he had, Harold had felt no connection. Even when they'd both been laid out defenseless, one unconscious, the other drugged, they hadn't poured back into each other's minds as should have been natural. There was nothing.

Wait. Just-- wait.

Appeared. Harold couldn't remember. Where had Hikaru been, when he hadn't been there? Where had any of them gone when they just faded away? Where had he, and why had he stopped fading away, finding himself on their beach every moment of his life? And just why the hell hadn't Harold questioned that before?

Some memories just wouldn't stitch together properly. He was terrible with timelines, but he hadn't always been. These days he had a certain amount of trouble structuring his memory into one-thing-after-another. It was as though the passage of time had been bent back on itself. Perhaps a crack was a better metaphor; the jagged lines of it cutting across his life from a central point of damage. It was easier to grasp older events in order. That wasn't an accident, or absentmindedness. Yet another thing locked infuriatingly away in a blur.

There had always been something a little strange about the life Harold Lee led, as mundane and boring as he'd always tried to be. Things happened to him. Surreality came at him in waves; his existence had been mind-numbing boredom spaced out with jaw-dropping, often frightening sequences of events that defied logic and sometimes even physics.

So often had the universe poked him that he'd learned to take it, over and over again, until he could take no more. He would explode, with words or action or emotion or sometimes just a scream into the air left to bounce off trees or the inside of his own skull. Reach out and somehow change the game, even if only in his own mind. Whatever this was, this rock stubbornly taken residence in his mind, it had inspired the reverse. Now, Harold Lee was doing the poking. Tapping at it, banging on it, wanting in, wanting so desperately to see and understand and know.

Eventually, in the way of Harold's bizarre existence, he was sure the universe would be willing to take no more.

Mustering some measure more determination, he bore down on the memories, and idly wondered what an explosion in one's own mind would feel like. Forgetting, for a moment, that he already knew.