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Part 1 of The Albatross
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2023-07-29
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2024-02-11
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Like the Argonaut

Summary:

After more than ten years on the Enterprise, Spock finds himself starting over again when his beloved Captain Pike is replaced by a young, new captain named James T. Kirk, who has a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. What’s more, his few remaining friends onboard, Nurse Chapel and Lieutenant Uhura, are barely speaking to him. If that weren't enough, Dr. M’Benga, the best doctor in the fleet and the only doctor he trusts, has retired and left sickbay in the hands of a new CMO, Dr. Leonard McCoy, who he suspects at best is a chaotic mess of emotionalism and human bias and at worst is a Section 31 agent with a dubious agenda.

Spock has always prided himself on his emotional control, taken comfort in the serenity logic can provide. But as he sets off on a new five-year mission, he begins to question if what he’s always done is still - or was ever - enough to keep himself and the Enterprise together.

Notes:

Summary: A Spones retelling of TOS blended with recent new Star Trek canon (Discovery and Strange New Worlds) and older deep cuts (from The Animated Series, tidbits of Vulcan lore from Enterprise, Voyager, TNG, etc.) that attempts to answer the question: Why did Spock resign his commission and attempt to complete the Kolinahr, a Vulcan ritual to purge all emotions and sever all bonds, after the five-year mission?

Alpha-canon compliant with some light twenty-first century updates to TOS scripts. (It’s gayer and less sexist?) Let’s just say I hold myself to an even higher standard of continuity than Alex Kurtzman appears to in actual new canon. Beta-canon aware when it suits me.

Content notes will be added by chapter!

Full draft mostly complete!

Chapter 1: [Meta] First Officer's Log, Supplemental, Or, a Changelog

Summary:

A record of changes to the fic to reflect new canon in SNW season 2. I will both indicate changes I made as well as elements I have not retconned into the story yet because it would be too disruptive. (Fortunately, this hasn't happened yet!) Spoilers, obviously!!

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

1.29.24

Prologue: Philosophically, out to lunch!

Summary of Changes: I changed Spock's recollection of his history with Nurse Chapel in his flashback to "The Naked Time" to reflect that fact that they'd had a more involved relationship.

Notes: Based on their relationship in TOS and the introduction of a more substantive relationship with T'Pring in Season 1 of SNW, I'd assumed that Spock had been messy with Chapel and sent mixed messages when his romance with T'Pring eventually fell apart. After the events of S2, I'm not sure where they're going with the two of them that would result in the specific dynamic in TOS. TBD.

Original: 

Still, after all those years, after all he had done to hurt her in the aftermath of his relationship with T’Pring, which itself had been an agonizing prelude to the humiliating coda that had been his first pon farr.

Chapter 2: Playthings

Summary of Changes: When Spock and Kirk discuss Yeoman Rand's career trajectory, Spock originally suggests that Kirk talk to La'an as though Kirk and La'an don't know each other. As of S2, they definitely do, so I've tweaked it slightly to account for that.

Original:

“Are you acquainted with Commander Noonien-Singh? She serves as Captain Ortegas’s first officer on the Reliant.”

“Only by reputation - I know Ortegas talks her up like she hung the moon in the sky. She was chief of security on the Enterprise several years ago, so I assume you know her as well?”

“Affirmative. I know she has mentored several enlisted crew members who now have careers in security and had an unusual trajectory in operations herself, though she did go through the Academy at one point. I think she may know more about Rand’s options.”

Chapter 4: In the Pink

Summary of Changes: I once again make the claim that Spock has never had a hangover, which is now not canon. 

Notes: I cannot believe how much that joke about Spock having a hangover from bloodwine in S2 of SNW is cramping my style.

Original:

Even on the rare occasions Spock had been intoxicated he had never experienced a “hangover”: coming down from the spores was probably the closest he’d come, if he understood the human experience.

Summary of Changes: Kirk tells Spock a story about finding out Carol Marcus was pregnant after the fact. That became not canon at the very end of S2 SNW when he reveals to La'an that he knows Carol is pregnant and they're "trying to make it work."

Notes: Idk why SNW does this much editorializing: I thought my interpretation was valid based on Wrath of Khan (where it does not seem like Jim was ever involved with David's life). Oh well.

Original:

He looked up briefly and then down again. “She was a scientist, brilliant, older. So brilliant even the Vulcans wanted her on the mission. Gorgeous, blonde, just… I did what I always do. She found me exciting, endearing, and isn’t it such a shock that Jim Kirk is secretly a bit of a bookworm, actually thinks. I was crazy about her, and I thought she was crazy about me too. Then I did something stupid and was grounded on Cerberus. She was so angry with me; I couldn’t make any sense of it. When I got back, she was gone. She didn’t leave a note, nothing. Didn’t call. So neither did I.”

Spock remained quiet, waiting.

“Then I get a field promotion. All of a sudden I’m captain of the Farragut, the youngest Starfleet captain ever. I’m getting some fucking medal, on Earth, and I see her, across the street, with a little boy who looks just like me. She sees me, and I can just tell she was panicking. That’s when I knew, for sure. I called her of course, and she didn’t deny he was mine. She didn’t want me to see him. It sounded so reasonable at the time.”

7.28.2023

Chapter 1: Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space

Summary of Changes: Originally, Dr. M’Benga was with the Enterprise during the Klingon War, and had an outsider’s perspective on medical service during the war, although he still had contempt for doctors who did not serve on the frontlines. As of 2x01 and 2x08 of Strange New Worlds, this would no longer be canon, as Dr. M’Benga very much did fight on the frontlines of the Klingon War (as did Chapel). The change I made to his conversation with Spock about McCoy's wartime service is right now fairly superficial - I may have to rethink M’Benga’s portrayal overall, but it may not be super necessary for this story. 

Notes: I’m a bit peeved by the M’Benga direction they went in for season 2. Having him be a Klingon War veteran is fine, even good (though… where was the foreshadowing in season 1??), but having him also be a… doctor-assassin super soldier? What is that? What does that even mean? I say this despite “Under the Cloak of War” (2x08) being one of the best episodes of the season.

Original: 

Dr. M’Benga looked very grim. “While I was encountering novel life forms and saving the day in my state-of-the-art lab when we were off who-knows-where during the war, doctors from Leo’s generation were elbows deep in guts on the front lines, where the Klingons considered medical frigates to be military targets.”

M’Benga scowled before continuing. “I say doctors, but I mean medical staff. A lot of doctors in his cohort, MD-PhDs like him, the ones who had ambitions of making their mark as scientists , pulled strings to get reassigned off the front line, where no one got any research done, certainly. They were only allowed to go into defense research or Section 31 when that bullshit still existed, as no one got approved for civilian rotations like we usually do, obviously. McCoy’s the only psych PhD his age I know of who hasn’t worked on mind-control, behavior modification, and memory suppression, or whatever crypto-fascist Dr. Frankenstein nightmare Section 31 had their psychologists doing. Those vultures would rather work on weapons that kill or break people or on countermeasures to doomsday weapons that theoretically could exist, instead of just being doctors trying to save people who actually did exist. We saw that in a lot of applicants for the CMO post. A lot of research fellowships, names on big defense or counterintelligence projects, but barely any trauma and triage work, let alone in deep space. But on a personnel record, all it says is ‘wartime service.’”

Chapter 11: Backdoor Pilot

Summary of Changes: Spock claims he’s never had a hangover after he wakes up from his misadventure as a vessel for Ambassador Kollos in “Is there in Truth No Beauty?”. As of 2x01 of SNW, this is no longer canon.

Notes: Of all things. I think this ep aired like the day after I posted this chapter.

Original: 

Although Spock had never had a “hangover,” he assumed it was something like his experience upon finally waking and leaving sickbay. 

Notes:

A changelog is a summary of updates and fixes to software that is currently already in production and out in the world. I would apologize for the tech jargon, but this is literally Spock, so...

Chapter 2: [Meta] First Officer's Log, Supplemental, Or, a Changelog

Summary:

Some Vulcans will literally go to Talos IV with their estranged half-brother before purging all emotions on the Plains of Gol instead of going to therapy.

Notes:

Content Note:
Discussion of mental illness from the perspective of someone with a degree of internalized stigma, discussion of spirituality.

See further notes at the end.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

“'But tell me, tell me! speak again,
Thy soft response renewing—
What makes that ship drive on so fast?
What is the ocean doing?’”
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"


 

[Stardate circa 2270: Mutara Sector, Beta Quadrant; Talos System, Alpha Quadrant]

 

On the fourth day Spock spent waiting at the rendezvous point, a vision came to him. His choice of discreet but solitary coordinates, under cover of the nebula’s static discharge, may have accounted for this and other deviations in his meditation practice. Perhaps the associations he had with the Mutara system and his last bout of “madness” accounted for the nature of these deviations: paranoia.

During several sessions of contemplation he had been overcome with the sense of a not-living, not-dead presence, as though the atmosphere of the shuttle and the space beyond itself were contemplating cosmogenic initiation and decline, the progression of explosions in supermassive black holes galaxies away and projected courses of quasar outflows. Although the haunted feeling of these episodes seemed new, it wasn’t as though he hadn’t been distracted from meditation by thoughts of astrophysics since he was a small child. This time was different. This time he saw something. However, although the cultivation of sensation and image in meditation was by no means encouraged, such things were known to happen. Spock had never admitted that this happened to him more than the average Vulcan. Probably.

In the vision, he was still in his small civilian shuttle, fast and spare, no extraneous comforts. The difference in his surroundings was a black cat, wearing what appeared to be a bejeweled collar, walking across the navigational console. It looked good-natured, he thought, Lewis Carroll's text arising in his mind like an axiom: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so he felt that it ought to be treated with respect.

“First, I would ask you where I ought to go,” he said to the cat, who paraded around the console, tail straight and proud, “and you would say that depends a good deal on where you want to get to. At which point I would say that I don’t care where, and you would say: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go. I then clarify that I do not care where I go as long as I get somewhere. You reassure me, say that I am sure to do that, if only I walk long enough.”

The cat sat at attention, wrapping its tail around its paws with great dignity, its green, green eyes staring at him, a feline condescension. I’ve often seen a Vulcan without a grin, she said to him without making a sound, but a grin without a Vulcan! A most curious thing. And Spock wondered when it was, exactly, that he’d disappeared.

His long-range sensors chirped a warning, and he brought himself back to the cockpit, which was the same as before, just without a cat in it. He recognized the transponder signal when a sleek cruiser dropped out of warp and hailed him.

“This is Spock,” he said anyway. “Please identify yourself.”

The view screen flickered on, a sculptural, impish face filling the screen, a disconcertingly wide smile spanning from pointed ear to pointed ear, under tousled brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard.

“Baby brother,” said Sybok.

 

~~~

 

“Let me summarize,” said Sybok, perched precariously on the arm of the captain’s chair, where his partner, an amused Angel, lounged. Spock regretfully noted that both he and the taller Vulcan were wearing almost identical tight, black leather pants, although he was not, at least, wearing a neon color-blocked crop top. Even if it did work. And there was nothing wrong with his beige tunic, anyway. “You’ve asked me to come meet you in secret to request passage to Talos IV, a restricted system. The same system you broke into twice, the first being when you were a fugitive from a psychiatric facility wanted for murder and the second time being when you almost got the death penalty in a court martial. You wish to visit this world so that you can spend time with Christopher Pike, your long lost love, to seek resolution before returning to Vulcan to attempt the Kolinahr.”

“I believe I stated that Captain Pike is a mentor and a friend,” Spock replied, “but in essence, yes.”

“And why would I do this?”

“The Talosians possess susceptive psionic powers that may appeal to you, both experientially and as a subject of study,” he said, having thought this over a great deal. “I also considered the fact that you would find my request… diverting.”

“I don’t know,” said Sybok, folding his arms, bouncing his leg, “I don’t know if I should do this. I may be the most wanted man on Vulcan, but you are my baby brother. I feel a sense of responsibility.”

“Although the restrictions on visiting Talos IV are severe,” said Spock, “I have found their enforcement ultimately lax, and while the Talosians are not harmless, they are generally benevolent. In their own way.”

“Oh,” said Sybok, “not that part. We’re obviously going to Talos IV; it’s been on my list for ages. I meant letting you go off and try to do the Kolinahr after.”

Spock tried to restrain a sour look, because of course that’s what his half-brother meant. “As a concession in light of this significant favor,” he said, “you may try to dissuade me while en route.”

Angel snorted, and started punching in a course from their console and then a series of commands to extend the ship’s grappler arm to tuck Spock’s starskipper into external storage. 

“This is going to be so annoying,” they said. 

Indeed, thought Spock.

 

~~~

 

It would take eight days to reach the Talos system, and it seemed probable that Sybok would spend all of them talking. Not only about himself, though he did that too, but even more so about his travels with Angel, his human lover, which seemed to veer from sophisticated experimental spiritual ethnography to outright brigandry. In one case, he spoke for at least 0.47 hours on the subject of a difficult-to-translate term for an Orion trance state before mentioning, off-hand, that the prompt had been collecting a bounty on a tribble smuggler set by the Klingons. From an outside perspective, setting aside Vulcan propriety, Spock had to admit that his half-brother seemed to be doing quite well.

“You know,” said Sybok, “I’ve thought before about writing a monograph on the philosophical importance of the myth of the hidden planet of superior, reclusive beings. Talos IV is a great example, but you also have myths about the Iconian homeworld, or the cloaked planet of the Aegis or the Travelers, depending on who you ask. I’ve even heard of some sort of trans-dimensional temple of non-corporeal prophetic beings hidden somewhere near Cardassian space. However, I’m not sure I have much to go on, besides recognizing the theme.”

Spock wanted to comment that these were all mostly mythological, but he had to admit that both Talos IV and the Aegis - or at least the “Supervisors” (and, ah! their shapeshifting cats) claiming to represent the Aegis - did exist. And it wasn’t like he hadn’t encountered weirder places over the past twenty years.

“Perhaps further inspiration will come to you,” he said, trying to remain polite.

“So, the Kolinahr,” said Sybok, now, unaccountably, dialed in.

“A traditional practice of the Vulcan people since the Time of Awakening,” said Spock, knowing he was being difficult, “to resolve and purge lingering emotions, to sever all psionic and emotional and legal bonds with others, and to remain in this state moving forward.”

“Right, you little shit, I know what it is,” said Sybok. “Don’t tell me you forgot my mother was the High Master of Gol and I grew up in the Kolinahru Monastery. It would be ‘logical’ to assume I am inquiring after the purpose of you doing it.”

“I always planned on it,” said Spock. “I even mentioned it to Angel years ago.”

“Oh,” said the captain, looking up from a padd at the other end of the table, “I am so not a part of this.” 

Without a backward glance, they left the small messhall and the brothers to their own devices.

“Yes, but why?”

“Most Vulcans aspire to attempt the Kolinahr at some point in their lives. I have few obligations and am unattached. I have no children, no bondmate, no intended bondmate. The timing is satisfactory.”

“Surak’s tits, Spock, don’t lecture me on the folkways of Vulcan. Everybody knows this is something you do after losing your place in society, the recourse of the bereaved. You are not a retired grandmother, a widower, or a constitutional ascetic. You’re what, forty? If we’re talking about tradition, you’re not even an adult yet.”

“The purpose of the Kolinahr is the perfection of emotional control. My emotional control is far from perfect. There is no place in Vulcan society for a man who cannot maintain his equanimity.”

“Dad did something,” said Sybok, frowning, eyes suddenly sharp. “Something else. Something new.”

“Your obsession with our father’s real and supposed flaws continues to trouble you, I see.”

“Ah, deflection. Well,” he said, suddenly relaxing, “you’ll be doing a lot of that if you’re going to be kolinahru from now on. You might even be able to talk to him again.”

Spock said nothing. Sybok wasn’t wrong, of course, but then again, it was pretty much always true that his brother couldn’t go five sentences in any conversation with him before complaining about Sarek.

“What are you telling mother?”

Spock hated when Sybok called Amanda Grayson mother, which was unfair, but it always felt subtly mocking.

“Mother understands my commitment to my heritage, and that this choice isn’t a judgment upon her.”

“So you haven’t talked to her about the fact that you’re doing this right now.”

Spock found himself distracted by the streaking lights of the stars at warp in the viewport over Sybok's shoulder, a commonplace sight but arresting. He would inform his mother of his intentions as he approached Vulcan. He would tell her he did not expect her to participate in the leave-taking ceremony, a ten-day vigil at the foot of Mount Kolinahr, but knew she would come anyway.

He could see it now, as though it had already happened. His mother approached on foot, with a dignity no human suffering from the severity of the Plains of Gol should have. He was caught by the intensity of her eyes, a ferocious stillness. She was wearing a light, embroidered headscarf, as though they were among strangers. All his life he had heard off-worlders remark on this habit of hers as though it were an exotic Vulcan custom. It was in fact an observance of an old way of being a married Jewish woman, a practice she took up when it suited her and never otherwise, a comfort.

After she took her fill, gazing upon him seated on the sands, she knelt down and leaned up to hug him, holding him tightly.

“I’m not going to say the Kolinahr blessing,” she said, as she leaned back and looked at him, searching again. “It’s not who I am, or what I have given you.”

She began to sing softly, the words recognizable as the Tefilat Haderech, the Traveler’s Prayer. The prayer, that the traveler may go and arrive in peace, safe from all enemies, the purpose of the work and the journey blessed. To be sung, Spock’s mind supplied, at least a mile outside the city limits, preferably standing. His mother smelled of sweat, anise, and roses.

She faded, the sun disappeared, and the stars were still stripes against the void of space the warp bubble had taken them beyond. It would happen like that.

“No,” said Spock, shaking off his reverie. “I have not.”

“You’re rushing into this,” said Sybok, as though issuing a ruling from on high. “There’s something, something painful and volatile and complicated, that you can’t handle, and you’re reaching for any handhold in the Forge to escape a wild sehlat.”

Spock lifted an eyebrow. “I see nothing illogical about purging all emotions as a response to being driven to the point of inefficiency and distraction by powerful feelings.”

“Uh huh,” his brother replied. “There may be logic in wisdom, but logic has no wisdom.”

This was a well-turned proverb, if a tad baroque in this context, and Spock thought he was gearing up to deliver another barb, but instead found himself saying, “I’m not… well, Sybok. I don’t know what to do, and this is something I haven’t tried yet. That’s all it is.”

His brother was silent, all mirth and mockery absent as he frowned, all of a sudden an unsettling and vibrant facsimile of Sarek. 

“I understand,” he said, finally. “I don’t like it, but I understand. I wish - I wish that you could let yourself reach for abundance, which is the birthright of all living beings, the desire for abundance, at least, if not its realization.”

Spock didn’t know if he too wished this for himself. Which he supposed was the crux of the issue.

 

~~~

 

Fleet Captain Christopher Pike, retired, was waiting by their shuttle when they landed, without incident for once, on Talos IV. It was strange to see him in jeans and a flannel, his hair longer, but otherwise he was the same as he’d always been. Solid and wry and beautiful.

“Spock, is everything okay?” He looked both concerned and serene. “I thought the five-year mission had ended.”

“It did,” Spock said. “This is a personal matter.”

“Oh,” said Pike, with an unreadable look. “What kind of personal matter?”

“Do you remember how I used to speak of undertaking the Kolinahr, an ancient Vulcan ritual?”

“I do,” said Pike. “It’s like an extended meditation retreat, where you come to terms with your feelings and relationships and then go on living a more contemplative and spiritual lifestyle. Sort of like a human monastic discipline. Is that right?”

Spock nodded, relieved that, despite their vast differences in temperament and worldview, he didn’t have to explain the basic concept. “The first part of the Kolinahr is the leave-taking, where you pursue… emotional closure with those close to you.”

“And I’m someone you need closure with?” The look was back, somewhat readable now: wary.

“I would appreciate the chance to discuss our past together and say a more thorough farewell, but I was also hoping we might be able to talk of certain things I, in good conscience, cannot discuss freely with others. Certain people I cannot discuss.”

Pike’s gaze softened. “You want to talk about Michael,” he said.

“As communication with her is impossible,” he said, “this seemed the most promising alternative.”

“Gotcha,” said Pike, looking thoughtful. “I’d be honored, Spock. But first I’ve got to make you dinner!” 

Spock followed Pike into the outgrowth of rocks, while Sybok started chatting animatedly with a small crowd of Talosians who had appeared out of thin air, while Angel perched on a rock, looking slightly bored.

He couldn’t say exactly where Pike had taken him. Likely it was some sort of cell-like enclosure, but the illusion of a cabin with an old-fashioned Terran kitchen with a view of mountains was completely immersive if he relaxed his telepathic shields slightly. His old friend clattered around the kitchen, while he watched in comfortable silence. The meal itself he would never recall, though he did wonder what exactly he was consuming.

“So, how’s it been going so far, the leave-taking? Did you do your Starfleet friends first?”

“I am satisfied with the farewells we exchanged at the end of the mission,” he said, which was a lie.

“Uh huh,” said Pike, looking suspicious. “What does emotional closure mean for a Vulcan, anyway? Actually, scratch that. What does it mean for you?”

Spock took a moment to think about this.

“I must admit that - I’m not sure what emotional closure entails,” he said. “It does not seem logical to deem terminated associations that may renew.” 

Spock then frowned at the sudden memory of Christine Chapel taking his hands that fevered, wretched day at the start of the last five-year mission when a loss of inhibition spread through the crew by touch, declaring she was in love with him. Still, after all those years, after all they had done to hurt each other in the aftermath of his relationship with T’Pring, which itself had been an agonizing prelude to the humiliating coda that had been his first pon farr. After all the years they had spent building their friendship and all the joyful things she had been welcoming into her life, this, again. Not the least of which was her new marriage to Erica Ortegas, the fact that her lingering sympathy for him paled in comparison. They had both moved on so long ago, but all it took was a change in brain chemistry to drop them back into an old, desperate place. He remembered hazily saying “I’m sorry” to no one in the turbolift as he’d run away from her, but after everything was over she was the one who had come to him and said “I’m sorry,” with that damning grief in her eyes, a more gracious cousin to pity. 

“It suggests a degree of - uncertainty,” was all he said in the end. “In the success of the Kolinahr ritual.”

Pike gave a half-smile. “What’s the degree?”

“Without the successful definition of parameters of emotional closure, the likelihood of completing the Kolinahr at this time falls to 42.34%.”

Pike snorted. “A little optimistic, don’t you think?”

“Chris, what do you suggest I do? Abandon my endeavor?”

Pike folded his arms, and frowned, giving the matter some genuine thought. “Many cultures have rituals like these, spiritual journeys, to instill the deepest values of a people in an individual. I know, I know, this is about logic, not the soul. Often, the attempt alone can bring insight and comfort to believers. Most forms of pilgrimage - which I think is the closest analogue - are experiential, and there’s no ‘there’ to reach. Am I wrong?”

Spock bit back many qualifications. Pike knew them all. “No, that is an adequate description from a human perspective. Reaching the state of Kolinahr is subjective, and takes different forms for different Vulcans.”

Pike nodded. “This is what I think, then, Spock. You’ve been through the wringer - you really have. I know your human friends - myself included - have stressed that it’s healthy to feel and express strong emotions. For humans, it is. But I know for Vulcans it works differently: for you, it’ll work in yet another way. You have had many experiences in Starfleet that tested your emotional control in ways that have given you and others pause. It makes sense that you’d try to seek the wisdom of your people while learning new ways of dealing with these concerns, which include impulsivity and self-sacrifice to an alarming degree. And that’s me saying that. If that’s why you’re doing this, then I’m for it. But if you’re doing this to punish yourself for your lapses in control or to prove your Vulcan bona fides to assholes who have always attacked you in bad faith, then I very much disapprove. As your friend, I simply can’t buy in to the idea that hurting yourself is okay. Also, to seek in Kolinahr something that it can’t give you - punishment or vindication - is illogical.”

Spock sat very still for a long time. “Thank you, Chris,” he said, finally. “I will take that perspective under advisement.”

“So, what do we do now?”

“It is traditional, among close friends, to share a mind meld.”

Pike fully smiled at that. “I’d love to. They’ve always been such special experiences, even if kind of freaky.”

The relief, upon placing his hand along some version of Pike’s psi points, was intense. No fear, no secrets, no disappointment, not anymore. They sat like this, Spock estimated, for several hours. Ending the meld was like taking a deep breath, and Spock felt better than he had in a decade. Pike, too, looked content, as though he’d smoked a joint.

“So,” said Pike, resuming their conversation out loud, “you want to talk about Michael.”

“Yes.”

“Go for it.”

“Before she… left, she said something to me, as my older sister.”

“Oh right,” said Pike. “I remember. From the mind meld we just did. She said to let people reach you, and that you should reach for the person farthest from you, to learn from them, to be guided by them.”

“I do not think she would see the logic of my decision to attempt the Kolinahr, and I do not know how I can come to terms with this conflict as she is… gone.”

Pike winced. “Spock… I’m going to be honest with you: I have no idea what she meant, really. She was about to give up her life for the sake of, well, everyone, and fling herself more than nine hundred years into the future. I’m not sure she was thinking very clearly.”

Spock couldn't agree. “Michael has always been known for her clarity of thought and action in a crisis.”

“Yes, but about strategy, about solving big, complicated problems from the bridge or in the lab. Not feelings in close relationships. She was deep in her own head, saying things that made sense to her.”

Spock had nothing to say to that, as he had to admit this was likely the case. 

“It seems disingenuous,” he said, “to not at least try to understand what she meant.”

“You know who you should ask? Jim Kirk. God, that kid always reminded me so much of Michael, it was eerie at times.”

Spock felt his eyes widen a fraction of a millimeter in shock. This comparison had never occurred to him, but all at once he saw the pattern, the rational fit. Jim, the man he called brother. Bold, just ahead, bright. Beacon of humanity, companion, leader. Steadfast and ruthless in their love, his brother, his sister.

“I will do so.”

“Oh also,” said Pike. “Some of those memories on the Enterprise - did that shit really happen? A giant Spock clone? Meeting the devil? You were a mermaid for a second? Twentieth-century Roman gladiators? A giant Abraham Lincoln in orbit? Your brain getting stolen?”

“The raw logs of the Enterprise are highly classified.”

“Spock.”

Spock sighed. “Near the end of our five year mission, our CMO, Dr. McCoy, discovered that a regular supplier of proteins for the food synthesizers whose contract began at the beginning of our mission had sent product contaminated by a psychoactive compound. The doctor believes it affects memory consolidation of stressful situations for mammalian humanoid species. Our accounts of certain facts of our missions at time had an… abstract relationship to what may have occurred. Lieutenant Arex, an Edosian, was not affected and xir logs have been adapted into the official Starfleet records. Xe was very confused by our behavior at times but assumed it was a cultural matter.”

“So you were tripping balls half the time.”

“The psychoactive compound did not affect our coordination.”

“I mean you were high off your asses.”

“We were ‘high’ off of the compound, yes,” he said. He considered asking Pike what this human fixation on anal suppositories was, and if he could explain “poppers,” a narcotic not registered in the Federation database. He had overheard a highly confusing conversation between Sulu and Chekov on the subject. He decided against asking for reasons that were not strictly logical but seemed more akin to the risk of getting caught making a facial expression by a teacher at the Vulcan Learning Center.

“See,” said Pike, “this is what I miss about Starfleet. The gossip. I bet the brass buried the food contamination ten fathoms deep.”

“Affirmative. Dr. McCoy risked his career to extract a promise to upgrade the fleet with food replicators.” In fact it had been the last project on which they had collaborated.

They were silent as Pike made a pot of coffee and returned with some sort of cake.

“Spock,” said Pike, in the gentlest tone he’d ever heard. “I find myself wondering. Is there someone, in particular, that you don’t know how to leave?”

Spock didn’t say anything at this non sequitur. Not at first. He wasn’t even surprised by what he said next. “Do you ever regret it? Ending our romantic relationship?”

Pike hesitated, looking at his coffee mug. “I don’t know if regret is the right word,” he said. “I missed you, being with you, of course. It was harder than I let on, seeing you try with T’Pring, but I told myself you had… peace with her. When that fell apart, it was even harder not to comfort you in a way that would have made things worse. And then, well, you know. And you knew that I… knew. That my accident hung over us, those last years.”

Spock nodded. What had he expected? Exactly this, if he’d allowed himself to think about it in great detail. He hadn’t planned to discuss this with Pike at all.

“I don’t know what’s happened to me, Chris,” he said. “I don’t know how I went from your - from you, to where I am now.”

“Where are you now?”

Spock ignored the question. “I can anticipate what you will say, what you have - said - but I must ask, was there anything I did that… contributed to the loss of our intimacy?”

“You’ve correctly anticipated that I still believe what I’ve said all along, which is that it was about me, and our circumstances, and not you. However, I think I get what you’re asking. Hell, you’re actually old enough to be asking a question like that.”

Spock inclined his head, indicating Pike should continue.

“The Enterprise has been your whole life since you were twenty-four. You’ve talked about how Kirk jokes that he’s married to the Enterprise, which is a whole other thing for a thirty-something guy to say, but in your case it’s as or even more true. Of course your deepest relationships are going to take root there. I was Enterprise’s captain for a long time, but I took the captain’s chair when I was the age you are now. I always knew there was more to me than being a Starfleet captain, but you didn’t really see that about me or yourself. If I really allowed myself to want you to stay with me, we would have left that life behind, and it would have been on my schedule. I was closer to ready to do that, because I was in a different phase of my life. I knew that you weren’t, and that if you were swept away it would hurt you. I couldn’t do that to you.”

“I see,” he said.

“Our relationship, such as it was,” Pike continued, “also began and ended with Michael. We couldn’t keep our distance when you were dealt the blow of her mutiny, starting a war, and her life in prison. Or when you thought she was dead for months, far away, unable to do anything. Then you became a fugitive and she and I ran after you, and frankly I still think about those nights we had on the Discovery before the end. And when she left, and I knew there was a limited amount of time left for me, I couldn’t justify… keeping you in that time of your life. I thought you needed things to get back to normal.”

Or you did, thought Spock, not that he disagreed with Pike’s assessment. You could have asked.

“I do not know if I could have left my life on the Enterprise, to have never let things go back to normal… But I wish, sometimes, that I could have continued to feel things, as deeply but clearly, as I did with you. I didn’t know how to do both.”

“I hope you do,” he said, voice soft. “Or that you will. You didn’t answer my question, Spock: is there someone you’re still holding on to?”

Spock still couldn’t say anything, because the answer would just go on and on.

 

~~~

 

When they left Talos IV, Angel had stated that they would leave him a few systems over. All at once, it seemed, he was back in his own ship. Before heading for Vulcan, he set course to the nearest subspace relay and sent a comm request to Kirk’s new apartment in San Francisco, which the now rear admiral answered within half an hour.

“Spock!”

Instinctively, Spock couldn’t help but let his eyes convey his version of a smile. Kirk was beaming. “What a welcome surprise! I thought you’d be buried to your neck in a desert by now or something.”

“That is not part of the Kolinahr,” Spock chided lightly.

“Sure, sure. Well, I know you’re hellbent on enlightenment at the moment, so what can I do for you? God is it nice to just kick back and talk about the meaning of life! I feel like a cadet again. Well, a cadet who didn’t have a stick as far up their ass as I did.”

The meaning of life wasn’t exactly what he was going for, but Spock conceded that the leisure to contemplate matters at length was, indeed, “nice.”

“I had a conversation with Captain Pike,” he said. Kirk gasped, looking thrilled at this dramatic and rare personal revelation. “And we were discussing the end of an… association I had with a person we both knew. She said something to me I didn’t understand, and Pike suggested I ask your opinion on the matter.”

Kirk’s eyes danced and crinkled as he said, “Oh, she said it at the end of an association, did she?”

“I’m not sure what you are implying, but I am not referring to a romantic or sexual relationship. She was… she was my first friend. A shield-sister - like you.”

That seemed to sober Kirk. He was still and intent, ready to take command of the conversation, at least.

“Lay it on me,” he said.

Spock had rehearsed what he said next, as he wanted to give as much context as possible but knew he couldn’t even give Michael’s name or the fact that she was his sister without committing treason.

“Hm,” Kirk said once he’d finished, looking as he did when considering a bold chess move. “Did you ever hear how Pavel once called you the monster whisperer?”

“Negative,” he said. “That does not seem like a logical characterization. I have no skill in training recalcitrant animals nor are there any such things as monsters.”

“What he means is that whenever we came across beings whose way of living and thinking differed radically from our own, more often than not you were the one who figured out how to reach them. Well, you and Uhura were tied for it, but still. What I get from what your friend told you is that she sees your gift for profound empathy and doesn’t want you to lose it.”

“Empathy? For a Vulcan, allowing such a transfer of feelings outside of a clinical or intimate context would be an almost moral failure. My friend would not accuse me of such a thing.”

“One, I don’t buy that for a second, and two, does empathy always have to be feeling what someone else feels? The concept implies understanding as well, not just responsiveness. For humans or Betazoids, sure, you’re going to feel stuff, but wouldn’t logic be one of the strongest tools for understanding what’s foreign and strange in someone else?”

“Indeed,” said Spock. 

“I’ve always thought that you are a true champion for the Vulcan ideal of ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations.’ It’s ironic, actually, that when you embrace your Vulcan side you best exemplify human values of curiosity, equality, and fairness.”

“Dr. McCoy would have some objections to that statement,” he said before he could think. Before he could stop the memory of his mouth on the man’s neck, the salty taste of skin, biting down.

“I don’t know about that,” said Kirk. “Have you talked to Bones recently? He’s still asleep, but I can get him if you want. I love you enough to beard that lion. That Leo. Hah.”

“Dr. McCoy and I have not been in touch,” he said. 

“That’s a shame,” said Kirk, and frowned. He didn’t say more, though he seemed to want to. “Anything else on your mind, Spock?”

“One more thing, Jim,” said Spock, knowing he had to get the timing just right. “What are poppers?”

 

~~~

 

Before he’d left Sybok and Angel, he’d spent almost a full day in a mind-meld with his half-brother. Ending the meld felt like being thrown backward from a freshwater stream, still parched and heat-sick.

“I’ve always resented you,” Spock had said then, “because you effortlessly have the very thing I had to fight for my whole life, and you delight in throwing it away. But these things you have and do, they have nothing to do with me. Really, I adore you, and I worry about you. And I think you feel the same way about me, for different reasons.”

Sybok had looked away from him, then looked at him again, grim. “So you’re serious about this. You’re really going to Mount Kolinahr.”

“I am.”

“Then as we have walked side by side, so now we part ways,” Sybok had said, in perfect Old High Golish, the beginning of the traditional blessing for a kolinahru novitiate, “that we may find the appointed time and place where peace and truth dwell, where we will meet face-to-face.”

Spock had offered the response, which was merely the ta’al, given silently.

“I wouldn’t call it delight,” Sybok had said, slashing away at the completeness of the moment. “I’d call it something else.”

He did not elaborate, but had offered the ta’al and risen to go, leaving him alone.

Notes:

The fact that Spock has already hidden out in the Mutara sector (site of the Genesis debacle) is established in season 2 of Discovery. As is the tight leather pants, actually. He visited Talos IV with Michael Burnham mid-season 2. Angel and Sybok's relationship is established in "The Serene Squall" (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds). I feel like finishing this story before season 2 of SNW is a priority for me, as I have no idea if the showrunners are pro-Sybok like I am at the moment. Honestly if Angel is ride or die for him, I'm sold. I'm sure he's not in Vulcan jail for a good reason.

Relatedly, I'm being pretty vague about "what happened" with Spock and T'Pring after season 1 of SNW. The show is clearly trying to retcon a reason why T'Pring rejects Spock so harshly in "Amok Time," but I'm not sure where that's going yet. The reference to Chapel "declaring her love" for Spock is from an early season 1 TOS episode, "The Naked Time."

Chapter title is a reference to my favorite dialogue exchange in Doctor Who, in the 1979 series "City of Death," between the Fourth Doctor and Romana II:
ROMANA: Where are we going?
DOCTOR: Are you talking philosophically or geographically?
ROMANA: Philosophically.
DOCTOR: Then we're going to lunch.

Paraphrase and quotes from Alice in Wonderland come from chapter six.

I'm getting pointers on "Kolinahr" from The Way of Kolinahr: The Vulcans, a 1998 Last Unicorn RPG sourcebook. I've gone back and forth on terminology, but I'm going with "the Kolinahr" (short for "the Kolinahr ritual") and "kolinahru" (someone who achieves "Kolinahr"). "Kolinahr" without a direct article also appears to be the state of no emotions itself. (Thus "reaching Kolinahr"). It's also the name of the mountain in the province of Gol! The mix of usages seems authentic to a complex and old cultural concept, so I'm keeping it this way for now, but let me know if it's too confusing.

My deepest apologies for the title.

~~~

Like if you want Spock to actually go to therapy (he won't); comment if you want Sybok to dress Spock at least once.

Chapter 3: Mr. Spock's Music From Outer Space

Summary:

Spock gets on the new captain’s bad side, encounters several unexpected personnel problems, and plays the Vulcan lyrette.

Notes:

Song lyrics in this chapter come from canon and TOS cast musical careers. See endnotes for details and other references.

Content Notes:
Discussion of wartime trauma and suspected war crimes (by Section 31), with comparisons to twentieth-century WWII Axis science. PTSD flashback mechanics that include direct comparisons between species supremacy (Vulcan) and intergenerational trauma around anti-semitism. Discussion of classism in Federation. Also, I’m sorry to say, an enormous amount of miscommunication. Reference to workplace sexual harassment and ways superior officers handled it (mixed). Canonical, minor character death.

Full disclosure, this chapter is as long as Spock thinks his day is.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

[circa 2265; Lya Station Alpha, Alpha Quadrant]


Before Spock began his morning meditation session, the words his cousin Selek once shared with him came to mind.

When he was seven years old, he had encountered a le-matya during the kahs-wan ritual, and his cousin had come to his aid in the Forge, saving his life. He did not recall why Selek had said what he did, but he had often reflected on his words: What you do not yet understand is that Vulcans do not lack emotion. Logic offers a serenity humans seldom experience in full. We have emotions but we deal with them and do not let them control us.

The pursuit of serenity through the rigorous application of logic had been a very productive endeavor in many seasons of his life. Yesterday had been yet another example of this pattern: it had been almost effortless for him to show no reaction to Captain Kirk’s announcement that he was hosting a crew “open mic” this evening as a “bonding activity” during their stopover at Lya Station Alpha to restock and take on new crew members.

This “open mic” was merely the latest in a series of decisions the captain had made that Spock considered impulsive and disruptive. Within weeks of James T. Kirk taking command of the Enterprise six months ago, it had already become obvious, on the surface, that this was no longer Pike's Enterprise. It had been irregular, if practical, when Kirk had insisted no one could be “precious” when the quartermaster faced supply chain issues while procuring the new uniforms and insisted the crew wear anything that fit regardless of department. He could see the logic, even if he thought wearing command gold gave the wrong impression to the crew about his ability to be a scientist and first officer. There was no reason, at first, to be concerned.

For the first month, crew operations proceeded within the parameters established under Captain Pike, and Spock was thinking it more likely - once the uniforms were sorted out - that the Enterprise would continue to be a credit to the fleet. He and Kirk had even taken to playing chess several times a week.

Then Yeoman Rand had asked to see him in his capacity as first officer.

Rand had come onboard with the captain, his aide-de-camp from the Farragut, Kirk’s first command, and Spock had immediately been impressed by their competence. Their ability to anticipate operational contingencies in a diverse array of situations - military, diplomatic, administrative - was pivotal to the mission completion record Kirk had been building, in Spock’s opinion. It was worth noting that Kirk also held this opinion, and acknowledged Rand’s work regularly in private and public. This, along with his skill as a chess opponent, were Spock’s two most important pieces of evidence that the “youngest ever Starfleet captain” did, in fact, have the ability to be good at his job.

He was surprised, therefore, when Rand stated that they had come to him with a matter they did not feel comfortable discussing with the captain.

“It’s Lieutenant Mitchell, sir,” said the yeoman, looking him squarely in the eye, everything about them vibrating exactitude, from their perfectly pressed skant uniform to their immaculate blonde quiff cresting over a continually fresh fade. “I’m sure you’ve heard how he’s been behaving with other crew members, especially the women.”

Spock had not.

“Specify, yeoman,” he said.

“He frequently makes sexually objectifying comments to crewmembers on- and off-duty, which are often derogatory rather than clumsy attempts at flattery.” They hesitated. “I’m from a military family, sir. I know the difference.”

Spock did not know what this meant, but nodded for them to continue.

“I am… one of the people he interacts with in this way. Recently, he’s begun escalating his comments into something that feels more personal, and I have spent a lot of effort attempting to avoid him. However, he has persisted. Today he went as far as to… make it physical.”

Spock raised an eyebrow. 

“He slapped my ass, sir,” said Rand, matter-of-fact.

That, at least, was unambiguous. “What you have described does meet the requirements for sexual harassment,” said Spock. “Regulations state that you may make a formal complaint, which I will take to the captain or Starfleet Command.”

“I’m aware,” said Rand, their voice quiet. “I’m not sure that would be… wise.”

“Yeoman, what do you mean?”

“He is a personal friend of the captain’s,” said Rand. “Captain Kirk brought him along as helmsman despite his… disciplinary record. He is qualified technically, of course, a very fine pilot, sir, one of the best, but I have gotten the impression that Kirk wanted him here in order to provide him some structure, give him the opportunity to, well, get his act together. Mitchell has a rather rough background, and I believe the captain is sympathetic. He’s very protective of crew who served on the Farragut, after everything that happened.”

Spock also did not know what “had happened on the Farragut,” although Rand seemed to imply it was common knowledge.

They continued: “For what it’s worth, I don’t think he knows Mitchell acts this way towards, well, women - he tones it down when the captain is present. But it’s the captain’s job to take care of the ship, and it’s my job to take care of the captain. Making a formal complaint would make my job harder. I’d like to avoid it.”

“That is a logical decision,” said Spock. 

Something changed in Rand’s face, as though a door had closed. He got the sense that he had made some sort of misstep, though he couldn’t pinpoint what it was. Although no one should have to tolerate harassment, and ship efficiency should not take precedence over upholding one’s oath as a member of Starfleet, Rand’s analysis of the situation seemed quite astute and insightful. Why had merely acknowledging this fact been incorrect?

Spock tried again. “If you do not wish to make a formal complaint, what can I do to remedy the situation as first officer?”

Rand relaxed slightly. “I would like to request that Lieutenant Mitchell and I no longer share bridge shifts, and I would like a different yeoman to be assigned to away missions he is invited to. I would suggest Yeoman Thompson or Yeoman Anderson. Mitchell has not shown any interest in either guy.”

“The adjustment to the duty roster is possible, and it will be done. As for away missions, I will attempt to do as you ask, but in some circumstances it may not be possible to intervene without the force of an official accommodation.”

Rand nodded. “I completely understand, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Rand still remained sitting, quiet.

“Is there anything else, yeoman?”

“There’s something I’d like to say, but I don’t know how to ask you this, as first officer.”

“Speak freely, yeoman. I will determine if anything is actionable.”

“The Enterprise isn’t like the Farragut, sir,” they said, thoughtful. “That was more of a, well, working vessel. Patrols and security, skirmishes in deep space, that sort of thing. The Enterprise attracts a different… kind of officer. The feel is more… civilian, in sensibility. I know I’m the best shot on board, and I teach the security officers’ hand-to-hand training. I can put a stop to anything I really can’t stand. I find Mitchell’s behavior frustrating and disrespectful, but not as upsetting as… That is to say, I’m used to a certain level of… I guess what I’m saying is that I’m far from the only person he’s treating this way, and I think the impact may be more… harmful for other people, other… women. That’s part of why I came forward at all, as it’s less of a big deal to me, and I know what to ask for. Someone really should talk to him. Keep an eye out.”

“Thank you, yeoman,” said Spock. “I will certainly take that under advisement.”

They rose to leave, but at the door of the conference room, they paused, and said, "She said - I was told you were the person to go to, sir. That you would be fair. I'm really glad that's true, and that you're the XO."

Spock nodded, not knowing what to say.

Although Spock had in good faith said that he could change the duty roster, he found it took hours to rearrange everyone’s schedules in a way that would not cause undue attention. He’d missed several critical steps for several ongoing experiments, and had to meditate a great deal to contain the frustration he felt at having his research delayed by weeks. Under Pike, his duties related to crew discipline had been, he now realized, comparatively light. He resolved that he would, for the first time, exercise his prerogative to bring new crewmembers aboard and find a replacement for the Astro Sciences department, which he still headed up, as this new captain, evidently, required a bit more of a firm hand, at least for now.

And he had, as Yeoman Rand had suggested, been more vigilant about Lieutenant Mitchell. But it had quickly become apparent that Spock actually didn’t know what he should be looking for.

Then there had been the galactic barrier incident. 

The debacle with Lieutenant Mitchell and their resident psychologist, Dr. Dehner, resulting in their deaths on the confusingly-named Delta Vega - Spock didn’t even know if anyone had had Vulcan’s satellite in mind when naming the remote outpost - would have been more than enough. But Kirk’s subsequent shakedown of departments had further destabilized the already shaky homeostasis of the Enterprise. And he hadn’t sought his first officer’s opinion on any of it, despite the fact that Spock had served on the Enterprise for more than ten years. 

The worst of it was Kirk’s choice of replacement helmsman. He’d chosen Dr. Sulu, an extremely promising young bio-astrophycist and the new Astro Sciences department head, who Spock had just brought onboard and promoted himself, because Sulu had expressed an interest in piloting and he was “trusting his gut.” Sulu had phenomenal scores as a pilot, but surely excellence as a scientist was more important to cultivate in the young officer, no matter what the lieutenant preferred. The only silver lining had been his successful recruitment of the historian, Dr. Tola, to join the crew as the new department head for social sciences, replacing Dr. Dehner. The Andorian, who was part Aenar, was the only qualified candidate who also happened to have a highest-level of certification as a psionic ethicist, a resource Spock now believed the Enterprise sorely lacked, considering how badly things had gone on Delta Vega. Dr. Tola was one of the new crew members coming aboard at their stopover at Lya Alpha Station.

Dr. Leonard McCoy, the new CMO, also one of the captain’s “personal friends,” was another. His arrival - six months late to the mission - was the difficulty Spock had expected today, not an “open mic,” which for him, the captain had made clear, was not optional.

As though this Dr. McCoy was in a rush to validate his concerns, the man interrupted his aborted meditation session via the comm in his quarters.

“McCoy to Mr. Spock,” a voice drawled, and though he knew the man’s slight accent was regional and not indicative of temperament, the sedateness and superfluousness of his enunciation of Global English made Spock slightly twitchy.

“Spock here. What do you require, doctor?”

“I was hopin’ you could make it down to sickbay in the next few hours or so. I’ve been reviewing crew records, and I have some questions for you. Administratively, you know.”

Spock relaxed slightly, aware now at how tensely he’d been holding himself. At least this sounded reasonable.

“Very well, Dr. McCoy. I will report to sickbay at 0900 hours.” An almost tangible vision of Pike giving him a knowing look and saying be nice, Spock, flashed through his mind. You’re this man’s commanding officer.

“Welcome to the Enterprise,” he added.

“Why, thank you very much, Mr. Spock,” said the voice, which almost seemed to be smiling - how absurd. “Happy to come onboard. McCoy out.”

 

***

 

He arrived at exactly 0900 to an almost empty sickbay. He thought it logical to check the CMO’s office, the wall separating it from the rest of sickbay having been set to opaque, before mounting a more involved search. The instinct had been sound: when he reached the doorway of the CMO’s office he could already hear rustling, and was greeted with the sight of a desk covered in padds and gadgets and vials and what appeared to be an empty aquarium and a set of striking hands, strong and long-fingered and tanned, reaching up from behind the desk to place, amazingly, a full bottle of Saurian brandy on its surface, its owner as yet unseen. 

“Dr. McCoy,” he said. “I am Lieutenant Commander Spock, first officer of the Enterprise. You wished to see me?”

The man the hands belonged to shot up to standing, almost over-shooting his mark, it seemed, as he rolled up onto the balls of his feet and back down again, and offered an entirely unnecessary smile, which highlighted a gap in-between his two front teeth, a puzzling dental quirk for a human of this century. The rest of Dr. Leonard McCoy’s appearance was consistent with the holo image attached to his personnel file. He was a narrow man, with short and neatly cropped brown hair, a wide face with a pointed chin, large and very blue eyes with thick and apparently very mobile eyebrows, having cycled through four different expressions in as many seconds: surprise - embarrassment - interest - comprehension. The only differences from the holo were a tan, surprising, for a space-faring human - perhaps due to months planetside on Capella IV - and the fact that he was taller than Spock had assumed, the same height as the captain, and only a few inches shorter than Spock himself. 

Not that any of this was strictly relevant to whatever matter was now at hand.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Spock,” said the new doctor. Spock now noticed his uniform was not regulation. He appeared to have foregone his science blues for an oversized sweatshirt with a Starfleet Medical insignia that read Ole Miss - Andoria Campus. This encounter was quickly becoming less promising.

“I trust you are finding your first day in sickbay adequate,” he replied.

“Adequate? This place is state of the art - I almost feel spoiled. Look at how enormous my office is!” The man waved around for emphasis. Unnecessary.

“Sickbay is outfitted appropriately to its requirements, doctor.”

“Well, I’ll be.”

“There was a reason you called this meeting, doctor?”

“I’ve been reviewing senior staff charts first, and I found some rather troubling omissions in your medical history, Mr. Spock.”

Increasingly less promising: rather than a legitimate question related to efficiency for the whole ship, the doctor had wanted to talk to Spock about Spock.

“Clarify.”

“Vulcans, as you probably know, are an under-documented species for StarMed. How y’all swung that, I don’t even want to know. So there’s more legwork you and I need to do to make sure we all know how to fix you when you're broke. But it says here that I’m missing comprehensive anatomy scans, blood panel reference charts, and a full medical history.”

How distasteful. Dr. M’Benga’s resignation and semi-retirement from Starfleet had never seemed more personally onerous.

Not particularly kindly, he said, “Dr. M’Benga is the leading expert in Vulcan physiology in Starfleet, perhaps you can ask him for advice.”

“Right,” McCoy said. “Now, I already did that, and he told me something very peculiar. He told me that you refused to comply with the higher medical records requirements for under-documented species, and so he was forced to take unique measures over the years to provide an acceptable level of care.”

“I do not understand.”

“He regularly called your mama, Mr. Spock. He even has your file classified as ‘pediatric.’” McCoy handed him the padd. Spock swiftly scanned it. His chart had, indeed, been labeled “pediatric” and had his mother listed as “patient’s guardian.” He felt - actually felt - a wave of embarrassment upon realizing that several of M’Benga’s more “magical” extrapolations of his physiological reactions over the years were - allegedly - merely details his mother had provided, duly noted and dated on the padd.

But this couldn’t be possible. Neither Dr. M’Benga or his mother would ever have violated his privacy in this manner. Humans, he knew, were sometimes prone to petty cruelties to establish dominance in a social order. Perhaps this was such a gambit. “If this is some kind of practical joke -“

“You’re telling me! It’s my first day and M’Benga is infamous,” replied the doctor, as though they were somehow on the same side.

Spock stared at him, unsure what the next move was.

“The fact remains I’m missing information, joke or no,” said the doctor, opening his hands and slouching for some reason, as though Spock needed reassurance. “So, what’ll it be, Mr. Spock? Will you work with me or will I have to call your mama? Because I will. Man to man, I want to treat you like you’re grown, but I need to give you the best care I am capable of givin’ even at the expense of both our dignities.”

“That will not be necessary, Dr. McCoy,” he said, willing his tone to be even more expressionless than usual. “I will review the records requirements and get back to you with the appropriate documentation.”

McCoy just stood there, and smiled. It felt strangely distant.

“Anything else? Dr. McCoy?”

“Now that you mention it,” said McCoy, all of a sudden gawky, bouncing on his feet, “do you know how I can get ahold of the quartermaster? I only got the old med whites, not the science blues, and I look a right mess. I was also hoping to figure out how to raise the temperature in my office, at least. It’s as cold as a frog’s tail.”

After directing McCoy to the relevant personnel officer, Spock went directly to the bridge, almost looking forward to the tedium of a shift at the conn while docked at a space station. Clearly, this new CMO had the potential to introduce further chaos on the Enterprise. Once seated in the captain’s chair, he waved over a yeoman to fetch a duty roster. The doctor would be giving an orientation for sickbay staff this afternoon, and although he had not planned on attending, it would not be conspicuous if he did so. He’d merely, yet again, lose precious time in the lab. This, however, could not be helped; he needed more information. 

He did have to concede the doctor had shown good sense in one respect. Although frogs to his knowledge did not have tails, it was in fact too cold on the ship everywhere, all the time.

 

***

 

The captain arrived mid-shift to relieve him, bringing a newly outfitted Yeoman Rand, who had acquired the sharp and bright new uniform, a red skant with a more exaggerated silhouette and a sleeker neckline. There was at least 2.89 minutes of pointless chatter across the bridge about the new uniforms, and then 6.87 minutes about the open mic. Rand showed off the falsies they’d brought for the captain to wear as MC, who then held court for an additional 9.53 minutes, soliciting opinions on which pair was most the flattering for his eye shape, eventually going with Lieutenant Uhura’s suggestion over Lieutenant Arex’s.

Acquiescing to the overall lack of discipline on the bridge, Spock took the uncommon step of reviewing material other than scans at his science console. Before re-encountering Dr. McCoy, it seemed wise to familiarize himself with the man’s service record. He tilted the screen slightly so he could not be observed.

At first, Dr. McCoy’s service record was fairly predictable for an ambitious medical officer. He’d started the medical track at the Academy at sixteen, and had pursued the joint MD/PhD program as an ensign through Starfleet’s university consortium rotation program, posted on various Federation worlds and stations. He’d made lieutenant junior-grade within a year of his first post-graduate posting to a starship, much like Spock had, and had worked on a succession of ships of various classes. His evaluations were exemplary, and his publication output was adequate. A brief scan of his published papers revealed nothing special, but nothing glaringly deficient. He had made lieutenant senior-grade on a Constitution-class starship approximately six months more quickly than average. 

And then, Spock was surprised to note, within a year he had been approved to transfer to the Enterprise for his first senior medical officer position in 2259 when the ship was being overhauled in drydock, right around the time he and Pike were due to return from the Discovery. However, in less than two months, before his start date on the Enterprise, he had resigned his commission. During the gap in his record there were a few publications in psychology and co-author credits on bigger projects set in motion years before, but no evidence of any prestigious research fellowship or a specialized private practice. 

Then, a year and a half later, he was reinstated at the rank of lieutenant commander and given the role of CMO at a very remote colony under joint Federation and Vulcan administration. He’d had no administrative or leadership experience prior, and running a colony hospital was surely no substitute for running a Constitution-class sickbay. CMO of the Enterprise was a crowning career achievement, the most coveted role for doctors in the fleet, and while he was not the youngest CMO, he was, at thirty-eight, one of the youngest. It did not make any sense. Unless one counted, of course, the captain’s patronage.

Dr. M’Benga was due to finish packing up his quarters today, having been in and out during Dr. Piper’s interim tenure, and Spock sent a comm request, which got an automatic reply, saying the doctor was not onboard. He asked the transporter chief to alert him when M’Benga had returned from the station. Surely the former CMO, a man Spock considered a mentor, would be able to shed some light on this new doctor and his questionable behavior and qualifications.

Feeling increasingly sure he was “on to something,” as a human might say, he arrived slightly early to sickbay and took a seat at a circle of chairs that had mysteriously appeared in the CMO’s office - perhaps a result of McCoy’s catching the quartermaster - nodding to the nurses, doctors, and med techs assembling, who regarded him with mild curiosity. Nurse Chapel seemed surprised, but she just gave him a small wave.

Dr. McCoy breezed in on the hour, slightly out of breath, but at the very least properly outfitted in the new science blues uniform, and took a chair in the circle, sprawling out in a somewhat odd stance, as though he didn’t know how to sit in a chair. He did a slight double-take at Spock’s presence, but then seemed to pay it no mind.

“Well, folks,” he said, “I am so pleased to meet y’all. I’m Dr. Leonard McCoy. When I’m not running meetings like these, I’m just a doctor and a surgeon, and a decent psychologist, though don’t tell the real psychiatry folk I said that - that’ll be a whole other meeting.” 

McCoy paused, as though expecting some sort of response, but everyone was silent. Clearly, they were having trouble parsing this bizarre diminishment of the important role the life sciences played in the Enterprise’s reputation. It was almost anti-intellectual.

“All right, then,” he said. “I’d like to start off by hearing how you’d describe the current state of the medical department. Feel free to just speak up like we’re just having a conversation.”

It took several seconds for anyone to say anything to this highly imprecise question.

“Dr. Solok from the Vulcan Science Academy just gave a talk on the quantum mechanics of cellular regeneration,” said Dr. Sanchez. “And Dr. Belar from the Trill Science Ministry is visiting next month to discuss new theories of non-carbon-based life.”

“Nice,” said McCoy. Several nurses glanced at each other, confused.

“We’ve had several publications come out of our lab since the mission began,” said Dr. Alders. “One in the IME Quarterly, another in the Interstellar Lancet, and several in the Starfleet Medical Journal.”

“Congrats,” said McCoy. This time, Alders and Sanchez exchanged somewhat pointed glances.

“We’re ahead of other Constitution-class ships in securing research grants and funding,” offered Lieutenant Tracy.

“Right,” he said. “Now look, folks, this is all fine and dandy, but we’re staffing a hospital, and we have four hundred patients in our care. Talk to me about what it’s like actually working here.”

Spock had heard more than enough. He politely made his excuses and left sickbay, deep in thought. This was worse than he’d originally suspected. The Enterprise was renowned for its research, in every department. This man seemed unqualified to serve alongside his own doctors, let alone lead the entire life sciences division. And this was even before considering the nonsense about Dr. M'Benga calling his mother. After the rest of his shift on the bridge, he found himself in front of the captain’s quarters.

“Come!” The voice was slightly muffled.

When Spock entered, he found the captain across his quarters, carefully applying false lashes and wearing one of the new captain’s uniforms, a tight-fitting green wraparound tunic. The man sauntered over and settled in at his desk, gesturing for Spock to take a seat on the other side. The lashes did look pretty good, he had to admit.

“Mr. Spock,” said Kirk, “what a treat! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I wanted to discuss the new CMO,” he said.

“Oh!” Kirk’s eyes lit up. “You’ve already met Bones! Isn’t he great?”

“Actually, captain,” he said, “I have some concerns.”

Kirk’s eyes were still bright, but there was now something hard about the set of his smile. “Is that so, Mr. Spock?”

“I have reason to believe he may not be qualified for the position of CMO.”

Kirk, a restless dynamo, even while seated, had gone still. 

“What,” said the captain, quietly, “do you mean? The reqs for the position were made public throughout the fleet. He meets not only the minimum requirements, but most of the preferred requirements. He comes highly recommended.”

By yourself, captain?

“I have reviewed his service record, and if you are referring to his ‘deep space’ experience, his leadership skills, and his research contributions, I’m not sure I agree that they are exceptional compared to his peers. His deep space service has been restricted to a planetside role in a small colony, and this marginal experience also constitutes his qualifications for running a large, prestigious department. And his research, from what I’ve seen, is, at best, workmanlike. I concede that he does appear to be a highly gifted surgeon. That, however, is not enough to lead sickbay and the life sciences department.”

“Workmanlike,” said Kirk, unreadable. Spock wasn’t sure why that detail had stood out to the captain. 

“Well, Mr. Spock,” Kirk continued, “as much as I want to give credence to all the thought and care you’ve put into this today, I’m going to have to defer to the opinion Starfleet Medical came to after numerous rounds of evaluations and interviews over the course of two months over six months ago and say that he is qualified.”

This conversation was quickly getting out of hand.

“Merely being qualified isn’t sufficient. The standard of every Enterprise department is excellence. I understand that humans value personal attachments in their decision-making, and he has certainly made the right friends, which is a credit to his social gifts -”

“A standard of excellence,” Kirk cut him off, repeating the phrase back to him, as though a figure in some anxiety dream from his years at the Vulcan Learning Center. Kirk’s expression was now unambiguously cold.

Well, if he couldn’t crack the code of what was going wrong, he might as well do his due diligence in his argument.

“Dr. M’Benga is the best doctor in the fleet -“

“And he doesn’t want the job, Mr. Spock. He made it very clear he’s in a different place in his career and life.”

“Affirmative, but as a point of comparison -”

“I asked Dr. M’Benga to make me a list, his wishlist, sky’s the limit, for his replacement. I, of course, had Dr. McCoy in mind, but I wanted his input first before I said anything. He came back the next day and said he couldn’t give me a list, because the only name that would be on it was Leonard McCoy’s.”

Spock allowed himself a blink of surprise. This was highly unexpected. Why hadn’t Kirk informed him of this months ago? Why hadn’t M’Benga? Now not only the conversation but also his own argument was getting away from him. 

Still, he pressed on. “May I ask what his - and your - reasoning is?”

“You have no business asking as my subordinate, but as colleagues and the highest ranking officers of the Enterprise, I’d be happy to elaborate.”

“I would appreciate that,” he said. “Sir.”

“That ‘marginal experience’ you describe both of deep space medicine and leadership was at a field hospital that he and his staff built from scratch on a new colony on the border of the Romulan Star Empire - not the NZ, the actual border. It was the first Federation colony to have less than ten percent humans signed on, and his caseload as an ‘old country doctor,’ as Bones likes to call himself, was more varied than any Federation hospital other than the IME hospital on Denobula, whatever that means - it was something a StarMed guy said. The colony on Cerberus was the last port of call for all deep space missions for the Vulcan Expeditionary Group, and his hospital was the deep space trauma center. I would expect you’d know, Mr. Spock, that other than the Enterprise we don’t have long-term deep space missions yet: the VEG does, and we sometimes pull escort duty. The only Starfleet doctor with more deep space experience is Dr. M’Benga, and that’s because he’s been the Enterprise CMO for ten years.”

This fact… had not occurred to him. He was clearly becoming emotionally compromised, because he could feel embarrassment seeping into the back of his mind. He knew where Cerberus was on a star map, of course, but he hadn’t thought to correlate the colony’s position with Starfleet and VEG mission plans.

Kirk looked troubled. “I’m not a scientist, Mr. Spock. I don’t know what ‘workmanlike’ means to you, or what you were expecting. Maybe he is a bit rough around the edges - I’ll admit I wouldn’t know. I do know that he hasn’t had access to state-of-the-art labs or research rotations that the Enterprise’s medical and life sciences department has become accustomed to. He’s a veteran, you see.”

This was going from bad to worse. The most logical interpretation was that Kirk was insulting him. That he, like many Starfleet military types, could only tolerate the Enterprise’s exemption from the Klingon war effort if its officers publicly excoriated themselves and denigrated the rationale that led to Enterprise’s special status away from the front lines. While Spock, like Pike, like Ortegas, like Chin-Riley, like anyone who had served then, still mourned their absence, he did agree with the Admiralty’s reasoning for preserving what a ship like the Enterprise stood for and what it could accomplish. It would be illogical to deny this belief.

“I believe every Starfleet doctor who wasn’t an Enterprise crew member has a ‘wartime service’ note in their record, sir, many of whom have done much more significant work in their fields.”

Spock had not expected Kirk to be pleased by his response, but he had not expected the intensity of the contempt that came into his face and voice as he said, “So, you’re one of those. I’m disappointed, Mr. Spock.”

Spock had no idea what Kirk was talking about, so all he said was: “Sir?”

Kirk drummed his fingers along the desk. “The Enterprise was your first posting, correct?”

“I also served on the USS Kongo - “

“As a cadet, in a very unusual program the Academy designed with you in mind, after you graduated from the Vulcan Science Academy. You barely even had to live in San Francisco.”

“By that definition, yes, my first posting was the Enterprise.”

Kirk tapped a different rhythm. “I’m a fourth-generation Starfleet brat myself,” he said. “My family was proud to be a part of Federation history, but we knew we weren’t the main characters of it. I was still the first member of my family to attend the Academy. First captain. Not like your family, of course, your great-grandfather made first contact with Earth. In Starfleet, we’re scientists, diplomats, and explorers, but the essence of Starfleet, to me, has always been that we’re the first ones who are there, sometimes the only ones, making the hard choices and being responsible for the outcomes.”

“I agree that this is one of the roles Starfleet plays. The Enterprise has played this role many times, as have I and every member of the crew.”

“Oh, I know,” said Kirk. “I’m just letting you know that I understand the difference between being special and having special pressures and actually having to fight for a seat at the table. I’m also aware I’m in the former camp, not the latter. I’m the youngest captain in Starfleet history, a prodigy, and a lot of people doubt me and want to see me fail. But if I do, all that will happen to me is I’ll be emotionally devastated. I’ve never doubted that I belonged in the captain’s chair, and I’m not participating in this sizing contest with the legacy of Captain Pike, who, by the way, strongly recommended me as his replacement. I think it’s more important to think about the consequences for everyone else if we, the crew of the Enterprise, fail in our mission. I think there are many things, Mr. Spock, that we have in common. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I’m not sure what you’re implying, sir,” Spock whispered, vaguely appalled that he wanted to punch him in his smug face and also start babbling an apology. And most pathetically, he missed Pike. Not for his competence, which would be logical, but for his presence, how it warmed and calmed every room he entered. How he just knew Spock, and trusted him. But Pike was gone. And here was Kirk, who was clearly unhappy with him for reasons he did not fully understand.

“Has Dr. McCoy violated his oath as an officer or performed his duties in a demonstrably unsatisfactory manner in the, oh, ten hours he’s been CMO, Mr. Spock?”

“No, sir,” he said, and swallowed the rest of his objections.

“You don’t have to like Bones,” said Kirk. “I can’t imagine anyone not liking him once they got to know him, but to each their own. But I will not tolerate personal animus as a grounds for disciplinary action, am I clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed, Mr. Spock. I’ll look forward to your performance at the crew showcase tonight.”

Spock knew, when he retreated from Kirk’s quarters, that he should meditate. His emotional control was slipping and he was acting on impulse. Instead he found himself returning to sickbay. At this time in the shift, especially while reprovisioning at a station, it was empty, except for Chapel, who was winding down her work. 

Without preamble, he approached her and said, “I regret that I was not able to successfully bring your concerns about Dr. McCoy to the captain’s attention.”

“Spock,” said Chapel, looking at him strangely, “what are you talking about?”

“He showed disrespect to the medical department and belittled your research, showing poor judgment.”

“Oh,” said Chapel. “I think I saw what happened differently, but I see why you’d think that, since you left when you did.”

“What was your perception of the first part of the meeting?”

“Oh, he was just telling people to knock it off with the grandstanding. Joe’s talked about him enough over the years that everyone was acting like a first-year grad student all of a sudden. He was a bit awkward about it, but that only helped make the conversation be more approachable after, I think. Then he met with each of us individually and went over our research goals and made sure he knew what we wanted to prioritize. He’d clearly talked to M’Benga about everyone, and had that good, like, sixth sense about what we were up to that a good professor-type has, even if it was outside his field, you know?”

“So the medical department is not… dissatisfied with Dr. McCoy?”

“No! He’s just kind of a neurotic grump, but in a cute way. I’ve always thought Leo was like that - though Erica still insists on calling him ‘boy wonder’ or ‘my sunny savant’ and like nothing else, since they were both cadets. Off-duty, obviously.”

Spock took about five seconds to recover from this new and also highly unexpected piece of information.

“I did not realize you were personally acquainted with Dr. McCoy,” he said.

“Through Erica, yeah,” she said. “I mean, Spock,” and for the first time he saw a flash of something restless break through her compassionate demeanor, “we haven’t really had a conversation in a long time. You know?”

Although they had certainly conversed on average 1.56 times every other shift they were both on duty, he was pretty sure that was not what she meant.

“I was surprised,” said Spock, knowing that if anyone deserved honesty, it was Christine Chapel, “to find someone in this post who I was totally unfamiliar with and with such a different… style and mode of speaking about his discipline. I wondered if he were merely one of the captain’s friends, like Lieutenant Mitchell.”

Chapel’s eyes brightened with comprehension. “Oh, that’s right, he is friends with Kirk, isn’t he? I’d have been a little hesitant too if I thought he was just Kirk’s guy - that Mitchell thing was a disaster: even if he was struggling, he didn’t have to behave like a pig. Even so, I’d find it super hard to maroon a friend somewhere as desolate as Delta Vega - it’s a big reason why I’ve stayed enlisted and out of the command track.”

She gave him an open, thoughtful look. “I didn’t realize you were a bit wary of Kirk, too. I thought I was the only one who was a bit put off at first. Because of Erica. I mean, they both made captain at the same time. She wasn’t even a finalist for the Enterprise job. And he’s so… so… I don’t know - ‘poster boy.’”

Although as first officer he probably shouldn’t be entertaining this conversation, he trusted Christine, even after everything, to know this was a “personal” conversation between friends about “feelings,” not endorsement of insubordination.

“I was also surprised by that turn of events,” he said.

“I had a little grudge against him at first, but I felt silly when Erica figured out why I was sulking, and she told me she didn’t even put together her supplementary application for the second round of interviews for the job.”

“She didn’t? Why not?”

“She had a long talk with Pike, you know, one of the good ones, where you’re the only person that exists in the world to him, and they talked over her career goals and what she’s passionate about. The Enterprise is a big status symbol and has the best of everything whenever it gets updated, but it’s not the most, I don’t know, innovative ship in the fleet, from a pilot’s perspective. There are these new classes of vessels coming out of Mars with next-generation warp engines, and ship-carriers with small-craft piloting crews who are creating ground-breaking new maneuvers. Not just to fight, but to do evacuations and salvage and dangerous scientific missions. She’s really happy with her command.”

“I see,” said Spock. “That does seem quite logical.”

Chapel’s eyes crinkled, amused. “And guess what?”

Spock raised an eyebrow. He was aware this was a “rhetorical question” humans favored.

“Erica likes Kirk! They became buddies when they were doing their orientation for new captains a few years ago. Even though he comes off all ‘whitebread’ as she says, he’s actually ‘a fun hang,’ ‘the real deal,’ and a ‘total weirdo.’ They have inside jokes and some kind of secret competition they refuse to explain to me. Like some command division bros thing, except they’re both goofy nerds. I like him just fine now.”

Spock wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react to this information. The fact that Ortegas approved of Kirk would overall be a positive mark in the captain’s favor. That was at least one “personal friend of Kirk’s” he already trusted.

“You know,” said Chapel, frowning, “Erica and I actually had a whole plan to seat McCoy at the same Enterprise friends table as you, Kirk, and M’Benga at our wedding so you could get to know each other. But you weren’t… able to make it. To the wedding. I assumed someone else had made introductions between you, Kirk, and McCoy before we left on the mission. I see you playing chess with the captain all the time - I guess that’s why I thought that. I wish I’d followed up - I’d hate it if you all got off on the wrong foot.”

“I see,” he said. Well. Well.

“Spock, are you okay? Because -“

No, I am not remotely okay, he thought, then shoved it aside. 

“My condition is acceptable,” he said. “Christine.”

“All right, Spock,” she said. She seemed, all at once, tired. “All right.”

The shift had ended, and she smiled at him again as she walked towards the doors. 

Spock wondered if perhaps he should attempt to speak with Dr. McCoy again, if he were still there, and show him a bit more courtesy and curiosity. Yes, this seemed like a reasonable plan of action. 

He strode towards the CMO’s office and its open door before hearing McCoy say: “Ah, Lady Amanda! What a nice end to my shift this is - “

Spock froze by the door in abject terror. He could admit this: denial was illogical. As presumably his mother at this very moment was saying something over the comm channel.

“And, do I spy a sunset? What’s the evening like in Shee-karr?”

Spock regained enough range of motion to grit his teeth at the mispronunciation of Shi’Kahr.

“I’ll take your word for it, ma’am. I ain’t never understood sayin’ ‘hot as Vulcan’ like it’s a bad thing. I’m like a hothouse flower, love the heat.”

They’re talking about the weather. Why is Dr. McCoy talking about the weather on Vulcan with my mother?

“Now, I don’t want to keep you from your supper and your plans, Lady Amanda. What can I do you for?”

A pause.

“Oh, I see. Well I can tell ya you’re still his next of kin.” 

A pause. “No, ma’am, says here he’s up to date with his record requirements, seems there’s no need for that going forward, ma’am.” 

A longer pause. “Yes, ma’am.” 

For some reason the accent just seemed overall more than before, and Spock picked up deference-helpful

“Yes, ma’am.” This utterance, while identical, seemed to convey a completely different meaning in an irrational number of syllables for the words used. Meaning: guarded-distant

“Yes, ma’am.” Relieved-open

“Yes, ma’am.” Amused-bashful.

Spock shook himself when he realized that he had unconsciously been going far beyond his mental shields to catch the doctor’s feelings without touching him, a lapse in control he hadn’t shown since before puberty. This was a highly irregular circumstance, but still: unacceptable. The nature of the irregularity: not only had Dr. McCoy evidently not been lying about his chart, his mother had of her own initiative called the new CMO of the Enterprise on his first day to check up on her thirty-five-year-old son.

He was still getting a hold on himself, when he heard the doctor say, his tone warm, “Well, bless your heart.” Genuine-no-irony-grateful. “Now, you take care now, Miss Lady Amanda.” Polite-benevolent.

Then, he heard a rustle and shift of muscles, over shoulder blades, a bend of a spinal column to lean back. Stop it. A deep sigh that based on the volume and timbre came from a throat exposed to the air. This wasn’t telepresence, just simple physics. That slight, twiggy man, leaning back in his chair and staring with those absurdly blue, big eyes at the ceiling. Stop it. Stop it.

He then heard the doctor mutter to the ceiling, “Miss Lady Amanda? Pull yourself together, Lenny-boy.”

He heard a rustling as the doctor rose from his desk and he - 

To be precise, Spock fled sickbay. Accuracy even in the light of emotional disturbance was still required of any Vulcan. Certainly, he had fled. Another point of evidence, he was walking down the wrong corridor away from the turbolift and his quarters with great purpose despite having none whatsoever in advancing upon the textile reclamation and inventory room, where crew members were lining up to get their new uniforms. The logical thing was to turn around.

Spock had only one objective after he started walking in the right direction toward the turbolift. He would spend the remaining amount of the time before the “open mic” in meditation. He was so focused on walking the few yards to the turbolift that he almost didn’t notice he was now sharing it with a very animated Sulu who was talking nonstop at a bewildered-looking Dr. McCoy, who had propped himself up against the sides of the lift. He retroactively cataloged that he had at least heard the words “the Yorktown rescue,” and, in fact, “Captain Ortegas” before Sulu, seeing him, redirected his social energy, though at a much less frenetic pace. McCoy glanced at him as Spock made the minimum viable replies to the helmsman, and he appeared openly relieved.

Then, to Spock’s consternation, McCoy followed him out of the turbolift and walked by his side towards his quarters. He discovered the reason when he and the doctor stood in front of adjacent doors: unlike M’Benga, this CMO had been given what had been the chief of security’s suite, which was between his and the captain’s.

McCoy turned to face him, and gave a polite smile.

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Spock, or probably, all the time,” said the doctor, with a confusing, impersonal amiability.

“You will not be attending the crew open mic tonight?”

Why am I prolonging this conversation?

God, no,” said McCoy. “I’ve been up thirty-six hours straight, what with my shuttle transfers. ‘Sides, as much as I like a good down-home hootenanny, somethin’ about having it be all official makes it awkward. Secondhand embarrassment kinda gives me the creeps, not something I want to pursue off-duty, if you know what I mean? I doubt the crew realizes that Jim just wants them to have fun; he can be pretty intimidating. He’s so gregarious and charming I think he forgets that he’s not exactly an easy-going fella.”

“I hope, then, that the captain succeeds in providing the other crew members with a ‘fun’ evening.”

McCoy’s smile became a lopsided grin. “But not for you, Mr. Spock?”

Something about the doctor’s clear engagement in the exchange, perhaps even enjoyment, made Spock scramble to make sure he wasn’t going beyond his telepathic shields again, which made his next retort and its tone much harsher than he had intended. “I am Vulcan. Vulcans, unlike humans, see no value in ‘having fun.’ We find the concept illogical.”

McCoy’s expression then was odd.

“Really,” he said. “Vulcans don’t?”

Spock saw no need to repeat himself.

“Mercy,” said McCoy, who seemed to find something funny. How could a face be so loud?  “I wonder if anyone’s looked into that. Is it the green blood? It’d have to be common to any Vulcan for that to be true. You know, something so obvious a human could understand it. Maybe the pointed ears.”

“I’m sure I don’t know. If you’ll excuse me, doctor?”

“Goodnight, Mr. Spock,” said McCoy, the impersonal amiability returning.

 

***

 

The success of the ensuing session of meditation was mixed. 

On the one hand, he did find his anxiety and embarrassment slowly fading, as he sorted through the errors he’d made in his assumptions and reframed the events of the day based on new evidence. Although a logical mind made fewer mistakes, holding onto feelings about an error was illogical. An error is an opportunity to make a correction, and a corrected mind becomes more precise.

On the other hand, his mind kept peppering him with excerpts of Surak’s words from the Kir’Shara on the logic of humor and diversion.

Between what is known and what is to be known there is laughter.

Play is the [Vulcan’s] first laboratory, and the next, and the last.

What may break the chains of the ego, so that the truth all around a [Vulcan] may be known? The ni’var of joy and pain. Even the ancients knew a false god has but one face.

For good measure, his mind, which was apparently not on the side of his own self-respect - surely Surak would approve, at least - supplied the full passage of the IDIC: 

What is a [Vulcan]? Can the memory of the fallen warrior only be found on the Fire Plains? Is it only the healer on the slopes of Mount Seleya who can bring life where there would be death? Has there only been one language, the edicts announced from the stronghold of Shi’Kahr? Does the radiation of the nuclear warhead only dissolve and deform the bodies and fields of a sworn enemy? Would it pass over your own child if [she] had taken shelter there? Jealousy says this true thing is mine alone, only the terror of a child says this. With a child, we are gentle and we offer knowledge; a full-grown [Vulcan] must use all [her] strength to gentle [her] own hands, and all [her] cunning to seek knowledge as though it were water in the Forge. All is not the same as all else is, but there is nothing that does not depend on something else, nothing that stands alone. There is infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

This passage in particular had caused an uproar when the Kir’Shara was discovered a hundred years ago. For millennia, the High Command had insisted that the IDIC referred to mathematics, physics, and engineering, or, at best, metaphysics or philosophy or aesthetics, all abstractions. The idea that Surak had formulated the IDIC in the context of internecine hatred and civil war went, overnight, from being a bohemian fringe theory to being a central tenet of Vulcan politics and self-perception.

His grandfather, Skon, who had first translated the Kir’Shara into Standard, had, in fact, written an entire essay in the appendices about the absence of a word for “Vulcan” in the Kir’Shara that did not merely mean “sentient being that so far has usually been ‘humanoid’ in form” except in the context of interstellar relations, when all “Vulcan” meant was “from the planet of Eridani 40.” The choice had been deliberate on Surak’s part: there were many words from that time that referred to Vulcanoid physiology and cultural patterns as exceptional and superior. The fragments and inscriptions left by “those who marched beneath the Raptor’s wings,” a probably apocryphal group of Vulcans who had abandoned the planet during the Time of Awakening, used these words all the time. The widespread acceptance of a belief in universal affinity between life-forms as well as the acceptance of unique histories and customs that differed from each other was widely believed to be the reason Vulcans had stopped killing each other. 

Then, very unwelcome, he flashed back to a memory from when he was very young, before Michael had come to them, at least. He and his parents were walking along the Fire Plains, and his mother had asked what the inscription meant on a particularly impressive and detailed statue of a pre-Awakening warrior - he could remember feeling her fascination-awe and his father’s keeping-watch-all-around

Then his father had translated the inscription as “the blood of the master race is green, know our slaves by their cropped ears,” and he’d been overwhelmed with his mother’s fear-anger-hurt through their bond as though there was too much inside his body. Without hesitation, he looked for the biggest lava rock he could, and hurled it at the statue with only his mind, with a keening yell: DIE. With mounting horror, he’d then turned to find his mother collapsed behind him, pale and motionless. The memory ended with his father looming over him, sweeping him up and away, holding him against his shoulder, blocking all sensation out.

Did it matter, that the next memory was slowly waking, cool and comfortable in the back of his father’s sandskimmer taking them back to the family compound, still held securely against his chest, his mother curled up against his father’s shoulder? They were speaking quietly, of many things he didn’t understand, about history and language and places far away and long ago. But he could feel his father’s influence through the points of contact with him and his mother. Safe-calm, slow-abundance, curious-humbled. Did it matter that his father’s library was then full of books from Earth, that there were more discussions between his parents over new padds and cups of tea? He knew his mother took him to shul more often after that day in the offworlders quarter, that they’d started lighting candles and observing a day for study and rest together as a family when they could, a Terran tradition his father had praised as highly logical in a tone he knew meant why, I like this very much. Did it matter that his father had started teaching him the telepathic arts, which had made him feel very proud and very Vulcan?

The nightmares had started then anyway, and for years they’d only get worse.

 

***

 

He was actually relieved when the transporter chief interrupted this unpleasant reverie, saying Dr. M’Benga was finally back onboard. He rose and made his way to the old CMO’s temporary quarters without hesitation.

A dry “Come!” came through the door once he chimed, and he found himself in empty quarters, devoid of M’Benga’s personality and vitality. The man himself seemed as charismatic and purposeful as ever, but smaller, somehow, packing up only one duffle bag, dressed in colorful civilian clothes.

“Ah, Spock,” said the doctor. “How was Dr. McCoy’s first day?”

Joseph M’Benga had been one of the first human doctors to complete a residency on Vulcan in a Vulcan hospital, and Spock had occasionally wondered if he was one of those humans who genuinely enjoyed living among Vulcans, not just one who derived some excitement from their odd ideas about Vulcans. The man had a way of cutting to the heart of things, and hated small talk as much as Spock or any grandmother sunning in a garden in Shi’Kahr did. He’d always been too shy to ask, though.

“Satisfactory, I believe, though he has already reorganized your office.” 

The doctor snorted. “Of course he did. Surgeons are so squirrelly. Can’t stay still.”

“His methods and manner seem very… different from yours. The evidence so far suggests he is dedicated and proactive, at the very least, which is adequate for an officer with supervisory duties, even if his research may not be as… innovative.”

“You wound me,” M'Benga said, with subtle playfulness, “he’s been a co-author on many of my best xenobiology papers for the past four years.”

Spock clearly had not meditated enough today, because he visibly startled at this, and almost stammered, “I did not… realize that. I would not have suspected - the theoretical sophistication of your style, the breakthroughs in biophysics -"

M’Benga gave a grunt, as though slightly offended. “I got some very challenging puzzles on the Enterprise, but hardly much of a sample size. Dr. McCoy tended to run the actual experiments or provide case studies and do the first statistical analysis. I can’t believe he kept insisting on being a second or lower author.”

Spock almost wanted to sit down.

“We doctors are biologists at the end of the day, Spock,” said M’Benga, giving him a knowing look. “The field is all about the empirical grind and the numbers we get from real squishy living things. It’s not like, say, theoretical astrophysics. Saying I just do the theorizing isn’t really a compliment. Why do you think I kept taking leaves for research posts to do real work in real labs? The Enterprise CMO post is sort of a dead end for a medical researcher as we bounce around all the time - phenomenal for your military career, but doesn’t do much for your CV as a scientist just on its own. You do this gig for love. Or possibly masochism. Both, if you plan to last long.”

Spock was finding a new depth to his errors today. “I must admit,” he said, careful, “that I did not realize the CMO post had this reputation among scientists. It’s possible I understand less about the norms of your discipline than I thought.”

M’Benga sighed, then. “Oh, probably not. The thing Leo McCoy needs to work on, professionally, is learning how to present his work in a way that convinces people of how important it is. He’s too humble, and that’s not a compliment: effective science communication and advocacy can become life or death in the blink of an eye. I think he sees me as a mentor, and that’s true in the sense that I had to knock some sense into his head about the value of writing up his research. He put more effort into his medical logs than some professors dirtside do in their monographs. Writing with me was supposed to be like training wheels. I wish it weren’t the case that the big leagues in the sciences still worked like this: I’m a third-generation PhD and my father led the team that broke the warp-9 barrier. Leo’s mother was a transporter hub maintenance worker raising him alone in Appalachia. I don’t think they had more than two Academy-prep-grade science labs in all of northern Georgia.”

Spock, admittedly, wasn’t sure what “Appalachia” was, but could extrapolate the impact of only having two acceptable science labs available to children in a region of that size, as he knew the dimensions of the state of Georgia, at least. He vaguely recalled several of his mother’s more passionate rants about educational disparities on Earth and the inadequacies of Standard Federation curriculum, which claimed to be so “advanced” that any child could have the same quality of education anywhere they had access to a computer terminal. He knew his mother was not always happy on Vulcan, but she never seemed happier than when she joked that Shi’Kahr had public children’s laboratories and workshops the way some Earth cities had something called “corner stores.”

M’Benga looked at him, considering. “You’re the two most senior scientists onboard. It’s not your job to hold his hand, but as he’s my replacement and you’re my colleague - I want you to know where he’s coming from. He’s a resource that shouldn’t be wasted. I want you to know this as a scientist and as his commanding officer.”

“I am not sure exactly how to be of use to him in that regard, yet,” Spock said, hedging, as he actually wasn’t sure. “But I will certainly keep that in mind. In the spirit of understanding, I was wondering if I could ask you a question.”

“Shoot.”

“I was discussing Dr. McCoy’s background with the captain today, and he suggested there was something exceptional about his wartime service, which wasn’t evident from his record. Do you know what it is?”

Dr. M’Benga looked very grim. “Most in Starfleet assume that Leo’s generation of doctors were elbows deep in guts on the front lines, where the Klingons considered medical frigates to be military targets.”

M’Benga paused, as though considering his words, and scowled before continuing. “In reality, a lot of doctors in his cohort, MD-PhDs like him, the ones who had ambitions of making their mark as scientists, pulled strings to get reassigned off the front line, where no one got any research done, certainly. They were only allowed to go into defense research or Section 31 when that bullshit still existed, as no one got approved for civilian rotations like we usually do, obviously. McCoy’s the only psych PhD his age I know of who hasn’t worked on mind-control, behavior modification, and memory suppression, or whatever crypto-fascist Dr. Frankenstein nightmare Section 31 had their psychologists doing. Those vultures would rather work on weapons that kill or break people or on countermeasures to doomsday weapons that theoretically could exist, instead of just being doctors trying to save people who actually did exist. We saw that in a lot of applicants for the CMO post. A lot of research fellowships, names on big defense or counterintelligence projects, but barely any trauma and triage work, let alone in deep space. But on a personnel record, all it says is ‘wartime service.’”

It was suddenly abundantly clear to Spock why Kirk was so displeased with his complaint earlier in the day. Spock understood why he had made this mistake, but he could certainly see that he had acted in haste and neglected to do due diligence in his investigation.

“I wish I had known this,” he said. “I was not able to contextualize his behavior today appropriately.”

M’Benga frowned. “He didn’t introduce himself to you months before he came onboard?”

“No, he did not.”

Leo,” M’Benga hissed to the air. “I told him to contact you, to introduce himself as my friend and collaborator, talk about his work, and to ask smart questions about the labs onboard so you’d know where he was coming from, set himself up as your peer.”

“I see,” said Spock. That would have indeed helped. It might have prevented this interpersonal debacle altogether.

“I should have been more honest and told him what a pretentious asshole you are,” said M’Benga, as though commenting on the color of his eyes, “No offense.”

Spock should probably take offense, but this seemed an apt description of what had occurred today. He did sit down, on the generic futon left in the quarters, suddenly feeling like a twenty-four-year-old science officer convincing Dr. M’Benga to approve his use of the exobiology lab. That is, already sure he’d missed a step in his excitement about some new idea that had come out just yesterday. 

He felt an almost physical stab of pain at the thought if Michael were here, she would have set me straight in five minutes. But when Michael had been there, he’d refused to speak to her, instead still following her as her frantic shadow, the Vulcan science officer who insisted on a career in command, to stand against militarism and for the pursuit of truth on the bridge of a Starfleet vessel beside her captain. 

“I agree with you,” said Spock. “I believe I may have judged him unfairly.”

M’Benga lifted an eyebrow. “Based on what?”

Spock hesitated. “In our first conversation, he called me in to discuss my failure to comply with record requirements. He showed me the chart he had on file.”

M’Benga rolled his eyes up to the ceiling as though invoking some unseen entity. “Leo, Leo, Leo,” he said.

“Dr. M’Benga,” said Spock and then paused. “Did you really call my mother?”

“Of course. The pediatrics label I added this morning because it was funny. It’s his first day. There are traditions in Starfleet Medical. Pranks.” M’Benga looked askance at Spock. “I’m surprised he told you about that, but Leo is much nicer than I am. I told him to just keep going behind your back.”

“He said he would if I did not comply with his demands.”

“And are you going to comply?”

“Affirmative.”

“Well done, Dr. McCoy,” the doctor said to himself. “You’ve slain the dragon. Point to the young challenger.”

“You have been… frustrated,” said Spock, “with my resistance to meeting the record requirements.”

“Yes,” said M’Benga. “Obviously. This entire time.”

“Why did you not inform me of your dissatisfaction?”

Spock,” said M’Benga, eyes wide with disbelief. “I did. Many times. I just gave up years ago. I had better things to do.”

Not for the first time, Spock reflected that as important as it was for him to control his own emotions, when among humans ignoring their emotions often led to treacherous and bewildering sequences of events that occurred at unpredictable intervals.

“May I make a query of a personal nature?”

“You may.”

“Why did you want Dr. McCoy to replace you? And only him?”

M’Benga, with an almost Vulcan air of irony, replied, “He’s a good doctor.”

The doctor closed his bag, and headed down the corridor towards the rec room, apparently staying to catch the show.

 

***

 

Spock’s idle hope that the event would be sparsely attended was dashed upon entering the rec room, which had been configured into many pillows and couches and chairs before a small stage, under a field of unfamiliar stars. He found a seat near the back and tried to look polite.

Soon, he had to admit that the event was at least interesting, due to the many talents of the Enterprise crew. Scotty had given an impressive show of some recreational robotics, and demonstrated techniques for “hypothetically” distilling various forms of alcohol using only spare parts that even Spock knew was not remotely hypothetical. Sulu, with the help of Rand, demonstrated several forms of old-fashioned fencing with authentic foils. Rand had then followed up with a frankly alarming knife-throwing demonstration. There were many musical acts, and aside from Riley’s renditions of Irish folk songs, none were terrible. And, everyone seemed entertained by Riley, anyway. In-between, the captain, glittering and pleased, kept up a friendly and unobtrusive patter, deftly coaxing up the next performer. Spock had almost relaxed when the captain finally spotted him.

As Spock braced himself, walking up to the stage, he realized he hadn’t even given a thought to what he would actually do if forced to perform. Fortunately, he had a stand-by. He programmed the rec room’s console to materialize a standard Vulcan lyrette. He played several simple themes that always appealed to the broad tastes of a majority human audience, and when he was finished, the room was completely silent. Then everyone erupted in thunderous applause.

From a corner of the room, Riley, Sulu, and Kyle were chanting “Encore! Encore!”

“Holy shit,” said Kirk, who was standing off to the side. “Let’s hear it again for our first officer, Mr. Spock!”

Another round of applause and shouts, even, he noted, from the small group of Rand, Chapel, Uhura, M’Ress, and their other friends.

“What do you say,” asked Kirk, “will you give us another, Mr. Spock?”

“I may have exhausted my repertoire for the evening, captain,” Spock said.

“Uhura,” shouted Kyle, suddenly, “you should get up there and do a duet with Spock! Everyone loves that!”

Uhura looked startled. 

Mr. Kyle was referring to the fact that for years at this point Spock and Uhura had been a fixture in the rec room, playing music together. Shortly after Hemmer’s death, over five years ago, the then Ensign Uhura had begun to show signs of withdrawing from social life. Spock knew he was not the most comforting person, and the best he could come up with, as her remaining living mentor, was proposing an ethnolinguistic study of completely tonal dialects of Vulcan to keep her mind engaged. This had led to him teaching her to play the ka’athyra, and then flowed into what Pike had called their “jam sessions.” 

They had stopped over a year ago at the same time Uhura had stopped associating with him socially, due, he believed, to his missteps with Chapel, and, to a lesser degree, Ortegas. Why Uhura persisted in her disapproval of and distaste for him and his company after Chapel’s own anger and hurt had long since faded made no sense to him at all. He merely accepted at this point that it seemed unlikely to change. He had even had to give Uhura a warning recently for covering too many bridge shifts for Lieutenant M’Ress, and her response had almost been insubordinate. He had put the Caitian on report, although he was about to clear her as she’d much improved in the past several weeks. In fact, this was the first time he’d seen M’Ress outside her quarters while off-duty since the mission had begun. She was also wearing a skant for the first time since Kirk had assumed command, and had let her enormous mane of hair loose. She was one of several crew members who had “perked up” in the past few weeks, including Rand, Lieutenant Arex, several other yeomen, and Uhura herself. 

Since Lieutenant Mitchell’s death, his mind, finally, too late, supplied. That’s the pattern. Now he wondered if there was another reason Uhura might be angry with him. He wasn’t exactly sure how to navigate this situation. Perhaps a tactical retreat was wise.

“I would be happy to accompany Lieutenant Uhura,” he said, “but I am afraid I have duties to which I must attend. I am confident she can manage on her own.”

A scattering of playful boos rushed through the crowd.

“I didn’t prepare a song for the Vulcan lyrette,” she said.

“Just make something up, Uhura,” called out Sulu.

“Aye, you are mighty gifted at improvisation, dearie,” called out Scotty.

Slightly rattled, she got up, and took the lyrette from his hands, and her eyes flashed to his, unsure. She must have seen, well, nothing in his eyes, and suddenly anger flashed, and all nervousness disappeared. 

“All right, then,” she said, taking a seat onstage as Spock retreated. “This one goes out to our first officer, then. For his confidence in the success of his musical protege.”

Spock knew enough about human social behavior that this was about to go very, very badly for him. Really, leaving would still be the most logical course of action. 

She riffed on a few chords in a good key for her vocal register, all thoughtful, lyrical repose, and although Spock had moved towards the door, he paused to watch, as she began to sing, slowly:

When first we met
I saw your lovely eyes look into mine
Then dart away for just an instant
To the part of me that says it’s different

She noodled a bit, thinking, then sang again: 

Embarrassed, you try to hide the fact that you’ve noticed
You would not want to hurt my feelings

And with flashing eyes, she deadpanned: “How droll.”

She repeated an earlier refrain, relaxing into her theme, as though no longer conscious of an audience.

If you this question pose to me
I’ll answer you as best I can
Although the limits of your mind will not adjust 
to compute the technicalities
Of my world’s inheritance

For Vulcan is not your mother Earth
It is the world I grew up in
As far removed from yours as worlds can be
The wonder is that I communicate with you at all

For deep within me
Are the differences you cannot see
The differences that are my shields against the love and hate
T
hat weaken you and make you vulnerable

And yet I will admit
There stirs in me a curiosity to know these feelings
For if just once I could command the change in me
And come to know them

She lapsed into an instrumental recapitulation, then murmured, coming back to the room: “That’s all for now.”

The crowd burst into raucous cheers, Kirk clapping heartily. Dr. M’Benga gave an encouraging whistle. Everyone turned to him, having clearly been aware he had stayed to watch.

“Quite skillful, lieutenant,” said Spock, put on the spot. “On several levels.”

Uhura somehow managed to look angry and guilty and thrilled at once from across the room. 

“Now do ‘Beyond Antares,’ Uhura,” Riley shouted. 

There was a roar of agreement. She nodded graciously, and settled in with the lyrette once more. Surely, Spock could go now.

And he did, but it was as though the music were on the comm system, following him through the empty corridors. 

The skies are green and glowing,
Where my heart is, where my heart is,
Where the scented lunar flower is blooming:
Somewhere, beyond the stars...
Beyond Antares.

The ship’s interior design, clean primary colors and crisp geometric shapes, began shifting around him. Now shadows fell, eccentric, from lights of bolder colors: pink, violet. Jewel tones and honeycomb mesh, curves and incomplete polygons. Mod, not abstract modernism, from the 1960s, or early twenty-first-century vaporwave drawn from the aesthetics of the 1990s Eugenics Wars. But of course that couldn’t actually be happening. 

I'll be back,
though it takes forever.
Forever is just a day.
Forever is just another journey.
Tomorrow a stop along the way.

The ship’s corridors seemed to close in, crowds of people moving down the hall in super-saturated uniforms and utility jumpsuits, where before he’d always assumed he had been walking alone. He felt all of sudden older, harder, and tired, as though he did not need to force his face into suitable severity. Now, it just stayed that way. 

There waits my love, a-sleeping,
Where my heart is, where my heart is,
Where the great blue crane its watch is keeping,
Somewhere, beyond the stars...
Beyond Antares.  

He didn’t meditate that night. He just lay on his bed, and stopped.

Notes:

- The quote from “Selek” is from the TAS episode “Yesteryear,” and it's an important plot point of the episode that at this point in canon, Spock wouldn’t remember the entire incident in his childhood accurately.

- I fully know that the continuity weirdness of “Where No Man Has Gone Before” is production-related and definitely not that deep, but I’m working with what I’ve got. The behavior I attributed to Mitchell is a real thing that happened to Yeoman Rand in "Charlie X" except in that case it was the worst teenage boy there ever was.

- The Delta Vega reference is not my fault! Apparently the J.J. Abram crew thought it would be cute to base Vulcan’s satellite after the completely different and very far away planet of Delta Vega from that TOS episode where Spock wants Kirk to strand Mitchell and then just gave it the same name.

- I think sickbay looks more like it does in SNW than it does in TOS.

- Also, no one said Ole Miss doesn’t have an Andoria campus! Maybe Dax ran into McCoy when he was back on Earth renewing his registration or taking his quals or something. (Cf. "Trials and Tribble-ations," DS9)

- I’ve spent more time than I expected thinking about McCoy’s professional persona in light of the more “scientist-practitioner” model that Crusher, Bashir, the Doctor, etc. follow. I feel like my take on McCoy’s deal is reasonable, but I will admit that this mostly happened because there’s no way in hell I believe a southern “good ole boy” is a fun and harmless dude to have on TV in 2022. (Not that TOS McCoy was particularly gross in the 60s, imho, fortunately, but still.)

- I will spare you the extent to which I thought about how higher education works in Star Trek, but I’ve decided for my own secret reasons that Spock actually did go to the VSA, but then turned down his commission in the VEG to go to Starfleet instead. (Spock going to the Academy is also canon as of ST: Picard.)

- For those keeping score at home, the one time McCoy mentions his daughter is in “The Survivor” in TAS, saying “she went to school on Cerberus.” Based on maps I squinted it, the placement on the Romulan border is correct.

- Relatedly, Kirk’s service record regarding the VEG comes up in "Court Martial." Discussion of "what happened" on the Farragut and why Kirk is protective is covered in "Obsession."

- Surak's writing I made up, but the Kir'Shara stuff is from Enterprise. More on that soon.

- By the way, Vulcans having a whole range of spooky psychic powers when they want to is in fact canon, as is Vulcans being able to perform telekinesis in the form of pyrokinesis at least. (Cf. "The Gift," Voyager and arguably STIII: Search for Spock.) I totally buy that for Vulcans most telepathic discipline is learning how not to do things: Spock even says so in “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” But we’ll be getting to that.

- A rudimentary form of the holodeck is portrayed in the TAS episode "The Practical Joker." As Roddenberry always wanted to include it in TOS and didn't for budget reasons, I've decided it's fair game.

- The “Uhura publicly humiliates Spock by improvising a song about him in the rec room,” scene really happened and is adapted from “Charlie X” where it is an order of magnitude more hurtful. I was originally going to adapt the actual song, but I couldn’t stomach it. Suffice to say the canon version is the single meanest thing I’ve ever seen someone do to Spock onscreen, and that includes Kirk’s xenophobic rant in “This Side of Paradise.” It’s hard to watch (Nimoy’s face is heartbreaking!!!!). To me, it begs the question: what the hell did Spock do to piss Uhura off? She’s a kind, brilliant, and thoughtful person - it must have been bad! (By the way, I’m using the SNW backstory of Spock being Uhura’s “tough but fair” mentor on her cadet cruise, and there is no Spock/Uhura in this series. I have a whole tangent about AOS Spock/Uhura, but I will refrain.)

- The actual song I used for Uhura was written by Leonard Nimoy from Spock’s POV, called "The Difference Between Us"

- Nichelle Nichols sings a full-ish version of “Beyond Antares” in “The Conscience of the King.” (And a partial version in "The Changeling.")

***

Like to give Yeoman Rand a raise; comment if you want Dr. M’Benga to have the most dreamy semi-retirement imaginable.

Chapter 4: Playthings

Summary:

Spock gets on the captain’s good side and attempts to discern a pattern.

Notes:

Content Notes:
Continued discussion of workplace sexual harassment and (more favorable) resolution, discussion of mental illness and internalized stigma, mention of canonical atrocities/tragedies (Tarsus IV and famine on Cerberus), mention of canonical character death, characters experiencing symptoms of PTSD, depictions of flashbacks.

I'm resigned to the fact that my chapters are long, and I'm channeling Victorian realism levels of verbosity and introspection.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

[circa 2265, USS Enterprise, Alpha and Beta Quadrants]

 

After Dr. McCoy had personally escorted a mostly catatonic Lenore Karidian down to the surface of Benecia, Spock found Kirk in the empty rec room, which was still configured as an intimate Shakespearean theater. He was sitting on the stage, of course.

Spock approached him carefully, making sure the captain knew he was coming.

Kirk didn’t look at him, his head resting on his knees, but then he said, “It was Hamlet’s line, you know?”

“Sir?”

“The last thing Lenore said, before she stopped saying anything. It was Hamlet’s line, not Ophelia’s. ‘The play’s the thing, to catch the conscience of the king.’ When Hamlet hires actors to stage a reenactment of his father’s murder, as some sort of trap for his uncle. I always thought that was a bad idea, by the way. I got marked down on a lit paper in middle school because I wrote about that instead of, I don’t know, metaphors? I love Shakespeare, but I hated writing about him. It’s strange that’s what she said.”

“Especially,” said Spock, “as she seemed to have cast herself more in the role of King Lear’s Cordelia than the melancholy Dane or the fair Ophelia. In the end.”

“There’s that, too,” Kirk looked up. “Mr. Spock, I didn’t know you were familiar with the Bard.”

“I’m familiar with many things, captain.”

Kirk smiled. “I’ve always liked you, Mr. Spock. You intimidated the hell out of me at first, but I’ve always liked you. Today I realized that I also trust you, and I don’t trust anyone. I wonder when that happened?”

 

***

 

Several months ago, the captain had asked to see him in his quarters. 

Although both Dr. McCoy and Dr. Tola and Dr. Noel’s psionometrics lab had cleared him for duty, Kirk still appeared unsettled by a recent transporter malfunction that had resulted in two clones of the man, now "back together." He’d played it off in the immediate aftermath, remaining playfully stoic while chastising “Bones” for not allowing the duplicates to “explore each other’s bodies” until the doctor had become a unique intensity of apoplectic only the captain - or, unnervingly, now occasionally Spock himself - could elicit. The doctor had remained irate for the better part of a week, after, although he was not alone - all members of the psychology department seemed equally exasperated. 

The crew had taken to referring to the duplicates as “good Kirk” and “evil Kirk,” which had set all psychologists on staff muttering about “how it doesn’t work that way.” McCoy had tried during a senior staff meeting to explain a theory that stated that duplicate clones, exposed to each other, tended to unconsciously take on opposing qualities of the base personality due to something he referred to as “colloquially, the narcissism of small differences.” It wasn’t completely validated, he’d said, as getting a sample size in the field had been impossible and creating one would be highly unethical. That didn’t stop him and several other psychologists from starting to write a paper about the incident, though. Spock privately saw merit in the doctor’s explanation on a conceptual level, but no one else felt keen to “embrace ambiguity” to “manage discomfort caused by cognitive dissonance,” as the psychologists pleaded.

Within the week, however, as the captain further “integrated” his memories as both copies of himself, the captain’s mood had suffered a precipitous decline. He was glad, for that reason, at least, that Kirk was taking the initiative to reach out to his first officer.

“Mr. Spock,” said the captain. “Why didn’t you tell me about Mitchell?”

“Captain?”

“Bones had Rand do a long debrief with him, and convinced them to talk to me about some of what had been going on. Rand told me they had come to you.”

“Yeoman Rand did not want to make a formal report, and desired confidentiality. They did express a desire for Mitchell to be… observed, but I did not know how to register my concern without abrogating the crew’s privacy.”

Kirk nodded. He looked miserable. “Jesus Christ, no wonder you were on edge about me bringing another ‘friend’ onboard. I thought you were talking about Bones and his… Well, anyway, I’m sorry I was an asshole.”

“After discussing that particular misunderstanding with Dr. M’Benga, I believe I, also, was an asshole. I also believe my actions regarding Mitchell were suboptimal. I could have done more, though what that might have been I still don’t know.”

“The worst of it, in my opinion,” said Kirk, “was the way Rand talked about their job, like they had some sort of personal responsibility for me and my moods. After what just happened, what I could have done…” Kirk broke off with a shudder. 

“Evil Kirk” had surprised Yeoman Rand in their personal quarters. No one was quite sure what he had intended, as, after babbling incoherently about ‘pretending’ and ‘can’t ignore it,’ the clone had lunged at Rand, at which point the yeoman had decked him, knocking him out cold, leaving him with what Sulu later referred to as “a beauty of a shiner,” and immediately called for security and Spock himself. Still, the implications were… unsavory.

Kirk shook himself before continuing. “I’ve been relying on them way too much, in ways that are - Rand assures me I’ve been a model superior officer, but I know there’s so much potential for, well, abuse. I do find myself expecting them to take care of me, and it’s not right.”

“I agree with your assessment, captain,” said Spock.

“The thing is,” said Kirk, “being the senior yeoman to the captain of the Enterprise is about as high as you can go, before getting promoted to some operations desk job at HQ. I know Rand doesn’t want to do that. I don’t know how to change things without impacting their career or ship’s efficiency.”

“As for the latter issue,” said Spock, rapidly giving it some thought, “perhaps it may be wise to expand the yeoman program, and to do more rotations, so that no one yeoman becomes indispensable, and all of them get more experience with a wider range of command operations.”

“Yes,” said Kirk, “yes, I like that. But isn’t Starfleet Command trying to wind-down the yeoman program, phase it out? Some new admiral wanting to ‘modernize’?”

“Affirmative,” said Spock, “but not yet. Even if it is contrary to the intentions of Command, it is still technically within your prerogative to do so. In my opinion, Command has not yet offered a suitable alternative for the yeoman program. I believe this unknown transition at some undetermined point in the future will be more successful if the current program is more functional than dysfunctional, even if it leads to a temporary expansion.”

“Excellent,” said Kirk. “And Rand?”

Spock and Kirk thought about this for a moment.

Spock had a thought. “Why has Rand not sought a commission?” 

Kirk’s eyes lit up. “Yes, yes, a good question. They come from an old MACO family, and enlisting as early as possible has been the norm for generations. I also get the sense that the sort of soldier-scientist culture of the commissioned officers feels a bit foreign to them. They’re mostly just interested in keeping everyone safe and productive.”

“Rand would be very well-suited to a career in security or tactical operations,” Spock mused. “Potential for command.”

“Oh, certainly, but I doubt they’d be willing to go to the Academy at this point in their career. Field commissions in security are rare - it’s easier for science officers and civilian specialists or even engineers to take shortcuts than professionals in operations.”

“However, that is due to the security clearance requirements as well as hands-on experience with Starfleet regulations and protocols, both of which Rand already has.”

“True.”

An idea occurred to Spock, though he knew the captain's relationship to his former colleague had some sort of... complexity to it. The sort of complexity that caused weighted "looks" between the senior women on the bridge when the then-lieutenant had occasionally visited. He hoped he wasn't about to make another interpersonal misstep.

"Commander Noonien-Singh has mentored several enlisted crew members who now have careers in security and had an unusual trajectory in operations herself, though she did go through the Academy at one point. I think she may have more insight into Rand’s options. She's currently posted with Captain Ortegas on the Reliant.”

“Excellent. I’ll give La'an a call – give me a chance to catch up with Ortegas as well. Did you know they’re considering manufacturing a whole class of fully-armed science cruisers based on the Reliant? Wild.”

Spock nodded, relieved the captain had taken the reference to Commander Noonien-Singh in stride. In point of fact, the Reliant, which had become operational a few years ago, was a prototype based on a semi-declassified Section 31 ship class, either the Nimrod or the Hi-You, but the version of events the captain referred to was the official story.

“In the meantime,” said Spock, “I think it would be appropriate if, as the yeoman program expands, we were to open a more senior, supervisory position for the other yeomen, and strongly recommend, even request, that Rand apply. They are obviously the most qualified, even if we still need to do our due diligence.”

“Yes, yes,” said Kirk, who looked sunny and confident for the first time since the transporter accident. “Mr. Spock, you are a marvel.”

“I am gratified you are satisfied with my performance as first officer,” said Spock, carefully. This was the first time he and Kirk had even alluded to their disastrous miscommunication about the new CMO.

“Yeah, um,” Kirk now looked unsure as he said, “by the way, I wanted you to know that I’ve asked Dr. McCoy to come to the bridge more frequently, but make it look casual. I think if anyone’s keeping an eye on me and serving as my sounding-board, it should be the officer who can relieve me of duty, and who won’t get scared if I’m a bitch about it. I don’t know how you’re feeling about Bones now, but I wanted to let you know.” The unsureness had become firm, as though throwing down a challenge.

“A reasonable suggestion, captain,” said Spock, keeping his tone mild. “I have no complaints about his performance thus far. As we’ve become better acquainted with each other’s research, I’ve come to believe we’ll be effective colleagues.”

This was, by the most rigorous standards of Vulcan honesty, untrue.

 

***

 

In retrospect, although Spock had been a great deal more circumspect about his interactions with the Enterprise’s new CMO, forcing Dr. McCoy to shoot the woman the captain kept implying was the doctor’s ex-lover at point-blank range did not augur well for the harmonious development of professional accord. 

The fact that the “salt vampire” as the crew were apparently calling it was in fact Nancy Crater’s murderer, not the woman herself, did not seem to factor into the doctor’s reactions to the event. More troubling, the doctor seemed on-edge and fearful around him personally. During the incident debrief, the doctor had sat on the other end of the table - when usually he sat next to the captain - and appeared to avoid looking at him. After the meeting, he had made a point to take the doctor aside and re-emphasize that his feelings of guilt and sorrow were illogical as the creature he’d killed had not been the woman in question, in an attempt to restore the doctor’s equanimity. 

McCoy had just stared at him, eyes widening to an absurd degree, his mouth dropping open. He looked at Spock as though he’d grown an extra arm. “Mr. Spock,” he asked, sounding hesitant, “are you trying to make me feel better right now?”

“Of course not, doctor,” Spock swiftly replied, “I have no interest in the quality of your feelings, naturally. I am merely concerned that you are showing evidence of compromised judgment, and would like to ensure that you are able to discharge your duties tomorrow after such an irregular incident.”

“Huh,” the doctor had said, his eyes still huge. Now he was looking at Spock as though he were sprouting two additional arms. “Well, I’ve noted your concern. You’ll be the first to know if I start becoming… ‘inefficient.’”

“That would be appropriate,” he replied, not sure he understood the strange current of feeling beneath the doctor’s words.

“Uh huh,” said the doctor, who seemed now to be inching away from him, as though wishing to be gone.

Evidently, McCoy’s overreaction only became more pronounced as the evening wore on. He got a comm from Uhura later that night, asking if he could come help her “get Dr. McCoy home” from the observation deck. Spock was so relieved that Uhura had thought to reach out to him for assistance that he barely remembered to be concerned.

“It’s not a big deal,” said Uhura quietly, standing by a slumped over McCoy pooled on the floor. “He’s just had a few too many. We were drinking in Rand’s quarters, and I said I’d get him home. He’s just in that drunk-stubborn phase and had to come here. He’s had a hard day.”

McCoy waved towards the viewscreens without raising his head. “Stars. We go there. That one there is-ah-is-ah place.” 

“Indeed,” said Spock.

His head snapped up, and the doctor actually glared at him. “Oh, it’s you.”

Uhura glanced at Spock. “Do I even want to know?”

Spock shrugged. 

Thus, he found himself guiding the stumbling doctor by the arm to his quarters and followed him in due to a concern for his coordination. McCoy sat down on his own bed and actually started to quietly cry.

“This display does not suggest you will be able to perform your duties effectively tomorrow,” said Spock. “I will take you off the duty roster so that you may regain control of yourself.”

“Stop acting like my feelings are your own personal problem you now have to solve,” the doctor slurred. “I can’t deal with it grate-grash-gracefully? gra-cious-ly? righ’ now. Gotta hypo, anyhow. Not my fir-first ah ro-de-o.”

“You are intoxicated, and I do not understand what you are saying.”

“Damn straight I’m inta-intox-fi-intoxicated,” he said. The tears seemed to have dried due to the ire now directed, irrationally, at Spock. “This is my bed. That I’m on. Off-off-duty.”

“I see.”

“You knew it wasn’t me,” said McCoy, who slumped down onto his back, looking at the ceiling. “Salt vampire.”

“I did not. I had a suspicion you had been impersonated by the creature, and it was proven warranted.”

“She wasn’t my ex,” said the doctor. “Jim is ridiculous.”

“I’m not sure how that’s relevant.”

“I-I’m plas-plastered. Everything’s relevant. She was my friend. Chose the wrong badge during the - well, you know. After, she couldn’t - she shouldn’t have been all alone out there.”

“You should sleep, doctor,” said Spock, “I’m taking you off the duty roster tomorrow.” He hesitated. “At least three days would be appropriate. Let me know if you need the other two days.”

A soft, derisive snort answered him from across the room.

“You knew it wasn’t me,” he repeated quietly and then his breathing changed. The man had fallen asleep.

Spock did give the doctor the next day off, which the man accepted without comment. Then the next day he returned to his duties and… performed them adequately. In fact, his efficiency had not been impacted, despite his unrestrained emotional display. He no longer showed fear or avoidance around Spock. This was not particularly noteworthy. Many humans, including senior officers, especially Scotty, had the bizarre habit of immediate, nonsensical emotional outbursts that, once released to the ether, allowed them to carry on appropriately. In fact, if anything, the doctor seemed to be more comfortable around Spock, even sometimes leaning against the science console when they conferred with Kirk, suggesting a level of comfort with physical proximity to his person. He would often challenge Spock as a scientist, which seemed pointless to him as Spock knew he was usually proven right, but the doctor’s comments, though ill-timed, were admittedly not unintelligent. He certainly did appreciate that the doctor did not cloak his objections in inefficient flattery and deflection, even if it did appear to others on the bridge that they “sparred.”

Of more concern was the doctor’s comment about Nancy Crater “choosing the wrong badge.” There were only a few things that could mean, and a quick search through personnel files suggested the most likely interpretation. Nancy Crater neé Bierce, PhD, had been a commissioned Starfleet science officer ten years ago, and a prominent psychologist. In fact, Dr. Bierce had published rather extensively with the late Dr. Dehner as well as a Dr. Miranda Jones, the only human class 10 telepath registered, who he knew only by reputation. 

There was also a small notation on her record that Spock had on his as well, for “hybrid species.” She had been a quarter Betazoid, a newer member to the Federation, a people who had only recently disclosed that they were as formidable telepaths as Vulcans were, if not moreso. In fact, although the Federation sympathized with Betazed’s desire for privacy - and Vulcan itself had advocated for their position - this delayed revelation of Betazoid telepathy was why telepaths in Starfleet now needed to be registered and certified at all. 

The “wrong badge,” in light of Dr. M’Benga’s comment on the “crypto-fascist Dr. Frankenstein nightmare” Section 31 had pursued during the war, was most likely to be a black one. And indeed, in the 2250s, she simply had a notation on her record that said “wartime service.”

Spock had been more attentive and cautious around the doctor due his gaffe on his first day, despite the fact that the doctor appeared not to know about his complaint. Now, however, he was worried about something else entirely. 

Despite what Dr. M’Benga had said about how McCoy differed from the other psychologists of his generation, the only reason why a lieutenant would have known about Section 31, let alone anything about its personnel, was if a recruitment attempt had been made. Why would the doctor have wanted Spock to know that? In light of this encounter, then, Spock found it logical to conclude that the doctor’s character and intentions, rather than competence, which had been established, bore further scrutiny. 

He did not anticipate, however, just how distracting and provoking paying closer attention to the doctor would turn out to be.

 

***

 

If he had to pinpoint a moment where he had made his first mistake with Dr. McCoy, it had to have been the affair with the con-man, Mudd, and the young people he’d brought on board as part of his “espousing settlers” scheme.

That had been a particularly trying week. Not because he had been all that tempted by the young ladies and gentlemen Mudd had brought aboard, four in all. (“A full selection!” - Repulsive.) He wasn’t quite as unaffected as Mudd assumed due to his Vulcan heritage, but the basics of emotional control needed for the situation had been thoroughly mastered by him and every Vulcan youth by the onset of puberty. The difficulties lay in enforcing crew discipline. Well, that, and declining the increasingly unsubtle sexual propositions from Mudd himself. Well, that, and the fact that Jim had more difficulty and less success doing so, complicating the case to an absurd degree.

He had noticed, of course, a flash of annoyance within himself held at abeyance by his mental shields, when Dr. McCoy, like everyone in the transporter room, had been entranced by their apparently ravishing young guests. Despite being a medical professional. Although he had muttered “curious,” under his breath in the doctor’s direction, of course this was merely information. He could add “perceptible response to acute-onset sexual attraction leading to distraction” as a data point on his ongoing list of McCoy’s habits and tendencies, carefully curated to allow a pattern to emerge. Not that there was an actual list. He had an eidetic memory for necessary information, there was no need for a physical list.

The real trouble had come later, on the bridge, when Kirk and McCoy had conferred, as though regressed to young boys, about the nature of “Mudd’s beauties” and their effect on the crew. McCoy gamely went on trying to explain their odd reactions, trying to reason through the hormonal fog, and Spock had found himself riveted. He had found himself almost smiling, and didn’t think to pinpoint what the exchange meant about the doctor’s temperament, what to add to the list. The best he could come up with later was that the doctor did not find sexual attraction a self-evident phenomenon unavailable to analysis. It was almost as if the doctor considered feelings fodder for thought, he mused. But Vulcans don’t muse.

The slip - noticing the doctor without collecting new data points - troubled him after the sordid affair ended, and he could no longer convince himself that it was the main source of his continued aggravation. As they’d prepared to leave orbit on Rigel XII, he’d had to restrain several facial expressions as the crew discussed the affair as though it were a great philosophical revelation, Kirk being the most bombastic, waxing on and on about the power of inner beauty and the transformation of Evan, the young man he had been so taken with. 

As far as Spock could tell the main difference in the beautiful versus ugly faces of the prospective spouses was the application or absence of cosmetics, and their soporific effect on those around them due to a low and highly adulterated compound of Deltan pheromones, which the young people themselves had found to be more trouble than they were worth. He had even donated several unused eyeshadow palettes to Uhura and Rand’s drive to send a “self-care package” down before they left, for whatever that was worth. 

When they were gone, McCoy was smiling on the bridge at the captain’s remarks as though nothing that disruptive had occurred, and complimented the captain on his medical sales acumen in “selling” the “beauties” and the miners on their new matrimonial situation, which was surely not deserved.

Before he could restrain himself, he broke into the conversation, saying, “I'm happy the affair is over. A most annoying, emotional episode.”

The doctor had smiled at him, a wry and warm expression, and replied, “Smack, right in the ole heart,” and softly hit the left side of his chest with his fist as a visual. Then, with what could only be described as showmanship, the doctor had apologized, and smiling, still warm and wry, repeated the gesture, thumping the location where Spock’s heart would be. 

Overwhelmed with what his mother would describe as “cute aggression,” he’d said, rather abruptly, and again, almost smiling, “The fact that your internal arrangement differs from mine, doctor, pleases me to no end.”

McCoy had given him an odd look again, his eyebrows disappearing into his hairline, but Spock had been more concerned with the truancy of his facial expressions than the implications of a social interaction that had not quite “landed.”

He considered this a mistake, because he didn’t notice in time that the doctor’s comments drawing attention to his Vulcan physiology were usually a clumsy - from a human perspective - attempt to call attention to the fact that human bodies weren’t a universal frame of reference - unnecessary from a Vulcan perspective. In response, perceiving some sort of provocation - perhaps, he admitted, from being paid any personal attention at all, suggesting he’d been too showy - he had usually made some comment on humanity’s relative inferiority. The first few times, McCoy was merely taken aback. Although Spock would never claim he understood - or had ever intended to understand - the unending scope of things to which humans took offense, even he should have realized that he was being rude, and in quite banal ways. 

After all, although some humans and even more Vulcans found calling attention to deviations from the norm derogatory, Andorians and Tellarites, at least, were vocal in insisting that no one species should assume their normal was everyone’s normal. Andorians, in particular, had always pointed out Vulcan bias when Vulcans made universal pronouncements - and to be fair, there had often been an element of truth to many of these accusations. Tellarites, as a matter of course, would argue with anything axiomatic. Or, well, anything. Humans were commonly known to have been the mediators between more partisan and more universalist species in the formation of the Federation, finding some aspect of themselves in both extremes. Almost reluctantly, once this had occurred to him, he had done a quick search in the Federation database for the demographics of the colony on Cerberus and found that the largest pluralities had indeed belonged to Tellarites and Andorians. He had the counterintuitive thought that perhaps the doctor was having issues adjusting to a majority human milieu.

The first time McCoy answered back to a comment he considered rude, the insult was highly nonsensical. After Spock had turned down a drink, referring to his “father’s people being spared the dubious benefits of alcohol,” McCoy had said: “this is why your people were conquered.” This was an illogical insult: Vulcan, famously, had never been invaded, let alone conquered. One of the more traditional and controversial appellations of the Vulcan people was that they were “the inviolate, the unconquerable.” 

In a way it almost brought attention to the form of making an insult itself, that mentioning differences should inherently be antagonistic, and made it absurd. This odd tendency reminded him of an inscrutable form of discourse in some human cultures and their media, that he’d never quite understood. The insult that wasn’t technically an insult - or not a serious one - and yet did indicate some real level of irritation or censure that could not be stated directly. Needlessly convoluted - why did humans have to be like this? And besides, some of the most cliche compliments regarding physical beauty on Vulcan had to do with how evident a healthy green flush to the skin was or how pointed and prominent one’s ears were. In fact, he had been mocked endlessly by other children for having a softer and less pronounced point to his ears, despite the fact that they were still a normal shape for full-blooded Vulcans. But McCoy couldn’t have known this about Vulcan culture. Surely.

When the doctor was angry with him - and he did get angry, genuinely angry - the “teasing” comments seemed to mostly disappear. Anger came out at apparent disregard of others’ wellbeing, or at Spock’s disregard for some procedural sticking point in a scientific analysis, which Spock only set aside, of course, due to a command decision logically taking precedence. Then, the doctor was direct.

Satisfied, therefore, with his observations of the doctor’s comport towards himself, he could make a preliminary list:

Dr. McCoy will be direct with criticism of command decisions and scientific disagreement.
Dr. McCoy seemed unable to offer an opinion, observation, or criticism without broadcasting his personal feelings about it.
Dr. McCoy was friends with at least one psychologist who he implied had worked for Section 31 during the Klingon War.
Dr. McCoy could be noticeably responsive to acute-onset sexual attraction and be distracted by it.
Dr. McCoy did not know how to insult him properly, and when he attempted it, it was usually in a low-stakes environment.
Dr. McCoy felt comfortable with physical proximity to his person.

This information so far did not explain the doctor’s referring to Section 31, so he determined he had to observe the doctor’s activities more thoroughly.

 

***

 

Attempting to casually observe the doctor’s behavior with others more generally proved frustrating, because he was not able to establish just how sociable the man actually was. He seemed both to be solitary and to have some sort of personal relationship with everyone. It was not uncommon to run into the doctor eating alone in the mess on off-hours - which Spock also favored - but then neither was it uncommon to find him comfortably, if quietly, eating with Chapel or Uhura or Dr. Noel and Dr. Tola. He even sometimes joined larger social groups, but seemed to rotate: he could be found in the company of his own doctors and staff, the psychology department, senior staff, Scotty’s crew, and incongruously, in his opinion, he even seemed to be a favorite of the “flyboys” group of pilots and navigators headed up by Sulu, who treated him as though he were some sort of visiting dignitary. He had even seen on more than one occasion some young person insist on pulling out a chair for the doctor, which startled the man a great deal.

At the same time, he had the subjective experience that McCoy spent all his time with the captain or with the captain and himself, and that the man could always be found alone, somewhere, when needed. Even more odd, in his opinion, was the doctor’s behavior at bigger starbases and Federation worlds where the crew had a day or so of shore leave. The doctor sometimes headed out with a group, but then sometimes seemed to disappear, not making it back to his quarters till late in the morning.

Quite by chance, he overheard an illuminating conversation in the mess that provided an adequate, if somewhat crass, explanation. The doctor had been sitting with Chapel, Uhura, and M’Ress, when Uhura asked, “I don’t know how you can stand to go on so many first dates, Leo.”

“Well, uh,” said a very embarrassed Dr. McCoy, “It’s um, with men who are, um, looking, the ‘date’ part is not always the, uh, well -”

“McCoy is right,” said Rand, who sat down by Uhura. “As difficult as dating and partnerships in the service is, Starfleet’s cruising infrastructure is decent -”

Spock couldn’t figure out how to hear less of this conversation, as - being quite familiar with Starfleet’s “cruising infrastructure” - he did not require further information, so he put his tray in the reclamator and headed to the lab.

That explained a supposedly important part of McCoy’s “personal life,” at least. Humans did seem fixated on sex. About half the time, however, the doctor was as solitary and elusive during shore leave as he himself was, staying onboard and rarely leaving his quarters. 

As to the man’s “hobbies,” Spock kept coming up with a blank. He never saw evidence of the man having any. He did various things in the gym, or in the rec room with others, but never repeated them regularly, to Spock’s knowledge. 

Spock decided to cease this part of his observation when he found himself thinking the doctor refused to act in a predictable manner to frustrate him personally, which was absurd. He therefore added to the list:

Dr. McCoy will sometimes spend time with large groups or smaller groups of people who may be “friends” from diverse social circles.
Dr. McCoy will sometimes spend extended periods of time alone when off-duty.
Dr. McCoy spends time with the captain, and, by extension, Spock.
Dr. McCoy has casual sexual encounters with strange men off-duty, and does not appear to have liaisons with the crew.
Dr. McCoy’s pastimes and personal interests were not apparent from casual observation.

Spock deemed it logical to set the matter aside to focus on other concerns.

 

***

 

Spock indeed did cease to pay much attention to the doctor for several weeks, but found the man’s nearness inescapable when he and the away team were stranded on a planet only inhabited by children and diseased, aggressive individuals the children referred to as “grups” and the crew referred to as “zombies.” Once they had ensconced themselves in a derelict hospital to analyze this disease - now that they knew they had all been exposed - Spock found himself grudgingly impressed by the doctor’s ingenuity in using lab equipment the equivalent of three centuries out of date. If pressed, he could almost describe the hours they spent together as pleasant. It was gratifying to work with a scientist as focused as he was on the matter at hand, and their disagreements were mild and productive, more a matter of “sounding out” ideas than any discord.

Once the nature of the disease had been discovered - that it was the effect of a “life prolongation” experiment and the “children” were in fact three hundred years old and became terminally diseased upon reaching puberty - he and the doctor were by each other’s side constantly, as the away team, all adults, only had seven days left before they - or the full-humans, anyway - suffered the same fate. On a rare occasion that Spock had left the doctor to confer with the security officers standing guard against marauding groups of surprisingly destructive ancient children, he paused by the door, finding the doctor engaged in conversation with the girl, Miri, who was reluctantly helping them. Or, to be accurate, Miri was helping Yeoman Rand, on whom she’d developed an obvious crush, tolerating Kirk, and mostly ignoring everyone else. 

“I don’t know why Jim keeps talking about making sure nothing like what happened to Louise happens again, like I can do anything for her. She’s dead. Louise doesn’t matter to me,” said Miri. Louise had been the most recently discovered “grup,” a girl only a few weeks older than Miri, who had died upon being hit with the lowest stun setting on Kirk’s phaser.

“Now, Miss Miri,” said Dr. McCoy, setting a timer on a tissue sample, “what makes you say that?”

“We used to sleep next to each other,” said the ancient girl. “Do each other’s hair. Tell secrets. She was so pretty, had yellow hair, and she smiled like a foolie, but it was nice. She was nice. She got angry sometimes though, and could make trouble. She disappeared a few weeks ago and now she's dead, and now that she’s gone, I’m starting to forget some of the things she said, or what she looked like. But I hate sleeping alone, and having no one to talk to. No one knows how to do my hair. I care more about that.”

“Sometimes you care about both.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had a friend like Louise, once. We had a lot in common, and spent a lot of time together. He was a doctor, just like me. And we’d talk about anything and everything, especially about boys, which can be a pretty interesting topic - boys, girls, anyone who makes ya feel fluttery - as you’re now discovering. Sometimes I felt like I could face down anything, as long as I could tell him about it. Then he died. It was scary and unfair, like how Louise died.”

“And then he didn’t matter to you, the way Louise doesn’t matter to me?”

“I really wondered if that was the case. Because after I cried myself sick for a long while, I’d keep writing these letters to him about all the things I was going through. I couldn’t send them anywhere. They were all about my problems and what I needed from him. I felt bad about it, like I was being selfish. But eventually I realized something, and I knew that I still cared about him, just in a different way.”

“What did you realize?”

“A lot of folks need someone to be close to. People from my world do, and I think people from your world do too. The need doesn’t just go away when you lose someone. You’re not replacing anyone when you try to get those needs met, find someone to talk to, or do your hair. You might as well feel ashamed of needing to breathe. And your friendship has changed - it’s changed even if you promised never to forget. It’s a memory now, and the story of you and Louise has an ending. You don’t have to help us for the sake of Louise's memory. You can help us because you want to keep living so you can make new friends. Either’s fine, maybe it’ll be a little of both. We just want to help you, and we don’t want to die, either, frankly.”

“Did you ever find someone new to be friends with, someone you could talk to, like him?”

McCoy paused. “Not like that, no. But I have different kinds of friends and family. People I never would have expected. I’m not lonely like I was.”

Spock added, mentally, though he wasn’t sure why: Now I’m lonely in a different way.

“That sounds complicated.”

“Sure is. That’s being a ‘grup’ for ya.”

“I’m glad I’m not one.”

“Eh,” said the doctor, “I’d tell you to not knock it till you’ve tried it, but I don’t speak back to my elders, Miss Miri, so I suppose I’ll defer to your experience.”

Spock could no longer justify delaying his interruption of this engrossing tête-à-tête, so he went back into the lab, but was silent, even for him, for a long time after. He’d cut his meditation time to the absolute minimum, but in the minutes he could spare, he became aware of a deep, throbbing, emotional pain, as though he’d torn the top layer of his skin off, and, if he were human, he’d be near tears over the feeling of exposure. He wasn’t sure how to add this to the list.

Perhaps due to this distracting lapse of emotional control, he did not notice the extent to which the doctor’s own emotional control had deteriorated as the disease progressed. He believed, when he insisted the doctor wait for Rand to return with the communicators and the kidnapped captain - believed to be a valuable hostage to Rand - that the doctor would comply. Logic dictated that testing the vaccine they’d developed was too risky, especially when there remained a real possibility that the yeoman and the captain would return shortly, and allow them to use the ship’s computers to model the vaccine’s effects.

No sooner had he left to talk to a security officer than he heard the doctor cry out his name, as though it had been torn from his throat. He’d run to the doctor’s side, who had collapsed, unconscious, to the floor, noting the empty vaccine hypo beside him. A quick check revealed a pulse. He told the officer the doctor wasn’t dead, “not yet.” All they could do was wait to see if the vaccine worked.

Actually, that wasn’t all he could do. Without hesitation he wrapped his hands around the doctor’s and did not let go, sending a light telepathic projection to forestall shock and to soothe. Of course he couldn’t be blamed for being unable to block a surface level exchange of projections: to merely force the doctor to take on his psychic, palliative suggestions would be an act of susceptive telepathy, mind control. Surely that would be more unethical than a light peak into the unconscious doctor’s thoughts. 

A sunny, green place on Earth. A young girl’s laughter. An endless glacier shot through with lights from an immense aurora. The dorms at the Academy, and a tree that he’d study beneath, the one everyone studied beneath. The electric scent of a sandstorm about to hit - Perhaps Spock had lowered his shields more than planned, if there was such bleed-through. Then again - a morgue, like and unlike the Enterprise's. Walking down a ship’s corridor willing it to go on forever. A beery smell, a dim crowded place. Shrapnel and conduits blowing while running behind an anti-grav gurney with other white-shirts with other patients, just a little bit farther to the shuttle bay. Curled up against a cool, strong body in the dark in a regulation Starfleet bed, long cold fingers trailing down - Spock fought the urge to bring his shields up immediately. 

Now a viewport, from an old escape pod, staring into a firefight, three medical frigates torn apart, Birds of Prey attacking a fourth, fighting Starfleet lightweight cruisers as the frigate’s shields glitched in and out. The morgue again, with a familiar face, Ortegas still in her reds, eyes and nose red, too, and you say to her I imagined this so many times. Him dying on the table. I lost him hundreds of ways - sometimes it’s my fault, sometimes I did everything I could. I never thought I wouldn’t even see him die. A field of tall grass, cicadas and fireflies at night, a man’s laughter, full of surprise, the little girl’s laugh again, delighted. Walking down the corridor again, on a ship that wasn’t but could be the Enterprise, hoping it never ends, hoping to never arrive.

Kirk was there now, and the room was full of the ancient children, and he was asking something about the doctor. The problem had been solved, but the doctor remained still. He took a second in the uproar to register that the doctor’s memories were unusually crisp and coherent for a psi-null human. His mind, its psionic register, almost had a discipline to it, which was bizarre. The man was unconscious, and not feigning it - unless he was a powerful telepath beyond even the most formidable Adept of Gol - but the projections of his dreaming mind betrayed habits or tendencies more typical of a trained telepath. There certainly were psi-null individuals whose logical and predictable temperaments gave them natural shields and control over their projections, but Dr. McCoy certainly did not have such a temperament.

He moved his hands to the doctor’s face and neck, turning his head to the side, to more closely examine the lesions on the doctor’s face. He kept cradling the doctor’s head, and it was as justifiable as holding the doctor’s hands had been, arguable. Still, he couldn’t let go. You called out for me, he reasoned. There had been nothing to indicate it had been personal. But the doctor had called out for him, all the same. Was McCoy unhappy he was there, at the edge of his awareness? He lowered his shields a bit further, dipping below the surface, to simply feel exhaustion-relief.

He wasn’t sure what to add to the list.

 

***

 

The next opportunity to gather information about the doctor’s disposition and intentions came about at Tantalus penal colony, a renowned center for rehabilitative psychology. He noted with surprise, when Kirk brought the methods of the center to McCoy’s attention, that the doctor showed visible disgust, and said “a cage is a cage, Jim,” after which the captain chided him for being “behind the times.” This was interesting - usually the doctor never missed an opportunity to make grandiose claims for the virtues of psychology. 

To his chagrin, the doctor caught him staring and sauntered over to his station.

“Interesting,” Spock said, to head off whatever McCoy was about to say, “you earth people glorify violence for forty centuries, but you imprison those who employ it privately.”

The doctor, face pulled long with incredulity, replied, “And, of course, your people found an answer.”

As they had indeed, Spock proceeded, with little irony: “We disposed of emotion, doctor. Where there’s no emotion, there’s no motive for violence.”

The doctor stared at him, expression unreadable, perhaps overcome by the logic of his statement.

As the fiasco with the penal colony and Dr. Adams’s “neural neutralizer” began to unfold, Spock allowed himself a brief moment to enjoy Dr. McCoy fighting the captain tooth and nail on taking Dr. Adams's words at face value. Although the captain was right that McCoy at this point merely had a “feeling,” he was in complete agreement with the doctor’s distaste for and suspicion of “rehabilitative psychology” and its promises to “correct” what was “incorrigible,” though he wouldn’t give the man the satisfaction of saying so.

Nevertheless, he spent the majority of the affair by the doctor’s side as he treated the assistant director turned inmate turned asylum seeker from the colony. To interrogate the man, of course, but he was struck by McCoy’s unflagging patience with the man’s raving and convulsions, even putting down a sedative hypo at the man’s request, even if it would have made his job easier. In fact, he found himself describing Vulcan mind melds to the doctor before he tried one with Dr. Van Gelder, acknowledging that he’d never done so with a human before. (Well, a human he could admit existed without committing treason: that is, Michael.) The doctor’s no-nonsense attitude about the procedure was refreshing, and he continued narrating for both the unfortunate patient and the doctor, a rare dispensation.

The aims and outcomes of the neural neutralizer soon became apparent, despite Dr. Adams’s efforts to thwart their investigation. The machine acted like a psionic resonator, capable of erasing memories and leaving the resulting mind open to any suggestion, which it would encode as true experience. Dr. Adams, in the final struggle, accidentally wiped his entire mind of all memories, all personality. Although the beam had not been set high enough to kill, he, Dr. McCoy, Dr. Noel, and the captain found him dead all the same.

When Dr. Noel raised this point, all the captain, a recent victim of the device, could say was, “But he was alone. Can you imagine the mind emptied by that thing? Without even a tormentor for company.”

“I understand,” she replied, and accompanied him out.

Spock lingered as the doctor examined the body.

“Are you pleased, doctor,” he asked, “that your suspicions about this place and its director have proven true?”

“Pleased? No, I’m not pleased.”

“Surely,” he pressed, “you must derive some satisfaction from the decommissioning of this device.”

McCoy was silent. Then, he stood up, and looked Spock directly in the eye.

“In no meaningful way has this instrument of torture been destroyed,” he said.

“Your meaning escapes me, doctor.”

“Has it occurred to you, Mr. Spock, that there might be some military benefit to Starfleet to perfect the selective suppression of memory and the implantation of artificial memories?”

Whatever Spock had expected the doctor to say, it wasn’t that. “There are several obvious benefits in the field of counterintelligence, and such an advance would be of interest to the military field of kinetic psychology; there have been similar techniques developed by the Vulcan V’Shar, for the suppression of memory, at least.”

“Yes, that’s right. And wouldn’t it be logical to refine such a technique on a large enough sample size in a controlled environment?”

“Yes, doctor.” 

“Do you understand now, Mr. Spock, why I am so ambivalent about the field of rehabilitative psychology?”

Spock frowned. “You are implying the prisoners are being used as test subjects in a weapons development program. That would be in violation of the Federation’s Declaration of Sentient Rights and Entitlements as well as most standards of interstellar law.”

“It’s a good thing, then,” said the doctor, slowly, his gaze unfaltering, “that Starfleet would never take any measures that could be considered extraordinary no matter how extreme the threat, and that any violations of sentient rights are always the result of individual bad actors.”

Without saying another word, Dr. McCoy walked out, leaving Spock alone with the body and an empty chair.

While meditating that night, Spock had a harder time than usual quieting his mind, which was abuzz with speculation over McCoy’s words earlier in the day. As a counterfactual, the doctor had paraphrased Article 14, Section 31 of the Starfleet Charter. The straightforward claim: McCoy was suggesting Section 31 still existed and that the field of rehabilitative psychology had been and remained under its purview. In decades prior, officially, officers commander-level and above had knowledge of Section 31’s existence and general jurisdiction. On a case by case basis, more junior officers might know of its activities if their service was required. The Discovery had been a prime example - most labs on the ship had been run by Section 31, and seeing black badges was commonplace. Vague knowledge of “black badges” and something to do with classified matters related to Starfleet Intelligence was ubiquitous in the fleet.

Since the elimination of Control and its attempt to wage war against the rest of Starfleet over five years ago, however, the rest of the fleet had been led to believe that Section 31 no longer existed, and that Starfleet Intelligence was now overseeing all classified matters. As far as he knew, he, Captain Pike, and former Commander Una Chin-Riley were the only ones who knew for certain that Section 31 still existed who weren’t working with that organization. Of course, it would be natural, among humans, for a lingering doubt to persist as to what had happened to the apparently defunct division. It was unclear, again, whether McCoy’s suspicions were based on credible information or mere paranoia. 

The question persisted why McCoy would mention this to him at all. He decided that he would keep the list open.

 

***

 

Spock then forgot about the doctor almost entirely for the next month. His whole mind, his being - his katra, even - consumed with psychic communications from the Talosians lightyears away, and Chris - Chris - Chris. He handed off his former captain and former lover and, now, likely, former friend to the doctor’s care as they hurtled towards Pike’s final refuge and his own demise without a second thought.

Those weeks felt like a lesser version of his months of “psychosis” that also, coincidentally, corresponded with his last visit to Talos IV. Spock hated coincidences. It reminded him too much of paying attention to repetitions in the environment for a reason that might or might not emerge, a constant distrust in the very thing that made him himself when all other signs and symbols failed: his mind. He was beset during meditation with memories of the months he spent locked away in a white room, writing on the floor and on the walls, the coordinates for Talos IV over and over again. 

Sometimes the days his mother hid him from his father and Section 31 in the family’s katric vault came to mind, carving those same numbers on the wall, repeating Surak’s First Doctrines of Logic over and over again. These disturbing visions were held as though in amber, and never resolved in the figure of his human sister, Michael, entering the mausoleum, after all those years, the first person to have broken his heart, and the only one, then, who believed him, even when he didn’t believe himself. He never wanted her to come down below, where he was, to end the cycle, for then she would no longer be coming. All this would have already come to pass, and she would never be coming back. Still, he walked, talked, and committed various serious crimes lucidly enough.

When it was all over it was as though he came to after being in a trance, and he was overcome - he must be honest, he must, unflinching - and emotionally compromised by the wreck he’d made of his relationships onboard the Enterprise. Deep space missions required trust, in the first officer almost as much as in the captain, and he had thrown that trust away. It almost didn’t matter that he had been absolved, the results of his court martial invalidated, his sentence rescinded. Everyone seemed to be treating him with caution. He caught Kirk watching him, an intense and unidentifiable emotion in the lines of his body, his eyes, the expression on his face.

He did not, therefore, examine very closely his motivations for leaping in, immediately, to support Kirk’s investigation of Anton Karidian, who he was sure, after examining the evidence, was, as Kirk feared, Governor Kodos, the butcher of Tarsus IV. Nor did he examine how often he sought out Dr. McCoy, pacing around the man in an almost guarding behavior because if he would just listen - Much good it did him: the doctor, infuriatingly, maddeningly, seemed very hesitant to believe what was clearly unfolding before their eyes, and kept harping on things like “evidence” or “data.” 

And so he found himself in Kirk’s quarters, advocating for the captain to “trust his gut” while the doctor advocated a more factual, plodding approach. The irony would not have been lost on him if he hadn’t been so keen on his position. The doctor had just finished trying to convince the captain he was acting on vengeance, not principle, when he excused himself to make several very urgent - very urgent! - calls to security from the captain’s mess, a room away.

When he returned, he found Dr. McCoy and the captain still arguing, and they didn’t seem to notice his approach.

“Do you even hear yourself, Jim? You’re backing yourself into a corner, where everything is black and white, and you’re prosecutor, defense, judge, jury, executioner - you need to think about what this is doing to you, we’ve talked about complex trauma and -”

“Bones, stop trying to make this more personal than it already is! How I am doesn’t matter. Four thousand people, gone. I see them walking into that converted hangar bay, no one walking out, and we’re still so hungry. The expression on his face, the way he moves, as he decides who is unfit, weak, who should be murdered so that the worthy live, so that we can eat. Don’t you understand, Bones? I didn’t escape the death chamber; I wasn’t on that list. I was a witness, and now there are only seven; I was one of those he decided was worth everyone else’s death. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. It just matters what’s true, that we finally have him, if we do.”

“Jim, I really think -”

“You know what I think, Bones? I think that you’ve never sacrificed your precious integrity for a greater cause. I think your precious feelings and hangups and medical ethics have always been more important than your oath or the security of the Federation. And you just love to shit on people like me, who sometimes have to get their hands dirty so people like you can stay pure!”

“Like the night people,” said McCoy, as though distracted. “The ones who live their lives apart from everyone, keeping secrets and putting an end to the source of society’s fears, so that life by day can exist securely.”

“Bones, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“Something a Cardassian freighter captain told me once. Gul Selek was a friend of mine - or an acquaintance - with Cardassians it’s hard to tell, they’re even more personable than southerners. She and I mostly talked about books.”

Spock hesitated in making himself known, stopped by this non sequitur. Gul Selek?

“The Cardassian - how the hell do you know a Cardassian, Bones? I’ve never even met a Cardassian! No, no, absolutely not. You’re just throwing me a new scrap of backstory to distract me from our fight, you enigmatic - coy - Scheherazade.”

“Is it working? Also, wow, man: Scheherazade?”

“It’s absolutely working, but -”

“Jim, we can dig in and play out a psychodrama as adversaries or we can get a grip. This is an ambiguous and shitty situation. Let’s acknowledge it and do the best we can. You know full well I can act like a by-the-numbers officer with a heart of stone, and that you are one of the most idealistic and principled people I or anyone has ever met.”

Spock stepped more fully into view. The doctor left soon after that, and then he and Kirk almost blew up during an attempt on the captain’s life. Everyone was mostly on his side - that is, Kirk’s side - after that.

Then, it was all over. Karidian - or Kodos - was dead, having, in a morbid inversion, once again “saved” the captain’s life. His daughter was discovered as a murderer of witnesses to her father’s crime, to the old man’s apparent horror, and had some sort of break with reality. Nothing had been proven. At least Lieutenant Riley and the captain weren’t dead. So when he went to find Kirk in the theater, to see how he was, he’d been received as a friend.

He hadn’t lied to the captain about his relationship with McCoy, not really. His relationship with the doctor, professionally, was adequate and showed signs of being genuinely dynamic in a way his collaboration with Dr. M’Benga had never been. He no longer had doubts about the doctor’s qualifications, even if their approaches clashed: sometimes, it even was productive, the friction. His personal… attitude toward the doctor, and likely the doctor’s toward himself, felt unstable and fraught. But that hadn’t been what the captain had asked, so its omission could not be considered deceptive.

The captain trusted him. He sat, vulnerable, on that stage, asking when that had come to pass.

“Slowly, but surely,” Spock replied.

“You’re right,” said the captain, “but I disagree. It was what you did for Pike. You learn everything you need to know about a man when you know what makes him do the wrong thing. Loyalty, compassion, refusing a no-win scenario. That’s the kind of man you are, the kind of friend you are. I hope one day I’ll have earned your friendship; today, you earned mine.”

Spock left the captain soon after with this stunning, dazzling gift. A moment of grace, of closure, harmonizing in a higher register, all petty concerns left behind. All he had to do was let that nagging doubt, that suspicion, that mystery that the doctor evoked go. It would be logical to do so. Any trouble the doctor might cause would reveal itself in due time. Spock had better things to do.

 

***

 

Nonetheless, as Spock still hated coincidences, he found himself checking the Federation database for Cardassian border crossings instead of meditating. Selek was a fairly common surname among Cardassians. It was also a common personal name on Vulcan. In fact, he’d completely forgotten that “Selek” was a significant but niche literary allusion connected to his very own family. There was an obscure collection of his grandfather Skon’s letters to and from Iloja of Prim, a poet who founded the Cardassian enclave on Vulcan, which would be called something like A Quality of Greenness in Exile-both-symbolic-and-literal in Standard that featured the two of them taking up the name of “Selek” as some sort of inside joke. The collection only existed in Vulcan, so it did not reach Federation literary circles easily, and the Vulcan literary establishment had little interest in Cardassians. He’d never connected his cousin’s name to the conceit, as almost dying in the Forge and self-indulgent wordplay among intellectuals never seemed related. Curious.

He paced about his quarters, willing himself to let this go. The doctor, with his volubility, his erratic behavior, his inscrutability, his dark hints about the underbelly of the service, his smile, the little bounce he did on his feet, his sloppy mess of anger and care and humor and passion and affection and stubbornness and his disciplined mind, his -

The next thing Spock knew he was in McCoy’s quarters.

“What,” said Spock, voice raised, “do you have to say for yourself after the events of this week? A crew member and the captain were almost murdered, a mass murderer almost escaped, and you fought me every step of the way when I sought out your support.”

McCoy looked up at him from the sofa, where he appeared to be reading, soft music playing (“country”?), and merely said, “I don’t know exactly what you mean, Mr. Spock.”

“I find that hard to believe, doctor,” said Spock, his tone severe.

The man idly fiddled with the stem of a glass at a side table, the soft lights catching in the pale white wine. “I’m sorry? I still don’t know what you’re asking me.”

This!” Spock threw up his hands. “This, exactly this. You hound me, harry me with your claims that I am callous, repressed, and yet, when faced with a devastating tragedy that strikes to the heart of your dearest friend, you are the one who is cold. What I don’t understand is your lack of curiosity, your lack of emotion -”

“Spock,” said McCoy, “sit down.”

Spock sat down.

The doctor set his padd aside and took a sip of his wine. “We left Talos IV five weeks ago, and then we got diverted under false pretenses to Dr. Leighton’s colony world, where both you and Jim started getting paranoid. Correction, you got paranoid: Jim got suspicious based on circumstantial evidence. Do you think it would have been logical for me to believe, based on his acquiescence to a personal request from an attractive young lady and a reassignment of Riley to engineering, that the ‘game was afoot,’ as it were? I don’t mean would it have been reassuring to you, I mean would it be logical?”

Perhaps he needed to meditate more than he thought, because he didn’t actually have an answer to that. Well, one where the doctor wouldn't be correct.

McCoy met his eyes, and then let them drop, looking - looking - sad. “I was tired, Spock. It was the first time in a week I’d gotten to sit down, and I’ve been feeling poorly since Talos IV. It wouldn’t have been right to say I thought you had something, and I was simply too tired to make you feel better. I assumed you were inventing an excuse to buddy up to Jim because you’re afraid you’ve hurt your relationship because of, I don’t know, mutiny, and you’re probably really unsettled that you could take an action that was so obviously emotional.”

“It was logical to aid Captain Pike -”

“Did you consider stealing a shuttle? Did you consider buying a shuttle and just flying there with him? Your daddy can afford a shuttle, right? Was commandeering the Enterprise and pleading guilty to a capital offense the only logical option available?”

Once again, Spock didn’t have anything to say to that.

“Anyway, once you’d come to me with actual evidence, I took you seriously. I also did my due diligence as a physician, and you can call it stubbornness, but is that actually fair? Even if I did buy your intuition, which I did, by the way, my role here is forensics and keeping people alive. Including mass murderers who are hiding out in a troop of Shakespearean actors, apparently.”

Spock still couldn’t say anything to that.

McCoy frowned and looked away again. “I think what bothered you is that I didn’t react emotionally the way you expected. So let me tell you something about human emotion. Vulcans don’t have a monopoly on suppression and internalization of strong feelings. Did you know that I survived a famine on a colony world? That I treated starvation - starvation, in the twenty-third century - while I was dead on my feet from also starving to death? The only mercy was a Good Samaritan came through the system and fronted us supplies before it got to the point of no return. That’s how I met Jim, by the way, did you know that?”

Spock at least had an answer for that: “I did not.”

“He was a lieutenant, a gunner on the Farragut, accompanying a Vulcan Expeditionary Group force on a deep space mission. They got in a scrape with the Orions, and he got his leg near blown off. They dropped him off at my hospital on Cerberus and he was stranded there for a few months. He was there when the crops failed, when the food was running out. We pulled some crazy stunts together to work something out for folks. He was beside himself, took way more responsibility than was sensible or rational.”

Spock blinked. McCoy took another sip of wine.

“I know about Jim’s experience on Tarsus IV, Spock. It’s bizarre that you assumed I didn’t. He and I have talked about it a lot. It’s one of the most formative traumas of his whole goddamn adult personality. So I shut down, emotionally, during this whole thing, okay? If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have stopped Riley from killing Kodos, which would have ruined that boy’s life. Now the butcher is dead, his daughter is something like dead, and nothing has changed. It’s a lot, and I’m having trouble controlling my emotional reactions.”

“So,” said Spock, hardly believing he was saying this, “you have been suppressing your emotions, because you are emotionally compromised?”

“Not to put a fine point on it, Spock, but yes. I’ve been emotionally compromised since Talos IV. I was worried sick, about you, the crew, Jim, and even Pike. I spent days by that man's side, trying to make conversation without tiring him out. He really loves you, you know? He was crushed. And this Kodos thing, demons from the past… Now that it's over I have to be gentle with myself and process the emotions I’ve pushed aside -”

Spock didn’t care about the gentle, processing-feelings part. He had remembered something. Something that he needed an answer to, right now

“Doctor,” said Spock, “you refused to release my full medical records to the court martial hearing on our way to Talos IV, using various administrative methods to delay its inclusion.”

“I did,” said McCoy, and something seemed to both soften and go rigid in his posture. He didn’t seem thrown by this abrupt change of topic.

“May I ask why?”

“I’m sure you know, if you’re asking at all. You have an inpatient psych flag for psychosis and anhedonia and a psionic flag for discohesion with temporal features in your file. There’s still evidence that you had a psychopathy flag, even though it was removed: say the word and I can get it actually scrubbed. There’s some workarounds in StarMed admin. I know enough about how these things go, especially these drumhead trials carried out on ships. No one’s mental health history should be used against them.”

Spock frowned. “I understand the implications. But why did you go to the trouble of aiding me? You did not and clearly do not approve of my actions.”

McCoy blinked. “Why, I’m not sure I could explain it to you if it’s not obvious already. I couldn’t do that to anyone.”

This did not help, but it seemed unlikely he would get a more precise answer.

“I would appreciate, doctor,” he said, at last, “that ‘workaround’ you mentioned.”

“Consider it done, Mr. Spock,” said McCoy with a slight smile. “Any chance in return you can get me some real reference numbers for your blood pressure from the Vulcan Science Academy?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“And, Mr. Spock,” McCoy said, then hesitated. “I know a little bit about what goes into… the circumstances that get that sort of thing in your chart. I know that there was… it was a complicated time. People made very difficult choices, and the wounds are still fresh. I understand, is what I mean. Some of it.”

Spock forced himself not to freeze at such a blatant invitation or provocation to share his most closely guarded secrets, and merely nodded, and then left as abruptly as he arrived.

Although Spock hadn’t been compiling his list for several months, he of course remembered it. He paced around his quarters, still delaying meditation, and got caught up on additions:

Dr. McCoy knows at least one Cardassian.
Dr. McCoy sometimes drinks alcohol, occasionally to excess, but no more than other humans do, and possibly less.
Dr. McCoy had a best friend who was a doctor, who died of unnatural causes. This may have been the man who McCoy had expected to “die on his table.”
Dr. McCoy knows or suspects that Section 31 still exists.
Dr. McCoy has the basic mental discipline of a telepath despite being psi-null.
Dr. McCoy survived a famine on the Cerberus colony, and met Jim Kirk when he was a lieutenant.

All of this added up to…

Spock stopped pacing.

It was so simple really, what was revealed was not a pattern but an anti-pattern. The doctor’s moods and moral judgments, so immediate and transparent in the moment, hid an opaque interiority. His interest in the details of everyone’s lives and what he offered up in return were all grounded in the present situation, betraying a jealous, instinctive - or trained - preference for privacy about his personal history and personal affairs. Even his closest friend apparently had to make do with information about his past doled out sparingly. Spock could track the doctor’s every move, chart his habits, analyze his speech patterns, but at a distance, he’d never get closer to knowing the man at all.

Suddenly, Macbeth’s most well-known monologue came to mind, the Scottish play having been the spark that lit the fuse of the whole damned affair with Karidian, with Kodos. Not the doctor’s life, but rather Spock’s list, his studiously crafted precís on a vexing, illogical creature, was in the end merely “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Enough. This is impossible.

This endeavor had become needlessly convoluted. Therefore, he would simplify it. The only thing that mattered was that McCoy was attempting to engage him in conversation on matters that, if he discussed them, would potentially be treason. Therefore, he must clearly indicate that he would not engage. It didn’t matter why the doctor wanted to discuss them, or what he might say. He would put an end to it. Any other errata was merely a matter of… personal interest, irrelevant.

The next day he found the doctor in the botanical lab, carefully repotting an Edosian orchid, a gift to the ship from Lieutenant Arex. Perhaps a pastime or merely a favor to Sulu - but such scrutiny would no longer be necessary.

“Doctor,” he said, without preamble, “I would like to state unequivocally that I view my responsibilities to Starfleet and Federation security as absolute, and I will not engage in speculation about classified matters.”

McCoy’s mouth dropped open, his eyes wide with surprise and blinking rapidly. And then, something flickered across his face, an intense emotion or complex of emotions. Spock couldn’t tell if it was guilt, grief, or pain. Then he clicked his jaw shut, and assumed an almost parade stance, expression neutral.

“Understood, sir,” said the doctor, tone flat, and turned away, shoulders tense.

Spock should have been satisfied by this outcome. He had cut to the heart of the matter, and supplied the remedy. The doctor was more distant, perhaps, but no more or less cantankerous and caring, and he respected Spock’s boundary with no apparent strain. The doctor did not try to confide in him anymore, if that had been what he’d been doing.

Spock should have been satisfied by this outcome, but an unease, something evasive, a feeling that would not name itself for interrogation remained at the back of his mind. The expression on the doctor’s face beside the flower beds reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t remember who.

 

***

 

The captain’s trust, that treasure, not that nagging feeling, that albatross, was what was on his mind a few weeks later when they investigated a series of attacks on stations near the Neutral Zone. Kirk’s trust was the first thing he thought of, when he intercepted and decrypted a message from their quarry and the viewscreen lit up with a full visual feed of the Romulans' bridge, observed but not yet observing: the enemy no one had ever seen. His thought was: earning the captain’s trust couldn’t have been more timely.

For there, on the screen, were Vulcans.

The man in the foreground turned, unseeing, toward them. His father’s face was staring back at him.

Notes:

Sorry for the “Balance of Terror”/”A Quality of Mercy” cliffhanger, but I thought Spock obsessing about McCoy and making up with Kirk deserved its own chapter apart from the very juicy Romulan Species Reveal Drama. Also, I promise structuring chapters like Cloud Atlas will not become a habit. Probably.

Spock: what am I supposed to do to figure this guy out? hang out with him? ask him questions about himself?
me, the author: I’m sure there will be no consequences whatsoever to you opting not to do that, Spock. *stares directly at camera*

Episodes referenced with some lines lifted from script (basically any dialogue in an actual scene from ep): “The Conscience of the King” (post-ep) -> “The Enemy Within” (post ep, some premise inversions, justice for Grace Lee Whitney!) -> "The Man Trap" (post-ep) -> “Mudd’s Women” (premise adjusted to be more “inclusive” in its sleaziness lmao) -> “Miri” (premise flipped so an almost pubescent girl isn’t competing with Rand for Kirk’s affection) -> “Dagger of the Mind” (“missing scenes” and post ep) -> “The Menagerie” (mentioned) -> "If Memory Serves" (DIS) -> “The Conscience of the King” again (“missing scenes” and post ep) -> “Balance of Terror” (adaptation of early scene)

Bug me about specific episodes in comments, as I always run over the character limit on notes.

Me thinking way too hard about how to “update” the context of McCoy’s weird physiology-specific comments without just straight up erasing them actually led me to remember how Andorians act towards Vulcans in Enterprise, which is pretty much the origin of this entire fic. Also, to trace the evolution of their back and forth I followed production order not airing order, so there’s technically a comment about Spock’s green blood in “The Naked Time” before “Mudd’s Women,” but that’s why I refer to it as the first time that happens. (I cut the extra context I made up for that one from the chapter, but I had something in mind.) There’s actually way less “green-blood, pointed-ear” comments than I expected in season 1. Usually McCoy is just straight up mad at Spock for being apparently callous, rude, or self-destructive with no reference to him being Vulcan at all.

The fact that admirals are always trying to mechanize and change things operationally for no real reason except they’re bored and vain and insecure was officially made canon as of like three weeks ago in the season 3 finale of Lower Decks.

I’ve decided Starfleet has decent Grindr, don’t ask.

“Dagger of the Mind” is actually the origin/key of the entire Section 31 “crypto-fascist Dr. Frankenstein’s nightmare” subplot in this story and what McCoy’s attitude about it is. Cut for time: a scene where McCoy reads Kirk the riot act for sexually harassing Dr. Noel, even if I had to tweak events slightly as the episode frames her as “the villain.”

I have so many issues with how Discovery handled Section 31, and really don’t like the message the end of season 2 sent (that it's redeemable and it was only a “bad guy” that caused the problem), and I feel like it’s caused enormous continuity problems. I’m doing what I can.

The reference to the “night people” is in Andrew Robinson’s A Stitch in Time, which is Garak’s memoir, essentially, and is articulated by Enabran Tain to Garak about the Obsidian Order. Don’t worry about it! *runs away*

For those keeping score at home, this is fifty years prior to the occupation of Bajor, Cardassians are vaguely known in the 23rd century (SNW, “Strange New Worlds”) and actually present on Vulcan in the 22nd (DS9, “Destiny”).

The reference to Sarek at the end is the easter egg in “Balance of Terror”: Mark Lenard, who plays Sarek, was cast as the Romulan subcommander first. I am still fuming over the fact that SNW missed the opportunity to cast their Sarek as that Romulan guy in their update, “A Quality of Mercy.”

***

Like if you, like the author, have realized that you too have no clear idea of what hobbies Bones has in TOS; comment if you think Spock maybe shouldn't have blown past the whole "be gentle with yourself; process your feelings" part of what McCoy was saying to get to more cloak-and-dagger concerns.

Chapter 5: The Vulcan Good-Bye

Summary:

Spock experiences historical events in a personal way and may be beginning to notice that he has friends, actually.

Notes:

Content Note:
Mention of war crimes, "race science," xenophobic insults (Vulcan), brief mentions of homicide and suicide. See also: content warning.

Content Warning:
The first section, the flashback, describes a conversation Spock has with T’Pol as a cadet about Sybok’s banishment from Vulcan. There is reference to telepathic equivalents to sexual assault and covert incest and child abuse that result in complex trauma for Sybok and secondhand trauma for Spock. There is supportive containment around the discussion, but it’s a lot. You can skip to the section following, set in 2266. You’d basically be missing some emotional backstory for Spock’s relationship with Sybok and T’Pol, as well as some world-building about katra and the fal-tor-pan.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

[circa 2251, Marin Headlands, SF Bay Area, United Earth, Alpha/Beta Quadrant]

 

Spock wasn’t worried, exactly, when Councilor T’Pol requested his company on a hike in the Marin Headlands during his second summer session at Starfleet Academy. His usual attitude towards her was one of awe and nervousness, but not fear. She, at least, the first Vulcan to serve on a Starfleet vessel and a member of the Federation Council, did not consider him an incomprehensible problem subject to some icy disapproval as most Vulcans her age, in his experience, did.

“I used to hike the John Muir loop when I served at the Vulcan consulate in Sausalito,” she said, as they walked through trees and brush to a vast vista of the Pacific Ocean, leaving groves of ancient redwoods behind. As though he wouldn’t have known a fact that was referenced in every history of the Federation. 

“Do you find it much changed?” What a banal question. Do not show so plainly how emotionally compromised you are. Not to her.

“Yes,” she said.

They continued walking in silence for a while. It was up to the elder Vulcan to speak. Spock would be patient. He would be in control.

“I have asked you to walk with me today because I wished to inquire after your well-being and thought privacy prudent, considering the unprecedented situation you find yourself in.”

T’Pol’s solicitude never ceased to amaze him, despite the fact that she had been a family friend since the time of his grandfather.

“My condition is satisfactory,” he said.

“I find that hard to believe,” she said. “Your elder brother has been exiled from Vulcan and has a warrant out for his arrest throughout every sector of Federation space and every part of the quadrant with an extradition treaty.”

“My brother is a criminal,” said Spock, stiffer than he usually was at twenty-one in his stiff silver cadet's uniform, which was very stiff indeed. “His actions demonstrate a rejection of Vulcan ways and our laws. It is logical that he be apprehended. Vulcans have confidence in our rehabilitation programs, and he will be given every chance to turn away from his decision to become v’tosh ka’tur. It is illogical to give this situation much thought, as its parameters are widely understood.”

“Do you give it much thought?” T’Pol’s eyes were sharp, hazel, and her beauty ageless, only her graying hair a witness to her passing into twilight venerability.

Of course. All the time. Sybok is the only thing I can think about. I can barely sleep, barely eat.

“Yes,” he conceded.

“What do you find yourself thinking about?”

He found the crash of the waves below almost overpowering, the briny smell so alien. Vulcan did not have oceans the way Earth did. “I am reviewing my actions to see if I can find an error leading up to this sequence of events.”

T’Pol had given up the pretense of walking, and took a seat on a large stone by the edge of the rough trail. “Which actions did you take?”

Spock did not sit. He was shot through with shame and fear and desperate longing for a place that did not exist. A place where his brother was growing roses with his mother, meditating with his father, playing chess with Michael, telling him secrets and wild theories, safe and at ease. He could not sit.

“My brother was experiencing interpersonal difficulties at the Vulcan Science Academy,” he said, forcing himself to face T’Pol, whose expression was consummately Vulcan, serene, reminiscent of her expression on statues, so many statues. “I had known the nature of these difficulties since I was fifteen. He asked me to tell no one, and I didn’t. I wonder what would have changed if I had told someone.”

“What was the nature of the difficulties?”

Spock was silent for a moment. Even now, when it couldn’t possibly matter, something ached, a deep throbbing in his heart-side, when he thought of betraying Sybok in this way. “He was assaulted, frequently. Many of his peers and some of his superiors in the advanced psionics and philosophy institute raped his mind in an attempt to get him to demonstrate a loss of control that would prove his approach misguided. He was advocating for a new way to approach emotions, built up philosophically from first principles, a project as ambitious as Surak’s. They claimed it was therapeutic and that my brother was mentally unwell and should not have resisted. They claimed it was on the advice of the High Master of Gol, who believed this violence would strengthen him or break him. Even if he is mentally unwell, that does not mean assault is therapeutic. And they only said this to him when he was… distraught, and threatened him if he told anyone. If they truly believed they were helping him, they would not keep it a secret.”

“Indeed,” said T’Pol. Something about her face had changed, becoming like living stone in a way that did not make her look remotely like a statue. “I did not know this was happening, but I am not surprised. I believe you. Your brother is a very gentle person, and his actions clearly indicate extenuating circumstances.”

“Either way, he is v’tosh ka’tur, a Vulcan without logic, and must be corrected.” 

Even as he said the words, Spock knew they were not his own.

T’Pol gazed past him, contemplative. “When viewed objectively, the term v’tosh ka’tur seems to mean whatever the mainstream of Vulcan society determines is aberrant at that moment in time,” she said. Spock couldn’t believe she could say something so, well, blasphemous. “Well within my lifetime, many of the practices of those who once were called v’tosh ka’tur and who were outcasts are now considered the height of Vulcan propriety. To even admit to experiencing a mind meld, even a non-consensual one, could ruin a career. After I was assaulted, it almost ruined mine. The idea of a mate-bond between spouses was an unspeakable act of sexual deviance, whereas today it is a wholesome part of a traditional and chaste marriage. It is illogical to assume norms of appropriate behavior will remain static over time.”

“There is logic in maintaining cultural continuity,” he found himself saying, though he wasn’t sure why.

“There is logic in many things that are wrong.”

“My brother is a criminal, and what he did was wrong, regardless of whether his philosophy has merit and has been misjudged.”

T’Pol stood and folded her hands behind her back, but made no move to walk further. “The principles of Vulcan rehabilitation themselves include the idea that no one is a criminal, rather that one may engage in criminal behavior. It is not accurate to say he is a criminal.”

Spock became aware of the tension in his body, how he couldn’t figure out what she wanted to hear. Defeated, he muttered, “Even so, why does this distinction matter? He is lost to us either way.”

“Yes,” said T’Pol, and her voice was intense. “We must name it, with our heads held high, and our eyes clear-sighted. Tell the entire truth. It will do you good to say it. Do not call him a criminal, v’tosh ka’tur, or outcast. Be precise.”

Spock, to his alarm, could feel the beginnings of tears gathering at the corner of his eyes. “My brother,” he whispered, to the whistling, sea-thundering air, “is the first Vulcan in a thousand years to be found responsible for taking a life in a time of peace, to murder. He is the first Vulcan since the time of Surak to have killed with his mind.”

“This is true,” said T’Pol. “What else is true?”

“He is the first Vulcan since the Time of Awakening to desecrate a katra stone, to destroy a Vulcan soul.” 

“To whom did this katra stone belong?”

“The High Master of Gol,” he said, almost afraid he’d be struck down by unseen lightning for speaking so plainly.

“Is the reason he did this in doubt?”

“No, it is not.”

“Why did he do such a thing?”

“Because,” whispered Spock, and closed his eyes. “He was summoned to the deathbed of the High Master of Gol, and instead of saying farewell, as is tradition, the High Master placed her katra in his mind. An adept in her twilight years over two hundred, one of the most formidable telepaths on Vulcan, occupying the mind of a boy of twenty-seven, who had not even gone through his first pon farr. Her acolytes forced him to undergo the fal-tor-pan. They drove the katra into a stone. I am told he almost died. It left him bonded, a stronger bond than between lovers or parents and children, to a stone beneath the earth. They wanted to leave him there, with all those whispering… ghosts, in the Hall of Ancient Thought. He destroyed the stone, and fought his way out of Mount Kolinahr, perhaps in a telepathic fugue, a threshold event. He killed three men, spilled blood on the Plains of Gol, without even touching them. He drove their katra into empty stones in the crypts as though he were a god.”

“Who is the High Master of Gol?”

“T’Rea, of the high clans, heir of an ancient dynasty, the closest thing to a Vulcan princess.”

“S’chn T’gai Spock, who is the High Master of Gol?

Spock, as though under a spell, looked at her, unseeing. There were cultures that believe that to give one’s name is to cede one’s power. Vulcan didn't have one, but this… High Master of Gol, at least, deserved it. Deserved to have this power taken away.

“His mother,” he said, his voice breaking on it, flinching. “His own mother, who treated him as an instrument of enlightenment, not a child. I cannot call it anything other than abuse, the things she did to him, for so many years, and this... I may be v’tosh ka’tur myself, but I think her actions are a greater sacrilege than destroying a katra. My brother killed those men in self-defense, and protected their souls. He did not destroy them.”

“This is true,” said T’Pol, and she did not flinch.

Spock dropped his head, feeling out of control, as he whispered again. “I do not believe his crimes are evidence of a wicked character. But it doesn’t matter. My brother is the most gentle, sensitive, and compassionate person I have ever known, and the bare fact that he has done this is enough to destroy him. All life, every fragment of soul or breath of consciousness is sacred to him. That is why I say he is lost to us.” To me.

“I know,” she said. “And what you say may be true, but comes from a place of feeling that is not final.”

“What is the use of that?” Spock scuffed a stone in the dusty path, not looking up. “Why does it matter that I feel this way?”

“Because you are permitted to believe in the continued worth of your brother,” said T’Pol. “You are allowed to disagree with authority to which you owe a loyalty you otherwise find reasonable and fitting. This will be an invaluable skill in Starfleet. Your feelings are a logical outgrowth of this reality. To deny their existence risks losing sight of this complexity.”

“What is the purpose of entertaining disagreement that you cannot act on, that you should not act on?”

“To keep watch on the future. If you can see more than one future, you may be able to have an impact on how things unfold.”

“But you also may not have any power to change things, have any impact at all.”

“That is also true.”

“In that case there is just chaos, ambiguity. So we do have these feelings, so there is complexity that would logically engender them. Why would we persist in being consumed by ambivalence that may never reach a resolution?”

“Oh,” said the old hero, sun in her hair, eyes open toward the sun, secret eyelids blinking, “I don’t think anyone knows that.”

 

***

***

 

[circa 2266, Federation side of the Romulan Neutral Zone, Beta Quadrant; various coordinates, Alpha and Beta Quadrants]

 

As Lieutenant Sulu and the new navigator, Lieutenant Stiles, discussed a plan of attack or retreat, Spock found himself staring through them to the bulkheads of the briefing room.

Stiles had raised his voice, and he was drawn back into the room. “These are Romulans! You run away from them and you guarantee war. They'll be back. Not just one ship but with everything they've got. You know that, Mr. Science Officer. You're the expert on these people, always left out that one point. Why? I'm very interested in why.

As Kirk called Stiles to heel, Spock had the automatic thought: Elementary, my dear Mr. Stiles. I neglected to mention that fucking Romulans appear to be Vulcans because I had no fucking idea that was the fucking case.

Instead, he said, “I agree. Attack.”

Kirk perked up, and the room came back to life. “Are you suggesting we fight to prevent a fight?”

When McCoy spoke, Spock felt as though he were speaking to him alone. “Based on what? Memories of a war over a century ago? On theories about a people we've never even met face-to-face?”

Perhaps he wished he and the doctor were speaking of this alone.

Stiles tore through his reverie, to say, voice full of hatred, “We know what they look like.

“Yes,” he said, meeting the angry young man’s eyes, “indeed we do, Mr. Stiles. And if Romulans are an offshoot of my Vulcan blood, and I think this is likely, then attack becomes even more imperative.”

The doctor was speaking to him now. His eyes really were so very blue. Absurd. “War is never imperative, Mr. Spock.”

Spock had the novel and unaccountable urge to reach for his hand.

“It is for them, doctor,” he said, anyway. “Vulcan, like Earth, had its aggressive, colonizing period. Savage, even by Earth standards. And if Romulans retain this martial philosophy, then weakness is something we dare not show.”

The doctor looked wounded in a new way, and Spock added, as he wouldn’t, usually, a plea, quieter: “Do you want another war on your conscience?”

That was the question, he reflected, as they all rushed back to the bridge with a new plan. Something twisted at the base of his skull, and the thought he’d been setting aside since the Romulans had come onscreen filled his mind. This was the exact same choice Michael faced before the Klingon War. Her life was ruined, and the quadrant had descended into two brutal years of war because no one would listen to her. They were listening now. How hollow this was. Michael had been brave, had staked her life and her integrity on an educated guess she’d made as a xenoanthropologist, an understanding of Klingon cultural values that differed radically from her own, fighting through her own biases, having seen her parents brutally slaughtered by Klingons as a child. He had no need to be that brave, no reason to doubt the position he’d taken in the briefing room. He understood something he wasn’t sure she ever had, not really.

Ten years ago, when faced with a standoff with a lone Klingon vessel in Federation territory, which was attempting to provoke a war, she had asked their father what the Vulcans had done to establish peaceful borders with the Klingons. The first time a Vulcan ship had encountered a Klingon vessel, they had hailed them with messages of peace and had been destroyed. The second time a Vulcan ship encountered a Klingon vessel, they had opened fire. She had taken from this a confirmation of her instincts about what Klingons valued, the way they saw the world. She had even called it, half-jokingly, “the Vulcan hello.” She had not seemed to internalize, however, that this was not a joke at all. He did not believe the Vulcans had been acting on logical speculation about Klingon instincts and what would bring peace most efficiently. They had been acting on their own instincts, and would have done so whether it meant war or peace.

Things happened. Strange. He could, of course, recite everything he said and did, everything he observed, as the dangerous dance continued, a case study he already sensed would be required knowledge for generations of Academy students to come. In a way, however, he remembered nothing until the final moment, when the Romulan ship was dead in the void, and Kirk had asked the commander to allow him to evacuate his crew.

He had the unsettling sense that he was a second ahead of what the man on the screen, who looked like his father’s twin, was saying. “No. No, that is not our way,” not-Sarek said, and that he would say it, inevitable. “I regret that we meet in this way. You and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend.” 

Immediate sympathy, inchoate understanding, arose in his - traitor, the word was traitor - mind. I know you. Even if you wore another face, I would know you, if you bled a different color. I know what you’re doing.

Kirk, who was human, begged: “What purpose will it serve to die?”

The man’s voice was kind, his expression almost fatherly. “We are creatures of duty, captain. I have lived my life by it. Just one more duty to perform.”

Without another word, the man who was not his father entered the self-destruct command, and the ship exploded.

Although he had no way of knowing at the time, Spock would come to think of this encounter itself as the anti-climax to all that would happen next.

 

***

 

Spock had never felt completely at ease among humans. Granted, he’d never felt at ease among Vulcans, either, but suffice to say there was a background level of discomfort he successfully ignored every day onboard the Enterprise. He could not ignore it in the weeks that followed.

Nasty comments about his alien presence, his malevolent intentions, which had previously been occasional, became commonplace. The Andorian crew members who socialized together were the most obvious about it, but their acrimony almost didn’t bother him. The rather creative insults against Vulcan integrity were rarely directed at him personally, and when they were, it was to his face. There was an honesty to it, and reason to distrust Vulcan, which had not dealt fairly with Andoria, which had lied and manipulated and stolen secrets, the most precious commodity of a highly social people. They certainly had reason to hate Romulans, who had kidnapped and enslaved the Aenar during the war a hundred years ago. All of this made sense.

He wasn’t sure if the fact that he was half-human made human rejection and disgust feel worse. Earth had no reasonable grievance toward Vulcan beyond reactive distrust of strangers and insecurity about Vulcan’s more advanced technology. Earth had been the closest and dearest ally to Vulcan in millennia of exploration and cautious overtures to neighboring worlds.

Even the words of people like Stiles didn’t hurt as much, however, as the fearful looks from people who did not insult him or accuse him or anyone who looked like him of being a genocidal traitor. Many members of the crew were afraid of him, afraid of what this meant for the fairytale the Federation had suddenly become in light of this terrible secret. Kirk could and did slap down anyone who harassed him. He couldn’t do anything about the fear.

He began checking the Federation News Network more regularly. Unsurprisingly, there were surges of isolationist protests and acts of violence against Vulcans, or even just Federation officials. The faction that called for the investigation of all Vulcans in Federation positions was almost as loud as the faction that claimed the entire thing was a hoax, a Romulan conspiracy. The Vulcan High Command, so far, had said next to nothing. From a Vulcan perspective, this was unsurprising. But Spock was the son of a diplomat, and had passively learned enough - however grudgingly - to know this was not helping matters. Silence breeds fear, whispers to fill the cracks. He almost called his father to discuss his thoughts on the situation, before remembering they were not on speaking terms.

Paradoxically, Dr. McCoy, the subject of anxious overthinking since his first day onboard, became one of the most relaxing people to be around. McCoy didn’t treat him any differently. They still argued, and still annoyed one another. He had never thought of feeling and expressing annoyance as a display of vulnerability, but now he did. He could tell the doctor was thinking a great deal and watching him more carefully, and perhaps was noticeably more sparing in his commentary on green blood or pointed ears. But this subtle protectiveness was preferable to Kirk’s overt loyalty, even if both were deeply appreciated.

Then Dr. McCoy died in front of him. On shore leave. He had the nerve to follow a white rabbit and a little girl in a white pinafore and blue dress, quoting Lewis Carroll at him, into the bizarre fantasy space the crew was trapped in, and ended up run through by the lance of a knight dressed in black. The knight was artificial, almost mechanical, despite being organic. McCoy’s body disappeared. Everything became increasingly ridiculous.

This isn’t happening, Spock decided. He isn’t dead.

Whether this thought made the eventual denouement of this misadventure contain the revelation of a once-again alive Dr. McCoy, he could not say. The fantastical receded back into manageable daydream, the sort of thing humans liked and rarely realized could be dangerous. He had almost forgotten why he’d avoided taking shore leave on the planet to begin with, but then everyone started to mill around, and he felt his distance from them all flood back in. He gently extricated himself from the illusory show girl McCoy had for some reason conjured up and passed off to him, and made his excuses.

Yeoman Barrows was attempting to drag the doctor off to some promised activity, which at least involved “a spa day and gossip,” when he tried to get the doctor’s attention.

“What now, Mr. Spock?”

“I require more information about the events of this day,” he said. Reasonable. 

“Mr. Spock, I’m on shore leave!”

“Yet something puzzles me, doctor.”

“Can’t it wait till we’re back on the clock?”

Spock ignored this. “How was it possible that you could have, if only temporarily, died? Yeoman Barrows may have imagined the black knight, but you believed he could not harm you.”

Said Yeoman Barrows had, giving up on McCoy, wandered off with Sulu and Rand. “Well, Mr. Spock, I have no idea, obviously, and we didn’t even understand the mechanism at that point, let alone how it works. However, as a psychologist, I suspect that although I thought the knight was not real while Barrows did, I was ready to die defending her, so it became a possibility.”

“A little morbid, don’t you think, doctor? Could you have not instead imagined that you would succeed in protecting her and vanquishing your foe?”

McCoy was exasperated now. “Haven’t you ever daydreamed about saving the day, dying a hero? It’s childish, but it helps prepare children to accept the reality of death, to give it meaning. As a man, I face the reality of death regularly, and have to live with the fact that I might not make it out any given time. It’s cathartic to finally experience the worst case scenario. As long as it’s an occasional impulse, it’s hardly a death wish.”

Spock gave a nod. The Romulan commander’s face came to mind and he shoved it away before the planet could manifest it. Then came something he’d never seen but dreamed countless times, Sybok, robes in disarray, staggering out onto an endless, hot plain, past falling bodies of larger men, crying, the only Vulcan he’d ever seen cry - Stop it.  

Yet he still couldn’t let it go. He wanted to understand… something. “Chorus girls, dying in battle, and children’s literature, doctor? I had no idea your inner life was so eclectic.”

McCoy almost looked bored. “Well, I’m a mysterious and sophisticated man, Mr. Spock. I’m sorry if that challenges you.”

“Not at all, doctor. I remain curious: why were you thinking of the work of Lewis Carroll?”

“I used to read the Alice books to my daughter,” he said, and then turned abruptly, and left the glade by himself.

A daughter? Before he could stop himself, he thought of a small human girl with a heart-shaped face and intense blue eyes and light brown hair in a blue dress and white pinafore, like an old-fashioned illustration of Alice herself, perhaps like what McCoy had seen upon first arriving. The girl in question peeked at him from around a tree, looking at him, curious, like a smaller version of Dr. McCoy. Then she had pointed ears and a green blush and warm brown eyes and dark hair, then she didn’t. She was Michael as a child and then she wasn’t. Before the tree, his mother was reading to all of the different, seated Alices, and Sybok too - or was it Spock? -, and then she wasn’t and they weren’t. He slammed aside the train of thought, and thankfully, it all disappeared. A daughter? Dr. McCoy had a daughter. Fascinating.

The doctor had fled so quickly. He’d been uncomfortable, unsettled by their exchange, affected. But he’d given Spock a secretive bauble, a confiding confection, and had reacted to him, just him. A deep satisfaction washed over him, and he let it. One moment of respite.

 

***

 

The next stretch of time he remembered, in the emotional, vivid part of his memory, as though they had never left the planet of walking daydreams. 

He was stranded on an alien world with an away team, the doctor at his arm, as the humans demanded he stop saving them to bury the growing dead over and over again. I am trying to keep you alive. You traitor, you machine, came the chorus. We can spare no time to bury the dead, and I wouldn't know what to say. Nothing is more important than burying the dead, but a Romulan would not know that. I never understood Antigone. A human being wrote Antigone. Let me die here with the others, then, and you will have things just as you like them. The doctor’s hand at his elbow, the remaining crew dragging him back to the shuttle. This is illogical. We won’t let you go. I don’t understand. How dare you not understand?

Captain Kirk, his friend Jim, held hostage by a god of war or a small child that didn’t like the look of him, how Spock wasn’t human. His power to transmute matter to energy and back again is behind the mirror in the drawing room. Break the mirror. Nothing works. Jim is still gone. Greater gods release them, taking the god-boy in hand.

The captain is fighting a Gorn at the behest of yet more gods. They are watching this on the bridge as though it were television. The Gorn, the only bogeyman that lived up to the name, who fed people to their young, who’d killed his friend, Uhura’s mentor, in front of him. Hemmer, the chief engineer, the Aenar, a stronger telepath than he ever was. Uhura becoming depressed, perhaps a project in Vulcan phonology - This Gorn looked ridiculous, as though it were just a man in a lizard costume. The captain won, like he always did.

They were in 1967 orbiting Earth for no reason at all. He ran the numbers, and steered the ship through time, as though that were something one could do. A hundred years ago the Vulcan Science Directorate said time travel was impossible. A hundred years ago, they said it was unfair.

The captain was facing court martial.

The captain won. Or Spock did. Was there a difference?

Spock found himself in an officer’s lounge on the starbase where they’d been stationed while the trial went on. He was sitting on a sofa in front of a long table. Kirk had arrived with Captain Ortegas, having left Rand to chat with Commander Noonien-Singh on the Reliant. Chapel came next, nestling up to her wife, joyful. Ortegas had an arm over her shoulder, their hands laced together. McCoy was due to arrive. They were all drinking something. He was drinking a Romulan ale. Made sense, now, that it was the only liquor that could get to him. 

Everything was mundane again.

McCoy, unexpectedly, arrived with a tall Vulcan woman in her prime years with olive-toned skin that made her green blood glow attractively at her pulse points and capillaries, with black hair in a severe crew cut and the off-duty uniform of the Vulcan Expeditionary Group, a soft-looking jumpsuit she must have been poured into. To Spock’s surprise, the Vulcan, Colonel T’Nura, introduced herself as “an old friend of Leo’s” and offered brisk hand shakes to the humans. After a split second sizing up, she merely offered him the ta’al. She was several inches taller than he was. She had a drink - also Romulan ale - and a beer in her hands. The beer was for McCoy.

He was frankly relieved when Kirk, who'd bolted upright like an exclamation mark, yelped, “Bones! Since when have you had a Vulcan friend?”

“I don’t know, Jim, a while?” The two of them started to sit down, pulling up chairs from a nearby table. Ortegas interrupted McCoy’s efforts to drag him into a dramatic bear hug, which the doctor enthusiastically returned, smiling brilliantly.

“Seven years, three months, and seventeen days,” said T’Nura, apparently content to leave off minutes and seconds. Her face was an enviably pleasant neutral, calculated to set humans at ease. “From a Vulcan perspective, friendship is understood differently, and perhaps a better term would be ‘comrades.’ From a human perspective, I would say we have been friends for six years, three months, and fifteen days.”

“That’s longer,” said Kirk, now merely mock-offended, “than he and I have been friends!”

McCoy shrugged, looking bewildered. Spock finally noticed that McCoy was not in uniform, and was wearing nicely tailored deep blue slacks and a whimsical but not too busy printed button-down that may have been silk. Was there something different about his hair?

Ortegas took a swig of her beer. “Please, please tell us what being friends from the ‘human perspective’ means.”

T’Nura lifted an eyebrow, more elegant than ironical. “It’s my understanding that humans consider certain social rituals and demonstrations of vulnerability to be the basis of friendship. In Leo’s case, I believe this occurred when we were out one evening and I decided to - what’s the term? - be his ‘wingman.’ He was resistant at first, but I am satisfied with the results. Many of the men I introduced to him were very sexually desirable, I believe. As a woman of logical persuasion, I am not the best judge.”

McCoy immediately turned bright red, and coughed over a sip of beer. “T-t’Nura,” he croaked.

Spock idly wondered if anyone other than perhaps - of all people - McCoy knew that “a woman of logical persuasion” meant a Vulcan woman who preferred women. Considering Kirk’s utter absorption with the colonel, it was hard to tell if he knew one way or the other.

T’Nura reclined slightly in her chair, posed at yet another devastating angle. “Humans consider anecdotes about pursuing sexual partners to be fodder for conversations in social gatherings, I believe?”

“Yes,” said Kirk, very quickly.

“Absolutely,” said Ortegas. “You’re doing exactly the right thing.”

“I don’t know,” said McCoy, drawling, “I’m not sure y’all have earned that particular story yet.”

“I see,” said T’Nura. “I will refrain.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” said Kirk, “but why are you friends with Bones?”

“Or, um,” asked Chapel, perking up from her position tucked under Ortegas’s arm, “what do you, as a Vulcan, get out of being friends with a human?”

If Spock actually felt embarrassment, he’d feel pretty embarrassed by the avid attention all of the humans, except McCoy, were turning towards T’Nura. Was it really so hard to tell why they were his friends? It was difficult not to take it personally, which was the most human possible reaction he could have in this situation. McCoy, despite being the cause of this irritation, broadcasted the annoyance Spock would be feeling if he were feeling something right now. Which he was not. He took another sip of his ale.

T’Nura tipped her head to the side. “I’m not sure what the wrong way would be to take that, Jim, or what use my generalizations about human-Vulcan interactions would be, Christine, but I will try. As a Vulcan who lives off-world and as a member of the Expeditionary Group, I value human friendship because I often find human behavior fascinating, and because I value human friends’ insights into social situations, especially where many different cultures and species are present. As for why I am Leo’s friend, it is due to his intelligence and well-developed moral character. For these reasons, I admire him. He is also far more adept at recognizing Vulcan social cues than the average human of my acquaintance. At the same time, he does not attempt to act Vulcan, as humans deeply integrated into life on the homeworld or in Vulcan-dominated fields logically tend to do. I find this contrast both pleasant and refreshing.”

“Oh,” said McCoy, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say I get Vulcan social cues. I maybe, sometimes, get when a Vulcan social cue is happening.”

Spock actually found this a highly relatable statement. He frowned at his ale. Had he really drunk half of it?

“That is still far more than most humans seem to be capable of. I would also say the same of myself and human social cues,” said T’Nura. “And I am more than three times your age.”

Ortegas leaned forward. “How old are you?”

“I am one-hundred-twenty-one years, three months, and two days old,” said T’Nura. She had a good twenty years on his own father. He had to admit this situation was becoming more surprising: his assumption was that older Vulcans, as the arbiters of social respectability, would be far less interested in befriending off-worlders and far more awkward in their company.

“Wow,” said Kirk, who seemed to be having difficulty assimilating this information, but did not stop looking at her reverently.

“You would have been alive during the Romulan War,” said Ortegas, almost roughly.

“Affirmative,” she replied.

“What,” Ortegas began, “was it -”

Kirk leapt up and waved toward the door. “Sam! Over here!”

They paused as their former colleague, Sam Kirk, and Lieutenant Uhura approached their table and settled in after various human configurations of hugs and nods from Spock and T’Nura. Uhura left to get drinks. 

“Dude,” said Ortegas, smiling, “I didn’t realize you were here.”

“I’m on my way back to Deneva from a conference,” said the elder Kirk. He then smiled at Spock, all teeth and mustache. “Spock! I hope my little brother isn’t giving you too much trouble.”

“Merely the appropriate amount,” Spock replied, feeling gentle warmth spreading in his chest. Perhaps this was what nostalgia felt like, that human experience. Or inebriation. With Sam Kirk, Ortegas, Chapel, and Uhura there, it almost felt like this could have been a night seven years ago, when he was more likely to go for casual drinks with other crew members. 

“Back off, Sam,” said the captain, “Spock is mine now. You had your chance.”

“I don’t know, Jim,” his brother replied, “you never forget your first Kirk.”

“It’s not the Kirk who gets there first,” he shot back, “it’s the Kirk who lasts.” Then he waggled his eyebrows dramatically.

Chapel looked toward them with a mixture of disgust and awe. “Why are you two always like this?”

“Oh,” said Sam, “I wouldn’t pull on that thread.”

“Bones is the psychologist,” Jim - Spock supposed he was Jim right now - offered. “Ask him.”

“Oh, the doctor,” said McCoy, with an easy grin, “is most definitely out at the moment.”

The Kirk brothers gave him a light round of boos as Uhura returned from the bar with drinks.  “What did I miss?”

“Sam and Jim were being territorial about Spock,” said Ortegas, “and we just met Leo’s Vulcan friend and were asking her nosy questions.”

“Hi T’Nura,” said Uhura. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here earlier. Sam and I were catching up while waiting for the captain’s trial to wrap up after I left the bridge. It was like the most dramatic five minutes when his shuttle got in, as he had his ‘protect brother’ game face on and then I told him he was off the hook, so we chilled and I had to give a dramatic re-enactment of the whole tell-tale heart gambit that cleared his name.”

“I am gratified to see you again, Nyota,” T’Nura replied. Nobody reacted. Uhura having a worldly and beautiful Vulcan lesbian for a friend seemed plausible. “I did not find the questions intrusive.”

“Erica was asking her about being alive during the Romulan War,” Jim mused. “Or was about to.”

“Wow,” said Uhura. “That’s fascinating. I mean, unless you’re not comfortable talking about the Romulans.”

“I am not uncomfortable,” said T’Nura. “The topic remains timely. What do you wish to know?”

“I guess, like,” said Ortegas, “are you surprised by the fact that Romulans are Vulcan-looking? Did anyone ever suspect that?”

“I was not expecting the Romulans to be Vulcanoid,” said T’Nura, “but there is a longstanding apocryphal tradition on Vulcan that a group of people left the planet during the Time of Awakening. Of course, there is little archeological evidence of such a recent exodus. However, we do know there are neighboring species that are arguably 'Vulcanoid,' suggesting a common ancestor. Therefore, there being a group of atavistic Vulcanoids is not, in and of itself, a challenging surprise.”

Uhura nodded. “What do you think of learning about the Romulans now? Is it meaningful to you that they are - or look - Vulcanoid?”

“As a Vulcan,” she said, without hesitation, “I have had occasion to deepen my appreciation of Surak’s wisdom, for now there is a concrete representation of what we rejected long ago, more evidence that he was correct. Other than that, however, I do not find them interesting. They are enemies of the Federation, and deserve no special consideration so long as they oppose our security and our values.”

“Who did people think the Romulans were, back then?” Sam was frowning, and Jim looked as though he were planning future chess moves.

“I cannot speak for everyone,” said T’Nura, “but I believe I considered them analogous to the Breen, who value privacy and control, and are never seen without protective armor.”

“I wonder,” said Jim, “whether anyone thought it odd that they so often fought with unmanned ships, which seems to suggest a cautious military culture, while waging such an expansionist war based on honor and supposed superiority.”

“They weren’t unmanned,” said McCoy, and Spock glanced at him sharply. There was something intense in his expression.

Ortegas nodded, looking murderous. “They kidnapped Aenar and made them operate their telepresence units to navigate and maneuver their ships.”

“A lot of Betazoids too, actually,” said Sam, looking grim, “though I don’t know if they were able to… do it, as well. Not one of them survived. Aurelan’s grandmother still has nightmares about being kidnapped by Romulans, which was a common fear for Betazoid children, which spread like a virus across schools as they all felt what each other felt. That’s a big part of why Betazed made first contact with the Federation.”

“And why they kept their telepathy a secret for so long,” McCoy added.

“So it could be a gesture of imperial power,” mused Jim, “to make their subjects fight for their glory. That does track.”

“Telepaths enslaving other telepaths,” said Chapel. She shuddered.

“I am not convinced the Romulans are a telepathic people, regardless of whether they retain the ability,” said Spock. He’d given this a lot of thought. He had also finished his ale.

“Ah,” said T’Nura, “you are thinking of the historical interludes from the Kir’Shara?”

“Affirmative.”

The humans were looking at both of them expectantly.

“Surak’s writing style encompassed many different genres, reminiscent of some of Earth’s earlier philosophers, though more coherent as a corpus,” Spock explained. “He often described features of his time as a complement to his philosophy.”

“Which was quite scandalous and contrary to the High Command’s line,” offered T’Nura. In fact, although Spock couldn’t exactly blame the humans for fixating on the Romulans, he personally was far more interested in what it would have been like for a girl of twenty to have suddenly had the full works of Surak available to all for the first time.

“He described several antagonistic factions to his pacifist movement, many of whom only used telepathy defensively, as a way to remain unreadable and and unmoved,” Spock continued, “as well as an exodus by a group of Vulcans. It isn’t completely clear they are one and the same, but that is the common - and most straightforward - interpretation.”

“To kill requires a vacant heart,” said T’Nura, as though quoting, which Spock knew she was, though he could not place the reference. “To conquer and to rule requires a mind whose battlements surround an abandoned stronghold.”

“Huh,” said Uhura, “does that mean that deadening telepathy and psionic empathy is necessary for a telepathic species to become militaristic on a mass scale?”

“Neither Spock nor I are experts,” said T’Nura, “but that would not surprise me.” 

Spock nodded.

“I wonder how they even managed to do that,” said McCoy, lost in thought. “It’s not just a switch you could turn off. The midbrain is forty-five percent of a Vulcan’s brain mass. Or that’s the average that we’ve been told. I’ve operated on Vulcan brains that were more like fifty or sixty. The lowest I’ve ever seen was thirty.”

Now, everyone was staring at McCoy. He looked momentarily confused. “Oh, right,” he said. “Y’all wouldn’t know about that.”

Spock frowned. “The Vulcan Science Academy has a functional ban on anyone studying Vulcan neurology or even performing brain surgery on Vulcans. The only surgical standards for Vulcanoid species, generally, that include some neuroscience, come from a paper Dr. M’Benga wrote several years ago that mainly has been useful in specifying what non-Vulcan surgeons should not attempt and what remains unknown. How have you performed brain surgery on multiple Vulcans?”

“Um,” said McCoy, who was actually blushing. “The, um, sample that paper is based on came from, well, me.”

Chapel’s eyes went huge. “Leo,” she said. “What? What? But that sample came from a case where the surgeon, with just an untrained orderly, operated on ten very badly injured Vulcans for fifty hours straight in combat conditions.”

“Wow,” said Sam, “no wonder Jim likes you so much. You’re as crazy as he is.”

“Holy shit,” said Jim, “wait, was that the time with the Klingons?”

The humans wheeled around on McCoy. “Yes, Jim,” he said, with a long-suffering sigh. “That was the time with the Klingons.”

“Guess what, nerds,” said Jim, “I’m a part of medical history. I was that untrained orderly!”

“Okay,” said Ortegas, “you have to tell us the story right now.

“I myself am quite intrigued,” said T’Nura.

“I am as well,” Spock heard himself saying.

McCoy looked at Jim, pleading.

“All right,” said Jim, “I’ll tell it until we get to the medical parts. So, this was on Cerberus, which is on the Romulan border, more or less. I was a security officer there for a few months after I got left by the Farragut when I needed surgery - this is how Bones and I met. Anyway, there was a lot going on, but in the middle of it, this Bird of Prey shows up, and a hundred Klingons just march right in to the colony. They killed the other security officers immediately. I was the only one they didn’t get, because I was in the med building, following Bones around. This was yet another time me flirting on-duty saved my life.”

“Jesus Christ,” muttered McCoy.

“Bones had me strip and get into an orderly’s uniform when it was clear the Klingons were coming our way. They demanded the surgeon treat their 'battle prizes,' ten Vulcan prisoners of war, who must have been VEG people. They said they’d kill Bones if he let any of them die, and Bones - as cool as you please - said that he would have treated them no matter how they’d asked and that if they thought his performance depended on his chances of survival they might as well kill him then and there. The Klingons actually liked that a lot, and were slightly more polite afterward. Anyway, since I was posing as an orderly, I had to help him. The most surreal couple of days of my life. Very gory.”

McCoy shuddered. 

“Oh,” said Jim, beaming, “that’s why I call him Bones! It was like he was an old-timey doctor, an old sawbones, on an ancient battlefield.”

McCoy glowered. “How macabre. And here I thought it was a comment on my figure. I got scarecrow a lot growing up.”

“No way,” said Jim, “you have a bangin’ bod. Very… sleek. Like a sexy cat.”

McCoy looked around, incredulous, as all the humans, including Sam, and T’Nura, for good measure, all nodded. Honestly it was more conspicuous that he hadn’t. Maybe he should get another ale. Should he raise an eyebrow? He raised an eyebrow, a compromise.

“Anyway,” said McCoy, “you incorrigible infants, that was one of the worst surgical marathons of my life. Those poor folks were on death’s door. A lot of the wounds seemed self-inflicted, even cranial trauma, which all of them had, and they must have been held a long time. I’d never seen Vulcans with long hair before, or beards. When some of them came to, we couldn’t even talk, as they didn’t speak Standard; it must have been some Vulcan dialect the UT couldn’t pick up. One of the few times in my life I wondered if failing to save someone would have been kinder.”

Something seemed off. T’Nura was also frowning.

“Yeah,” said Jim. “I remember being shocked when I finally got back to the VEG group and the Vulcan captain told me he had no interest in investigating because it was not logical to think that those prisoners were members of the VEG.”

“That is accurate,” said T’Nura. “They clearly were not.”

Uhura blinked. “How do you know?”

“All members of the VEG must be fluent in Standard,” she replied. “Excessive hair growth would be surprising. Most members get treatments to freeze hair growth so they do not need to think of their physical comfort while on a tour. Furthermore, I do not believe captured VEG officers would self-harm in that manner. We undergo extensive training in anti-torture techniques. Each of us is also trained in martial arts that include several efficient and relatively painless ways to kill and commit suicide.”

“Jesus,” murmured Chapel.

“Also,” said Uhura, “there aren’t actually any Vulcan dialects that the UT can’t handle on the spot, other than Old High Golish, which is mainly ceremonial or, like, intimate. That’s why you hear 'thee' sometimes, on Vulcan, as they upload a patch to UTs for everyone on-world. They probably weren’t speaking Old High Golish.”

Sam looked puzzled. “So how did Klingons get ten Vulcans and why would they then take them out in the middle of nowhere?”

“They wouldn’t,” said Spock. “There is no logical reason for them to do so.”

“They didn’t,” said Jim, with a very “checkmate” look on his face. “They weren’t Vulcan at all. They must have been Romulan. The Klingons knew. At least six years ago. At least.”

The silence among them all was total.

“No,” murmured McCoy, stricken. “Dear God, no.”

“I took a look at your run-in,” said Ortegas. “Romulan warbirds are Klingon Bird of Prey imports, or that one was. The transmission was leaked, right?”

“I did think it was super weird,” said Chapel, “that the commander looked exactly like Ambassador Sarek. I don’t know if anyone else noticed that.”

“Oh,” said Uhura, “everyone most certainly did.”

“There’s full blood panels, anatomical scans, psionic tests, reflex tests in that paper Leo and Joe wrote,” said Chapel, slowly, looking closely at something on her padd. “It’s all there in the metadata. And if I run the species recognition scan…”  She tapped a bit. “Damn. All come back Vulcan, most of them high likelihood, a few probable, and one possible…”

“The Klingons let me keep the records,” said McCoy, whispering, barely audible. “Why did they let me keep them? How could I have been so careless? I put way more detail into the paper than I needed to.”

“We have to tell Starfleet Command,” said Jim. “We have to tell them right now.”

“Tell them what?” There was something warning in McCoy’s tone. Chapel looked extremely tense. Sam looked vaguely ill.

“Don’t you see?” Jim looked around. “We can come up with a way of finding out who’s pretending to be Vulcan! Everyone’s going around harassing Vulcans - we can settle it once and for all, and everyone can stop acting crazy and focus on the real enemies, the Klingons and the Romulans.”

“Jim,” said McCoy, his voice cracking, “no. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Well,” said Ortegas, who was also getting excited, “why the hell not? We can tell what species people are with a scan.”

“No, we can’t,” said Chapel, pained. “That’s how people think it works, but it’s not.  Positive identification is due to a whole host of factors and represents and it’s always a probability, a degree of confidence. Say we run the DNA against the standard averages for various Vulcan phenotypes. If the results come back seventy percent, that doesn’t mean thirty percent of the DNA is not Vulcan. It just means it’s a 70% match to statistical averages.”

“Okay,” said Jim, pressing on, “then we can make a test to positively identify Romulans.”

“Not with a sample size of ten, we can’t,” McCoy growled.

“We can travel faster than the speed of light,” said Ortegas. "Why can't we figure it out?"

Jim turned to his brother. “Sam?”

“Jim,” he said, “Leo and Chris are right: according to the mainstream consensus in xenobiology, it doesn’t work that way. But there are people who say that it can, and they’re not fringe. They’re also the creepiest motherfuckers in xenobiology. Obsessed by hybrids and defining… differences.”

“I encountered several of them in childhood,” said Spock. “I underwent many studies.” He’d almost forgotten he was there. McCoy was right. McCoy was exactly right. Yet, the implications… he’d accepted that Romulans might look like Vulcans, that they may be Vulcanoid, and share a common ancestor. But for them to be indistinguishable from Vulcans… were they actually the ones Surak wrote about, the ones who left three thousand years ago? Had that been more than legend? Were they Vulcans? Worst of all, his immediate reaction was not disgust or fear: it was curiosity. What were they like? The Romulan population of the Romulan Empire was speculated to be in the tens of billions - how did they live without Surak’s teachings? Not the warmongers and elites: the everyday people they’d never seen…

“Y’all,” said McCoy, “it’s fucking race science. It’s not good science. It’s a solution in search of a problem, the definition of confirmation bias. And it’s ugly. We know how ugly it gets.”

“Okay, okay,” said Jim, raising his hands. “I get your point. Sorry I asked.”

Ortegas grimaced. “I’m not. Showed us how people who don’t know their stuff, like the average person, would react, maybe. Jim and I aren’t dumb, and we’re certainly not into race science. I’m glad we didn’t jump the gun.”

Chapel suddenly squeaked, and dropped her padd.

“Chris,” said Uhura, turning to her. “What’s the matter?”

“I - I - I just got -” Chapel gulped. “I got a notification from Starfleet Medical, saying I may need to talk to Starfleet Intelligence, but I ‘shouldn’t worry.’ Just from accessing the article and running that… Oh my God.”

McCoy gave a rattling sigh, and covered his face with his hands. “A Green Scare,” he muttered. “A committee on un-Vulcan activities…”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Sam, placating. “This is Starfleet Medical. Something like this will go through the Federation Science Council. They know their stuff. And besides, what are they going to do, test all Vulcans?”

Spock restrained a wince.

“If any member race were to undertake such a project,” said T’Nura, who had been receiving this human melodrama with calm interest, “Vulcans would be most likely to acquiesce and succeed.”

“But they wouldn’t,” said Chapel. “They wouldn’t, right? Right?”

 

***

 

Within two days of leaving spacedock, the Federation News Network gave a press conference, claiming that the Klingon Empire had known about the Romulans’ origins, and stood to benefit from the turmoil they all found themselves in. They also announced the “good news” that soon no one would have to fear a Vulcan was a Romulan in disguise, because through the actions of a brave Starfleet doctor, the Federation had genetic material to sequence, which he’d taken from the Klingons who had been kidnapping Romulans for their own purposes. They would soon have the ability to say conclusively if someone was a Romulan spy. The Klingons and the Romulans wouldn't get away with it.

Within a week, the Federation Senate had passed an emergency resolution requiring all citizens of Vulcan descent to undergo genetic testing. Within a month, the process was up and running. Compliance on Vulcan was one hundred percent, with no objectors. A quiet and withdrawn McCoy had administered the test to Spock in the privacy of his quarters, perfectly professional. The doctor slipped up just at the end, by saying, mournfully, “A mass campaign like this is easy to fuck up and easy to tamper with, even if it did work like that. The only people they’ll get will have nothing to do with anything.”

The results made no one happy. Anti-Vulcan partisans, who’d been grandstanding about a vast conspiracy, were made to look like fools. There was no indication Vulcans of Romulan heritage had “infiltrated” the echelons of the current Federation government. At the same time, the results did not come up empty, especially not on Vulcan. Every other day, some new local citizen or minor celebrity or politician was “exposed” as part-Romulan. What exactly was to be done about this was not at all clear, but stories were trickling in. Resignations, marriages annulled, hours of questioning, people disappearing for days…

Ironically, this phase was, technically, much easier to deal with on a personal level. The people he knew best, his friends, perhaps, made a point of making sure he wasn’t alone in public spaces if he didn’t want to be. His lunch table was a revolving door of familiar faces: Uhura, Chapel, Rand, Sulu, the captain, the doctor… Levels of casual anti-Vulcan sentiment almost went back to normal. People were less on edge around him. Yet everyday, Spock felt more and more unmoored. Each new item from Vulcan made him feel ill, and no amount of meditation could make it recede completely. No matter, he would simply endure, as he always had.

One day, after leaving some misguided utopian society with a seedy underbelly - for the life of him, he could not remember which, he received an encrypted message from a seemingly random connection. He had received such a message every year or so since he was a cadet.

Watch the coverage coming out of Shi’Kahr. -S

As soon as he could, he rushed to his quarters, and called up the local news on Vulcan. They were relatively close to subspace beacons, and it was almost live.

Councilor T’Pol’s face filled the screen. It was better to see her face, Sybok was right, to hear slow, grave Vulcan voices analyzing the announcement, at first. On Federation channels, the mass-comm ones, there was merely the headline: T’Pol, daughter of a Romulan spy? Investigation into possible treason by beloved Federation hero and former Council member.

That night, before meditating, Spock actually did throw up.

 

***

 

For days, there was nothing from Shi’Kahr. Carefully crafted non-statements came out from the Federation Senate and Council. Spock had difficulty remembering other people existed during those days, retreating to his quarters whenever possible, and he didn’t know if there were new rumors, new fears. Then, on every channel, including community Starfleet ones, there was a notice of a special joint broadcast from Shi’Kahr with the Federation Council for the following evening.

Spock watched it alone.

The Vulcan High Command council members, as well as the Federation executive committee, and other members of the diplomatic corps, his father, of course, included, stood on the steps of the Federation building in downtown Shi’Kahr. Slightly to the side, T’Pol stood in formal robes, her head bowed. A Federation councilor, a Denobulan, stepped forward and spoke firmly, as though orating, although Spock could guarantee the Security Ministry had cleared the surrounding streets to allow for a more controlled filming environment.

“Fellow citizens of the Federation,” she said, “we come to you in a spirit of transparency, and we feel with you, the fear, anger, and sorrow that this grave attack to the very fabric of the Federation by our oldest enemies, the Klingons and the Romulans, has caused. We honor the many Vulcans, a just and honorable people, who put Federation safety first, and bore scrutiny with grace and resilience. Our hearts go out to those who discovered members of their family had been enemies in disguise, and we reaffirm that it’s Romulan loyalty, not Romulan blood, that we must interrogate and protect ourselves from. 

“The recent accusations against former Councilor T’Pol are serious enough, considering all her good work and her importance to the history of the Federation, that we wanted to come to you directly. Starfleet has been able to verify that her father was, in fact, a deep undercover agent for the Romulan Star Empire, who was responsible for many security breaches before and during the war a hundred years ago. I want to be very clear: we have found no evidence - no evidence - that Councilor T’Pol had any knowledge of her father’s crimes, and has been as surprised as we have been by this tragic news. In light of how our enemies might use her legacy and her position to sow seeds of doubt among us, T’Pol, a true hero, has asked to leave the Federation and retire in neutral territory, in seclusion. She will be leaving after this broadcast. We are in awe of how she has again and again put the needs of the many before the needs of the few, or the one, as any loyal Vulcan would.”

Spock couldn’t breathe. He had to remind himself to breathe. Words echoed, in her voice, T’Pol’s voice: Tell the entire truth. This was wrong. Many things that are logical are wrong. She was an old woman, she’d never see her children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren again - 

T’Pol’s head was still bowed. We are creatures of duty, you and I. Just one more duty to perform. He knew they would never see her face again.

Now T’Pau had stepped forward, regal, awesome, final. “Vulcan has come before you to affirm our conviction that the Romulans are not our brothers and sisters. They are not our kin. They are unlike us, and we do not know them. There is no space in the great tapestry of Vulcan society for the insidious poison of Romulan propaganda and sabotage. They dare claim this place, our home, was once their home. If there is any shred of proof to this, let our enemies know that there is no way home. You, Romulans, are all outcasts. You, Romulans, are not welcome here. Vulcan will stand against you with our true family, the great Federation, time and time again.”

The broadcast ended after that. Spock sat on his meditation mat and tried - he tried - He heard a beep from his padd. For the second time in a week, unprecedented, was another encrypted message:

I’m on it, baby brother. Benefit of being an exile. I’ll look out for auntie. -S

Instead of meditating, he fell asleep, and slept eight hours, as though he were a human being.

 

***

 

The first morning after the news of T’Pol’s exile went public, he received an unexpected update from the FNN, an exclusive from Andoria Prime. There were renewed protests outside of Federation buildings, but this time they were in support of Vulcan

“Look,” said an electric blue and very pretty zhen interviewed on the street (with helpful pronouns, she/her, in Standard, a most enlightened choice on the part of Andorian journalists in Spock’s opinion), “we all thought this was a witch hunt but, whatever, maybe it was on the level. I mean, fuck Romulans, forever, obviously. But do they really expect us to believe T’Pol is a traitor? Just because she’s half-Romulan by blood? Who the fuck cares about blood? A warrior’s honor is in her soul. She didn’t choose who her thavin - wait, it’s father, right? - who her father was. She’s the only Vulcan - and yeah, I said Vulcan - who always stood with Andoria against the Romulans when the High Command couldn’t commit to the alliance for a year, a year -” The interviewer cut away to broader shots of the large protest, as it was clear that she was just warming up to the topic. Many other Andorians said much the same, with many saying, as well, “leave those pointed-ear Vulcans alone.”

One interview, of a tiny Andorian child shaking with rage, repeated frequently in the broadcasts: “Romulans are bullies. Bullies should get wrecked! Bullies are the Romulans, not the pretty green lady who looks like an Earther fairy.”

Really, it brought to mind his father’s advice about negotiating with Andorians: although they might hold forth with an almost unbearable stream of vehemence and seemingly nonsensical reasoning, if you let them get to the end, they usually had a point that was, if not logical, at the very least a clear sticking point.

It couldn’t be as simple as an Andorian’s confidence in one Vulcan woman’s honor. He remembered another thing his father had told him, long ago. Most people are taught to treat politics as a story; they look for a logical conclusion, even when a conclusion is not logical to expect. Despite all the activity and strife, very little changes all at once. A conclusion makes things simple. Simplicity may not always be logical or accurate, but it is often practical and necessary.

At lunch, Dr. Tola, in their brilliant red skant with white hair piled in an elaborate beehive, sat next to him at his table.

Without preamble, they asked, “Have you ever considered wearing your hair differently? Vulcan haircuts aren’t very flattering.”

“I have worn my hair differently in the past,” said Spock. “I did not prefer it, though I believe humans mostly did. I received 153.54% more attention compared to baseline. 205.43% more attention from heterosexual women and a certain subset of homosexual men I could never satisfactorily define.”

“Not surprising, and fair enough, at least you gave it a shot,” they said, with a shrug, and ate a bite of stew. “Have you ever grown a beard?”

“I have,” he said.

“How did that go over?”

“Reviews were mixed.”

This rather intensive interrogation about his hair was interrupted when, to his surprise, several other Andorians he’d seen regularly sit with McCoy ambled up and took a seat at his table as well. They all carried the conversation easily, and even included him with minimal effort into their small talk and minor arguments. Andorians in Starfleet had a reputation among humans, at least, for being “bros”: blunt, laconic verbally but visibly emotional, athletic, and chivalrous. He had seen much evidence that there was something to this characterization, but it hadn’t occurred to him that this, too, was a concession to “mixed company.” In a majority Andorian group, which he’d certainly never found himself in the middle of, he could barely keep up with the speed of conversation. Everyone seemed to know everyone that everyone knew, and there was almost obsessive concern about the details of everyone’s lives couched in insults that were either rote or resulted from wildly inventive wordplay. Everyone seemed, also, to be at one point quoting poetry, not anything he recognized. Sometimes they broke into song. He felt, momentarily, beside himself in a not-unpleasant way.

This bemusing interlude ended when Lieutenant Andrews, a human on the alpha shift security rotation, walked by and said, loudly, “I see Romulans still keep Andorians as pets.”

Naturally, all of the Andorians stood up, except for Dr. Tola, who watched with keen interest. Lieutenant Thaleb, also a security officer, a thaan who was easily 6’5” and 300 pounds, said, loud enough that the room went quiet, “What the fuck did you just say, Andrews?”

Andrews, very unwisely, in Spock’s opinion, answered back, “You know he got into the Academy by kissing up to that Romulan traitor bitch. Probably ‘cause he’s a Romulan too. Maybe it wasn’t just kissing, maybe he was her...”

“Get her name out of your fucking mouth, that’s T’Pol you’re talking about,” said Ensign Shoth, another thaan on security.

“Leave Mr. Pointy alone, that’s sexual harassment,” said Lieutenant Jhollos, a shen, also on security. Then, perhaps realizing what she’d said out loud, she glanced apologetically at Spock and said, formally, “Sir.” 

Spock gave as gracious a nod as he could without letting a smile escape his control or, T’Plana forbid, a laugh.

Thaleb folded his arms and glared down at Andrews. “We Andorians call bullshit when we see it. Nothing good ever comes from making a whole planet take a blood purity test, and T’Pol is a goddamn hero. I know humans aren’t that ignorant and intellectually lazy about your own history, so I guess it’s just you. The XO is all right.”

Really, Spock, as first officer, probably should not be enjoying this as much as he was. 

“What did you just say to me?” Andrews, who was rapidly validating everything the thaan had said about his intelligence, appeared to be escalating. In the mess hall. In front of him. With an Andorian.

“I called you ignorant and intellectually lazy,” Thaleb replied. “I’d also say you're a creep and a pervert, as well as cowardly, foolish, and petty.”

“You can’t talk to me like that,” said Andrews. “You better… you better watch yourself.”

“Sure thing. If you get tired of embarrassing yourself and try to start something, just know I got my ushaan-tor in my quarters with your skull’s name on it, Andrews.”

“He clearly just threatened to kill me with an ice pick,” said Andrews to Spock. A challenge. “Are you going to do anything about it, or is he really your pet after all?”

Everyone was watching him now. He was aware he had to make the right move. This was like a much more stressful version of chess. Would he encourage violence in his own defense? Would he come down on a crew member in his own command for insulting him, no matter how inappropriately the subordinate had acted? Would he punish the Andorians like a Vulcan villain in an Andorian manga? Would he seem fearful, tyrannical, corrupt, brave, benevolent, honorable?

Fortunately, if he knew anything about ship discipline, he knew the regulations. “The question is what you’re going to do about it, Mr. Andrews,” he said, tone mild but carrying. “The uniform code clearly states that an Andorian citizen in Starfleet may challenge another member of the service to the ushaan. As long as the other person understands and consents to participate in combat, it is perfectly acceptable. I am sure several people here would be willing to educate you on what an Andorian honor duel would entail. If not, I can provide you with the relevant data tapes.”

Oh, everyone - except Andrews - loved that answer. Even he could feel the room’s mood change into an amused sigh, a release of tension. All the Andorians sat back down at the table and beamed at him, a facial expression on an Andorian he had never seen before. He wondered if this was, in fact, a first in Vulcan-Andorian relations. He could not decide whether the expression on the face of his inner Ambassador Sarek was horrified or proud. Not that he’d ever been able to tell. For the first time in months, at least, the face didn’t morph into that of the Romulan commander.

After Andrews had slunk away, Thaleb had sat back down and thumped his shoulder, which was startling, but he recovered well enough. “The doc was right about you. For a green-skin, you do know what’s up, even if you’re too quiet.” 

The other Andorians murmured agreements, with scattered mentions of “the doc,” and even a “real Archer move, honestly,” or “nah, that’s pure Soval,” and a few “Mr. Pointy’s a pink-skin too, you know…” This was also the first time he’d heard Andorians in real life actually say the word, “pink-skin,” which seemed to substantiate an idle speculation he’d had at the Academy that at some point, early in Federation history, a human had pulled an Andorian aside to explain what a bad idea it was to call humans that to their faces.

He pitched his voice to only Dr. Tola, who he hoped was something like an ally. “What did Dr. McCoy say to them about me?”

“Nothing special,” they replied. “He always talks you up behind your back. Gives you sass to your face, so everyone knows he’s not backing you to be a bootlicker and that you can handle yourself and that you have a mouth on you too. Real crafty, as you’re not exactly approachable or charming when left to your own devices. He makes sure to ‘complain’ whenever you do something stupid but brave, which goes over well with this crowd. You know humans. Slippery little ice-bores, putting in a word here and there, being all understanding, trying on different personalities depending on the phase of the moon or who’s watching. I don’t even know if he did it on purpose. I can never decide if that human compulsion to connect everything and everyone in the galaxy is annoying or cute. Seems to save our collective asses more often than not, though.”

“I know what you mean,” said Spock, and he did, actually. “Do Andorian crew members really refer to me as Mr. Pointy in private?”

Dr. Tola snorted. “No, they call you something else in private.”

In a way, it was as simple as an Andorian’s confidence in a Vulcan’s honor. Within a day, everyone on the ship, at least, had dropped the issue. Well, first Sulu forced him to give a high five on the bridge, and then Jim had made him do so in private. Also, Spock discovered that Lieutenant Thaleb was what humans called a “heartthrob,” and that his challenging Lieutenant Andrews to the ushaan in Spock’s defense meant a great deal and also seemed to work in the thaan’s favor, interpersonally, “with the ladies or equivalent,” according to Rand. Perhaps it helped that humans tended to have fairly short attention spans for scandal. The Romulan Affair could flair up in the future, likely would, but then again, so could something else. Mercurial, baffling creatures, human beings. Slippery, indeed.

But the brief high, the little ending, seeped out of him as soon as he was alone.

 

***

 

When Spock returned to his quarters, he knelt before his bookcase and took out an old-fashioned wooden box he kept on the bottom shelf but never opened. The logical placement of meaningful possessions that were unneeded on a daily basis, but whose existence should not be forgotten. There weren’t many things in the box.

He lifted out a pendant with a long chain, and let the memory wash over him.

He was twenty years old and standing in the courtyard between the Science Academy and the Expeditionary Group headquarters, the theory and practice of Vulcan’s power in the quadrant. He was waiting for his father to return from a closed-door meeting with the chancellor and regents after Spock, upon graduating from the Vulcan Science Academy, had very publicly and very firmly rejected his commission in the Vulcan Expeditionary Group. Before today, he had wanted nothing more than to rush out into deep space, his mind dizzy with the potential discoveries awaiting him in the unknown. He had been thrilled when a ranking member of the VEG had approached him and told him, informally, that he was going to be offered a commission. 

Then the man had said something else.

“This is a significant moment,” said the man, “for you have exceeded all other incoming officers in this year, despite your inherent disadvantages.”

Thinking, perhaps, that the man somehow knew of his L’rak terai, he asked, “Which disadvantages?”

“Your human mother,” he said. “Besides your unique appearance, no one could tell you were a half-breed Vulcan. Your father made the right choice.”

Stunned, he forced himself to pursue more information: the logical choice.

“What choice did my father make?”

“We did not want to destabilize the Group with too many untried... elements, so we offered him a choice: we would either offer a commission to his ward, the human girl, or to you, his half-human son. He did the logical thing and chose you.”

He could tell, distantly, that he was about to lose emotional control. And then he did.

Now he was waiting in the afternoon sun, and although he would not cause a further disturbance in the grand center of Shi’Kahr, he had no intention of ever speaking to his father as his son ever again.

An older Vulcan woman in simple robes approached him. When she came closer he realized it was Councilor T’Pol, his father’s mentor, and one of his recommenders to Starfleet Academy, to which he’d applied behind his father’s back. He’d told himself it was a backup plan. He’d told himself it wasn’t because he wanted to prove to himself he could do anything that Michael did. That even if he’d chosen Vulcan, to be Vulcan, he could have chosen to be human.

“I came to offer my congratulations on your achievement,” she said. This was an odd thing for a Vulcan to say - or, rather, an odd way of saying it. Spock didn’t reply. “I realize the events of this day have been… complicated.”

Spock didn’t ask how she already knew what had happened at the reception. He’d never seen a Vulcan engage in gossip, but somehow older Vulcans, at least, seemed to know everything immediately.

Then she asked: “Are you familiar with the art form called ni’var?”

An unexpected question. “It was a pre-Awakening art form that was made to appear different when viewed from a different perspective. It is commonly believed to be a primitive form of dialectical aesthetics, which has been surpassed in the excellence of today’s art forms, which perfect the concept of synthesis and oneness. That was what I was taught. I am not… familiar with it.”

“The Kir’Shara brought so many changes to Vulcan understanding, and one of them was in aesthetics. Surak referred to ni’var more than any other art form in his writing as being a companion and aid to logical thinking. He described far more breadth in the form than had been found archaeologically. A work of ni’var could be plastic - a statue, an image - but it could also be a performance or work of conceptual art. He believed that the radical possibilities of duality were the strongest evidence of a common truth: what was important was that oppositions could be of the same substance, share the same position in time and space.”

“I thank you for this gift of knowledge,” said Spock, a traditional answer.

He, to his shame, then jumped when her hands touched his to place in his palm an IDIC pendant. He already had his IDIC pin, declaring his membership in the ranks of the VSA, to be worn on formal occasions, pinned to his tunic as of two hours ago. Each year, artists on Vulcan competed to design the VSA graduation pins for the new social elites of Vulcan, and they were exquisitely made and always became priceless family heirlooms. There was a display case in the family compound where each successive generation placed their pins, two thousand years worth of intellectual achievement. A place had been made for his pin, beside the place where Michael had left hers behind. This IDIC pendant was sturdy and attractive, but generic, the sort you could get at any adornment kiosk in Shi’Kahr.

“My mother,” said T’Pol, “when she joined T’Pau and the restorers of the Kir’Shara in the Forge, sent me this pendant with a hidden map to lead me to her, claiming to the forces in the High Command that opposed them that it was a family heirloom. I was able to lead Captain Archer to them, and together we restored both the katra of Surak, who chose that human man to dwell with at the time of crisis before returning to Mount Seleya, as well as Surak’s writings to the Vulcan people.”

Spock swallowed and looked down at it. Oh. That pendant. The pendant carved into every statue of T’Pol, not least of which was the triple statue of T’Pol, T’Pau, and Jonathan Archer, bearing the Kir’Shara ark, outside of Federation headquarters in the Vulcan Regar. 

“Soon after,” T’Pol continued, “I and a human close to me were faced with a great crisis. Terrorists from the Terra Prime movement created a hybrid half-Vulcan, half-human child, a binary clone of both he and I. She is the first known half-human, half-Vulcan in our shared history. She was made as a weapon against our growing alliance that would soon become the Federation, and her existence was a violation of both our bodies’ autonomy. Together, we and the crew of the first Enterprise saved her, and named her Elizabeth, after the sister my comrade had lost in the Xindi attack on Earth. She was not going to survive due to the criminal negligence of the terrorists in creating and caring for her, but in the time we had, their weapon became our gift, and a source of pain became a source of joy and then a source of pain, once more, when she was gone, and a source of joy, when I remember holding her, the beauty of her katra. And in her short life she was all her own, a separate being, with an unwritten destiny, neither weapon nor gift. In those last days I hung this pendant above her creche. The false heirloom became a true inheritance, passed from mother to daughter. I wept, one of the few times I have done so, over this IDIC, which my human comrade and I held in our hands as we grieved her. This pendant becomes a work of ni’var as I tell this story.”

Spock hadn’t thought it possible he would think of anything else other than his rejection of a lifelong dream and his hatred of his father today, but he looked at the pendant with a new awe and almost fear. This moment in time was forever doubled, out of his control.

“It also belongs, now, to you,” said T’Pol.

Spock’s eyes snapped up to hers, feeling his body go almost numb with shock. This was Councilor T’Pol. This was T’Pol’s IDIC pendant.

“I came to congratulate you, Spock, son of Amanda Grayson and son of Sarek, because I have received word that you have been accepted into Starfleet Academy and will be offered a commission as a cadet. I have also heard, informally, that many of your ‘credits’ will transfer.”

Spock continued to stare at her.

“You are the first Vulcan to have applied and been accepted at Starfleet Academy. For a hundred years, Vulcans have stood on the bridge of Starfleet vessels, appointed as observers and guides, scientists who are always set apart, treated both as an object of suspicion and as a judge from on high. You will have the chance to stand beside your fellow officers as a peer, having walked with them and challenged them to make the way broader and richer for generations of scientists and explorers in the years to come. This is a significant achievement, and thus I have taken the unusual step of offering congratulations as a human being would.”

“I - you honor me,” he said.

“I do,” she said, her tone severe. “As I have just stated, you have accomplished something worthy of praise.” 

And then, amazingly, she winked.

His hand closed around the IDIC pendant in that courtyard and opened again, fifteen years later, in his quarters on the Enterprise, alone.

Still kneeling, he placed the IDIC pendant around his neck and tucked it beneath his uniform. He had no plans of taking it off.

Notes:

Episode references: “Balance of Terror” -> “Shore Leave” -> “The Galileo Seven” -> “The Squire of Gothos”/”Arena/”Yesterday is Tomorrow” -> “Court Martial” -> vaguely “Return of the Archons” or “A Taste of Armageddon”

I loosely adapted the whole deal with Sybok’s exile and T’Rea’s general backstory from Memory Beta, which cites the novel Sarek and the Final Frontier novelization. I made the T’Rea thing about ten times worse. I was like “trash_heron, where TF did this horror story come from?” and realized I’m channeling a childhood favorite, The Winter Prince by Elizabeth E. Wein. I’m hoping I can get across “T’Rea, a very bad person, who is a woman who had a child,” not “T’Rea: evil, bad mommy who is dangerous to men.”

The Hall of Ancient Thought, where the katra stones are, is pretty established in beta canon and sort of in alpha canon (in STIX it’s like “the katric ark”?). I’m going with the RPG sourcebook version where it’s located at Mount Kolinahr (at least for Adepts of Gol) not Mount Seleya, but there’s evidence that "katric arks" are in multiple places (cf. “The Andorian Incident,” Enterprise, where there are catacombs beneath the monastery of P’Jem, on a colony world, or in season 2 Discovery, where Spock’s family has their own katra stone crypt beneath their house).

Spock’s memory of Michael is a reference to the Discovery pilot, “The Vulcan Hello,” which in retrospect is an extremely direct allusion to “Balance of Terror.” The “fact” that Kirk’s actions stopped a war is established in SNW season 1 finale, “A Quality of Mercy,” where Pike experiences what would happen if he were captain during “Balance of Terror.”

The dialogue in the “BoT” section is verbatim from that episode, in the spirit of “A Quality of Mercy,” except I changed “galactic war” to “another war” because “galactic” is too imprecise for Spock to say imho.

For those who didn’t catch it, it’s been established that Amanda reads the Alice books to Spock since TAS in the 1970s and is a big plot point in Discovery. McCoy conjuring up the opening of Alice in Wonderland first thing is what actually happens in “Shore Leave.” Suggestive, no?

The fact that people get paranoid about “Romulan blood equals traitor” is most clearly established in TNG’s “The Drumhead,” I’ve chosen to take the position that you can’t biologically tell Romulans from Vulcans with any precision. I stand by this, because, in addition to my scruples (ethical and scientific), I think it’s far more interesting from a storytelling perspective.

How exactly the Romulan War in the 2150s went down is strategically vague in canon. The Romulans kidnapping the Aenar to pilot drone ships telepathically is in “The Aenar” in Enterprise. I’m suggesting they keep doing it, and it’s very upsetting to Andorians. I made the Betazoid thing up, but it makes sense to me.

Sam Kirk’s wife, Aurelan, to my knowledge is not quarter-Betazoid, but she’s also not not quarter-Betazoid.

My apologies for reminding everyone that Sam exists leading up to “Operation -- Annihilate!”

I actually took the bit about the ushaan being in the Starfleet uniform code from an RPG guide in the 1990s about Andorians.

The system of four genders for Andorians is in beta canon, but we’re going with it.

TOS McCoy far more frequently defends and compliments Spock behind his back, lmao. I’m not making that part up, anyway.

T’Pol turning out to be the daughter of a Tal’Shiar agent was actually in the works for Season 5 of Enterprise. The events T’Pol is referring to happened in a season 4 arc about the “Vulcan Reformation” (“The Forge,” “Awakening,” “Kir’Shara”) and the de facto season/series finale (“Demons,” “Terra Prime”).

The VSA/VEG being gross about Amanda and Michael is drawn from Star Trek (2009) and “Lethe” (Discovery), respectively. Discovery is also the source of Sarek’s Very Bad Parenting Decision, and I think gives more context as to why Spock is so mad at him. I went over the scripts of both.

T’Pol’s IDIC pendant is also in the aforementioned arcs, and I’m suggesting it’s the same IDIC pendant Spock wears in “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” The thing about the IDIC pin and the VSA is my extrapolation from him also wearing an IDIC pin in that episode as well as Michael’s IDIC pin on her graduation day from the VSA.

“Ni’var” has famously become the canonical name for the reunited Vulcan-Romulan homeworld in the thirty-second century on Discovery, but it actually was invented by a fan in the 1970s!

Like if you agree that Kirk and Ortegas haven't earned "Leo's Vulcan lesbian friend gets him laid" story yet; comment if you want T'Pol to actually have a pleasant and uneventful retirement.

Chapter 6: In the Pink (E)

Summary:

Spock begins to experience sexual difficulties.

Notes:

Content Note:
E for explicit depictions of sexual fantasies and masturbation. Content warning for the fact that a character experiences intrusive thoughts and feelings related to sex that make them deeply uncomfortable. Blackouts and intrusive thoughts of an aggressive nature (fighting!). Dubious consent due to sex pollen, an interpretation of an episode that arguably portrays noncon (“This Side of Paradise”). Mentions of a trans person having been pregnant, references to the concept of abortion. Um, sports?

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

[circa 2267, 1930; Omicron Ceti III, Earth, Deneva IV, USS Enterprise , Alpha and Beta Quadrants]


He found the doctor after a while - after all, the sun was shining, a fragrant breeze was blowing, and he saw no reason to rush. Since arriving on Omicron Ceti III he felt as though time had come to an understanding with him.

Dr. McCoy was alone, under a tree with a full canopy, with various bottles and containers and shakers on a picnic blanket. He was drinking a cold and cloudy amber something, with a sprig of green on top. He sat down near McCoy, between tree roots.

“Hi, Spock,” said the doctor, Spock could hear his relaxed smile.

“I made out with Leila,” he announced. “I took a walk, and then I found you.”

“Nice,” said McCoy. Then, with a faint echo of concern: “Was it nice?”

“It was just nice,” he said. “I didn’t want to and then I did. I enjoy physical intimacy for its own sake, but it can be very stimulating. Further escalation to orgasm seemed like too much trouble. I feel content; I don’t have any aches or pains, I feel energetic and satisfied, and I don’t want any more. I’ve tried my whole life to rid myself of self-driven desire and an over-large sensual appetite, using various emotional suppression techniques, but now I am succeeding effortlessly. Perhaps it would be agreeable to feel ecstasy or passion, but there are so many complications. I wish sex didn’t always result in disappointing people or getting hurt so badly you believe you’ll always be alone.”

Spock was dreamily aware this was more talking about himself than he could remember doing and that there was a reason he didn’t do that, but couldn’t remember what it was.

“Sex doesn’t always,” said McCoy, “sometimes you can end up knocked up as an ensign fresh out of the Academy.”

“Is that what happened to the mother of your child?”

“In the sense that I was the one who got pregnant in this scenario, I suppose you could say that.”

“Ah,” said Spock. “You are trans.”

“Yep.”

“Why did you not get an abortion?” He wondered idly if there was some risk or unpleasantness in asking this that he was overlooking but decided not to worry about it.

“Entirely emotional reasons,” said McCoy, who had not taken offense. “I was in love. My father had passed, and I felt the need to bring in new life. I was curious what would happen. My mama had me just as young, and she said to me, ‘I’m not going to lecture you on making my mistakes. You’re not a mistake. The important thing is you feel like you’re choosing what you want, and it’s the world around you that should make space for you and any children anyone has.’ Her saying that made me dig in when everyone told me how it would ruin my career.”

“The desire for children is part of the logic of survival, and does not require further rational explanation. The occasion of acting on that desire, however, is of course subject to further analysis. Your mother’s ethical reasoning seems sound.”

“You’re not the first Vulcan to say something like that to me.”

“Vulcans value family and child-rearing more than humans do.”

“That, I’ll give you.”

“So, your daughter is not a young child.”

“Sometimes I wish she still were, but I concede she is not.”

“Why do human parents say they wish their offspring were still young children? I have often heard this sentiment expressed.”

McCoy settled back into the tree, and took a long sip of his drink. “There’s a belief that humans grow apart from their parents as they age, and childhood is the one time true intimacy exists. It’s also easier, in theory, to protect them, as you control more about their lives. To the extent there’s anything to it, I think it’s important to get over it and accept that everyone grows up. However, I understand the impulse.”

Spock paused to watch a cloud that looked like an ancient sailing vessel pass by. “Among Vulcans I believe there is an opposite belief. Although caring for young children is a very serious and vulnerable responsibility, true understanding can only exist between adults. Vulcan parents become more involved with their children as they age, not less.”

“That makes sense to me too.”

“Leo, what are your recreational pastimes?”

McCoy half turned and  smiled at him, a dazzling thing. “You called me Leo! Well, let’s see. Nothing so impressive as fencing or writing music and playing harp or even chess, that’s for sure. Honestly I feel like I just read or write letters and have vid calls with friends and family. The reading may not count, it’s often medical research, but a lot of it is just things I'm curious about, not something immediately applicable. I like learning local and ancient medical techniques, which is sort of a hobby, but is mostly me being paranoid about getting caught without my fancy equipment. I used to keep some antique surgical equipment in sickbay before Khan almost slit my throat with a scalpel; they’re in my room now. I like watching old movies with people; my partner liked westerns. I like singing with other people, though there’s not much call for that. I grow roses. Sulu gave me a little planter in the botanical lab.”

“I used to grow roses with my mother,” said Spock. “My father had a greenhouse added to a wing of the family compound, and my mother enjoyed growing all sorts of Terran flowers and herbs and vegetables, but roses in particular. Gardening with adult family members is considered a traditional pastime of Vulcan children. It was an easy and productive way to honor both sides of my heritage. One of the few.”

“That’s cute and classy. I grow roses because of my mama too. When I was a kid, my mom had a series of lackluster boyfriends, and she got real sad sometimes. Do you know the Earth fairytale, ‘Beauty and the Beast’?”

“I’ve seen allusions to it in Earth literature and film, but I am not familiar with the source material.”

“In the story, a merchant who lost his fortune goes on a trip to recoup his losses and asks his three daughters what presents they want him to bring them. All the youngest asks for is a rose. The father ends up stealing a rose from an enchanted castle, and the beast that lives there said as punishment he had to remain as a prisoner in the castle for the rest of his life. He begged for a week to say goodbye to his daughters, which the beast allowed. When the youngest daughter found out, she insisted on returning to the castle in her father’s place, to live out his sentence since she’d been the one who wanted a rose so badly.”

“This sequence of events seems far-fetched, doctor.”

“It’s a fairytale, Spock, give me a break. Anyway, when I heard the story, I immediately thought of my mama, because getting flowers always made her feel like a lady, and roses were her favorite. The boyfriends never brought her flowers. So I got it in my head that she might get in the same kind of trouble, that she’d get herself taken away forever just because she wanted a rose. Which is mighty unfair - a lady should get flowers without complications. I decided to solve the root cause, as it were, and stole cuttings from the city gardens and learned to grow them. That way, no man or beast could tempt her and trap her. She didn’t know the reason I did such a damn fool thing, but she was so happy with the flowers, I kept doing it. And so began my life of crime.”

“I understand the logic, even if the premises upon which the reasoning is based are highly nonsensical.”

McCoy snorted. “Well, bless your heart.”

“I have never determined whether that expression is essentially sincere and effusive or ironic and pejorative.”

“Yes, that’s right,” said McCoy, his tone indulgent. “It’s contextual.”

“I wish context didn’t exist," said Spock, feeling a not entirely welcome surge of urgency. "When humans invoke context they’re usually rationalizing something after the fact. I suppose this is necessary for them but seems inefficient. Attempting to identify and analyze context is exhausting: there are so many redundancies and contradictions. No matter how much energy I devote to the endeavor, I still make mistakes. I often feel defeated, as though it weren’t worth the effort. I used to believe it was worth the effort - but that was when my coworkers cared about me, too. Captain Pike loved me and gave me the benefit of the doubt, and it was like a protective field around me that made me seem good and worthy to others. Sometimes now I behave rudely or carelessly on purpose because it hurts more when my sincere attempts at kindness and sociability are rejected. I estimate it contributes to 34.56% of my daily stress.”

McCoy was silent for a moment, taking a another long sip of his drink, the ice clinking in the glass.

“You know,” he said, finally, “there’s a classic case study in interstellar psychology, like that you learn in your intro classes. Human psychologists originally tried to compare Vulcan psychology to humans on what they called ‘the autism spectrum.’ Those guys had pull but not much talent, I think, and the framework made it into the diplomatic playbooks. Complete disaster, a lot of almost fatal miscommunications. Someone finally told the Vulcans what was going on, and they asked to view human research on autism. You know what the VSA came back with?”

“I knew this at one point, but I don’t care to remember it. Your rambling conversational style is pleasant; continue.”

“They made the case, exquisitely researched, that the mainstream frameworks of autism were out of date and were inaccurate descriptions of autism in humans anyway. They synthesized ethnographic accounts from autistic people as well as a few theorists from earlier in the twenty-first century who actually were autistic or listened to folks who were autistic. This is work humans had been doing too, but in our defense, nothing but the most milquetoast takes on social sciences was supported in the immediate aftermath of World War Three. Not only did the framework not fit Vulcans, it didn’t fit humans with autism either. The concept of an autism spectrum isolated from everything else people have going on doesn’t fit, either.”

“This sounds highly plausible, though I don’t have enough information to assess the validity of your account.”

“No one could nail anything down about what made Vulcans so different - anything people said was definitively human ended up being some sort of reduction that lent itself to xenophobia. That was the main point, I think. It didn’t work treating the Vulcans like they were autistic because the way people treated autistic folks didn’t work either. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that there's a higher representation of folks with autism among humans who live or work in Vulcan environments than in human ones. Saying there’s a connection there works in that, well, context, in a way it doesn’t when trying to decide by fiat why people are different from each other. There’s something to patterns of affinity that can’t be correlated with frameworks of exclusion.”

“My mother is autistic,” said Spock, again feeling as though he usually would never disclose such a thing, but not able to remember why. “She was diagnosed late in life, right before she had me. Your verbosity at this moment is quite familiar.”

“Okay,” said McCoy easily, as though he couldn’t be bothered to invent some socially acceptable reaction to this information.

Spock unfolded his legs and stretched, floating back through the conversation without noting the leaps he was making.

“You and I are similar,” he said, “in this.”

“In what?”

“As regards roses and our mothers, to return to the previous topic.”

“Yes, mothers and roses.” 

“I was very afraid as a child that my mother would leave me and my father for Earth. I was dedicated to maintaining her Terran garden because I thought if something happened to her roses, she really would leave. My reasoning was also incomplete.”

“We’ve also outgrown classical psychoanalysis, thank the Lord,” said McCoy, “but kids sure do love their mamas. I remember being so startled when I realized my little girl looked up to me in much the same way. Very surreal.”

“I am enjoying this conversation. It is gratifying to hear you speak about your memories and thoughts on personal topics.”

“Well, thanks, Spock, I’m enjoying this conversation too, for the same reasons.”

“Your commentary on interstellar psychology is far more interesting when you talk about its underlying principles than when you apply it to specific interpersonal situations.”

“I mean, there’s a reason why I got a whole PhD in other people’s feelings. I’m a shit therapist.”

“False. Numerous crew members have commented on your skill as a counselor.”

“That means a lot to me, to hear that.”

They sat in companionable silence for several minutes, watching the clouds roll by.

Spock felt that slight urgency again. How annoying. “Would you really not like me better if I ‘mellowed a little’?”

“You heard that bit of our conversation, did you?”

“Affirmative. I had dropped the communicator beside me, but my hearing as a Vulcan is superior.”

“In general people tend to be more likable when they’re relaxed, myself absolutely included. I think Jim mixed up me worrying about your stress levels and me thinking you were avoiding me and skipping out on Jim’s trio time. I like you the same amount right now as I did before.”

“There is an amount of liking you ascribe to me.”

“It’s even a non-zero amount.”

“Vulcans do not have a concept of liking someone.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I think of you often.”

“Why?”

“I do not understand you.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Do you believe me incapable of it?”

“Oh no, not at all,” said McCoy. “It’s just that I keep a lot inside, and it’s a habit at this point.”

“I wish you would always tell me your thoughts and comment on the manner of your thinking. I am constantly trying to deduce your reasoning from your behavior and expressions, but I am often wrong.”

“Why, Mr. Spock, I didn’t realize you cared. You think I’m worth the effort, even though it’s stressful. That’s very sweet.”

The urgency, again. “Would you say I am cold and distant, like a moon somewhere? That the parts of me that are human aren’t worth the effort, that they’re too small to make any difference in my life?”

“No. Why would anyone say that?”

Why indeed? It seemed rather uncomfortable and disruptive a thing for someone to say. He didn’t really want to think about Michael right now, or ever, not if it meant losing this blissful contentment. Nevertheless he felt that same tug, a pull, to give the doctor anything he asked for.

“So it will hurt less,” he explained, “when they leave me behind. So that I will grieve less.”

“Did it hurt less?”

“No.”

“I wouldn’t think it would. That’s a pretty childish way to try and protect someone.”

“The person who said it was a child.”

“Ah, well, that explains it.”

“I am not a child now, and it still troubles me. It is not logical.”

“Is the person who tried to hurt you still gone?”

“Yes.”

“Seems logical to me, then.”

He looked at the doctor, and maybe shouldn’t have. Dr. McCoy had neat and shiny brown hair and beautiful eyes. He liked the man’s face: it was expressive, seemed old and very young at the same time. His hands were elegant and strong, like a Vulcan man’s should be. His narrowness, even, was pleasing, the sort of wiry delicacy of a body that was a blur of motion and endurance, but hadn’t been built up to fight or to posture. His body would be a dream to arrange and manhandle, but he wouldn’t break easily. Really, the doctor's physical presence was very distracting. Spock was starting to have ideas that caused disquiet.

“You,” he said. “You don’t stop trying to provoke me, get me to acknowledge my humanity. You keep insisting that it’s there.”

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

“It would be very pleasant to touch you, to have you between my legs, leaning back on my chest, my arms wrapped around you. However, then I would want to kiss you, hold you still against me while I fingered you to orgasm, and leave bruises on your neck with my mouth. I do not want to do that right now.”

“Why not?”

“The emotions associated with such actions are not peaceful.”

“Fair enough.”

“I don’t know why I just said that. I usually wouldn’t.”

“Let’s not dwell on it. If I started thinking about touching you, I wouldn’t be able to stop.”

“Agreed.”

“Do you want a mint julep?”

“Yes.”

The sun was warm, the sweetness of the drink refreshing, and the clouds continued forming interesting patterns that set off cascades of associations. Some time had passed, and the doctor had fallen asleep in the grass. An odd feeling became perceptible while watching him - tenderness, he believed, relief that the man was finally resting. 

Leila found him a while later, and wanted to spend more time with him. He was amenable - it was also a relief to exchange light touches and aimless kisses with someone with whom he shared mere fondness. There was something too magnetic about the doctor - very disturbing. Better to float along, relishing each little feeling and tiny freedom, no longer caught in the undertow of big feelings and unsatisfied longings for reckless autonomy.

Soon enough the captain called again; he wanted something.

 

***

 

Even on the rare occasions Spock had been intoxicated he had infrequently experienced a “hangover”: coming down from the spores was probably the worst he'd ever had, by his limited experience. The journey from Omicron Ceti III to Starbase 27 to drop off the colonists was, for everyone, uncomfortable and tiring. Productivity and response times were down, and on multiple occasions, he saw crew members gazing off into space while on duty. Dr. McCoy had been in sickbay nonstop and had only told him, rather brusquely, that he recommended Spock let these lapses go for the time being. Frankly, Spock was too fatigued to do anything else. He spent as much time as possible in his quarters, having no desire to interact with Leila or the other colonists. 

He had to make one foray outside his usual daily circuit (quarters, bridge, lab, repeat) when Dr. Tola reminded him he was overdue for an exam at the psionometrics lab.

The Andorian apparently read the disinterest in his posture immediately. “You’re the last psi-positive on my list,” they said, almost defensively, as they attached various sensors to his forehead and hands. “I did the pseudo-null ESPers first just to make sure no one had ascended to a different plane. I gave you the most time; I knew you were busy and also that you hate this.”

He should probably have responded graciously. Dr. Tola was still furious with the captain and, by extension, him, for allowing the head of the history division to be trapped on a harsh undeveloped world as the lover of an augmented warlord she’d known for a couple of days. The fact that he had agreed with Dr. Tola on the matter of letting Dr. McGivers stay with Khan had done little to assuage their wrath, as he hadn’t done much to actually put a stop to anything. 

But he was… tired. “I still don’t understand why this is necessary.”

“Bullshit, I’m sure you could quote me the regulations on telepaths in the service.”

“I mean, in this instance.”

“McCoy probably stayed up for four days straight analyzing that sex pollen, and it had a low-level telepathic field to coordinate its pod people. Real nasty piece of work, went right for the behavior pathways in the paracortex, and suppressed some of the bonding pathways.”

“Sex pollen?”

“That’s what everyone’s calling it,” they said. “I mean, that’s how you snapped out of it, right? Everyone assumes you fucked the captain. For like the strong feelings thing.”

“I did not fuck the captain. Why does everyone assume I fucked the captain?”

“Don’t tell me Captain Kirk isn’t a bottom.” Dr. Tola, seeing his continued, severe stare, added, “Oh, you mean you didn’t… Huh. How did you snap out of it, then?”

“He made some very xenophobic insults that were also sexually harassing. I hit him with a metal pipe.”

“That’s so much worse! Why didn’t he just seduce you? I thought he was good at that.”

“I believe it did not occur to him.”

“Why wouldn’t it - I mean, he’s your boyfriend, after all.”

“The captain is not my boyfriend. I have not ever been sexually intimate with the captain.”

“That’s so weird,” said Dr. Tola. “Are you sure?”

“I am absolutely positive, Dr. Tola,” said Spock. “May I go now?”

“Sure. Just don’t get married in the next month or something, and maybe add another half hour to your meditation routine for a while. Your results indicate you’re coming back from overtaxing your emotional suppression mechanisms. Contrary to the subjective experience, the spores weren’t disinhibitory, not really. Also, your bonding pathways are in shock from being squished, sort of like pins in needles in a limb that’s fallen asleep and is waking up. You might have mood swings, impulses. If you got your hormones checked, I'd bet they're all over the place.”

Spock could have done without the imprecise metaphors for metaphysical phenomenon with abstruse connections to his neurology, but as far the recommendations went, Dr. Tola’s seemed sound.

On his way back to the turbolift, he ran into Dr. McCoy, who appeared to be heading to the lab himself. He nodded politely - this was one of the first times he’d seen the doctor since they’d been… under the influence. McCoy smiled in response, that same impersonal affability he defaulted to in public. However, before they’d passed each other, the doctor called out, “Hey, Spock,” to get his attention.

He folded his arms behind his back. “Doctor. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve been meaning to say something since we got back from the colony -”

Spock tuned out a little in what, beyond the edges of his mental control, was terror. He had yet to successfully untangle the implications of their uncharacteristic interlude and had hoped it could be forgotten.

“I wanted to let you know, completely sober, that you can call me Leo if you want to. I don’t expect you to, or have a preference about whether you do or don’t, but I just wanted to make sure you knew you were allowed. We’re friendly enough, you know?”

Spock blinked, feeling disoriented and deeply grateful. That wasn’t bad at all. That was, actually, both measured and generous. How did the doctor so often achieve this balance?

“Thank you, doctor,” he said. “I understand.”

McCoy nodded, everything projecting a mild detachment. “Mr. Spock,” he said, and carried on to his meeting with Dr. Tola.

That evening he cut his meditations short. And the following evening. And the next.

 

*** 

 

Even though the doctor had requested the time several months ago and gotten it approved without incident, Spock was still surprised to see the doctor carrying a full duffel bag as he walked towards him as he held the turbolift door on their floor. He thought the doctor’s absence was further out, wouldn’t happen yet.

“You are leaving,” he said.

“First time taking shore leave in a long while,” said McCoy, smiling, with a pure, unstrained energy Spock had never seen, and bounced back and forth on his heels. 

“I hope it will prove restorative, doctor.” This was what he’d said, but he’d almost asked Dr. McCoy not to go.

“Me, too,” said McCoy, still grinning. “I haven’t seen my baby girl in almost a year - I didn’t even get to see her settled back on Earth!”

Spock found this somewhat disorienting. He’d only recently learned that McCoy had a daughter, and it was still difficult to imagine. What sort of father was he? How often did they see each other? Were they close? What was his relationship like with her other parent - would he see them as well? What was McCoy’s ex-partner like? Were they together in some way? Some humans weren’t monogamous; did McCoy have monogamous relationships? McCoy did not seem nervous or unsure, however. He simply seemed happy. I wish I saw him like this all the time, he thought, though he wasn’t sure why.

“A worthy occasion for leave,” he said. He still didn’t want the doctor to go - the feeling was visceral, and a little odd.

McCoy was beaming at him, as though this was a meaningful thing for him to say. “Don’t do anything too exciting on Organia,” he said, as he left the turbolift, “and keep Jim out of trouble. I’ll be back soon!”

 

***

 

Surely a whimsical notion, but Spock found himself thinking, when he and the captain had returned from Organia, that he would have to apologize to the doctor for failing to heed his request not to “do anything too exciting.” As difficult as it was to wrap his head around what had just occurred, the hours and hours of meetings via subspace comm with the admiralty had been even more nightmarish. They required a great deal of repeated answers to identical questions before they would accept that yes, the treaty with the Klingons imposed on them by the Organians was real and that there hadn’t been anything he or Kirk could have done to stop them.

On paper, the treaty was, as his father might say, a model of conservative diplomacy. He had been known to repeat an anecdote about then-Captain Archer mediating the first ceasefire between Vulcan and Andoria, in which the human had stated that a compromise was a solution neither side was happy with, and the three of them - Soval, Shran, and Archer - had toasted to their mutual dissatisfaction over Andorian ale. Sarek had called this the beginning of a Federation style diplomacy. 

In practice, the immediate impact of this “compromise” was a precipitous decline in crew morale. There was an increase in fights reported by security, more injuries due to inattention, and far less time spent congregating in common areas. “Nobody likes being told what to do by a stranger,” Kirk had said during their evening chess match. “And even if this has immediate positive effects, at the end of the day we’re in a situation that’s divorced from the actual political status of our two states. Did you hear about the chancellor?”

“Indeed,” said Spock. “Highly unfortunate.” 

In the aftermath of the Organian Insult, as the Klingons were apparently calling it, Chancellor L’Rell, the leader who had ended the war - and had been installed by Starfleet covert operations lead by his own sister - had been deposed and presumably executed. (Considering that as far as he knew the director of Section 31 was still her ex-lover and the father of her child, Spock personally found it more likely she had merely been relocated, but he couldn’t say that.) They had needed a scapegoat, and a woman rumored to be more friendly to the Federation than she should be after a major upheaval in the Beta Quadrant's balance of power made for an excellent target. 

“Just goes to show no good deed goes unpunished,” said Kirk, who frowned, and took his last bishop. “Believe it or not, we were already on the best terms we ever had been with the Klingons, and now it’s significantly worse even if superficially all hostilities have ground to a halt.”

Spock nodded - he agreed with this interpretation. Still, he also sensed that didn’t quite explain the crew’s dismal mood in the days that followed. He wished McCoy would come back, as the man would actually be of use in this situation - he understood this sort of thing.

He was able to extrapolate an explanation after a few more days, however, when Scotty, of all people, lost control on the bridge after he was told they would be sharing a drydock with a Klingon vessel for minor repairs in the near future. 

“We cannae just park our lady next to those Klingons, sir.”

“We can, and we must,” said Kirk, with careful patience. “There’s no reason to think the treaty won’t be enforced at this time.”

“But it’s just not right, captain. This is madness.”

“Madness that ensures a measure of peace, Mr. Scott,” said Spock, “has advantages over tenuous détente and cycles of war.”

“If these high-and-mighty Organians care so much for peace, why dinnae they put a stop to war when there actually was one? Millions dead, even more lives destroyed, and these bastards can just snap their fingers - oh, aye, I know they don’t have fingers - and we have a new neutral zone? Why now? Why not then?”

At this, Lieutenant Freeman, who’d been giving Kirk a report, started shaking and balling his fists. “He’s r-right,” he said. “It’s like everyone - my sister, my fiancé, died for nothing.”

The captain had asked Scotty to get himself together preferably somewhere other than the bridge and had asked Freeman to give his report later. Overall, Spock found the interaction instructive. The cause of the malaise was clearly existential despair and post-traumatic stress. He had no idea how to resolve such things, of course, but perhaps the crew, who were mostly human, after all, could at least be distracted. He put the problem at the back of his mind, and such passive consideration paid dividends when reviewing fleet news the next morning. He pressed the chime on the captain’s door, and had caught him at a good time. The captain seemed relieved and glad to see him, inviting him to take a seat in his small living room area.

“What’s on your mind, Mr. Spock?”

“Are you familiar with the ship’s traditions around the Rigel Cup, sir?”

“No,” said Kirk, looking surprised and perhaps delighted by the topic, drinking some of his tea which had been next to an abandoned old paper book. “Make me familiar.”

“Captain Pike would arrange for the competition to be screened in recreational areas and would host social gatherings for the crew. He was on a winning team in his youth, and several members of the Enterprise crew, including Captain Ortegas, competed during his tenure. This in fact would be the first year we would not have celebrated the occasion.”

“Well,” said Kirk, “who am I to argue with tradition? Let’s do it - and the Rigel Cup is going to be fun this year, Ortegas told me: a lot of young blood and Starfleet teams. This will be just the thing to remind everyone who we are. Put Sulu in charge of organizing it: he’s the social butterfly of the senior staff and a sublight nerd, too.”

The captain’s instincts, as usual, were correct: to call Sulu’s reaction to the request enthusiastic was an understatement. Soon there were announcements for viewing parties as soon as that evening, mostly centered in the rec room and other lounges on different decks, and the next few days included running updates from Uhura on the comm system, often with color commentary from Sulu when he was at the helm. Spock actually had to more frequently turn off his ship-wide alerts in his quarters to get any peace. The excitement did not annoy him, however. Crew morale did seem to be rallying, and he actually understood why the activity was interesting to so many onboard, even if he saw little purpose in joining the festivities. Kirk, however, did, and eventually more or less ordered him to make an appearance in the rec room the moment his shift was over. Doing so was not his preference, but neither was the request onerous, which in and of itself was a nice change.

The rec room had been configured as a holo-theater, complete with concessions he didn’t remember authorizing. Sulu and the other pilots and navigators were huddled around the big vidscreen, as well as every single Andorian onboard, it seemed. Yeoman Rand was perched on Sulu’s lap for some reason, even though there were many open seats. There were cheers and groans and pointless advice and castigation yelled at the screen, which was showing the final race of the Rigel Cup. 

Spock drifted nearer in spite of himself; after all, sublight racing wasn’t uninteresting. There were a range of open-ended specs for one-pilot starfighters and a light cruiser to be crewed by three to five team members in the final race, which allowed for many different worlds and systems to compete. On the leaderboard were several Starfleet insignia, but one team had a slightly different symbol: it was a Starfleet Academy squadron, and they were among the leaders. Every few minutes the screen split to show playback of the formation and individual trials. The cadet squadron had come in second in formation flying, and had come out clearly ahead in the solo precision flying trials, with two cadets taking first and second and the rest placing within the top ten. On frequent replay was a decorative but alarming precision stunt the whole squadron had performed on a different day of the Cup. The five starfighters had come within meters, it seemed, of each other, and ignited vented plasma in unison as they peeled out, creating what everyone seemed to be calling a “starburst,” which had apparently been dreamed up by one of the cadets on the team, a Trill named Torias Kolvoord. Now, from a points total, the cadets only needed to get third place or better in the race to win the Cup.

“A navigator I’m scouting is a cadet on that team,” offered Sulu over a shoulder, having noticed Spock. Apparently, he’d approached closer than he’d expected. “Pavel Chekov. I’m locking him down immediately even if they don’t win. God this brings me back, and I was an alternate and only after I graduated.”

He decided to let this pass without comment as in fact he and the cadet’s former instructor, Lieutenant Arex, had already made overtures to the young navigator due to his promise in astrophysics. He supposed multiple expressions of interest would only strengthen their case, if being posted to the Enterprise weren’t enticing enough.

The teams entered the last loop, and the ships were flying a complicated obstacle course around the edges of the Rigel system. The Academy team was bold, unhesitating. He found himself staying as the ships came down to the finish line. The cadets took second place by a split second, winning the Cup. The assembled officers in their red and gold let out ear-splitting yells. The Andorians started chanting “sh’Valrass! sh’Valrass! sh’Valrass!” Sulu had bolted for the nearest comm station down the hall, presumably to “lock down” Chekov, while Rand, having neatly leapt out of the way, appeared to be administering what may have been a betting pool, which Spock decided he hadn’t noticed.

“Fascinating,” said Spock, with little irony. He felt a flutter, a warmth, such a tiny feeling. 

As he made his way back to his quarters, everyone on the ship seemed to know. There was an air of celebration, which Spock thought logically preferable to the mute misery after the business with the Organians. In fact, as he settled in to meditate, the captain himself had made a ship-wide announcement. “This isn’t just nostalgia and school spirit. This is the first Starfleet team, not cadet team, Starfleet team, to only have one United Earth citizen, and the combined skill of our own from Trill, Andoria, Vulcan, and Kaminar made this a landmark victory for us in a time of great uncertainty. And let’s not forget, this is the first Academy team to have a majority of members who aren’t men! Let’s give a collective salute to our very own Cadets Pavel Chekov, Torias Kolvoord, Jo-“ boomed Kirk’s ebullient voice before Spock switched off the comm. 

This sort of thing gave humans - and Andorians, anyway - so much joy. He always forgot about human beings that they were collective in a different way than Vulcans were, and were not only or always emotionally overwrought individualists. He’d always marveled and mourned over how humans could twist themselves in and out of various identities and associations without contradiction. 

After meditating for a while, he checked his messages and saw Sulu had forwarded an interview Chekov had given after the race to the senior staff with the message we got him! He played the vid, although its length was intimidating.

A pretty human reporter with very tall blue hair was talking in a busy hangar to a very youthful-looking human man who had a neat, regulation cut and a highly effusive manner, constantly twitching and bouncing.

“We’d love to hear more about your team’s story. Your team is unique for the Academy, isn’t that right, Cadet Chekov? You even turned down a spot on the official Academy team to put this squadron together.”

“It is,” he said, speaking English in a thick Russian accent, with vowel shifts and consonant replacements Spock strained to filter out. “Usually we compete for a spot on Gold Squadron, which is made up of top pilots and navigators in the upper classes. I knew I wanted to fly, not just navigate in the final race, so I looked for other like-minded pilots.”

“Your teammates have impressive stats and did very well at the Cup, of course - I’m surprised they weren’t also offered spots on Gold Squadron. Could you speak to why that is?”

Chekov shrugged, his hands continuing to flutter about. “To be a team, it is not just your stats but also, hm, about common interests - can you be friends? There are no open tryouts for Gold Squadron. It is by invitation. Also, a few of my teammates were underclassmen, who would usually not be considered.”

“Do you think that might account for the fact that this is the first majority non-male Starfleet Academy team and the first Starfleet team with only one member from United Earth?”

“Perhaps,” said Chekov. “I respect Gold Squadron. Good team.”

“What do you make of the controversy over your lead pilot placing first in the solo precision flying trials?”

“I think it is in bad faith,” he said, looking like he was restraining an angrier retort. “They look at her and see a teenage girl with a sad story - it was only when she kicked the asses of everyone that they suddenly became concerned she had an advantage because of her heritage.”

“Either way, a remarkable achievement for all involved. What’s next for you, cadet?”

“I will be shipping out after graduation, navigating for a Constitution-class starship,” he said, bashful.

“Any chance you can tell us which one?”

“When it is finalized, I will let you know,” said the boy, with an awkward but rather charming attempt at deflection.

“We will all be wishing you and your future shipmates the best. Now, about Cadet Kolvoord, and his new maneuver, which some are calling a ‘starburst’ -”

There was far more to the interview, but Spock felt as though he’d gotten enough information. He reviewed Chekov’s file again, and replied-all to the message to senior staff, only second to Lieutenant Arex, who had spoken in praise of his former navigation student, writing: His research record for his age is quite impressive, and he is equally qualified to become a bridge-rated astrophysicist, a satisfactory background for an Enterprise navigator. Astro Sciences will easily be able to sponsor him for doctoral work as an ensign.

He almost felt himself smile. In fact, he’d ask Kirk to let him train the newly-minted ensign as a relief science officer, and anticipated a mutually beneficial situation all around. He might even have more time to spend in the lab if he didn’t have to always pull double shifts on the bridge. And, despite the fact that few of his colleagues - aside from Uhura - would guess he’d be a popular mentor, there was a reason he was one of the most highly requested post-graduate practicum supervisors in Astro Sciences. Working with younger scientists was one of the few times he’d always felt perfectly at ease in a social situation even if it was human-dominated. Vulcans really didn’t get enough credit for the patience and attentiveness they demonstrated as teachers, his mother had always said.

There was a lighter feel to the days that followed, and as he took his lunch, a brightness as Dr. McCoy sat with him, finally back from leave.

“Do you remember,” asked the doctor, without preamble, “on Omicron Ceti III, when you told me Vulcans became more involved with their children as they grew older?”

“Affirmative,” said Spock. This was the first time either of them had directly referred to their time together on that hazy idyll of a planet. 

“I think it’s not just Vulcans. Lordy, I don’t even remember getting into the kind of predicaments that girl finds her in, and I was a terror. Do you remember everything being so intense and dramatic when you were a youngun’?”

Spock thought for a moment. “I would not categorize my behavior as dramatic by more universally recognized standards, but I did evince far less emotional control. By Vulcan standards I was poorly behaved.”

McCoy nodded vigorously. “That’s just it, Spock, I can tell she’s not even trying to get into mischief: she’s just full of energy and impulses and cares so much about everything. I don’t remember caring that much, but I must have. Here I was patting myself on the back for raising such a mature young lady, and she is, don’t get me wrong, it’s just she went and found herself some grown-up problems.”

“Was your leave dissatisfactory, then?”

“Oh, not at all,” said McCoy, with a grin. “One of the best I’ve had in a long time, even if it wasn’t that relaxing. I’m actin’ all wallered out, but I’m so proud of her I could skip down these halls.”

He had almost reached for the doctor then, his mind going dizzy with all he wanted to do to him. Stroke the back of his hand, pull him into his lap right there in the mess and slip his hand under his shirts, or push him up against the wall, pin his wrists, and - 

He must have looked visibly startled, as the doctor then started saying ominous things and reaching for his tricorder, and he’d excused himself conceding, that he did, in fact, feel unwell.

The dreams started that night. 

 

***

 

He didn’t often remember his dreams: after all, he slept fewer hours and experienced fewer REM cycles. These dreams had the quality of visions, and he always woke feeling as though he had not rested at all. In the first dream, T’Pring, dressed only in a short, dark blue shift, had been kneeling between his legs palming his increasingly external erection through his regulation Starfleet briefs, occasionally leaning forward to wet it through the fabric with glancing, calculated little sucks. Her dark eyes met his, unblinking, with an expression that could be stern or merely clinical.

“I estimate it is taking 7.39 minutes longer for you to achieve full external tumescence than your average during our encounters,” she said, tone flat.

“I have told you before that this is unnecessary,” he said. “I am perfectly equipped to begin engaging in foreplay that will be stimulating for you. In fact, reaching a stage of advanced arousal quickly will be counterproductive to my performance. Furthermore, there is nothing more arousing for me than bringing you to orgasm.”

“According to my research, human cisgender men prefer sustained attention and focus on their erectile tissue, with the goal of achieving orgasm during penetrative intercourse. Maximizing the rigidity of the penis seems the most conducive to finding that act satisfactory. You are familiar with my preferred penetrative tools.”

“I am not human.”

“You are also not happy.”

“You don’t care if I’m happy.”

“Of course I don’t. I do, however, intend to make you yield.”

“What does my submission have to do with my commitment to you?”

“I have no idea. Your capitulation to my preferences is required to achieve my objectives. The most efficient route is to make it so good for you that you can’t imagine being anything other than mine.”

With that, she took off her shift in one fluid movement, and he was overwhelmed with an awe he only remembered the echo of, at her full breasts, warm and golden and brown, with their dark areolas, the perfect taut line down her defined abdominal muscles to her smooth and swollen mons pubis. She hooked her fingers into the band of his briefs and removed them summarily, maneuvering his legs and feet so quickly he barely had time to register his nakedness before her mouth was on him.

He bit back a groan. “You never did this,” he said, his voice ragged, for it did feel good, so wretchedly good. “We weren’t like this. You were a traditionalist, expecting me to serve you, to take pleasure in my performance of duty to you. Since when have you sought my pleasure?”

“I care nothing for your pleasure, but I am fair. You serve me so that when your time comes, I will not refuse to serve you,” she said, popping her mouth off his cock, lips glistening with spit and pre-cum. “You want to crack me open, make me feel it, how I am yours, to breed and bend to your will.” Her mouth was back on him, and he groaned this time, in shame and fear. 

“But,” he said, and panted, “I gambled that my time would never come. Nothing indicated it ever would. It was never going to be like this. I never wanted this. I don’t like this. I don’t want to be this way. You don’t want me, and I never liked you. You’ve done terrible things, and you don’t even care.”

Her head continued to bob faster as the thought floated up through their touching skin. I gambled, and I lost.

He woke in a cold sweat, painfully everted into the air and not sheathed somewhere wet and warm, his internal lubrication beginning to dry on his cock. Mechanically, he enclosed it in his fist and pumped frantically, chasing after orgasm with the single-minded focus of adolescence. He came without ejaculating, with a half-strangled sob, throwing his arm over his eyes.

What was happening? It couldn’t be…

As he came down from his orgasm, he felt his autonomic reactions returning to baseline. He dismissed the creeping paranoia. He hadn’t had an episode like that since his early thirties, but he’d been having sexually arousing nightmares about T’Pring and pon farr for twenty years.

 

***

 

The second dream was a bit harder to dismiss, perhaps because the events that preceded it were highly distressing. Not the matter with the time traveler, Lazarus, not really. That had been an interesting transdimensional physics and temporal mechanics puzzle, even if a quadrant-wide alert of invasion and the threat of all matter being destroyed caused some heightened feeling among the crew. Though he had to admit that it would be useful to blame his shocking lack of emotional control on external stressors.

He had difficulty even bringing the issue to mind in meditation later in the day, as though even remembering his reaction to…

All she had done, in the end, was trip as she entered the turbolift, and he’d moved to hold her upright by catching her upper arms. Her being… Lieutenant Uhura. The proximity, the very pleasing smell of her, the delicate, cunning aftertaste of her mind from the brief physical contact had set his mind loose on a vivid fantasy of escorting her back to his quarters, where she, with enthusiasm, would have slipped off only her undergarments, shoved him down on his back, and ridden his face, his hands gripping onto her ass, her thighs, the black leather of her boots on her calves. He would make her ready, make her beg for it -

When the turbolift made its first stop, Spock had bolted out onto the wrong floor, Uhura’s confused and oblivious expression deepening his shame.

Shame. That was the difficulty, he decided, in meditation, why he felt so strange. It had been illogical to be sexually aroused by Lieutenant Uhura’s proximity. He was her mentor, and a complicated source of professional and emotional support - she put a high value on his approval and needed comfort and understanding he struggled and often failed to provide. Neither of these realities was enticing to him romantically. Of course, she was attractive. Very attractive. By far the most attractive human woman on the ship, in general, and to him, certainly. But he knew for a fact that she preferred women, hadn’t dated men since her early years at the Academy, and hadn’t enjoyed doing so when she did. He believed she had also recently started dating Lieutenant M’Ress more seriously. No matter how appealing her physical form, her lack of sexual interest meant he would never truly find her sexually alluring. 

That was the problem with fantasy: he could invent a version of Uhura that didn’t exist, and this was shameful, as he was very attached to the young woman as she actually was. He set aside the more alarming question of why he’d had such a strong impulse to begin with. What he was going through couldn’t matter: understanding the nature of his shame, correcting his behavior, that mattered…

In his dreams that night, he was running at a breakneck pace through the Fire Plains, his hair down to his shoulder-blades, dressed in a style of robes he’d only seen on statues. He was being pursued by a hunter who would catch him. His flight was illogical, but he ran anyway, breathing heavily from true exertion.

The world tilted, and he was on his back, T’Pring in armor pinning him to the ground with an ancient spear reminiscent of a lirpa

“Even at the end of your life,” she said, “you are foolish and arrogant. Why run from me? I am your better. You are for my blade.”

“I am a fool and I am arrogant - that does not merit death at your hands.”

“I fight for my sisters, and to raise up our house,” she said. “You and your demon brother are a threat to our glory, and so you must die. Your deficiencies are irrelevant. I pity you.”

“We were bound once. I was meant for you.”

“You betrayed me.”

“Surely there is something of value I can offer you alive that I could not in death.”

“Nothing comes to mind.”

“Please, woman, I can be of use to you, I swear it. I know things - I know secrets -”

“Your father’s bloodline was all we needed,” she said. “I cannot wring it from you, and so your usefulness to my clan has come to an end.”

She shoved the blunt head of the spear into his gut, and everything went black and wet, blood pouring out -

He awoke, still wet and in the dark, tears on his face and ejaculate cooling, tacky and redolent, on his stomach. He stayed in the sonic shower 5.92 minutes longer than necessary. He just couldn’t seem to get clean.

 

***

 

He’d paid attention after that. He grudgingly conceded that he could be in the early stages of pon farr, but this was nothing like the scant information he had received as a boy on Vulcan. For one thing, aside from the dreams, he had no impulse to return to Vulcan or to salvage the tattered remains of what remained of his immature bond with T’Pring. For another, his increased libido appeared to be directionless, or rather going in every direction. Tradition stated that he would choose one mate and pursue them relentlessly if he were unbonded. He had not, so far, seen conclusive hormonal changes in his scans. (He had stolen a medical tricorder from sickbay. He could not risk being around either the doctor or, even worse, Nurse Chapel.) 

Perhaps he was getting ahead of himself. His sexual activity had, he now realized, decreased dramatically since Pike’s accident. He was well aware that the crew viewed him as a kind of eunuch, but that had never been the case. He’d always craved and sought sexual contact more than other Vulcans did and far earlier - as far as he knew - it’s not like anyone talked about wanting it - and had, as was common for young Vulcans before bonding, pursued diverse sexual experiences as a sort of recreational field research. He and T’Pring had never been monogamous, of course: well, he in practice had been, but she certainly had not, but when not spoken for, he’d been rather, well, promiscuous. It had almost been a game, finding mutually satisfying sexual encounters that were neatly compartmentalized from his professional and personal life. For emotional intimacy and nurturing, he had Chris. He’d had Chris since he was twenty-four. He’d found the arrangement efficient. He didn’t have Chris anymore, and so it had fallen apart. That made sense.

Perhaps, as Kirk would have said if Spock had confided in him - which he didn’t - Spock just needed to “get laid.” 

Of course, as soon as he’d developed this hypothesis, he found himself in New York City in 1930, trapped with the captain, and waiting for McCoy to reappear so they could stop him from destroying the future of the Federation, apparently. He tried not to think about being trapped, but he had to avoid thinking of many things, as he certainly couldn’t seek sexual release in the current situation. The last thing the timeline needed was his mutinous, green, alien cock stuck in it. No hat could hide that. Perhaps if he merely offered a man a blow job and remained clothed, pretended to be some kind of submissive with a very specific fetish… But he knew enough about the time period to know homosexual encounters were arranged in some sort of code he certainly did not know. Would women of this time be amenable to casual cunnilingus and digital penetration? A great deal of effort to achieve the indignity of merely soiling his trousers, which he only had one pair of. Irresponsible. Illogical.

Of course, Kirk with his human cock held himself to a different standard, as always, and had the gall to actually court Edith Keeler, the woman they had to make sure stayed dead. He could feel his irritation mounting as Kirk absented himself as he toiled away at the ancient radio equipment, attempting to gain some information from the Guardian’s transmissions. There was nothing stopping him from meditating, but it seemed ineffective, so he avoided it. 

When Kirk came in late one night, Spock almost hallucinated that the man slipped into bed with him, curling up with his back to Spock’s chest, the fantasy was so vivid. He would press the man down onto his stomach and then lift them both up, and murmur various accusations as he nipped at the man’s neck and pulled at his curls, wrestling him out of his clothes, refusing to kiss him the human way, his hands everywhere. His harsh words would become praise and encouragement once he had the captain naked and on all fours, and he used the slick and smooth lubrication from his sheath to quickly but lavishly finger the man open as his cock hardened deep within himself - Would Kirk whimper, writhe, beg as he was made ready? Would he -

Spock went rigid as the captain’s breathing actually changed across the room, the vision disappearing. The soft - by human standards - sound of skin pulling skin carried across the room, rhythmic and unmistakable. The captain was touching himself as unobtrusively as possible after his date with Miss Keeler, as though they were ensigns in their bunks on the lower decks again. Polite, only incidentally exhibitionist. Spock, miserable, and even quieter, worried two fingers into his sheath and stroked his still internal erection. It took longer than he wanted, as he had to be quiet, but as the captain gave a soft sigh, went still, and then fell asleep, Spock bit his wrist as he had the most humiliating and unsatisfying orgasm of his entire adult life, mercifully dry. He lay there in shock. If he ever had the inclination of bedding Jim Kirk - which he had long ago acknowledged as appealing in the abstract - this was the most unsexy and disturbing variation imaginable. Somehow he still fell asleep and was somewhere else.

He was in a crowded, working-class district of Shi’Kahr, transient home to migrant workers on and off-world, late at night, in front of a club he recognized, with the fuzziness of a badly assimilated memory, as one of the off-worlder bars where he would engage in reckless sexual encounters as a teenager, mostly with older alien men, when the emotional pressures of hazing at the Vulcan Science Academy and his brother’s disintegrating mental health became too much. The name was blurred. Someone about his height bumped into him on their way inside, and to his shock he saw it was Dr. McCoy, in his surgical tunic, tricorder out, rushing ahead into the crowd, not looking up. He darted after the man, shoving through the crowd, which all of a sudden thinned out in front of a small stage where they’d have rotating live music performed. The doctor was nowhere to be seen.

The piano, badly tuned, started crashing into a jaunty tune that sounded twentieth-century and Terran, like something out of an old black and white movie his mother occasionally favored, fond of performers like Cary Grant or Katherine Hepburn. He supposed it wasn’t entirely surreal: Jim had just gotten back from taking Edith to such a picture, and he was fairly certain he was dreaming.

He could accept then, with a measure of grace, the fact that T’Pring, Jim, Michael, Uhura, and T’Pol were sauntering onto the stage in frilly little one-pieces and that the piano player appeared to be Sybok. His brother, in skimpy teddy styled as a tux, with a wide smile, started singing at his bench, the five performers and many of the crowd singing along:

Enjoy yourself,
it’s later than you think!
Enjoy yourself,
while you’re still in the pink;
the years go by,
as quickly as a wink -
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself,
it’s later than you think!

Sybok then shifted into a cheerful dirge, while Jim batted his eyes at him and said, on the mic, “Look, honey, at that beautiful funeral! I’ve never seen so many flowers!”

“Yeah,” replied Sybok on mic, looking up at the bedazzled and befeathered captain soulfully, “he was a nice man too, but never had any fun. Didn’t have time, just worked and made money. He didn’t even have time to enjoy himself.”

“Poor man,” cooed Jim, with a dramatic pout.

Sybok went back into the melody, as Michael - who, while also scantily clad, projected a thankfully serious and unerotic energy, stepped up to her mic and began to sing:

You work and work for years and years; you're always on the go:
Never take a minute off, too busy makin' dough.
Some day, you say, you'll have your fun, when you're a millionaire -
Imagine all the fun you'll have in your old rockin' chair!

The chorus came back in - Enjoy yourself! Enjoy yourself! It’s later than you think! - and more of the crowd was singing along. Where was McCoy? Was he well, was he still -

T’Pol, while still old, was showing far more perfectly buoyant cleavage than Spock had ever let himself contemplate, as she leaned into her mic and sang, with a lovely and correct voice, still perfectly composed:

You never go to nightclubs, and you just don’t care to dance,
You don’t have time for silly things, like moonlight and romance,
You only think of dollar bills, tied neatly in a stack,
But when you kiss a dollar bill, it doesn’t kiss you back!

After another chorus, Michael frowned and said into the mic, “Do you think the parallels to American working-class alienation under capitalism hold-up in the twenty-third century?”

“I think it works,” said Sybok from the piano bench, adding little flourishes to the melody that was accompanying their patter. “He’s still a Capricorn.”

T’Pol, T’Pring, and Michael all asked at once: “What does that mean?”

“It’s astrology,” said Jim. “I’m an Aries!”

“It would be very obvious,” said Sybok, “if Leo were a Cancer.”

T’Pring stepped up to the mic, her face blank. “What is astrology?”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Uhura, with a placating posture towards the other women.

Michael was still frowning. “This song was written in 1949 but our performance appears to be an amalgam of both Louis Prima’s original mid-century recording and a live version recorded by The Supremes in 1965; it’s therefore anachronistic for additional reasons. This song reflects post-war economic anxieties more so than Depression Era concerns.”

Jim wheeled on her, wide-eyed. “How the hell does Spock know all that?”

Michael shrugged, and Uhura said, “Who can say? Spock knows a lot of things.”

She then leaned into the mic and sang, with her gorgeous, expressive voice:

You worry when the weather’s cold, you worry when it’s hot,
You worry when you’re doing well, you worry when you’re not,
You worry, worry all the time, you don’t know how to laugh,
You’ll think of something funny, when they write your epitaph!

Spock, to his dismay, realized he was now completely naked. Still, no sign of McCoy.

T’Pring, who was stiff and had a subtle shyness and nervousness Spock had observed and felt protective over long ago, approached the mic, and sang in a clear little voice without expression:

You love somebody very much, you want to set the date
But money doesn’t grow on trees, so you decided to wait,
You’re so afraid to take a bite, bite off of more than you can chew,
Don’t worry - you won’t have teeth when you’re two-ninety-two!

After the chorus, Kirk sashayed up to the mic with a flourish and ate the mic as he sang:

Your heart of hearts, your dream of dreams; your ravishing brunette
has left you now and she's become somebody else's pet - pity isn't it!
Lay down that gun, don't try my friend to reach the great beyond
You'll have more fun by reaching for a redhead or a blonde!

The chorus then repeated again and again - Enjoy yourself! - still no McCoy - It’s later than you think - Michael and Sybok were sharing whispers over the piano and laughing in his direction - Enjoy yourself! - where had the doctor gone? - while you’re still in the pink! - how did this song ever end? 

Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think!

Spock woke up gasping but still, thankfully, dry and flaccid. Kirk had already left. Spock made a note to scan himself immediately upon returning to the Enterprise. Even to seek out the doctor, if he had to -

Which he fully intended to do, but in his defense, there was a lot going on.

 

***

 

His arousal upon Dr. McCoy’s worried face flickering into view over him was immediate and maddening, and he clenched his hands into the sheets of the biobed in anguish as the doctor began exclaiming over the bed's readings, and pulling out a tricorder. He had never been less comfortable with his body’s responses. Not after such a near miss with the entire population of Deneva IV, not after Sam and Aurelan dying, not after Peter Kirk woke up motherless and fatherless, not after he believed he had been blinded. There was nothing remotely seductive about the doctor’s body language, but the man’s genuine joy and relief at this “miracle” was enough to send him into a hallucination, a waking wet dream. 

“Oh darlin’,” the doctor would say, pressing his beautiful hands against the psi-points on his face, almost innocently, “you’re burning up.”

And then McCoy would climb onto the biobed and straddle him, and lace their fingers together. “Don’t you worry about a thing,” he’d say, and draw their hands up to his face, and Leo would lean his face into his palms. “Come in, come into me, all of me.”

“My mind,” he’d say, and, due to sex fantasy logic, they were suddenly disrobed, “to your mind. My thoughts -” He would gasp, as Leo lined him up and sank onto him, already completely wet - “to your thoughts. Our minds are -”

“Spock!” The doctor’s voice sounded urgent.

“Yes, doctor,” he said. “Yes.”

Spock! ” Now it wasn’t just urgent, the voice. It was… irate? The sound of fingers snapping interrupted what was developing into a fantastic interlude and -

He came back to the room, and Dr. McCoy was leaning over him, fully clothed, his expression splitting the difference between livid and alarmed.

“I asked you if you knew anything about this membrane I’m picking up in your eyes, because if it’s not part of your anatomy we need to get you in the OR immediately and -”

“My internal eyelids,” he said. “An evolutionary adaptation to protect the eye against various environmental -”

McCoy flushed, his eyes widening. Spock wondered if he could request the doctor be less pink. “Internal eyelids? Mr. Spock, you haven’t been blinded! Good God, man, why the hell didn’t you tell me about this?”

Spock blinked at the man, who was even pinker. Could he be made more pink?

“I forgot,” he said, distracted.

YOU FORGOT? ” The doctor’s roar was loud enough that everyone in sickbay and probably the entire deck was startled.

Spock didn’t have anything remotely intelligent to add, so he said nothing at all.

Shortly after their usual song and dance with Kirk on the bridge, a small respite after the day’s tragedy, Spock paced outside of sickbay, arguing with himself, which was highly inefficient, as he was a formidable opponent. The doctor had demanded he subject himself to a follow up exam, but he didn’t think seeing the man again was wise. Still, he owed the doctor his compliance. For his… bad behavior? His powers of reason still felt a bit sluggish, as though rebooting.

He walked into sickbay, which appeared empty, and immediately stopped at the sound of gasping, as though someone were hyperventilating, but not in a biobed. The logical conclusion was that it was a member of the medical staff. He carefully edged into position to look into the office by the door, and saw Dr. McCoy with his head between his knees, breathing heavily, wringing his hands, twisting the ring he wore on his little finger. Some sort of attack of nerves. 

Having satisfied curiosity, leaving was the considerate thing to do. The compassionate thing to do would be to approach the doctor, and offer some kind of comfort or aid. But he found he did not know what sort of assistance or comfort the doctor needed. And even if he did, McCoy would have refused it out of hand, assuming he wasn’t being serious or that he needed protection from McCoy’s vulnerability, even if that were completely illogical. He felt a pain that was almost physical, which should be impossible after today’s ordeal, and it was different, too. Every anxious and wayward lustful thought had fallen out of his head.

So instead he remained, and watched for several minutes as the doctor started breathing counted breaths, until he lifted his head up, a face covered in tears. 

McCoy blinked at him, owlish.

His voice was hoarse, and he did not look pleased to see him. “What do you want?”

He meant to say that he was only doing what had been asked, but instead said, “Doctor, you are distressed. May I inquire as to the reason?”

McCoy grimaced and looked away, and then sighed. “Five minutes, Spock. It took Chapel five minutes to run a standard postmortem scan on the organism. I can run that scan in my sleep: I know how long it takes. I couldn’t stand telling you and Jim no for five minutes. I made a decision as a scientist and physician I knew was wrong just because I couldn’t say no to you for five minutes. So yeah, I’m distressed.”

The doctor was looking at him again, now with wild eyes, as though he were about to run away or toward him. Spock had a sudden sense that few people had ever seen the doctor look that raw, that this confidence was a gesture of trust he couldn’t fathom having earned.

“I can see that, doctor,” he said softly. “I’ll come back later.”

“Thanks, Spock,” said McCoy, looking relieved and very tired.

As Spock walked towards the turbolift, he realized that he had a very urgent hard-on, deep inside himself, and he almost wanted to scream in disgust. It was all so wrong.

If he had to specify when he truly considered the feasibility of attempting the Kolinahr for the first time, it was that moment.

 

***

 

The ship’s mood was subdued for a day or so, but it was, of course, the captain and select members of the crew who were most impacted by the captain’s bereavement and the presence of the silent, freckled boy. The captain always seemed to find something to do, and took on every conceivable administrative or personnel task he could as they made their way to the nearest starbase, where they would leave the child. Dr. McCoy told Spock the boy would be going to live with Aurelan’s family on Betazed, where his older brothers had been doing an exchange program and living with their grandmother. It would take another week for a cousin to arrive and escort the child home, but the captain scheduled no delays and arranged no leave for himself. Yeoman Rand - soon to be lieutenant - had just secured a posting in security on the Reliant under La’an’s command, and had volunteered to make their way to their new berth from the starbase and look after Peter Kirk in the meantime. 

As far as he could tell, some combination of Dr. McCoy, Nurse Chapel, and Dr. Noel had arranged this, with the doctor as the go-between with the captain. When he saw the boy at all, he was most often in the company of Chapel or Dr. Tola. Chapel, he knew, was a favorite with children, and Dr. Tola had experience with pediatric psionics cases - the boy, an eighth Betazoid, was empathic. Only once did he see Dr. McCoy with the child, in the botanical lab lounge, which he’d entered for a sample from one of Sulu’s more exotic plants. He wondered, perhaps, if the doctor had taken the boy with him to care for the roses. 

He hesitated by the door, watching, unseen. The child was sobbing, almost hysterical, with his hands over his ears as though trying to block out sound. McCoy knelt to his height, and gently took his hands from his head and arranged them pressed together, fingers folded, except for the index fingers and thumbs, which he placed together, extended. He was speaking softly, as though giving instruction, and the boy hiccuped and closed his eyes. Spock believed this was also a meditative posture in several Terran traditions, but it was striking - it also looked very much like a Vulcan practice for distraught children, and a foundational exercise for telepathic shielding. The boy’s breathing evened out.

Spock decided he could come back later, and left without being seen.

 

***

 

Kirk asked him to play chess the night after they had left Peter Kirk with Yeoman Rand. Spock actually had attended Rand’s going away party, thrown by Uhura and M’Ress, which had been - if he had such a thing - fun, if a bit poignant when he observed how glued to each other’s side Sulu and Rand were. He hadn’t even realized they were involved, but had gotten “the tea” in far more detail than he required from Tola and Chapel. The loss of Rand’s competence and dedication was grievous and went without saying, but he made the point of telling them anyway, which had earned him a hug that had given him something almost like a panic attack as he scanned his body for any hints of untoward arousal. The captain, uncharacteristically, had not been in attendance, and Dr. McCoy had left just after Spock had arrived. 

After the party wound down, Spock made his way to his quarters in an odd, ambivalent mood he couldn’t identify, and stopped short as he turned the corner. Dr. McCoy and the captain were embracing, Kirk’s back pressed against the wall, and his front melted into the doctor’s, who was leaning over him, protective. Kirk’s head was tucked against McCoy’s neck, a fragile look on what Spock could see of his face. Spock didn’t move as the doctor slowly detached himself from the captain and guided him by the elbow into Kirk’s quarters.

When he woke up the following morning, he discovered several drinking glasses were shattered and ground into his rugs, and that he must have cut the strings of his lyrette. He didn’t know what to make of the mess, and wasn’t sure why he didn’t remember making it. However, he had a busy day, duties towards the crew, and he set the matter aside once again.

That evening, Kirk was winning their chess match. This didn’t happen infrequently, which was a big reason why they played so frequently. He’d also, without fanfare, finished an entire bottle of Scotty’s best Scotch.

Spock felt like the thing to do was to say something, but he didn’t know what to say, so he waited.

“I know it’s pathetic,” Kirk said finally, “when I joke that I’m married to the ship.”

“Jim?”

“Sam had this suspicion, but he never - will never - said it directly, that I thought I didn’t have to deal with whether or not I was going to grow up, have a family, as long as he had one. Like being an uncle could be enough. I thought he was delusional, but what was he supposed to think? Nobody understood what my problem was.”

Spock was silent, still gathering information. This was an opportunity to provide “emotional support” and although he felt unqualified, he felt no impulse to flee. Curious.

“I was making Peter feel worse, you know. Tola and Bones wouldn’t say it, but they thought it. Dr. Noel said it. She still hates me. He knew everything I was feeling, but not why. Thank God I’m not part Betazoid - I used to wonder what that would be like; I have no idea how you handle it. That’s why I stayed away from him. I’m like empathic poison.”

“I never doubted your decisions stemmed from anything other than your best judgment,” said Spock.

“I know everyone thinks I should take leave, look after the boys,” he said.

No one to Spock’s knowledge had suggested any such thing, not in the captain’s presence and not behind his back.

“I reiterate that the current arrangement seems well-considered.”

Kirk started laughing, and it wasn’t a happy one. “It wasn’t even a question. I’ve always kept my distance from my nephews. It’s not that I was putting off having kids or living vicariously through Sam. I just know it’s not something someone like me can have. Not anymore.”

“Whatever role you may have played,” said Spock, very carefully, “does not have to be the only one you can ever fulfill in the future.”

“Jesus,” said Kirk, “don’t tell me Bones is sucking you off, that’ll make him turning me down and putting me to bed like a child last night even more pathetic.”

Spock’s frozen expression, which even he couldn’t subdivide into shock, affront, rage, or concern, seemed to answer Kirk’s question.

“Bad joke,” he said, and he wavered slightly in his chair, clearly more intoxicated than he appeared. “I mean that did all happen, but it has nothing to do with you. I’m a pig.”

Spock tried to hide just how high alert he was. On the one hand, he was very concerned about Kirk; on the other, the captain, seducing the doctor…

“You propositioned Dr. McCoy, captain?”

“What a sordid way of putting it,” said Kirk, who frowned at the empty bottle of Scotch. “He and I used to, well, let’s just say my propositions have been very favorably received in the past.”

Spock did not like this. He didn’t like this at all. He had a vision of slamming the captain’s head into the bulkhead over and over and froze again. What was happening to him?

“You are sexually involved with the CMO?”

“No,” said Kirk. “That’s what I mean. The last time was a few months before the mission, after Erica’s wedding. Then I drew a very clear line. I can’t believe I was actually nervous about it. Leo is so… cold about things. Romantic things. How kind, attentive, protective he is, just makes it worse. I kept thinking, I’m the one who’s holding this line. Cuz see, if it’s my choice, I get to keep telling myself I’m the one in control. Means I can’t be rejected. Strategic. I’m so… strategic.”

Most unnerving, by far, was that Kirk was now calling “Bones” Leo. “But you were rejected?”

“In Leo-speak, basically. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Jimmy, but what you need right now is a glass of water and a good night’s sleep.’ Like he’d be the one taking advantage. He stopped calling me ‘kid’ years ago, but it’s like he never stopped.”

This did sound consistent with what he knew of Dr. McCoy’s character. Spock held his hand open, which wanted to curl into a fist, at the thought that he wished McCoy had been more unequivocal in his rejection of the captain’s advances. McCoy had no business being near the captain, alone with him, letting the captain touch him -

What was happening? His skin all of a sudden felt too warm. It was almost as if…

“I’m sorry I keep rambling. I guess I need someone to talk to and Leo’s the one person I can’t talk to.”

“Why not? I don’t really understand what you’re trying to avoid saying.”

Spock was vaguely aware he wasn’t supposed to ask humans blunt questions like that when he didn’t understand what asinine subtext they were referring to, but he all of a sudden felt… it wasn’t tired, but it was like being at the end of some source of resiliency, of resolve. He fidgeted with his collar, feeling overheated.

Kirk just laughed, and smiled, as though relieved.

“Can you keep a secret?”

“I can,” he said. Not knowing what the captain was going to say, he did not say whether he would.

“All this,” said Kirk, gesturing at himself, his room. “It’s a fraud. I’m not Captain James T. Kirk of the Enterprise, dashing bachelor, boy wonder.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m an exceptional actor. That’s what I wanted to be, an actor. I only got obsessed with Starfleet after - after Tarsus. That was always Sam. Kodos just had to have a second life as an actor.”

Spock still didn’t understand, but didn’t want to repeat himself, so he raised an eyebrow.

“All I am,” he said, looking down at his hands, “is an absent father. I can’t even be there for my own son, let alone Sam’s boys.”

Well. That was not… what he had been expecting. The errant twitchiness, the impulses to fuck or fight his friend and superior officer, receded momentarily.  

“Jim, please elaborate.”

He looked up briefly and then down again. “She was a scientist, brilliant, older. So brilliant even the Vulcans wanted her on the mission. Gorgeous, blonde, just… I did what I always do. She found me exciting, endearing, and isn’t it such a shock that Jim Kirk is secretly a bit of a bookworm, actually thinks. I was crazy about her, and I thought she was crazy about me too. Then I did something stupid and was grounded on Cerberus. She was so angry with me; I couldn’t make any sense of it. When I got back, she was gone. She didn’t leave a note, nothing. Didn’t call. So neither did I.”

Spock remained quiet, waiting.

“Then I get a field promotion. All of a sudden I’m first officer of the Farragut, on track to be the youngest Starfleet captain ever if I didn't fuck up. The next day I get a call from her. I thought for a split second she wanted to get back together, and I dreaded it. Then she told me she was pregnant. We went through the motions, tried to make it work. I couldn't just stop being me over night. I was driven, obsessed with work, with Starfleet, kept failing to balance work and family. She broke it off, said we were too different. She didn't want me to see him, our boy, thought it would be too painful for all of us. It sounded so reasonable at the time.”

Jim rolled the glass back and forth on the table between his hands. He looked like he was about to weep. “It sounded reasonable, but I knew it was an excuse. She didn’t want the instability, the danger, the long absences, the military influence in his life. If I’d resigned my commission, set up a life for myself nearby, I know she would have relented. She never asked me to do that, but I know she would have. But I didn’t. You know why?”

“No,” said Spock. “Despite the problems military institutions can cause for a society, Starfleet has many vital functions that include defense but go far beyond it. You have done great work that has impacted many people and worlds, for many years to come. I would not think resigning would be an easy or obvious choice.”

“You’re right, but that’s not why,” said Jim, and closed his eyes. “I was scared. I know how to do this, this role, how to be Captain Kirk. I don’t know how to just be a person, let alone a father. I’m not special in that way - no parent knows what the fuck they’re doing. But I’m too scared to be that vulnerable, to not be the best at what I do. I’d get angry and defensive and anxious… What kind of example does that set for a child? I can either be an absent father or a terrible father. I can be a good captain; I can’t give that up. I can’t; I’d fall to pieces.”

Spock was silent. He didn’t think that the captain wanted to hear that as far as his statements were accurate, his reasoning was sound. It was better to be absent than to cause harm, and it made sense to do something well than to do something else poorly. He wondered if he were missing something. He also had the odd impulse to say that his own father perhaps had a similar experience with Sybok, and it would be reasonable to speculate that Sarek carried a great weight of shame and guilt and self-doubt over abandoning his first-born, but that would not be helpful either. He had been estranged from his father for eighteen years and saw no reason to ever renew their relationship. The comparison would not be reassuring: Sarek had an exceptional career and commanded a great deal of well-earned respect. But the man’s children were dead, exiled, or rejected him. A great man wasn’t necessarily a good father.

“This secret,” said Spock at last, “is something you cannot discuss with Dr. McCoy?”

“Absolutely not,” said the captain, who then shuddered. “Leo has every reason to hate men who abandon their children. Complete justification.”

“How so?”

“Leo’s father was a fucking piece of work. Some fancy doctor in Atlanta from a family that actually brags about how far back their roots in the South go back, if you know what I mean. I think he actually thought of Leo as his bastard and Leo’s mom like she was white trash, like something out of an old-timey novel. His mom had him at nineteen, and David McCoy wanted nothing to do with them. It was only when Leo was a top med student in Starfleet that his Atlanta family came around, wanting credit and recognition and favors. And that’s all before he had his own kid. I bet he hated absent fathers even more after that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Leo has functionally been a single dad. He had a kid as an ensign at fucking twenty-one, and raised her on starships. His partner was super involved, but couldn’t live with them, obviously. Nobody does that, in Starfleet, and he had to fight each time to keep her with him. The only time he wasn’t raising her was during the war, when she lived with some uncle, and he’s still so guilty about it. Like he was off losing the family farm at a blackjack table instead of being on the front lines, making sure she was safe. When her other dad died and she had some kind of breakdown, Leo resigned his commission to take care of her. He chose her every single time, no matter how hard it was, and he’s still a genius doctor and the goddamn CMO of the Enterprise. His kid is amazing, like actually fun to be around, and she adores him. They talk all the time. God, she’s not even a kid anymore, Jesus; I’m old. He wouldn’t understand what I did. He’d never look at me the same way.”

Spock could not adequately process this very important information, and set it aside for later: they were talking about Jim right now. 

“Perhaps not,” said Spock. “I could see that changing his assessment of your suitability as a mate. But if I understand it, you do not want a relationship like that with the doctor. I do not think it is certain you would lose his regard.”

“I hope you’re right. I’m not ready to risk it,” said Kirk.

“It is your decision,” said Spock.

Kirk rubbed his face. “God, I’m such an asshole. Leo isn’t cold. He had the love of his life die on him and he’s devoted his life to his daughter and his patients. He sleeps around sometimes, but did you know that I’m the closest thing he’s had to a partner since Joss died? And I’m not his partner, we’re friends and sometimes this… other thing. That’s all he could handle and it’s all I’ve ever been good for. The Enterprise is the first time he’s had any time to himself in, well, his entire adult life. And every time I get knocked down I just devour every scrap of attention and affection I can get from him because being with him feels so good and it’s so easy to get him to give and give and give.”

“So don’t,” said Spock. “Don’t do that. Let him… be. Trust that he does care about you, and that he’s not going anywhere.”

“You hate me now,” said Jim, staring at his glass, gripping it tightly. “You should - maybe not hate me, but - I’m not a good person, Spock. I’m not a good man.”

Spock, feeling moved, leaned forward and placed a steadying hand on the captain’s shoulder. “You said you hoped someday to earn my friendship,” he murmured. “I didn’t understand what that meant, and I still don’t. But I’ve considered you my friend for at least as long as you’ve thought of me as yours. Nothing you have told me tonight changes that reality. I also believe that friendship is as vital to you as it is to me, and is not a transitory or inferior human association. Like the doctor, I’m also not going anywhere.”

Jim’s - and he was Jim, now - eyes filled with tears, but didn’t fall. 

“I’m not a good man, either, Jim,” Spock said. 

Jim rolled his eyes. “What did you do, look too long at a married woman’s hands one time?”

Spock actually laughed, a bitter, cut-off bark. “Among other things,” he said.

Jim gave a watery smile, his eyes twinkling just a bit. “Why Spock, you dog. I’m going to get you drunk one of these days and you’ll tell me all about it.”

Spock nodded. He almost looked forward to it. 

“But, to quote the doctor, I do in fact need to sleep and drink a glass of water. Good night, Spock.”

“Good night, Jim.”

He was back in his quarters, though he wasn’t sure how. He had stripped naked at some point, and was staring at himself in a mirror in the bathroom. He was flushed green and breathing shallowly. “Stop looking at me,” he hissed, vaguely aware he was speaking in Vulcan. “Do you mean to challenge me? You dare meet my gaze?”

When his fist crashed into the mirror, he didn’t feel it. His reflection was broken into dozens of fragments, eyes and mouths, like the only version of an angel he was prepared to accept. He was panting, a deep, ragged sound. His bloody hand, a deep sluggish green, was around his cock, which had slid out all at once. He pulled at himself roughly, bracing himself against the counter. He couldn’t feel his cock either, just an itchy spasm across his skin, and a blinding heat pressing into his skull. He willed cool hands pressed to his forehead, phantom whispers soft in his ear, sweet promises of yielding to him, surrounding him, taking him in. It wasn’t real. His throat was dry, and he still couldn’t feel the vise his battered hand had around his cock, moving up and down. It should be painful. When he came all over his hand, cum mixing into blood, he wanted to throw up. He still couldn’t feel it. 

Something was very, very wrong.

Notes:

Oh yeaaaaahhhh, it’s amok time!!! If I make pon farr sound terrifying I’m doing my job right. Obviously there are lots of hot pon farr fics but I was like “nah, let’s try something else.” Don’t worry, this is slow burn with eventual smut, not all sex in this fic is a stand-in for Spock’s neuroses.

Yo, I wrestled a lot with “This Side of Paradise,” because if I hewed to the most obvious reading, we would be talking about sexual assault. Early drafts went this direction. I wrote my way around it based on the idea that there’s an internally consistent take that they weren’t having sex or fooling around with anyone they cared about or didn't want to as it would count as a “violent feeling.” Just want to be clear that I have no interest in excusing Leila’s actions in this episode, and that the most straightforward take is pretty damning and disturbing.

Spock is more or less verbatim repeating Michael's words to him as a child from that mid-season 2 episode of Discovery.

Beta canon generally portrays McCoy as the non-custodial parent with an ex-wife, but there's nothing in canon that states that about the prime universe. Usually Joanna's birthdate is given as 2249, and I did reuse the name "Joss" as an homage. Also, nobody said McCoy wasn't trans!

The Rigel Cup is introduced in TNG’s “The First Duty,” as is the premise that cadets can participate. It canonically exists in the 23rd century, as it’s one of Pike’s laurels on his introductory okudagram in DIS’s “Brother.” In “The First Duty,” the “Kolvoord Starburst” was banned “a hundred years ago” after an accident where all five cadets died. As that episode takes place in the late 2360s, I find the timing very suggestive. For those keeping score at home, Torias Dax, who was a pilot for the Trill Science Ministry working on transwarp stuff during WoK, was joined and died in 2284/85. I couldn’t help myself, as there was an elite pilot future-Dax who was around at the time the “Kolvoord Starburst” was banned in the 2260s. Stay tuned, and huge extra credit if you can guess which TOS episode I’m setting up for.

I'm sorry for the little bit of Spock/Uhura, but it was an interesting thought experiment in light of AOS. As to Uhura being a lesbian in the prime timeline, it's just a vibe I get from SNW. At the very least, I can't believe she's straight.

This chapter contains the thesis of why you don’t need to worry too much about the McKirk tag on this fic. Also, I don’t know how some Spirk got in there, but I’m clearly having my cake and eating it too, as I want to honor the historical significance of The Premise (K/S) and totally see the sexual chemistry, but I just don’t see much compatibility romantically.

I was so amused to discover Spock is a Capricorn! Fun fact: Kirk Prime is an Aries and Kelvin Kirk is a Capricorn. Do with this what you will. Unlike Spock and Kirk, McCoy’s birthday has never been confirmed, but it would be extremely on-the-nose if he were a Cancer (mother archetype, opposite/complement of Capricorn).

The “Enjoy Yourself” musical number is of course an homage to that exceedingly creepy scene in the fifth season finale of House, MD, which is how I know about this song at all and why I always associate it with genius men losing their minds over the guilt they feel about fucking a woman over.

By the way, I think Kirk is being too hard on himself and that there’s nothing inherently wrong with him, even though I think my take is believable - shame and self-blame is a really typical trauma response! I did find it super intriguing that Kirk straight up avoids Peter in that episode. (And also that Spock claims he "forgot" he had an inner eyelid.) The technique Spock is talking about when he sees McCoy and Peter is from “Innocence” on Voyager, which is a great glimpse of Vulcan parenting.

Like if you too cannot watch TOS without being like “Kirk has a secret kid he’s not allowed to see the entire time; what’s going on in his head??”; comment if you think Spock should just go to the fucking doctor; oh my god.

Chapter 7: The Argonauts (E)

Summary:

Spock continues to experience sexual difficulties, which begin to affect his, uh, work.

Notes:

Oh, my God, I'm so sorry for the delay! I was busy with life, but honestly I kept writing and rewriting this chapter and the next. There's just a lot of character development and plot hurdles I need to clear, and I've been too perfectionistic and kind of tired, too. I was originally going to do BOTH "Amok Time" and "Mirror, Mirror" in the same chapter, but finally decided to at least split it in two. Fortunately, this does mean that there's a decent chance I will drop the next chapter sooner rather than later, as I've already been agonizing over it. And yes, that one will do "Mirror, Mirror"!

Content Warnings:
Consent issues around pon farr including sexual assault of a canon character (referred to), misogynistic comments (referred to), emotional abuse in a relationship, discussion of sex work (with terms sometimes considered slurs, used by sex workers), reference to violence against sex workers, discussions of medical trauma, discussions of gender and sexuality in a Vulcan context that parallel real-world internalized homophobia as well as something like gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia that may not entirely align with inclusive language (tho I tried, y'all), altered states of consciousness (blood fever) from the point of view of the narrator, characters referring to amount of intelligence as a measure of self-worth, a dub-con sexual fantasy involving exhibitionism, graphic sexual fantasies and masturbation. Takes place during the TOS episode "Amok Time," so anything there may come up.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

[circa 2267; USS Enterprise, Vulcan; Beta Quadrant]

Spock sat alone in his quarters, staring at his console. On the one hand, he had sworn he would never do this. On the other hand, he had just, when Dr. McCoy had politely asked him to come in for a routine checkup, threatened to break the doctor’s neck if he brought it up again. Out loud. In the turbolift. He was the man’s superior officer. 

On some level, he had meant it. 

His hands, still numb, which hadn’t not been numb for a week, managed to type the commands to open a comm link that bypassed the Enterprise’s main security protocols (which he had, after all, programmed himself) to an encrypted channel. He then paced around the room for ten minutes, waiting for a response. His skin prickled with heated little jabs sweeping up his arms and neck.

Audio only, a familiar voice came from behind him and said, “Baby brother! What an absolute delight! What can I do for my favorite military man?”

Spock gritted his teeth in an uncomfortably animalistic grimace, sat back down, and said. “Sybok. I require your assistance on an urgent personal matter.”

“Oh my, a personal matter. An urgent personal matter.”

“My time has come upon me,” he snapped, wishing he had his hands around his brother’s neck. Adversary, obstacle, something hummed within him.

“What a special time in a young man’s life,” chirped Sybok, gently mocking. Challenger, enemy. “Who’s the very logical and well-bred lady this time? Don’t tell me you’ve made up with the prison warden who tried to kill me and cheated on you with that cop who also tried to kill me.”

“There is no la - there is no one. And no, I have not.”

A slight pause. Spock tried, unsuccessfully, to uncurl his hands, which had spasmed into fists. “I see,” said Sybok, less cheerful now. “You have no bondmate and no intended spouse. The only respectable option of course is to visit a matchmaker anywhere with a Vulcan enclave. Why would you need my assistance with that? Just drop Sarek’s name anywhere. You could even mate with an alien, I suppose.”

“A shon-ha’lock match is not an option for me because T’Pring has not officially ended our engagement,” Spock forced out, feeling slightly dizzy.

A longer pause. “So, no one will accept your suit while she still claims you, but if you, the man, broke off the engagement you’d be a social outcast and no one would accept your suit anyway. The only respectable option available is a public rejection at her hands and a fight to the death. That absolute ghoul.”

“Correct.”

Although illogical, Spock almost longed for a fight to the death at this point. At least, then, this would be over.

“Ah,” said Sybok, and something subtle changed in his tone, a keener energy coming to bear. “You want to know if there’s a disreputable option, preferably discreet, and you assume I’d know, since I’m a whore.”

This was more or less true, not that Spock would have phrased it that way. “Because you have survived pon farr unbonded,” he corrected, stubborn. “How did you accomplish this?”

Sybok gave a heavy sigh.

“My pon farr cycle is textbook,” said Sybok, “every seven years like clockwork, started a few days after I turned twenty-eight. My third was about a year ago.” 

Spock, despite being on an audio-only channel, had the paranoid thought that Sybok could see how deeply he was flushing green in embarrassment to even hear such a thing spoken of by another man, let alone his own brother.

“And you were unbonded?”

“For my first two, yes. Angel and I became bondmates a few years ago.”

Spock was unsure whether he could congratulate his brother on his marriage to a pirate who was wanted in as many systems as he was. “I know the resolution must be… sexual,” he said. “But I am concerned about my psychic control. I do not want to telepathically induce plak tow in another who cannot possibly consent to such a risk.”

“Yes, fuck or die situations are like that. I survived my first pon farr cycle’s plak tow without a lover, my second I managed without intercourse and did not experience a full plak tow . My third I did make prolonged love to Angel, but did not induce the plak tow in them and still did not enter a full blood fever myself.”

This was even better than Spock had been expecting, and also worse in the sense that these details were now imprinted onto his unfortunately excellent Vulcan memory. “How did you achieve this?”

“Certain meditative and telepathic techniques I’ve been developing, or, well, adapting from Pre-Awakening sources. The first time I got by with dumb luck and desperation. The second time because I’d prepared for years. The third time was a refinement of the techniques.”

This was most… acceptable. His fists had unclenched. “Will you teach me?”

“Yes, but I don’t think it’ll do you any good. It takes time and if your cycle has already started…”

“So… you do not have any suggestions?”

“Of course I do, Spock. You’ll just need to return to Vulcan to see a plak tow adept. It’s a little short notice, but I can pull some strings -“

Plak tow adept? Explain.” He caught himself. “Please.”

“A plak tow adept, Spock. A sex worker, and a highly skilled one at that. They work with clients who are unbonded, usually. Workaholics like you, widowers, the odd homosexual…”

Spock’s response was immediate: “There is no such thing. That cannot exist on Vulcan.”

“You sanctimonious nirak, of course there is such a thing. Not everyone exchanges child brides like the aristocracy does. It’s logical.”

Spock’s head was spinning. This did, actually, make quite a lot of sense. Although Vulcans in traditional marriages were vastly over-represented in off-world Federation politics, perhaps due to the volatility of more modern customs, the old ways were followed by less than ten percent of the population. Yet, as far as he knew, no one had died of the plak tow in recorded history. 

“But it cannot be ethical, legal,” he said, anyway.

Sybok made a displeased grunt. “You know as well as I do that decriminalizing sex work is a prerequisite for joining the Federation.”

“But this isn’t just sex work! How could I ask someone to not only relinquish their right to withdraw consent, to risk their life for mine, at any cost?”

“Okay, leaving aside the massive irony of you, a soldier, saying that, as I was trying to tell you, they’re adepts: specialists. They are either immune or resistant to relevant forms of susceptive telepathy, the ones who take on the acute cases, and with early-stage cases, they specialize in inducing plak tow, which keeps them in control of the sexual encounter and neurobiologically unaffected.”

“What do you mean?” The first part made a certain amount of sense - powerful enough shielding could block the mating-bond thrall, presumably, and there were aliens, even on Vulcan, such as the Cardassians, who were psi-negative. The second part was impossible, that someone could induce plak tow at will.

“I mean, that the primitive parts of the midbrain recognize the inducement of a sexual thrall regardless of the origin. The reason why someone in pon farr has the urge to induce plak tow in their sexual partner with or without consent is to create a sense of security. If someone else induces plak tow , that compulsion is satisfied, because it’s the presence of the sexual thrall itself that reassures the midbrain sex is on the way. It doesn’t matter whether or not the other person is actually in plak tow themselves. The danger of coercive telepathy during intercourse then falls to nearly zero.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Only a man - only someone with a pon farr cycle - can induce plak tow in a mate, and only while in pon farr.”

“That’s incorrect. I would know.”

Spock felt his temper getting away from him again. “If this is yet another conspiracy theory about the divine feminine or queering masculini -”

“I know this for a fact because that’s how I was conceived, I mean,” said Sybok, his tone now sour.

Spock sat in stunned silence, his anger slipping away from him, like a sehlat off the leash, sniffing around succulents in a garden.

“Of course,” Sybok muttered, “Sarek never told you that.”

“That - that - why? No, he was experiencing pon farr and… what?”

“He didn’t have a pon farr cycle at the time. He’d been kolinahru for nearly twenty years.”

Spock sat back. For the first time in a while he felt neither coiled to attack, lustful, or disconnected from his body. He was just surprised. “He - what?”

Kolinahru. Sarek. You know, Mount Kolinahr, the Plains of Gol? Lots of sand, very hot?”

“Father completed the Kolinahr?”

“T’Plana’s righteous flogger, are you serious? He never - Spock, he’s an Adept of Gol. How do you think someone becomes an Adept of Gol? They don’t have a low-residency option.”

“There are many adepts in different roles in society, and not all are kolinahru,” Spock said stiffly, surprise fading as that incessant buzz or a growl came back into his mind, the anticipation of attack.

“Spock,” said Sybok with an actual thread of anger beneath his annoyance. “You’re aware the failure rate of first time attempts is 87.94%, the median number of attempts of a successful kolinahru is three, and that only 10.95% of kolinahru maintain their status for more than ten years? Only 1.37% maintain it for over thirty years and no one in recorded history has ever done so while not remaining a resident at the monastery. Traditionally you only get invited to train as an adept if you’ve been kolinahru for at least five years, usually more like ten. All those itinerant adepts were kolinahru when they became adepts.”

“You’re an Adept of Gol,” said Spock, as though bargaining. “Were.”

“The High Master first made me attempt the Kolinahr at age seven, and yeah, I succeeded on the first try. Because I was seven and had never left the monastery in my life - it’s not like there’d been much to have any feelings about. I was a quick study and attained the rank of adept by sixteen. I was kolinahru that entire time. Then I ran off, and my own father oh so graciously took me in.”

“I see,” said Spock. He wished there was a Vulcan equivalent to his mother’s special occasion utterance of “what the fucking fuck?” He felt slightly nauseous, even considering a child being forced to attempt the Kolinahr. Perhaps he needed Amanda’s even more special occasion utterance: “are you shitting my dick, right now?” 

“Right,” said Sybok, still containing his anger, “so, when dad was your age he had some sort of spiritual epiphany and ran off to Mount Kolinahr. He became a particular favorite of the High Master, her… protege. She put him through all kinds of tests and trials, and the worst was when she induced plak tow in him to see if his mind was strong enough to resist, which of course it was not. He was set up, anyway, she wanted a kid she could experiment on, who might inherit both their skills. She more or less threw him out after that, he fled Vulcan and reinvented himself, and now you exist. You really didn’t know?”

“I did not.”

“Wait. Spock. You and Sarek didn’t go through the coming of age rite, either. The first mindmeld between father and son at twenty-five, before the first pon farr cycle?”

Spock didn’t dignify this with a response. 

“But he offered, right? I mean, he offered to do the rite with me and we could barely be in the same room. I turned him down, of course. I was a bitch about it, and said there was nothing he could teach me about sex I didn’t already know, but frankly I did not want an intimate view of how his sexual trauma and my very existence were fused together.”

“He did not,” snapped Spock, “as the VSA had long-since informed him I was unlikely to have a pon farr cycle, I was in deep space on the Enterprise at the time, and we also haven’t spoken since I was twenty and still haven’t.”

“He didn’t even have a verbal conversation with you about pon farr, did he? I knew you were ignorant but this… unbelievable.”

“How is any of this anger towards our father, ostensibly on my behalf, helpful?”

“Well, I am no longer angry with you. As much. Surak’s tits, what a mess.”

“So, meditation is an option,” said Spock, now desperately trying to get them back on track now that he remembered what the track was, “as is working with a plak tow adept.”

“Meditation may be an option but it takes years to… how far along are you?”

“I have been exhibiting symptoms for two months.”

“Two months - Spock: two months?”

Sybok was now openly furious, all playful irony gone. He sounded exactly like Sarek, too. It was difficult to accept. How could someone else be that angry? - He was that angry. If someone else were that angry that would be too much… anger? He wasn’t sure this made sense. 

Sybok’s next question was asked in a deceptively calm tone. “What are your current symptoms?”

“My internal temperature has been elevated by two degrees for the past week. I have not been able to eat for three days.”

Sybok was silent for a full minute. The silence stretched on and on.

“You need to return to Vulcan, immediately. After we end the call, you will immediately comm Dr. Selek, my friend and an adept supervisor, who will arrange for a plak tow adept to see you upon your arrival. I have already sent a message saying that only advanced specialists can see you now. She’s expecting your call. Then you have to return to Vulcan.”

“She’s not named Dr. Selek,” said Spock, feeling slightly dizzy. “That’s not real.”

“You really are feverish - what the hell are you talking about? It’s a common surname in the Cardassian enclaves on Vulcan - she’s half.”

“That’s too many Seleks,” Spock insisted, feeling quite certain he was on to something.

“I think we should end the call -”

“No, wait! You had mentioned something about meditation techniques…”

“No. It’s too late for that. You’re already in the first stages of plak tow. Once you confirm to me that you’ve survived, I will then send you my materials on the subject. But not now, because I do believe you are arrogant and delusional enough to attempt meditation anyway even though I’m telling you it's not an option for you this time.”

“But you had mentioned… your first pon farr - you managed to survive without…”

“Trust me, you will not find what I did remotely feasible.”

“Sybok, I - I will request leave and return to Vulcan, I will call this Dr. Selek, but if I am delayed…”

Sybok gave a long sigh. “Very well. My working theory about pon farr is that it’s an intense form of psionic discohesion that can only be relieved through sexual externalization, to shock the subtle mind and the physical body to rejoin a world beyond their own feedback loop. It’s not sexual but involves the sexual. Vulcans are highly sensual and tactile people with high needs for intimacy. Uninhibited, prolonged sexual intercourse is the most straightforward resolution, as it’s certainly not something Vulcans do on a regular basis. But so can any experience that breaks down the self’s ability to create its own world, stay enmeshed in its narcissistic autoeroticism.”

“Practically speaking, what do you mean?

“It means committing an act in the real world that is so completely against your sense of self that it feels as though someone else has done it and reaching sexual release from that act.”

“Against your sense of self?”

“A taboo act,” said Sybok. “Either an act that is sexually taboo or an act from which deriving sexual pleasure would be taboo.”

Spock lapsed into horrified silence. “You cannot be serious, Sybok.”

“Then tell me you haven’t been having increasingly disturbing intrusive thoughts and nightmares of a sexual nature.”

Spock had no answer for that. Wait, yes he did. “That’s… normal?”

“Yes, Spock, it’s normal in a Vulcan without an appropriate outlet for emotional and sexual expression. If you’re a good virginal boy who’s never gotten his dick wet, the first pon farr is terrifying and makes you agree to do crazy things like, for example, marry someone you don’t know in a highly exhibitionist public ceremony where, at worst, you might have to fight to the death. Ideally, you’re so traumatized by the experience you’ll collude in continuing the cycle as a society and never talk about it, certainly not with other men.”

“What does that have to do with committing a taboo sexual act?”

“Spock, what do you think the kal-if-fee is?”

“Sybok,” he said, his voice cracking. “I must admit I am not thinking as clearly as I usually do. Please explain what you mean.”

“What could be more unreasonable and anathema to a Vulcan than trying to kill an innocent man in combat in order to fuck a woman who has rejected you and left you to die? It’s humiliating and desperate, goes against our moral fiber, and makes no fucking sense. It’s a ritualized and socially permitted violation of what we hold dear - peace, logic, self-control. And obviously it’s also extremely horny - when you’re deep in plak tow, everything is about sex. That it’s socially acceptable doesn’t make it less horrifying. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been psychologically scarred by the kal-if-fee. Almost all of them become kolinahru.”

“But you’re saying other things could… suffice?”

Sybok said nothing.

“What did you do, brother?”

“I would prefer,” said Sybok in a clipped tone, “not to discuss it. I will say that the act did not involve another living being. It is irrelevant: it has to be a transgression to you, according to your psychology.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” said Spock, feeling sort of lost. “How to do that. I feel bad about wanting sex even when it’s nice.”

“I know, you’re a very chaste and miserable boy, which is why you need to go to Vulcan.”

“It’s not that easy,” he protested, as though Sybok could do anything about that.

“Worst case, why don’t you just hijack the Enterprise again? Apparently that’s not as big a deal as we've all been led to believe.”

“Sybok,” said Spock, summoning up the ghost of his dignity, “I would rather die than betray my oath as an officer and put my own selfish needs above the needs of the crew.”

“I’m ending the call now. Call Dr. Selek. Don’t die, asshole.”

The connection cut out. 

Spock blinked as a message came over the line with a new frequency. He switched to a regular private channel, and put in the comm request.

Within seconds, the console flickered to life, with a probably annoyed Dr. Selek on screen. Hard to tell, with anyone at least partly Cardassian. Her overall facial structure was a Vulcan as his was, with rather attractively pointed ears, just with distinctive ridges in a rather gorgeous pattern, and a few areas on her face and neck that may have been scaled. She was as composed as any other Vulcan, but did have a polite smile of the average Cardassian on Vulcan, which no one ever knew how to interpret. Like the Mona Lisa, thought Spock, who then realized he’d just been staring at her without saying anything.

“So, you’re at that stage,” she said, tone crisp, and appeared to be making some notes. “I’ll keep this simple. Will you agree to keep all of our conversations and all of your interactions with adepts of our order confidential?”

“Unless it violates my oath as an officer,” he replied.

She nodded and noted something down. “There are some standard liability waivers. I’ll send them to you to read, if you can, or someone will brief you upon arrival before getting your signature. One of them, that I suggest you download to a pad and sign before you get incoherent, confirms that you want to engage in sexual acts with an adept to alleviate plak tow. Not that a datapadd and a thumbprint is ever irrevocable consent, but it's better than nothing, and you may not be very coherent by the time you arrive."

“Acceptable,” he said.

“Will you also agree never to abuse any personal information you may accidentally glean about your specialist, which includes, but is not limited to, repeated attempts at contact, threats, or any legal or extralegal forms of retaliation?”

“What? Men have done that?”

“Answer the question.”

“Of course I will agree to this.” Again, because his brain wasn’t working, he added, “why even ask? Couldn’t I just say anything?”

“You could, but it makes me feel better to see how you react to the question.”

“I see. Is that all?”

“Will you refuse to work with an adept based on preferences related to gender or species? The majority of adepts are not women, and you cannot expect to be matched with a full Vulcan or even part Vulcan.”

Spock’s mouth dropped open in shock. “The generosity and bravery of anyone doing this as a vocation or profession at all aside, this is a matter of life and death - what man would insist on some sort of fetishistic and… xenophobic preference for gender or species?”

Dr. Selek quirked an eyebrow and almost looked amused. “You’d be surprised.”

“I will not refuse, and would have had no preferences anyway.”

“Well, that was easy. Except for being painfully last-minute.  I’ll send some materials to review. When you’re in orbit call this comm line again, and we’ll send you beam-down coordinates. You’ll be in a private facility, with healers and doctors on-hand.”

Indeed, that had been easy. Wait. “What about… payment? I do not know how funding for your order works.”

“Sybok has already agreed to arrange for funding, which in your case would be more of an optional donation anyway. One of the perks.”

“Of being a… patient?”

“Certainly not,” said the woman, who frowned. “One of the perks of being the family member of a plak tow adept. Technically former, I suppose. With the amount of behind-the-scenes advocacy and research he still does with the order, I’d say he’s fairly active.”

Oh. Oh. Spock felt like he could fall off his chair with the force of twin realizations that there was a reason Sybok had been so angry about his predicament and also that when he had called himself a whore, he was merely being precise. Something else too, about the way men about the VSA had talked about him, the way it had been ugly…

Dr. Selek snapped her fingers in front of her face, and Spock shook himself out of it. “We’re done here, Commander Spock. Please travel to Vulcan as soon as possible. Sooner.”

After the call ended, Spock had every intention of walking out the door and finding Jim, to ask for leave. There was always a way to justify going to Vulcan, and it wasn’t that far off from their current course. He certainly had enough personal leave accrued, not having used any of it since he’d, well, had a different mental breakdown ten years ago. Instead, he lay down on his bed, on his back, in a corpse-like pose. He couldn’t tell how long he lay there when he hallucinated a soft chime and knock at his door. If he could just get up, go to Jim, request leave, enter the coordinates -

The soft knock came again, with a soft voice accompanying it through the thick metal of the door. Not a hallucination. He closed his eyes and willed it away.

When the knock came again, he shot off the bed, nothing but barely contained fury. “I am indisposed,” he hissed, his voice shaking, turning back on the comm panel by the door.

“Spock,” came the worried voice of - oh no, no, not - Nurse Chapel. “You open this door right now. You sound like death, and I know you haven’t eaten in three days.”

His hands scrambled over the door, as though wanting to claw at, um… something? “Dr. McCoy, leave me alone. Do as you’re told, you, you, uppity barber.

Open the door. It’s just me, I’m here as a friend,” said Chapel, her voice somehow more worried but also angrier. “I made you fresh plomeek soup. You have to eat something; I’m not leaving till you do.”

Go away, woman,” he snarled.

“Jesus Christ. Okay, not here as a friend anymore, I’m using my medical override.”

He leapt away from the door, crouched to attack, as the door slid open and there was Christine. Soft, strong, lovely Christine in a blue skant with her big, thoughtful eyes and her rich smell - sandalwood and peony and vanilla - layered above the safe, homey smell of plomeek soup on a tray.

She stepped forward, expression resolute, and Spock lost his entire Vulcan mind.

 

***

 

“You know, I’m considering making pamphlets for common health issues among the crew. Here’s one: So, Spock, You’ve Decided to Commandeer the Enterprise Again.”

Spock became aware that through the door to sickbay the room was spinning. He shouldn’t be here - he should be in engineering. For the spinning that the ship was doing. Not here, where Dr. McCoy had lips. And was moving them. He dreamily trailed after the doctor, who’d walked quickly back to his office, the way he did when he was agitated. Maybe Dr. McCoy should relax.

“Come in, Spock, I’m all ready for you,” he said, seated at his desk.

That was very suggestive, Spock noted, disapproving. It will be my duty to remain professional.

“My orders were to report to sickbay, doctor. I have done so. And now I'll go to my quarters.”

McCoy did not look particularly worried about this declaration. “My orders were to give you a thorough physical. In case you hadn't noticed, I have to answer to the same commanding officer that you do. Come on, Spock. Yield to the logic of the situation.”

Yielding. Yielding would be nice. What if you could yield to logic? Swoon, as it cradled you against its bare chest and ran a hand up your thighs. Though why logic looked like Dr. McCoy at this moment was anyone’s guess.  “Examine me, for all the good it'll do either of us.”

“Hop up on the biobed,” he said, standing with his arms folded as Spock sat on the bed Dr. McCoy kept in his office for privacy and advanced consultation. He set up the scan and frowned, and then glared at Spock. “I know what you’re doing.”

Spock didn’t meet his gaze as he was, in fact, using every spare ounce of energy to regulate his biosigns, keeping them in the normal range.

“Spock,” he said, a bit louder. “Stop it.”

He did not stop it. This was logical. There was nothing the doctor could do, and there were secrets no true Vulcan would reveal.

“Spock, you know I can take all the basic measurements the old-fashioned way, right? Stop it, or I will have to come over there and touch you.”

His reaction to this was probably also logical, which was to fold his knees under his chin and lock his arms around his legs and look scared. At least this way, if his hard-on managed to slip out, no one would see it.

McCoy froze at this display and then very slowly moved to the scanner station and turned off the scan. He pulled a chair away from his desk, and sat across from him.

“I was only half-joking about that pamphlet,” said McCoy. “Jim said you described having a blackout when you changed our course to Vulcan against orders from Starfleet Command. What’s going on?”

Spock said nothing. 

“The scanner’s off, no one’s going to touch you right now, but you have to talk to me.”

Against his will, he found himself slowly mirroring the doctor’s more relaxed posture as they merely breathed slowly for several minutes, a soft, neutral expression on the doctor’s face.

“I must return to Vulcan. It is a matter of… biology.”

Well, that explains everything, then,” said McCoy, who rolled his eyes but somehow still projected nothing but calm into the room. “Let me guess, this is a reproductive health issue?”

Spock stared at the doctor, amazed.

McCoy gave an exasperated sigh. “It’s a Vulcan thing, it’s clearly at least psychosomatic, and you’re being ridiculous, even for you. Obviously, this is about sex.”

“Vulcans do not speak to off-worlders of this… condition,” said Spock, solemn and somewhat more present in the room, now that he was explaining something. “Vulcans understand our ways, when it comes to mating, but even we do not speak of it amongst ourselves.”

“Uh huh.” McCoy pinched the bridge of his nose and screwed his eyes shut. “Let’s cover some basics. Have you noticed any discoloration, skin texture changes, or swelling on, inside, or around your sheath?”

Spock stared, confused.

“Okay. Have you had difficulty bringing down an erection? I know the refractory period is functionally nonexistent, but it’s usually uncomfortable if it lasts more than forty-eight hours, right? Are you still able to evert and revert? Any changes in lubrication?”

“You can’t know about these things,” said Spock, horrified. “No human does.”

“You’re right that the VSA has withheld very basic information about Vulcan reproductive health, and common sexual health issues, but I can ask ballpark questions to narrow some things down. I am an exobiologist.”

“Off-worlders should not even know the structure of Vulcan genitalia.”

“Good God man, the VSA is bad, but they’re not ‘the Vulcan stork logically brings Vulcan babies, don’t ask questions,’ bad. This is not forbidden knowledge about Vulcan dicks, Spock, and anyway I have practical knowledge. I’ve seen some, know how they generally work. Not a mystery.”

“Practical knowledge.”

“Yes, practical.”

“No Vulcan would seek out a human doctor for matters of sexual health.”

“Kill me,” muttered McCoy to the ceiling. “Just kill me.”

Spock frowned. McCoy wasn’t an adversary, he was a… He wasn’t going to kill him, anyway. That would be illogical. For reasons.

“There are contexts other than professional where a human can acquire such practical knowledge. And for the record, you’re the first Vulcan I’ve ever met who’s suggested sex can’t be spoken about. In casual conversation among friends or ‘comrades,’ it comes up as much as it does with humans, and is discussed quite logically. Often with too many details. And way too many questions about everyone else’s sexuality. Though, I guess the Vulcans I’ve known come from a different class background than you do.”

Spock blinked. “Of course Vulcans can talk about sex. I’m not talking about not talking about sex.” 

McCoy had that look again, which he didn’t see as often these days, like he was observing some new life form that appeared to break the local laws of physics. “What,” said McCoy, amazed, “are you talking about not talking about, as regards mating, then?”

“You did not say you merely discussed sex,” Spock pressed, deciding that this was the move, not discussing his terminal medical condition with the CMO. “I do not believe Vulcans or humans show or demonstrate their sexual functionality to friends.”

“Depends on the friend.” McCoy sighed. “Fine. I’ve hooked up with a handful of Vulcan guys when I was younger, okay? I know people who are married to Vulcans, doctors who treat them. Interspecies sex requires a lot of direct communication. Whether first-hand or second hand, the experiences were all very educational, because, well, Vulcans, you know? Are you happy now?”

Was he happy? Usually, Spock knew he’d have a very clever and provoking reply to this. Something about how it was McCoy’s human limitations that made him assume he needed to feel something, or asking many, many follow up questions about the nature and extent of Dr. McCoy’s sexual contact with Vulcan men. For example, how many? Had he allowed any of them to join with his mind, touch him there? What proportion of McCoy’s sexual partners had been Vulcan men? Had he enjoyed his time with any of them, all of them? What had he enjoyed about these encounters? Was Spock happy?

Instead, he just answered the question. “No.”

“Fantastic,” said McCoy. “We’re on equal footing now, both embarrassed, both unhappy. You can’t and don’t have to run the Vulcan mystification of basic bodily functions con on me. Now answer the questions. What’s up with your junk?”

“There’s nothing wrong with my genitalia, doctor. This is a natural… sexual process for male Vulcans, but it requires treatment on Vulcan.”

“Sure. But what is it?”

“No Vulcan would speak of this.”

“I’m a doctor, Spock, not a gossip columnist. This is confidential, and I probably understand the VSA-StarMed politics better than you do. Tell me.”

It was much harder than usual to deny McCoy’s requests, which was an odd discovery, as he usually assumed he didn’t have any trouble at all. “It’s called the pon farr. It is a reproductive cycle that culminates in these symptoms every seven years, usually beginning before the age of thirty, when a Vulcan man becomes sexually mature. Pon farr is an… overwhelming urge to… to mate. To copulate.”

McCoy frowned. “Not sure I’m following. So, every seven years a sexually mature Vulcan 'male' gets very very, uh, frisky? I don’t get why this is a big secret. I mean, it’s not hard to figure out that Vulcans - or Vulcan men apparently - can have sex more than once every seven years.”

“Indeed, doctor, you are not following. Yes, Vulcans have sex at many different times and for many different reasons, but it is done according to logic - to create stronger bonds, or release tension, or to engage in playful exploration. But pon farr is desire unleashed from logic. I am - doctor, I’ve become… increasingly emotional.”

“Be still my heart.” McCoy looked thoughtful, however, not mocking. “So it’s not the sexual nature exactly that makes this a secret, but rather the loss of emotional control?”

“Yes,” said Spock, relieved that they were getting somewhere.

“How does going to Vulcan fit into this? Is there some symbiotic environmental factor…?”

“No,” said Spock. “Vulcan is the only place where I can find an appropriate partner with whom to act out these… urges.”

“The urges that are so intense you’ve blacked out and commandeered the Enterprise again.”

“Yes.”

McCoy pursed his lips. “Is there an actual biological reason why this sexual experience needs to happen with another Vulcan?”

“No,” said Spock, confused again. “That’s irrelevant, although Vulcans are more accustomed to the… rigors and dangers of plak tow. It’s difficult to describe the fortitude it takes to experience sexual intercourse during pon farr. It… strips our minds from us, rends the veil between the atavistic and the cultured being…”

McCoy did not look adequately impressed by the seriousness of pon farr sex. “Spock, and no judgment, but have you ever had sexual intercourse before?”

Spock had a sudden vision of smashing the doctor’s desk in two. 

“Yes, Doctor,” he said, tone glacial. “I have been sexually active since my late teens, which is not abnormal for humanoids, I believe. I have had, depending on your criteria, twenty-nine sexual partners. In the matter of sexual encounters involving sexual intercourse, I calculate -“

“Whoa, there, cowboy,” said McCoy, holding up his hands, “I get the picture. We’ll hold off on that calculation till we’re sure it’s medically relevant.”

Spock glared at him. 

“So, how would you describe the difference between your baseline sexual behavior and sexual behavior during pon farr?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know - what do you mean you don’t know?”

“I have never experienced pon farr.”

McCoy frowned again, and deeper. “You just turned thirty-seven.”

“Oh really, doctor? I hadn’t noticed.” Spock lost his sudden sharpness and looked down at the floor. “When I was assessed by the VSA in my youth, they concluded due to my hybrid nature, I would probably not have a pon farr cycle. That I am a… sport, a mule. Infertile, sexually immature.”

When he glanced up, something in the doctor’s expression darkened. “They told you that?”

“They said I was unlikely to reach sexual maturity as a Vulcan male.”

“And they just left it at that, did they? Of course they did, those small-minded, bigoted, incurious, incompetent -” McCoy took a moment to collect himself. “Spock, based on the records you gave me and my own assessments, I’ve inferred that you began puberty in your mid teens, and according to your most recent sperm sample, and the last one five years ago, your lil swimmers are fine. Better than the human average, actually.”

Spock blinked and then raised an eyebrow. “When did I give your lab a sperm sample?”

“And of course that’s what you’re hung up - When you came in and got the full panel right when I came onboard? The nurses put you under that full body scanner, should have felt various little pokes and prods all over? You signed off on it.”

Spock of course remembered this. He had been running various equations for local effects of entropy in higher dimensions in his head to combat boredom. He had not bothered to read the form or the results. The same had been true the last time M’Benga had convinced him to undergo an exhaustive physical, five years ago, ostensibly.

Perhaps not understanding his silence, the doctor said, somewhat embarrassed, “It’s the twenty-third century, Spock, it’s not like folks have to go jack it into a little cup while watching porn.”

Spock raised an eyebrow again. “If you discovered this while studying my medical records,” he asked, trying to remain calm, “how could that have been overlooked by the VSA?”

“I wondered that myself,” the doctor replied. “As far as I could tell they were looking for some hormonal indicators, mostly neurological, related to pon farr, a condition I didn’t know existed, apparently. But the blood work had been done, as well as other scans. There was a rise in testosterone levels, different patterns of hair growth, vocal cord thickening, skin changes, changes in semen. Did you not, uh, notice?”

Of course he noticed. Of course he noticed he was freakishly hairy and his voice was breaking. Of course he’d noticed autonomic erections and nocturnal emissions. He’d spent hours and hours meditating, attempting to regain control of his body. His studies and taming his rebellious physical form were the only things he had time for in late adolescence. Other than after the bombings that almost killed Michael as a child, it was the one period of his life when he regularly had panic attacks.

“I noticed,” he bit out. “I assumed it was some defect due to my hybrid physiology.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t tell anyone about it, huh?” 

“I did not.”

McCoy didn’t look angry anymore. He looked… sympathetic. “I know it’s not the same, but it’s very rough to go through the wrong puberty, in my experience, feeling like your body’s letting you down. I’m sorry I didn’t ask more questions before twisting your arm about those records. It’s well, logical, that you don’t trust doctors. A kid should be able to rely on doctors who know what they’re doing. This is malpractice and a violation of your reproductive autonomy.”

The doctor drummed his fingers on his thigh, thinking. “This cycle doesn’t necessarily have to do with fertility, then. That was the one thing I had to go on.”

“You are not required to understand pon farr, doctor. If you want to help, convince Jim to take me to Vulcan.”

McCoy ignored this. “So, clinically speaking, you just need to get laid?”

Spock sighed. “Yes. No, it’s not that I just need to get laid. But prolonged sexual intercourse is involved in most cases, yes.”

“Well, why couldn’t you find a sexual partner at Altair Six? Or, off the record, a bit closer to home, you know? Maybe someone who even, say, outranks you and is the sorta guy who would, uh, take on for the team? Off the record. Hypothetically. It could be anyone, right? It’s not some obligatory heterosexuality thing, right? It’s not a marriage-only, we-hear-each-other’s-thoughts-forever-only thing, is it?”

He was lost in the sudden vision of Jim writhing beneath him, his hair matted into wet curls, begging. Then seamlessly, he saw himself calmly walking onto the bridge, walking up to the captain’s chair, and breaking Kirk’s neck, then roaring as his limp, broken form slid to the deck.

He shuddered, and tried to remember the question. “Physiologically and in practice, no to both questions; by convention, maybe to the first and definitely yes to the second. But it’s not that simple.”

“Make it simple,” said McCoy.

Spock crossed his arms in a very secure and not at all defensive manner. “Your lack of rigor astounds me, doctor, you cannot merely demand an impossible thing.”

McCoy hissed. “Let’s try this again. Would being physically intimate with someone other than a so-called ‘appropriate partner’ on Vulcan alleviate the symptoms?”

“It’s not an option, doctor.”

“Damn it, Spock, answer the goddamn question.”

“In certain situations. Possibly.”

“Okay, that’s a start. I wonder if -”

“Nothing is a start. Stop wondering. Convince Jim to change course for Vulcan.”

“Spock, we gotta cover all our bases here.”

“Doctor, it is not an option. If you knew what that would entail, you would not be suggesting it. It’s not just sex.”

McCoy’s eyebrows shot into his hairline. “I’m a doctor, not a nun. Tell me what the hell you mean.”

“You keep repeating your formulaic conversational tic ‘I’m a doctor, not a…’ more than usual,” Spock accused, wondering if he could somehow make a run for it. “Did you know that?”

“My what? What are you talking about? I don’t do that.” McCoy scowled. “I don’t - Hey, mister, stay on topic. Spill.

Spock closed his eyes. “As I understand it, the physical demands of the mating are extreme. To - to facilitate the ease of… prolonged copulation, a male can by touch initiate a susceptive telepathic projection that sets off plak tow in his mate, with all its symptoms and dangers, so that desire and motivation to copulate is… compatible. With a bondmate, perhaps even an established sexual partner, this telepathic trigger can be more… gradual, more comfortable, and a telepathic pair-bond hopefully allows for more… attention to a partner’s feelings. But initiating plak tow in another does not have to be… gentle, or even… consensual. I do not know how or even if initiating this psionic thrall can be avoided during sexual intercourse.”

McCoy apparently needed a moment to process this. “Okay. I take it back. I know why this is a secret now. I’m starting to see what the problem is. Jesus Christ.”

McCoy got up and paced, needing, apparently, yet another minute.

“Almost exclusively,” said Spock, “this sexual encounter only takes place between bondmates, who have an existing, continuous telepathic bond, and it’s not experienced as… violent. I’ve been told.”

“How would that solve the problem?”

Spock probably knew what the problem was, but hesitated to say it out loud. “Entering plak tow can be coordinated and less overwhelming for a bonded couple.”

“The issue of consent, Spock.”

Right. He looked at McCoy. McCoy looked back at him. I don’t want to fight him: I wonder why?   “For Vulcans, entering the mate-bond is the point at which consent is given for inducing plak tow at some point in the future.”

McCoy stared at him in horror. This is bad, thought Spock.

“You could not understand the intimacy of a telepathic bond, the potential for… accord and understanding,” Spock said, weakly, and less than half-heartedly.

“Really? Because tell me to my face right now that any other telepathic bonding species has the same concept of consent. Betazoids? Aenar? Trill? Kelpiens? Medusans? Wait, that’s a bad example - uh, Deltans! The rare human, even?”

This was unfortunately a very good point. 

“I did not say I agreed with this model of consent,” said Spock. “That’s just what the model is.”

McCoy took a deep breath, and sat back down. “I could see how that could work in a very specific cultural context,” said McCoy. “As I’m a doctor, not a xenoanthropologist.” McCoy was now glaring again as well. “But, I’d wager since Vulcan society seems, if anything, matriarchal, that there’s rules on rules on rules about women’s - or, what, non-pon-farr-cycle-havers? - rights in a marriage that inform a contractually situational resigning of consent to match a man’s apparently ‘natural’ loss of sexual autonomy.”

That was actually pretty close, for someone who wasn’t a xenoanthropologist. 

“I am also not a xenoanthropologist,” said Spock, “but I believe I can disclose that it’s widely acknowledged that the most logical union in Vulcan society is between two women, or two people who do not have a pon farr cycle. The least… logical would be between two people who do. Have a pon farr cycle. Marriage between… men. It’s considered… emotionally excessive. Indicative of a lack of discipline that is… shameful.”

McCoy’s eyes were somehow even huger than usual, and his mouth dropped open in renewed horror. He quickly recovered himself, however, and returned to a definitely fake neutrality.

Spock hesitated. The next part was certainly not public knowledge. “Anyone approached by a Vulcan man as a mate whether for a cycle or for life has the right to reject him and leave him to suffer alone, one way or another. Doing so is unheard of in the case of a bonded pair, but the right remains, even if it becomes moot once both people are in plak tow. This is considered an incentive to be… satisfactory, as a husband. This reality impacts everything about gender roles.”

“I think I’m getting it,” said McCoy, rubbing his chin. “And this whole set up doesn’t work for you at the moment. Oh. It doesn’t work for you at all, does it? You’re clearly deeply upset about these issues of consent, above and beyond the stress your body is already under. It’s, well, human.”

McCoy was right. In this he could concede he was more human than Vulcan. Curious. He hadn’t noticed that he was suffering from anxiety about pon farr as well as from pon farr itself. He nodded.

“I think the Vulcan model of consent makes sense within a Vulcan context," he said, "but the fact that there is limited flexibility outside of that context also makes it problematic or at least… insufficient. I have little information or recourse about weathering the plak tow off-world.”

McCoy frowned. “You keep using pon farr and plak tow almost interchangeably, but you haven’t explained what plak tow actually is. The UT is not picking it up, either.”

“Blood fever, the final phase of the pon farr.”

McCoy went still as stone. “Blood fever?”

“Yes, if the pon farr cycle does not come to resolution, plak tow is terminal.”

McCoy’s face turned beet red and puffed up like a Terran blowfish, and he leapt to his feet. “God God, man, why didn’t you say so? This isn’t just about sexual consent, it’s consent to risk death! Of course you’re terrified, how could you even meaningfully consent to sex right now? Which you knew, but why didn’t you - Don’t tell me,” he said, his voice harsh, “let me scan you right the fuck now you complete, utter, despicable infant.” 

Spock froze.

Then the doctor roared: “Now!

Spock vigorously nodded. 

McCoy jabbed at the scanner controls, still flushed scarlet. “I’m such an idiot, I assumed this was psychological and you needed to talk it out so you’d see more options. Stupid, stupid, the psychologist thinks it’s psychological, what am I, a first-year resident?” 

Spock watched the doctor in silent fascination. He hadn’t even realized the doctor could be that color on his entire visible body. 

McCoy glared back up at him, once the biobed beeped back to life. “And you, when it’s a fuck or die situation, you lead with that, you hear?”

He didn’t wait for Spock’s nod, but instead, wrapped his arms around himself and looked at the console and the output above the bed. He adjusted and typed for a few minutes. That fascinating shade red started draining from his face until he was quite pale. 

He walked over to the biobed, and said, gently, in a flat tone, “Spock, I can’t get the prognostic precision required. I need you to roll up your left sleeve. I’m then going to place three fingers for several seconds in the crook of your left elbow, then I’m going to remove my fingers, and I’m going to step back to where I was standing before. Okay?”

Spock froze, knowing he was radiating terror.

“Your hesitation is completely logical,” said McCoy, still in a gentle, flat tone. “I simply have information and training you do not that convinces me I can do this without harm to you or to me, and it would be inefficient to explain at this time. Roll up your left sleeve.”

Spock rolled up his left sleeve. 

He didn’t know what he had been expecting, perhaps for everything in him, body and soul, to pounce on the doctor, his friend, and drag him down to where he was, but instead there was light, cool pressure. Neutral. Almost comforting. And then it was over. He rolled his sleeve back down.

The doctor, back at the scanner, lifted a hand to cover his mouth, and he looked away, his eyes suspiciously wet.

He cleared his throat, and wrung his hands, suddenly awkward. “Based on your adrenaline levels and… you have eight days, at most.”

“I understand,” said Spock, and he contemplated his now folded hands. 

“Well, I’ll just have to do it, then.”

Spock’s head whipped up to stare at McCoy. “Doctor -"

“Save it, Spock. I’m going to see Jim right now. I won’t break my promise and tell him about pon farr, but I’m going to do everything I can to get you to Vulcan. If Jim can’t get it done, we’ll figure something out. There are protocols for medical evac. I just need to make… a truly staggering amount of calls.”

Right. Convince Jim to take him to Vulcan. What he had repeatedly requested. Logical. Not - not - not -

“You wait here, okay? I want to take your vitals again. I’ll set the office door to Do Not Disturb.”

“And then, what?” The idea of the doctor leaving, of all this… reality starting up again, was suddenly too much. He’d felt more present with the doctor than he had with anyone in weeks.

McCoy looked him up and down with a mild expression. “Well, here’s what I suggest. What you shouldn’t do is go to a low-stimulus environment like your quarters and stop restraining bodily reactions that only make you socially anxious. You shouldn’t reduce as many external sources of stress as you can since it’s unlikely you can do much about the internal sources. You shouldn’t comply with every single request I or my department makes to take your vitals. Whatever you do, don’t do that. You should try to go about your day, and worry as much as you can about everything. Worry how there won’t be a cure, worry we won’t get there in time, worry you’ll do something terrible. Don’t listen to the medical staff, just keep it all in your head and worry as much as you possibly can. Who cares if you accidentally slip up while you try to act like everything’s normal and do something weird or unconscionable? It’s more important to worry about it and literally work yourself to death and not say anything. You can just worry about what you’re capable of all the time and if it happens, it happens. Not like other people’s wellbeing or your own conscience matters, or anything.”

Spock scowled. “Doctor, your suggestions are completely illogical and unethical. I believe returning to my quarters and remaining under medical supervision is far more appropriate. I insist you take my health seriously.”

“Smart,” said McCoy, nodding, expression still mild. “I think you might be right - do what you think is best. My bad.”

Spock sagged, realizing what had just happened. “My apologies, doctor,” he said, shell-shocked. “I had not realized I was so incapacitated that I could fall victim to something as inane as reverse psychology.

McCoy rolled his eyes and stood to leave. “There he is; there’s the Spock we know and love.” He turned at the door, and said, “We’ve got your back, Spock. You’re not going through this alone.”

The graciousness of these words were only slightly undercut by him picking up the doctor muttering to himself at the door to sickbay. “I need a raise. Or an early retirement. Loving men indicative of a shameful lack of discipline, my Georgia peach of an ass.”

The door to McCoy’s office soundlessly closed, leaving Spock to his own devices. At the back of his mind, he tucked away the thought that he should meditate on why, exactly, he was better able to access more of himself in the doctor’s presence, even now. Because the live-wire feeling, to take and defeat any challenger, was back.

He became conscious, then, of the smell. A light-bodied musk, ambergris, sharp and cool. Petrichor, and frankincense. Cedar. Rose. Evidence of the doctor, his body in this place, day after day.

Before he could stop himself, he was thrown into a waking dream, where the doctor walked back in, and closed the office door. Come here, he said, and led him by the hand away from the sterile biobed. You need to show me, he said, and raised Spock’s hand to face, and drew him in. The doctor’s blood bloomed beneath his skin, as his breath sped up into a ragged pant. He was getting warmer and warmer, pressing Spock’s hands to his neck and chest, so he could feel the heat, hotter, then hotter again. Spock, darlin’, I need you. Leo bared his neck to Spock’s seeking mouth. I’m burning up, please, please -

He kissed up Leo’s neck, his jaw, whispering reassurance. I know, I know. I know what you need. He placed Leo’s arms around his neck, and with a pleasant amount of effort, picked the tall man up, his legs wrapping around him. He carried him over to the biobed, where -

Spock unfortunately became aware that he was still by himself, with his hand around his weeping cock, drawn out of his trousers, stroking it roughly. In sickbay. In Dr. McCoy’s office. On a biobed.

He took a split second to rationalize this. After all, this was probably medically necessary, or at least not suppressing his instincts was, and he wasn’t sexually harassing anyone. There was an abundance of sanitizing equipment. In fact, he should speed up, in case McCoy was coming back soon. He determinedly focused on the soft and deliberate slap of his hand and his cock and changed position to get a better grip, thrusting into the tight circle of his fist, trying to think of nothing at all.

He just needed to ejaculate. That would help him calm down. He’d already come four times today, but maybe this time…

This time, he was in Leo’s territory, surrounded by reminders of him, just asking for him to add his mark to Leo’s, to let him know who he belonged to. There had to be evidence. Evidence Leo couldn’t hide, that he had to touch. All his surgical smocks and utility jumpsuits in the cabinet for his double and triple shifts, spread out all over the desk, drenched in his cum. Like you’re going to be, Leo. Yes, that was it…

Spock all of a sudden realized he was, in fact, standing in front of Dr. McCoy’s cabinet behind the desk, and had a blue surgical smock clutched in one hand, the other still pawing at his dick. With a strangled sob of “Shit!”, he frantically put the smock back, slamming the cabinet door closed, his hand flying away from his pants. Then back to his trousers, to re-do the magnetic clasps, shaking, his teeth chattering in his head. He was still hard, but numbness was spreading up his arms, his neck, his jaw. No. No. No. No. No! He could hear his gasps, hyperventilating, as his wooden legs and feet, tingling, began running, he was running, out the door, out of sickbay, and then nothing, nothing at all.

 

***

 

The next few days were like a radio tuning in and out, the only constant the persistent, increasing heat. He wasn’t sure what was hallucination, memory, or dream.

He thought Jim had actually visited him and demanded an explanation. His memory of the conversation was nonsensical, however. Why would he have spoken to the captain about salmon? What did feel real was the suspicion that he should apologize to Nurse Chapel, but he couldn’t remember why.

At one point, while playing the lyrette, it had a voice that sounded just like Uhura, and he yelled at it to stop. It hurt too much that she wasn’t there, actually singing with him. That had probably been a hallucination.

So, probably, was staring at a picture of T’Pring as a child from their koon-ut-la ceremony for hours, rocking back and forth sobbing that he was sorry, and then smashing his computer console like a pre-contact aluminum coke bottle to make her innocent face just go away. However, the computer continued to remain crushed like a cartoon safe in different visions, so he wasn’t entirely sure.

He was fairly certain Nurse Chapel did in fact come visit him at one point, but it was hard to believe she could stand to be around him, let alone talk to him.

“I had the most startling dream. You were trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear you. It would be illogical to protest against our natures. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

She was standing over him, over his bed.

“Your face is wet,” he said. 

“I came to tell you we are bound for Vulcan,” she said, “We’ll be there in just a few days.”

“Vulcan,” he said. Yes, there was something important about Vulcan. “Nurse Chapel.”

“My name is Christine.”

“Yes, I know. Christine.” The name felt unfamiliar. He hadn’t said it, not like that, for a long time. Beautiful, brilliant Christine. One of his first friends onboard. When he’d been so young. “Would you make me some of that plomeek soup?”

“Oh, I would be very happy to do that, Mr. Spock,” she said, as though trying to smile, trying to tease. “But first I have to take your vitals.”

He rolled over onto his side, staring at the wall, as she sat and took out her tricorder. “Where is Leo? No, that’s right. He wouldn’t want to be here.”

“Leo’s been holed up in his office, burning out the subspace relays and requisitioning all the biolab computers, working on your case. I think him and Joe are messaging constantly. None of us get to help. I think he’s sleeping in sickbay.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he’s stubborn as you are and has a God complex almost as bad as yours or the captain’s. He cares about you. He’s your friend. A lot of people care about you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What?”

“I need to apologize to you.”

“What for?”

“I believe I did and said things that were misogynistic, though I can’t remember what. I don’t really think that way, but being distressed is no excuse.”

Chapel - Christine - was silent for a moment.

“I forgive you,” she said. “I know you don’t think that way. You’re my friend, and I care about you. You get to make mistakes sometimes.”

“I’m sorry, too, for… I’m sorry.”

He felt her weight on the bed as she sat down.

“Do you think you’ll see T’Pring while you’re on Vulcan?”

“No,” he said. “She can’t know I’m coming. She doesn’t care if I die.”

“I know you didn’t end things on the best terms,” she said, soothing, “but you and T’Pring had a long and serious relationship, and there were good times as well as bad times. Of course she doesn’t want you to die.”

“You don’t understand,” said Spock. “You’re so far away, somewhere so much kinder. She’ll let me die, let it happen. Make it happen. It’s the most efficient solution to her problem.”

“You’re right, I don’t understand, but that’s okay. You don’t have to see her.”

“I don’t think that way about women.”

“Okay.”

“I know they can hurt me just as badly as anyone else. I know that so many of them have to be strong, when nobody would care if I’m weak. It’s not fair. I don’t want to bother any of them, but does that really mean I have to die or do something I can’t live with?”

“I think you should get some rest, and then eat some soup.”

“Christine. I’m scared.”

“I know, Spock, I know.”

He drifted through strange dimensions, through the liquid seal of each shard of his mirror, still broken. He couldn’t remember if he did, in fact, eat some plomeek soup. Perhaps that’s what allowed him to finally gather the echoes of his wits and make his way to the bridge as they approached Vulcan. Gave him the strength to step into the Jim-and-Leo-on-a-turbolift dimension. He repeated the steps to himself: Hail Space Central, comm Dr. Selek from his station, beam down.

“Bridge,” said Jim, strained.

Dr. McCoy was miraculously right there. “It is obvious that you have surmised my problem, doctor,” he confided to the glorious apparition. “My compliments on your insight. Captain, there is a thing that happens to Vulcans at this time. Almost an insanity, which you would no doubt find distasteful.”

“Will I? You've been most patient with my kinds of madness.” Jim looked sad. Why was he sad?

He repeated the steps to himself: hail Space Central, comm Dr. Selek from his station, beam down. That’s what was going to happen, right?

“Then would you beam down to the planet's surface and stand with me? There is a brief ceremony.” 

Was there? Or was that the koon-ut-kal-if-fee? He wasn’t doing that. But wasn’t he supposed to? He was missing something. Maybe he wouldn't make it to Dr. Selek's facility. But why not?

“Is it permitted?” Jim looked wistful.

“It is my right,” Spock said, though he actually couldn’t remember. “By tradition, the male is accompanied by his closest friends.”

“Thank you, Mr. Spock,” said Jim, as though he meant it.

“I also request McCoy accompany me.” 

Dr. McCoy had to be there, or it would all go wrong. Dr. McCoy would be paying attention. He could see him, at least, at the end. Leo and Jim. But that wasn’t what was going to happen. He repeated the steps: hail Space Central, comm Dr. Selek from his station, beam down. That’s all he had to do.

“I shall be honored, sir,” said the doctor, surprised.

A sharp pain began at the balls of his feet and raced up his nerves, and he wasn’t sure why. Why was the doctor surprised? That didn’t make any sense. And why did it hurt so much that he was surprised? He was pretty sure that happened later, how much it hurt. It couldn’t have hurt so early - it couldn’t have hurt this much all along.

Ah, now, the bridge dimension. He was probably there as an astral projection. How else would he get there?

“Captain,” said Lieutenant Uhura, which was obviously fake. He hadn’t seen Uhura in thirty million years. “We're standing by on Vulcan hailing frequencies, sir.”

“Open the channel, lieutenant,” said the captain. “Vulcan Space Central, this is the USS Enterprise requesting permission to assume standard orbit.”

A disembodied voice, speaking Vulcan. Interesting. “USS Enterprise from Vulcan Space Central. Permission granted. And from all of Vulcan, welcome. Is Commander Spock with you?”

“This is Spock,” someone said. This wasn’t one of the steps. He was missing something.

“Standby to activate your central viewer, please.”

This wasn’t one of the steps. Something was wrong, and he’d known something was wrong, but it wasn’t connecting to the other dimensions in the other pieces of the mirror, where someone could explain.

Nurse Chapel came onto the bridge. Maybe in this dimension it was her job to explain.

“Doctor,” she asked, “what’s going on?”

Then again, maybe not.

Spock blinked. So, there was T’Pring’s giant head. It wasn’t exactly surprising, but something was wrong.

“Spock, it is I,” said the head.

He should thank her giant floating head for clarifying. He could use all the information he could get. If something were different, he would have put the pieces together. There had been steps. Hadn’t there been?

“T'Pring,” someone said again, “parted from me and never parted, never and always touching and touched. We meet at the appointed place.”

“Spock,” said T’Pring’s giant floating head, “parted from me and never parted, never and always touching and touched. I await you.”

He wasn’t sure where the giant floating head had gone. He wasn’t sure it would leave him alone. 

It was something about the detective, wasn’t it? The detective the real T’Pring wanted to be with. The detective had been chasing someone, and Spock didn’t like it.

“She’s lovely, Mr. Spock,” said Uhura, reverent, who loved women, who loved women so much. “Who is she?”

A sharp puncture in the bridge dimension, an oracular gift from somewhere he couldn’t get back to right now. Dr. Selek knows Sybok. Detective Stonn can’t listen in on a private channel without serving a warrant, but he can monitor whether people of interest to the case communicate at all. Unlikely Stonn has been regularly surveilling me, highly likely he has been surveilling Dr. Selek, who is member of a marginalized, barely decriminalized community and a known associate of Sybok. Why I would be calling a plak tow adept supervisor and then immediately changing course to Vulcan was easy to deduce.

I am going to die, he tried to say.

“She is T’Pring,” someone said, interrupting. “My wife.”

Chapel had evidently heard it too, because she looked at him, stricken, and tried to get the doctor’s attention, whispering urgently.

He’d had this dream before. He was always on Vulcan. He struck the gong, and T’Pring stopped him from striking it a second time, calling out, “Kal-if-fee! ” 

She was, is, always will be so, so beautiful. He should compliment her on her dress, but his mouth isn’t working, not exactly.

T’Pau was there, though. At some point, had her mind spoken to his? She had wanted him to do something. Get them out of here, child; it’s a trap. Stall, if you can, your father is on his way. I can’t intervene directly. What does she mean? He didn’t feel her mind anymore, so he couldn’t ask.

Another difference: T’Pring is pointing at Jim, naming him her champion. Stonn is right there, and everyone except T’Pring and T’Pau is confused. T’Pau is disgusted. T’Pring looks like she’s planning something, but when isn’t that the case?

A problem: what if this isn’t a dream? That’s Jim. What if it isn’t a dream?

“My friend does not understand,” he said. That’s Jim.

He’s not saying it right, because Jim is still right there.

“He does not know,” Spock tried again. “I will do what I must, T'Pau, but not with him! His blood does not burn. He is my friend!”

“It is said thy Vulcan blood is thin,” says T’Pau, trying to suggest something. “Are thee Vulcan or are thee human?”

There’s something to work out, a way to save Jim in what she just said, but he’s so tired.

“I burn, T'Pau. My eyes are flame. My heart is flame. Thee has the power, T'Pau. In the name of my fathers, forbid. Forbid! T'Pau. I plead with thee! I beg!”

Something flashes in the old woman’s eyes, that looks very much like despair. He’s missed something. That wasn’t what he was supposed to say. “Thee has prided thyself on thy Vulcan heritage,” she says, colder than before. “It is decided.”

The staff of the lirpa feels cool in his hands. Something has caught on fire. Finally. Challenger at his feet. Gorgeous creature, panting in the sand, in the heat.

“Spock! No!”

Leo. Leo shouldn't see me like this.

The pretty Jim-thing escapes him, takes his blade. His blade, sharp and starving. Give it back. He’s excited, anticipation building. He wants to throw up. Finally. Finally.

“Is this Vulcan chivalry? The air’s too hot and thin for Kirk. He’s not used to it.”

“The air is the air. What can be done?”

“I can compensate for the atmosphere and the temperature with -”

Somewhere to the side and above his body, that’s where he was. The body was moving, perhaps, but instead of attending to it he looked - or some analog of looking - at the sky, which was closer than before, almost in reach.

Or reaching. He was falling into a false sky, a vast mirror, endless, beyond voice but not words. You will comply. Provide the necessary information. Nothing inside him continued to happen. He did not know what was being asked of him. You resist - you will comply. Resistance would be futile, for he did not know. Resistance is… futile. There are forces in tension that at some point resolve. What will be, will be. This is not information - your words hold no new meaning. That, he did know. Nothing he ever did was enough.

He was reaching some terminal point, his approach to the event horizon of oblivion endless for he was perpetually conscious of inevitable annihilation. 

Still, the body, somewhere, was moving. 

Then the pain, blinding. Agony of being touched by another mind when he’d ceased millennia ago to believe any mind existed. He was being torn in seventeen directions, as a fierce bright thought shot through his disintegrating consciousness and the fading hold of that vast… thing, that perfect, infinite order. There was a flash of red light. The thought, so solitary and small as though a person like him had thought it, like a child or an angel: not yet, Spock, not yet. This hasn’t happened yet. The moment of my death, he thought. The red light, again. No, the death of time. Time has not run out; it’s not running at all. Even now you’re passing through here, and will soon be gone. Also, you’re being a bit melodramatic. Get on with it.

The red light went out.

There he was, in the body, where he’d always been, staring at Kirk’s unmoving form, clutching at it. His trousers, at some point, had become tacky and disgusting with ejaculate.

“Get your hands off of him, Spock! He's finished,” yelled Dr. McCoy. “He's dead.”

His fever had broken. He was Commander Spock, first officer of the USS Enterprise, and his life was over. 

Jim was dead.

Jim was dead.

“I grieve with thee,” said T’Pau.

Jim was dead.

 

***

 

Jim, it turned out, was not dead.

Returning to his quarters, after being examined in sickbay and reunited with the very much alive Captain Kirk and serving a very surreal bridge shift, was the first time he actually thought about what had just happened.

While he was gone, someone had cleared away his ruined computer console and replaced it with a new one. Nothing was out of place - even his fear sweat had been cycled out. It was almost strange to not feel strange anymore.

He opened an encrypted comm link, circumventing his own security protocols again.

I survived.

After a moment he sent a second message.

You were the one who told Sarek.

A few minutes later, he received a reply, with a small document file attached.

As promised, and yes, I was. He sent T’Pau, obviously.

Obviously. T’Pau was a very old ally that Sarek had inherited from T’Pol and carefully cultivated over decades. She was on the Vulcan High Council. She didn’t do weddings.

Spock turned his connection on the line to live, and replied.

Thank you. I know that could not have been easy or comfortable.

Sybok set his connection to live as well.

It’s my fault I didn’t tell you to use the same security measures to talk to Dr. Selek that we use to talk. She called me almost immediately when she realized she’d been traced. I tried to reach you, but you were too far gone to talk. I had to do something.

Before Spock could decide on a reply, Sybok sent another message.

I love you so much more than I resent him.

Since he was alone, and it had been an extraordinary week, he let himself smile.

I love you too.

This wasn’t what he’d usually allow himself to say, but he sent it anyway. After all, he did.

More messages from Sybok.

For the record, we all hated T’Pring. Michael and I bitched about it all the time before she left. She was awful to both of us, too. Amanda even admitted to me once that she didn’t like her. She and that cop deserve each other.

You deserve something real.

We better cut the connection. You’ve got to keep your nose clean, baby brother. 

Thank you for not dying. Or becoming a killer and a traitor at the same time. Remember, we already have a murderer and a mutineer in the family. Michael and I got it covered. It’s your job to actually have a life.

Until next time, xoxo, s.

The connection flickered out.

He glanced through Sybok's work-in-progress magnum opus on pon farr and plak tow. He swiftly decided he did not have the intellectual energy to understand any of it at the moment, but did note that as far as he could tell, there was a lot less about masturbation than he expected, and far more about “sitting with all of your feelings” than he had feared.

Spock settled on his meditation mat, and closed his eyes. He could do that now. Gratifying.

His whole life, he had known that choosing a Vulcan way of life meant he was choosing a Vulcan marriage with, most likely, a Vulcan woman. A half-Vulcan couldn’t be given the same benefit of the doubt, trusted to marry a man and still maintain emotional control. But he hadn’t taken it seriously: without the pon farr, there was no urgency to establish a household, to live with a bondmate, to have someone always in his head. His engagement with T’Pring had been socially… useful, even when it was a hurtful farce. They had both been independent and career-driven, and had never been monogamous. But now…

He could easily believe that most men who’d gone through the kal-if-fee became kolinahru. Perhaps someday he would have to resign his commission to attempt the Kolinahr, or suffer with regular periods of life-threatening illness alleviated only through Herculean mental discipline or visiting “specialists” in secret. Unless Sybok was actually on to something.

More than that, he noted with numb finality, when he considered the possibility of marrying a Vulcan in a traditional way his mind went blank. Even his dogged persistence in hewing to his Vulcan heritage quailed, now, in the face of what felt like a missing part of his mind, the part that could want that, consider that an actual possibility. He hadn’t paid much attention to that inclination, that intention, but it had been there, a reassurance. Now it was gone.

What was left, he supposed, was merely human. 

He could have any sort of relationship with any sort of person or none at all. He could marry in a human way, even bond with another in the Vulcan way - what was supposed to be the truest form of intimacy for a telepath -, or do both or neither. But he wouldn’t strike the gong on that desolate dais again, and trust there was someone who waited for him, held his life in her hands, and would not harm him. In this regard he could now never be Vulcan enough, and he simply couldn’t care. Not anymore. 

As he continued meditating, something came loose, in his mind or his chest. 

The visionary scene became precise and detailed, an extension of his one reliably exceptional telepathic skill, reception, clairvoyance, the ability to take in and understand information other telepaths would only receive as an impression. In many cases, it made him immune to telepathic illusions. But combined with his eidetic memory for technical details and the material world, it also had made his memory often overpowering, emotionally, as though he were actually somewhere else.

In this case, he was reclining in T’Pring’s bed in her penthouse apartment in Shi’Kahr, clothed, while he watched her prepare for her workday at something a human would call a vanity - the Vulcan word meant something like “mirror table.” A place to inspect the outer appearance, to ascertain whether one was arranged acceptably for whatever social situations the day required. She was brushing her hair, which was very long, leaning over, a slip of her flat stomach visible in her matching silk set, a rich terracotta colorway, her bare legs stretched out and gleaming. There was a routine, and it never changed. Arise immediately upon waking while Spock tried to gather himself, drink sixteen ounces of room temperature water, perform her stretches and postures on her meditation mat, then sink into seated meditation. By then, he’d thrown on clothes: if not his uniform, then something like a uniform, and he’d joined her. 

Her rising from the mat was his cue to stop, as she’d disappear into her closet, and he’d find some perch upon which to sit or sprawl and he’d checked his messages or read on an omnipresent padd. Today he wasn’t, though, because he was watching her complete her morning ablutions, her outfit for the day laid out on a bench that was probably there for that exact purpose alone. A sonic cleaner, very delicate, that she’d moved over her face and decolletage like a wand, and then a manual and almost inefficient application of a thick, spicy-smelling cream on face and neck. She rubbed more oil into her arms, legs, and stomach. Now, the hair, brushed out. Then, she’d apply her trimmers and scissors to adjust any wayward piece of her hairline and eyebrows. 

She would summon him with a slight twitch in their faint, lonely bond, and he’d sit at the table instead, and she’d watch carefully as he did the same, leveling his bangs, trimming errant hairs. Then they’d trade off with her brow laminator, an essential and obvious device in a Vulcan’s grooming repertoire that he’d only discovered in his twenties and only used regularly after she’d shown him how. Finally, he’d do his one human task: applying a depilator on the highest setting to his face and neck. A Vulcan man could go six weeks between “shaves” - Spock removed his facial hair both morning, night, and midday when he had the time. This was a concession to his obsession in adolescence with removing all body hair everyday, constantly checking and checking and checking for regrowth anywhere.

“I have arranged for us to share a meal together at the cafe in the gardens by the transporter hub,” she said. “You’ve shown increased satisfaction while eating plomeek prepared in the manner traditional in Ra’al, and this cafe specializes in cuisine from that region. We will be able to spend meaningful time together without rushing to your transporter slot. You are struggling to suppress your anxiety about punctuality.”

Spock nodded, feeling slightly on edge. No one who wasn’t family had ever paid this much attention to him.

“I have administrative tasks to perform this morning, but I have loaded a padd with several well-regarded texts about the psychology of military command in human-dominant settings. I believe you may glean some insight that may aid you in being more confident on the bridge. Having a track record of voicing and validating sound strategic opinions is important for your career.”

She left the padd by his side, efficiently pulled on her clothes, and walked out to the living area. They’d both get their own breakfasts, and leave each other to their own devices until it was time to go. He’d already packed, and he’d read what she suggested - she was usually right about what he needed to be at his… best.

The pain that shot through him then ripped him out of the memory, back into his quarters, some ten years later, now cold, seated on the floor. He lay down and rolled onto his side, able to admit he’d assumed a fetal position. 

He had spent such a long time feeling ashamed and bereft over his ruined relationship with T’Pring. Clearly, there was something wrong with him - even though he knew the way she treated the prisoners under her control was wrong, even though he knew there was no… spark, no passion between them. The fact that he hated her for what she’d almost done to Sybok was isolated entirely from the fact that he was convinced he didn’t deserve her, and never had. She had been good, no matter how many bad things she did, and he must have been bad, no matter how hard he tried. He’d been so afraid of feeling that much, and that badly, that he’d never allowed himself to follow the grief and confusion to its logical conclusion. Tell the entire truth.

T’Pring had been considerate and had cultivated him with such attention because of the role he played in her life and plans. He had belonged in that small category of things and people she actually cared about, who and what was allowed to be close to her. Once he no longer fit, all that solicitude and concern had gone away. 

She treated him as she did everyone else: logically, and without interest. He remembered once being impressed when she told him she’d scored in the lowest percentile for empathy and the highest percentile for situational logical thinking. Only Vulcans so effortlessly logical and detached could do something like capturing and re-educating criminals and malcontents.

The pain, he could see now, was complicated. 

First, that someone who had been so close to him could try to kill or ruin him, make him kill his friend and captain. That made sense - any Vulcan or human, most humanoids, would be hurt by such a thing. But on a deeper level, there was something worse: T’Pring’s actions simply hadn’t been personal. They hadn’t been about him at all. She didn’t need to be hurt or angry with him to have done what she did. T’Pring’s family was an emerging political force on Vulcan, and even though formally ending the engagement before the koon-ut-kal-if-fee would have made sense, it would have been slightly embarrassing from a public relations standpoint. 

It was perfectly acceptable, socially, to follow the correct procedure and break their bond through marriage-or-challenge. And that’s what she cared about: it was permissible and it was the logical way to get what she wanted exactly the way she wanted it. Whether it was fair or… kind didn’t matter. And it never had - that hurt too. The entire time she was doing his brows or taking him on dates she had been ruthless and calculating with everyone else, including his own brother and sister. She was sure as a blade in the hand of the establishment, the embodiment of a perfectly - always artificially - traditional faction in Vulcan politics.

He remembered one of his pon farr nightmares, when T’Pring had hunted him down for some ancient betrayal. In a different age, T’Pring could have been a hero. She would have been an implacable warrior, who showed no mercy to her enemies, and kept her people safe. There was something beautiful and, well, sexy about someone that strong, someone who only loved rarely and possessively. It wasn’t a quality, he now realized, he found particularly attractive in a partner, but he could see the appeal. He’d even gotten off on the appeal, for a time. 

In this time and place, in the hands of a regressive and intolerant political machine, she was simply a person who did terrible things. And it hurt to think he’d been so miserable for so many years over failing to connect with someone he could not respect and who didn’t even care about him. 

There had been nothing there to lose, yet the grief was still there.

He remembered, as a teenager, “eavesdropping” on conversations his mother had with Michael about dating. His sister had even solemnly sat through a classic Amanda lecture on breakups before the girl had even brushed hands with anyone. 

“All around you,” his mother had said, “you’re getting the message that losing closeness and a shared identity with a romantic partner means there’s something wrong with you. Some human cultures say the same, but Vulcans on the homeworld take it to an extreme. It’s true that breakups can hurt a lot, for humans. It brings up a lot of thoughts and feelings about what it means to be close to someone, what you expect based on your past experiences and knowledge. Even though it’s uncomfortable, there’s a lot of value in taking time to reflect on all that. You can learn a lot about which parts of you need to shine in a relationship with someone else. People call out different versions of yourself - you should only be with someone who brings out a version you can and want to live with.” 

He could have sworn she’d glanced at him then, dropping momentarily the pretense that she didn’t know he was always listening.

He’d never really thought much about the fact that he’d scored in the highest percentile for every category of emotional reactivity, intensity, and reciprocity for a Vulcan, including empathy. He assumed it was just part of his human deficiencies. Compassion and care for other people, even when there was nothing to be gained, no logical obligation, was a quality he… needed in those close to him. For better or worse it was a part of himself he simply could not live without. 

Dr. McCoy was a perfect example of this human quality. He’d go to astonishing lengths for a stranger, even an enemy, and if he cared about you, he’d just go even farther. When he cared about you, he was just more himself, like he practiced, every day, how to care, and now it came easily. He didn’t know how to say it, knew he probably couldn’t, but he admired this quality in the doctor a great deal. It was a strength of character he would welcome, if he ever did consider… committing to someone. Something he recognized in himself, something he wanted to grow. Not that he had any romantic interest in Leonard McCoy, of course. He was just a good example.

Spock arose from his meditation mat, and went to splash water on his face. Someone had also replaced his broken mirror. 

He looked at his face, and his face looked back.

 

***

 

Spock let his empty mug list sideways as he loosely held the handle of the mug, tilting his head back against Jim’s mattress from his seat on the floor.

McCoy was sitting across from him in front of an armchair, humming and pouring himself another brandy. The doctor had also been ordered to the captain’s quarters to “get drunk and spill the tea about T’Pring” the day after they’d left Vulcan.

Jim’s head popped out over the mattress, where he was lying on his stomach.

“You’re out of hot chocolate, Mr. Spock,” he said, voice slurred. “Should… more. With marshmallows. Can he have marshmallows?”

McCoy rolled onto his hands and knees and crawled to the low-yield food synthesizer, walking on his knees back with a new mug of hot chocolate, and spilling less than he did the first time.

“Spock can have marshmallows,” McCoy sang tunelessly, “Everyone can have marshmallows now.” He practically rolled back to his spot, now sprawled on the floor. “I forgot the whipped cream,” he mourned, but then sighed happily. “I’m off-the-clock, who cares? Deal with it, Mr… Mr. Ears.”

“I’m Mr. Spock,” he replied. “I believe.”

Jim rolled over onto his back, his mop of now unruly curls escaping his daily gel and brushing against Spock’s head. “Women, huh?”

“Shut the fuck up, Jim,” said McCoy.

“No,” said Jim, “but, like, women.”

“Speaking of women,” said McCoy, who then paused to hiccup. “Every god in the universe bless Christine Chapel for pulling me aside and telling me you’se afraid of the missus, had absolutely no desire to see her, and you thought she’d try to kill you. ‘S why I brought the good stuff in mah big-ole-doctor purse. So I could defend your virtue, just, bam, hypo to the neck.” He started giggling, as though he’d made a joke.

“Women,” said Jim, with a sigh.

“Actually, I thought you and Jim were boyfriends,” said McCoy, as though this followed. “Once I found out you weren’t straight.”

“I wish,” whined Jim. “Whoa,” he said, propping himself up on his elbows. “You thought Spock was straight?”

“Yes?”

Spock took a big slurp of the hot chocolate, and let several tiny marshmallows melt in his mouth.

“Bones, you really took a look at this guy and thought ‘now there’s a heterosexual man’? You never thought I was straight!”

“He’s Vulcan, Jim, it’s different.”

He felt a tap on his shoulder. “Spock. Spock. Is he right?”

“On Vulcan,” said Spock, gesturing vaguely, “I am very… manly. It’s not, exactly, a good thing. People saw me as a jock, or - or - a bad boy, depending. On factors. For example, a beard.”

“Grow a beard,” said Jim.

“No,” said Spock.

“Captain’s orders.”

“No,” said Spock.

“Spock can grow a beard,” McCoy offered.

Jim poked his shoulder again. “Hey, Spock. Did you know you can grow a beard?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ll grow a beard?”

“No.”

Sudden,” Jim declaimed in a sonorous voice to the ceiling, as he rolled back:

the vessel, as she sail'd along,
Spoke, wondrous portent! as with human tongue:
Her sturdy keel of Dodonean oak,
By Pallas vocal made, prophetic spoke.

The Argonautica,” said Spock, dutifully.

McCoy made a face. “By Maggie Nelson?”

Jim flipped onto his belly again. “By who? No, Bones, Apollonius. Apollonius of Rhodes. Jason and the Golden Fleece. Men on boats, Bones. Men with men on boats. Witches - witches, sometimes.”

McCoy took a sip of his brandy and flipped him off.

“T’Pring read The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson many years ago because she thought it would help her understand my alien sexuality,” said Spock. “I read it too.”

“Huh,” said McCoy, “I hated The Argonauts.”

“Wow,” said Jim, “Bones, I’ve never heard you say you hate a book before.”

Spock tipped his head sideways. “What is the source of your antipathy?” 

Frankly, it had seemed of a higher quality than usual among the books T’Pring had read on human sexuality. He had not enjoyed Fear of Flying, and he still did not know what a “zipless fuck” meant.

“A lot of that book was about the narrator’s insecurity about being a queer woman when her life started following certain patterns that straight women’s do. That’s all right as far as it goes, though it’s a little hard to get into in this century, since compulsive heterosexuality has attenuated and looks different nowadays.” McCoy took a prim sip of brandy, having fallen deeply into the intellectual virtuosity of inebriation. 

“But she projects a lot of this insecurity onto her partner’s transition, contrasting his changes on testosterone to her coinciding pregnancy. He becomes symbolic, a mirror. All I kept thinking was ‘I wish there was more surviving literature from the pre-contact era by transmasculine authors.’ Where is he in this book? I thought. I miss him, I thought. Give him back, I thought. I mean, you can only read Testo Junkie or the diaries of Lou Sullivan so many times. I was also pregnant and a man when I read it, so it felt particularly off to me.”

Fascinating.

Kirk’s eyes had gone wide. “Bones, you sound like a queer studies class. Why don’t you talk like that all the time?”

McCoy rolled his eyes. “I don’t know, Jim, I’ve been busy.” 

The doctor then stared intently at his glass. “It hurts, sometimes, when you talk in a way that may need explaining to someone who not only doesn’t care what you mean but also might wish someone like you didn’t even exist.”

McCoy looked up then, and met Spock’s eyes. It felt like something passed between them. Recognition, perhaps. It was… pleasant. He took another sip of his hot chocolate.

They stayed for what felt like several more hours, before Jim kicked them both out, and they leaned heavily against each other as they made their way down the corridor. McCoy slumped against his own door, and pulled Spock close, chest to chest.

“I’m enormously angry about this Vulcan ‘fuck or die’ thing because it's actually a 'fuck or die or kill someone' thing and you didn't tell me,” McCoy hissed into his ear, alcohol-breath hot and sour on his cheek. “Goddamn furious. You have to see me tomorrow in my office, I put it on your schedule. We’re going to have a big fight, and you’re going to get your act together. You can’t keep neglecting yourself like this. You took over the Enterprise twice.”

“As you wish,” Spock rumbled, nodding.

“I mean it, Spock,” said McCoy, who was now pointlessly straightening Spock’s nonexistent collar, that is, just tugging at the neck of his shirts. “I have facts, and figures - well, charts, really -, and I know what I’m talking about. Even if you get - get mean, imma fight you.”

“Anything you want, doctor,” he said.

McCoy threw back his head, laughed, and let him go.

Notes:

Notes:

Who’s gonna tell him?

The scenes from “Amok Time” in this chapter heavily lift dialogue and sequence from the episode directly. I didn’t rewatch the scenes to double-check everyone’s body language and movements, so blocking may be slightly off, but if I edit this later, I might tweak if something is completely off-base. The convo between Spock and McCoy is a riff on his actual canon convo with Kirk in the episode.

"Nirak" is a Vulcan insult from the Kir'Shara arc on Enterprise, which, to paraphrase Soval, means "foolish person who has their head up their ass."

The idea that both Sarek and Sybok (and Spock, eventually) are Adepts of Gol is in beta canon.

For the record, when I picture sickbay, I’m mostly thinking about the floorplan seen in SNW, where the CMO gets their own office with a private biobed.

Also, I'm so sorry I did T'Pring dirty, but when SNW made her a prison warden and Stonn her coworker, my hands were tied. She's the worst!

I retconned T'Pau being more chill based on her characterization on Enterprise.

On pon farr:

So, I’ve read a lot of Spones pon farr fics, but in doing my research, I rediscovered some interesting material in canon that tweaks some of the common tropes. First of all, it is actually canon that you can fuck it out without getting married or becoming bondmates, and that there’s a difference between forming a permanent telepathic marriage bond, and using telepathy to make someone else go into pon farr.

The issues with consent are actually very much canon, and best explored in “Blood Fever,” on Voyager, which is the most information we get in canon about pon farr. Considering that it’s also established in Voyager that holodeck sex can work for pon farr, and considering that it’s implied that Romulans don’t experience pon farr, I feel like it’s pretty clear we should not take poor Spock’s feverish ranting about pon farr at face value. It also suggests that there’s a very heavily psychosomatic element to pon farr. Sybok’s “working theory” is my way of making sense of the mixed messages we get about what pon farr means and needs in canon. My guess is that the hormonal imbalances become real and dangerous as the result of a psychological phenomenon, which is not immutably “natural.” It tracks for me that Vulcan elites would purposefully block any real effort to end or lessen the effects of pon farr if doing so helped maintain social order and, perhaps incidentally, predispose Vulcans to remain on-world.

McCoy’s suspicions about pon farr and his frustration about lack of information is echoing The Doctor’s distress and annoyance over his Vulcan patients on the two Voyager pon farr episodes. This is also funny because McCoy’s “personality” is in The Doctor’s programming, which I’m sure Bones is spinning in his grave about. Rewatch any episode where The Doctor sasses Tuvok: you’re welcome.

Whether pon farr is a cycle in all Vulcans or just “male” Vulcans is a bit ambiguous in canon: both are stated verbally. There’s evidence on Enterprise that a female Vulcan (T’Pol) can have pon farr triggered by an external stimulus. In that episode (“Bounty”), she states that “it’s not time yet.” The way I make sense of this is that Vulcan women don’t have a pon farr cycle, but are socially conditioned to accept that they have one if they marry a man.

"Shon-ha'lock" is a term Tuvok introduces in Voyager ("Alter Ego," "Gravity"). The idea that there's something like Vulcan speed dating is something I lifted from that enormous Vulcan dictionary the ST writers crib off of sometimes.

Another fun fact, that I mention for no reason at all, is that the first variation of the phrase “resistance is futile” vis a vis a synthetic life form is actually first spoken by Spock in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (“resistance would be futile,” technically).

The author of this fic may or may not have opinions about The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson that overlap to some extent with Dr. McCoy’s.

Yes, T’Pring reading The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson to understand Spock’s sexuality is canon as of SNW Season 1, and I will never stop talking about it.

Also, for some reason I can’t get out of my head that T’Pring’s fancy penthouse has the same vibes as Kim Kardashian’s monochrome-beige interior design at the moment.

I actually planned to include several thousands of words of the “fight” Bones plans to have with Spock, but I cut it for time.

Like if you too wish twenty-third-century personal brow-laminators were a thing; comment to add a marshmallow to Spock's hot chocolate.

Chapter 8: The Triumphs of Doctor Moriarty

Summary:

Spock is back on the job and totally fine!

Notes:

Uh, so, realized that the "Amok Time and Mirror, Mirror" chapter is going to turn into three chapters, not two, unless I'm going to drop a novella. I really am much closer to finishing the last part of this sequence and will try to post within a week. After next chapter we'll be caught up to right before "Journey to Babel."

Content Notes: References to forced mind-melds and basically any gross stuff that comes up with the mirror universe in general and the episode "Mirror, Mirror" in particular. Near fatal violence. Technically maybe some voyeurism.

Also, there's plot and the next chapter has more.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

[circa 2267; USS Enterprise, Alpha and Beta Quadrants]


Spock arrived at the psionometrics lab with only seventeen seconds to spare before his first appointment with Dr. Tola. After their drunken evening in Kirk’s quarters, he and Dr. McCoy did not have a fight the next day. To be precise, they had begun a fight the next day, which so far had lasted two weeks. He believed the fight might have ended the day before, and was fairly certain he had lost, although he wasn’t sure what exactly Dr. McCoy had won. At least these weekly sessions with Dr. Tola were more of a concession to his preferences, even if it had been a concession that had been freely granted by the doctor.

The fight, to Spock’s understanding, revolved around putting him under some sort of advanced medical surveillance. He hadn’t initially been sure how this differed from the doctor’s usual demands for checkups - which he had always nimbly circumvented - but quickly determined, when McCoy had grimly handed him a padd with orders from Starfleet Medical, that this was something new. And thus, as the doctor had predicted, the fight.

“These measures seem indicative of anti-Vulcan bias,” Spock had said, not even looking at the padd.

McCoy had given him a flat look and folded his arms. “Spock, you commandeered the Enterprise, almost died and scared Jim enough that he risked another court martial, and then tried to kill Jim and would have succeeded if it weren’t for a truly inspired Hail Mary pass on my part. All as the result of a treatable medical condition endemic to Vulcans, the symptoms of which you were experiencing for, I discover, after the fact, two months.”

Spock had glared, and also folded his arms.

“If you would read the padd,” McCoy had said, “you’ll see that I flagged this request as a possible human-bias case, meaning only twenty percent of the authorization chain at StarMed was human. You’ll notice three Vulcan doctors signed it. I even added a statement describing the cultural context in the vaguest possible terms I could get away with.”

Spock had ignored this, finding the previous answer more promising. “Doctor, as much as you or I might be dissatisfied with the dearth of disciplinary consequences for my truly appalling actions of late, I have been cleared of all charges. You do not have the prerogative to attempt to trap me into some sort of tyrannical implementation of double jeopardy by medical fiat.”

If you would read the padd,” McCoy had growled, “you’ll see that this is disciplinary in the sense that you have to do it, but it’s not punitive. Also, if I have a tic of using catchphrases, you have a tic of talking like you swallowed a thesaurus when you're being ornery.” 

Spock had continued to glare.

“Look,” the doctor had said, running his hands through his hair in some mixture of nervousness and exasperation, “I took this step to put pressure on the VSA, not you. I ran you through the gamut of scans and records requests a few years ago, but I kept running into legal roadblocks from the Vulcans: redactions of your records, reference charts for a selection of biosigns with none of the data or even the metadata to explain them. This isn’t a medical time-out. I need the bureaucratic cover to do a full species profile on you from the ground up, something called a hybrid medical reference.”

“If you mean to make me a research specimen -”

“I intend to do no such thing. I’m not some Vulcan traditionalist fishing for what makes you tick, I’m gathering and assessing data on an ongoing basis to figure out how to keep you ticking. Which, incidentally, is going to benefit more than just you - you know you’re not the only half-human and half-Vulcan in existence, right?”

“Although this may be beyond the scope of emotive pulleys and levers that animate your behavior, doctor, your desire to categorize the unknown does not equate the knowledge and skill to do so.”

“How poetical. It’s a good thing, then, that I’m the guy that authored the framework for hybrid medical references currently in use throughout the Federation, and I’m the only Starfleet doctor who’s done a work-up like this on a part-Vulcan before.”

“Oh,” Spock had said, to buy himself time. 

Yet again, his constantly deferred intention to delve deeply into the doctor’s research history appeared to be causing complications. 

“I will file an appeal with Starfleet Medical,” he had said, not able to come up with an actual response.

“Of course you will,” the doctor had said with a sigh, and Spock had stalked out, the fight still on.

However, as the days stretched into a week and beyond, no matter how much time he spent off-duty researching the doctor’s “orders,” he couldn’t actually find anything obviously faulty in the doctor’s reasoning or in the approvals process at Starfleet Medical. He did find an embarrassing gap in his initial investigation of the doctor’s professional background. 

The doctor had, in fact, authored “hybrid medical reference” guidelines, almost his first act after his residency and dissertation, and appeared to have personally fought for their adoption over a decade, having recruited various other power players in the Federation Science Council orbit, particularly Betazoid scientists and policymakers. This hadn’t shown up obviously on his CV, because it wasn’t what a scientist would call research: it was too practical, too useful, too mired in the bemusing contradictions of medical politics, and, finally, too obscure, addressing a corner case, the “rare” multi-species individual. 

As for the doctor’s experience implementing his work, Spock finally gained some belated clarity on the gap in the doctor’s service record almost ten years before. He hadn’t been working for Starfleet or the Federation Science Council, nor had he been practicing medicine. Instead, he had worked with a little-known Refugee and Migrant Health division of the Interspecies Medical Exchange - that mostly forgotten pre-Federation institution sidelined by Starfleet Medical and the FSC - as a public health researcher, focusing on OB/GYN clinics. The part-Vulcans the doctor had referred to had in fact been Vulcan-Cardassian hybrids, suggesting the doctor, to Spock’s surprise, had actually spent time on Vulcan itself during that mysterious year and a half when he’d resigned his commission.

By the end of the second week of fraught antagonism with Dr. McCoy, he had to admit that he didn’t have grounds for an appeal. Reminding himself, once again, that he truly had behaved very badly very recently, he tried to be gracious in capitulation and told the doctor himself.

“I do have one remaining objection,” Spock had said.

McCoy had nodded, unsurprised. “Go on.”

“I will not do… the mandated therapy requirement. I am Vulcan - it’s completely inappropriate.”

McCoy had actually smiled. “Are you asking for culturally appropriate psycho-behavioral care under the Vulcan-Federation treaty?

Spock wasn’t sure what the smile had meant and he had been too tired to find out. “Yes.”

McCoy had smiled more broadly. “Was hoping you’d say that. I poked around a bit, and comparable care is meditation with another telepath. Meditation that, by the way, has absolutely no defined criteria. You can see Dr. Tola for an hour a week. I just need proof of attendance.”

“Dr. Tola is not a psychologist, why would they agree to what amounts to a waste of our time?”

“They agreed when I explained it meant the two of you could have one hour a week where no one was allowed to comm either of you and ask for things. You don’t even need to talk to each other. You just need to be in the same room alone, and it can be a lab.”

This was… satisfactory.

“That is… satisfactory,” he had said.

“Thought you’d think so.”

“I am surprised, doctor,” Spock had said, afraid this was too good to be true. “I would have thought you would be eager to get me into therapy.”

McCoy had snorted. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to get you into therapy, and I don’t buy for a minute that it does nothing for Vulcans. But mandated counseling is a StarMed bureaucracy thing and it's silly. You have to want to do therapy for it to work, and honestly, yeah, most counseling in Starfleet is pretty human-centric. At least this way you’ll actually be doing something that will help with your stress. I know you never get a moment’s peace to just sit down and work or catch your breath with no distractions, guaranteed. You’re even benefitting another overworked member of the crew by doing so.”

“That is remarkably adroit, Dr. McCoy. I… appreciate it,” Spock had said, bemused that he genuinely meant it. “That does seem both culturally appropriate and beneficial… psychologically for me.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a rumor going around that I'm a pretty good psychologist.”

When the doctor had smiled this time, all gummy and bright, rocking on his heels, Spock knew that hostilities had concluded, and that they had, in the doctor’s estimation, “made up” and gone back to being “friends.” The doctor had even followed him to the mess to eat lunch with him in good spirits.

And so he found himself at the psionometrics lab for what the doctor had whimsically called “study hall for telepaths,” confronted with a very frazzled-looking Dr. Tola, who appeared to be nursing a pint of Andorian ale in the middle of the day at a very cluttered desk, their head buried in their pale blue hands.

Getting no input from Dr. Tola, Spock took a seat at a lab terminal and spent the next twenty minutes in blessed silence, catching up on duty rosters and messages from department and division heads, the little annoyances that caught and tore at his concentration. He made such headway he was genuinely calm when Dr. Tola interrupted him from across the lab.

“Hey, Mr. Spock?”

“Yes, Dr. Tola?”

“Look, I know we’re just doing our own thing here, but I just spent four hours before this debriefing a distraught A and A classicist about how we just killed some god she was in love with - Apollo or Phoebus or something? I love the Ancient Civ and Archeology folks, don’t get me wrong, but I can only take so much. I don’t think I can focus on work. I could use a distraction, if you’re up for it.”

“I would welcome a more diverting activity,” said Spock, feeling, actually, a bit spontaneous for once. “What do you suggest?”

“I’m torn between playing a game or actually meditating.”

Spock raised an eyebrow. “In this particular case, Dr. Tola, I believe Vulcan does actually have a compromise to offer an Andorian.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re about to suggest Vulcan jenga.”

“Jenga?”

“It’s a human game where you remove building blocks one at a time from a structure and try to create a more sophisticated structure without knocking the whole thing over. There’s a Vulcan version.”

Spock maintained his impassive expression. He would have to improvise. He wasn’t sure whether the Andorian was referring to kal-toh or the keethara, which had, in fact, been his two suggestions.

“I could show you how to control fire with your mind,” he suggested.

“Oh hell yeah!”

And so that first “session” passed rather pleasantly. In the following weeks, he and Dr. Tola went between working in silence and swapping notes and techniques for various trivial but delicate telepathic practices. Spock, frankly, seemed to take far more than he was able to give. Unsurprisingly for someone of part Aenar heritage, Dr. Tola never could master the basics of telekinesis, but he had benefited greatly from their coaching sessions on increasing accuracy in telepresence projections and the basics of sorting out precognitive psionic events.  He’d never admit this to McCoy, but he’d actually begun to look forward to his weekly meetings with the Andorian.

Aside from his increased visits to sickbay for tests and scans with various medical techs, he could almost say the rhythm of his days and weeks was settling into its normal cadence.

Until he mind-melded with a biocidal deep space probe that had, as a technological “changeling” for a pre-contact Earth probe named Nomad, developed at least rudimentary general intelligence AI, which probably should have been impossible. At the very least it had made him pass out, which was hardly normal. Dr. Tola had kept him under supervision for over an hour after the incident and lectured him the entire time about his neurolytic enzyme count and electrical abnormalities in his midbrain, saying that he’d barely avoided contracting Pa’nar Syndrome.

Nobody else commented on his reckless behavior until Uhura’s “I got out of sickbay and have recovered from a total brain wipe” party, when the woman of the hour herself had cornered him with a look of determination on her face.

“Spock,” she said, folding her arms, “did you really, after Nomad ‘absorbed’ and wiped my mind, and called me ‘defective’ and my thinking ‘chaotic,’ try to explain me to it by saying ‘that unit is a woman’? And then tried to telepathically commune with the killer robot and almost got permanent brain damage? What’s going on with you?”

Spock had no remotely acceptable answer to this question, and his rush of gratitude when Mr. Kyle and Mr. Riley interrupted to beg a song from Uhura was undoubtedly cowardly. He quietly began edging out of the rec room.

“Just dinnae sing ‘Beyond Antares,’” said Scotty, mournful, as Spock made it through the door, “every time ye do, another one of my engineers ends up in mortal peril. Me, in this case.”

He settled onto his meditation mat back in his quarters, very troubled. The simple answer to the question ‘what is going on with you?’ was that he had been more affected than he’d like seeing the deadly Nomad attack Uhura and kill (if temporarily) Mr. Scott, and he had become emotionally compromised. Why exactly that had led to an outburst of misogynistic reductionism or a lapse in self-preservation was unclear and troubling. He anticipated his inner Amanda gearing up to deliver a lecture, but it didn’t happen because he actually had never received that particular lecture. He’d never had this problem before, at least not that he was aware of. The best he could do was re-enter the moment of the exchange, and follow the irrational logic of his feelings at the time. Nomad saying: “That unit is defective. Its thinking is chaotic. Absorbing it unsettled me.” And he had said, “That unit is a woman.” And the emotional tenor under the remark was protectiveness and envy. Protectiveness because where Nomad saw “imperfection,” he merely saw difference. Envy, because to be a woman was to be an exception to the strictures of total emotional control and self-effacement. Who could sing and cry and rage and be the opposite of worthless. A woman, something he wasn’t.

Nomad’s words, using his voice, came back to him. I am performing my function. Deep emptiness. It approaches. Collision. Damage. Blackness. Error. Flaw. Imperfection. Must sterilize. Rebirth. We are complete. Much power. The creator instructs. Search out. Identify. Sterilize imperfections. We are complete. We are instructed. Our purpose is clear. Sterilize imperfections.

Something coming, drawing near, nearer all the time, symbolic information in perfect order, a mind too vast to be a mind. Resistance is futile. Where is the creator?

And merging with the inside of a human woman’s mind, the anguish and despair of a scientist, a soldier, and a mother, looking out at a vast dead galaxy with nothing and no one. Gabrielle Burnham, trapped after the end of days, trying to get back, watching Michael die a hundred different ways, chasing after the monster, Control. The destroyer.

Sterilize. Sterilize. Sterilize. Sterilize.

Spock was shaking, pressing his fingers into the mat, trying to return to the present. One sister, beating her drum, then her heart…

He counted his breaths and recited the First Doctrines of Logic, until he was once again alone inside his own head.

 

***

 

The hard part, thought Spock a few weeks later, was not identifying the impostors from an alternative universe and deciding what to do with them - throwing them in the brig - the hard part was not letting on that he knew what was happening almost immediately. The Terran Imperial salute, after all, was not exactly subtle. The security officers who had escorted the struggling doppelgängers to the brig seemed to accept Spock’s perspicacity as par for the course, for which he was very grateful. 

He wasn’t even sure that Jim himself had the security clearance to have been briefed on the existence of what Cadet Tilly had kept referring to on the Discovery as “the mirror universe,” an eerily similar parallel universe, with an almost impossibly specific duplication of individuals and events and technology, just with inversions based on the character of humanity itself. Personally, he’d always found the lack of curiosity Starfleet Command had shown in how such a thing could be possible astounding, but it wasn’t as though he had any better ideas himself. He didn’t even know where to begin to get the crew back - as far as he knew the last crossing had occurred due to the mechanism of Discovery’s DASH drive and certain peculiarities of the mycelial network in yet another parallel dimension.

So, his calm, casually dominant attitude before his prisoners’ cell was to some extent a bluff. He also felt slightly petty for maxing out the brightness of the lights, knowing people from that universe were more photosensitive.

“You traitorous pig,” snarled not-Kirk, trying to puff up and loom in the doorway of the cell. “I’ll hang you up by your Vulcan ears. I’ll have you all executed!”

How unpleasant, but not as bad, he had to admit, as Emperor Georgiou cornering him soon after his recovery from psychosis and saying she kept a “stable” of Vulcan slaves due to their “stamina” and that she knew from personal experience she was capable of “riding him hard and putting him away wet.” And even that wasn't as bad as Dr. Culber's account of the emperor requesting a threesome with him and his estranged husband, both of whom were very gay, and calling him "papí."

Spock therefore, with a non-zero amount of satisfaction, replied, “I think not. Your authority on this ship is extremely limited, Captain. The four of you will remain here in the brig and in custody until I discover how to return you to wherever it is you belong.”

“Has the whole galaxy gone crazy? What kind of a uniform is this? Where's your beard? What's going on? Where's my personal guard?”

He recalled a brief conversation he’d had with Dr. Culber after a particularly flamboyant display of psychopathy from the Terran emperor trapped on Discovery about the nature of these “mirror counterparts,” and the doctor had theorized that it wasn’t just that these people were unethical and cruel where they were not, but that they seemed - deliberately or not - to hone in on the things one rejected as intolerable in the self. Where Jim was shrewd and circumspect, perhaps this pretender was thoughtless and bombastic. 

Spock quirked an eyebrow. “I can answer none of your questions at this time.”

The stranger wearing his best friend’s face sneered. “All right, Spock. Whatever your game is, I'll play it. You want credits, I'll give them to you. You'll be a rich man. A command of your own? I can swing that, too.”

“Apparently some kind of transposition has taken place,” he replied, ignoring this outburst. “I find it extremely… interesting.”

With that, he spun on his heels and walked away while not-Kirk began screaming after him again. “Spock. What is it that will buy you? Power?”

“Fascinating,” he muttered.

“Power, Spock? I can get that for you!”

He was about to turn the corner when he heard a laugh, almost a giggle, an extremely grating sound, and froze. 

“It’s not Spock, captain,” said a voice that did not belong to Leonard McCoy, not really.

Spock slowly made his way back to the cell, with a sinking feeling. The last thing anyone needed were more imperial Terrans who had insight into their own universe. He subtly waved the security officers to come back in closer, just out of sight. Staying languid, he leaned back against the wall before the cell, reminding himself to keep his stance wide and imposing.

Not-Kirk’s aggression had now disappeared, and his eyes were raking over Spock, calculating in a different way. 

“Well, you would know,” the not-captain said to the not-doctor, who had curled up in the corner of the cell.

McCoy kept laughing, which almost sounded like crying. It was awfully riveting. Spock could think of nothing less appealing than reading this man telepathically, but it was as though his chaotic presence was rolling off him in waves through the psionic field. Almost as if not-McCoy was, in fact, psi-positive and projecting.

Across the cell not-McCoy laughed harder. “Captain,” he said, in a hoarse voice, “he’s a fucking joke, this Spock. Weak. Can’t do a tenth of what the real one can. God, it’s sickening.”

“Really?” Not-Kirk looked intrigued. Not-Scotty and not-Uhura had perked up subtly, listening.

“He’s never used a Stone of Gol. I don’t think he even knows how to kill anyone without touching them. He hasn’t ever performed the Judgment of Sudoc. I wonder how he keeps his Vulcan underlings in line, without that. He’s not even able to do basic telekinesis. He’s like a sweet, sheltered virgin. Pathetic.”

Spock was appalled, which in and of itself was disturbing. It was as though this ghoul that wore McCoy’s face could slice right through him, affect him, in a way that only the real McCoy could, but the sensation couldn’t be more alien.

“As I have been attempting to explain,” said Spock, “I am not the Spock you apparently know. At first glance it appears as though you are visually identical with our missing crew members, aside from uniforms and grooming, and you believe you come from an Enterprise that is different from this one. Almost as though you were from a parallel universe. However, we have several tests to run before we can entertain that possibility seriously.”

The strangers looked at him, stubbornly silent. 

“I believe it would be to your advantage if you cooperated,” he said.

“Sure,” said not-Kirk, a not-really-a-smile, too wide, taking over his face. “If you say so. Why don’t you let us out - I’m sure the tests would be much easier. Perhaps you have more comfortable accommodations.”

Not-McCoy started laughing again, hysterical. 

“Shut up, you insane whore,” not-Kirk snarled, and moved on the seated man, raising his hand to strike. Spock started forward before remembering there was no way he’d drop the force field on his own, and instead gestured for the security team to join him in view of the cell.

Not-Kirk had hoisted not-McCoy up by his shirt, and was striking him hard across the face.

“Stop,” Spock called out, and gestured for the security team to aim phasers. Not-Kirk paused briefly and gave an almost friendly smile over his shoulder. 

“There is some merit to your suggestion, Mr. Kirk,” said Spock. “I will take one member of your party with me to the lab. Mr. McCoy will do. I am going to lower the shield and McCoy is to come towards us. There are four phasers trained on you.”

Not-Kirk started laughing and raised his hands, stepping away from not-McCoy. The thin man staggered up and slowly made his way toward the entrance of the cell. 

As the field dropped and re-engaged with McCoy’s counterpart on the other side of it, not-Kirk called out, “He’s not so different. He’s still going to make use of you, McCoy.”

Once out of the brig, not-McCoy was quiet, even meek. He followed Spock closely, at his elbow. He had the uncomfortable thought that he and the real Dr. McCoy often fell into a similar rhythm when walking or standing, side-by-side, McCoy often just slightly behind him. But in this case it felt… deliberate. Deferential. They entered sickbay, and Nurse Chapel did a double-take, and then made herself scarce. 

Desirous of privacy, and frankly against his better judgment, Spock led the other McCoy into the CMO’s office, and gestured to the man to sit on the biobed in the office. It also happened to be the one biobed that had a force field, which Spock engaged, waving the security officers to wait outside the office door.

Without further comment, he began running the standard set of advanced scans on the man, wondering if it would be enough. Much as he’d hate to admit it, he could not actually operate Dr. McCoy’s equipment with anywhere near the same skill and ingenuity, but he doubted what he was looking for was actually medical. He would have to make some… adjustments to sickbay’s interface and permissions to get what he needed. He could only hope that if Dr. McCoy could be recovered, he’d either take the tampering in stride or, less likely, not notice. When. When Dr. McCoy could be recovered.

“I wanted to thank you, sir,” said not-McCoy, his voice calm, all evidence of derangement now absent, at least for the moment. “He may have really killed me that time.”

Spock kept typing in a terminal he’d opened at the doctor’s desk console, writing and rewriting various algorithms in his programming sandbox, as he considered how to measure and calculate the right quantum signature across dimensions. Transdimensional beaming couldn't even be called theoretical, merely speculative, but the fact that the mechanism seemed to have been involved once suggested it could be invoked again. He wondered to what extent the ion storm was a variable in this case. He did not relish the commentary Dr. McCoy would offer upon his return about the dangers of transporters. If he returned. 

“The consequences of any one of you coming to harm are as yet unknown,” Spock lied, as he knew mirror universe counterparts dying had no effect on anyone whatsoever. “It was logical to prevent violence amongst you.”

“Still,” said the man, his eyes on the floor. “I was wrong, too. You’re more like him than I thought. You’re still protecting me, sir.”

Spock stopped typing and glanced at the man, suspicious, and, then, uneasy. He had been thinking of his crew’s return, and hadn’t spared much thought about the fact that in the meantime his people were very much in the other world. What was happening to Dr. McCoy at the moment? 

Hoping he still sounded impassive, he asked, “What is the nature of your relationship with my counterpart?”

“Oh, you own me,” the man said.

Spock now stared at the not-doctor, who looked at him, and then looked away.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I am legally the property of Commander Spock of the ISS Enterprise. He is responsible for my behavior, and I live and serve at his will.”

How could that be? How could a human be a slave?  Spock almost forgot that he shouldn’t know the general outlines of imperial Terran society and its class system, but recovered enough to ask, “Is it typical that humans are kept as slaves in your universe?”

“Not at all, sir,” said the man. “However, criminals stripped of their citizenship can be claimed as property. The Terran empire respects the Vulcan slavery laws in addition to its own.”

“So,” said Spock, “you are not a doctor? Dr. McCoy is the CMO of this Enterprise.”

“I am a doctor, and I am CMO,” said the man, still quite placid. “Commander Spock finds it… advantageous to control the ship’s surgeon. The rest accept the situation because they fear and respect him. I am also highly skilled and well-educated, which minimizes some bad blood. Moving against me is unwise as it would incur his wrath, but at the same time no one needs to fear my ambition, as I can only do as he tells me. My position is relatively secure.”

“I see,” said Spock, and tried not to show his intense panic. If his friends and colleagues weren’t in an agonizer booth at that very moment, it was likely they were attempting to pass themselves off as their counterparts. What exactly did this… other Spock expect from Dr. McCoy?

“You’re concerned,” said not-McCoy. “You’re very concerned. I can feel it, as though you were him. Fascinating.”

Spock let himself slightly frown instead of jumping out of his chair in alarm. Because now that he mentioned it, there was something more than powerful projections coming off of the man in waves. It was almost as though he were there, in his mind, through some shortcut that bypassed his mental shields entirely.

“Ah,” said not-McCoy, “I take it you and my counterpart are not bonded.”

Spock’s anxiety reached a peak that made his spine go numb. 

He mechanically finished coding his solution and set the scan and analysis running. If it worked at all, it would take hours. He didn’t answer. He didn’t think he needed to. Considering.

He was startled into looking at McCoy’s counterpart again when the man began to laugh, a low chuckle. “Interesting,” said not-McCoy. “You care about him. I wonder if he feels the same? If he does, he’ll have a miserable time in my place.”

Spock didn’t realize he’d stood until he was standing in front of the biobed across from the force field. “What do you mean?”

Without flinching, not-McCoy said, “He won’t fuck him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Spock’s mind went white for half a second.

Not-McCoy was staring at him, wide-eyed, a large and not particularly kind smile now on his face.

“Any member of the crew being assaulted on your Enterprise is chief among my concerns,” he said, finally.

“He’ll be curious about him at first,” said not-McCoy, with a coy look. “He’ll examine him, inside and out. If your Dr. McCoy likes you, he’ll be threatened and may get a bit rough. Him liking you suggests a version of him vulnerable enough to be liked, as though he were a person. Nobody likes Spock. I care about him more than anyone - my life depends on him and he’s very good to me -  but even I don’t get to like him. If this goes on for more than a few days, though, he'll have to put your Leo to the same uses he puts me.” 

The man made a show of considering something, before smiling again. “He probably will fuck him, eventually, out of scientific curiosity. But then again maybe not. He’s always found sex rather repulsive, too messy, and he did just go through his first pon farr a few weeks ago. I’m still sore.”

At some point, Spock’s hands had spasmed into fists, and he almost heard a faint buzzing in his mind, like psychic tinnitus. “What uses would he have for Dr. McCoy?”

“Controlling access to medical care on the Enterprise, for one, as I told you,” said not-McCoy, easily. It occurred to him, distantly, that one of the oddest features of this conversation was the man happily volunteering all kinds of personal information he could never imagine Dr. McCoy disclosing. “Sex, rarely. But primarily he uses me as a psionic resonator, to channel and amplify his powers. Why bother with a Stone of Gol, when you own your own little medium?”

Spock stared at him, expression blank. What did the man mean by medium?

Something about the situation seemed to amuse the other McCoy, and he laughed again. “You know, he even has this great bit going where Captain Kirk thinks he has some magical death ray called the Tantalus Field, but it’s just a fancy scanner and short-range transporter Spock made for the Emperor and he just uses me as a psionic resonator to off the poor bastards if necessary. He’s got Kirk over-reliant on it, and the idiot doesn’t even realize. Hilarious.”

“What do you mean he uses you as a psionic resonator?”

“Oh, you know,” said not-McCoy, “since I’m slightly psi-positive and empathic, it was easy enough to saturate my mind with the right sort of strange energy to bring me to full, if weak, telepathy, molded to his… needs. Human telepaths are more receptive anyway. It’s a good thing I have a Vulcan, an Adept of Gol, to keep me in line. I tend to project and introject all over the place, the psychic equivalent of a cat in heat when I’m not under a stronger telepath’s control.”

“You are psi-positive,” said Spock. The evidence had been there, but it was bizarre, a bizarre inverse of what he knew. “Dr. McCoy has shown no evidence of psionic abilities. He has a disciplined and shielded mind and gives little away.”

“Why? What’s wrong with him?” For the first time, Spock got the sense, through that strange throughline to not-McCoy’s essential feelings, that he was actually curious and not playing an angle.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if we’re the same, genetically, it would make no sense if he were psi-null or had his empathy and projections under control. I come from a long line of women with the emergent human telepathy trait, like back-country witches, cunning women with the sight. Lots of psychics and mediums, all inevitably insane.”

“I have no further knowledge on this subject,” said Spock, stiffly.

The other McCoy whistled. “Wow. Well, you better put a rush job on whatever it is you’re doing. If your McCoy really is as damaged or defective as you say he is, my Spock will kill him.”

 

***

 

Dr. Tola, at the door of the psionometrics lab, looked very displeased to find Spock, an ersatz double of their own Dr. McCoy and four grim-looking security officers before them. 

“You don’t write,” they said, “you never call. Why is FauxCoy here?”

“I need you to scan him.”

“Why? Scan him for what?”

Spock raised an eyebrow, and Dr. Tola, with a grimace, ushered them all in.

“I’m counting this as our session this week,” they said.

“Acceptable,” Spock replied.

Dr. McCoy perched on a minimalist biobed while the four security guards stood around him, staring. Dr. Tola drew him over to their desk, which was even more chaotic than usual, as, in their words at their previous work session, “you gave my history division head to a genocidal fascist, and now I have to do her job too.” Spock had pointed out that he also had to head the Astrophysics division and that he essentially was the computer science division, but they had merely scoffed.

“What did you bring him in for?”

Spock explained about not-McCoy’s claims of being telepathically bonded to his counterpart and being psi-positive. Dr. Tola opened their mouth to say something but thought the better of it, and made their way over to the not-doctor to begin a series of scans, both technological and telepathic.

After about twenty minutes, they returned to Spock and nodded. Spock asked the security officers to wait with not-McCoy in the corridor.

“As far as I can tell,” said Dr. Tola, “he’s telling the truth. Did you think he wasn’t?”

Spock didn’t answer this question. “I wanted to know whether his psionic profile deviates significantly from Dr. McCoy’s.”

Tola gave him a strange look. “Why?”

“The extent to which it does may be an indicator of Dr. McCoy’s safety with my counterpart. And may suggest assistance he may need upon his return.”

“Will knowing how much trouble he’s in help get him back any faster?”

“No,” said Spock.

“I guess it’s a good thought, preparing for psionic sequelae, giving me a heads up. But, ah, why, Mr. Spock, do you need to know anything about this?”

“I don’t understand.”

Dr. Tola paused. “Permission to speak freely, sir.”

“Granted.”

“I want to know if you’re asking as the first officer and the top-rated telepath in the fleet or as a, well, Vulcan.”

Spock quirked an eyebrow.

Dr. Tola seemed to brace themselves. “I mean, Vulcans are intensely territorial and possessive of people with whom they share telepathic bonds. From an Aenar perspective, anyway. Sorry, I know how that sounds.”

“I do not have a bond with Dr. McCoy. Either Dr. McCoy.”

“That’s not… entirely true. The psionic signature of this man is not different enough from our McCoy’s that your midbrain would be able to tell the difference. Your mind isn’t bonded to his, but his is bonded to yours. On some level he feels like he belongs to you. So I ask again, why do you want to know about our Dr. McCoy’s psionic profile?”

Spock actually took a moment to think about this. “As first officer, I need to know if all psi-positive individuals are registered and compliant with testing after telepathic events.”

“Dr. McCoy’s psionic profile is complete, and he is in my opinion neurotically compliant with all testing requirements. If he tangles with your evil twin, I’d haul his ass in anyway - well, I wouldn’t have to as he’d come to me immediately. Now I’ll check him out regardless, if it would make you feel better.”

Spock nodded, so preoccupied with what this answer implied that he did not correct Dr. Tola, as nothing ever needed to happen due to his feelings. “He isn’t registered, however. I have the security clearance to see the list of telepaths onboard.”

“He’s in a gray area,” said Dr. Tola. “He doesn’t fit the criteria for a Class 1 telepath. I’ve argued for years we should have a separate assessment for psionic empaths, but no luck yet, so I can’t speak to that. The doppelgänger is probably a Class 2 telepath, but it’s very hard to tell, and if there were an empath scale, he’d rate higher on that, but I have no idea what he was like before the other Spock, uh, customized him, so I can’t really compare his baseline to our McCoy’s. Our McCoy’s Esper score is literally off the charts - it’s 107 - but humans don’t have to register on potential alone, just test after telepathic incidents. Presumably 107 was where this guy started as well.”

“I see,” said Spock. 

“I don’t blame you for wondering,” they said, relenting. “That fake McCoy has a weird set of skills, never seen anything like it: I ballpark him at a two, but for some situation he may blast past the class ten threshold in some area. Humans are only now starting to show telepathic traits, and Terran telepaths are so unpredictable, real wildcards. Weak in some areas, over-powered in others almost at random, with few conventional adaptations in neurological structure to moderate their gifts. It’s all very ad hoc, like phenotypical Russian roulette. For every Dr. Miranda Jones, there’s a Charlie X. For every Dr. McCoy there’s a Gary Mitchell.”

“Thank you, Dr. Tola.”

He nodded to the Andorian, and ducked out of the lab, where the security officers stood at attention and not-McCoy lounged against the bulkhead as though it were an alley outside a bar, at his leisure.

“We will now return to sickbay,” he began, before he felt a blow to his head from within his own skull, and the corridor erupted into chaos.

The men were on each other like animals, punching and clawing at each other, phaser pistols forgotten, and within seconds fingers and arms and noses had been broken. Spock swayed where he stood. “Stop,” he said, his voice dull. He tried again. “Stop!”

He forced himself to look at not-McCoy, who was still in a casual pose. The man’s electric blue eyes bored into his, and his mouth drew up in a crooked smile. He felt a growing, sucking ache in the inside of his head, like nothing he’d ever experienced. Another Spock used this man as a resonator, but who was to say it only went one way? Who needs a Stone of Gol, when you have…

“Officers,” he shouted. “Your aggressive feelings are being used against you. You must feel nothing - fill your minds with peace!”

The men stopped what they were doing and stared at him, and Spock for a half second thought he’d gotten through, but then all four immediately turned and began slamming their heads into the bulkheads. The precarious situation was about to become lethal.

Not-McCoy started to shake with silent laughter.

Spock couldn’t think of another alternative - by instinct he sunk into the bond the imperial Terran had with him, seeking the loudest tangle of insecurity and shame-terror and merely listening. He clearly didn’t even have a tenth of the power his Adept of Gol counterpart did, but his one reliably exceptional telepathic gift had always been receiving and ordering details from projections, lifting reason and precision from impression, lightning quick.

“I can’t imagine killing redshirts for your amusement best serves Memory Omega, does it, Dr. McCoy?” The words flew out of him, and he didn’t understand half of them, as though seeking a control panel in the dark.

Not-McCoy turned on him and prowled closer, as the security officers dropped to the floor, passed out. 

He did not look as wrong-footed by this question as Spock might have hoped, his eyes still wide and gaze predatory.

“You’re right,” said the man, seizing him by the arm and beginning to drag him towards the biolab across the corridor, which of course wouldn’t be locked. “So eerie, how you can be this inside-out version of him and then for a second be just like him.”

In a stomach-turning move, Spock felt his own latent telekinesis work with not-McCoy’s push through the door, which sent him sprawling on the deck, where the not-doctor had a phaser trained on him, set to kill. He found he was breathing heavily.

“For example,” said the man, conversational, “pulling psionic power from my master would be unthinkable. I only considered the theoretical possibility when I felt how open you were to me. Adorable, really.”

“You still insist upon your fictive enslavement, then?”

“Oh,” said not-McCoy. “That’s all true. Commander Spock merely recognized that an asset like me could only be fully exploited if persuaded, not compelled.” 

“I cannot fathom what a man like him could possibly offer a man like you,” Spock snapped.

McCoy gave him a cool assessment. “Fascinating. You actually can’t, can you? You’re like a mirror image. You’re terrified of losing control of yourself and hurting someone so badly you’ll be alone till you die. My master is terrified of losing control over everything else, not being strong enough to always fight back and win.”

In some distant, quiet corner of his mind, Spock apologized to the real Dr. McCoy for complaining so vehemently about his armchair psychologizing.

“As to what he can offer me,” said not-McCoy, “that’s simple. Vengeance, obviously.”

Spock had no idea what was so obvious about that, as he couldn’t imagine what a Leonard McCoy fixated on revenge even meant - the doctor was forgiving to an illogical degree.

The man proceeded to draw an almost invisible chain from beneath his shirts, revealing what was clearly a dataprobe, already configured for a standard Starfleet input port. How on earth had that made it past their scans?

“You planned this,” said Spock. “With him. This wasn’t a transporter accident.”

“If it makes you feel any better, it’s for a noble cause,” he said, and snickered. “We’re the good Terrans, the ones who want to bring the great empire to its knees. We just find your Federation so inspiring.”

He inserted the probe into the lab computer, and the screen flickered. Spock was a bit uneasy. He was quite confident in his skill as a programmer and systems architect, and that in any other circumstance no data breach would get more than surface or corrupted data. In this case, a version of himself was the one hacking the system. 

“You just want information,” he said, recalling he had, on instinct, referred to something this man knew as “Memory Omega,” which he guessed was an allusion to the library planetoid, Memory Alpha. “That’s what this was all for?”

“You’re surprised? If you wanted to destabilize a quadrant to change the balance of power, wouldn’t you gather intelligence and leverage to achieve your aim? Spock knows the empire must fall to chaos and that we need to be prepared for the rise of a new order so that less will be lost in the crucible of war and revolution. You’re Vulcan enough, you’d probably think it’s the most logical thing to do.”

Spock in point of fact had spent a negligible amount of time plotting interstellar domination or positioning himself within centuries-worth of projected events, and wasn’t even sure why this would interest him, but if it ever did, he probably would think that was a logical approach. He vaguely remembered liking an old science fiction series that his mother favored, The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, as a child. Not that “psychohistory” was anything other than whimsical wish-fulfillment for the mathematically-inclined, of course; his mother, at his father’s insistence, had explained it was a bourgeois co-option of real historical disciplines rooted in dialectical materialism and class war.

This train of thought would be best reserved for a time when a volatile human who can read my mind does not have a phaser pointed at me, he scolded himself.

“Oh, it’ll take a few minutes to get the data we need,” said not-McCoy. “By all means think about how our life's work reminds you of an old book you jerked off to as a kid.”

I never jerked off to The Foundation Trilogy - who would do tha-

“Enough,” said the doppelgänger, glancing at the progress bar on the terminal screen, and also, Spock noted, a minute timer added to the visual interface. “I’m bored.” He sighed. “This place is so underwhelming, you know? Saying I have a message for Section 31 is going to be anticlimactic.”

Spock flinched. He couldn’t help it.

“Oh, does it scare you if I say the name aloud? Is it like in Beetlejuice? Do you think they’re listening? Section 31. Section 31.” The man made a show of looking dramatically around and then cackled. He glanced again at the screen, checking again.

“You poor thing,” cooed not-McCoy, his grin widening, looking slightly off to the side as though at something that wasn’t there. “They’re going to drag you in by that firm ass for questioning, and whoever comes back from that? Maybe your little doctor too, or whatever’s left of him. The message, by the way, is that Memory Omega would welcome more intentional collaboration should they ever want to pop in.”

Spock’s mouth dropped open in mute horror. At the implications of any of that possibly being true, let alone the fact that now he knew about it.

“Yeah, the paperwork is going to be a bitch today, isn’t it, kitten? Whatever will you say in your report?”

Not the truth, obviously, which was likely the entire point. Which raised an interesting possibility. Also, kitten? That’s worse than “my master,” Spock thought, before realizing that thinking so probably made him a bad person.

“My day would certainly be easier if I didn’t have to explain why you’re hacking the computers of the Starfleet flagship,” Spock said, glancing nervously at the progress bar.

“And why, kitten, would I care about making your day easier?”

“What do you want?”

Spock was highly doubtful it was anything he’d be willing to give, but it was worth a shot. The Terran, to Spock’s surprise, leaned over and paused the program.

“Just some answers, nothing that you’ll lose sleep over. And the probe will conveniently malfunction.”

“Answers about what?”

“I want to know about the woman. I want to know who she is and what she and her pet Vulcan want with Commander Spock.”

Whatever Spock had expected, it wasn’t that. There was something weighted in the not-doctor’s words, as though the woman were “The Woman.” In surreal disarray, Spock said, “Do you mean Irene Adler?”

McCoy gave him an incredulous look. "I'm sorry, did you just panic and ask if I was talking about a villain in The Triumphs of Doctor Moriarty? You're also a descendent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, aren't you?"

Spock said nothing as the answer was shamefully apparent. Not-McCoy rolled his eyes.

“No, sugar, I'm not talking about a fictional character. This bitch looks like a hot lizard demon. Leggy. Mouthy. I’ve never seen a non-human act like that, even a Vulcan. She was traveling with an old Vulcan man, who she keeps calling ambassador. He feels like your universe, but the woman - she just feels wrong.” The man shivered in disgust.

Spock blinked. This did not sound remotely familiar. “I do not know anyone like that.” McCoy was frowning, eyes narrowing. “My father is an ambassador,” he said, quickly. That had been the only other thought that had occurred to him. 

“I know he's not Inquisitor Sarek, I'd recognize my own father-in-law,” snapped the man. His frown changed. “I believe you. So, this was pointless.” He looked beyond Spock at the wall, his gaze unfocusing. Then he started to laugh again, ripped the probe out of the input, and dropped the phaser, which was somehow even less reassuring.

“Is there anything else that you want?” The words tore out of Spock, anything to make it stop.

“Joanna,” said the man, with his empty eyes, his smile dreamy. “Where is she? Is she here?”

“I don’t know who that is,” said Spock, as the familiar sound and dispersion of a transporter beam slowly erased the laughing specter from his reality.

He sat for five full seconds, sprawled on the floor of the lab, alone. Then he slowly stood and went to a comm station, telling the security team to stand down and send medics. Then he was rushing to the turbolifts. It was illogical, but he had to - he had to see.

 

***

 

He was almost out of breath when he arrived, but collected himself, impassive, as the captain, the doctor, Scotty, and Uhura materialized on the transporter pad. Spock found himself avoiding looking at the doctor directly.

When he did allow himself to look at the doctor, the doctor looked back without particular aversion or reaction. He seemed tired, at least. Exhausted, really. He allowed himself a brief moment of hope, as they made their way back to the bridge, that Dr. McCoy’s exposure to his imperial Terran counterpart had been minimal and uneventful. The doctor was even able to joke that he preferred Spock with a beard, as though everything was fine. Maybe it was fine?

This hope was swiftly dashed as Dr. McCoy excused himself to “go see Dr. Tola.” Then again, Spock had made a point of requesting that Dr. Tola examine the doctor regardless. The feeling of hope, however, did not come back.

Uncharacteristically - but unsurprisingly, considering the classified messages from Starfleet Command he and the captain were receiving - the senior staff debriefed in private with the captain instead of in the conference room. That didn’t mean, however, that all the reports weren’t sent to him for secondary approval.

Prior to our transport out, I asked the captain to allow me to stay behind and treat the half-Vulcan first officer of the ISS Enterprise, who had suffered a blow to the head during our altercation. Contrary to my readings, he regained consciousness when we were alone and perhaps used some form of susceptive telepathy to hold me still and initiated a version of a Vulcan mind-meld. I do not know what information he did or did not find, as from my perspective, I passed out shortly after the meld began. I came to when he was half-carrying me to the transporter room, at which point he helped the rest of us beam back to the Enterprise.

The events the doctor described were unambiguous: his counterpart had raped Dr. McCoy’s mind.

All the fear he had felt, as that not-McCoy had described his relationship with the other Spock, came rushing back tenfold, and no amount of meditation seemed to completely allay it.

He began watching the doctor’s behavior when they were in the same room with an intensity he had not possessed since the doctor’s first weeks on the Enterprise, looking for some clue, some sign of distress. And there were clues, or suggestive possibilities. The doctor was in the habit of being early or late to most meetings and appointments, usually early, but for weeks he’d been arriving at senior staff meetings exactly on time. He could have sworn he’d once seen the doctor self-administer a hypo-spray outside the briefing room when he himself had been running late. The doctor didn’t avoid him, didn’t really treat him any differently, which he still found odd. He knew the doctor’s… preoccupation with his health after the pon farr debacle was merely collegial, but he had gotten the sense that something, hard to place, had shifted. That they’d gotten… closer. But it was almost as if things between them had reset. And, more telling, Jim seemed awkward and unsure around him. He covered it well, but at one point even tried to compare him to Satan on the bridge out of nowhere.

He told himself that he was likely - what was the human term? - projecting, and that while it was likely true that there was some emotional difficulty to overcome with his friends due to these awful events, it wasn’t, exactly, personal. He was doing well enough, telling himself that, until they got trapped on a planet Dr. McCoy had called very “Halloween.” The doctor and several other members of the away team ended up being possessed and controlled by the aliens’ very powerful susceptive telepathy, perhaps even more powerful than that of the Talosians.

When they’d finally concluded their macabre misadventure and beamed up, Dr. McCoy took one step away from the transporter and collapsed. Without thinking, Spock had moved to catch him, holding him up by the arms, sensing an odd jolt of mental activity, and the doctor had flinched away from him, dramatically, muttering, "Jesus Christ, please just calm down." McCoy then looked dazed and glanced up at him as though just seeing him.

“Bones,” said Jim, starting forward. “What’s wrong?”

“Took more outta me than usual,” he said, gruff. “Excuse me, gotta check on something.” With that cryptic declaration, he’d turned around and left the transporter room.

Spock hadn’t been needed on the bridge, and had spent about an hour pacing around his quarters trying to convince himself to let it go before finally asking the computer for Dr. McCoy’s location and heading to sickbay without a clear plan.

He was brought up short at the door to the doctor’s office, where McCoy was staring at a full bottle of Saurian brandy, with an empty and dry glass beside it.

The doctor glanced at him with a mild expression, no longer visibly tense or on-edge. “Mr. Spock, since when do you spend a minute more in sickbay than you have to? What’s going on?”

“Doctor, I -” Spock hadn’t actually thought this part out. “Doctor,” he began again, defaulting to the truth, “I came to express a concern about the recent away mission, that you experienced such intense and immediate somatic effects after being exposed to powerful susceptive telepathy.”

“Okay,” said the doctor, his expression neutral. “I don’t know why this incident stood out to you in particular, as it seems like we’re getting psychically bamboozled every other week, but I already got checked out by Dr. Tola.”

“It stood out to me because it’s your first exposure to psionic influence after your time in the imperial Terran universe.”

“Ah,” said the doctor, voice flat. Spock felt relieved and anxious that McCoy didn’t seem to be confused by this statement. “I was wondering when we were going to have this conversation.”

Spock still stood, unsure, in the doorway, but McCoy waved him in, and asked him to take a seat. “Now, out with it, man, what bee got in your bonnet?”

“I am concerned, doctor, that you may not be aware of some of the… possible side effects of mind melds. There are several neurological complica-”

Dr. McCoy held up a hand. “Spock, I don’t have Pa’nar Syndrome.”

Spock blinked. After the pon farr situation, he really shouldn’t be surprised at the doctor’s random familiarity with Vulcan health conditions. “I am… relieved to know you are aware of the condition, doctor, but the diagnosis is not always so clearcut and your symptoms, the brief projection I received -”

“I am aware, Mr. Spock,” McCoy replied, “which is why I have been consulting with other medical professionals on my case.”

“The paradigms of human medicine -”

“The symptoms you noticed were side effects of my current dose of Lexorin and getting the whammy from those lil psychic furballs down there.”

“Doctor,” said Spock, trying to remain seated and not leap out of his chair. Lexorin? “Psychic PrEP,” as Sybok called it, even though this was a technically imprecise analogy. “That drug is completely unregulated in the Federation at large and only prescribed by Vulcan healers. It can be habit-forming, and the side effects -“

“Good thing, then,” said McCoy, some welcome grumbling coming back into his tone, “that I was prescribed Lexorin by a Vulcan healer. Priestess K’Ryla at the Mount Seleya monastery.”

Spock blinked. That was… plausible, actually, aside from the fact that the waitlist for aliens at Mount Seleya was infamously long.

“We’re in deep space, Mr. Spock, and I’m the CMO,” said the doctor. “I knew it would be some time before I could see a healer for a corrective mind meld; I’ve been checking in with her regularly and consulting with M’Benga and Dr. Tola. If it becomes an emergency, you as XO or the captain would get my paperwork for emergency leave.”

“I… see,” he said. “That is a… reasonable explanation for your behavior in the transporter room.”

“Ya think?”

Spock slowly rose to go. 

There was the other piece, the unspeakable, terrible piece, that flinch, but there was something closed in the doctor’s expression that strongly implied the conversation was over.

 

***

 

Still, the doctor continued to act neither interested or particularly averse to his company in the days that followed. One morning when Dr. McCoy was walking him to the bridge from their adjoining quarters, he frowned after a crewman who’d greeted him, and Spock took a chance at, well, conversation.

“Something wrong?”

“Yes,” said McCoy. “There’s something odd about that man, and I can’t quite pinpoint it.”

“Perhaps you’re making a rather hasty judgment. Mr. Norman has only been aboard seventy two hours.”

Now McCoy was frowning at him. “I know when something doesn’t strike me right, and he doesn’t.”

“Specifics, doctor,” said Spock and glared. “Labels do not make arguments.” Well, so much for being friendly, he thought.

McCoy took a breath, as though gearing up for a pole vault. “All right. There’s something wrong about a man who never smiles, whose conversation never varies from the routine of the job, and who won’t talk about his background.”

Spock was momentarily stunned into silence. “I see.”

McCoy seemed to have a belated realization and leaned forward. “Spock, I mean that it’s odd for a non-Vulcan. The ears make all the difference.”

Spock felt off-kilter. Solicitude and the doctor’s subsequent confidences had turned to antagonism that had become personally insulting and now… flirtatious? How had…?

“I find your augment strewn with gaping defects in logic,” he said, and tried not to cringe internally at using the word “gaping” in any context in reference to the doctor.

“Maybe,” said McCoy, with a new intensity, “but you can’t evaluate a man by logic alone. Besides, he has avoided two appointments that I’ve made for his physical without reason.”

“That’s not at all surprising, doctor,” Spock replied, his tone heated. “He’s probably terrified of your beads… and rattles.”

They looked at each other, tension suddenly crackling between them, unnamed. Then the turbolift opened and they snapped out of it, back to a business-like neutral. What was that?

Annoyingly, Dr. McCoy’s “intuition” was in this case dead-on and Crewman Norman turned out to be an extremely sophisticated android who took over the Enterprise and navigated them to an uncharted planet.

Even more annoying, the planet was populated by other androids, remnants of an advanced civilization from the Andromeda galaxy, who all served the interests of Harcourt Fenton Mudd in order to have a sense of purpose. He, having become the ruler of his own personal paradise, had become bored and wanted to strand them there instead.

Because Harry Mudd was devious but not particularly cautious, he and the rest of the away team - or hostages - were soon allowed free-run of the place, and Spock quickly located the central computer that coordinated the android population. He then, having some free time, investigated the research laboratories, where he found Dr. McCoy. The facilities were breathtaking and remarkable, and they roamed in silent agreement between lab stations and terminals. As they walked back to rendezvous with the others, they found themselves walking with a crowd of various android models of extremely pretty women.

“Do you think Mudd even makes male androids?” McCoy was staring around, wide-eyed and exasperated.

“We have not seen enough to -”

He and the doctor stopped dead as they entered a corridor with walls of glass, where they could see below the walkway a vast enclosed greenhouse, like an Olympic field, with many male androids with very few items of clothing. They were lounging in leather or lace on opulent chaise lounges or rubbing oil into each other’s skin, no one model looking like another, all shapes, sizes, and colors. Upon further inspection, not all of the synthetic beings were in states of repose. A few seem to be gathered around teaching boards in various corners paying rapt attention to a lecturing android on, it appeared, proper methods of preparing human rectums for penetration. At another “workshop,” the androids started pairing off and were practicing fellatio.

He and the doctor proceeded to stand, eyes glued to the windows, for a full five minutes, mesmerized. 

“Uh,” said McCoy, finally. “We should - we should go. I won’t tell anyone about this if you don’t.”

Spock shook himself and started walking with the doctor. “I see no logical reason why this needs to be in the mission report.”

“Exactly,” said the doctor, nodding vigorously. “Gonna bleach this out of my brain.”

“Agreed,” he replied.

“We should never tell Jim,” he and the doctor then said at once.

“Not until we’re at least five sectors away,” said McCoy.

Spock nodded and they continued in silence.

Spock was sort of out of it for the rest of the highly silly interlude, half-heartedly suggesting his standard fix, “breaking the robots by acting irrationally,” which was his equivalent of “have you tried turning it on and off?” This was accepted in the same exhausted spirit in which it had been extended. Chekov - who Spock vaguely couldn’t help thinking he had woefully neglected since his arrival - asked the captain what was next.

“Next,” said Jim, faking a hint of mischief, “we take the Alices on a trip through wonderland.”

Spock did actually find himself surrounded by Alices that were far too accommodating. Alice 27 kept asking him for feedback on her proposed adjustments to the Enterprise's warp engines. 

“Of course,” he said, dully. “Your computations would inevitably lead to a total description of the parabolic intersection of dimension with dimension.”

“Mr. Spock,” said Alice 27, “you have a remarkably logical and analytical mind.”

“Thank you,” he said, deciding he was too bored to overthink this. 

Without warning, he applied a Vulcan nerve pinch on Alice 210. Nothing happened.

“Is there some significance to this action?”

“I love you,” he told her. “However, I hate you.”

She paused. “But I’m identical in every way with Alice 27.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, with the blunt confession of a dreaming self. “That is exactly why I hate you. Because you are identical.”

That did it, and both Alices powered down.

“Fascinating,” he said, even though it really wasn’t.

He sort of daydreamed through the rest of the improvised theater of the absurd that perplexed the androids into malfunction, and almost felt disoriented when the doctor got attention his attention again.

“Well, you must be very unhappy, Mr. Spock,” said McCoy.

“That is a human emotion, doctor, with which I am totally unfamiliar,” he said, remembering to be a person enough to be a brat. “How could I be unhappy?”

“Well, we found a whole world of minds that work just like yours. Logical, unemotional, completely pragmatic. And we poor, irrational humans whipped them in a fair fight. Now you’ll find yourself back among us illogical humans again.”

There was an edge to it, but it felt different than usual. “Which I find eminently satisfactory, doctor,” he said smoothly, “for nowhere am I so desperately needed as among a shipload of illogical humans.”

“Touché, Bones,” Jim said, cheerful, and then continued to either chastise or flirt with Harry Mudd for a while, impossible to tell. Not for long enough that Spock could determine what had gotten into him today, however.

Jim, delivering his last word - “have fun! - turned away, smirking, before Mudd croaked out “wait!”

“What is it now, Harry?”

“I have the invitation code for the Winter Lights Festival on Casperia Prime.”

All of them - Spock, Jim, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty, Chekov - pivoted to stare at him, completely attentive.

“You have - Harry,” said Jim, eyes wide, “you’ve been under fancy house arrest, how do you have an in at the swankiest, biggest, wildest party in the Beta Quadrant?”

“I have my ways,” said Mudd, with a bedraggled dignity. “That’s why I was so keen on leaving this planet now, laddybuck.”

“Well, suddenly this weird-ass scheme of yours makes an order of magnitude more sense,” said Jim, “but are you trying to bribe me? Because, honestly, A for effort, but I’m not going to -”

“No, no,” said Mudd, resigned. “I know. But someone should have fun. Let me live vicariously through you.”

“Uh,” said Jim, genuinely stumped.

“You know, Jim,” said McCoy, “we are overdue on a little R and R. It’s been a bit touch and go, doing our job on this robot paradise planet. We’ve been flirting with burnout for months.”

“I almost let them put my brain in an immortal and beautiful robot body,” offered Uhura.

“See, that there is a clear symptom of burnout,” said McCoy, gravely.

“True,” said Jim, who rubbed his chin. “But would the Winter Lights Festival have anything for straight people? Everyone on the Enterprise has to be into it.”

Everyone glanced at Scotty.

“Why are you looking at me? What would I know about straight people?”

They all lapsed into thoughtful silence, perhaps, like Spock, trying to come up with at least one straight person on the Enterprise.

“There are appealing natural attractions on Casperia Prime, I believe,” said Spock, giving up. “Hikes, winter sports, and various water-related activities.”

“Sounds like there’s something for everyone,” said McCoy.

Notes:

Next up, a Risa episode, which is sure to be super relaxing and uneventful as all Risa episodes are.

Episodes referenced:

“Who Mourns for Adonais?” (background) -> “The Changeling” (background, dialogue, coda) -> “Mirror, Mirror” (missing scenes, dialogue) -> “The Apple” (background) -> “Catspaw” (background) -> “I, Mudd” (dialogue, missing scenes, coda)

Kal-toh and the keethera, as well as controlling fire, are Voyager/Tuvok references. (Mainly "Flashback" and "The Gift.")

Um, at the risk of over-explaining a "joke" (not a joke), there's a lot going on in Spock's Nomad-induced panic attack that's referring to TMP, ST Picard, Discovery, and (maybe) the Borg. All in due time, but I feel like it's not giving too much away to say the primary reason this series exists is because the parallels between Nomad, V'Ger, Control, Romulan robot armageddon conspiracy theories, and the Borg drove me absolutely nuts. I'm sure it's not that deep and generations of writers are just riffing on the usual scifi themes, but it's just too many coincidences for my peace of mind.

Although Emperor Georgiou does not threaten Spock with a good time on Discovery, she absolutely sexually harasses Culber and Stamets for not being bi in the prime universe and calls Culber "papí." I think she does have Vulcan love slaves (hah!), but I might be thinking about Mirror Kira.

Mirror McCoy and Mirror Spock were tricky, because I wanted to foreground how terrible Mirror Spock’s encounter with Dr. McCoy is, but at the same time in their own universe, Spock and McCoy kind of deserve each other and are sort of the good guys, comparatively. (The bar is in hell.) There’s going to be a bit more fallout in the next few chapters.

Also, there is a trope in Spones “Mirror” fics that Spock melding with McCoy to heal him after is this very sweet and romantic thing, and they are pretty moving. However, I wanted to try something different, the less rosy reality that a) Spock is a powerful telepath but he’s by no means trained and certainly not trained as a healer and b) psychologically speaking, having Spock poke around in McCoy’s head after that trauma sounds like very bad therapeutic practice. McCoy is just being a grown up.

I've enjoyed quite a few "telepathic Bones" AUs, but just wanted to flag that this is not supposed to be an AU and McCoy will not be going Dark Phoenix or anything.

The Stone of Gol is a real weapon in canon, showcased in the TNG two-parter, "Gambit." Sudoc is a warlord and archnemesis of Surak in the RPG sourcebook.

Memory Omega being like Mirror Spock’s First Foundation a la Asimov as well as Section 31 sniffing around the mirror universe is a beta canon idea from David Mack, who also, for the record, is the one who came up with the original concept of Control. I have my quarrels with him when it comes to characterization because I am OPINIONATED about how to portray Julian Bashir and Garak, but I do end up playing with a lot of his ideas. He and Una McCormack (a Garashir writer from the 90s who now writes the licensed Cardassian stuff and a bunch of Picard and Discovery Star Trek novels these days) probably have the most influence on this series so far in terms of world-building.

"The Triumphs of Doctor Moriarty" is an allusion to Mirror Phlox in "In a Mirror, Darkly," discovering that literature from the prime universe is similar but has too many themes about "compassion and heroism," which prompted me to think about what the mirror Sherlock Holmes would be called.

Pa'nar Syndrome is (not kidding) sort of like Vulcan AIDS, and is the result of a faulty mind-meld. This and "mind rape" is explored in "Fusion" and "Stigma" on Enterprise.

Lexorin is a reference to a drug McCoy takes after Spock dies and hitches a ride in McCoy's brain, but my elaboration of its uses is my own invention.

All of the suspiciously flirty dialogue during "I, Mudd" is actually verbatim from the script!

Casperia Prime is a real pleasure planet in canon - it's where Worf and Dax go on their honeymoon - and it seems likely it's in the Beta Quadrant. Mainly I wanted to do Risa without literally doing Risa.

My joke about not knowing if there are any straight people is a reference to the fact that I literally can't think of a character on SNW who seems unambiguously straight. In all seriousness, I firmly believe people are way more queer in the 23rd century and there's only so much heterosexuality on Star Trek because it's a TV show in America.

Like if you'd be tempted at least a little bit to have your brain installed in an immortal and beautiful robot body; comment if you too would like the invitation code to an awesome gay party on Casperia Prime.

Chapter 9: Go Ask Alice

Summary:

Spock actually takes shore leave for once and definitely does not have daddy issues.

Notes:

Oops, this is long. Because the beginning of Season 2 of TOS is so rich for Spock's character development we're spending a lot of time here, but I'm hoping to pick up the pace a bit with the next chapter.

Content Notes:
Use of the f-slur by someone who would use it about themselves, threats of violence against family, death of minor original characters in a thriller setting, discussion of "passing" and anti-interspecies marriage that may parallel Earth situations, discussion of Vulcan homophobia. Um, acid rock and prog? Discussion of something a character considers a possible form of slavery. There's plot in this one.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

[2267; Casperia Prime, USS Enterprise; Beta Quadrant]


Spock had put himself in the last beam-down group to the archipelago on Casperia Prime that hosted the Winter Lights Festival, but he still hadn’t taken the time to figure out what he was going to wear.

He stared at his closet far longer than the paucity of civilian clothing he possessed deserved. After a moment, he reached for a few items at the back of the closet and bureau. Following a sudden whim, he tousled his hair a bit, breaking up the perfect line of his bangs. He spent some time styling it with old tools he’d banished to a bottom drawer long ago, and did a more elaborate makeup look than usual. He didn’t look the way he did ten years ago, but he felt comfortable, lighter. 

Although everyone was also in civvies, he got a lot of stares in the transporter room, even from McCoy. The entire senior staff had taken the last slot, it seemed.

“Spock,” said Jim, almost bouncing, “are you wearing leather pants?”

“Vegan leather pants,” said McCoy, contemplative.

As the two men had sorted this out on their own, Spock had nothing to add. They all beamed down to a cool and crisp field redolent with fruit and flowers and fragrant wood, and twinkling lights and stages spread out as far as the eye could see. By unspoken agreement, everyone scattered to their own adventures.

Spock walked for a while, past impromptu art installations, concert and theater stages, occasional tasteful fetish demonstrations, pop up cafes with catering from all over the quadrant, mobile bars. None of the music or the scenery clashed as scene melted into scene. There were endless streams of people, but no crowds. 

He, of course, had never been to Casperia Prime, an up-and-coming competitor to Risa as a Federation-friendly pleasure planet, but he had been subjected to effusive descriptions of the Winter Lights Festival by Sybok on numerous occasions. He had taken this with an enormous grain of salt, but on one memorable occasion, a very young Sybok and Michael had snuck off before her graduation from the VSA, and her reports had been highly favorable as well. 

“There’s really something for everyone,” she had said. “Intimate spaces and hyper-public spaces. There’s high-adrenaline and high-stimulus environments but also plenty of engaging pursuits for observers and contemplatives.”

“Voyeurs, you mean,” Sybok had said.

“Oh, for them too,” she’d said, with an endearing obliviousness. “I actually attended a stunning lecture on textile art across the Alpha Quadrant and then caught a show from my favorite Andorian ice-wave band in a crowd of only a couple hundred people. Best fusion cuisine I’ve ever had, too. Really reminded me of the theory that an interstellar culture is as much an aesthetic practice as a political -”

“There was also that lesbian couple from Xahea,” Sybok had chirped. “Seemed really informative for you. As a xenoanthropologist.”

Michael had then tackled him and they’d mock sparred in the courtyard of the family compound. In the twilight of memory, he enjoyed the youthful brio, though at the time he had been anxious to get back to his schoolwork and worried Sarek might overhear the commotion.

Anyway, Spock was impressed, not by the lavishness and sophistication of the festival, but by the fact that he was enjoying himself with little effort on his part. After exploring for a while, he drifted towards a string ensemble from Ardana, and leaned against a smoky-smelling tree at what he thought was a reasonable distance.

Spock idly scanned the crowd and to his surprise saw another Vulcan nearby. He would not have expected any of his people to find an event on Casperia Prime appealing. Aside from Sybok, obviously. He also would not have expected the man to have shoulder-length ash blonde hair with soft, natural waves. He had also never seen a Vulcan wear blue jeans. Spock rejected out of hand devoting any mental resources to assessing whether the stranger was v’tosh k’atur: now more than ever he firmly believed it was none of his business.

Spock had been looking at the man too long, and the stranger met his eyes with a shocking, wry half-smirk and raised his drink in a bewilderingly casual gesture of acknowledgment. He tore his eyes away and stared resolutely at the stage. Within minutes, however, he felt the subtle signature of a Vulcan telepath at his side, a polite gesture to be so obvious. To his further surprise, he felt a long-fingered hand lightly on his arm, getting his attention.

Spock was forced to look up, slightly, at the man. Up close he was very striking and uncharacteristically “rugged” for a Vulcan, with a nose almost as prominent as his own and with stubble as robust as his own could be; his eyebrows were softer, somehow less severe than average. Spock froze as he spotted a furry dusting of blonde hair on the man’s arms where his shirt had been rolled up, and on what chest was visible in the deep V of his half-buttoned flannel. It was almost as if -

“Honey,” said the man in English in a soft drawl, “let’s get you a fresh drink and a spot to watch that’s further out - the volume must be makin’ ya miserable.”

So startled by the bizarre contradiction of a Vulcan with an unplaceable Southern accent reminiscent of Dr. McCoy’s, he let the man guide him to an open bar further out from the stage. Also, he was right - he hadn’t even noticed how painfully loud everything had been, despite the subtlety of the instrumentation.

The drink, some sort of herbal spritzer with a hint of Romulan liquor, was perfect, and Spock fell back into contemplation of his new companion.

“I rarely meet Vulcans who can speak English,” he said, switching to the language himself. “Have you spent time on Earth?”

“Not lately,” said the man. “And same.”

“Is it your intention to socialize with me?” Spock felt almost giddy with relief that this was a normal and not odd thing to say for once.

“I’d find that highly agreeable, sugar,” said the blonde Vulcan, in a tone that could be either flirtatious or reassuringly friendly. He was studying Spock now, too. 

“I mean no offense,” said Spock, “but do you happen to have human heritage as well as Vulcan?”

Even by the standards of Vulcan propriety, this level of directness was slightly rude, but all the man did was have a look of dawning realization.

“You’re Spock,” he said. His demeanor changed slightly, the edge of flirtation swiftly retreating. “I’ve only seen pictures of you in uniform. Your hair looks great, by the way. And yeah, I’m half too.”

A half-Vulcan. A half human, half-Vulcan man. Who seemed to be less interested in their conversation now that he knew who he was. He felt a tremor of nervousness at the back of his mind, and realized he was worried he was being rejected - how… juvenile. “Does that change your desire to… socialize with me?”

“In the sense that I’m no longer trying to get you into bed,” the man replied, with comforting frankness. “I’m old enough to be your father. You’re a grown man, but in this case I literally grew up with your father. I’m friends with your brother, too. If it makes you feel better, Sybok flirted with me even more when he figured out who I was. I, uh, declined, obviously.”

“Of course he did,” Spock muttered and he rolled his eyes before he could help himself.

“Jeez, now I know why Sybok pestered me about going to this shindig: I have no idea if he was trying to get us to hook up because he has a twisted sense of humor or he wanted me to check up on you because you just had the most ridiculous public break up in recent Vulcan memory. You should come over to my place. I’ve been living here almost a year: artist residency. My house and studio are nearby.  It’s quieter there, and we can talk.”

“That would be most agreeable,” said Spock, feeling excited and shy, which he hadn’t felt for a long time. “And knowing Sybok, it could be either or both.”

They walked together away from the crowd. “It is… surprising to me that my father knew a half-human Vulcan in his youth,” he admitted.

“Wasn’t on your Sarek bingo card, huh?”

“Sarek bingo card?”

“Inside joke. Our families were old friends.”

They walked along a lovely moons-lit path in companionable silence. Spock was rapidly considering which family among his family’s social circle could have, in secret, had a half-human member.

“You’ll have a hard time proving it, but I’m T’Pol’s son,” his new acquaintance offered. “I know you were thinking about it.”

Spock tried to digest this extremely shocking piece of information. It was both unthinkable and made a lot of sense. His hand drifted to the chain of the IDIC pendant around his neck.

“I suppose that means I’m half human, a quarter Vulcan, and a quarter Romulan,” his companion said, with faint bitterness. “If that impacts your desire to socialize with me.”

“It does not,” Spock said without hesitation. “You’re Lorian. You have a sister, T’Mir. Her work on transwarp theory is inspired.”

“I do and it is. She’s still on Vulcan, passes for full. She’s T’Pau’s daughter-in-law, so no one will look too hard at her… background, even if our mother did have to go and be a stubborn martyr about everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if us getting left alone was the main incentive for mother agreeing to do that, not that she asked us what we’d prefer.”

“Many across the Federation disagree with the Council’s actions,” said Spock.

“You as a Starfleet officer have no opinion to share on the matter, I reckon,” said Lorian.

“Of course,” said Spock, and raised an eyebrow. “I must admit, I am now curious how you came to meet my brother.”

“We have certain… intellectual interests in common, and I introduced Sybok to his bondmate,” said Lorian, amused. “Angel is a very… promising young person. A lot of potential.”

For what? Larceny? Con artistry?

“Are you… in the same line of work?” Spock hated how strangled he sounded, but if there was one Vulcan who wouldn’t care about emotional expressivity, it was likely this one.

Lorian quirked an eyebrow and looked him up and down, reminding Spock that he was a Starfleet commander and the first officer of the Enterprise.

The older man’s mouth twitched into and out of a smile. “No?”

Spock suppressed a pained expression and radiated embarrassment.

They reached a dwelling built into a gently sloped hill covered in grass that glowed indigo by moonlight. As they entered, muted lights in various corners lit up a comfortable sunken sitting room lined with paper books past the doorway, the dwelling itself seemingly composed of earth, glass, and wood. Not Vulcan, but highly attractive to a Vulcan sensibility. Lorian told him to sit anywhere, and Spock settled on a firm cushion against a panel of glass looking out on a moons-drenched atrium. Lorian was fussing with a low-yield synthesizer by the wall, and handed him an elegant glass of iced tea, which was, to his mild surprise, dandelion with a dash of oat milk.

“In all seriousness,” said Lorian, settling down beside him, “I met Angel when they were very young and attempting to leave their… obligations to Federation security. I served as a mentor of sorts for a while before they… branched out.”

“They were Starfleet? But Angel was only posing as Dr. Aspen,” said Spock, feeling lost and even more embarrassed. But even more than embarrassed, anticipatory, as though something very important was about to happen.

“I can’t keep up with who Angel impersonates, but no, not Starfleet, not exactly.”

The base of Spock’s spine went cold, and he repressed a shiver. Section 31. Which begged the question: what kind of artist was Lorian, anyway?

“So,” said Lorian, taking a sip of his tea, “now’s when I ask you how you’re doing after that T’Pring debacle.”

Actually, Spock had almost forgotten how very recent that disaster had been. There had been too many personal disasters in short succession, but he supposed he was no more recovered from the experience than he had been before things had gotten worse.

“I don’t know,” Spock confessed, tipping his head back against the glass and looking at deep shadows playing across the ceiling. “The experience was humiliating, terrifying, and violating.”

“I’ll bet,” said Lorian. “Must have been a shock too. I mean, how would you know when or if you’d go into pon farr?”

“The scientists at the VSA said I would never experience pon farr,” he said, quietly.

“I didn’t go into pon farr until my forties, just a bit older than you,” said Lorian, matter-of-fact.

“If it would not be too forward,” said Spock, too burned, somewhere inside, to feel ashamed of speaking of these forbidden things, “I’d be interested to know how you’ve handled your cycle. Sometimes I think I should just go to Mount Kolinahr and be done with it.”

Lorian whistled. “Damn, that’s… drastic. I don’t know if it’ll be the same for you, but I actually don’t have a pon farr cycle, per se. I’ve only experienced it twice after a stressful telepathic event that whacked out my hormones. I handled it by getting laid. There are more people than you think who can’t get zapped into plak tow. Sybok has some new meditation thing that might work, too.”

“Oh,” said Spock. “I did get possessed by telepathic spores that interfered with my bonding pathways shortly before my symptoms began.”

“That would do it if it were me,” said Lorian. “But it’s not like there’s much of a sample size when it comes to men like us.”

Men like us. Spock let out a sigh, and felt a restful lightness settle in his gut, his shoulders relaxing. The tea was rather good. He hadn’t had dandelion tea since he was at the Academy. What an unexpected possibility, like a gift, that he might not have a pon farr cycle after all.

“I don’t know why Sarek arranged for me to go through the koon-ut-la,” he said. “I was complacent about it for a long time, but in retrospect it’s obvious that a traditional marriage never would have worked out for me.”

“Sarek and I haven’t had a real conversation in decades,” said Lorian, “but I admit that surprises me too. I’d be tempted to say that he and I came of age in a very different time with very different expectations, but he had the most bohemian and cosmopolitan upbringing of anyone I knew. Skon certainly didn’t have him go through the koon-ut-la.”

“I didn’t know that - I suppose I always assumed my father’s childhood was very traditional.”

“If he’d been born ten or fifteen years earlier, it might’ve been. My daddy used to get a rise out of mother saying the first generation raised with the Kir’Shara and the Federation were Vulcan flower children. It’s hard to describe the impact all that had on the previous generation, and what kinda rifts opened up between parents and children. Skon embraced the new age with open arms, but T’Rama, your grandmother, wanted nothing to do with any of it. She was in the VEG, off-world all the time, rattled from the war with the Romulans, and basically disowned her own husband and her youngest son, taking your uncle Silek with her, even though he was nearly a grown-ass man by that time.”

Lorian paused for a moment, looking vaguely surprised he’d said so much. “Goddamn,” he said, and took a sip of his tea, “I haven’t talked about this in ages.”

“I appreciate anything you can share very much. All of this was unknown to me. I didn’t -” Spock dropped his head, feeling ashamed in a way he hadn’t since he was a teenager. “I wasn’t aware I had an uncle.”

Lorian didn’t look shocked to hear this. He just nodded, pressing his mouth into a grim line. “Sarek, the baby of the family, was just a kid but T’Rama thought he’d already been corrupted by Skon’s eccentricity and, frankly, xenophilia, and left him behind. I remember Iloja, that Cardassian poet, who everyone knew was Skon’s real partner by that time, actually threw Silek out of the S’chn T’gai compound because he threatened Sarek when he found out he already knew how to meld, that he had parent-bond with Skon. Calling a little kid a pervert and a freak, saying his own mother believed it would be logical to kill him - it was awful. He was barely ten.”

“I had no - I had no idea,” said Spock. “I suppose I -” He coughed. “I owe Sybok an apology for saying he was reading into Skon’s friendship with Iloja of Prim. Though in my defense, all I ever knew about it was from a collected edition of their letters.”

“Just an apology? I’m surprised he didn’t make you take a bet.”

“He is my brother, and I am not a fool.”

“Smart.” Lorian gave Spock a small but genuine smile. “Iloja was more of a mother to Sarek than T’Rama was, in my opinion. It was awful. Sarek came to stay with us for a while after so that Skon could get clear of the legal fallout, and got his marriage annulled. I remember thinking he looked like a ghost out of an Earther story, wouldn’t say nothin’. He just followed my daddy around the garden and helped him take care of T’Mir, who was just a baby. I was five and fascinated by the fact that he wouldn’t talk, as I never shut up. I kept asking him questions… Eventually I made up an entire cipher with different colors of thread I got at a bazaar in Vulcana Regar and spent several days trying to teach it to him, so he wouldn’t have to speak. He just listened, and then mother found me out and told me to leave him alone. Skon and Iloja came and picked him up soon after and he still wasn’t talking, but I found all these little woven braids laid neatly on my desk that answered all the questions I’d ever asked him.”

Spock stared at him, rapt. He almost felt like he was intruding, even though this all was so freely offered. He felt an itch underneath his skin as he considered there might in fact be many things his father had never told him.

“Funny, really,” Lorian said, wistful. “When we were older, Sarek was the one talking my ear off with all sorts of ideas and plans for a new Federation society, and I was the quiet one.”

“So,” Spock said, wondering if he was going too far, “did my grandfather not, in fact, disapprove of my parent’s marriage? I assumed that was why I’d never met my father’s side of the family.”

Lorian turned to him in clear surprise.

“That’s what you thought? I guess Skon did pass away just before you were born. Mother told me he was very disappointed he never met Amanda in person, but did insist on frequent calls with her, specifically. He only wanted to hear about her research and stories about her life and her friends, and told Sarek to make himself scarce because he kept hovering, making sure they weren’t offending each other. They found each other riveting, apparently. Skon was quite the character. Sybok reminds me of him a lot, even if he’s the spitting image of Sarek, who took after his mother. You look more like Skon, actually.”

“My father has only ever told me about my grandfather’s academic accomplishments and his teachings on the Kir’Shara,” said Spock. He had never once found that strange, until now. No one had ever told him he looked like any of his relatives before.

“I’m sure he has his reasons,” said Lorian. The man wasn’t merely being polite; he seemed to be thinking.

“Sybok said that marrying my mother was him reinventing himself after what happened with T’Rea. I didn’t even know the circumstances of Sybok’s birth until I asked him for help with handling plak tow off-world. I suppose I don’t know much at all, really, about my father’s past, not the… personal details. I suppose I assumed that was just normal for… Vulcans. Perhaps there’s something to his speculation, that I and my mother represented some kind of… break, with the past.”

Lorian was silent, and drank his tea.

“I haven’t spoken with Sarek, not really, for almost twenty years,” Spock confessed into the silence.

Lorian still said nothing, but the silence was not repressive, the air of the room felt like it held permission.

“My anger with him, that led to the estrangement, was warranted at the time. It still is, even if I don’t… feel it as often, anymore. I wonder, sometimes, about reaching out, but I don’t because I can’t think of what… to say. I do not know how to approach him without making things worse.”

“It’s possible,” said Lorian, “that your father never told you much about your family and his past because you were still a child. I imagine he was very… protective of you. Probably still is.” He chuckled. “If I ever figure out how to have a real conversation with the man again, I’ll let you know if I have any tips.”

“What happened between you? It would have been… logical, to have wanted you in his life, especially once he married my mother.”

“I haven’t lived on Vulcan since I was twenty,” said Lorian. “Like you, now that I think about it. As I alluded to before, T’Mir has always been far more comfortable living as a Vulcan than I ever have. Your father and I remained close for a while despite the distance, but at a certain point it was made clear to me by various… interested parties, that my attachment to him was selfish, childish, detrimental to his… prospects. Not Skon, of course. Mostly T’Pau. I withdrew from him, and by the time I realized I was being foolish and unfair, he had gone to Mount Kolinahr, and had ended up setting aside his prospects all on his own, for a few decades at least. After he married Amanda, I made a point of getting in touch, but we never moved beyond superficial topics. Your mother and I actually talk more often: she called me a lot when you were a child.”

Spock straightened slightly. “You’re my mother’s Vulcan artist friend who lives off-world.”

“I suppose,” said Lorian. “Perhaps she has more than one.”

Perhaps she did - Spock wouldn’t put it past his insatiably curious and friendly mother - but it was, indeed, odd that Amanda had never mentioned Lorian by name. It seemed more like something his, well, father would do. Also -

“Jesus Christ,” said Lorian, who groaned. “I haven’t said any of that out loud for half a century and I hear it now; it sounds like a gayer Persuasion in space.”

Spock smiled, still feeling a lightness in his chest. “Speaking of Austen, why would your attachment to my father have been detrimental when you were younger, if I may ask?”

“The skeletons in my family’s closet, it turns out, are pretty damning for a young politician’s… companion. My gender, too, was problematic, and would have reflected poorly on his emotional control, which, considering his progressive views, was always in question. In a way things would have been easier had he been particularly drawn to T’Mir.”

Ah, so it had been that sort of closeness. “I had to confide in the ship’s CMO - a human friend of mine I… trust - about the pon farr, and I got the impression that he believed there was something homophobic about conventional wisdom about… long-term partnership among Vulcans.”

Lorian burst out laughing, and his shoulders shook with it. “He ain’t wrong - and damn, that’s insightful for a human. I feel like it’d be easy to be suckered in by the idea that being ‘sexually normal’ on Vulcan means being pansexual, but only if you keep your head down and be useful, if you’re too much of a dyke, and God forbid you’re too boy crazy. I mean, the idea that you’re defective and meant to be a celibate monk or an ostracized pervert and xenophile is downright human, in a bad way. A homosexual must be a xenophile - since two Vulcan men would never commit to each other, of course. As though Surak wasn’t a giant homo playing house with his ‘philosophical rival’ Jarok and never got over losing his childhood sweetheart, Senet.”

“That does explain some of the pointed commentary written about my father’s marriage over the years,” said Spock. “I never really understood what was being insinuated.”

“Oh, yeah, using dog whistle language to accuse Sarek of being a faggot is an old favorite of his political enemies, has been for years,” said Lorian. “And they’re not exactly wrong -”

Spock found himself chuckling, a reaction he never would have expected to have, hearing about his father’s sexual preferences and history. 

“I’ve always found it amusing that the Terran press has such a fixation on my mother’s femininity that they miss that she wears Vulcan men’s clothing more than half the time,” Spock said. “She has such little regard for or even comprehension of fixed gender roles and expression. One year in college, she took a random used nametag at a childcare research center and went by Anthony for a year and was assumed to be a man, and was confused when everyone asked her why she hadn’t corrected anyone.”

“Sarek just doesn’t give a fuck. He never did - why would he have to? He’s a paragon of Vulcan masculinity. That was never a big factor in my insecurities, honestly. What really got me was when ‘concerned parties’ told me my profession and lifestyle would ruin him. I had no intention of living on Vulcan again or being a respectable member of society. I couldn’t argue with that.”

“What was so objectionable about being an artist?”

“My artistic career is a relatively recent development,” said Lorian. “My professional life has been eclectic, but mainly I’ve been an independent antiquities dealer. I specialize in Vulcanoid artifacts across the Beta Quadrant.”

“Vulcanoid artifacts,” said Spock, slowly. “Across the Beta Quadrant.”

“Indeed,” said Lorian, who swirled his tea. “Perhaps it will come as little surprise that many Vulcans of my generation developed a passion for ancient history after the revelation of the Kir’Shara, and many of the… devout comprise a not insignificant power bloc on Vulcan today.”

“Including your own mother, until recently,” said Spock. “And T’Pau.”

“And your father, on the periphery, yes,” he said, with a half-smile. “Business has been very good, but my methods have been unorthodox, to say the least. Turns out, the range of our ancestors is politically inconvenient, and extends far past the Neutral Zone. Naturally, it was quite a surprise to realize a year or so ago that many of these archeological finds acquired by dubious means may have been, well, Romulan all along.”

“Naturally,” said Spock, his tone equally dry. “I must say, I find it surprising not that your excursions have been tacitly permitted by the Federation but that the Romulans have allowed you such latitude.”

“Well, Romulans are, of course, Vulcans, so they are as prone to the brotherly duels of the fire mountain gods as we are. Unity is not a traditionally green-blooded virtue. The interests of state security regularly come in conflict with the aspirations and ambitions of the senatorial class. Aspirations and ambitions that require resources. Business, as I said, has been very good.”

“Then, let me rephrase, I am surprised that, considering your unique expertise, that you have remained… independent.”

“Let’s just say declining job offers has been far more taxing than avoiding legal complications due to my travel itinerary and product sourcing.”

“I believe you,” said Spock.

Lorian looked at him for a moment, studying him again.

“I’m leaving soon,” he said. “Very soon. Within weeks, when the residency ends. Considering the current political climate I’d like to get a bit of breathing room, get further from Federation borders. And Romulan, for that matter. I have some people I’d like to visit in the Alpha Quadrant.”

Something about the careful way he said this made Spock think that T’Pol must be somewhere in the Alpha Quadrant. A relief - that she might be on the other side of known space from Vulcan and the Romulans.

“That seems prudent.”

“I want to show you my studio,” said Lorian, putting his glass down. He’d come to a decision. “And I want to meld with you, if you’ll consider it. There’s something you should see.”

This was a bad idea. Spock knew that. Lorian didn’t seem untrustworthy, exactly, but he certainly did not seem… harmless. Being T’Pol’s son, an interlocutor of his mother, and even being Sybok’s friend or his father’s ex-lover gave him a certain amount of confidence that Lorian had no intention of harming him, but he was his father’s son and well aware that satisfying curiosity about the underbelly of quadrant politics always came at a cost.

“Very well,” he said, anyway, and followed Lorian deeper into his dwelling. 

Shadowy moonlit corridors of wood and glass gave way to a barely enclosed clearing, like a vast greenhouse, which appeared to house a workshop, a gallery, and a garden jumbled together.

Lorian moved to one of the big, cluttered work tables, and began gathering what looked like small twisted shapes, vaguely circular, made of iron, into a crate. “By all means,” he said, “look around, I have a few things to set up.”

So Spock did. He started with a circuit around the room, glancing at canvases propped up against panes of glass and installations made with various mixed media. Spock would be the first to admit that he lacked whatever “eye” one needed for assessing artistic quality, but he could, at least, try to notice themes and patterns.

An obvious one was Vulcan mythology. He found a series of collaged materials that depicted various stages of the creation myth, ancient painting techniques mixed with little mechanical creatures and landscape features like rivers and sandstorms worked through the canvas, all of a piece. He found himself particularly drawn to a towering installation, a woman doubled or two women back to back, two faces looking out, made of glowing light strips, translucent holographic robes waving and shifting in a nonexistent wind. 

When he regarded one face, the woman seemed mournful, and out of the corner of his eye, he thought the other face looked mocking. When he stepped to the side and looked squarely at the other face, it seemed to be filled with longing, and the other face now appeared, in the periphery, to be wrathful. He couldn’t immediately tell how this was accomplished. He wondered if this could be called an example of ni’var.

“I believe I was having dreams of the dirge sisters when I came up with this one,” said Lorian, who’d come up behind him unnoticed. “The Day of Annihilation kept coming to mind when I had to travel to the nearest starbase to have my blood tested, and when mother was run off Vulcan.”

Spock nodded.

“I’m ready,” said Lorian, who took him by the arm and led him to the center of the studio, a slightly raised dais surrounded by leafy ferns. The platform held a simple labyrinth worked out in different kinds of wood panels, the small wrought-iron objects glowing as lanterns at each turn of the path. There were strange symbols at a regular interval that looked reminiscent of those found on old cave carvings on Vulcan, symbols no one had ever translated.

“When I was younger,” said Lorian, “I sometimes feared I wasn’t really a telepath. I could read feelings by touch and could mind-meld with other telepaths, but I struggled with basic projection and reception, never got anywhere with telekinesis. It was only when I was introduced to a Romulan practice, the Zal Makh, that I began deepening my own unique skills. They don’t use it for melding - I’ve never gotten a clear answer on whether Romulans are telepathic at all - but I’ve found it affords me very sharp visualization and an almost objective stance towards my own memories, so I or someone melding with me can experience them with precision and with minimal self-consciousness, almost as though one were observing unseen.”

“Fascinating,” said Spock, looking at the labyrinth with more interest.

“You shall walk the path, eyes closed, while I follow close behind with my hands on your face’s psi points. When we reach the center, I will be able to share something with you that I think you should know.”

Spock tipped his head in agreement, and waited for Lorian to come up behind him, his chest lightly pressed to his back, as his hands settled around his face. He hadn’t done something so vulnerable in years, possibly ever, but it was as though the older man were guiding them on a razor’s edge just past the erotic into something even more intimate.

They stepped forward onto the path.

Yut makh, the closing of the eyes to the sensual world,” said Lorian. According their matched perfect memory of the stretch of platform before them, they were passing over the first symbol.

Another few steps forward.

Lu shiar, lifting the eyes without seeing.”

Another step.

Qlam wath, the unfolding of the true path.”

Another step and they stopped.

Vri glam, the center.”

They stayed motionless in the dark. Spock could hear a rustling, the fall of footsteps.

Another step, without walking. Light brightening vague outlines of objects all around.

Rok khan. Rok khan.”

Another step into this other place, and the heat, the mild humidity of the Voroth Sea in northern Raal ran through him, a sudden and total immersion into sensory impressions. Another, and he could see the deep amber sea crash up against the rockface below, through a window in a dwelling high above. This was unlike any mind-meld he’d ever experienced. He felt himself and Lorian fading into the air of the room, what could be a bedroom, tidy but lived-in, books and padds on the bed and on floating shelves, small figurines and mobiles of glass and wood, potted plants, symbols painted on the wall here and there, many half disassembled little household machines scattered on a desk. 

One more step, and there was the boy, Lorian, no more than twenty, dragging two duffel bags onto a hastily-made bed, then darting to the shelves and cubbies and closets, throwing in clothes and shoes and books and tools. Spock and the present-day Lorian didn't feel there at all.

 

***

 

“Then she just left,” Lorian said, to an open mobile communicator on the bed by his bags as he kept filling them, describing the end of the fight, feeling torn to shreds inside, his mother’s eyes going dangerous and cold. “She forbids me - she said as your mother I forbid you - from applying to Starfleet Academy. I tell her she’s too late, I already applied, and she just walks out, not a word, takes her speeder. She’s being - she’s being illogical.”

There was silence over the line, and Lorian felt crazy. He had just called his own mother, who was T’Pol, illogical.

“That could be the case, once we gain the necessary context to understand her behavior,” said a young man’s voice, calm and soothing. “Did she explain her reasoning?”

“Bless your loyal heart, but don’t do the whole making me calm and happy again with logic thing, mister. It doesn’t work if you’re not touching me, not when I’m this upset.”

A light cough came over the channel. “Then perhaps coming here would be a reasonable compromise?”

“I’m trying to get away from my mother; I’m not going to Shi’Kar.”

“The S’chn T’gai estate is in Kir.”

“That’s a technicality; it’s right on the border of Shi’al Province. It’s a suburb. Like Baltimore and DC, or something.”

“I recommend you do not say such a thing to Skon; it’s at least spiritually important that our family is from Kir.”

“Right, land of adventurous nomads with roots from all corners of the globe who were never conquered but were above all the wars across the equator. First spacefarers, first space pirates. Regular pirates too, the scourge of the Thanath Sea.”

“The people of Kir were not pirates. More, what is Iloja’s expression, like the ‘air men’ of the Hebetians - dreamers and eccentrics?”

“Head in the clouds, you mean.”

“Perhaps.” There was a brief silence. “Lorian, where will you go?”

“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. Maybe I’ll take the first shuttle I see when I get to Vulcana Regar.”

“That would introduce many additional variables to your current situation.”

“You think I’m overreacting. Okay. Fine. I am! I’m not a real Vulcan anyway; I get to overreact.”

“All reactions stem from logical causes.”

“I just need to be out there, in space or somethin’, honey, like we talked about. I can’t wait any longer.”

“Lori, please.”

“Sarek -”

“Come here. Come here first, and I’ll go with you. My father has connections to all sorts of opportunities, especially on Earth - I’ll even buy us a ship if I have to. Just come here. We’ll figure it out together.”

Lorian sighed as he snapped the enclosures on his bags, taking one final look around his childhood bedroom. “Why do you even put up with me?”

“That’s not an answer, Lori. Promise me you’re coming here. I am very concerned.”

“Okay, okay,” Lorian smiled as he shouldered his duffel bags and made his way down to the garage. “Just promise me your dad and Iloja aren’t going to fawn all over me again. The more they tell me how clever and funny and pretty I am and how lucky you are, the more it goes to my head.”

There was a suspicious pause. “Vulcans do not lie, Lorian. You know how much influence I have on my father’s behavior, let alone Iloja’s. Perhaps the assessment of a Cardassian literary giant and a renowned historian and philologist should be considered seriously.”

Lorian took the minute while he loaded his bags into the back compartment of the sandskimmer he and his sister considered “theirs” to flush green and settle the butterflies in his stomach. The mouth on that fella, Lorian thought, and then flushed a deeper green when he remembered he now knew several ways this was true.

“Sweet talker,” he muttered instead.

“I’ve never understood that Terran phrase.”

“You best brush up on your folksy idioms, if we end up going to Earth.”

“Affirmative.”

“Thanks, darlin’. For everything.”

“We will be together soon, ashayam,” said the voice firmly, like it was an axiom.

Not that he’d ever tell him, but he actually did feel a bit calmer, Sarek being half a continent away notwithstanding. Lorian allowed himself the luxury of a goofy smile, and headed back into the house to prepare and pack up food for the trip. 

But when Lorian walked into the kitchen, he found three human men in unfamiliar gray uniforms, who sat at the table as though they had been waiting for him all along, perfectly at ease. 

He should run - don’t think, just run - but instead he just stood there.

“I didn’t realize Starfleet had black badges,” he said, in English.

“They’re new,” said one of the men in a placeless American accent, perhaps the true neutral of Kansas, whose face was plain, the sort of person you wouldn’t remember whenever you weren’t talking to him. Lorian hadn’t even realized that he was the tallest and biggest of the men - there was something so… meek, unassuming about his posture.

“Can I help you folks with somethin’? Wasn’t expecting guests, I must admit,” he said, tone even and expression blank, grateful, for the first time, to be a Vulcan who only knew how to talk to humans like someone from the American Deep South. “Can I get y’all some water or tea? We got chamomile, but that’s the only Earther one.”

“We just need to discuss a few things, Lorian,” said the forgettable man. He smiled, and it was friendly and mild, which was the oddest thing about it, how it didn’t seem creepy or ominous at all. “We’ve already been rude. I’m Agent Harraway, this is Agent Donaldson, and this is, if you can believe it, Agent Smith.”

Agent Smith laughed, a friendly sound, but his eyes were colder than Agent Harraway’s. He had a reddish face and a lantern jaw, what Uncle Mike might call, though not without irony, a “man’s man.” “I’d actually take a water, if it’s not too much trouble, Lorian.”

“Comin’ right up,” said the boy, desperately trying to find something useful on the way to the water spout over the kitchen’s multi-use basin, and could only pocket a small, blunt knife used to spread nut creams on flatbreads and crackers. 

The men had stood up, when he returned with a glass of water, and Agent Smith gestured towards the sitting room. The three agents took the seats usually meant for him, his mother, and sister, leaving him the chair a bit further off to the side, with the cushion, for guests. Agent Smith, with no hesitation whatsoever, took a grateful sip of water.

“So,” said Lorian, after a moment, “y’all are agents, huh? Like secret agents, or somethin’? For Starfleet?”

Agent Donaldson, an older man with the most serious expression of the three, said, “We represent the security interests of the Federation, and sometimes work very closely with Starfleet. That’s all you need to know.”

Lorian very seriously doubted that, but he nodded with a dutiful expression, giving away neither acceptance or resistance.

“We came to talk to you about your application to Starfleet Academy,” said Agent Smith. “There are a few things we need to clear up.”

“Didn’t realize the Academy made house calls if you left out a transcript or somethin’,” said Lorian.

“It does not,” said Donaldson. “Your application has not even been processed. When it hit the subspace relays at Jupiter Station, we intercepted it, and have not forwarded it along just yet.”

Well, that sounds extremely illegal, thought Lorian, his alarm kicking up another notch. “Must be some pretty big things we need to clear up, then, huh?”

“Yeah,” said Agent Smith, with an apologetic look that did not meet his eyes, “sorry about that, buddy.”

Lorian stopped himself from cringing. Even Uncle Mike had stopped calling him “buddy” years ago, before he’d turned ten. Not that Uncle Mike was around to call him anything, anymore. He couldn’t believe it’d been eight months since…

“You are the son of a Federation hero, one of Earth’s staunchest allies on Vulcan,” said Donaldson. “All things being equal, you attending the Academy would be historic. The first Vulcan cadet. The problem is, you’re not just Vulcan, you’re also human.”

“Not sure, exactly, how that’s a problem,” said Lorian, with a sinking feeling.

“Don’t get us wrong,” said Agent Smith, “we’re all for hybrid kids and interspecies love stories, and in any other situation we’d all be rooting for you. Hell, we’re all still rooting for you: you’re the future we’re all working so hard to protect.”

Although Lorian had resented, pretty much all his life, his mother’s insistence that he keep his human heritage a secret, he had to admit that he was glad he’d been spared people saying that sort of thing to him. He hadn’t realized how obvious it was that the person saying it would have an agenda, or that when someone says you’re the “future” they sometimes mean you shouldn’t be there yet.

“The problem, Lorian,” said Agent Donaldson, “is not that your father was human, but the human your father happened to be.”

Lorian kept still, but inside an unsteady thrill ran up along his panic. Was someone finally, finally going to tell him the truth?

“Can’t say I know who that’d be, sir,” said Lorian.

“Oh, son,” said Donaldson, “that’s not exactly true, now is it?”

“I mean,” said Smith, “you must have wondered about your Uncle Mike, may he rest in peace. Not exactly typical, is it, for the most famous Vulcan woman in the Federation to raise children with a human man who never leaves the family estate and who no one seems to remember meeting before?”

“Well,” said Lorian, “my mother did always say that family is something you do, not something you are. Ain’t exactly a secret that Uncle Mike was our daddy in practice, and the details don’t matter. As for him not getting out much, I think folks underestimate how much work being a stay-at-home-dad is. My sister‘n I were a handful.”

“A lovely sentiment,” said Donaldson, “but in this case untrue. The details do matter. Michael Kenmore was a man with many secrets, most of which concern the foundations of the Federation itself.”

“A pre-warp tech conservationist from Jackson, Mississippi who never moved farther than New Orleans until he relocated to Vulcan? Which, I grant you, is a big change of scenery, but like you said, mother’s a big deal. ‘Nuff to turn anyone’s head.”

“Michael Kenmore is a fiction I crafted myself,” said Agent Donaldson. “The man who went by that name was a member of our organization, and had many names. Being your father was, in essence, a well-earned retirement.”

“All right,” said Lorian, willing his hands not to shake. He knew it. He knew it. Well, not that Uncle Mike was some sort of retired spy, but definitely that he wasn’t really Michael Kenmore and that he really was his father. “News to me. But I won’t say nothin’ if you don’t.”

“That won’t be good enough,” said Donaldson. “Once you’re processed by Starfleet Medical, you being half-human won’t be a secret, and your mother’s too famous and influential for anyone to leave such a scandal be. You’re a smart kid, Lorian. What do you think will happen if not only your mother but all of her old friends turn out to have been keeping secrets for years and years going back to before the Federation was even founded?”

“Depends on the secrets,” said Lorian.

“Anything our organization deems classified is volatile and consequential,” said Donaldson. “You’ll have to trust us on that.”

Lorian definitely didn’t think he should trust these “agents” on anything, but he had to admit, this did make sense. He also finally noticed that Agent Harraway hadn’t spoken a word since they left the kitchen. He was far too easy to overlook.

“So, what do you want me to do? Not apply? I’ll admit that’s a kick in the teeth,” said Lorian, “but I can be a good sport. I’m sure I can find something else to do.”

“Not exactly, kid,” said Agent Smith. “You see, we do want you to apply. If you do, you’ll get in.”

“We can arrange for your records to show that you’re a hundred percent Vulcan,” said Donaldson. “Even a full-Vulcan cadet will be very auspicious for Starfleet, even if a Vulcan-Human one would have been ground-breaking.”

Lorian said nothing. This was trouble. If it was so easy, why hadn’t they just offered to do so in the first place or gone ahead and just did it? It’s not like his first guess, if his cover weren’t blown, would have been “top-secret spy agency no one knows about.” He probably would have assumed Uncle Jon, being the President of the Federation, had done him a solid.

“Thanks, I guess,” he said.

“Don’t thank us yet,” said Smith, his expression disingenuously apologetic.

“Because of your particular set of circumstances, Lorian,” said Donaldson, “knowing about your heritage and family history is an all-or-nothing proposition. Even our conversation today makes you a significant security risk for the Federation. There will be some… stipulations.”

“Which would be…?”

“At first, nothing much,” said Smith. “You’ll keep pretending you’re just Vulcan like you always have, and be a cadet just like anyone else. We’ll be in touch, from time to time, give you some guidance on your career if necessary, and coordinate on your first postings. But you won’t have to think about it that much. Just be a young officer, and we’ll do the rest.”

Surak’s sweet tits, this is bad, thought Lorian, keeping his expression engaged and polite. Deep within him terror bloomed.

“When you’re ready,” said Donaldson, “you’ll become more involved in our organization.”

“We know how this sounds,” said Smith, that fake-apologetic look on his face again. “But this is a good thing, Lorian. You’re going to do crucial work, something any Starfleet officer would be proud to do. On a personal level, you’ll learn all about your father, see his world, really understand his legacy and his sacrifices. I’m not exaggerating when I say that without him we wouldn’t have won the war with the Romulans.”

“We know, better than you think,” said Donaldson, “how hard it’s been to hide so much of what you are. Your passion, your sense of humor, your need for social connection, even your interest in art history and mythology, all those human things that made you feel like a stranger here, that a Vulcan would call weakness, are exactly what the Federation needs. You’re going to have access to places no one else can go. You’re going to be a key player in protecting peace for billions of souls in the Beta Quadrant, protecting Vulcan itself. You’re special, Lorian. We’ve been waiting for someone like you.”

“That’s quite an offer,” said Lorian. “What happens if I don’t take it?”

The three men glanced at each other. 

“You had a pretty big fight with your mom this morning,” said Smith, this time the remorseful tone sounding more genuine, which was somehow worse. “No one would blame you if you took off in a rush to get some air, maybe go see that nice boy in Shi’Kahr. But you’re upset, maybe a bit more careless than usual, or maybe just have bad luck. Vulcan really does have a pretty high accident rate for speeders in the Womb of Fire.”

Lorian’s breath stopped, and he had to force himself to restart it. The terror that had been creeping up from his gut finally made sense.

“Your mother and sister, of course, would be devastated,” said Donaldson, very serious.

“Seems like,” he said, finally unable to keep a miniscule wobble out of his voice, “you’d not be getting much out of that. Since I’m so… special. Not sure mother would… take that lying down.”

“We’ve been waiting a long time for someone like you,” said Donaldson, “and we can wait longer. We’re more than equipped to keep T’Pol in line. Her even having a public life and a family at all is the most latitude that woman is ever going to get.”

Although Lorian had liked absolutely nothing these men had said so far, he really didn’t like the way Donaldson was talking about his mother.

“Even for a little girl,” said Smith, “your sister’s affinity for applied physics really is quite something. Starfleet always needs engineers.”

Lorian couldn’t move, his throat feeling cold and numb, his limbs frozen, which considering what happened in the following ten seconds, was either a very good or very bad thing.

From the kitchen, a tall figure dressed head to toe in black robes over what might have been body armor and a helmet with an opaque face shield fell upon the agents, slashing a nasty looking dagger to Harraway’s throat as three flashes of blinding green light shot across the room, the whine of disruptor fire drowning out the shouts of the men as Agent Donaldson and Agent Smith dissolved like melting film, jerking and now unable to scream.

Once the molecular remains of the other two agents dissipated, however, the would-be assassin and Agent Harraway instantly relaxed and stepped apart, completely calm.

Lorian forced himself not to whip around to see how many he had to deal with behind him, and another assassin dressed in black, holstering an alien-looking disruptor pistol, walked around his chair to stand by the other two. This one, the one who had just killed two men in cold blood, was slighter and shorter, but the other two were on the tall side, for humans, and average, for Vulcans. Lorian focused his awareness by instinct and determined that there were just three people in the immediate vicinity.

No one was pointing any sort of weapon at him at all, and that made him even more scared. He couldn’t find his voice, let alone the words to say.

Agent Harraway adjusted something over his sleeve, and immediately his face changed shape. How his face changed was difficult to say. He was still an unremarkable white man with brown hair, just with faded blue-green eyes instead of brown. Nothing about his posture had changed. However, he seemed… familiar now.

The man gave a gentle smile, and said, “Sorry for the dramatic entrance. Agents like those two wear small sensors and cameras out in the field. On the off-chance they picked up anything at the end, they would have seen me about to die as well. Forensics will show three disruptor shots fired and molecular residue from three humans.”

“Let me guess,” said Lorian, hoarse, “the bits of the third guy belong to someone who happens to be named Harraway, huh?”

“Good guess, Lorian,” said the man.

“We don’t have time for this,” said the smaller assassin in black, with a man’s voice, British, with an accent that could cut glass. “You’ll need to brief him en route.”

Some feeling returned to Lorian’s limbs, and he shot up, shaking. “I’m not going anywhere, you hear, with any of you people! You kill me, you just do it,” he yelled.

“Sir,” said the man who wasn’t actually Agent Harraway, “while I agree the sooner we leave, the better, a couple minutes aren’t going to make the difference for our cover and might make a lot of difference for the asset. If he puts up a fight, that’ll threaten the operation as well.”

“Fine,” snapped the man in black.

The tallest assassin continued to say nothing. There was something ever too slightly smooth about her presence to his fledgling telepathic senses, most reminiscent of a priestess or an adept from Gol. So blended into the environment, so tucked away, that you really should be scared of what was going on underneath. If she weren’t standing in front of him, he never would have suspected she was there.

The three of them then sat down, the smallest man, coiled to spring into action, “Harraway” in the same comfortable position, and the tallest assassin, to Lorian’s surprise, sprawled over the remaining chair.

“By all means,” said Lorian, in a high voice, “make yourself at home.”

“So, first things first, Lorian,” said not-Harraway, “those men, Agent Donaldson and Agent Smith, were who they said they were. They really were from a clandestine and powerful organization that believes its mission is to safeguard the Federation. What you don’t know is that the decision to recruit you today was made quite recently, and was quite controversial internally. Interacting with your family puts too big a spotlight on their activities, and they knew if they made contact they might have to kill you, which would be even more risky and wasteful, as you rightly noted. You're also right that your mom would never, ever let that go.”

“What were they going to do about me applying instead, if they weren’t gonna recruit me?”

“You were going to get a formal rejection from Starfleet Academy today instead, no explanation.”

“Oh,” said Lorian, actually surprised he had it in him to feel disappointed after the past twenty minutes. “So,” he said, able to speak normally, he hoped, “what’s gonna happen now?”

“Well, it’s a bit complicated to explain, but -”

“You are going to leave Vulcan, and you’re not going to come back,” said the tense smaller man in black. “You will never live on-world again.”

What?

“He’s right,” said not-Harraway. “That is what needs to happen. You had a big fight with your mother this morning, and you’re going to run away, create a whole new life for yourself off-world.”

“Doing what?”

“Whatever you want, Lorian,” he said. “It’s your life.”

“But I won’t be able to talk to my sister or mother ever again, never see them?”

“Not at all,” he replied, “you’ll stay in touch, mend your relationships, and see each other as much as feels right to all of you.”

“Just not,” the boy said slowly, “on Vulcan.”

“That’s right,” said not-Harraway.

“What’s to stop those… agents from trying to recruit me again, or trying to kill me?”

“The armor and disguises you see my two colleagues wearing, as well as the weapons they used, are identical to the black ops uniform of a foreign intelligence agency. The agency that sent those men today will find the fact that this foreign power knows about their plans alarming enough that they will no longer find it viable to recruit you. They’ll think it’s most worthwhile to keep an eye on you to see if that same foreign government makes contact again. As they never did in the first place, nothing will come of it.”

“What will this so-called foreign government think about you framing their own guys?”

“Oh,” said the human, “we’re hoping they’ll find it merely intriguing, as their modus operandi right now is more intelligence gathering than intervention. They’ll wonder who actually did it. However, as this secret actor will do nothing else interesting, they’ll lose interest eventually as well, and conclude that this was most likely an internal power struggle deep within Starfleet. They’ll find circumstantial evidence to suggest this was the case.”

“And who, exactly, are these mysterious assassins supposed to be working for?”

“The Romulan Star Empire,” said the tense, faceless man in black.

“Oh,” said Lorian, faintly. “Look,” he said, “no, uh, offense, but I’m not really getting the sense that these guys or, I guess, Romulans would let something like this go.”

“They will not harm you,” said the man in black. “We’ll see to that.”

“That’s another thing,” said Lorian, “who are you people, anyway?”

“Members of a clandestine and powerful organization,” said the human, tone dry, “whose mission is to safeguard all sentient life in the galaxy. Sometimes, we work very closely with Starfleet.”

“Let me guess, that’s all I need to know?”

“Probably not,” not-Harraway replied, “but that’s all we intend to tell you.”

Well, even if these people were crazy and going to kill him, they at least seemed more honest. Better senses of humor, too.

“You’re forgetting somethin’,” said Lorian. “My mother. You think she’ll accept any of this?”

“I will talk to your mother later today,” said not-Harraway. “Of anyone on our team, I have the best chance of convincing her this is for the best.”

“I’m not going to let you threaten my mother,” said Lorian, folding his arms.

“I won’t need to,” said the man. “She and I have… worked together in the past. I believe there’s enough of a history there that she’ll take me at my word.”

Lorian stared for a few seconds, then said, everything coming into focus, “You’re Agent Daniels, the time traveler, who helped Uncle Jon with the time war Xindi stuff.”

The man’s - Daniels’s - easygoing expression froze. The man in black somehow vibrated with even more tension, sitting up even straighter. The tall assassin in black started to chuckle, a melodic and rich sound.

“Oi, Daniels,” came her voice, a deep alto, “you owe me five strips of latinum.” Her accent was also British, but sounded softer, blurrier somehow than the man in black’s.

“How could he possibly know that? All records have been wiped,” said the smaller man, his accent becoming somehow even more British than before, “and neither T’Pol nor his father would endanger him in this way. Someone else must have gotten to him, we need to -”

“Oh come off it, sir,” said the tall woman in black. “There’s a more obvious explanation, isn’t there, mate?”

This was directed to Lorian. He glared at them all, resolute.

“Oh, bloody hell,” said the man in black, for once not sounding like the world was ending and instead sounding weirdly whiny. “Of course she’d do that. And of course he’d… bollocks.”

Daniels sighed, actually looking annoyed instead of bland. “T’Pol did the old V’Shar hard-copy backup trick as insurance, probably of various raw logs, didn’t she? I do think she’ll listen to me, but it’s no secret she’s not the most… trusting person, when it comes to, um, time travel.”

“An’ of course this one,” said the woman, “found it, prolly looking for clues about dear old dad.”

“T’Pol would not leave something like that lying around,” said Daniels, frowning.

“Of course she wouldn’t,” scoffed the woman. “Bet she had her pool boy whip up something real nice and secure. But you can’t count out the wiliness of a Vulcan teenager with a knack for tinkering and a daddy-sized hole in ‘is heart.”

“A ‘knack for tinkering’ that rivals Michael Kenmore’s?” Daniels now looked mildly amused.

“Uncle Mike taught me how to break into different kinds of safes,” Lorian found himself admitting. “Sort of like a game, because I kept taking apart every machine in the house. But there was one type that he thought I couldn’t crack, but actually when I finally found out how, I kept it a secret.”

“Brilliant,” cackled the tallest assassin.

“Okay,” said Daniels, “this isn’t our ideal scenario, but it does make some things easier. Lorian, what we’re proposing you do is, more or less, what you’ve already done. The agents today were unwittingly acting on behalf of a group of individuals who want to disrupt history. You were thinking about running away earlier today, right? Getting that rejection right after the fight, maybe you would have thought your mother had pulled some strings, that it was the last straw? You couldn’t even wait long enough to go to Shi’Kahr first.”

Lorian hated to admit this, but Daniels was right: he was just hot-headed enough for that sequence of events to be entirely plausible. There was no way in the molten core of Vulcan he was going anywhere with these people, though. He had promised Sarek.

“Deep down,” said Daniels, “you know that if you go see your friend, he’ll talk you out of leaving. Because your mother wasn’t - and I am so sorry Lorian - she wasn’t being illogical. She’s at a supposedly defunct V’Shar outpost brainstorming desperately with President Archer about how to get those people away from you and he’s telling her how he received a rare and cryptic visit from Agent Daniels prior to her call. That’s the reason why she’ll trust me. She’ll be expecting me.”

There was a tense moment where Lorian stared them all down, if anything rooting his body further into his seat. 

But he knew he was about to give in.

“Trip Tucker,” said the man in black, and everything in the room narrowed to the faceless shield of the man’s helmet. “Charles Tucker, the Third, born in Panama City, Florida. First chief engineer of the USS Enterprise. Loved pecan pie and terrible movies, any movies, from the twentieth century. Real pre-contact pop culture aficionado. Shy and sensitive but endlessly charming and caring, the sort of person who’d never give up on you. Loyal to a fault, and a truly bloody awful spy. On numerous occasions he almost blew his cover trying to help strangers, even enemy combatants, that he just met, and still won us the war with the Romulans. A genius of an engineer, a pioneer of applied warp theory. A devoted brother, friend, and partner. Before he died, he went by the name Michael Kenmore. No matter what happens today, the truth of who he is belongs to you from now on. He was your father.”

Suddenly he could breathe again, and it came in a heaving gasp.

“All right,” Lorian said, choking on the words. “All right.”

“Well,” said the woman in black, slapping her thighs, “time to hit the road.” 

Somewhat to Lorian’s surprise, she was the only one who rose to her feet as he staggered upward. 

“Come on then,” she said, and he followed her back to the garage, where she slid into the driver’s seat of the speeder. After a second’s hesitation, he sat in the front passenger seat, and vaguely noticed there were more bags in the back compartment than before. 

She initiated the startup sequence, and then peeled out of the driveway to the long road taking them to the wooded edge of the compound. Lorian gripped his knees, as she was going ever so slightly too fast.

When they reached the main road that took them out of the mountains that ringed the northern edge of the Fire Plains, the woman fiddled with the controls and, of all things, the Jefferson Airplane song, “White Rabbit,” started playing.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall

Lorian turned the volume down slightly and sat back, scowling. “A little on the nose, don’t you think?”

She tapped the console and “Time” by Pink Floyd blasted out instead. “Better?”

He tried to settle into his seat further, and couldn’t relax. “So, you got a name, Agent…?”

“Selek,” she said, and turned the steering wheel slightly, forcing them to take a turn on the winding road just a bit too sharply.

“Do you even know how to drive?”

“Loads of different ways, including like a distraught boy who’s cross with his mum and running away from home.”

Lorian glared out the window. “Where are we going?”

“We’re taking the shortcut through the Forge to Vulcana Regar, where you’re going to get on a commercial shuttle to Denobula. Up to you after that, but I’d recommend looking up your mum’s old friend, Dr. Phlox. He’ll put you up and won’t pry.”

Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don't Fear) The Reaper” was now playing.

“Why are you playing acid rock from 1960s and 1970s Earth?”

“Oh, you know all of these were on one of Uncle Mike’s road trip playlists more than once.”

“Not the same ones!”

“You’re chasing a feeling, you’re a very angsty boy right now, Lorian.”

Lorian was starting to get genuinely irritated, because although he had zero presence of mind to remember that any particular songs existed right now, Selek’s instincts weren’t half bad. He did blast old pre-contact Earth music from Uncle Mike’s collection and go for drives in the Forge or down the Voroth coast when he was upset. Also, he really did like BÖC’s 1976 album Agents of Fortune.

“Is this your job at the temporal agency? Are you the fuck up they send on milk runs? Do you just make playlists for when you kidnap Vulcan boys because you have nothing better to do?”

“I wish, mate. Also, you’re vastly overestimating how much forethought I’m putting into what I play next.”

Which apparently was Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.”

Lorian let his gaze drift out the window again, the speeding blur of trees thinning out as rocky outgrowth started becoming more twisted and bizarre, the edge of the Fire Plains.

All of a sudden, Lorian’s hands went numb. “Can Daniels’s face-changing thing make him look like a bunch of different people?”

“What do you think?”

“I think it makes sense he’d go back to a face mother would recognize when he speaks to her, but it makes no sense why he’d go back to that face while I was still there.” 

He noticed his hands were shaking.

“I’m with you so far,” said Selek, her tone still light but less mocking.

“You did it on purpose,” said Lorian, his fragile bubble of calm finally shattering once more. “You knew or suspected my mother had evidence of her time on the Enterprise in the compound. You wanted to see if I knew who he was. You weren’t really surprised - you were, you were manipulating me, making me feel like I’d figured something out you didn't want me to know, made me feel more in control.”

“A reasonable inference.”

“What actually happens now?” 

Lorian carefully felt for the door controls with twitching fingers, but they’d been locked.

“As I said before, I’m taking you as far as Vulcana Regar, where you’re getting on a transport to take you off-world.”

How do you expect me to believe that?

“Preferably without you having a panic attack, but if needs must,” she said. 

Lorian started thrashing at the door, trying to get the angle right to kick it open.

“Think it through, bruv,” said Selek, who merely sounded amused. “We’re going two hundred miles per hour. Also, give me your nutbutter knife; you might hurt yourself.”

The fact that “Paint It, Black” by The Rolling Stones was the backdrop of his struggle made Lorian feel slightly hysterical.

“Stop,” said Selek, in a very, very different tone of voice, devoid of good humor. She caught his wrist as though in a vise and suddenly he went completely limp in his seat - it felt like a telepathic suggestion, but it was so quick and overwhelming he didn’t know what had happened. He rolled his head over to look at her, and she was quiet for far too long. He instinctively knew she was talking to someone inside her helmet.

“Horrific fucking timing, I know,” she said, finally, “but there’s been a change in plans. We’re expecting company.”

All his lassitude burned away, Lorian went wild, lunging towards the console, and then he felt a firm pitch at the side of his neck, and everything went dark.

When Lorian came to, he was where he’d passed out, in the passenger seat of his speeder. They were now past the Fire Plains and beginning to approach the most treacherous part of the Forge, the Womb of Fire.

Beside him was Agent Selek - probably. She looked like an entirely different person. Her loose assassin’s uniform had been replaced by a set of deep blue robes that could have been Vulcan, but didn’t seem to be characteristic of any one region. She wore a simple structured cloth headdress reminiscent of a priestess but far too plain, and her face was now visible. Her skin was a dark golden-brown, her eyes gray, her forehead was ridged, her sharp brows and long hair beneath the headdress were thick and jet black over her gaunt and unambiguously Vulcan face.

Or the face she happened to be wearing, anyway.

Also, she now had what looked to be an actual sword sheathed and strapped to her back. He also no longer had his... nutbutter knife.

“Nice hat,” he said, finally.

“Fuck you, Lorian,” said Selek, cheerfully, her accent unchanged.

“Who are you supposed to be now? A traveling cleric?”

Selek ignored this. “Here’s what’s happening. Those Federaji blokes, the ones with the black badges, cocked it up more than usual. The Romulans were tracking them and caught our disruptor signatures. We were prepared for them to do so, if needed, but that does mean they’re going to try and intercept us, nab you, and kill me. So we need to add a bit to the story we’re telling here. I’m going to pick a defensible position, you’ll hide, and I’ll take care of them.”

Lorian’s mouth dropped open. “There are Romulans on Vulcan? Right now?”

“That’s adorable,” said Selek. “You can assume there are operatives from every major Beta Quadrant power on every founding Federation planet. Increasingly, Alpha Quadrant as well. Some operatives are undercover spies, some are just hired mercenaries working for subsidiaries of subsidiaries, some are double or triple agents and multitasking. Operatives working for Romulan interests certainly are and have been present on Vulcan.”

“Oh, right, of course,” said Lorian, abashed. “So much for me being the son of not one but apparently two former spies,” he muttered.

“Fortunately, mate, it’s not genetic,” she said, as she neatly pulled the speeder behind an outcrop of stone on a sandy bluff. “Out you get.”

Selek walked a bit ahead of the speeder and squinted at the horizon, licking a long finger and testing the air. Lorian boggled at the display: shouldn’t she have some sort of fancy super-scanner?

“Right,” said Selek, and dragged him over to a specific deep crevice in the rock face, where he could see the slope of the rocky dune but had cover in two directions. “Wait here.”

“But - but,” Lorian stammered. “What am I supposed to do if they get you? We’re in the middle of the Womb!”

“Lorian,” said Selek. “If they kill me, you’re not going to be able to out-fight or out-run them. Go quietly and my colleagues will pick you up later. The Federation president is your godfather and your mother is terrifying; they’re not just going to kill you.”

“But -”

Selek pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay, on the off chance you’re on your own and against my advice decide to take on highly armed and deadly fighters, your only shot is to get ahold of one of their disruptors. Remember they’ll be set to kill. If on the even slimmer chance you win, there’s a basic survival pack in the skimmer. You got tossed out on your arse into this desert when you were seven - you can rough it till you find a comm signal.”

Lorian stared at her. “What do you mean, get one of their disruptors? Where is your disruptor?”

“Not here,” she said.

“Then how are you going to take care of them, Selek?”

Selek shrugged and smoothly drew her sword. The blade was unadorned and slim, with a wooden hilt wrapped in leather and a crude metal filigree at the base that looked like dragon wings.

Also, it was just a sword.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” said Lorian, bewildered.

“Good talk, now be quiet and stay there till I come and get you.”

When the Romulans came, five of them, it was as though they rose up out of the sand, dressed exactly as Agent Selek had been at his house, and gathered into a small formation, disruptors drawn.

Selek stopped directly in front of them as they advanced, her stance open and sword gleaming.

Jolan tru,” Selek called in a carrying tone, in a language the UT didn’t catch. “Feldor staam toreht.

“Silence, faithless whore,” growled one of the assassins in what must have been Romulan, translated into unplaceable, accented Standard. “The Tal Shiar cannot tolerate your interference on Vulcan. Play at your depraved perversions elsewhere.”

Selek said nothing. She moved.

He and Uncle Mike had a yearly tradition of watching the Suus Mahna trials, and Lorian had even studied several Vulcan combat styles as a hobbyist. The way Selek fought looked nothing like anything he’d ever seen and at the same time like all of them put together. He’d felt a bit of pride when as a young teen he’d been able to tell the difference between a choreographed fight in an action film and real fights, but the way Selek was moving actually did look like something out of a movie. She moved as though she were on wires, spinning in midair, using her opponents’ bodies as rams and stepping stones, her blade flashing. He realized, hair rising at the back of his neck, that she was using telekinesis sparingly with enormous control. The Romulans didn’t get off a single shot.

The fight was over in ten seconds.

Selek looked down at the bodies, most of which had been removed from their heads, and wiped down her sword against a nearby rock, leaving streaks of dark blood that may have even been green.

Then she fell to her knees and ran her hands over and around the bodies of the fallen assassins. To Lorian’s horror, he realized she was running her hands over them and covering her hands in blood, which was absolutely green, and rubbing streaks of it on her face while keening. She leaned back, threw her arms and neck open to the sky, bending back at a steep angle held by her core alone, and began to sing, occasionally pounding her fists into the sand, a slow, steady beat. The unruly and total outpouring of her feelings was terrifying, palpable from yards away even for a mediocre telepath like himself. The words felt familiar but were almost older-sounding than Old Golish, and the melody was unmistakably the same of the dirge oral tradition stated Surak sang over the body of his t’hy’la, Senet, who fell on the battlefield. Like any Vulcan, he could fill in the words:

You have gone where I cannot follow
I too lie here yet I will rise and go on
Let me awaken in the city of the dead
And by the shore of the Thanath Sea I will find you
Sha-Ka-Ree must be where we may still walk together
At dawn, I will walk alone and sing to you

Lorian stood in the open and rooted to the ground. He felt as though he was struck by lightning, and knew, in a final way, that he would be pursuing this image, the green-blooded rhapsode unrestrained and unafraid, primal and archetypal, for the rest of his life.

He stayed frozen as Selek then rose, and efficiently stripped, revealing a skin-tight and textured jumpsuit that looked distinctly futuristic and functional, and piled her robes and sword beside the bodies. Using a hand wrapped in a hood that had been wrapped around a now detached… helmet, she used one of their disruptors to vaporize all evidence of the warrior she’d been a moment before. She looked as though she was scrubbing her face, her back turned, and when she began walking back up the slope of loose shale and sand, her face was clean. 

Despite having a spiritual epiphany that was also a panic attack, Lorian, still twenty years old, checked out her body as she approached him. She was thin and deceptively narrow, although her shoulders were broad compared to her sharp waist and jutting, bony hips. She looked as though she had the metabolism and musculature of an elite athlete, although she still had a gentle taper of fat on her stomach, ass and hips and her chest was obviously compressed by her technical bodysuit. Only V’Kor commandos looked anything remotely like that.

As she came closer, she looked at him, unwavering, and Lorian started to feel dizzy. He began half-seeing a profusion of vines bursting with bright, jewel-toned flowers on cream-colored stone, the sand becoming thick grassland running forward into marsh, the air wet and warm, distant hills lush and green. Then it felt as though he was caught in a shockwave, as though a chorus of countless voices fell silent, and the land being replaced by a void - impossible, not that you would be taken from home, but that the earth beneath your feet could disappear -

When Lorian woke again, he was back in the passenger seat of the sandskimmer, with a bit of a headache, and they were now in a less remarkable and milder part of the Forge, with rolling sand dunes, approaching the final stretch to Vulcana Regar. 

He looked over at Selek, and almost jumped out of his seat, for instead of the sleek and treacherous Vulcan warrior, there was now a Klingon woman, with the facial ridges of the lower-class, and unremarkable, drab, and likely padded clothes, covering her up to her neck.

“It’s all right, mate,” said Selek, for this must have still been Selek, with a new gentleness. “It’s perfectly natural for a Vulcan civilian to be thrown by visceral violence and death. I take kills pretty hard myself, which is why I’m glad I had the time to observe basic battlefield etiquette.”

Lorian couldn’t sort through the incongruity of Selek suddenly being a Klingon enough to contest that it hadn’t just been the gore, but also the vision of the green place being ripped to nothing, so he just blurted out: “What, are you just some sort of master of disguise now?”

Selek rolled her eyes, which was even more dramatic under her magnificently bushy brows. “I’m choosing to believe you’re comparing me to The Great Paris in Mission: Impossible and not anything in that terrible Dana Carvey movie.”

“But can you really - can you pretend to be a Klingon? Like flip a switch? You were just pretending to be some Vulcan warrior monk with skills that you did not just fake.”

“Who says I’m Vulcan and not Klingon?”

“You don’t have the hips for it! Under that padding you look like the most expensive dancer at a club with the good kanar in Little Cardassia!”

Selek looked at him with such dismay he actually couldn’t tell if she was mocking him or was actually scandalized.

He flushed green. “Iloja took us, okay? He said we wouldn’t understand the parallels between Cardassian and Vulcan love poetry if we didn’t have context on classical tropes of desirability. He told us it was educational!”

“I was going to blast Klingon opera and sing along till the spaceport for that crack about my hips, but considering you just told me I’m sexy according to Iloja of Prim, we’re going to listen to King Crimson instead.”

She put on In the Court of the Crimson King, and Lorian found himself relaxing enough to feel embarrassed.

“You’re not… the agent they send on milk runs, are you?”

“No, Lorian,” she said, and sounded sad. “I’m not.”

“Can I ask a question about… what just happened?”

“Ask away,” she said, non-committal.

“First, not a question, but goddamn, that’s scary that the Romulans have so many Vulcans working for them. My question is what is the Tal Shiar and do they hate women, or somethin’? They were talking like you were… slutty for an assassin or something.”

“I think what the Tal Shiar is should be self-evident and they hate the kind of woman I appeared to be, yes.”

“What sort of woman is that?”

“The sort of woman who would not, aside from the fancy footwork, do pretty much anything else I’ve done today.”

“So you’re not a… whatever they thought you were?”

Selek shrugged.

“That reminds me,” she then said, drew something out of her boot and tossed him something flat and small. “If you run into Romulans again, you’re going to need this.”

“Uh,” said Lorian, staring at what was very clearly a hilt and sheath, “thanks for this… tiny knife? Why do I need a knife?”

“This is something called an ‘honor blade.’ It’s meant to be kept close to the body and may be hidden - a defense against an attack at intimate proximity. Or for ritual suicide, though please don’t use it for that. And it’s not so much what it does, as what it means to the Romulans you might run into.”

“What does it mean?”

“To an ally, it means protection and guarantees your honorable intentions. To an enemy, it means that someone is coming back for you, and they will never, ever stop.”

“Whose… knife is this, that it could mean that?”

“Mine,” she said. “A family heirloom, of sorts.”

“You’re really… giving me this? Why?”

“Consider it a long-term loan,” she said. “You won’t need it that long - another blade like this will come to you at some point, and that’s yours to keep. Then you’ll pass this one on, and that person will return it to me in due time.”

“Who do I give it to?”

“The first Vulcan-Human hybrid to graduate Starfleet Academy,” she said. 

“Oh,” said Lorian. That was… extremely specific. He wondered if he were envious or relieved that there would be someone like that in Starfleet during his lifetime.

He noticed, then, that they were not taking one of the several roads towards the Vulcana Regar spaceport. Perhaps he was tired, but he didn’t have it in him to feel alarmed again. “Where are we going?”

“We’re going to a freight shipyard just outside the city. Another part of the change in plans, now that we’ve been made by both the Federation and the Romulans. Also, why I’m dressed like this now. I’m going to mess up your eyebrows and bob your ears with some cheap prosthetics and a hat so you’ll pass for human, and we’re going to walk onto a Klingon merchant freighter together. There, I’ll hand you off to my boss - the high-strung bloke who iced our Federaji friends back at the house - who will take you as far as he plans to take you.”

Lorian stared at her, aghast.

Misunderstanding, she said, “He’ll look different, obviously, human, most likely. Not like a ninja villain in a Godfrey Ho film meets RoboCop.”

“No,” he said, “that’s not - Look, am I really that important? Or is the thing I could fuck up… that important?”

“No, you’re not, in the sense that there’s no particular thing you need to specifically do to preserve the timeline. However, yes, the timeline under attack is important.”

“Still, this seems like… overkill to me. Didn’t you send just Agent Daniels to work with Uncle Jon on protecting the entire Federation from the temporal cold war?”

“We usually do work in teams, the thing about Daniels is he’s a regular savant at… Never mind, you’re right, this is overkill. You’re getting white glove service due to some… inside baseball.”

“Inside baseball. The baseball being time traveling secret agents from the future?”

“Well, yeah.”

“You expect me to just… accept that, let this go?”

Selek gave a deep sigh, which hissed slightly through her larger and sharper Klingon teeth. “I would be thrilled if you could. It will harm you less than we’ve already had to harm you today.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lorian,” she said, her tone steady and now humorless, “you’ve had two groups of spies try to kill you today, and you’re leaving the only home you’ve ever known. None of your relationships will be the same. But the thing that’s going to hurt the most is that soon we’re going to leave you on your own.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What’s happened to you today is traumatic, awful, and difficult to understand. Getting swooped up by mysterious super spies from the future who have answers and a noble mission is like a tourniquet. A temporary measure that changes how you work to save your life but will damage you if it goes on for too long. You’re not a part of this - the work we do, the scale of the conflict we’re in. The more you learn the more powerless you’ll feel.”

Lorian felt dull, and distant. She was right. The idea that this exhilarating and horrifying ride would stop and his ruined life would just keep going was impossible. “Why not?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Why do I have to be powerless? Why can’t I be a part of this?”

“You don’t want to be a temporal agent, Lorian.”

“Maybe I do. Your job seems cool.”

“It’s very cool. It’s also not something you sign up for. And you can never retire.”

“What, you have to do this for the rest of your life? Till you die?”

“That’s a… charitable way of putting it.”

Agent Selek was quiet as Pictures from an Exhibition by EL&P came on. Lorian let his gaze drift out the window, watching the speeding blur of blinding sand. He wanted… something. “Any other, um, Romulan tips?”

“Sure,” she said. “If anyone tries to get you all mixed up in Butlerian jihad nonsense and do evil shit - in order to save all sentient life from annihilation - they’re talking out their arses. Sentient synthetic lifeforms aren’t the problem.”

“Did you just make a Dune reference to the robot apocalypse? While we’re driving through sand dunes?”

“What, would you prefer a Matrix reference?”

“I mean, that’s a little more accessible, don’t you think?”

“Well, let’s try this, then. What do you know about Pre-Awakening eschatology?”

“You mean like fairy tales about the end of the world?”

“Yes.”

“Probably more than the average Vulcan,” said Lorian, and frowned. “Mother says the Book of Uncoverings is fairly obscure, but Uncle Mike was determined to find ‘Vulcan bedtime stories’ and this apparently was the closest thing. He even made Sarek’s father translate it into Standard just so he could read it to me and my sister. Bedtime stories are such a bizarre human tradition. Why would engaging with imaginative stimuli induce sleep in children?”

“I never understood why humans do that either. Tell me the story of the end of the world.”

“Well, when the age of the gods comes to an end, the lovers, Iron and Fire, who made everything else on Vulcan, lose interest in each other and in making anything. Iron cries three tears into the Voroth Sea, and from that come her last children, the dirge sisters. One plays a drum, the other sings and carries a horn made from a lava monster or something, but never uses it. The gods are afraid of them, and kill the sister with the drum. The other sister, in her grief, sounds the horn, which wakes up the first children of Iron and Fire, the warring brothers who are also mega-volcanoes, and they destroy everything, the Vulcans, the gods, even Iron and Fire, until everything melts back into the primordial magma of Sha-Ka-Ree or something.”

“What do you think the moral of that story is?”

“Stories having morals is a human concept.”

“You’re as human as you are Vulcan.”

“Okay, then, I always thought it was about the dangers of self-fulfilling prophecies, I guess. Or entropy, how there’s a cycle of expansion and decay. Productive forces are also destructive forces, and if you try to have one without the other, everything goes dead, inert.”

“Sure. But on a more practical level, if you don’t like the message, it’s counter-productive at best and catastrophic at worst to shoot the messenger. To put it another way, killing women who say things you don’t want to hear is always a terrible idea.”

“What does this have to do with the robot apocalypse?”

“Nothing, that’s the point: it’s illogical to apply mythological thinking to a historical situation.” 

“So your tips for me - who you want to stay out of time war stuff - about Romulans are to show them a knife from a prophecy you just made up and to not commit war crimes if I’m trying to stop the rise of the machines?”

“Pretty much. I mean, there’s more, but you can figure that out along the way.”

“You do know that’s not making me less curious about whatever… this all is.”

Lorian folded his arms and looked up at her, expecting her to smirk or bristle. Instead she frowned and was silent for a full five minutes.

“It’s called a Varley Extraction,” she said.

“What is?”

“The way temporal operatives are recruited, common across many factions. You’re removed right at the moment of your death. As long as you never return to your time, not as yourself, and no recruiter caused your death, it’s legal enough.”

“That’s what you mean, when you say you can’t sign up to be a temporal agent?”

“Yes. It’s a very resource-intensive process, evaluating candidates, and then convincing them to be agents, to be loyal. They look for particular skills, of course. Combinations of skills. Certain psychological profiles. That’s what they’ll tell you, that you’re so special and have your heart in the right place. You have what it takes to be a bloody anti-hero. But it’s more than that. Many field agents have a military background, particularly in intelligence, and can follow orders. That’s also pretty obvious. What they won’t say, though, is that the key qualification is dying in dishonor.”

“What?”

“You have the kind of death that would make you into an unquiet spirit. A pointless death, a death where you lost and people were hurt, a death in the middle of making a big mistake. An accident, a failure, a betrayal. That’s how they get you. You’re too ashamed to be properly homesick, and you have something to prove to yourself.”

“You can’t retire, because you can’t go home?”

“I can’t retire because I’m legally dead,” she said. “In times and places where I have legal standing, I have the same rights as a corpse. If I can’t do this anymore, I’ll have to die. If I go rogue, they can euthanize me. They legally can’t call it an execution. It’s unlikely I’ll die of natural or accidental causes. I haven’t physically aged since I was extracted and put through the recruitment process and even if I die on a mission, it’s simple enough to get a… backup copy. Since I’m dead and not a real person, there aren’t legal limits on that, and I’m an expensive investment.”

Lorian stared at her, feeling slightly nauseous. That sounded very much like a violation of the anti-slavery sections of the Federation Constitution. What the hell was going on in the thirty-first century?

“But… Agent Selek, you’re not really dead. That ain’t right. How could that be legal? That goes against everything the Federation stands for.”

“I am really dead,” she said, gripping the steering wheel. “In the same way I’m really alive. It’s the one ritual, the one spooky necromancy thing you have to do. When you’ve agreed to become an agent, you have to be the one who makes your death… real. You get split into two versions of yourself - one goes back to die and one stays. The one who stays crosses over into the universe where they’re dead.  I’m actually not, well, from here, not technically. I’m similar enough that there aren’t any compatibility issues, on the quantum, subjective, or even telepathic level, but in this timeline, I am dead - or will be dead.”

She was looking over at Lorian now, as though concerned about him. “As for how the Federation could allow this in the future, there have always been exceptions made for extraordinary measures in times of extreme threat. That loophole was in the Starfleet Charter before the Federation even existed, and they never do away with it. Temporal agents are too valuable and too powerful to have the same freedoms other people do. From a security standpoint, that is. I understand where they’re coming from, but I don’t agree with it, obviously.”

“Why did you sign on, then?”

“Instead of going back and just dying?”

“Well, yeah.”

“You’re going to hate this, but I’d have to say: faith.”

Lorian wasn’t sure if he hated it, but he certainly didn’t expect her to say that. “In what, time gods?”

“Okay, funnily enough, there are a handful of transdimensional beings that from our perspective could be called gods, who can manipulate reality at will and exist outside of time, as we know it. I grew up in a society with a religious tradition around some of them, but I don’t necessarily see them that way, as gods. However, I’m not arrogant enough to think they’re just other species we can understand the same way. Oh, that’s another tip: if you ever run into a god, try not to draw attention to yourself, aim to be as boring as possible.”

“Uh. Okay?”

“I have faith,” she continued, “I guess, in history, that what happens to people matters, and in my own limitations, that there’s always something I could be missing. Because I have faith, seeing where things are going is more interesting than being dead.”

Lorian wasn’t sure what to say about any of that.

“Knowing what I know, when I see these handful of centuries before and after you, I see an irradiated wasteland, mind-bending violations of reality, and real people live here. I was even one of them. I behave as a person, not a quantum signature, and I don’t care that much about who or what is the ‘prime,’ original version of something on a technical level. Because I also have faith in the fact that people actually exist, and I’d rather try and make things better or stop them from getting worse for everyone than roll over and die.”

“Oh,” said the boy.

“You don’t want to be a temporal agent, Lorian.”

“Yeah,” he said, feeling suddenly bereft. His life really would just… go on. He wouldn't be someone else. “I don’t.”

“Just live your life and die uneventfully. I’d really like it if this, right now, is the worst thing that ever happens to you.”

The boy stared out the window again. “I just hope that mother and T’Mir are going to be okay. And Sarek.”

“Sarek?”

“Sarek, Skon’s son. My, uh, suitor.”

“Shut up, seriously? I did not have ‘Sarek scored with T’Pol’s half-human son’ on my Sarek bingo card.”

“You have a Sarek bingo card? Also, why the hell would that be on a Sarek bingo card?”

“You'll get it in a few decades.”

“I promised him, you know,” said Lorian, who frowned. “I promised that I’d go to Shi’Kahr first before I went off-world. He wants to come with me.”

“A promise,” said Selek, face unreadable, “is a prison.”

“He’ll be fine,” said Lorian, who needed to be firm, rock solid, on this point. “He’s so… perfect. He’ll be happier with someone who’s less of a disaster. Whenever we’re together, it’s like he coaxes me into this beautiful, well-ordered world where I’m… precious and taken care of, but that’s all coming from him. It was stupid to think I’d actually get to keep feeling that way.”

“I'll tell you right now that it wasn’t stupid,” said Selek, “but when you lose the hope that you’re one of the lucky ones, it’s true that you never do get it back.”

“Why are you telling me this, any of this? Why are you indulging me?”

“Do you want the true answer or the hard answer first?”

“Hard answer.”

“It’s too late for a light touch. You need substantive information to stay safe, even if it hurts you. You’re Vulcan. If you stop a Vulcan from asking questions long enough they go berserk.”

“What is the true answer?”

“You saved my life, or, well, something like that, a long time ago, and you didn’t recognize me. You just helped me because it seemed like the right thing to do. From my perspective, you deserve every ounce of effort I’m putting into this job, even the quirky music catalog, the half-assed therapy, and the witty repartee, because you’ve already earned it.”

“Oh,” said Lorian, blushing again and feeling himself tear up slightly. Selek tactfully kept her eyes on the road. 

“Agent Selek,” he asked, “how did you die?”

Lorian expected a quip or an insult, or just silence. 

“Young,” she said.

“I grieve with thee,” Lorian said, the words out of his mouth before he could think them through.

“In grief thou are with me,” she replied, in perfect Old Golish, the traditional reply.

Another song faded out as another filled in, and - 

Spock found himself in the center of the labyrinth, wrapped tightly in Lorian’s arms, face tucked into his shoulder. He was shaking as though crying, but his eyes were dry.

They separated slowly, and then Spock followed him as they retraced their steps. 

Without a word, they walked back to the front room, and Lorian got two more cups of tea, hot and chamomile this time, and they sat where they had before.

In the bracing calm of perfect clarity, Spock drew out T’Pol’s IDIC pendant from under his silk, violet tunic. He took it off his neck and handed it to Lorian.

“Your mother gave this to me when I was accepted to Starfleet Academy. She told me of Elizabeth and said the pendant’s history made the gift itself an act of ni’var.”

Lorian examined it with reverent hands, eyes wide. “Wow, I always assumed it was in some museum.”

“I did as well,” Spock said. “I will return it to you, of course.”

“No,” Lorian replied. “It’s yours now. You have a connection to Elizabeth that neither I nor T’Mir have, surviving the trauma of living openly as what we are, and the impact the sister we never met had on our parents and by extension us is too… raw, for the constant reminder this pendant would be. Besides, obviously T’Pol brushed up on ni’var aesthetics to connect with her son the artist, and I think the earnestness of her gesture is endearing. I’d hate to undo it.”

Spock took the pendant back and hung it on his neck, leaving it out for the time being. Lorian leapt to his feet and went to a box on a bookshelf across the room, coming back after a moment, and placing a small, sheathed knife before Spock. Then he drew a second knife from his boot and laid it beside the first.

“Speaking of cursed heirlooms from T’Pol’s family,” said Lorian, and nodded to him to examine the knives.

Spock drew them out carefully. They looked almost identical and completely different. The first he quickly determined was the knife from Lorian’s memories, with its simple leather hilt, the plain winged emblem, and a few words of Romulan script on each half of the double “shadow blade.” The second, from Lorian’s boot, was extremely ornate, with latinum and dark red and black gemstones inlaid on the hilt, each half of the blade covered in gilt lettering.

Lorian tapped the extravagant blade. “This honor blade belonged to my grandfather, the Tal Shiar agent who made it his life’s work to undermine Vulcan and sabotage the Federation. Who abandoned his daughter and casts a long shadow over our lives even today. The lettering is his abridged genealogy, and various honors his family had won through the centuries. Generations upon generations of high-ranking members of the Tal Shiar. He knew what he was doing; they only sent the most seasoned and loyal operatives to Vulcan.”

He picked it up and they watched it shine in dim light. “This is my honor blade because I refuse to hide the truth to myself or those who would come near me. Every act of defiance against the ruling-class of Romulus and beyond - every rejection of endless war I make with my own little life - I make with this blade at my side, turned against its own history.”

“If you’ll indulge my ignorance of art,” said Spock, “it sounds to me like an act of ni’var as well.”

Lorian smiled. He then sheathed his blade and returned it to his boot, leaving the simpler blade glowing in a patch of moonlight. He didn’t have to say that this blade would be going with Spock when they parted; he remembered.

Spock traced the wings on the hilt. “Do you know what the lettering says?”

“I do,” said Lorian. “The simplest translation is something like absolute candor. I, however, am partial to the poetic gloss: tell the entire truth.”

Spock continued to stare at the blade. “I don’t think he was fine,” said Spock. “Sarek. When you left.”

He could feel a sigh come from Lorian at his side, with words barely audible: “I know.”

 

***

 

A week or so later, trapped on a planetoid with a very much alive Zefram Cochrane and his “Companion,” a transdimensional telepathic being who barely manifested on the physical plane, Spock reflected that this was not in fact the strangest thing that had happened recently. Perhaps I have been serving in deep space too long, he thought, at one point, when they were trying to explain to the father of the warp engine and first contact that a swirling cloud of light had kept him alive for a hundred and fifty years, could only communicate by sharing thought and feeling, and was in love with him. 

“I don’t understand,” said Cochrane, and Spock felt a twinge of annoyance even though the man’s confusion was logical. I wonder what impact so many five-year missions have had on my sense of perspective.

Dr. McCoy seemed to have a similar reaction. “You don’t? A blind man could see it with a cane. You’re not a pet. You’re not a specimen in a cage. You’re a lover.”

“I’m a what?”

“Her attitude when she approaches you,” Spock said, “is profoundly different than when she contacts us. Her appearance is soft, gentle. Her voice is melodic, pleasing. I do not totally understand the emotion, but it obviously exists. The Companion loves you.”

Cochrane shuddered. “Do you know what you’re saying? For all these years, I’ve let something as alien as that crawl around inside me, into my mind, my feelings.”

Spock now restrained a flinch at his aggrieved tone, how there was something twisted in it. Something alien crawling around in my mind…

Jim also seemed a bit done. “What are you complaining about? It kept you alive.”

“That thing fed on me,” Cochrane snapped. “It used me. It’s disgusting.”

“There’s nothing disgusting about it,” said Dr. McCoy, voice firm. “It’s just another life form, that’s all. You get used to those things.”

“You’re as bad as it is,” snarled Cochrane.

Spock felt vaguely ill, that the doctor felt he had to get used to “those things” - something alien crawling around inside my mind, my feelings - and that Cochrane could accuse the doctor of being as bad. Nothing like that should ever come anywhere near the doctor, not ever.

“Your highly emotional reaction is illogical,” Spock said, his tone clipped. “Your relationship with the Companion has for one hundred and fifty years been emotionally satisfying, eminently practical, and totally harmless. It may indeed have been quite beneficial.”

“Is this what the future holds? Men who have no notion of decency or morality? Maybe I’m a hundred and fifty years out of style, but I’m not going to be fodder for any inhuman monster.” With that, Cochrane stormed out.

“Fascinating,” Spock said, vaguely, to the room. “A totally parochial attitude.”

“Doctor, doctor,” cried Commissioner Hedford, their dying diplomatic charge, wasting away without the Enterprise’s medical equipment. McCoy flew across Cochrane’s bungalow to her bedside.

“Right here,” he said, patting her hand, “Commissioner Hedford.”

“I heard him,” she said, delirious, “He was loved and he resents it.”

“You just rest,” he said, gentle.

“No,” she moaned. “I don’t want to die. I’ve been good at my job, but I’ve never been loved. Never. What kind of life is that? Not to be loved, never to have shown love? And he runs away from love.” She burst into tears.

All of a sudden he flashed back to sickbay, to strange not-McCoy staring into him, knowing without kindness, him saying: Nobody likes Spock. I care about him the most, but even I don’t get to like him. It would mean he was vulnerable enough, too much of a person, to be liked. He thought of his father, at ten years old looking as innocent and lost as the wounded young Sybok he’d first met, being told by his brother that his mother wished he was dead.

Spock walked swiftly out of the bungalow and into the endless, sparse landscape, stopping several meters away, looking out at nothing in particular for quite a while.

“Hey,” said Dr. McCoy, who had come near him, standing just behind and beside him. “I had to get her comfortable first. Are you all right?”

“I am undamaged,” he said, and did not turn to look at him.

“That I very much doubt,” said the doctor. 

“I should be asking you, doctor, what your condition is at this time, to be confronted with a reminder of such communion and intimacy that a human considers a violation of his consent.”

“Right,” said the doctor, sounding almost bitter. Then, he said, his voice gruff. “Spock, you can’t help me.”

Spock did turn then, and Dr. McCoy was frowning at him. “Doctor?”

“I know you feel responsible for what that man did, but you’re not going to be able to do anything for me. You’re not a trained healer, and it’s not minor damage: you’re a powerful telepath and could make it worse.”

“What of the damage… the emotional damage,” said Spock. McCoy blinked. “Do you require… verbal processing?”

“Are you asking me if I want to talk about it?”

“I am.”

McCoy sagged and wrapped his arms around himself. “No, Spock,” he said, his voice clear enough. “Not - not yet. I saw things in his mind that I didn’t want to face about myself, and I can’t sort through it until I’m set to rights.”

Now Spock blinked in surprise. That was not… what he had expected the doctor to say at all. What could he possibly

“Doctor,” he said, slowly. “I will respect your wishes in this matter, of course, but I think you should know that I did spend some time with your counterpart. I am not completely… ignorant of their dynamic.”

McCoy went rigid and pale and then sprung forward, gripping Spock’s forearm. “He got close to you? Spock, are you all right? Damn it, I didn’t even think… When we get back we should run some tests…”

Spock tilted his head to the side, bemused. He almost wanted to laugh, though the sick feeling in his stomach hadn’t gone away. 

“As I said, I am undamaged. But perhaps I would welcome, at some point, talking about it.”

“Yeah,” said McCoy, eyes wide. “Uh, yeah. Right.” He shifted his feet and wrung his hands. “Let’s um, get Jim, maybe try talking to this Companion again…”



***

 

When they left Zefram Cochrane and the new life form, a symbiosis of the dying Nancy Hedford and the Companion, Jim’s sunny prediction that the diplomatic corps could easily replace the commissioner in a bloody treaty negotiation turned out to be premature. 

The Enterprise had been required to deviate significantly from more interesting pursuits far back within Federation territory. Instead of getting to survey a stellar nursery, which Spock and particularly Ensign Chekov had been looking forward to, they had a few pointless days of shore leave at a drab and unremarkable space station while they picked up a new Federation diplomat. He had at least been looking forward to a few uninterrupted days to finish writing a paper on the Nomad probe and general intelligence AI, but days before they even docked, he’d received an urgent meeting request from the Starfleet Command liaison office.

The office was tucked away in an area of an old-style promenade with low foot traffic, and was staffed, in reception, by officers in uniform and civilian garb with prominent Starfleet badges. He was ushered in immediately to a conference room in the back.

Waiting in the room was someone Spock had never wanted to see again.

“Commander Spock,” said Ash Tyler, the director of Section 31, “it’s been some time.”

Spock gave a minute nod and took a seat. 

“Before we start, this conversation is classified at level black-theta,” said Tyler, looking grave. The same level as all evidence of the “mirror universe” - or evidence that this was a known quantity to Starfleet Command, anyway. 

Spock gave another nod.

“We’ve received a full briefing from Captain Kirk of the events that took place on the other side, and your report on the activities of the imperial Terrans on our side of the looking-glass was quite thorough.”

“I believe that information was disclosed to Starfleet Intelligence, Mr. Tyler, and to that agency alone.”

“Of course,” said Tyler, who tapped his badge, which Spock finally noted was silver, not black, and that he had a captain’s pips on the collar of his muted green and bronze silk tunic. Starfleet Intelligence was the one service that allowed plainclothes on duty. “My officers forwarded me both immediately. As division head for multidimensional affairs at Starfleet Intelligence, I thought I’d follow up personally.”

Spock swiftly intercepted and suppressed the sick horror at the knowledge that the director of Section 31 was so deeply embedded in Starfleet Intelligence, as it was, among other things, illogical. Hadn’t closer accountability and oversight of Section 31 by Starfleet Command been one of his and Pike’s demands?

“I’m particularly interested,” said Tyler, “in the visiting Mr. McCoy’s excursion to the Enterprise ’s sickbay and various labs.”

I’m sure you are. “What part of my report was inadequate, sir?”

“Oh, no part, Spock,” said Tyler in a reassuring tone, as though he was a friend, not the Klingon double agent turned Section 31 triple agent who’d permanently taken on a dead man’s life, face, and memories, murdered Dr. Culber, and destroyed Michael’s mental health in the process. “I merely wanted you to check something for me.”

He waved Spock over to a terminal where a selection of the Enterprise’s server logs was displayed. 

“We’ve duplicated the logs within the time span he was in range of a computer interface, so we could examine a copy and not trip any of your security protocols,” said Tyler. “We want to know if the visiting McCoy accessed any of the ship’s computer systems. Beyond his aborted attempt to hack into our databases, of course. After extensive analysis, we don’t think he got anything useful, but we thought you might have better luck, as you’ve customized many of the ship’s systems and have a better sense of typical server traffic. Sorry for the delay - we really wanted to do our due diligence before we bothered you.”

Keeping his face blank, and kicking himself for not checking this possibility himself, Spock sat at the terminal and worked in silence for a few minutes. 

“Yes, he did,” said Spock, finally. “It may have escaped notice because he was attempting to duplicate the schema and credentials of a read-all query for Starfleet and Federation databases. And he appears to have made the request through a biobed, not a terminal.”

“So,” said Tyler, “a query that would allow access to the full databases but just the format and generic credentials of a valid query, not the results themselves?”

“Affirmative.”

“Thank you Mr. Spock, this has been very helpful.”

Tyler apparently expected him to go.

“From what I saw of the man,” said Spock, “he did not have the capacity to manually write a search program let alone without a client interface via a biobed.”

Tyler nodded. “We agree,” said Tyler, “but to discuss the implications would put us at a higher security clearance than necessary. We’ll reach out if we require your assistance again, Mr. Spock.”

“I am always happy to work with Starfleet Intelligence,” he said, adding a very light emphasis to “Starfleet Intelligence.”

“Of course,” said Tyler with a faint smile. “Dismissed, commander.”

The matter consumed the entirety of his meditation session once he’d returned to the ship until a preliminary explanation presented itself. 

The first layer of the explanation was obvious: the other Spock indeed wanted access to the accumulated knowledge and technology of the prime universe. He hadn’t set these events in motion to gain a copy: for one thing, such a massive data transfer could not be done without every firewall activating, which was exactly what had happened. More importantly, it was not necessary. Any crewman had full search access with one universal code, even if they’d get flagged for searching for things beyond their pay grade, as nothing classified was in the databases. The query was trivial and routine: he’d only caught it because it had been sent from the sickbay office when the doctor’s counterpart had been in the room.

Another layer: the other Spock didn’t need a copy of the database because he already had one. What he didn’t have was the basic format and credentials for anything beyond guest access to a Starfleet ship’s interface. He had heard, secondhand, from Michael, that the Terran emperor had claimed a Starfleet vessel from this time period had been thrown back into the “mirror universe’s” past and that they had been able to study it to a certain extent. No one had determined what vessel this was, but this troubling development did suggest that the interfaces and credentials on Enterprise in 2267 were compatible. 

Yet another layer: not-McCoy had made a grand production of “hacking” the Enterprise and then “failing,” leveraging this attempt to gain even more information. But the man had actually quietly completed the other Spock’s mission well before they’d made it to Dr. Tola’s lab. The rest had been… set dressing, a deflection, perhaps a bid for just a little more information, either for McCoy himself, as he’d suggested, or once again on the other Spock’s behalf.

If this were all part of the plan, he thought, then all of the other Spock’s actions were calculated. Including going into the doctor’s mind and…

Before he could stop himself, he was already walking to the turbolift, to sickbay. There had to have been some reason, some plan, for the other man to have - to have committed such a violent act. Perhaps some kind of conditioning, which could explain McCoy’s strange side effects, though he didn’t know how. 

He had considered and discarded ten different theories when he entered sickbay, only to stop short when he saw Dr. M’Benga.

“Where is Dr. McCoy?”

“Not here,” said M’Benga.

“Doctor,” he tried again. “Why are you here?”

“I’m filling in as CMO at the moment,” he replied.

“And Dr. McCoy is unable to fulfill his duties as CMO because…”

“As the first officer,” said M’Benga, “I’d imagine you’d have access to that information.”

Point, Dr. M’Benga. 

Spock began backing out of sickbay to find a terminal to check his comm messages. “Ah, of course, it is agreeable to see you, Dr. M’Benga, I just need to - I’ll just -”

“I missed you too, Spock,” said M’Benga, rolling his eyes.

Back in his quarters, the message was easy to find. Top priority. Emergency medical leave, to Vulcan. The message hadn’t been sent by Starfleet at all, but on a Federation diplomatic channel.

The request had been approved at the discretion of the Vulcan Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United Federation of Planets, S’chnn T’gai Sarek.

Notes:

Aaaaaand now it’s time to head back to Vulcan to pick up the parents!!

Episodes:
“I, Mudd” (events referenced in previous chapter) -> “Metamorphosis” (missing scene, coda, dialogue)

One version, at least, of Lorian is canon. (“E^2” on Enterprise) The characterization in this fic is different because of life experiences, but I’ve preserved the core of him being very intense, taking after Trip in terms of engineering gifts, and losing Trip young (at 14 in canon, late teens in this fic).

T'Rama and Silek are beta canon - given backstory of Skon's "first wife" basically. Made up Silek's deal.

The Zal Makh is a real thing in ST:Pic ("The Impossible Box") and way more horny than it probably should be.

I made up the cultural stuff about Kir province, but was riffing on the RPG sourcebook.

Trip faking his death to join Section 31 as the worst spy ever and going undercover in Romulan territory and then surfacing as “Michael Kenmore” and having secret love children (Lorian and T’Mir) with T’Pol is beta canon.

Um, my profound apologies if the British English in this sounded silly. I was going for the “boss” having RP with occasional informal diction and Selek having an “Estuary” London accent (RP and hints of Cockney), like Adele basically. Some East End influences are okay too.

Senet and Surak is also from the RPG, but I like it a lot. I may or may not have gotten distracted from this chapter writing a post-TFF timestamp set during the Time of Awakening to be shared after the fic’s conclusion.

The Vulcan end-times stuff is Romulan lore from ST:Picard.

“Varley Extractions” are from the old beta canon lore about the Aegis, and is a reference to IRL author John Varley and his novel Millenium, where the idea originates. I made up some of the technical details, but the concept is the same. I’ve decided the temporal agency uses this method too, but I cut the essay I wrote on it, lmao.

Romulan phrases:
Jolan tru - hello/good-bye
Feldor staam toreht - “Please, friends, choose to live.”

And yes, in reference to the latter, I was thrilled to discover that at one point Elnor says at least the short version of the Qowat Milat catch phrase in Romulan (“Nepenthe,” Picard).

As to why the UT didn’t pick up the Romulan, my idea about this is that civilian UTs work differently than Starfleet UTs and there are political reasons why it’s not ideal that civilians - particularly on Vulcan - can just understand every dialect of Romulan. A related idea I like is that Romulans in 2190 would only speak one dialect to outsiders - this would also explain why AOS Uhura would go to the trouble of learning three.

“Honor blades” and them being family heirlooms are a beta canon concept from Diane Duane, but my take on them is an extrapolation of Michael Gabon’s super fun Romulan lore for ST:Picard, which posits distrust and subterfuge as core principles of Romulan society (which is amply supported in many Romulan stories, especially on TNG). I like the idea of “honor” being a complex term and one of the meanings is protecting the integrity of and proximity to the physical body, so it’s traditional to have a little knife on you (at least).

At the risk of over-explaining a joke, Selek is saying she’s like the opposite of a Qowat Milat even if she can fight/talk like one because no Qowat Milat would do anything requiring going undercover or hiding their identity. This isn’t directly stated in canon but I think it’s heavily implied. Romulan warrior nuns are a lot of kickass things, but being good spies is not one of them.

“The Great Paris” in the 1960s show Mission: Impossible is a “master of disguise” played by Leonard Nimoy. The show shared sets with Star Trek, and apparently sometimes they’d steal MI props and spray paint them to be more “space.”

Am I implying the temporal agency has some sort of historical link to Section 31? Basically, yeah, but don’t worry about it too much yet.

Am I implying T’Pol has some sort of connection with the Qowat Milat??????????

Why are so many random people named Selek in this fic????? Hmmmmmm.

Like if you too did not have “Sarek hooked up with T’Pol’s half-human son” on your Sarek bingo card; comment if you think Trip’s roadtrip playlists would be dorky but also very involved.

Chapter 10: Paradise City Lost

Summary:

Spock is blindsided by information he willfully withheld from himself, even in 2267 everyone thinks the Nimbus III colony is a joke, and Spock doesn’t not have a conversation with his father.

Notes:

Ugh, so sorry for the delay! I wrestled with this chapter, and I'm still thinking through how I'm rewriting the next little bit to get us to season 3. I thought it better to post what I could get done! I really appreciate your patience and support!

Content Notes:

Vulcan supremacist behavior, threats of violence in a hostage situation, anecdota from the Mirror Universe where anything sort of goes. Abusive and gendered language that is sexist and gross uttered by antagonists. References to bullying and PTSD. A reference to a conversation with sexual content in a previous chapter. Um, and like so many daddy issues.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

[2267; Vulcan, USS Enterprise; Alpha and Beta Quadrants]


“Clear hangar deck. Clear hangar deck. Depressurizing. Recovering shuttlecraft. Hangar deck pressurizing.”

Spock found himself staring at the red-clad security officers marching into the hangar and into position, not looking at anything in particular. McCoy turned to him anyway, conspiratorial, and said, “How does that Vulcan salute go?”

Spock was glad he’d been able to join the doctor and captain a bit late, falling into step behind McCoy, thus hiding whatever small signs his face betrayed that suddenly seeing the doctor again, after two weeks, did not leave him… unaffected. Without speaking he demonstrated the ta’al.

“That hurts worse than the uniform,” McCoy muttered to himself, seeming frustrated to an absurd degree with his failure.

He turned his attention to another unwelcome prompt for emotional intensity, his father and mother escorted out of their shuttle along with Sarek’s staff. The last representatives to join the voyage to the Babel Conference in two weeks time. At the very least, with his parents, there was a script for this initial encounter. 

Becoming aware Jim had just said his name, he turned to his father, gave the ta’al and said, “Vulcan honors us with your presence. We come to serve.”

Sarek, of course, regarded him with no reaction at all. “Your service honors us, captain,” he said, turning his gaze to Jim.

Introductions continued. He internally flinched when the captain offered up his own services as a guide to his own parents, and was so relieved his father requested someone else it took him a second to realize this was possibly a slight.

He was longing for the end - soon surely - of the interaction, when Jim made the bizarre offer for him to “beam down” to Vulcan to visit his parents. 

“Captain,” he said, unsure if he’d missed something, “Ambassador Sarek and his wife are my parents.”

At this point, the formal ceremony was over, not due to a dignified conclusion, but because Jim had his equivalent of a meltdown, babbling his apologies to Sarek, trying to explain his mistake for no logical reason Spock could discern. They all moved out into the corridor, everyone seemingly scattering, except for the solemn aides at Sarek’s side as his father patiently listened to the captain stammer.

His mother’s amusement at the commotion turned into a sunny-natured grin, after which she practically leaped forward and pounced on Dr. McCoy, dragging him into a hug and further into the hall and the interaction further into “social territory.”

Spock stood stock still, losing his entire power of speech. 

Leo! It’s so good to see you again! I just got the news!” His mother pulled the doctor in closer.

McCoy did not stiffen, but actually gave a rather sweet smile as he lightly returned her embrace. “Always a pleasure, Lady Amanda.”

“Oh, that stuffy official nonsense is over for the moment; I keep telling you it’s just Amanda.”

Always a pleasure? Keep telling? What news? Spock may or may not have tracked all of McCoy’s recorded movements on Vulcan over the past several weeks, and he was quite sure that McCoy had spent most of his time in a “private residence” in a working-class neighborhood of Shi’Kahr on the other side of the city from Sarek’s official townhouse or somewhere near Mount Seleya. A horrifying thought occurred to him. Had his mother tracked down Dr. McCoy all on her own and forced him to… socially interact while he was on Vulcan? Was this a continuation of her well-meaning if invasive campaign to insert herself into his medical care at the beginning of his tenure?

Mistaking the meaning of his bald stare at the pair entirely, his mother pulled him closer, and looked up at him, eyes shining, and asked, “Isn’t it just wonderful? We just got the official notice from the Interstellar Surak Foundation that Joanna is a finalist for the Skon Translation Prize.”

Joanna?

McCoy’s eyes flicked nervously to and away from Spock’s face, but his features were otherwise relaxed. “I’m pleased as punch, ma’am, and she’s over the moon just for the recognition.”

“Ooh,” said Amanda, taking both of their arms and walking them down the hall at a leisurely pace. Spock felt a chill go down his spine as the excited - nervous - tired energy of mother slipped easily into his mind like a latch clicking shut. “I could have strangled Sarek last year when he grilled her on her ‘intellectual ambitions’ when he took her and the whole team out for dinner after winning the Rigel Cup. Oh, that week was wonderful - I’m so glad we were able to make it -, and the cadets were so adorable! She’d just had the most exciting night of her entire life, should have been on top of the world - the galaxy! - and he somehow gets out of her that her grades are slipping. Can you believe they got into a solemn forty-five minute conversation where he dragged out of her that she did like her language classes and was still top of that grad seminar in Vulcan literature she tested into?”

Amanda looked up at him with her big, doe eyes as though she expected him to know what the hell she was talking about. Spock shoved his reactions away from the bond-link unconsciously.

“I do,” he said, glaring over the top of his mother’s head at McCoy, whose ears were beginning to turn red, “indeed find that difficult to believe.”

McCoy at least had the decency to wince.

“Between us,” said Amanda, giving them both a conspiratorial glance, “I’m grateful he did that. For years, I’ve been worried her love of flying would become her whole life. Starfleet pilots have such dangerous jobs!”

“Excuse me,” said Spock, retrieving his arm from Amanda, and trying to block his alarm through their apparently still very active telepathic bond. “I will rejoin you soon, mother. I have several matters to attend to.”

Amanda beamed at him and dragged McCoy on, chattering away. What the hell was going on? Joanna, presumably, was McCoy’s daughter, apparently a Starfleet cadet, evidently a winner of the Rigel Cup, and known to his mother for years?

He fell back, Sarek having finally ended his conversation with the captain, and walked beside him, tense. Any larger concerns he had with interacting with his father were at the moment eclipsed by the astounding events of the past five minutes.

“Dr. McCoy knows my mother,” he said.

Sarek looked grave but also, of course, impassive. “That is evident; why have you said so?”

My true request for information is implied by the statement, why make me say it? However, surliness at this point in his career and life seemed inappropriate. “How does mother know Dr. McCoy and his daughter?”

“Their acquaintance developed over the course of a year and a half that they were in residence at the family compound in Kir, eight years ago.”

What?

What?

Irrationally, he wanted to say there was no way that was true, but he had not, in fact, spent more than two months at home total in the past twenty years. 

“So you… also know Dr. McCoy and Joanna… McCoy?”

Sarek now appeared, ever-so-slightly, annoyed. “That would logically follow from him and his daughter being guests in my home.”

How did Dr. McCoy and his daughter come to be guests at the ancestral estate in Kir?” Spock asked, clenching his jaw.

“As Dr. McCoy has not invited you into his confidence,” said his father, “that is none of your concern. Perhaps, as you have become so interested in the human practice of asking personal questions, you should ask him.”

What?

Sarek moved swiftly to catch up with Amanda, leaving Jim coming up from behind. 

“I’ve never been more embarrassed in my life,” said Jim, woeful. “You sometimes overthink something so much you make basic factual mistakes? I mean, I knew Bones and Jo had been taken under the wing of some Vulcan ambassador with a human wife and I knew you were the son of a Vulcan ambassador and a human mother. I convinced myself I’d misheard one or the other name - what’s the alternative, that your parents love Bones and you had no idea? I mean, Bones tries to downplay it, but his kid is basically like their honorary granddaughter - there’s no way you’d treat him the way you do if you knew that. It was easier to think there were two Sareks.”

Spock folded his arms and looked ahead, beleaguered. 

“Goddammit Bones,” Jim breathed. “You have gotta be kidding me.”

“Negative,” Spock bit out.

“I should keep a little black book of forbidden Bones lore that he just comes out with every few years,” the captain muttered. “Jesus Christ.”

 

***

 

By the time Spock had to make an appearance at a reception they were hosting for all the ambassadors onboard, he had set aside his consternation about this turn of events in order to categorize the surprise as yet another, if extreme, example of McCoy’s general secretiveness. This did not explain the nature of the man’s relationship with his parents, but at the very least he could reassure himself that this was unlikely personal.

This only slightly comforting thought was dismantled within the first five minutes of the reception.

“Nyota,” his mother cried, and the two women fell into a hug. “I haven’t seen you in ages! I heard you got approved for an exolinguistics grant to study Beta Quadrant languages.”

So my mother also has a relationship with Lieutenant Uhura, he thought. Although this revelation did deserve the appellation of “fascinating,” he could not bring himself to mentally add it.

“Five dialects of Klingon, all three of Romulan,” said Uhura, cheerful. “I’m excited! Hey, did you hear that Jo is a finalist for the Skon Prize? She swore me to secrecy when I coached her - you know her, very stubborn about anyone doing her any favors. I had to basically bribe her with unreleased demos of that ice-wave band the kids all like to get her to call me at all. I mean, I had aides from Sarek’s office deliver an unabridged copy of the Kir’Shara to my dorm at the Academy even before I placed as a finalist. She didn’t have to be so cagey about it.”

Ah, and clearly McCoy’s reticence about his daughter had not extended to Uhura.

“That sounds just like her,” said Amanda, and then elbowed a very wan and awkward-looking McCoy. “Wonder where she gets that from?”

“I don’t understand the implicit criticism,” said Sarek, who’d temporarily extricated himself from small talk with other diplomats. “What humans call stubbornness, a Vulcan would call a commitment to principle. Just as there is no influence I have over the Skon Prize, neither is there any logical reason Joanna owed us news of her aspirations.”

“So she got it from you,” Uhura deadpanned, with a too-keen glance in Sarek’s direction, “then?”

Sarek looked momentarily baffled. “Ah, a joke,” he said.

Spock meanwhile had been staring, dumbfounded, at Uhura. She seemed to finally catch on and raised an eyebrow, curious.

Sulu, with a very full plate of hors d'oeuvres, wandered by with a terrified-looking Chekov trailing behind. “You talking about Jo? Did she get that antique pistol Ortegas and I sent her? I made sure to include a secure case.” 

“Yes, Sulu,” said McCoy, exasperated and twitchy. “She got the delivery, but she can’t keep a phaser in her dorm room no matter how secure the case is. I’ve put it in storage for now.”

Amanda turned to the helmsman, her eyes bright with curiosity.

“We met up with her a while ago on Casperia Prime, ma’am, and I’m Hikaru Sulu, by the way, hi,” said Sulu, who mercifully did not seem to know his mother but also didn’t seem remotely surprised the woman had a vested interest in Joanna McCoy. “Some of the Academy kids hitched a ride during their break. I was giving Chekov a hard time for planning to meet up with cadets on shore leave, but then I find out Ortegas, Chapel, and the doc here, who me and Rand were meeting up with anyway, were chaperoning them all. We got to talking about anti-Rommie sidearms for captured pilots in the warp-five era, and Erica and I wanted to surprise her.”

“I wasn’t chaperoning,” McCoy protested. “It’s a wonder I got to see her twice in the same year.”

Meanwhile Amanda was sizing up Chekov with an almost alarming interest. Chekov, however, seemed to be glancing at Sarek, who wasn’t paying him any attention at all.

“It’s lovely to see you again, Pavel. I still think about that lovely conversation we had about the Jewish Autonomous Oblast during the Soviet era. And it must have been so nice to see your friends so soon after you shipped out,” Amanda said to the boy.

“I - yes, ma’am. Friends - they are good to… see.”

McCoy now leveled a skeptical raised eyebrow in Chekov’s direction and the boy practically quailed. 

“Ah, young love,” said the captain, coming up from behind and clapping Chekov on the back. The boy looked like he was about to pass out.

“Pretty sure she’s still dating Torias,” said Uhura.

“Hang in there, it might not last,” said Jim, quite earnestly, to the ensign.

“Jim,” McCoy snapped, “you can’t just say that to a young man.”

“Ensign Chekov,” said Spock, “I believe I’d requested new star charts of the systems surrounding that nebula - would you happen to have time to look into the matter now?”

Chekov shot him a wondering glance of gratitude.

“Yes, I have stars,” Chekov said, strangled, “to chart. Excuse me - it’s the stars.”

The ensign then made a swift escape, and Sulu ambled off for more refreshments.

“He was off-duty, Spock,” the captain chided, jovial, “have a heart!”

Uhura, perhaps intuiting that Spock’s actions had been entirely motivated by “heart,” changed the topic.

“So,” she said, “when is Jo heading to Vulcan?”

“Um,” said the doctor, “she’s not, actually.”

Now he was the focus of the entire circle, and he started fidgeting. “There isn’t funding for transportation,” he muttered, “and they can’t make accommodations for remote participation. She’s just glad to get the recognition.”

Amanda and Jim gasped, and Uhura looked horrified. Spock and Sarek, obviously, had no visible reaction.

“That is not logical,” said Sarek, now frowning. “She has earned her place in the finals. I am due to return to Earth after this conference. I will escort her to Vulcan and back. It will require an insignificant adjustment of my schedule.”

McCoy froze. His mother looked between the two of them bemused.

“Sir, you really don’t -“

Sarek gave him a withering glare and McCoy grimaced, a tight frustrated expression he’d often seen the doctor direct at him. Though how that could be possible he did not know. There could be no way he’d ever given McCoy a look like that before. He wasn’t his father.

“I understand the underlying message of that rhetorical gesture, Doctor. The other finalists are either on Vulcan or have family resources to arrange the trip. This is not preferential treatment, it is an action that re-establishes parity. As the Vulcan Ambassador to the Federation and the son of Skon and president of the Interstellar Surak Foundation, escorting an exceptional Starfleet cadet to Vulcan is consistent with my political agenda.”

McCoy opened and closed his mouth. Now his mother looked unambiguously amused.

“Yes, sir,” said the doctor, but still sounded reluctant.

His father looked, ever so slightly, hesitant, an expression Spock had only seen two or three times in his life. “If you have doubts about my ability to provide appropriate companionship for your daughter, that is another matter. She will also be able to spend time with the Lady Amanda once we reach Vulcan.”

McCoy looked so puzzled it bordered on alarm.

“He means,” said his mother, in a way that seemed oddly familiar, “that he wants your permission to take Joanna on a road trip.”

“This would be an interstellar voyage,” said Sarek, frowning at his wife. “No roads would be involved.”

Spock suppressed his annoyance when he realized his mother’s “translation” for his father reminded him of McCoy’s for himself.

“It’s been long enough since I’ve had a teenager in the house that I actually miss it,” said Amanda.

McCoy gave a quiet bark of laughter, then recovered himself. “Joanna’s almost nineteen, an adult, technically, so you don’t need my permission, but you have my blessing, Sarek. I’m sure,” he said, and gave a small smile, “that she’ll be thrilled to spend some time with both of you again.”

“See, adun,” said his mother, “I told you that starting on the emotional reason is a more persuasive approach with humans in interpersonal situations that don’t require diplomatic negotiation.”

“You are wise, adun’a,” said Sarek. 

Uhura caught M’Ress waving her over to the Caitian ambassador’s entourage, and she made her excuses.

McCoy slapped a smile on his face, barely covering his awkwardness, and mercifully changed the subject. “Mr. Ambassador, I understand you had retired before this conference was called. Forgive my curiosity, but as a doctor, I’m interested in Vulcan physiology. Isn’t it unusual for a Vulcan to retire at your age? After all, you’re only a hundred and two…”

“One hundred two point four three seven precisely, doctor, measured in your years. I had other concerns -”

Spock still felt shell-shocked through the rest of the interaction, only vaguely registering that Sarek was accosted by a Tellarite when he stepped away and that Amanda and Dr. McCoy were for some reason discussing the late I-Chaya and “Vulcan teddy bears.”

Once his father had retrieved his mother and retired for the evening, Spock swiftly removed himself from the proceedings, though paused, when he saw Uhura standing alone nursing a drink.

“Lieutenant Uhura,” he said. “I did not know you were acquainted with my mother and father.”

She shrugged. “I don’t see why you would - you don’t talk to them right?”

“We’ve served together for almost ten years,” he said. “I am surprised this never… came up.”

Uhura gave him a knowing look, though Spock wasn’t sure what she knew, exactly. “I was a cadet, and you were my super intimidating mentor who was going to write my evals. My mentor who is a Vulcan. You’ve always been a superior officer. My Vulcan language skills are a matter of record, as is the fact that I won the Skon Prize, which is awarded by the Surak foundation your dad is the figurehead of. I wasn’t just going to say ‘Hey, your mom and dad had me over for dinner when I won the Skon Prize and I slept in your childhood bedroom.’ I’ve always had a complex about not seeming hot-for-teacher - I had some… weird experiences at the Academy.”

You did what? You had a complex about… what?

“I trust you no longer find me… as intimidating,” Spock said instead, unsure of whether this was a good or bad thing.

Uhura snorted. “Of course not,” she said. “But I mean, it’s not like you’re easy to get to know. You don’t talk about personal stuff - ever. Are you really that surprised it never came up?”

Perhaps not, thought Spock, as he retreated to his quarters, but if he wasn’t surprised, he was certainly… something.

So he found himself at the door to the doctor’s quarters - the man had evidently beat a hasty retreat as well. Once let in, he just stood by the door and folded his arms. The doctor was curled up on his futon sofa with a paper book.

Spock glowered at the doctor, expectantly.

McCoy met his stare from across the room, and then his eyes gradually narrowed. “What, Mr. Spock?”

“Is there a particular reason why you have withheld basic information about your daughter and your personal history from me? Let alone the fact that you have a remarkably close relationship with my parents and have lived in my childhood home?

McCoy’s eyes remained narrowed, and he was frowning. He set his book down beside him.  “Why, I don’t know, sir, I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that you’ve never shown any active interest in my personal life except for one memorable occasion when we were high and you told me you were too lazy to finger-fuck me, completely unsolicited.”

Spock opened his mouth to argue, but… actually, the doctor had a point. However….

“Your personal relationship with Ambassador Sarek and his wife is a conflict of interest - I am your commanding officer. It should have been disclosed.”

Now McCoy was staring at him, almost baffled. 

“Disclosure,” said McCoy, “would suggest something wasn’t out in the open. The captain knows - or I thought he did. My residency records are up-to-date. Tons of my friends in Starfleet know. Your parents and I didn’t talk about you that much, and hardly ever in the present tense. I didn’t even know about your goddamn teddy bear. And you think the fact that I haven’t brought up the fact that your parents know me and are attached to my daughter shows a lack of concern about conflicts of interest?”

Spock blinked. Well, that was logical enough. He didn’t find it remotely satisfying, however.

“Perhaps,” said Spock, actual anger slipping into his voice, “my lack of familiarity with human customs is to blame, but none of this seems to be the behavior of a friend.”

McCoy, infuriatingly, had the gall to look stunned.

“A friend…? You think we’re friends?”

“Clearly I have been in error,” said Spock, tone cold.

“Well,” said McCoy, flushing, surprise giving way to sudden fury, leaping to his feet. “ Well. Excuse me - excuse me, mister. Excuse me if I got the impression you don’t like me very much.”

“How is that relevant or a precondition of you acting with integrity?” 

The moment the words came out of his mouth, Spock knew he had made a very, very bad mistake.

Anger drained out of McCoy, and instead he said, almost devoid of expression, “Okay. Any other questions about my family that you feel you have a right to ask?”

Spock had many questions, didn’t see what “having the right” had to do with asking questions, but asked, anyway, “Does your daughter have Vulcan heritage?” That at least would explain… something. Probably.

McCoy gave him that incredulous look again, as though he were seeing a new life form for the first time. “No, Mr. Spock, she does not.”

With that, he spun on his heels and stormed out of his own quarters.

That hadn’t gone well, and that was before an ambassador was murdered and his own father ended up in one of the doctor’s biobeds, with a terminal prognosis.

 

***

 

When you were five years old and came home stiff-lipped, anguished, because the other boys tormented you saying that you weren't really Vulcan. I watched you, knowing that inside that the human part of you was crying and I cried, too. There must be some part of me in you, some part that I still can reach. If being Vulcan is more important to you, then you'll stand there speaking rules and regulations from Starfleet and Vulcan philosophy, and let your father die. And I'll hate you for the rest of my life.

His mother slapping his face after delivering her ultimatum - telling him to turn away from his duty to save his father’s life - had caused a negligible amount of physical discomfort. The words lingered.

They lingered through the captain’s miraculous (and ultimately duplicitous) recovery, relieving him of duty. They lingered through the surgery, the chaos of the attack on the ship while he went into and out of sedation as he donated the massive amounts of blood his father needed, attempting to solve the mystery of the Tellarite ambassador’s murder. They lingered once Dr. McCoy had put him and his father back together again, clearly enjoying, on some level, being able to chastise Jim, himself, and his own father all at once.

He had been fourteen the last time he’d reacted in a less disciplined way to the telepathic bond he’d formed with his mother since he’d been in the womb. They’d had a fight about Sybok, about Spock not telling her where he’d gone during one of his disappearing acts. He had lost his temper, and suddenly he had the disorienting sensation of being in a far more fragile body, incandescent with a matching rage and devotion. It had been very difficult to tell whose feelings were whose, and he and his mother had only become conscious of the room they were in forty-four minutes and thirteen seconds later. 

His mother had apologized. His father had ordered him to meditate. That sort of unmediated fusion of feeling and instinct hadn’t happened again. He’d become dedicated to perfecting his grasp on techniques his father had taught him since childhood - by the time he left home he and his mother were able to share thoughts and feelings more independently along the link. Then he’d left, and the exercise had become moot.

A soft door chime interrupted his meditation back in his quarters.

“Come,” he said, knowing she was here. He didn’t rise from his mat.

“I came to apologize,” she said. “It was wrong for me to speak to you that way, certainly to slap you.”

That was a lingering benefit of the link, that they had a shorthand, a way to just be in the middle of what actually mattered.

“What disturbs me the most,” said Spock, “is that I think you meant what you said.”

“I would never hate you,” Amanda whispered.

Spock shrugged. 

“You have, however,” he said, “been unfair. You may have wanted to cry, when I was targeted for abuse, but you didn’t cry. Not where I could see. Even you knew that crying would be wrong. How could I, as a child, have done what you could not do?”

“You’re right,” she said, miserable. 

He hated seeing her miserable. It was only marginally better than feeling her misery viscerally in his own body. He remembered how to fix it; just say it didn’t matter, that he was unaffected. She would be disappointed and angry, then, but not miserable. At least not where he could see.

“Me crying was a particular fixation for my tormentors,” he said, instead. “When they physically attacked me, it was specifically to make me cry. They called father a traitor, and they called you a whore. Me crying would have been their crowning achievement. It would have validated their other claims. That was what seemed logical to me, as a child.”

“I’m so sorry, Spock,” she said, tears pooling in her eyes. She carefully wiped them away on her sleeve. She didn’t crumble into disconsolate sobbing, but she didn’t hide them either. She was still right there.

“Why are you so angry with me? I sense that the anger went beyond your fear over losing Sarek and my refusal to help in the way you wanted me to.”

She sat in his chair, shortening the distance between her and his position on the floor. She looked thoughtful.

“I’m more angry at your father, and at myself,” she said, at last. “For giving you a way of being in the world as a child that was so… frozen. Based on fear. To the extent I’m angry at you, I suppose it’s because you’re not a child anymore. You’re a grown man. And months ago you almost died. You didn’t ask us for help, you didn’t just say ‘go to hell’ to T’Pring and those vultures. I had to hear about the details from Lorian of all people, because you and your brother and father, you Vulcan men, were in some sort of self-sacrificial idiot league of silence. Sorry, that’s not fair to Sybok, the only emotionally mature man in this family: but you and your father, sure. Keeping up appearances - appearances, Spock! - as a Vulcan was more important than saving your own life! That’s not even logical! You almost died. You almost killed your best friend.

Spock blinked. “Lorian told you? Not Dr. McCoy?” He couldn’t muster surprise that his father had simply not told Amanda anything about the koon-ut-kal-if-fee debacle.

Amanda’s eyes flashed with wrath. “Of course Leo didn’t tell me! He’s your ship’s doctor! He even told me to back off on his first day as CMO when I was offering to keep going behind your back to get your health information. He was so nervous to set boundaries with me, but he did it without blinking an eye.”

Right. That had… happened. Furthermore, it was… illuminating to consider that his mother had not cold-called the ship’s CMO on her practically estranged son’s behalf, but rather was reaching out to a personal friend - her behavior was more logical than it had appeared, out of context.

“Look,” his mother said, deflating. “I know I’m a hypocrite. I understand that Sarek and I were not the best role models and can’t fix what went wrong since we’re such messes ourselves, but that’s not stopping you from finding someone or something else that can.”

“Both of you are admirable people with a strong sense of moral purpose,” Spock said, tone mild, “and to the extent I am today a person with any strength of character, it was due to your influence. I know that you… care very deeply, that you love me. I know that father has not neglected his duty to me, at least, in the Vulcan way. I know very little about child development, but a lack of love, for lack of a more precise term, is the root of many pathologies, I believe. I do know this has not been the case for me. As for… as for my difficulties with… self-preservation, I don’t know what to do. I know that’s not what you want to hear.”

“To be honest with you, Spock,” said Amanda, who looked at him with a soft and unfamiliar expression, “I’m scared sometimes to think that you’re faced with problems that neither I nor Sarek, in our own ways, have been able to solve. I wanted love and good intentions to be enough.”

Spock considered this. “Mother,” he said, “I have always appreciated your ability to self-reflect and explain your point of view. I do believe I could benefit from being less… rigid about my adherence to Vulcan custom, particularly in light of recent events. I must confess, however, that I don’t know where to begin.”

Amanda laughed. “I don’t really either. Although,” she hesitated then, seemed to brace herself, “you could speak with your father. He’s in the botany labs at the moment. I know I need to stop getting in the middle of you two, but I think he might surprise you. It has been a long time.”

Spock, somewhat to his own surprise, nodded and rose to his feet. His mother stood up as well and came toward him slowly, but she did not hesitate to draw him into a close hug. He had forgotten how small she was. She still smelled like roses even far from home.

When he arrived in the botany labs, he found Sarek examining Sulu’s Edosian orchids with a careful air.

His father, without preamble, said, “My son, now that we are not delayed by more pressing concerns, if you will permit a personal conversation, I wish to address how I have wronged you.”

Spock blinked. “To what particular wrong are you referring?” He hadn’t meant to sound quite so caustic, but, honestly, he had no idea, or, rather, too many ideas.

“At the moment, I refer to my mistake of committing you to a traditional Vulcan marriage when you were a child, and my inadequacy in addressing my missteps. The ordeal you suffered on Vulcan recently was in large part my fault.”

“I suppose Sybok told you so?”

Sarek tipped his head. “No,” he said. “Sybok merely informed me of the severity of your condition, his suspicions about T’Pring’s intentions, and your itinerary. We did not have a… personal conversation.”

Spock blinked. What a remarkable demonstration of self-control on his brother’s part.

“I desire to make amends,” Sarek continued. “The first thing I have thought to offer is an explanation of my negligence. I did not intend to do so, thinking it akin to an excuse, but your mother offered a theory that without understanding my reasoning you may come to conclusions that would harm you. I have come to trust her intuition in these matters.”

“Very well,” said Spock, a little baffled. “I had assumed you had committed me to the koon-ut-la because you wanted me to follow the ways of Vulcan.”

“Interesting,” said Sarek, and he frowned slightly. “Your mother proves prescient once again. I did not expect that was what you had concluded.”

Spock raised an eyebrow. What was his father talking about? Why wouldn’t he have come to that conclusion? Wasn’t it all very obvious?

“What was your reasoning, then?”

“I thought that giving you tangible proof that you were a part of Vulcan society would help you recover from the post-traumatic stress of that year. I had noticed that you seemed very… fixated on ‘being’ Vulcan after the bombings and various… misadventures in the Forge. I did not see any inherent harm in the coping mechanism as there are many benefits to Vulcan philosophy, particularly for a telepath as strong as yourself, so I enabled it without considering the long-term consequences.”

Spock stared at him. He opened his mouth to speak, then clicked his jaw shut, and stared more.

“Father,” he said, “you believe that I was fixated on being Vulcan?”

Sarek quirked an eyebrow, all bemused serenity. “You disagree with my assessment?”

“Shortly before the koon-ut-la, you told me I must choose between being human and being Vulcan. I believe your words exactly were: ‘The time draws near when you will have to decide whether you will follow Vulcan or human philosophy. Vulcan offers much. No war, no crime. Order, logic and control in place of raw emotions and instinct. Once on the path you choose, you cannot turn back.’”

Sarek now looked visibly confused. “I remember giving you my insight and analysis on the situation, using those words, but I am not sure how this constitutes a disagreement with my previous statement.”

“Your insight and analysis -” Spock stopped himself and tried again. “I did not at any point consider that a conversation between… equals who were exchanging points of view. I believed you were expressing your expectations of me, a child, what I needed to do to gain your, my father’s, approval.”

Sarek’s eyes widened, conveying direct shock. “My mistakes are more numerous than I anticipated. I have wished,” he said, seeming actually wistful, “that I understood you the way your mother does. Around that time, shortly after your sister met with her accident in the Forge, you also ran away, and were rescued by a visiting cousin, Selek. He asked me to try and understand you, and I think of his request often. I have honored this request, but I have not fulfilled it with anything approaching competence.”

“I met Lorian recently,” said Spock, which was perhaps a non sequitur, but also the most he could find within himself to say.

“I know,” said Sarek, accepting the digression gracefully. “He asked to speak with me after meeting you. We spoke for many hours for the first time in decades. I found the interaction highly informative. I am very grateful you were able to discuss pon farr with him.” He paused, and looked, again, almost awkward. “Lorian suggested to me that my discomfort and distance after you left for Starfleet had been interpreted differently than I had intended. I hadn’t even realized that I saw history repeating itself despite my efforts, that I had failed to convince you, just as I had failed with your siblings, that you could stay. I concluded I was incompetent and that trying again would make the situation worse. He believed you might have thought my continued silence was motivated by disapproval.”

“I did think that,” said Spock, startled into honesty. “Father,” he began again, “do you know why I did not wish to speak with you when I left for Starfleet Academy?”

“I assume the reason was not that I had ethical concerns about the role of the military and concerns about your well-being in that milieu?”

“It was because the VEG representative at my graduation told me what you had decided on behalf of myself and Michael, that I had done well despite the ‘disadvantage of my human mother.’ I believed that you had not chosen my sister because she was human, and that you disapproved of who I… am, not just my choice of career. That no matter what you said, your fundamental views were aligned with those who opposed my very existence.”

Sarek looked unambiguously appalled. “This is highly informative,” he said, finally. “And regrettable. Knowing this, I cannot fault your logic, and your emotional reactions make far more sense. I recognize the continued need to make amends. Speaking with Lorian, reminded me that sometimes I require… patience. I cannot promise that I will ever give you what you need, but I can always offer you patience, in turn.”

This was perhaps the most reassuring thing his father had ever said to him, and possibly the most honest. 

“Your insight into our relationship and your own… emotions surprises me,” Spock admitted.

Sarek dipped his head in acknowledgment. “After the aftermath of the war,” - after I lost my mind and Michael died and Sybok broke out of prison - “I was introduced to an intriguing human discipline related to maintaining the health of bonds. Your mother took an interest in it as well. The skills taught in this practice can be transferable to other situations. Have you heard of ‘couples therapy’?”

Sarek regarded him with a total lack of irony, almost guileless.

“In passing,” said Spock faintly. “Who introduced you to this human… discipline?”

“Dr. McCoy, of course,” said Sarek. “It took quite a few frankly inefficient and redundant conversations for him to explain the purpose of the practice in terms I found acceptable. Understanding the purpose of redundant conversations for humans is one of the skills this discipline teaches, in fact. I concede, I am nowhere near mastery. Your mother and I have increased our number of sessions due to… recent events.”

Spock could only say, “That is… logical.”

They lapsed into silence again, but it was more comfortable. 

Sarek’s comm pinged, and a flat Vulcan voice from one of his aides rang out loudly in the quiet botanical labs. 

“Ambassador, you wished to be informed of any major developments in the Alpha Quadrant. Significant information has just become available.”

“Go ahead,” he replied.

“Our diplomatic offices on Trill have received reports that four weeks and two days ago a series of ecological disasters have struck several worlds in Cardassian space. Both Cardassia Prime and the fifth largest colony have had failures of their environmental grids, and have been subject to severe and destructive weather events. The colony world was the biggest producer of a feed crop for livestock, and due to the decommissioning of mining worlds and industrial accidents in shipping infrastructure over the past ten years, the cascade effects across the agricultural worlds will be catastrophic. Severe famine warnings have been issued throughout Cardassian-held sectors. Federation observers are calling for immediate aid.”

Sarek’s mouth thinned slightly, grim. “Federation observers? What requests are coming from Republic of Cardassia channels?”

“No Federation representatives have heard any news or received any overtures from the Republic in two weeks and five days. Contacts in non-aligned diplomatic offices have received no word either. The consensus assumption is that there has been some sort of impact on the subspace relay networks.”

“But there has been no evidence that this has been the case?”

“There has not been. VEG ships in the area even sent preliminary probes, but no damage to subspace communications has been detected, at least at the borders of Cardassian space.”

Sarek’s eyes narrowed. “I understand,” he said. 

“Should the office prepare to take a position on aid?”

“Negative,” he said. “Prepare a series of meetings with my counterparts in the Far Horizons bloc as well as those representing the signatory worlds of the Fellowship of Peace and Prosperity. The staff should also get me on T’Pau’s and the High Command’s schedules as soon as possible - prioritize meetings with Vulcan officials over our other Federation allies. I will join the staff in our designated conference room shortly.”

Sarek turned to Spock. “Son, I must attend to my duties.”

“I thought you had retired and had only come back for this conference?”

Sarek raised an eyebrow. “I was only barely convinced by my mentors of the logic of retiring from diplomatic service to run for a seat on the Federation Council. However, I believe evidence is mounting that I am needed in the diplomatic service.”

Well. All right, then.

“What does this development in the Alpha Quadrant mean? The Federation doesn’t even share a border with the Republic of Cardassia.”

“For the Cardassians and their neighbors, a tragedy that may last generations,” said Sarek, a thread of bitterness seeping into his voice. “For the Federation, I do not yet know.”

He gave Spock the ta’al and left him.

 

***

 

The news hit the Federation news reports the morning they arrived at the Babel Conference a week later, a minor item in the Alpha Quadrant digest, with the troubling addition of an explanation for the silence from the Republic of Cardassia:

Series of Disasters in Cardassian Space Leads to Political Instability

Several weeks after reports of supply chain issues and severe famine warnings reached Federation news outposts, a spokesperson for the Cardassian Central Command gave a broadcast to the public. “In this time of unprecedented danger, Central Command has stepped forward to lead the Cardassian people. The need for quick, decisive action has led to the dissolution of the Detapa Council and its deliberations while we resolve this crisis.” When diplomatic contacts attempted to follow up, they were met with silence, and observers have noted a build up of Cardassian military vessels along the edges of their space. Rumors of widespread riots on Cardassia Prime are as of yet unconfirmed.

He had looked up from the padd, which he had been reading over breakfast, and looked into the distance, contemplating the news. He was drawn back into the room, by the noisy clatter of Dr. McCoy’s tray, as the doctor joined him and glanced at his padd. 

“Awful, isn’t it? I wish there was something we could do,” said the doctor, clearly emotional.

“I was not aware you followed Alpha Quadrant politics, doctor.”

McCoy frowned. “I don’t, really, but Cardassian stuff catches my eye. I got the impression from folks I knew that there were issues with the civilian government, but I can’t imagine a military coup is a positive development.”

“I am inclined to agree,” he replied. Still there was something particularly troubling about this turn of events, as though he were missing a crucial piece of information.

He resolved to ask his father - since their renewal of communication, the scope of their conversations had been restricted to discussing politics. Not being particularly attuned to that world, he found his father’s analyses genuinely fascinating, and Sarek seemed to find satisfaction in offering his expertise.

A more diluted version of this fascination had spread to the crew as well, and he often found officers across the ship engrossed in livecasts from the conference. He was even invited by the captain to join a screening of Sarek’s speech in the rec room.

On screen, Sarek had stepped up to the podium, imposing and, for a Vulcan, vibrant, even passionate, not even speaking off of notes.

“As Vulcan ambassador to the Federation, I have come on behalf of Vulcan to offer our support for Coridan’s admission to the Federation. As your colleague and friend, I would remind all here and all following these deliberations that what we decide here today will have impacts that will extend far beyond Coridan. 

“I am a student of history, who comes from a family of scholars. We have never found conclusive proof that Vulcanoid life began on the planet we call Vulcan; we have found many suggestions that our common ancestors across the Beta Quadrant were once a servitor race of the Iconian Empire, which spanned the galaxy over a hundred thousand years ago. This story has repeated over and over again: only an interstellar civilization can rise to the heights of technological and cultural richness. 

“Worlds that remain narrowly concerned only with their own immediate gains and losses will eventually come under the sway of rising empires and be devastated in the wake of each empire’s decline. Societies that aim to rule large areas of known space have time and time again fallen to chauvinism and barbarity toward those they conquer, limiting their potential and ensuring their demise when the wheel of revolution turns again. 

“We are writing a new story, performing a ground-breaking experiment: an interstellar society that is held together by equality and mutual respect and curiosity. Not an empire, but a vast fellowship of sentient beings that grows each year. I urge my colleagues today to think not only as representatives of their own worlds, but as members of an interstellar society, the United Federation of Planets, who think of generations to come. Now is not the time to turn away from our neighbors, to withhold our friendship and our solidarity. Thank you.”

Some in attendance actually clapped, echoing the sounds of approval from the delegates onscreen.

Ultimately, the vote to admit Coridan was almost unanimous. Notably, Tellar Prime voted in favor. It appeared that the successor to the murdered ambassador was a member of the Interstellar Millenium Party, the same one as his father, himself, more than ninety percent of Starfleet, and a growing plurality of voters across the Federation. That the murder of a Federation ambassador dovetailed so neatly with the goals of the progressive bloc prompted a hint of disquiet at the back of his mind, one he could not yet justify. 

The end of the conference also coincided with the announcement of the Federation opening up "diplomatic conversations" with the Romulan Star Empire, as well as the announcement that the Federation, the Romulans, and the Klingons were joining together to create a “Galactic Planet of Peace,” a joint colony settled by all three powers in Neutral Zone. This and the Coridan vote seemed tied together in everyone’s minds, despite the fact that his father had very studiously not spoken in favor of the Nimbus III project. His disquiet deepened, but became more thoughtful.

Everyone else, before losing interest in the human fashion, did not share his ambivalence. 

“They’re going to teach that speech in schools,” said Jim the night of the vote. “Is it weird that I have a crush on your dad now?”

“Ugh,” said McCoy, “yes.”

Spock, at the same time, said, “I am no judge of erotic aberrance but at the very least that seems highly illogical.” 

“Sarek is a happily married man, Jim,” said McCoy. “Besides he’s… never mind.”

“No, Bones, now you have to finish that sentence,” said Jim, bright-eyed.

However, at that point Sulu at the conn pinged the captain and McCoy was spared, as Jim rushed off. 

“Hey,” the doctor said, “it could be worse. Jim could have a crush on your mama.”

“Affirmative,” Spock agreed.

 

***

 

It was supposed to be a supply run. A check in. The only reason he was on the away team at all was that a very obstinate commissioner had bullied Jim into “sending along your Vulcan” to visit the Vulcan ship in the civilian convoy to Nimbus III.

However, when he blinked into the warm half-light of a Vulcan transporter room, only Dr. McCoy, of their party of seven, had also made it aboard. More pressingly, no less than ten Vulcan men in matching robes were aiming phaser rifles at both his and the doctor’s chests. They had the deep indigo arm bands with silver embroidery of a cell in the Vulcan Isolationist Movement.

He really should have expected this.

“It is logical,” said one of the stone-faced men in Vulcan, “to take you hostage, half-breed. We are taking a principled stand against the travesty of this Planet of Galactic Peace, this Nimbus III colony, defiling even the defective elements of our race by encouraging fraternization with Romulans in some nonsensical, abortive gesture towards peace in the Beta Quadrant.”

Spock could care less that the Nimbus III colony project might incidentally lead to Vulcan-Romulan families; however, he could agree that as far as meaningful progress towards peace was concerned, the Nimbus III project was silly. 

“You may have cause to reconsider the logic of your course of action,” he said, lightly, “as taking two Starfleet officers hostage guarantees the failure of your endeavors.”

“Yeah,” said McCoy, who folded his arms and glared at their captors. “What he said.”

Now, unfortunately, the attention of the armed extremists was on the human doctor. “Vatur,” snapped the leader to a younger Vulcan near the controls, “you will investigate and report why this… alien detritus has been brought aboard. Seize them both, we will bring him along with the half-breed to Talek.”

Spock attempted to settle his mind as the men frogmarched them deeper into the ship, not aided in the least by McCoy’s complaints and threats to their captors that clearly masked fear.

They ended up in a vast hangar space, with the entire Vulcan contingent of the ship, mostly civilian colonists, huddled together, loosely corralled by yet more Vulcans with matching arm bands and phaser rifles. 

“You will wait here for our leader,” said one of their captors, positioning them in a corner of the hangar.

McCoy’s eyes widened, taking in the sight of the colonists, peering over the Vulcans’ shoulders. “Look,” he said, “there are children and elderly folks you have trapped here, and I demand you let me check over the colonists.”

To Spock’s - and likely McCoy’s - surprise, their guards allowed it. “The condition of the colonists is irrelevant,” said the guard. McCoy’s eyes narrowed, but he lost no time approaching the colonists, weaving in and out of the crowd with his tricorder, asking quiet questions.

Soon there was movement at the entrance of the hangar bay and McCoy was seized and dragged back over. The man’s face was white as a sheet, but his lips were pressed together in what Spock recognized as fury, though not at a level he had ever seen before.

A Vulcan man marched into the bay, trailed by followers, clearly this “Talek” who was leading their captors.

Talek and the bulk of his followers continued to ignore them as they worked around a console, setting up various kinds of equipment. Then Talek stepped alone to the front of the crowd of prisoners and turned around. Spock then realized the equipment was holorecorders and microphones, and that the lights had flashed to the universal signal for “live.”

“Vulcans who follow the true ways of Surak, who are truly logical in thought and deed, today take a decisive stand against the marooning of our fellow Vulcans among enemies in the name of a false peace masterminded by the failed experiment the Federation has always been,” said Talek, with perhaps too much stage-presence to seem completely dispassionate.

“We demand,” he continued, “that Vulcan withdraw from this travesty and recall all colonists. We believe the fate awaiting them on Nimbus III is worse than death. Therefore, we will not hesitate to spare our fellow Vulcans this indignity, even through death. If our demands are not met in twenty-four hours, we will begin euthanizing ten colonists every hour. If we are boarded, any aliens will be met with lethal force. If we are breached, we have set the ship to self-destruct, and everyone will die.”

Talek began walking purposely over to Spock and the doctor, the cameras following. “As a demonstration of our seriousness, we will show all watching what we will do to representatives of your corrupt Starfleet.”

Spock tried to keep his face still, but McCoy was shaking with barely contained rage.

“We have here, the half-breed, S’chn T’gai Spock, the son of Ambassador Sarek, who has led Vulcan so far astray due to his fetish for all that is not Vulcan. He is accompanied by an alien, a human, who we will now execute.”

Spock was moving before he could think, and ten different men held him back as he struggled towards the doctor. Dr. McCoy looked frozen.

“As to the fate of the half-breed,” Talek continued, “that depends on whether he has the discipline of a full green-blooded Vulcan. While we await Vulcan capitulation over the next twenty-four hours, we will subject him to various trials, of which this is the first.” Talek now looked at Spock. “When we kill your human, Commander Spock, will you betray yourself? Already, your eyes appear sad. Will you cry?

Spock had no time for any of this, and renewed his struggle, throwing elbows and kicking.

T’kal’in’ket! ” McCoy suddenly yelled. “Spock, son of Sarek, invokes the right of T’kal’in’ket!

Spock, distracted by this amazing utterance, stopped struggling. As did their captors.

“What is this?” The leader’s eyes flickered to the holorecorders that were still set to “live.”

“Commander Spock is a graduate of the Vulcan Science Academy and he has the right to invoke the T’kal’in’ket. All hostilities have to stop until after the trial is convened - you say you need to prove if he’s Vulcan enough. What trial is more legitimate than the T’kal’in’ket? Or do y’all not follow the ways of Surak, then?”

The kidnappers started glancing at each other subtly and looking to Talek to see what he would say. Talek straightened his shoulders, and made his voice project. “Even if this half-breed’s father bought a piece of paper from the Vulcan Science Academy -“

“On the contrary, Talek,” said Spock, getting with this surreal program. “It is a matter of public record that I graduated top of my class and am one of five students in the past century to pass the final examinations with a perfect score.”

“Show off,” muttered McCoy.

“Sir, as aberrant as this is, he does speak the truth.” A Vulcan, who couldn’t have gone through more than one pon farr, looked up from a nearby console as he said this, and almost had a facial expression.

“Very well,” said Talek, as though fighting off a sneeze, “you shall have your T’kal’in’ket. Kill the human - “

Spock coiled again to spring into action again.

Sha-set! I’m the sha-set! Not so fast! I’m his sha-set. He has a right to one.”

Talek did not reply for a full five seconds. “You, a sha-set, an advocate in a duel of logic? An insulting, pathetic ploy -”

“Excuse me, I have an MD and a PhD,” said McCoy, “which gives me a well-rounded background in forensics and logical argumentation.”

“That is a human measure of competence,” said Talek, a note of triumph creeping into his voice.

“I also have an Initiate Diploma in Pure Logic from the Kohlinahru Monastery in Gol,” said McCoy.

All the Vulcans in the room were again silent and now staring at both the doctor and Talek. Spock became aware that all of the colonists were staring, paying very close attention.

McCoy folded his arms. “Well?”

“That is a diploma program for tourists,” said Talek, attempting to recover, eyes flickering to the holo-recorders again, “for proving one’s imported alien whore is marginally better than a beast and can live among civilized men without drooling. Is that what he is to you, Spock, your whore -"

“It also meets the minimum requirement to be a sha-set, and you know it,” said McCoy. “I’m a doctor, not anyone’s whore, but I think it’s illogical that you think that sexuality has a taboo quality. The term is sex worker.”

“It does not meet the requirements,” Talek snarled. “You are not Vulcan.”

“Am so,” the doctor said, with a toothy grin, “I’ll have you know I’m a bona fide citizen of Vulcan.”

“Doctor,” hissed Spock, as McCoy was clearly bluffing, “you do not know what you’re -” 

You idiot, you reckless, brazen idiot!

Talek scoffed, making a rude gesture with the rise and fall of his shoulders. “If you mean you did a little residency paperwork with your Federation during a long vacation -"

“No,” said McCoy. “I’m a Vulcan citizen of Shi’al, by the old rites of Shi’Kahr. Fasted on Mount Seleya, the whole damn thing, and I’m an immigrant in good standing. Matter of public record.”

The young Vulcan at the terminal practically gulped as he said, after a moment, “Sir, this is true.”

“Records can be faked,” said Talek.

McCoy rolled his eyes. “Why in the Sam Hill would I go to the trouble of faking that? Besides, what I couldn’t fake is the vokaya crystal embedded in my left palm just like it is in yours.”

This also got a resounding and deeper moment of silence, as a different young lieutenant stepped forward, scanned the doctor’s palm, and gave a tiny, miserable nod.

The doctor wasn’t bluffing. The doctor wasn’t bluffing. Even his own mother hadn’t become a full Vulcan citizen by the old rites - she had thought Sarek’s frequent gifts of vokaya jewelry to her and Michael had been a touching gesture of belonging before she realized they could be used as tracking devices. After Michael had almost died in the Forge, his mother often caught him sneaking vokaya jewelry into her and Michael’s bags and cloaks, thus leading to a memorable series of lectures on the theme of “you’re not entitled to track a woman’s every move just because you’re scared.”

“That would be why your transporter beam brought both me and Dr. McCoy aboard,” said Spock, tone cool, as though he weren’t having an existential crisis about the events of the past ten minutes. “Presumably you used the vokaya to isolate your Vulcan target.”

Talek nodded sharply. “Very well. Your explanation is adequate. However, the alien still cannot be the sha-set - your slattern cannot be your second in a duel of the intellect.”

“Good God, man, buy a fella dinner first,” said McCoy. “Mr. Spock and I are just fellow officers, acquaintances at best.”

“A duplicitous claim,” said Talek, “for it is common knowledge that you are a known associate of the traitor Sarek. Perhaps you are his whore or his spy or both - perhaps he shares you with his son? Or perhaps the abomination you call daughter is what interests him? How else could you insinuate yourself onto the rolls of Vulcan at Mount Seleya but as a concubine?”

A distinct air of embarrassment pervaded the hangar. Even his fellow logic extremists, ready to die and kill for the cause, knew this was a bit of a stretch. 

McCoy’s bafflement was unfeigned. “As a what? How can that possibly still be a thing?”

Spock had just the slightest presence of mind to be extremely annoyed that no one in the entire hangar seemed remotely surprised by the idea that it was “common knowledge” that McCoy knew his father. Also that if pressed he would have to admit that there were technically some minor canons of unrepealed patronage law that might suggest that concubinage might still be legal and that might be the one way you could fast-track citizenship privileges by the old rites, including being “tagged” with a vokaya crystal. And some of those obscure rules may have technically been invoked to give his own mother more rights on Vulcan as a non-citizen. Technically. 

“It is obvious,” Spock found himself saying, as regally as possible, “that this is not the case. Both I and my father are proud citizens by the old rites of Kir Province. My family’s patronage is invalid in Shi’al.”

“What nonsense is this, the S’chn T’gai family have been patrons of Shi’Kahr for millen-”

Several of Talek’s men were trying to get their leader’s attention. 

“Sir,” one muttered, “the S’chn T’gai lands are in Kir.”

Talek dropped his voice to mutter back, “But they have been a leading family of Shi’Kahr for two thousand years; everyone knows that.”

“That area of Kir could be considered a suburb -”

Fine,” Talek said, at full volume. “You shall have this alien as your sha-set. Take them away. We must prepare the Quorum. We will commence in forty-eight hours.”

One of the older men at Talek’s side frowned slightly. “Does the twenty-four hour time limit still apply for our overall demands and executing the colonists?”

“Yes,” said Talek, looking wrong-footed. “Yes. That’s - yes. Twenty-four hours.” He made a swift gesture and the recording finally stopped.

The atmosphere in the hangar was distinctly awkward, even for Vulcans. Talek made another gesture, and Spock and McCoy were dragged out of the hangar bay, down a different corridor. They were thrown into empty crew quarters, and the door locked behind them.

McCoy promptly slumped down the bulkhead to the floor. 

Spock glared down at him. “Doctor,” he said, the word bitten out. “That was an unacceptably reckless action you took.”

McCoy sighed, his eyes closed. “How do you figure? Besides, I have information you don’t.”

Sure. Fine. Of course. “And what, pray tell, would that be?”

“They have no intention of letting anyone go. Humiliating Starfleet and the Federation by toying with you is the only thing they actually want to do here. Taking that away from them was the only leverage we could get, and also the only thing that occurred to me that meant I didn’t get shot. They might even worm their way out of the executions until after they’ve had a go at you. It’d be anti-climactic if they started shooting people before they were through with you.”

“How have you come to this ambitious conclusion?”

“Every colonist I scanned had a hybrid flag come up in their file. I think everyone they put on this ship is part ‘Romulan.’”

What?

Spock walked over to the viewscreen and stared out into space. This revelation, of course, made a certain amount of sense.

“Of course it does make a twisted amount of sense,” said McCoy, as though he’d said this aloud. “You can’t just call it a crime to be part-Romulan and not know. They can’t prove everyone was covering something up. But, see, this isn’t technically exile. I bet it was pitched as a fresh start. But even an illogical human like me can see that the major powers in the Beta Quadrant wouldn’t be setting up shop together on a planet that had anything going for it.”

“You believe Vulcan won’t prioritize a rescue if Starfleet isn't involved,” he said, tone flat. If the ambassador's son weren't a hostage.

McCoy didn’t answer.

Spock began pacing, feeling slightly feverish. 

They didn’t speak for several hours, shifting their positions around the room at random, but when Spock spoke again, it was a though he were continuing the conversation without interruption.

 “You are aware that even if Talek’s Quorum participates in good faith, our chances of winning the T’kal’in’ket are lower than 4.73 percent?”

“Which is why it’s a good thing we have forty-eight hours to prep. Well, forty-two hours. I’m just buying Jim time.”

“Ah,” said Spock. “So your invocation of the T’kal’in’ket was in bad faith as well, then. That seems consistent with your respect for all things Vulcan.”

McCoy rubbed the bridge of his nose and muttered, “For fuck’s sake.”

“Wherein would lie your objection to my assessment?”

“We’re being held hostage by fascist terrorists who fully intend to blow us all up, Spock, I’d say I’m being very respectful of Vulcan culture by not being sentimental about the non-violent measures I’m taking to give all of us more of a fighting chance.”

This was actually true and very annoyingly reminiscent of something Sarek would both do and say, but Spock could not allow it. That wasn’t the point.

“I merely find your actions inconsistent, doctor. You frequently disparage my Vulcan heritage in imprecise and exaggerated terms, and yet it turns out you are a citizen, by the old rites of Shi’Kahr, of my homeworld. Truly astounding, as most of those rites consist of tests of one’s sincerity in following the ways of Vulcan.”

McCoy glared at him from the floor, with an almost frightening intensity. “Spock,” he said, voice very even and quiet, “has it ever occurred to you that I rag on you - and I admit that I do - not when you’re just sitting around being Vulcan, but specifically when you say and do the sort of things our benevolent hosts do and say?”

Spock recoiled. “Doctor, if you had even the slightest comprehension of what you’re accusing me of -”

“Oh, that I’m accusing you of flippantly riffing off of Vulcan fascist dog whistle rhetoric to piss off everyone around you as a defense mechanism from the casual cruelties of human prejudice and because you know the vast majority of humans can’t even tell so you’re only hurting yourself?  Which in and of itself is a compulsive defiant behavior in your own head against the very assholes who tried to kill you when you were a kid? And, I guess, right now?”

So the doctor does have more than the slightest comprehension…

“And you are one of the humans who can tell, I presume, that my Vulcan behavior as a Vulcan is inappropriate and facetious?”

Spock felt balanced on a razor’s edge, as though he were about to lose something he didn’t even know he had, depending on what the doctor said next, if McCoy messed this up.

McCoy blinked. “Of course not. I’m just a human,” he said, very serious, “who didn’t hear a Vulcan call my daughter an abomination for the first time today. Hell, it hasn’t even been the first time this year.”

That could only mean - Spock's eyes widened, and the bottom of his stomach dropped out. “You are referring to my counterpart from the imperial Terran universe.”

McCoy deflated. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Not to change the subject, but, yeah.”

“On the contrary, doctor, I very much wish to know more.” Spock waited, his posture caving in unconsciously, as he wanted to become smaller.

McCoy looked off into the distance. “He showed me - It was a routine raid of a rebel ship, and he saw an opportunity. They’d just lost a ship’s surgeon, and he realized how useful that… other version of me could be. Strip-searched him the same way he tried to do with me. He shot the other version of Joss in the head, and dragged me - him - off the ship, leaving a hysterical Joanna behind. Then he made the other me watch on the bridge as the Enterprise destroyed the ship. He held him by the back of the neck and forced his eyes to stay open. He said that there was no place for an abomination like Joanna in the Terran empire, and that he was saving my life by getting rid of her. That it was a mercy for both of us. It was so awful I couldn’t stand to know more, so I passed out, but right before I did I felt what I - what he - what the other McCoy did. He believed him and he felt… relieved. To be unburdened and to… submit.”

The doctor was crying now, quietly, but steadily, and sniffing, wiping his eyes with his sleeve.

“I’m a piece of shit, Spock,” he said. “There’s some version of me out there that would have felt relieved if my little girl died or got taken away. So no, you’re right. I can’t judge anything, and I’m worse than any Vulcan. I’m such a selfish asshole that I have the gall to be offended when I’m reminded of that fact.”

“Doctor,” Spock whispered, horrified, “that is not logical. Our sparring aside, you know that humanity isn’t inferior. You are not him.”

“I’m not… I don’t know, sometimes,” said the doctor, congested, “I don’t know. I’ve had this recurring dream, since Joss died. I’m walking down the corridor to my quarters, where I’ll have to tell Jo that he’s dead and that we’re alone. And in the dream I want so badly for the corridor to just go on and on. I want to never arrive, and in the dream I just keep walking. Because there was a moment, right there, when I wanted to give up. That… weakness is in me. Not just in my evil twin. I’m a psychologist, and I know that everyone wants to give up sometimes. But I hate that part of me, try to push it down as much as I can.”

The doctor tried to get control of his breathing, and cried a bit more.

Spock hesitated a minute before, with an almost blinding sense of conviction, he knew he had to say something, even if it made the doctor despise him forever.

“Doctor,” he said. “When I met your counterpart, I had a great deal of access to his… emotional state, due to his bond to the other Spock. He was not passive in their… partnership, and he told me that my counterpart had won his loyalty by offering him the opportunity for vengeance. Both of them were working to overthrow the empire. He was telling the truth - there was a great… obsessive hatred in him, driving him. I too find it… highly disturbing to attempt to understand my counterpart’s point of view, but I think it is possible that - in their world - his actions were merciful. If the other McCoy did feel relieved in that first moment, that was not his attitude when I met him. He wanted to tear down the world around him that had placed him in that position. I do not know how he truly felt about her, but I can at least say that he hated the injustice that had placed him in a position where he could not care for a child. He asked about Joanna in our world in his last moment on the Enterprise. He did not merely give up and become another man’s… possession.”

McCoy stared at him, his mouth open. “So you’re telling me that my counterpart wasn’t a heartless, weak opportunist but instead he was calculating, cruel, and bent on revenge?”

“Yes?”

McCoy gave a bark of laughter and slumped back against a wall, looking as if an enormous weight had been taken off of him. “That actually makes me feel so much better,” he said, and laughed again. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you were right. About emotionally processing what happened. You could help me - you just did. You beat me at psychology.”

“I assure you, it was not on purpose,” Spock said, smiling slightly.

McCoy chuckled. Spock dropped onto the meditation mat in the unknown crew member’s quarters and closed his eyes.

“Joanna is a telepath,” McCoy said, into the silence, several hours later, Spock having long since turned to dismantling the door panel. “A very powerful one. She’s the first cadet to be pre-certified at class 10 since, well, you.”

“Ah,” said Spock, certain scattered pieces of information beginning to click into place.

“When she lost her father, after the war - hell, it wasn’t just her father. She also lost her godfathers, the uncle she’d lived with during the war, and her grandmother - my mama was in a civilian shuttle that the Klingons shot down, since she insisted on seeing Jo. This all happened in the space of a year. She was having trouble. A lot of trouble. I was having trouble, and she could tell.”

“Strong psionic gifts can amplify psychological distress,” said Spock. “Strong bonds between parents and children can amplify… everything.”

“Ain’t that the truth. Anyway, there weren’t any resources for a telepath like her - it’s all so new, you know? Taking her to Vulcan was the only option. I resigned my commission, couldn’t work. We were in public housing in Shi’Kahr. I kept applying to bring her to Mount Kolinahr but I kept on hitting roadblock after roadblock. The peacekeepers started getting something like psychic noise complaints, she’d get into fights with Vulcan kids on the streets, and eventually we started getting… threats. From, well, folks who thought Vulcans were superior. The peacekeepers were going to take us into protective custody, and we would have been separated, maybe permanently.”

“The logic extremists threatened you,” said Spock. “Bigots like our captors.”

“Yeah,” said McCoy, who swallowed. “I heard Dr. M’Benga was on Vulcan. I didn’t even know him personally then, but I basically hunted him down, begged for his help. He called your mama. Before I knew it, I was at this goddamn mansion and your father was giving me the third-degree. I thought he was treating me like a useless, hysterical dumbass, but at the end of the conversation he informed me that we would be staying at the compound and placed under his security team’s protection, and that he’d personally demand, as an Adept of Gol, that Joanna be seen immediately and trained. Me too, with the healers for the psionic…injuries, and some basic psionic training to help support her and manage my… I kind of have an allergy now, to certain kinds of psionic energy.”

“I see,” said Spock. “That is… Obviously this is new and unexpected information, but from what you’re telling me, that makes sense. It does not surprise me that my parents… intervened. Did my father also suggest you become a Vulcan citizen?”

“Yeah,” said McCoy. “Vulcan has the most comprehensive rights for telepaths of any member of the Federation. United Earth doesn’t have… anything. It’s the difference between Jo getting to see a healer or an adept and having to be put through some grotesque mind-scrambling machine. And I can say that - my cohort invented them. Worked out for me too. That’s why I booked it when I got a briefing request at the Starfleet Command liaison office - they understandably wanted my head examined after that other Spock’s joyride, but this way I got checked out by actual Vulcan experts and didn’t get my brains zapped and melted in some S-, uh, some classified basement.”

“Your emergency leave was approved by my father’s office because you are a Vulcan citizen.”

“Yep. I didn’t give them details. Had lunch with your mama, though, since I was in town.” 

“Do you intend to… remain a Vulcan citizen?”

“I don’t see why not,” said McCoy. “Look, I obviously don’t feel much natural affinity with Vulcan culture, but the folks I met really stepped up for Jo and me. The old rites were a big commitment and made me respect Vulcan values a lot, even if I’ll never feel welcome. It’s a founding Federation world, and the cities are diverse, so it won’t be too terrible to retire there. I like my little townhouse in Shi’Kahr just fine. The only downside is it’s harder for Jo and me to live on Earth. Probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that United Earth has major restrictions on owning property if you’re an ‘alien.’ Had to give up my mom’s house in the Blue Mountains - it’s not much, but it’d been ours for over a hundred years.” 

To Spock’s chagrin, this actually was a surprise. He’d had dual citizenship on Vulcan and United Earth his entire life and had never considered the matter.

“Doctor,” he said, finally. “I must apologize for my previous… severity. I find this information very helpful for understanding the context of our recent… interactions, but I can understand why it would not come up… naturally.” He found his tone becoming more gentle as he said, “Would I be right in thinking you never mentioned your Vulcan citizenship either because you did not consider it appropriate to gain some sort of social advantage?” 

“Well, yeah,” said McCoy. “Vulcan saved my daughter’s life. I’d never brag about being a part of that world - I’m just trying not to be too much of an embarrassment. It’s not like I did anything to deserve it.”

Spock wasn’t sure, actually, that this was true, but he was all of a sudden very conscious of the fact that he had been entrusted with McCoy’s personal affairs to a degree far more than he himself deserved.

“We are friends, you know,” said McCoy. “I mean, I’ve considered myself a friend to you or at least friendly to you the entire time I’ve been onboard. I just didn’t think it was, uh, reciprocated. I guess you did ask me to come down to your shotgun wedding on Vulcan, but you asked like it was an afterthought. I didn’t mean that I don’t want to be your friend.”

“You doubt that I am capable of being your friend,” said Spock, feeling hollow. “I lack the humanity to relate to you without discord and misunderstanding.”

“Nah,” said McCoy. “I’m friends with all kinds of people in all kinds of ways, and you must have noticed that butting heads doesn’t bother me much.”

McCoy took a breath, and Spock noticed that the doctor seemed tense. That he was, perhaps, even scared.

“If you want to be my friend,” he said, “The number one thing you gotta know is that I love my daughter, and I would do practically anything to protect her. More than protect her, since she’s not a child anymore: I’d do anything to be good for her, to be a person who’s good to have around, who adds to her life. Absolutely, I’d do things that are illogical. Or wrong, if it ever came to that. I don’t want to… show how I feel about her to just anyone. The way you and I are - nothing I could say about her to you would be casual, surface-stuff that doesn’t matter. You’re too… perceptive. Hell, I’ve never told anyone about that nightmare or what the other Spock showed me; it’s not gossip about the Rigel Cup. I didn’t volunteer all that stuff about your folks because it has to do with her, a time when we were very vulnerable. Getting to know me means getting to know Joanna, and that’s a privilege. I don’t care if you can barely stand me or respect me some days, but if you ever crossed the line about her… I couldn’t be your friend anymore.”

“I understand,” said Spock, humbled. “I understand that would be - is - a privilege. I know I may not - that I may not adequately communicate interest in personal matters. But I would never - I do not regard the… duty of a father as trivial or unworthy of respect, whether it’s logical or not.”

“This has been a very productive conversation,” said McCoy. “I hope we don’t die.”

As if on cue the door to the empty quarters blew open, revealing a highly armed Colonel T’Nura in VEG tactical armor and two phaser rifles in each hand.

“Dr. McCoy,” she said. “Commander Spock. Are you unharmed?”

“Uh - yeah,” said McCoy. “I think so.”

“Affirmative, colonel,” Spock said. “The threat has been neutralized, I presume?”

“Yes, all suspects have been detained and are being transferred to the Intrepid.”

Spock and McCoy glanced at each other.

“Not that I’m complaining,” said McCoy, “but that was pretty quick.”

T’Nura tipped her head, puzzled, but then began escorting them down the hall, holstering her rifles across her back and adjusting her various knives. “Naturally, the V’Shar has been tracking these particular cells of the Vulcan Isolationist Movement quite closely. We were reasonably prepared, and were surveilling the situation continuously and immediately. Your gambit was rather successful, also. We were able to take them down much more easily. It was also easier to convince your captain to allow the VEG to intervene in the Enterprise’s stead since you and Dr. McCoy weren’t in active distress.”

McCoy winced. “So a bunch of people did see all that… vile filth, then?”

“Fortunately no,” said T’Nura, who frowned slightly. Spock perked up. “The Intrepid was able to intercept the message. Only a few officers saw it. We… summarized, for the Enterprise. Captain Kirk was the only one who saw it. I believe Starfleet may not be satisfied with this state of affairs, but I believe diplomatic immunity of some sort was invoked.”

Spock didn’t know what more to say. Dr. McCoy didn’t either. T’Nura seemed unbothered by the silence, until she broke it. 

“I request you pass along my congratulations to Joanna, Leo, as I believe is the human custom,” she said. “Winning the Skon Prize is an honorable achievement for one without Vulcan heritage. The Lady Amanda informed me this morning.”

Notes:

Yes, the main conflict in this story is “Spock refuses to Google his crush.” I’m pretty sure the Sarek-McCoy-Amanda backstory is the most soap opera twist in this fic, fwiw. Hope it wasn’t too out of left field.

Shout out to Amanda Grayson, who would never suspect that Spock and Bones weren’t instant BFFs the second they met and also probably ships it.

Shout to Sarek for being ridiculous. I’ll have you know a lot of the dialogue in the earlier part of this chapter has been in my Notes app for months in a note entitled “Sarek makes trouble.”

The subtweet about Uhura "having weird experiences at the Academy" with seeming "hot-for-teacher" is a dig at the way AOS handled the Spock-Uhura relationship. We'll go into this in more depth later in the series, but I'm not going to throw Kelvin Spock under the bus about it. Doesn't mean that wasn't a super messed up idea on the part of the filmmakers. Uhura learning "three dialects of Romulan" is a reference to Kelvin Uhura knowing them in ST 2009.

On that note, there are three canonical sources for “Spock gets bullied and Sarek says something questionable”: “Journey to Babel” (DC Fontana), “Yesteryear” (DC Fontana), and Star Trek 2009 (almost verbatim riffing on the aforementioned dialogue by DC Fontana). Spock (Prime) is remembering what Sarek said in “Yesteryear” - the memory of the kids making him cry and calling his mom a “whore” is the PG-13 version of the “Yesteryear” scene in ST 2009 but I think it’s fair game because the scenes are so similar.

I didn’t want to let Sarek off the hook or anything, but it is kind of weird to me that we’re supposed to believe Sarek was actually a Vulcan chauvinist hardliner who was incapable of grasping that his son was half-human. It’s more believable to me that Sarek just sucks at communicating and makes a lot of bizarre assumptions from a human perspective. I’m really big on the interpretation that Vulcans for the most part just have resting bitch-face unless they’re deliberately being nasty, and are more curious or indifferent about humans than disapproving and humans just project all over them.

The timeline of Cardassia falling to fascism is a bit fuzzy in DS9 and TNG: roughly the decline of the First Republic is ongoing by the end of the twenty-second century going by Dax’s reminiscence of Iloja on Vulcan and that torturer dude’s rant in TNG's “Chain of Command.” I’m choosing to have a conclusive military coup happens in the 2260s for Quadrant Politics Reasons, which seems early enough that by the time we get to TNG/DS9 it’ll feel like it’s been like that forever. Again, a reminder that the occupation of Bajor isn’t till the 2310s.

It's canon that Nimbus III was founded in 2267, which is wild to think about. I mean, how did that even happen????

The T'kal'in'ket is a concept introduced in Discovery season 3's "Unification, III," and seems super fun. Also yes, this joke is the entire reason I gave Spock a degree from the VSA.

Vokaya crystals existing and being used as tracking devices is a reference to AOS Star Trek: Beyond vis a vis McCoy giving Spock a hard time for tagging Uhura.

"Logic extremists" is a Discovery term, and the "Vulcan Isolationist Movement" is a TNG term ("Gambit"). I'm assuming the latter is an umbrella term across the century.

I think I'm cheating a little bit by having McCoy claim he doesn't give Spock grief for just "sitting around being Vulcan" because he does sometimes start shit in a medical context, but my take for this fic at least is that this is in reference to VSA stubbornness and barriers to care, it's usually a come back to Spock being an edge lord, and saying he has green blood and pointed ears isn't offensive to a Vulcan anyway.

Oh, and the events of this chapter take place during "Journey to Babel," and the Nimbus III incident is set right after "The Trouble With Tribbles."

Like if you think Spock should just literally read any news article about the Rigel Cup to establish some basic facts about Joanna instead of whatever he's currently making up in his head; comment if you would like to be a fly on the wall for Joanna and Sarek’s “road trip.”

Chapter 11: Suffer Thy Neighbor

Summary:

Spock socializes more privately with the CMO and experiences the benefits of girl talk. Meanwhile, the balance of power across the Alpha and Beta Quadrants continues to shift in response to a tragedy and apparently everyone needs to be reminded that Nazis are bad.

Notes:

Notes:

I've gone back and edited the previous chapter to have the interlude where they get kidnapped to take place before "Wolf in the Fold," as mixing up the continuity at this point didn't add anything. I still reserve the right to do so in the future!

Content Warnings:

Intoxication, mentions of the plot of "Wolf in the Fold," mentions of a canonical assault in "The Gamesters of Triskelion" and depiction of its aftermath, canonical death of large numbers people, discussions of "passing" and "intermarriage" in a human-Vulcan context, mentions of Nazis and white supremacy, mentions of infidelity and mental illness.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: I'll add one more heads up on the next chapter but I'm going to change the title of this fic. The original title was me forcing myself to stop being a perfectionist and start posting, but I think a better title is "The Argonauts" or something similar. (I'm deciding if I'll literally use the title of Maggie Nelson's book lmao.) I'll include a new epigraph from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (which is a real book and where the title of Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts comes from), but will be referring to a different but related passage in the Barthes book.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

[2267-2268; USS Enterprise; Alpha and Beta Quadrants]


Spock wondered, finding himself uncharacteristically wistful, whether being dosed with high doses of sedatives would somehow spare him for the continued reality that the Enterprise - his computers, that he’d tailored to their mission - had just been possessed by Jack the fucking Ripper and that every single member of the crew aside from the captain and himself was currently high on tranquilizers. And Jim had already fled to the surface of the planet to “see some girls at that one cafe,” having completely failed to get him to come along.

Which left him, once again, the voice of reason on the Enterprise, though far more practically-speaking than usual.

The crew seemed to be gliding and drifting through the halls. He caught sight of Lieutenants Uhura and M’Ress walking away from the bridge, despite this meaning no comms officer would be on duty. The Caitian drifted towards him, and - ah, Scotty and Mr. Kyle had disappeared, just leaving a silent McCoy walking slightly back and to his side.

“Dance party,” M’Ress purred. “Rec room. Nyota will DJ.”

Spock just stared at her.

After a beat, Dr. McCoy said, “Can’t. Gotta get to sickbay. In case. People. Have needs.” He made an expansive gesture, as though compensating for the relative parsimony of this statement.

The speakers crackled on, and the corridors were filled with music that sounded definitely Terran, very likely pre-Contact, and vaguely familiar. 

I can feel your energy from two planets away
I got my drink I got my music I would share it but today I'm yelling
Bitch don't kill my vibe
Bitch don't kill my vibe

“Sulu,” said Uhura, her eyes narrowing. “We have to go back to the bridge,” she said, pulling at M’Ress’s sleeve. “So no one can use the comm system.”

“Only you can have the aux, Nyota,” M’Ress rumbled.

“Damn straight, baby.”

“Nyota,” she said, as the pair drifted away, “what is ‘the aux’?”

Spock noticed McCoy veering away and he swiftly seized the man’s arm.

“Sickbay,” said the doctor.

“Eloquent as ever, doctor,” said Spock, deciding he at least deserved to be annoyed. “However, you are not on duty. Furthermore, you are the last person to be tranquilized and the most currently affected.”

“I’m the CMO,” McCoy replied, blinking up at him.

“Indeed,” said Spock, “and this, if you recall, is the Enterprise. I am completely confident you will be paged if your presence is truly required. You are in an altered state of consciousness, doctor.”

“Nah, my inhibitions are just lowered.”

“As I have said.”

Spock, tiring of this, began practically dragging the man after him back to their quarters.

“Trust me,” McCoy said, his words slow but precise, “I mixed this up. This ain’t no street trank. Though you know we owe a lot to early work with ketamine… You think I can’t whip up a well-balanced anxiolytic tranquilizer? It’s anxiety. I know about anxiety. It’s anxiety.”

“I believe you,” he replied, not releasing the doctor’s arm as they entered the turbolift.

“Kendrick Lamar.”

“Doctor?”

“The song. It’s Kendrick Lamar.”

Spock’s occasionally encyclopedic knowledge of pre-Contact music courtesy of Amanda clicked into place.

“The track is from good kid, m.A.A.d city,” Spock said.

“I knew that. So, sickbay now?”

Spock did not dignify this with a response, and pulled the doctor out of the turbolift.

“I didn’t mix up uppers and downers in the med labs on the side at the Academy,” said the doctor. “Not out of completely legal substances, and not before I was eighteen to be extra careful. I didn’t do that, no, sir.”

“This entire digression is irrelevant, doctor.”

He had arrived before the doctor’s door, and had to actually position his arms and shoulders to face the right direction.

“Erica just had insomnia, and all the pre-measured doses were still for big ole fellas and the student clinic had a two week waitlist for custom doses. Mine was better, anyway. Word got out. But I didn’t do that, not at all.”

“Doctor, although I don’t care about anything, I definitely do not care about your youthful indiscretions.”

He walked quickly to his own door, only to find that his friend had somehow tailed him, and followed him into his own quarters. 

“I was a bad kid, I still can’t believe I got into the Academy,” the doctor said, and then flopped, as though boneless, onto the futon in the living area. “I have a record. Sealed, now, ‘course. Took me a while to realize not all rules was dumb and hurtful. A lot of ‘em were when I was a young’un. But rules, they’re just part of the overall picture. Part of the, um, logic of a sitch’ation. Or is it structure? Foundation of the structure? Whatever. Persistent defiance means you’re taking the rules as seriously as if you’re following them.”

“Amid the tangle of incoherence, I detect a rather Vulcan attitude, doctor,” said Spock, his arms folded, still standing, and wondering what to do. “Almost a paraphrase of a more popular axiom of Surak’s.”

“Joanna taught me it,” said the man, who now curled onto a pillow on the sofa. “She can read all that stuff. She’s always been a good kid.”

“Doctor,” Spock began, “you should be taking this opportunity to do something… restorative.”

McCoy extracted one long arm from his huddled form and patted the seat beside him. “Sit down, Spock. Take a load off.”

“These are my own quarters,” he replied, unsure if the doctor was actually cognizant of this fact. “Surely there’s something you want to do.”

“I can’t go do Jim’s bullshit when I’m this relaxed,” he said, as though thinking, and perhaps forgetting the captain had uninvited him once he registered the doctor’s lack of sobriety. “I’m following my instincts. I want to do what I want to do.”

“Which is spend time in my presence?” 

Spock hoped, at least, that this would snap the doctor out of it, whatever it was.

“Yessir,” McCoy drawled. “Sit down.”

How bizarre. Spock, if somewhat gingerly, sat down next to the doctor. “Do you merely wish to be in a certain proximity to my person?”

McCoy shrugged. “You can do whatever you want,” he said, matter-of-fact. “I always feel safe with you, you know, how an animal does, in its body. You smell nice. Are you familiar with the concept of blanket consent?”

“Familiar enough to know it absolutely does not apply in this situation.”

McCoy nodded against his pillow, serious. “You’re smart,” said McCoy. “Did you know?”

“I am aware.”

McCoy frowned, as though parsing a new word in a language he did not speak. “Do you want me to leave?”

Spock sighed. “Your presence is acceptable, if the currently requested level of closeness is adequate for you. Would you perhaps like to read a book or drink some tea?”

McCoy’s smile was brilliant, blinding. “You are a genius,” he said. “I’m in the perfect mood to read a novel. What do you have?”

Spock could have pointed out the computer was right there and had a decent recommendation algorithm, but instead he said, “Jim has requested I read his favorite series of books, and I am finished with most of them. Have you read Master and Commander?”

“No, but Jim bugs me to read them all the time; he’s leant me those books five times. What the hell, today’s the day.”

Spock rose to download the novel onto a padd and retrieved several padds of various monographs and articles on duotronic programming he’d been working through. He then fetched, after brief consideration of the options, two mugs of mint tea.

McCoy grunted in contentment and shuffled up to take the padd and the tea, and actually stayed upright while drinking it, before slipping back down again, reading against the pillow. Contrary to his earlier concerns, Spock actually was able to work without interruption from the doctor or the rest of the crew who were, it seemed, actually “taking a load off.” Perhaps in this particular case the doctor’s “potion” had been of a superior quality.

Several hours later, his padd, currently networked to his quarters’ console, flashed a notification he’d set up for news from the Alpha Quadrant. He opened it, and frowned.

This morning, all ships in range of the Cardassian fleet received the following transmission: “The so-called Republic of Cardassia will be held responsible for its crimes against the Cardassian people. Central Command pledges that Cardassia is finally for Cardassians. All borders are closed until further notice.” Anonymous sources have confirmed that the government of the Republic of Cardassia has been permanently dissolved and a new government with a newly appointed legislature, led by the military, has been formed as the Cardassian Union. Federation officials have not been able to reestablish communications with Federation citizens still inside Cardassian space. Reporters are still waiting for a statement from the Federation Council.

This obviously was bad news, but it tugged at that same disquiet he’d been observing at the back of his mind.

His ruminations were interrupted by the first comment McCoy had made for quite some time, not even looking up from his book. “Does Jim know how gay this is?”

“Unclear,” he replied.

McCoy snorted and went back to reading. After a few minutes of fruitless speculation, he made a mental note to discuss the news with his father and returned to his contemplation of current research on artificial intelligence. One of his regular interlocutors in the Trill Science Ministry had suggested he review Richard Daystrom’s work after he’d sent his draft of his paper on the Nomad probe’s ability to update its own programming and hardware on a deep space voyage. There were really some interesting parallels that…  

After a full six hours had passed, McCoy set down the padd and stretched his arms overhead. “Well,” he said, “I’m feeling my usual amount of on-edge again, so I’m going to finish up some reports before I go back on shift.” Spock nodded. “Thanks for the tea.”

A few days later, Spock couldn’t stop re-checking the stats from the past twenty-four hours at his station on the bridge. For some reason, productivity and efficiency had doubled in the shifts since the crew’s “trip,” and he was trying to figure out a valid reason why they couldn’t, as Jim brightly suggested, “do this more often.” Finally, he decided the only problem was bureaucratic and logistical, which would have to be enough.

The doctor had, as he usually did, followed the captain onto the bridge, apparently in mid-conversation about the Patrick O’Brien novels.

“You are so like Maturin, Bones,” said Jim. “Brilliant, gentle but ruthless when needed, sort of morbid, a landlubber, full of mysteries.”

Ah yes, thought Spock. By the end of the tale of Aubrey’s and Maturin’s maritime adventures, it was revealed that all along the doctor had been a spy. Something he had initially suspected of Dr. McCoy himself, which he had not, in point of fact, disproven.

“I guess, but you’re Aubrey, obviously, and I have you and Mr. Spock pegged as the double act. And I’m not exactly an intellectual.”

“Spock? Nah, in his own way he’s his own Aubrey. You can’t have Bones, though,” Jim said, meaning Spock had to actually acknowledge he was now involved in the conversation. “He’s my Maturin. He can be your… Watson! Dr. Watson to your Sherlock Holmes.”

McCoy looked, if anything, more offended than Spock did, his eyebrows disappearing into his hairline.

“Oh, thanks, Jim, I’m the comparatively slow-witted foil to the great detective, is that right?”

“I believe you to be in error, captain,” said Spock. “Dr. Watson’s gifts lie ultimately in his predictability, a control in the notional laboratory of Holmes’s mind. I would never accuse Dr. McCoy of such a thing.”

“Why, Jim,” McCoy drawled, “I think I may have just been complimented.”

Then Jim, and then McCoy frowned as they noticed the rest of the bridge slowly falling silent, more and more of the officers drew others’ attention to computer terminals, the Federation news channel logo flashing all over the room. Spock pulled up the feed at the science station.

Romulan Star Empire Claims Territory in the Alpha Quadrant and Signs Major Treaties

Shocking diplomatic observers across the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, the Romulan Star Empire today announced the results of secret negotiations with the Breen Confederacy and the newly formed government of the Cardassian Union and have claimed several sectors bordering both states as Romulan territory in the Alpha Quadrant. 

They have signed a major trade agreement with the Breen, guaranteeing increased Breen and Romulan traffic between the Alpha and Beta Quadrants in non-aligned space outside of the Neutral Zone. They have also signed a nonaggression pact with the Cardassian Union, and reportedly delivered several industrial replicators to the hardest-hit worlds in Cardassian space. 

This news comes only weeks after the Federation and the Romulans set a date to have a first meeting about establishing an ongoing diplomatic relationship, and days after ground was broken on the Planet of Galactic Peace colony on Nimbus III. News agencies are still waiting for comments from the Federation Council.

Aha, thought Spock, unhappy, for once, that he’d been right to continue paying attention to the obscure Cardassian situation. 

Lieutenant Riley broke the pall that had fallen over the bridge. “How do they think they’ll get away with this?”

“Why,” snapped Uhura, “wouldn’t they get away with this? This all happened outside Federation space, and it at least sounds… legitimate. Plus, we just got not un-friendly. The Federation can’t turn on a dime and condemn them.”

Spock agreed, but as a Vulcan, he did not feel he could speak in even qualified defense of the Romulans.

Sulu turned around and frowned. “But the Romulans have to know that we have plans to invite planets into the Federation deep into the Alpha Quadrant over the next fifty years. Like, the projected maps are everywhere and negotiations have been ongoing for decades. And that space closer towards the galactic core - if it’s crawling with Breen and Romulans, it’ll be harder to convince those worlds to join.”

“That’s why they did it,” said Chekov, looking thoughtful. “They’re preparing for a war fifty years from now since they decided not to start a war now. Boxing us in.”

Nobody liked the sound of that, and the silence lingered over the rest of their shift.

 

***

 

Considering the day he was having, Spock weighed telling Dr. Tola that he was unavailable, as the head of the social sciences department pressed his door chime over and over again. He had spent several very fraught hours trying to rescue the captain and half the bridge crew from a mysterious abduction, at one point considering giving them up for lost, and it had turned out they had, of all things, been abducted to fight gladiatorial matches with other captives for the entertainment and profit of yet another ethereal and despotic race with far too much time on their hands. 

“You know,” said a retrieved Jim in the transporter room, looking far too cheerful and bare-chested in a very shoddy-looking bondage harness that could have only been for decorative purposes, “I feel like this happens often enough it’s like a running theme. Maybe we should ask the anthropologists. And tell the Academy to do more ‘gladiators in space’ drills.”

McCoy, who’d been circling around him with a tricorder out like a very lanky and enormous fly, snorted. “At this point they should just give us actual swords and shields and make us salute Caesar or something. Maybe put it on space TV again like when you fought that beefy lizard.”

“Bones,” said Jim, aghast, “you take that back. Knock on wood - damn there’s really not any wood… around on the Enterprise. Don’t jinx us!”

“I’m sure Mr. Spock would have something to say about that,” McCoy said.

“I do not,” Spock replied, with a hopefully repressive amount of severity. Now the two men were staring at him. “Very well. Jinxes are illogical.”

Thank you,” said McCoy.

“Betrayal,” Jim muttered.

“Put a shirt on, Jim.”

This might have been easier to take if it hadn’t occurred soon after the memorable incident with the tribbles - the actual confrontation with the Klingons hadn’t been interesting, but running afoul of what must have been some truly wet-behind-the-ears Starfleet officers who’d wandered onto the ship from the twenty-fourth century had been a major, if somewhat interesting, inconvenience. Mainly because of how much work it was to keep anyone saying or asking anything too interesting about this possible future. 

Humans had very little impulse control when it came to divination, he’d come to learn, and despite being accused by Jim of making up regulations about time travel that didn’t exist, he stood by the improvised rules he’d forced on everyone. It was just common sense, something their guests didn’t seem to have, as he’d spent the better part of an hour trying to determine if the voluble doctor of the group was actually serious when he hinted this was a Section 31 psyop and not time travel, only to find the young man had no idea what Section 31 was and simply had read too many spy novels. He’d felt a genuine appreciation for Dr. McCoy’s comparative professionalism, which he deeply resented. 

Dr. Tola continued to activate the door chime. It had been a long week.

However, as the Andorian was unlikely to give up, he finally admitted them. Unusual for them, their face and lips were bare, their white hair still piled high but in a coolly messy way. They were also wearing a science blues utility jumpsuit that was several sizes too small for them and non-regulation combat boots. As Spock himself had processed Dr. Tola’s and Dr. Noel’s domestic partnership form and painstakingly rearranged the psionometrics lab reporting structure last week, he decided it was prudent to let this lapse in regulation uniforms go. It didn’t have anything to do with a rail-thin, towering Andorian beauty glaring down at him in his own quarters.

“You should have an office,” they said.

You should wear your own uniform, thought Spock. 

“I don’t need an office,” he said.

“I have an office. Leo has an office. Helen has an office. The captain has like several special rooms he refuses to use and just makes people hang out in his quarters. You should have an office. You’re basically - what’s that Terran phrase? - HR, which I would find hilarious in different circumstances.”

“Dr. Tola, if you would come to the point…”

“I am an emissary from concerned humans, mostly Nurse Chapel, who believe I’d have better luck convincing you to not do what you’d be inclined to do when I tell you that Lieutenant Uhura got relieved of duty and is confined to quarters.”

Spock raised an eyebrow. “What was the reason?”

“She, um, yelled at Captain Kirk on the bridge, really cussed him out. And maybe, um, punched him a little bit? Like he didn’t even need to go to sickbay. But that, uh, happened.”

“That being the case, she should be in the brig, not confined to quarters,” Spock said.

Tola sighed and rubbed the bridge of their nose. “Yeah, so the downside of the humans sending me is I don’t know how to say all that crap about special circumstances and how treating everyone like a fleeting, complicated ice sculpture is more motivating than dealing squarely with people when they fuck up. But from my point of view, I felt frustrated on her behalf because if this were an Andorian ship - well, an Andorian ship a hundred years ago - she would have been well within her rights to challenge him to the ushaan so they could actually fight it out. Um, Tellar Prime rules, no maiming or killing. It would have helped everyone move on: Kirk had to make a shitty call because of the Prime Directive, and Uhura needed to defend her honor. He can’t apologize because he’s the captain, but he can take a punch.”

Spock felt as though he was missing something. “Dr. Tola, to what are you referring? What did the captain do and how was Lieutenant Uhura’s ‘honor’ in question?”

“I think what he did was just leave all those slaves on that gladiator planet with a verbal promise from their captors to educate them and take care of them and not, um, enslave them again? Uhura was assaulted by one of the captives who was kind of a boss among the gladiators. And no one is going to be held accountable. Not that guy, and not the overlords who set up the whole sick situation. Her honor came into it because the captain was joking around with Chekov about the fetish gear they all had to wear, like the whole thing had been a funny joke, which wasn’t very sensitive. Sidebar, I find it very odd that human men, especially the super pink ones, don’t realize that just because something isn’t classic rape that doesn’t mean it’s not sexual assault or just traumatizing in general. This is me editorializing, but I feel like the captain gets violated on away missions so frequently he’s had to believe it’s not as fucked up as it is.”

If Spock had moods, his would have soured. Perhaps this was what was so disconcerting about their more bizarre misadventures: they stimulated the human desire to counter the absurd with laughter, and this could hide the more nefarious implications of their experiences. He also did not want to, at the moment, consider the extent to which he himself had been “violated” on away missions, as that would only worsen his… subjective condition.

“Regulations state that the captain is the final word on crew discipline unless the crew member appeals to Starfleet military courts,” he said at last. “It would be… irregular for the captain to exercise this prerogative as he is the complainant, but if he were to insist that she not be disciplined, the matter would be resolved. Unless Uhura appealed that decision, of course. It would not be the most… politic of decisions on paper, but it’d hardly be his most controversial.”

“Great,” said Dr. Tola, and their stance relaxed. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

“Do you wish me to… speak with the captain?”

“Oh no. Chapel set Leo on it. They should both be drunk by this point. There are some serious rancid vibes coming from the captain’s quarters right now. Not that I pry, but it almost made me sneeze.”

Spock nodded, a little absent.

Nothing about that talk had suggested that his presence was needed by Lieutenant Uhura, but he spent hours ruminating on how she might be… recuperating. An unreasonable waste of time: certainly he would only make her feel worse.

Somehow, the next day, he found himself tracking her down at the gym, wailing on a polyurethane dummy with boxing gloves. (She had been released from her quarters and given a few days off as soon as Jim had sobered up enough.)

She went rigid as she sensed his approach, but when she glanced over her shoulder, she just grimaced and went back to punching. “Oh, great. Just what I need. You here to give me a lecture?”

“No,” he replied, and stood with his arms folded behind his back, observing her technique. Proficient, vehement, but not truly efficient. Only after a few minutes did he get a jarring sense of deja vu, realizing he’d once confronted Michael in a gym like this after she too had punched a superior officer, though after the death of one of her bridge crew. The moment was almost mirrored. Then, he had approached his older sister, steeling himself to offer comfort and something like forgiveness, and her moves had been agile, expert, deadly. Here, he was the elder… brother, he supposed, and he was steeling himself to offer comfort and something like an apology.

She paused, and wiped sweat off her brow with her taped wrists, breathing heavily. “What do you want, then?”

Spock didn’t have a great answer to this, so he gave the one that would get her attention, and that happened to be true. “I want to be a satisfactory friend,” he said. “I am… here for you.”

Uhura straightened and stared at him, shocked. Then she frowned. “If you offer to play music with me again, I swear to God, Spock…”

“I had not planned to. I came to inquire whether you would be interested in being trained in Vulcan self-defense techniques.”

Uhura blinked, disbelief blooming into her features. “Like a Vulcan nerve pinch?”

“Among other things, yes.”

“Deal,” she said, still looking shocked. “Okay then, let’s do it.”

He hadn’t intended to do this now, but he took the request in stride. “You may dispense with the gloves,” he said, “but let me examine the taping of your wrists.”

When she approached him, he delicately turned over her hands and wrists, avoiding her fingers, almost shy. They were adequate. 

He stepped back, and they began.

Over an hour later, Uhura’s exhaustion got the better of her stubbornness, and he politely said nothing when she collapsed in a sweaty heap on the floor. He had found her progress satisfactory. She had good reflexes, and a sound analysis of her opponent’s weaknesses, but her instincts were still not quite engaged. She was an earthling, and an intellectual by training and cerebral by temperament, and had never thought she would need to harm someone with her bare hands.

“You’re surprisingly… great at adapting this style for a petite human woman,” she said, gasping.

Spock offered her his hand without flinching to pull her up, in the human fashion. “In fact,” he said, “my human sparring partner in my youth had to adapt her Suus Mahna style to accommodate my physiological differences.”

“Damn,” she said. “You’ll have to introduce me to that woman, if you get the chance.”

“If I get the chance,” he said, voice soft, unable to meet her eyes, “I’d be honored to do so.”

“You big softie,” she said, and really smiled at him for the first time in years.

For a while, things started to, well, feel better. He even survived a trip to a planet where the inhabitants had based their modern society on a 1920s history of organized crime in Chicago without undue mental strain. At times, he actually found the situation amusing. He was even beginning to meditate on this unexpected increase of his emotional resiliency.

Then he felt the Intrepid die.

 

***

 

“I assure you, doctor,” Spock snapped, practically vibrating on the biobed, wanting to rush back to the bridge where he’d collapsed in agony, “I am quite all right. The pain was momentary. It passed quickly.”

McCoy refused to pick up the pace. “All of my instruments seem to agree with you if I can trust these crazy Vulcan readings. Spock, how can you be so sure the Intrepid was destroyed?”

He leapt off the bed. He didn’t have time for this. He had to… He had to.

“I sensed it die,” he said.

“But I thought you had to be in physical contact with a subject before -” The doctor seemed calm, as though he were being reasonable. 

“Doctor, even I, a half-Vulcan, could hear the death scream of four hundred Vulcan minds crying out over the distance between us.”

Dr. McCoy remained unmoved. “Not even a Vulcan could feel a starship die.”

Spock began pacing, something like pain racing down his arms and into his hands. “Call it a deep understanding of the way things happen to Vulcans, but I know not a person, not even the computers onboard the Intrepid, knew what was killing them or would have understood it had they known.” 

Anger. The “pain” was anger.

The doctor still would not relent, with his asinine quest for something as mundane as facts. “But four hundred Vulcans?”

“I've noticed that about your people, doctor,” he said, the words flying out of him, wishing they could tear into the solid figure of the man and just - “You find it easier to understand the death of one than the death of a million. You speak about the objective hardness of the Vulcan heart, yet how little room there seems to be in yours.”

McCoy stared at him, his expression barely impassive. Either projected or seized, he couldn’t tell, underneath the doctor’s feelings swirled in a tangle of hurt - confusion - worry. He gave a crooked, shattered half-smile.

“Suffer the death of thy neighbor, eh, Spock? You wouldn’t wish that on us, would you?”

Spock couldn’t begin to parse what the fuck that meant, but he shot out, as though he did, “It might have rendered your history a bit less bloody.”

He had occasion to contemplate the odd phrase further a short while later when he was dying alone in a shuttle with failing shields and life support, surrounded by the enormous single-celled organism that had wiped the Intrepid and an inhabited star system from existence. 

“Personal log, Commander Spock, USS Enterprise,” he began. “I have noted the passage of the Enterprise on its way to whatever awaits it. If this record should survive me, I wish it known that I bequeath my highest commendation and testimonial to the captain, officers, and crew of the Enterprise . The finest starship in the fleet.”

“And you said I have a martyr complex,” said a translucent and softly glowing apparition of Leonard McCoy.

Ah, a hallucination, he thought. Logical, considering the composition of the remaining atmosphere.

“Yeah, but why are you hallucinating me?”

“It’s always about you, always so personal,” he snapped.

“Spock, your last words to the Enterprise were ‘Tell Dr. McCoy he should have wished me luck.’ By God, I am going to take it personally. Can you even imagine how I’ll feel, if we survive, and you’re dead?”

“I don’t suppose I could, doctor,” he said. “My imagination when it comes to feelings is, as you’ve frequently pointed out, limited.”

“Bullshit, but fine, I’ll tell you. First I’ll distract myself by taking care of everyone else. Dogging Jim’s every step, forcing everyone in for checkups. I won’t accept you’re gone for an illogical amount of time. Because there won’t be any closure, will there? The chances of the Enterprise surviving and finding evidence of the Galileo are 8412 to one.”

At this point, Spock was resigned to the fact that he obviously could imagine what the doctor would feel, as he was the one who was estimating those odds.

“So, I’ll be waiting. Even when it’s obvious you’re gone, and I start to grieve, I’ll still just be waiting. All for you.”

“Logically, if I am dead, I can’t be held responsible for that.”

“But it’s what you want me to do. That’s why I’ll do it. You know I will. Do you know why?”

“I think you’re projecting,” he informed his hallucination, “so no.”

“Well, I think even you can admit that saying that was intentionally provoking. Throwing something out that I can never answer, leaving us broken off, not over.”

Life support had fallen to fifteen percent; shields, eight percent. “If I grant that, will you please get to the point?”

“There are two options. One, you really are a heartless asshole. I care about you. I’ve lost so many people in so many brutal ways, just like you have, and you want to haunt me, be so petty as to suggest this was somehow my fault?”

“If you actually thought not ‘wishing me luck’ could have caused my death, then you have bigger problems than grieving my passing.”

“But you said something so illogical anyway, just to get to me. The second option: you don’t want the conversation to end, and this was the last chance to play our little games. You wish I was here, because you’re scared to die, and it comforts you to have me here.”

Spock rubbed his eyes. “The second option would also explain why I’m hallucinating you right now.”

“Yep.”

“‘Suffer the death of thy neighbor,’ what did you mean by that?”

“It’s not biblical? Something from the King James?”

“There is no such verse in that text. The closest I could find is in the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus. ‘Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbor, and not suffer sin upon him. Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the Lord.’ The source of your Christ’s ‘golden rule,’ I believe.”

“He ain’t my Christ, mister. Have you considered that you had startled and hurt me by thinking I could possibly have been implying I didn’t care about those poor people? That I was babbling? I’m not sure how you could have got that from me asking about the accuracy of your telepathic experience, by the way.”

“I’d prefer not to consider that possibility. If these are my last moments of conscious thought, I want an actual explanation.”

“There’s a world of difference between ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ and ‘suffer the death of thy neighbor.’ The first is a way of relating to someone else, someone who isn’t you, a way called love. Empathy requires distance. Intimacy does. How can you get close if you don’t have boundaries? But if you suffer someone else’s death - how can that be anything but annihilation? That’s not love.”

“That’s a literal interpretation of the phrase and does not take into account the use of the word ‘suffer’ when the translation was written. A better gloss would be - ‘Do you really think we should tolerate, bear, endure the death of someone nearby?’”

“I’ll do you one better. I was also implying, do you really think caring about the people around you makes you unable to care about people you don’t know and never will? Do you really think that’s the root cause of genocide, other atrocities? To which you said -”

“It might have rendered your history a little less bloody,” he said. “Which I now concede doesn’t make much sense.”

“Thus, my original take: we were upset and not saying anything that sensible.”

“Logical enough.”

“Which feeling do you think is stronger, matters more in the end - your anger at the idea that I couldn’t see or withstand your pain and never could or your longing for my understanding, attention, respect, and regard?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Life support at ten percent; shields at five.

“Well, do you know how you could definitely never find out, you monumental infant?”

“Dying would be effective.”

He blinked. Somehow, his head had cleared momentarily. No one was in the shuttle with him.

I suppose I could redirect my remaining shields and life support to thrusters. My odds of rescue improve very little, but they do, in fact, improve.

A haze of desperate maneuvers and calculations and the Enterprise loomed, the comms crackled again, live.

“Spock, do you read me? Do you read me, Spock, do you read me? Come in, Spock. Spock! Scotty get a tractor beam -”

Jim.

His eyes narrowed. A tractor beam, and they only had a 53.124 second escape margin, which Scotty, in the background, confirmed, with slightly less precision.

“Captain,” he said, finding his voice, “I recommend you abandon the attempt. Do not risk the ship further on my behalf.”

Shut up, Spock!” Dr. McCoy’s voice. “We’re rescuing you!”

“Why thank you, Captain McCoy,” he said, not even thinking that much at all.

A flurry of movements, beating the odds again. He slumped against the seat, looking at the mostly dead shuttlecraft console. “Shuttlecraft to Enterprise. Shuttlecraft to Enterprise. Request permission to come aboard.” He almost smiled.

A few hours later, he was ready, when the doctor came by his quarters, to say something. He didn’t know what precisely he would have been apologizing for, of course, but he felt like doing something like apologizing. He had been… hard on the doctor. That wasn’t right, he had been… demanding of the doctor, even provocative. There was a human phrase, “lashing out,” that he’d never quite understood but seemed apt.

“Come,” he said, affecting his most distant posture behind his desk. 

McCoy entered without hesitation and placed a data tape before him on the desk. “I was talking to Jo,” he said. “The cadets at the Academy are pretty shaken by the loss of the Intrepid. They did an open screening of the public vigil in Shi’Kahr live for the Vulcan cadets, and all the other cadets showed up to meditate along with them. I was able to get a recording of the vigil. In case you hadn’t seen it.”

He blinked at the tape. Then he picked it up. “Thank you, doctor,” he said.

McCoy gave a shy grin, bounced on his feet, and gave an awkward wave, as though he were about to leave.

“Doctor,” he said, still wanting something and from him. “Would you be… amenable to watching it with me?”

McCoy looked surprised. “Why of course, Spock, if you’d like. I’d be honored.”

“I reacted irrationally,” he continued. “In sickbay. I was struggling with difficult feelings, and I knew you could bear them, even if you did not deserve them.”

“Well, I’d be a hypocrite if I couldn’t understand that. ‘Sides, I was so spooked by your collapse I shut down your completely valid experience and acted like you couldn’t have been right. It may not be a traditional Vulcan trait to be able to pick up psionic projections from that far away, but it’s certainly a known telepathic one - telepresence. I know your sessions with Dr. Tola are just study hall, but you might ask them about it. I’ve only heard of Aenar being able to do things remotely like that.”

“Dr. Tola has actually been working on telepresence skills with me,” said Spock. “I have an aptitude, apparently.”

“Hm,” said McCoy, “doesn’t your mama have a high Esper rating? I remember Sarek mentioning that it was almost as high as mine, years ago. Human telepathy is wacky; it’s possible you got some psychic party favors and the Vulcan model of psionics doesn’t entirely fit you.”

Great. Fantastic. “I believe she does,” said Spock. “That speculation is not without merit, doctor. I will consider the matter.”

“Not tonight, though,” said McCoy, who dropped into a surprisingly graceful seated position on his meditation mat, a modified version of Vulcan ones. The doctor looked up at him, and Spock was overwhelmed at how appealing the sight was. He hadn’t meditated with anyone like this since his romantic relationship with T’Pring. He felt incongruously giddy as he settled in to honor the comrades they had lost.

“Not tonight,” he agreed.

 

***

 

After this, McCoy did seem to drop by more frequently for social reasons. It was hardly excessive or regular, but it was more than the zero amount of times it had happened before the incident with Jack the Ripper. After the nasty business with the Klingons and a technical violation of the Prime Directive, he was almost expecting the man.

“Come,” said Spock. 

It was indeed McCoy, who stood by the door, barely in the room. Spock tensed for some kind of lecture on getting shot in the back or scaring the hell out of Scotty and Nurse Chapel, but just as quickly relaxed, when he noted, by the doctor’s downcast eyes and unsure shifting on his feet, that this was not about him.

“Doctor,” he said. McCoy’s eyes flicked up and then flicked back down.

He stood and walked over to the low-yield synthesizer and fixed two mugs of chamomile tea, which he’d developed a renewed taste for since Casperia Prime. 

“Sit,” he said, sitting in the chair in his living area, leaving the futon open, putting the two steaming mugs down. The doctor obeyed, and then took his tea up in both hands, and inhaled for a moment, before taking a sip. Spock did the same, saying nothing. There was something almost meditative about it, just waiting, letting the moment go on.

“When I was on Vulcan,” the doctor said at last, “I had to demonstrate my ability to work as part of the citizenship application. I worked with the IME refugee health division, which is a bit neglected, shamefully, and started doing research and clinical hours with Cardassians and Cardassian-Vulcan hybrids in Kir City. Sort of the reverse commute from the outskirts of Shi’Kahr. I don’t know if I was overcompensating, or just naive, but I was… pushy, really elbowed my way in to try to reduce the health disparities in that enclave. I was appalled - this was Vulcan, for God’s sake, the most, well, civilized planet in the Federation, millennia of public medicine and high standards of living. And I was dealing with maternal and infant mortality and disability rates of a pre-warp planet. I ended up getting mixed up in local politics that… it’s a long story, but I made things harder for the clinicians, all women, who I was working with. Maybe I also made things better, some of them told me I did, but I definitely made them harder. I learned that…”

He was silent again, and both of them sipped at their tea. Spock was fascinated, still in that detached, curious state.

“I learned that being the way I am has consequences,” he said. “That I’m not the guy to make the call about the lesser of two evils. I’ve tried, since then, to stay in my lane, not take charge of things I don’t understand and make them simpler for me. I try to take more time to understand them, not force situations to be all-or-nothing.”

McCoy glanced up at him, looking almost scared, as though expecting a challenge. 

Spock considered offering one, but as he reflected on what he knew of the doctor’s behavior, he wasn’t sure he saw the need to. The man wouldn’t back down from his principles or the feelings they inspired, his commitment to life and dignity for all involved, even when it was strategically disastrous or even literally impossible, but he also didn’t take control, he didn’t try to subvert and dominate and manipulate other people. He was just… honest, and there was a vulnerability in that, something reassuring in the almost purely emotional discomfort his candor inspired in… himself.

“I have noticed this tendency in your behavior,” said Spock, at last. “There is… logic in self-awareness, especially when one is highly… emotional.

McCoy let this stand and merely nodded. 

“I couldn’t stop Jim from giving those people firearms,” he said. “Hell, leaving one side with Klingon weapons and the other side undefended seems just as bad. I didn’t have a better solution, and it wasn’t my place to decide. Jim feels bad about it too, but he really does believe maintaining the balance of power is the most strategic solution. That’s going to comfort him.”

“You do not think it is strategic?”

“I know what happened down there was not right, and even if I did think it was strategic, I don’t think that would comfort me the way it does Jim. I just feel… shitty. I can’t feel better about it; I can just let… go, as there’s not much I can do now.”

“Can you just let go?”

“Not tonight,” he said quietly, and put down his mostly empty mug of tea.

“You want company,” Spock said. You want my company.

“Yeah,” he said. “Is that okay?”

“Yes,” said Spock. “I cannot entertain you, as I am rather… drained, as well, by the events of this mission. I am going to read and meditate.”

“That’s perfect,” said McCoy, who leaned back against the futon and closed his eyes. 

Spock returned to his desk to retrieve his padd, and after a pause, loaded up another padd with more books in the series Jim was so fond of. He placed it on the table in front of McCoy and returned to his reading.

When he glanced over to the doctor now and then, the man was often staring off into space, or closing his eyes, or occasionally trying to read on the padd. Eventually, he’d made use of the stylus and appeared to be writing, then drawing, perhaps engaging in that quirky human tic, “doodling.”

Once he finished his reading, without saying anything, he put down his padd and walked over to his meditation mat, sat down, and closed his eyes. It was easier to meditate, letting his thoughts and feelings slide over the surface of his mind, than it had been in quite a long time.

When he arose from the mat, he saw that the doctor had fallen asleep, tipped over at an awkward angle, mouth hanging open slightly. He fetched a small pillow from the edge of the futon, and carefully moved the doctor so that he was lying down fully, head supported. He tried to keep touch at a minimum, but did, if he was being honest, send weak suggestions that the doctor should remain asleep, to sleep more deeply. The man sighed, and nosed into the pillow, getting comfortable. Spock then fetched a quilt from his sleeping area, and tucked it around his sleeping friend.

He retreated to his own bed, and actually fell asleep, sleeping far longer than he usually did, almost six hours. When he awoke, the doctor was gone, the quilt neatly folded, and the padd wiped.

Spock almost smiled. He knew neither of them would mention this night, but only because there wasn’t any need to.

When Spock returned to his quarters later after shift - or was it the next day? a week after that night? - he immediately noted that there was something in his room that hadn’t been there before. Namely, a padd on his desk. He fetched his tricorder and scanned the padd, which appeared to merely be a padd. He carefully picked it up, and skimmed the contents.

It was the last published crew manifest of the Intrepid as well as the complete, unclassified personnel files of each member of the crew. And one text file that merely said: Keep following the news from Vulcan. 

He flipped over the padd and scanned for the serial number with the tricorder. It was one of the eleven padds he kept for his routine use at his desk.

“Computer,” he said, “how many times have the door controls been activated in the past six hours? At what times were they activated?”

“The door controls have been activated two times in the past eight hours.” The computer then listed to the second when he had opened the door to leave his quarters at the beginning of beta shift, and when he had returned in the past few moments.

“Between the times when the doors were activated, were there any downloads from the computer console in these quarters?”

“Negative.”

“Computer, please list how many times the crew manifest of the Intrepid has been accessed since the loss of the Intrepid on the Enterprise?”

“Five thousand, four hundred, and twenty-one times.”

He spent a good fifteen minutes examining the console’s activity himself, and scanning for any clues on the padd. Nothing immediately presented itself as an explanation. He interrogated the computer about times the crew manifest or personnel records of the Intrepid had been accessed since the loss of the ship. The majority of the requests had come from the personnel officers as well as many from private quarters, the volume reflective, perhaps, of human morbid curiosity. 

He had to conclude that for the moment, he did not have an obvious suspect for a culprit; however, he did know that at first glance it appeared the culprit had the ability to access his quarters without immediate detection, which suggested some very humbling if not humiliating implications for his grasp on the ship’s computer systems.

There was nothing else to do but to settle in, and begin reviewing the padd, looking for some explanation.

He returned to the problem obsessively when he was off-duty for several days, almost a week, when it finally occurred to him. He almost ran to his quarters from the bridge the second he was relieved.

“Computer,” he began, when he was alone. “Calculate the rate of personnel transfer to the Intrepid relative to the VEG average over the past six months.”

“The rate of personnel transfer to the Intrepid was 254.08% of the average crew transfer rate in the VEG.”

He repeated the query in different ways, ruling in and out various statistical considerations. The overall result remained the same: two to three times as many Vulcans transferred to the Intrepid leading up to its five-year mission as any other Vulcan-dominant crew in the fleet. Then again, the initiative was new - crewing a Starfleet vessel with VEG officers, but…

He reviewed the personnel files again, making notes by hand and double-checking some of his vague memories of Vulcan political families. He found what he’d suspected.

Relative to the rest of the VEG, the rate of officers with seniority was four times the norm, most of whom had been reassigned to the Intrepid in recent months. In addition, many of the crew, senior officers or not, had ties to more traditionalist and isolationist families on Vulcan, who tacitly or covertly supported the Isolationist Movement.

When the Intrepid was destroyed, the most experienced and longest tenured members of the VEG had died. At the same time, the military base of the Vulcan Isolationist Movement had been effectively eradicated. Although the former was lamentable, the latter should have been not-unwelcome news. Spock studiously worked to not entertain active antipathy towards the logic extremists (he did not deny that such antipathy could take root in himself nor that these feelings, specifically, were valid), but he did oppose all they stood for and recognized a material threat to himself and his family that had obviously continued to the present, recent events being a dramatic example. He should be… gratified. Relieved.

 

***

 

Over the next few weeks, Spock remained glued to official Federation and Vulcan channels. 

Within a few days of his discoveries about the Intrepid’s crew manifest, the most salacious scandal in Vulcan’s recent history broke. T’Pol’s daughter T’Mir gave a widely disseminated interview in which she revealed that she and her brother Lorian were half-human. Her account was sparing and exact - with the logical purity of the classically feminine Vulcan manner - but the commentary afterward throughout the Federation ably took on the burden of “connecting the dots.” Countless writers and publications decried decades of prejudice, insisting that this story of integration and coming together was core to Starfleet’s earliest history. T’Mir mentioned him several times in her interview, which her commentators cited as her lifting him up as an example of bravery and progress, even though he had never met the woman. Strikingly, no one even mentioned the fact that her mother was half-Romulan and had recently been exiled - it was eerie, as though some sort of agreement were active among the press and political commentators. He received an alarming amount of requests for interviews, which he ignored until he could program a script to politely auto-decline.

The week following T’Mir’s interview, Vulcan experienced the greatest incident of civil unrest in centuries, or what humans likely would have called the most mind-bogglingly peaceful and nonviolent protest they’d ever seen. Millions of Vulcans draped in Federation colors marched through the streets of Shi’Kahr to the Council chambers, where all members of the VEG on-world marched to the head of the procession and resigned. 

The protesters argued that their numbers were proportional to the number needed for a referendum, and, bowing to the logic, the High Command admitted the leaders to the Council chambers. Soon after, the VEG was formally dissolved and turned over to Starfleet, with a small fraction reforming as a science fleet reporting both to the VSA and the Federation Science Council. Then, all other colonies under Vulcan administration were put on a five year timeline to transition to Federation administration. Finally, T’Pau accepted a seat on the Federation Council.

The last immediate changes that came were the most personal. Ambassador Sarek accepted a position as Federation Ambassador-at-Large, making a final shift from representing Vulcan to representing the Federation. Then, a week later, the Vulcan Science Academy announced a special partnership with Starfleet to streamline entrance to the Academy following, it seemed, the ad hoc curriculum and program that had been developed for Spock. The next day, he found an official invitation from Starfleet Academy to be a commencement speaker for an upcoming graduating class at the end of the five-year mission. As he could not find a logical reason to decline, he had to accept.

A few days later he received a ping from an encrypted, random subspace frequency, his first word from Sybok in months. The message just said: Watch the coverage of Sarek’s swearing in.

When he pulled up the Federation channel for Earth, he received a shock when he saw his father, dressed in his normal regalia, beside his mother who was dressed in an Earth-style three-piece suit for the first time since before he’d been born. There was a whirlwind of visits, including an image, which he found rather jarring, of his parents walking into his mother’s childhood synagogue on Grand Avenue in Oakland by the lake, and Sarek was wearing a yarmulke. It wasn’t that Sarek hadn’t ever gone to shul with them on the rare occasions Spock and his mother were both in a Terran milieu, but to have it documented and broadcast felt surreal. 

He found himself wishing Michael weren’t nine hundred years in the future and Sybok wasn’t running from the law precisely because he wanted both of them on a vid call to discuss this. 

And not only because this came out within days of Starfleet’s foremost historian being apprehended for violating the Prime Directive specifically to teach an alien world the “benefits” of Nazi ideology and ending up as a literal Führer. Not that this was made public, of course, but he suspected, if he looked into it, the curriculum at the Academy had been very swiftly revised. The impact on the crew of that horrific interlude, at least, had been profound. Even Spock could tell how miserably awkward everyone felt when Dr. Noel scrambled to lead an “interspecies sensitivity seminar” that had gotten derailed as soon it became clear the psychologist, having studied John Gill’s work herself, only had a shallow understanding of the problem and its impact. (“Don’t be mean to people who are different even though it’s natural to prefer your own kind,” was the overall theme.) 

He bore some responsibility for that, as he, Dr. Tola (an actual historian who had always hated John Gill), and, notably, Ensign Chekov ended up improvising a seminar on Soviet intellectual history and Marxist historical theory. Then, pretty much every alien and non-English speaking human onboard revealed to the humans raised with a Global English curriculum that the consensus in the Federation outside of United Earth was that Marx, Lenin, and Mao were the only social theorists anyone took seriously when trying to understand Terran history. Spock himself had brought up the fact that immediately after making first contact, the Vulcans had almost exclusively dealt with the Sixth International of the Socialist Bloc countries, considering it the most logical candidate for a world government. Uhura had added that most Terran words in Standard were, in fact, Global Chinese. Apparently, some of the American and European crew were under the impression that the socialist government of United Earth had organically arisen from western “liberal” values of “democracy” and “freedom” and “equality” and on the whole had a very vague understanding of how capitalism and ethnocentrism had figured in their own histories.

By the end of the session, Jim looked pale as a ghost, Dr. Noel was practically in tears, and quite a few of the human crew looked shell-shocked. Not all of them, though. Dr. McCoy, notably, had taken the paradigm shift in stride. When Jim asked if he’d known about all this, he’d merely said, “No, this was all news to me, but it’s not like I needed to be convinced that Nazis and capitalism are bad.”

The most immediate change onboard was that young, passionate and shy by turns Ensign Chekov issued a more open invitation for others to attend his weekly shabbes dinners. Jim, a previously non-practicing Jew, had been attending religiously, sometimes with McCoy in tow as a guest. Spock hadn’t yet, but he had blocked out the rec room with his own access codes for everyone’s use on Friday evenings, adjusted to match sunset on their adjusted Earth time zone.

But with the press coverage of Sarek’s and Amanda’s visit to Earth, it had all started feeling far more... pointed.

He found himself walking to sickbay before he’d figured out why, but decided it was likely he wanted to talk to Christine. He wasn’t exactly sure what kind of conversation he wanted to have, but felt sure she was quite good at it. She was resetting some sensors on a biobed near the door, and straightened to attention before Spock deliberately relaxed, trying to indicate this was a social call.

“What’s up Spock?”

“I was wondering if perhaps you would be available to spend some time together after your shift ends. I am in need of… someone to talk to.”

Her eyes widened. “And you didn’t go to the captain?”

He shifted, uncomfortable. “It is about family dynamics, and I am not sure the captain would find it…” He trailed off, not sure what he meant by that. That the captain wouldn’t be interested or the captain wouldn't know how to have a deep conversation about intergenerational conflict.

She nodded, sympathetic. “I was going over to Uhura’s after this, would you like to come?”

This was acceptable. Although he still did not think he had the sort of relationship where he could prevail upon Lieutenant Uhura for insight, she was certainly trustworthy and competent about personal matters if she were willing to entertain his problems.

“Hey, Leo,” Chapel called to McCoy, who was organizing files. “Do you mind if Spock comes with us to Uhura’s for our vent session? He’s had a day. Family stuff.”

Spock restrained a flinch, as McCoy looked startled. “Why, of course I wouldn’t mind,” the doctor said, recovering rapidly. Mercifully, he did not get a dig in at Spock’s expense.

Perhaps sensing Spock’s growing sense of unease, Chapel said, “It’s just the three of us. I’ll go comm Uhura.”

Spock nodded. He decided, on quick reflection, that he couldn’t think why he wouldn’t want McCoy involved. In fact, it bore some thought why he hadn’t sought the doctor out in the first place. McCoy actually knew Sarek and Amanda better than anyone else on the ship. Still it felt… vulnerable. Perhaps most vulnerable of all, Chapel assumed that the three of them were his friends and appeared to be correct.

Although Spock wasn’t exactly sure what a “vent session” entailed, the social practice did not seem too complicated. Required materials: wine, blankets and pillows on comfortable seating, and privacy. Apparent objective: performing emotional maintenance to better strengthen interpersonal bonds. On paper this seemed like something he would have little interest in, and McCoy did glance at him nervously a few times in the beginning, but he found the experience unexpectedly pleasant.

He enjoyed seeing McCoy like this, he realized. Relaxed and open, not defensive over his emotional expressivity. He liked the idea of McCoy curled up on Uhura’s rug, drinking wine, and chatting with the women about their and everyone else’s lives in this engaged, benign way. Although he’d long since filed away that the doctor did not naturally feel at ease with him when it came to personal matters - for which he could not objectively fault him - it hadn’t occurred to him that he couldn’t be like this with Jim either. However, McCoy did not seem chilled or silenced by his presence. None of them did. Curious.

Very quickly, the humans’ attention turned to his “family stuff,” which he dutifully reported, unsure what to leave in or leave out. When he finished the recital, he saw that he needn’t have worried that he was overreacting. The humans’ eyes were all huge.

“I don’t even know where to start,” said Chapel, sounding awed.

“I do,” said Uhura, “I need some visuals stat.”

The two women and McCoy gathered around a terminal where they all regarded decades-old photographs of T’Mir and Lorian in silence.

“Wow,” said Chapel.

“I didn’t even know Vulcans were allowed to have good haircuts,” said Uhura, zooming in on Lorian.

“He has a certain air about him,” said McCoy.

“You mean he’s stupid hot,” said Uhura.

“I mean sure,” said the doctor. Chapel nodded.

This then led them to looking up pictures of a young T’Pol, which sparked further nonsensical discussion of her "hotness." Spock was not entirely sure what T’Pol’s and her children’s sexual desirability signified in this conversation on the sea change of Vulcan’s political landscape and apparently his parents’ public approach to their marriage. However, as he was out of his element, he decided to “trust the process.”

“First off,” said Uhura, “who the hell did she have kids with? Did she like have a secret husband hidden at her ranch or something?”

The three humans contemplated this mystery.

“The only humans I would have thought she would get with were President Archer or that chief engineer of the Enterprise, Trip Tucker,” said Chapel thoughtfully. “And there’s no way T’Pol could have kept Archer as her secret husband and Tucker died at the end of their mission. Though there was that tactical officer, Malcolm Reed, who became her first officer when she got her own command. But he died right before Lorian was born. I suppose she could have had secret love children with Archer. No, I feel like that also would have come out once T’Mir came forward.”

Uhura and McCoy glanced at her.

“What?” Chapel folded her arms. “Like that wasn’t what we were all thinking about during the Federation Charter module of Starfleet History at the Academy.”

“I was not thinking about that,” offered Spock.

Now Chapel and Uhura glanced at each other.

“I was thinking about President Archer and General Shran, mostly,” said Uhura. “I assumed Malcolm Reed and Trip Tucker were secretly dating.” McCoy nodded. 

Spock shrugged. He hadn’t been thinking about that either, but it did seem more plausible than Minister T’Pol having secret love children with President Archer. He did not think it wise, of course, to disclose that he actually knew the real answer to this question.

“Ooh,” conceded Chapel. “Fair enough.”

“Okay, big picture,” said Uhura, who appeared to be chairing this portion of the vent session, “I feel like it’s kind of fucked up that Spock now has to be like the mixed-race poster boy when everyone tiptoed around his existence before. It’s like they can’t just be normal about Vulcans having kids with humans. Like, that’s wild that Lorian and T’Mir had to pass for Vulcan. Why didn’t Spock have to do that? What actually changed? Because it certainly hasn’t stopped people from being weird about Spock and his mom.”

Chapel looked thoughtful. “Is it a gender thing? Do Vulcans have a gender thing about intermarriage?”

“Clarify,” Spock requested.

“Historically when humans get disgusting about intermarriage,” said McCoy, “there tends to be a double-standard where women marrying an outsider is a bigger deal than men marrying an outsider, because it was implied that women were the property of men, so a wife from somewhere else was a ‘prize’ but men would consider a woman they didn’t even know who was part of their in-group to be under their jurisdiction.”

“Wow, Leo,” said Uhura, “I can’t believe you managed to say all that without explicitly mentioning white supremacy and settler colonialism.”

McCoy winced. “I probably shouldn’t just assume that’s implied,” he muttered. “Sorry.”

Someday, perhaps, Spock would cease to be appalled by new revelations about human barbarism. “No,” he began, stern, “there is not -" Then he stopped himself, and thought very hard. 

“There may be something to that,” he said, grudgingly. “It may be a different variation,” he said. 

He did some quick mental mental calculus of how much he could describe pon farr without describing pon farr. Namely, that although female Vulcans could experience pon farr, it was not on a regular cycle unless they were bonded to a man. It was responsive, and not obligatory. Males of the species were set in their seven year pattern.

“There is a very strong and very old cultural belief,” he said, finally, “that males are more dependent upon females, when it comes to pair-bonding. More motivated.”

“Please don’t tell me,” Uhura growled, “that Vulcans think women don’t enjoy sex.”

“It is not in reference to sexual desire or pleasure, per se,” he said, “rather it refers to the urge to create a relational dyad, the genetic foundation of a family unit.”

“So like the opposite of the stereotype that men refuse to settle down in some human cultures,” said Chapel.

“That sounds analogous, yes,” he said. “Vulcan women are renowned even off-world for their independence.”

“Fascinating,” said McCoy, but he looked pensive, not playful.

“Women are perceived to have greater power than men in Vulcan society,” he said, surprised this had never occurred to him, “even if the historical conditions have at times placed them materially in a disadvantaged position as a class.”

“Did Vulcans ever have a patriarchal phase?” McCoy looked engaged again, not lost in thought. “When they tried to disempower and devalue women to control them?”

“Not in a systematic way as in human history, no,” said Spock. “Vulcan civilization was not tied to agriculture in the same way humanity’s was, and did not develop laws and customs at the level of population until much later in their technological development. However, it was typical before the Awakening for men to kill each other over desirable mates, and the implication that women would… acquiesce to the resolution of such conflicts.” He of course could not mention the terminology of “property” in the traditional Vulcan wedding ceremony. As far as he knew it did not and never had any basis in any legal code.

“In fact,” said Spock, thinking if Vulcans had a hell he might be going there for saying this, “there is an extremely controversial alternative historical argument about the Time of Awakening that suggests Surak was essentially a mere scribe of more widespread efforts of wise Vulcan women to teach logic as a method of telepathic discipline for self-protection and the protection of children.” 

He did not mention that the controversial monograph in question had been written and published by Sybok from prison. Queering Sha-Ka-Ri had been, however, very thoroughly peer-reviewed and was widely cited. Outside Vulcan.

“Oh, that’s totally what happened,” said Uhura.

“Absolutely,” said McCoy.

Spock looked confused.

“We’re making an assumption,” said McCoy, “based on Earth history, where it’s been discovered time and time again that advances in civilization attributed to singular great men were actually the work of women as a group.”

“Ah,” he said. “I have no opinion on the theory, although the most recent contribution to the subject is well-argued. It is considered taboo, however, to question Surak’s centrality to the Awakening.”

“So,” said Chapel, “are you saying that a Vulcan woman taking a human mate would be seen as a rejection of Vulcan men? Like a superior kicking an inferior when they’re already down.”

“Perhaps,” said Spock, who frowned.

“By that logic,” said McCoy, “wouldn’t a human woman taking a Vulcan mate suggest that she, though human, could be his superior? Which threatens the very idea of Vulcan exceptionalism?”

They all sat in silence contemplating this.

“I know you have issues with your dad, Spock,” said Uhura, “but he might have been more radical than I thought.”

Indeed, thought Spock, who did not like this possibility at all.

“Is that why it’s weird?” Chapel looked as she did when she was about to crack a particularly difficult diagnosis. “That having the humanness of your mom be so publicly trotted out feels jarring because it didn’t seem, as a child, that she had that more prominent position in the family that a Vulcan woman would have had?”

Spock blinked rapidly. “Perhaps,” he said. 

“So it seems hypocritical,” said Uhura. “Leo, what do you think? What was it like living with the two of them?”

“I keep forgetting about that,” said Chapel.

Spock was in no danger of ever forgetting about that.

McCoy looked at him, a bit nervous, but then seemed to steel himself. “From my point of view,” he said, finally, “Lady Amanda certainly never seemed… deferential to Sarek, in private. However, I wouldn’t say Sarek treated her like a matriarch, who was leading the family. He has a very… uh… strong personality, though.”

Chapel and Uhura glanced at Spock. He wasn’t actually in a position to comment on the last twenty years of his parents’ marriage, but this didn’t seem inconsistent with his own more impressionistic memories of childhood and adolescence. He shrugged.

“I think,” said Chapel, “that you should ask your mom.”

 

***

 

Eventually, he did. He specified he was interested in a “social call” and she responded within 14.57 minutes.

“Spock!” His mother’s face lit up like a beacon, her smile wide in a way he couldn’t ever remember seeing as a child. “Let’s be social - I believe in us!” Her eyes were dancing, as though they were co-conspirators of some sort.

“I’m not sure what human or Vulcan bystanders would make of our socializing,” he said, and smiled slightly.

“That’s why they’re not invited. This is an exclusive event! What’s on your mind?”

She’d always done that. Only at the Academy had he realized it was more customary for humans to ask the more distressing alternative: “How are you?” When the question was “what’s on your mind?” he could always answer.

“Your recent public appearances with Sarek since he was sworn in as Federation Ambassador-at-Large.”

“Did you see the candid shot of me in the suit with Sarek on my arm? I think I looked rather dapper, even at my age.”

“Your sartorial choices seemed… quite satisfactory.”

“Oh,” she said, “you’re making me blush!” That was the thing about Amanda - she was being playful, but she was also, ever-so-slightly, blushing. A droll earnestness he suddenly realized was his own as well. 

“But I have to say,” she continued, “this is the only time I can remember you making a comment about my wardrobe choices in your entire life, so I’m thinking it’s on your mind for non-fashion-related reasons.”

“Affirmative,” Spock said, feeling something relaxing in his shoulders. He didn’t know why he had been so nervous to discuss this with her - what she had to say wasn’t predictably comfortable, but she’d always been easy to talk to. “I found myself experiencing… cognitive dissonance, to see you in Terran garb and to see Sarek appear more… accommodating to human customs in public. It has given me cause to reflect on Vulcan gender norms and how they applied to your and my father’s marriage. I wanted your perspective.”

“Wow,” she said, blinking in surprise. “That’s a good question, and I think I know what you mean. I’m just intrigued that this angle occurred to you, the gender and cultural implications.”

“To be transparent, I came to this line of thinking due to a session of ‘girl talk’ with human… friends.”

“With, like, wine included?”

“Yes.”

“And Uhura was there, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“Okay,” she glanced to the side, “give me a second to think and also because that’s adorable.”

Spock waited.

“I haven’t really thought about Vulcan gender norms, but for me,” she said, “what was significant about that trip was how public everything was. I feel like the actual shifts in our relationship came about a few years ago, though they’re still ongoing, of course.”

“What… shifts?”

“Well,” she said, “we both realized some things after… well, after the war. It was the only time I ever seriously considered a divorce.” After Michael died. After she hid me from my own father when I was wanted for murder.

Spock’s eyes widened slightly. Somehow this possibility had not occurred to him. A childish instinct, perhaps.

“I was angry with him, of course,” she said. “I think even you picked up on that.”

Spock nodded.

“But things only really fell apart when I got really caught up in a relationship with an older Vulcan woman.”

“You had an affair?”

Amanda tilted her head, curious. “Well, your father and I never had a monogamous relationship,” she said, matter-of-fact, “but I suppose you could say that. We had an under-discussed understanding that our other relationships and trysts couldn’t be prioritized over our own marriage. I started avoiding him, and spending more time with her. Boundaries were really difficult with T’Nura, as she was on our security team at the compound.”

T’Nura?  “Colonel T’Nura? In the VEG? Leo’s friend?”

“Oh,” she said, looking mildly interested, “have you met her?”

“I have,” he said, trying not to look thunderstruck.

“God, your face,” she said, and gave a rueful chuckle. “This is the first adult adult conversation we’ve had, isn’t it? She’s friends with Leo because Sarek and I assigned her as his and Joanna’s bodyguard - it had seemed inappropriate to keep her on my team since we were romantically involved. She actually moved with them to Cerberus once she rejoined the VEG. She and Sarek swear up and down they weren’t colluding to keep an eye on them, but I have my doubts.”

“So,” said Spock, still trying to desperately wrap his mind around many, many things about this conversation, “Sarek and T’Nura were… collegial?”

“I mean, they’re Vulcan,” she replied, “but yes, I’d say so. Oh,” she said, frowning, “to clarify, T’Nura wasn’t interested in, well, stealing me away from Sarek. She went into our relationship completely comfortable with the boundaries I had intended to keep, and was actually rather uncomfortable when I wanted to change them. I was uncomfortable too. It’s not like Sarek and I had arbitrary rules in how close we could get to other people, but I’d never felt inclined to really prioritize anyone but him.”

“But you did prioritize… T’Nura.”

“More so who I got to be with her, I think,” she said. “As I said, she wasn’t really interested in a serious relationship, so I was to some extent projecting. I was working through some complicated emotions about my marriage.”

“Who did you get to be with her?”

“Human,” she said.

Ah. Spock was finally beginning to see where this might be going.

“T’Nura’s older than your father,” she said, “but they’re from roughly the same generation. I’d lived on Vulcan for thirty years at that point, and I felt like I could get along with her so easily. She, also like your father, is more cosmopolitan and experienced with human behavior, and I didn’t have to really explain myself or justify anything I did. I really wasn’t reflecting on what it meant, but she broke things off and moved off-world, and so I was forced to really take a look at myself, and what I was doing. Plus, on the way out the door, Leo somehow got your father obsessed with couple’s therapy, so we had to work through the… junk.”

Spock had found himself leaning forward, slightly, genuinely curious.

“Have you ever been in love before, Spock?”

Captain Pike - Chris - flashed through his mind like lightning. “Yes,” he said. “Not in the context of a committed relationship, but yes.”

His mother, mercifully, accepted this tantalizing piece of information with impressive neutrality.

“I fell in love with your father on Earth. I was in my late twenties, and had really begun coming into my own. I’d gotten my PhD early, and was already well-established as a researcher, had grants from the Federation Science Council, then the VSA, everything. I was sexually experienced, well-traveled, sure of myself. Dr. Amanda Grayson. I found your father completely… fascinating . Even though he was so much older than me, there was an innocence to him that I found captivating. I’d had Vulcan colleagues and friends, even briefly had a Vulcan boyfriend at one point, but Sarek was so strange, not because he was an alien, but because he’d spent the past twenty years in a desert perfecting his telepathic skills. The last time he’d slept with someone was essentially before I was born. At the same time, he was and is the most erudite and insightful person I’ve ever known. He seemed so emotionally self-sufficient, so logical, and yet as a diplomat he could reach humans in a way no other Vulcan could. Maybe because he was - is - so logical - it made him curious when everyone else had become dismissive. He’s always been one of my favorite people to talk to.”

Amanda smiled, and it was soft and private, looking off into the distance. For the first time, it occurred to Spock that his mother actually liked his father. She found him appealing, attractive, and enjoyable to be around. That they were bonded was a fundamental truth of existence, but that she saw him as a person with foibles and gifts seemed somehow novel.

“I pursued him the way I did everything, single-mindedly and passionately. Then, we got married, and, over his concerns, we had you and relocated to Vulcan. Once we were there, though, I just… crumbled.”

“How so?”

“All of my knowledge of Vulcans came from interacting with them off-world. I’d always had the upper-hand, because I was in a place that fit with my Terran sensibilities. Now I was the alien, but also a willing exile from humanity, because suddenly having a psychic link with an Adept of Gol and a very precocious telepathic child meant that I didn’t really recognize my own mind. I had no frame of reference for my own experiences. Nothing human seemed to help me - only the Vulcan way made any sort of sense. All those traditions and customs are exquisitely tuned to keep telepaths sane and secure.”

How strange. Spock had the distant sense that if his mother had ever expressed this to him directly as a child or teen that he would have emotionally collapsed in shame and fear. Now he was merely looking at another person, a familiar stranger. What she was saying made sense. He had, after all, been there the entire time.

“I had a hard time owning up to it,” she said, “how hard a time I was having, because it meant admitting I’d been wrong. I hadn’t been ready, and I didn’t know who I was anymore. I couldn’t ask for help or accept the ways your father reached out to me and tried to support me, and I resented him for not helping me. There were many times I wished I could be less… human. And it hurt you, all of you.”

Michael remained unsaid between them, but always implied.

“I see,” Spock said. I guess?

“You know, I take it back, this all came to a head when I met Leo and Joanna,” she said. “Seeing how much pain he was in, how young he was, made me take my own issues more seriously. Your father even more so: in fact, he would no longer accept my deflections and hounded me about the impact the early years of our marriage had on me.”

“The impact of having an undisciplined telepathic child tied to you,” he mused, thinking of his and his mother’s “episodes” and of McCoy’s hesitation when naming his need to recover from “psionic injuries,” his “allergy.”

“Wait, what?”

“You had said you weren’t… ready to have me, that you’d made a mistake. Unless I misunderstood. And you said Dr. McCoy was in… pain.”

“Shit,” she said. “No, I just didn’t elaborate. It wasn’t a mistake to have you - or even if it was a mistake, and I could have been much better equipped to be a confidently human parent to a telepathic child if I’d waited another ten or fifteen years, you are unquestionably worth it. That’s not even a question. Not for me. Even if that’s selfish. And it’s not like Leo’s issues were due to his telepathic bond with his daughter.”

“They… were not?”

“No,” she said. “Both of them were in bad shape because of the way the bonds had broken when Jo’s other father died.”

“Dr. McCoy’s partner was a telepath? And they were… bonded?”

“Yes,” she said, and looked puzzled. “Of course he was. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”

Spock decided this was not the time to disabuse his mother of the notion that he and Dr. McCoy had been close friends since the beginning of the mission.

“Sarek would never give me details,” she mused, “but I got the impression Joss didn’t know what he was doing when he bonded with Leo, who was barely more than a kid, and left him and their daughter so… vulnerable, when he died. Sometimes I think Leo struggled so much with accepting help from Vulcan disciplines because it meant accepting that Joss had, well, fucked up. Or something like that: again, I was mostly kept out of the loop. I’ve never seen your father look so haunted, than after he’d work with Leo. It made me realize that the changes in my neurochemistry had impacted me more than I’d admitted, and paradoxically made me appreciate how much Sarek and Vulcan society had helped me.”

“Was it really so… jarring,” he began, feeling almost wistful for some reason, “for you to have a bondmate?”

“Hm,” she said. “I’m not sure ‘jarring’ is exactly the word I would use. It was just… Okay, so you know I’m slightly psi-positive, right?”

“I do,” he said.

“Melding and then bonding with your father was like discovering I had an extra sense and that the hints I had gotten before were part of a shared world, not just my own peculiarity. I always felt like such a weirdo. It was overwhelming, which isn’t good or bad. But in terms of the difficulties… Hm. Here’s a good example: when I moved to Vulcan I lost touch with all my human friends. I just ignored them for years. It took me a long time to realize why: I’d gotten so used to constantly sharing my thoughts and feelings so fully and immediately with your father, and then even more continuously with you, that I just forgot how to… talk about myself. And what’s the point of details and stories if you can just share everything at once? 

“Mostly using words to talk about ideas or factual information made perfect sense to me - it seems… illogical to use imprecise language and indirect clues to communicate an inner experience when a superior psychic intimacy is possible. Maybe even cheapens it, to talk about feelings like you’d talk about just any other thing. But I’m not Vulcan, and human forms of expression and storytelling are extremely important. I also can’t initiate that intimacy with people: I’m dependent on telepaths, so isolating myself from other humans wasn’t healthy. I got my head out of my ass eventually and tried to make it up to my old friends, which more or less worked, but I still have a reputation of being sort of mysterious now. Possibly, I’ve maybe overdone it, meeting new people, to compensate. Actually, have I shocked you quite a bit during this call?”

“I do not experience shock in the way you’re saying, but yes, I have found many pieces of information you’ve shared surprising.”

“See, that’s a change since I’ve had a bondmate. I had a tendency to overshare when I was younger.”

“I… see,” he said, shoving the implications about other… individuals into a different part of his mind for further, later analysis.

“Anyway, noticing all those things made me freak out, and I distracted myself with T’Nura, but that also made me realize that even if I had struggled and lost myself for a while, I’d grown into who I am now, and my hesitation and deference to Sarek’s preferences was just a pointless habit. We’ve been working on our reactions to each other now that I’m more openly emotional and individualistic and that, well, I actually need your father to talk about his feelings sometimes.”

“And father has been… amenable to that?”

“Eager, even,” she said. “I’ve felt really humbled. That’s the amazing thing about marriage: we can be at our best and worst and still show up for one another decades later. He’s my husband, and he loves me and wants me to be happy - or whatever the Vulcan equivalent of that would be. And he really seems to flourish, when I go to the trouble of supporting him on his own terms, too. He has even more trouble asking for help than I do. For example,” she said, perking up, “he finally let me spend pon farr with him! We’ve been married for almost forty years. He had a really clever solution -”

His mother seemed oblivious to how wretchedly awkward this was to contemplate, and in light of the extremely recent news that his parents’ relationship had never been monogamous, he absolutely and under no circumstances wanted any further details.

“I understand,” he said firmly. “I’m sure his solution was… more efficient.”

Amanda snorted and seemed to be about to say more before she finally caught the hint of horror tightening his jaw.

“Oops, and we’ve reached the limit of what you can talk about with your mother,” she said, and laughed, merry and uninhibited. “Anyway, does that make our grand outing on Earth seem less strange in context?”

In the sense that you have replaced that incongruity with a more deeply weird revelation about our family dynamics and the formation of my entire adult personality. 

“Affirmative,” he said.

“Yay! I think we’ve done a very good job of socializing.” She sounded very smug.

“Indeed,” he said, not sure what else to say.

 

***

 

Later, he did think about McCoy. Actually he couldn’t stop. There was something so tantalizing about these hints about the man’s inner life and personal history, how he might, all along, have had a unique ability to understand him despite seeming so inimical at the start. And, also, that Spock himself might be able to provide a deeper empathy than others if the doctor were to confide in him. He started having a series of dreams wherein he ended up mind-melding with McCoy. They were almost all highly erotic. 

He was torn about them. He probably would have been disquieted by the sexual content in other circumstances considering the stakes of that interest being genuine, but he was more stuck on the idea that he wanted to enter McCoy’s mind, when he had reason to believe the doctor would find such an offer particularly unwelcome from him. This… desire for the man didn’t make a great deal of sense. In some ways, also, it seemed just a bit too convenient. An attractive human man who was sexually experienced with telepaths, with Vulcans and knew his own parents, was even a Vulcan citizen? He hadn’t considered his earlier suspicion that McCoy might be connected with something clandestine and sordid, but he had recently gotten confirmation that some sort of operative was onboard the Enterprise.

After one particularly ruminative evening, he found himself in Jim’s quarters, asking for advice. 

“So let me get this straight,” said Jim. “You’re saying that you’ve found yourself behaving in uncharacteristic ways with Dr. McCoy, and are wondering if you’re being manipulated by him to act that way. And that the purpose of the manipulation is to butter you up as an intelligence asset, because Dr. McCoy has implied he thinks it’s possible that Starfleet still has some kind of black ops. Essentially, you think Bones is a honeypot.”

Ah, yes, “honeypot,” that was the term. “I do not think this, I am merely sharing a suspicion and asking for your insight.”

Jim looked skeptical. “Yeah, Bones is not a honeypot.”

“I understand you have a strong sense of his character, Jim -”

“Oh, I do, but this is my professional opinion.”

“Professional?”

“Yeah, as a honeypot.”

“Captain?”

Jim raised an eyebrow. “I came up through Security, Mr. Spock. Security officers have mandatory training and reporting duties with Starfleet Intelligence, and we’re a big feeder for their rank-and-file. And, you know, for the other agency. Do you think it’s normal that every young woman I meet on a dicey away mission suddenly gets attached and can be convinced to share information or sabotage our adversaries?”

“I have noticed that your appeal to women is… pronounced, captain.”

Jim sighed. “Don’t get me wrong, I pull like crazy, but if that’s all it was, I’d just be getting laid, not getting people to save our asses. I do specialize in straight women, though. I scored very high on assessments as an ensign - I have a gift, apparently, despite clearly being a twink. Remember that one time I actually sexually confused a robot who wasn’t programmed to love?” He paused. “You didn’t really know it was an act? I don’t actually get off on bamboozling gullible, young women, and I can count on one hand the times I actually had to sleep with them.”

“I… I see,” said Spock.

“Anyway, I don’t think Bones is a honeypot because if someone were going to honeypot you, they’d be a calm and collected nerd who miraculously respected all your opinions and suggestions. The last thing they’d do is try to get a rise out of you or aggravate your impulses to, uh, poke them back. You know, like chemistry? Have you associate them with losing control? General brattiness? That just makes you freak out and run away. No offense. As to the black ops thing, a lot of veterans of the Klingon War have a complex about that. I don’t know if Starfleet Intelligence still has some sort of secret branch like Section 31, but as a military man it wouldn’t shock me if it did. I know we’re not supposed to think of ourselves as a military, and I hope a hundred years from now Starfleet officers will drink the Kool Aid without a chip on their shoulders, but I’m not naive.”

“I see,” said Spock. “I am truly grateful for your insight.”

They were silent for a moment.

“Anything else on your mind, Spock?”

“A new consideration has occurred to me,” he admitted. 

“Go for it.”

“These skills that you have, to influence the actions of one’s… suitors in high-risk situations, can they be taught?”

“Are you asking me if I can teach you how to be a honeypot? Because, my friend, you absolutely have what it takes, and your whole deal is actually complementary to mine. Please tell me that’s what you’re asking.”

“Considering the amount of annoyance unsolicited interest has caused me on away missions, it seems logical to improve my ability to use that interest to the mission’s advantage.”

Yes,” said Jim, his eyes closing, in an attitude of prayer, and maybe also muttering something that sounded suspiciously like “bi bros forever.”

“Also, Jim,” he said, “I believe I should have an office.”



***



He did what he could to put the matter to rest. The espionage matter, that is. He still didn’t know how or why he seemed drawn to McCoy, but there was no rush. Obviously, he had no intention of acting on whatever “feelings” had developed - they were merely an occasion for self-reflection and the perfection of his emotional discipline. The reason, the principle, would reveal itself in time. His personal interest in McCoy did not require his attention or energy.

He continued to believe this, and to benefit from a relatively productive season in the lab, until the moment after the M-5 debacle when, having left the bridge together, McCoy pulled him aside, tucking them into a corner by a ladder into the Jeffries tubes. Spock modulated his breathing, keeping it steady.

“You need to go to sickbay,” McCoy whispered. “Between 1215 and 1235. There’s only one med tech on duty then. Inject Dr. Daystrom with this hypospray, and then inject him with this sedative again when you leave.” The doctor pressed both doses, cold in their metal casings, into his hands.

“Doctor?” 

Spock’s continued efforts in breath control were now for a completely different reason.

“When I got him to sickbay he started saying - well, he started saying things I don’t think anyone should know about, and certainly not me. He - Spock, he was out of the public eye for twenty-five years. I spun some psychobabble for Jim about why he barely published, but surely you can see -” McCoy huffed, looking deeply frustrated. “I sedated him, but it’s safe to wake him.”

“You sedated a patient without medical justification?”

“I sedated him,” McCoy hissed, “because I want him to make it in one piece to the rehabilitation center and not disappear forever the minute he leaves this ship. And that goes double for any of our people who overhear the wrong thing.”

“I see,” said Spock. “Why do you want me to speak with him?”

“Because it’s about the ship’s computers, I think, and if anyone should hear what he’s saying, it’s you. If you want. I mean, you don’t have to.”

Spock knew he would do so anyway. After a day like today, when the visiting Dr. Daystrom and his M-5 had usurped Spock’s own familiar computer systems and almost gotten all of them killed in a misguided effort to prove to the brass they could automate Starfleet vessels via shipboard AI, he felt a measure of personal risk warranted. He owed it to the computers.

Dr. Daystrom’s dignity had returned in sleep, the genius at rest. He woke him anyway, once the sickbay cleared out. The man’s eyes snapped open, rolling about wildly, as he opened and closed his mouth like a fish drowning in air. Then he seemed to shake himself.

“Good, good,” he muttered. “I’m sorry I did not - Dr. Spock, I’m sorry I was so preoccupied and did not speak with you about your recent paper on the Nomad probe. I’m one of his peer reviewers. Don’t tell Dr. Spock I said that; he’s not supposed to know.”

Spock decided to simply nod. How odd to be addressed by his academic rank - the fact that he had two PhDs rarely came up in his day-to-day life.

“They wouldn’t leave me alone,” he said, and tried to grasp his head, despite his restraints. “I want you to understand that. I kept telling them it simply could not be done. We don’t have the hardware to run the computations anywhere, let alone the nanocircuitry to place onboard something as small as a starship. These are calculations on a quantum level, multiversal, in time and space. The mass and drag on fuel supplies for the computers alone… I thought maybe if I went a different direction, a generalized artificial intelligence, an AI that could become sentient, that might begin to approach the problem. A non-sentient creature of the vacuum can navigate the mycelial network, after all. Something alive. But they kept saying no. Then they said yes. There’d been some sort of change in leadership. They said if this worked, I could see my son again. I could try. He never forgave me - his mother - the Klingons - the war. I meant it, that the M-5 was designed to save lives, not take them.”

Spock slowly stood up to his full height, now miserably grateful for the doctor’s wisdom in sedating Dr. Daystrom. McCoy hadn’t exaggerated. No one but him should hear this, and he would be better off if he sedated the man and left immediately.

“Go on, doctor,” he said, softly, curling back down, keeping the conversation between the two of them.

“They didn’t want me to find out, but I did. I suspected, obviously. I’d guessed it almost completely. They didn’t want me to work on Control because Control already was sentient. I just didn’t guess time travel. I assumed it was some sort of Iconian technology or something even more alien. But I knew. Why else would they have had me program the backdoor in the fleet’s operating systems?”

“What backdoor?”

Dr. Daystrom shook his head, eyes wide with fear. 

“Let me rephrase,” Spock said, keeping his tone soothing. “You were asked - ” by Section 31, by their plants in the admiralty - “to program some sort of backdoor into the fleet’s operating systems, all the ship’s computers upgraded since the 2240s. Then you were asked to develop a computer powerful enough to calculate jumps in time and space across a multiverse that could fit on a starship. You suggested artificial intelligence, and were blocked. Then, I speculate, about a year or so after the Klingon War, you were allowed to develop the M-5, to experiment with sentient AI again. Is that more or less correct?”

Daystrom nodded, slowly, looking relieved.

“You were right to tell me this,” he continued, although he was quite uncertain this was true, “but you must not speak of this again. Not until after your rehabilitation, and I doubt you’ll find it wise to disclose then. That is how you will be able to see your son again. Do you understand?”

The great scientist, with tears welling in his eyes, nodded again, and shuddered. “I hope to God you’re right, Dr. Spock, but I have little hope there will be much left of me if they do let me go. Will you tell my son something for me?”

Spock was completely unsure whether he would or not.

“Yes,” he said, anyway.

“Tell him to look over the manuscript on robotics I was going to submit to my publishers. I was obsessed with cognition, sentience, and I lost sight of the fact that a thing that thinks also has a brain and a place to keep it. How can a humanoid mind reason ethically about humanoid lives if its body is the size and scope of a ship? The nanocircuitry needed is currently impossible, but it’s the only way forward.”

Spock blinked. “Fascinating,” he said. “I will tell him, Dr. Daystrom. I am going to sedate you now.”

Daystrom nodded and closed his eyes, straining towards an oblivion that only came with the chemical hiss of the hypo.

He made a mental note to also suggest Richard Daystrom, Jr. check in on Harry Mudd’s android planet for good measure as well. He hadn’t learned much, in the end. That Section 31 and the admiralty had been trying to automate the Discovery’s navigation had always been explicit. That the future version of Control had been active as early as the 2240s had always been a possibility. 

He was a scientist, and a computer scientist at that. He had never wished to hinder the development of a sentient AI in the abstract, merely the specific version that would annihilate all other thinking life forms. He would have to see if he could find this “backdoor,” but even then, the matter was not conclusively urgent, merely extremely unnerving. Control had ordered this addition to the fleet’s operating systems decades ago, and, after all, Control no longer existed.

Notes:

I don’t know if I’m pushing it with the “Bitch don’t kill my vibe” reference, but I feel like if I have to believe everyone in the twenty-fourth century is familiar with Frank Sinatra’s catalog, they can know about Kendrick Lamar.

The idea that Kirk's favorite books are the Aubrey and Maturin ones came from a Spones fic called "Surgeon's Mate," but it seemed so obviously true I borrowed it.

I debated cutting my summary of Spock’s take on “Trials and Tibble-ations” because it seems unfair to tease that the DS9 crew offscreen did end up blowing their cover and not showing it, but I might write a timestamp about it someday and maybe work it into the next story.

I actually had sketched out that whole scene with Uhura and Spock training before I remembered that parallel scene in Discovery season 2. Also, again, I’m really not going to throw Kelvin Spock under the bus when we get to AOS, but it kinda is my headcanon that Spock Prime is super creeped out by the fact that he’s dating Uhura and started doing so when he was her professor at the Academy. That’s on Kurtzman et al for thinking that was cute and not sketchy as hell.

So my idea of a Breen-Romulan relationship is entirely based on that one Tal Shiar operative in DS9 repeating a “Romulan saying” to “never trust a Breen.” And clearly the Cardassians and the Romulans have some kind of… thing, if Garak is going undercover on Romulus and the Obsidian Order and the Tal Shiar are randomly in cahoots.

By the way, it’s super unclear whether the Romulans (or the Klingons) have territory in the Alpha Quadrant. Most maps onscreen show them solely in the Beta Quadrant. Also, by TNG the Federation is in split between the Alpha and Beta Quadrants but in TOS it’s mainly still in the Beta Quadrant. I feel fine giving the Romulans a little foothold in the Alpha Quadrant in the 2260s. I picked an "empty" area that occurs on most maps. Also, keep in mind that the Romulans suffered a major retreat in the Tomed Incident and the Treaty of Algeron in the 2310s and hadn’t been heard from again for fifty years until the TNG era. To my thinking, there has to be something they were made to step down from by the Federation, and getting out of the Alpha Quadrant in exchange for the cloaking device ban seems reasonable.

All of the dialogue in "The Immunity Syndrome" section is from the episode!

Okay, for months I’ve been so frustrated trying to track down what on Earth McCoy is referring to when he says “suffer the death of thy neighbor, eh, Spock?” Like the closest reference I get is biblical (Leviticus 19:17). What does McCoy even mean????? If anyone knows what this allusion is, please, please tell me.

Um, I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent scratching my head over the political economy of Star Trek, particularly between the Federation and other states. One of my least favorite things about Star Trek is how all the “enemy aliens” are just out to get the Federation… because… reasons?, and the actual material stakes of the conflicts are super unclear. (Except actually in terms of the Cardassians, which is another reason DS9 is so interesting.)

I ended up cutting a more detailed take on "Patterns of Force" due to time and how it's not exactly on-topic for this fic. I also left vague whether the USSR exists in Star Trek. (I'm inclined to say yes.) Also, I’ve decided it’s most likely that United Earth in Star Trek is socialist, but not communist, if that makes sense. That is, in terms of government and ownership of resources to make things (that is, capital), capitalist enterprises are subordinated to the wellbeing of Earth’s population as a whole.

Um, how serious am I about the idea that Kirk teaches Spock how to be a honeypot? Not at all. How serious am I about the idea that Kirk has intelligence training and/or at least is deliberately honeypotting the girl of the week? SERIOUS AS THE GRAVE. This is my unshakeable headcanon, you cannot convince me otherwise.

Richard Daystrom is in the top of my fucking list for a SNW cameo, and I kind of can’t believe it didn’t happen on Discovery. Even in the 1960s a black man was the genius who designed all the computers in the fleet! How did this not come up during the Control fiasco?!

The idea that Control is built into the fleet is an idea from David Mack. I don’t think it was directly cited in season 2 of Discovery, but is a reasonable explanation for what we see onscreen.

According to TNG (I think), Dr. Noonian Soong was friends with Richard Daystrom’s son and got a grant to develop the positronic brain from him, and he was generally a Daystrom fanboy.

Like if you too have ever (or would) deleted from your brain that the Enterprise got possessed by Jack the Ripper; comment if you think Spock should go to girl's night more often.

Chapter 12: Backdoor Pilot (E)

Summary:

Spock remembers the first time he slept with Dr. Leonard McCoy, more or less. A lot was going on at the time.

Notes:

Omg I am so sorry I got stuck on this foreverrrrrrrrrrrr. As I said in the last chapter, I'm changing the title to a reference to "the Argonauts" (both the Maggie Nelson book and the source quote in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes).

We're more than halfway through the plot at this point, but no guarantees on uhhhhhh wordcount.

Content Notes:

Explicit sexual content, references to a trans person's genitalia, arguably telepathic child abuse mentioned, minor canon character death, a lot of plot.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

[2268, 1968; Neutral Zone, Alpha and Beta Quadrants; USS Enterprise]


Eyes, ice gray-blue, beneath heavy blonde brows. Hypnosis has never been effective on Vulcans. But the eyes are mesmerizing.

“Now that I have your consent, I’m going to tell you what will happen. If all goes well, you won’t remember most of this conversation, but I can’t account for all the unique features of your hybrid neurochemistry. So if at some point you do remember this occurring, I want you to know that I told you exactly what would happen.”

He had. The senior supervisor for the “Aegis,” Gary Seven, had said, before initiating - what is this, a mind-meld? - that he needed Spock to deliver a message and that he might experience side effects.

Commander Spock, sir? Is it… is it really you? And what is that? Like a siren or beacon that can think, very far away, but not like a person. Coming closer.

“Yes, I did state what would happen before entering your mind, and I’m saying it again now. There is nothing inconsistent. The gap in your memory will be approximately three minutes and seventeen seconds. Your mind won’t want to dwell on it. It will throw up distractions. Fortunately, this is an eventful time in your life. It will feel natural.”

Sir? I’m starting to think it is you… I hear you now when I’m awake. What’s wrong? - I don’t understand you -

“There are very few things you may remember, either way. First, you are just the messenger. There is nothing for you to do about this information. The fate of billions of souls depends on it.”

You seem upset. Very upset. And… and scared. He’s starting to notice I’ve been off, you know how he is, and…

“Second -”

That’s it. I don’t care what he says, I’m coming to you. I know I can, that - that - they said I could. Why did - okay, no, not the time. I’ll be there soon - you sound like you’re in trouble! 

No. No. No. No. No. No.

 

***

 

Spock wrapped his hands around the metal bars, tightened and angled his grip in a minutely novel way, and shook the bars of their cell again. Looking for a weakness.

“Angry, Mr. Spock? Or frustrated, perhaps?”

Spock did not look at his cellmate, who was perched on a stack of dusty bedrolls at the back of the cell.

“Such emotions are foreign to me, doctor. I’m merely testing the strength of the door.” He readjusted his grip and shook again.

“For the fifteenth time,” said McCoy. Spock, despite his brave words, felt a distinctly conscious flash of irritation stripe across his mind, down into his fists. Obviously each of those fifteen times was slightly different… He shook the bars again. Also, it was the seventeenth time.

“Spock.”

Spock’s hands moved across the bars, and he crouched down, testing the metal and concrete of the entrance, refusing to brace himself for more… more…  He tried not to remember what was fresh in his mind, the adrenaline and the rage and the deep-down fear he had barely begun to sublimate into finding a way out of their current predicament. McCoy prone in the dust of the staged arena, a man on this bizarre world dressed in a costume-shop version of a Roman gladiator’s kit striking with lethal intent at his friend’s flimsy shield. Jim staring on in horror. And he had… he had...

Spock had put an end to the situation, both of their attackers passed out cold, within seconds, getting them thrown back into the cell, a near miss with summary execution. That hadn’t been the plan. Not that there’d been a plan. If there had been a plan, it would have made more sense than an instinctive refusal to allow his… one of his men to be harmed. He couldn’t even call the instinct human. He knew very well how it was also Vulcan enough.

“Spock! I know we’ve had our disagreements,” McCoy continued. He was closer. He was right beside him. Spock refused to look at him directly. “Maybe they’re jokes. I don’t know. As Jim says, we’re not often sure ourselves sometimes, but what I’m trying to say is -”

“Doctor,” he ground out, testing the bars again, then facing his interlocutor, “I am seeking a means of escape. Will you please be brief?”

“Well, what I’m trying to say is you saved my life in the arena.”

Spock was caught off-guard. They were in a cell; they were on an away mission. Spock was half-Vulcan. James Tiberius Kirk was captain of the Enterprise. He had saved Dr. McCoy’s life in the arena. These were all factual statements. Why was McCoy looking at him like that?

His eyebrows raised and he blinked. “Yes, that’s quite true.”

The shy, perhaps tender affection, but also the composed benevolence of the psychologist, superior in his personal insight, slipped off McCoy’s face, and he tensed in anger, and he snarled, “I'm trying to thank you - you pointed-eared… hobgoblin!”

Spock felt something snap, somewhere in the middle of his body, and knew he was, all of a sudden, very, very angry. His tone was even, though, the sarcasm merely apparent, not blatant. “Oh, yes. You humans have that emotional need to express gratitude. ‘You’re welcome,’ I believe is the correct response.”

Something faltered in McCoy’s expression before snapping back into his keen, probing glare of disbelief. As though he had just realized something.

Spock shuffled past him, to the opposite side of the door, desperately trying the bars, trying to make this… anger go somewhere useful. It was confusing, the anger, as though his emotions had run past his reasoning, waiting for it to catch up.

“However, doctor, you must remember I am entirely motivated by logic,” he said, his voice colder now, forbidding. “The loss of our ship’s surgeon, whatever I think of his skill, would mean a reduction in the efficiency of the Enterprise and therefore -”

The doctor’s hand was firm, deliberate, warm, but across his psi-points it felt like a brand as he shoved Spock away from the bars, pinning him to the concrete wall. Spock had the wild thought - I wonder what he will do with me, now that he’s caught me - before reviewing contradictory information. Namely, that under very few conditions could the doctor actually pin him anywhere, and that McCoy’s gesture was more expressive than dominating. A demand to be heard. He belatedly realized that the shock to his telepathic senses was not projection but rather its lack. The doctor was shielding, and very loudly. He was very much feeling something.

“Do you know why you’re not afraid to die, Spock? You’re more afraid of living,” McCoy half-hissed, hoarse with restraint. “Each day you stay alive is just one more day you might slip and let your human half peek out.”

Spock dropped his gaze to the doctor’s arm, extended, the heel of his hand pressing, still. He wondered if he’d missed something, some unvoiced part of the conversation. He turned away from the doctor’s hand, which wasn’t holding him still at all, and wrapped his fists around the bars again. They were both kneeling on the dusty floor of the cell.

“That’s it, isn’t it? Insecurity.”

Spock stared at nothing. The oppressive opacity of the doctor’s strong emotions, whatever they were, should have attenuated when they broke contact, but he could have sworn he felt the doctor smile, for whatever nonsensical reason.

“Why, you wouldn’t know what to do with a genuine, warm, decent feeling.”

Spock rubbed his thumbs up and down the bars above his fists. He felt his face pull back into shock, a horrifying soft look, even if the doctor couldn’t see him. For once he wished he could summon up his feelings to the top of his mind, because he didn’t know, precisely, what they were.

He turned back slowly, and fixed McCoy with a steady gaze, saying, with a trace of pleading, “Really, doctor?”

McCoy’s eyes dropped, and he gave a wry half-smile, all anger gone. “I know,” he said. “I’m worried about Jim, too.”

He turned back slowly to the bars, and gripped them tighter. Jim? McCoy was worried about Jim? Spock wasn’t worried about Jim. Worry was illogical, and besides, Jim still had leverage - their captors still (mistakenly) hoping to coerce him to order down the crew of Enterprise to become gladiators and slaves -, and he and the doctor were the only likely leverage the pseudo-Romans could utilize, and even then Jim was a disciplined Starfleet officer. It was highly unlikely the captain was in immediate danger.

He gripped the bars even tighter. At some remove he could even detect a hint of pain in his seizing hands.

Then he turned back to the doctor and kissed him.

It was a clumsy thing, his mouth coming down hard and off-kilter to the doctor’s. He corrected the issue, seizing his face with his hands and angling the man up to him, and kissed him again. He felt the mental flinch under the doctor’s skin and instinctively moved his hands away from the doctor’s psi-points, one settling at the nape of his neck, the other tugging at his hair. He had the time to make the necessary adjustments, because, he belatedly realized, after the first shock of a kiss, Dr. McCoy had been kissing him back quite enthusiastically.

In fact, his tongue was in the doctor’s mouth, which was warm and wet and sour in a pleasant way. He believed the doctor had opened to him first, he’d have to meditate on the matter - Oh hell - this thread of thought was lost in - the body his hands were touching, the man in his arms, buzzing with surprise - pleasure - apprehension - hunger - fury - desire - wanting, wanting -

The kiss broke, each of them gasping for air, Spock couldn’t tell how. They stared at each other, McCoy panting and red-faced and now in his lap, looking wild. Then, as though a flip switched, the doctor scrambled off him and bolted back a few feet. Spock, for his part, had gone as still as the rock face of Mount Kolinahr.

What the hell did I just do? 

“I must apologize, doctor,” Spock said at last, holding himself rigid. “My behavior is entirely inappropriate. I do not know what has come over me.”

McCoy looked dazed, slightly dreamy, as though somewhere else. But where? “I was upset,” he said, oddly contemplative in his flushed-pink and swollen-lipped state, “and I insulted you. I should have known better.”

Spock frowned. “Doctor, I can assure you your puerile commentary on my physiological differences has never inspired amorous sentiments. I do not fight the urge to… kiss you whenever you call me ‘hobgoblin.’ Which is a far weaker insult than the typical satanic comparisons the crew tend to make - a friendly household spirit? Offense doesn’t make sense.”

“I’ve never called you ‘hobgoblin’ before,” McCoy just said, still absent, his fingers tracing over his own lips, more exploratory than clinical. “And that’s also not what I’m talking about. Vulcans famously do not have a version of ‘thank you.’ The only similar forms are a grave insult - or whatever it is Vulcans call being offended. But it’s so contrary to my instincts, I keep forgetting.”

Oh. Right. His analytical capacity had finally caught up with his fading anger. His mother’s explanation for gratitude had been relatively straightforward: humans don’t assume cooperation will be willingly given and even when it would be expected, it was a gesture of politeness to engage in a social ritual that suggested it was not, to acknowledge the other person’s separateness and autonomy. Classical Vulcan culture had no translation for either concept. For the latter, to indicate that the other party’s fulfillment of obligation was in doubt suggests distrust and a low opinion of the other’s skill. As to the former, it was either logical to cooperate and aid someone or it was not. Individual willingness based on personal factors coming into the equation would be evidence of a shameful lack of discipline. 

Paradoxically, this was even truer among those with close bonds. Polluting the distinction between an intimate attachment and a relationship of “logical obligation” (the closest translation his parents had worked out) was appalling. It indicated a lack of respect for the one held dear and a lack of effort taken to protect them. If one’s logic was dictated by devotion or preference, how could it be counted upon under duress when faced with implacable conditions that had no concern for one’s… feelings? This distinction was also legal: even kolinahru, who had all familial and otherwise civil bonds annulled, were still permitted to name those to whom they had a logical obligation, which might lead to leaving Mount Kolinahr in order to render aid. Too large a list might lead to the adepts counseling an acolyte away from the Kolinahr, but to have no one on it at all was a rather bleak indictment of that particular Vulcan’s service to society.

In short, the doctor’s gratitude suggested there was a universe in which Spock wouldn’t have tried to save his life. Where he wouldn’t have recognized his logical obligation as a superior officer to those under his command. Furthermore, the idea that his actions stemmed from their personal relationship was even more damning. Saving the life of someone you cherished was the definition of the least one could do, hardly worthy of “thanks.” If I really did care about you, I wouldn’t show you by saving your life - I’d show you in a more obvious, unequivocal way.

Which he supposed he just had.

He glanced up from his hands, and McCoy was watching him. “You were surprised,” he said. “I could sense it.”

“That you kissed me? Well, yeah,” McCoy replied. “I mean… it’s certainly an explanation for some of the… tension between us.”

“You kissed me back.” Illogical to state the obvious, but he had to say it.

“I did,” said the doctor. “That didn’t surprise me.”

Spock quirked an eyebrow. “I did not know you harbored such a persistent attraction to me that acting on it should seem unremarkable, doctor.”

McCoy rolled his eyes. “Obviously, it’s not something I think about on a daily basis, but, you know, I have eyes. I’d heard you were handsome, but then I met you, and I filed away ‘huh, he’s sexy too’ along with a hell of a lot of other impressions. It’s important to be upfront with yourself, especially when you take care of bodies all day. And I’m a pretty physical guy, even if I’m no Jim.”

Spock blinked. What a matter-of-fact statement. The doctor had immediately noted his attraction to Spock, had been conscious of it the entire time they’d been onboard? He hadn’t even fully articulated his attraction to the doctor before he was kissing him. Actually, he still hadn’t.

At a loss, he stalled. “Yes, you have a reputation for indulging your… sensuality.”

“Right,” said McCoy, his voice flat now. Spock felt a flicker of concern. The doctor had appeared to take offense, even though it had not been intended. But instead of flaring up at him, thus illuminating the source of irritation, the man just shut down. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

“Worry, doctor?”

“I’m not going to make a fuss, or nothing. I know you’ll be fine going back to normal, but, as you’ve said, this ain’t my first rodeo. Don’t give it a second thought.”

Spock was quite sure he had said nothing whatsoever about “rodeos,” but at that point they were interrupted by the guards bringing them meager but palatable rations: bread, cheese, and flagons of clear water. 

He needed to meditate. He needed to understand what had just happened. He needed to know why the doctor’s swift assurance that he could “go back to normal” prompted such an empty, disorienting feeling. But he couldn’t. The doctor was now pretending to sleep, implicitly leaving the first watch to him.

In the meantime, he could recognize a part of the yawning cavern of unknown intensity that stretched out before his mind. The doctor had been right. He didn’t know what to do with a “genuine, warm, decent” feeling. His feelings were inchoate, molten, and not remotely decent at all.

 

***

 

“Before I can consider your request, supervisor,” Spock had said before consenting to the supervisor’s request to carry a message, “I must ask for further clarification about your motives.”

Shortly after the business with rockets and nukes and orbital satellites, Spock was once again standing in Supervisor Gary Seven’s office in 1968, pulled aside for a chat while Jim and (presumably) the supervisor’s assistant, Roberta, chattered at each other in mutual bewilderment.

“You are still wondering if I am human,” Gary Seven replied. “It depends on your point of view. In your time frame, I do not believe I would make the cut.”

“Your… superiors’ mysterious identities do not inspire trust,” said Spock. “Particularly considering I already know that there are temporal operatives in the future who seem to represent the Federation, which you do not. Correct?”

“I do not work for the Federation,” he confirmed. “However, as far as the temporal defense forces of your people’s descendants concern themselves with historical integrity, we are harmoniously aligned. In general, this has been the case. In practice we pursue similar goals, through different methods, and respect each other’s jurisdiction. That is why I need your help, in fact.”

“Your message concerns something outside Aegis jurisdiction?”

“A matter that falls outside of theirs, actually. The Aegis is adamant that the temporal agency of your Federation’s future respect the ban on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Earth. It is a red line, considering the outsized influence of Terran society on Federation history.”

“And this message would encourage them to break this rule?”

“I hope so, yes.”

Spock raised an eyebrow, but quickly determined that he would not win a stare-off with this man.

“I am exploiting a loophole. She will understand what to do - the coordinating committee has requested her services before, and my protege trained her. If all goes well, they’ll accept the irregularity. If it does not, the mutual aid treaty will be moot as this entire timeline may cease to exist.”

“Who is she?”

“Agent Selek,” said Gary Seven. “An operative of the temporal agency.”

“That’s not her name. Selek, that’s not what she’s really called,” he said.

“True,” Supervisor Seven agreed.

Curiosity killed the cat; satisfaction brought it back. That name again. This was a terrible idea. This was a deeply, horribly terrible idea. But he had to know.

“What would delivering this message entail?”

“A telepathic exchange,” he had replied. “Something like a mind–meld. You may have some gaps in your memory.”

 

***

 

“I don’t understand why I have to be here,” said McCoy, perched on the modified biobed in the psionometrics lab, wringing his hands, fractious.

“Really? Because I think you damn well do,” said Dr. Tola, not looking away from the terminal by Spock, where he was recumbent on another such instrument, tilted up at a forty-five degree angle.

“I mean,” sighed the doctor, who rubbed his eyes, “I can come back later.”

“Not if you expect me to also come back later,” Tola countered. “Anyway, I’m getting some entanglement echoes between you and some corresponding numbers on his neurotransmitters. Are you sure you didn’t mindmeld with the Vulcan after you also plugged your goddamn brain into an alien computer, Leonard?”

“Yes, Ashratolabohr,” said McCoy.

“Unclear,” said Spock.

McCoy wheeled on him, aghast. “What?

“You were unable to access your memories of the surgical procedure needed to transplant my brain back into my body. However, you were also practically shouting with all the information you acquired. I merely listened.”

“But you were a disembodied brain!”

“No, I was in the process of undergoing brain surgery - my brain was thus embodied.”

“But we weren’t touching!”

“Okay,” said Dr. Tola, “shut up, both of you. Leo, you know Spock is just weird like that - he’s a strong proximity telepath too. Maybe gets it from his mom; though I don’t know, there are enough spooky bedtime stories about Vulcan mindlords I think they might be lying about how handsy they have to get. Spock, you clearly did more than merely listen - I think you went on a fishing expedition, which as an ethicist I would find troubling except for the fact that that you did so when your brain was scooped out of your skull like frost melon and your psychic proprioception - if you will - was whacked out.”

McCoy’s body folded up, arms tucked in, and he scowled. Spock was expecting some irate eruption directed at his person, but instead he just muttered, “So all that revolutionary surgical knowledge is still in my head, but of course I can’t get it out myself.”

“You could ask Spock to mind-meld with you on purpose,” said Tola.

“Pass,” said McCoy, quickly. “That’s the last thing I need. It’s bad enough I have to hear him outside my head.”

“I would of course decline if asked,” Spock said. “I am not equal to the task of sorting through such contradictory emotional flotsam and jetsam to find anything of technical value.”

“Oh ha, ha, Spock. I bet you think you’re so clever -”

“On the contrary, I know I am -”

Out, ” Tola thundered. “For some unfathomable reason you clowns seem no worse for the wear. I’m going to get drunk with my girlfriend. Leo, if you start to see the future or levitate come get me, I guess. Spock, keep your brain in your own skull, please, which is a sentence I never thought I’d say.”

McCoy and Spock rode the turbolift back up to their quarters’ deck in pointed silence.

“You know,” said McCoy, finally, “Lieutenant Arex used to wonder if there was something wrong with xir UT - xie couldn’t believe half of the stuff we said happened on missions, even ones when xie was there.”

“Is there a point to this non sequitur, doctor?”

“Somebody stole your brain. And then I put it back in your head. I’m just saying today was very silly, okay?”

“Perhaps. Though I can’t help but wonder if it may also have been - what is the phrase? - your lucky day.”

With that, Spock walked ahead of a stunned McCoy out of the turbolift. 

“What is that supposed to mean?”

The doctor, of course, was following him. Spock was unsurprised when the doctor walked into his quarters after him as well.

“I’m surprised insight has escaped your finely-tuned empathy,” he said, turning to face McCoy. “Don’t deny that a part of you relished the opportunity to fashion me into your own remote-control automaton. It took me forty-three minutes and eight-point-three-five seconds to remove all of the robotic harness. You were quite thorough in stringing me up.”

McCoy’s eyes went huge, his face reddening. “I’m a doctor, not a puppeteer - I just threw in everything that - that! Well - well - like you weren’t getting off on being some omniscient voyeur who didn’t even have to deal with the inconvenience of a body that feels things!”

“Illogical,” Spock spat, “as you just pointed out, I did not have a body with which to get off.”

McCoy’s mouth dropped open. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered, looking down. “Of course it’s like that.”

“Like what?

“This,” he replied, waving wildly between the two of them. “It’s been weird since, you know, when we, uh -”

Spock glared. “Engaged in physical intimacy that led to sexual arousal? I thought doctors were supposed to be more articulate about -”

“Stop,” said McCoy, who held up a hand. “Let me think.”

Spock stopped.

“All right,” said McCoy. “Let’s do it.”

Spock replied without thinking: “Do what?”

“Have sex,” McCoy said, looking him square in the eye.

For exactly 1.84 seconds, Spock thought nothing at all. 

“Doctor, you cannot be serious. I am your commanding officer and -”

“According to regulations,” the doctor cut in, “fraternization is not forbidden. There’s an automatic case for sexual harassment if the superior initiates, assuming anyone files a complaint. There isn’t an automatic case when a subordinate propositions a superior officer. Also, I haven’t been your primary physician since your whole pon farr thing, and I cleared you of your medical surveillance a few weeks ago. So, I am propositioning you. Let’s have sex. It would be far more logical than having convoluted fights riddled with innuendo. Our sparring is weird enough already.”

That was… true. That would be a more logical and far more efficient way of managing mutual sexual attraction. He wasn’t entirely sure, though, why he was panicking at the same time as his cock was dutifully stiffening, his slit beginning to lubricate.

The doctor didn’t seem perturbed by his indecision, but merely continued to look at him, waiting.

“And you wish to do so… now?” Of all the eight thousand and ninety-five things I could ask first…

“Sure,” said McCoy. His posture was still nonchalant, but Spock could detect the passing minute tremors and twitches of nervousness in his face and hands. “Do you want me to take the lead? Boss you around a little this time? Not like an actual scene - just tell me what you don’t like or want to do as we go.”

“That… would be satisfactory.”

McCoy gave a sharp nod. 

He was across the room in no time at all. McCoy crowded him against the bulkhead by his terminal, taking his face in his hands. Thrilling, to not have to reach down or up, just across. 

“I don’t want to meld,” McCoy murmured. “But you can have what you feel when you touch me.”

There was no way that the human’s body could change temperature so rapidly, but his hands, mouth, the firm line of him in Spock’s arms was shocking, as though very hot or very cold. Some extreme.

Feeling and sensation refused to take shape in words. Separate things, a rapidly changing heat map of emotional overwhelm and the catalog of actions being undertaken. 

The doctor’s tongue was in his mouth. They were kissing; he did not know if it was skillful.  McCoy’s shirts were on the floor, and his hand was slipping into Spock’s undone uniform slacks.

He noted that the doctor knew how to tease his sheath, fingers pressing firmly below his everting cock. Spock noted that he was running his hands over the other man’s face frantically, fingers tracing his cheekbones, the shell of his ear, his lips. McCoy’s eyes were dark, as he caught two of his fingers and drew them into his mouth. Spock arched away from the bulkhead with a gasp.

He felt his hands seize into the other man’s hair with an impulse not unlike anger. Then he slapped McCoy’s hand away from his slacks and spit his fingers out of his mouth and kissed him again, now walking them towards his sleeping alcove, McCoy stumbling slightly. He went easily, but Spock still felt out of control, at a disadvantage.

A catalog of undress: two science blues, two black undershirts, discarded enroute. McCoy’s slacks and briefs, unfastened and pulled down and off roughly after he’d been pushed onto the bed. The doctor’s face, bemused but still holding a smirk, looking up at him as he boxed the man in. More kissing, more teeth than kissing. A chaotic dispersion of blinding light, different visual extremes in a psychic sense compressed into helpless synesthesia.

Spock found himself kneeling, supplicant, on the bed, his mouth on the doctor’s cock, his fingers stroking, seeking intensity along the lips of his cunt. This was easier, a more legible back-and-forth. What to touch, how to suck, how fast, how hard, how much, what each part was called. He shuddered when he slid a first finger inside of him, becoming aware of how viciously the man was pulling at his hair. McCoy was making noise at some remove, and quite a lot of it. 

Another finger, then another. Spock couldn’t stop a groan at how hot and tight he was as he began fucking him with his hand. And wet - agreeably wet, particularly wet, he discerned. This was reckless - hands far more sensitive than mouth, his own cock stiffening almost to the point of pain. The contractions of the doctor’s orgasm made his own body lock up, and as he finally slipped slick fingers out of the man he realized, dazed, that he’d not only come but ejaculated in his trousers. That was new.

Sound and color began leeching back into the room as he drew himself up to lie beside McCoy, taking deep breaths beside his panting, flushed, and sweating partner. They were silent for a few moments as the doctor’s breathing marginally slowed.

“Hot damn,” he said. “Well, aren't you full of surprises?”

Spock frowned, still feeling disoriented. “What could be surprising about both of us experiencing orgasm as a result of sexual relations?”

“No offense,” he replied, “but I sorta thought it might be bad. Not to knock your skills, and it’s not like I’ve ever had a Vulcan be a bad lay. It’s just that I was bluffing about relieving sexual tension as a solution to some of our other problems. I thought we might be building it all up in our heads, and concrete experience would get it out of our systems. But, fair’s fair: I haven’t been that turned on in years.”

“Do you find that you have gotten ‘it’ out of your system, doctor?”

“Don’t call me doctor in bed,” McCoy chided. “And no, not as such.” He suddenly sat up and swung his legs around to stand, stretching. “Guess it’s just another tool in our toolbox. I’m going to use your sonic. Then, you should definitely use your sonic.”

“Reasonable,” Spock said.

“Oh,” McCoy said, popping his head back around the doorframe of the refresher, “I’m spending the night by the way. We’re too old to run off in the afterglow as though that makes fornicating any less emotionally unruly. I’ll get out of your hair once I’ve slept a bit.”

“Very well,” Spock said to the ceiling. He reassured himself that he was fairly certain that everything that had happened in the past hour had at least made sense.

 

***

 

“Second,” Gary Seven continued, “you must only deliver the message to Agent Selek.”

Commander Spock - I wonder if you can hear me too. Wishful thinking.

“You say the message is for Agent Selek,” he says. “How will I know who she is?”

“That will become clear in time. You need not trouble yourself.”

“I am not troubled. How will I know?”

“You will recognize her easily enough, I imagine.”

It’s not like I’m trying to talk to you in my head or anything. Or that I ever did that. I just wonder, because I can hear you when I’m awake now…

Spock soldiered on. His mind felt abstract, a growing edifice of thin slices of thought, not entirely of his own making. “Is she the same Agent Selek who extracted a young Vulcan named Lorian from a Section 31 plot in the 2290s? She was working with a superior officer, probably a human, a short and slight man with a British accent, and an Agent Daniels, also human. She herself was tall for a human, average height for a Vulcan, telepathic to some degree, and also had a British accent, one that was more informal.”

“Not impossible,” the supervisor said, and Spock remembered that the man had a cold hand on his face and had for over a minute. His face was close. “However, that would be highly unlikely. Agent Selek has never worked in the Beta Quadrant during the twenty-second century. She and Agent Daniels, though they are collegial with each other, notoriously don’t work well together. As to the third man, I suspect I know which agent that might be, but to my knowledge he is not their superior officer. Agent Selek is tall, I suppose, and is certainly telepathic, but that describes half of the temporal agency at any given time. The only Terran language I have ever heard her speak is Russian. She’ll be loaned out to help us with a bit of trouble with the Cambridge Five and the KGB in a few years.”

“Can you really not give me some sort of description of the individual the message is meant for?”

“As I have no idea how she might appear or what psionic projections she will show you, I cannot. It is not necessary to describe her appearance and demeanor when she is not undercover, and could, in fact, be dangerous. Who she is will be quite obvious.”

 

***

 

They had waited in an empty storage bay on the maintenance level of Drozana Station before their hosts arrived. There wasn’t even a table. There was no conceivable reason why the captain and first officer of the Enterprise would be standing around doing nothing in an empty room at the edge of both Neutral Zones. Fortunately, however, the crew was unlikely to notice their absence. Almost everyone had taken shore leave shifts in the levels above, with the notable exception of Dr. McCoy and Scotty, who both described the station as “spooky” and refused to elaborate.

For a species affected by “atmosphere,” as humans often were, Spock had to admit that the empty room with stale-smelling carpet that they had locked themselves into could be considered disconcerting. Jim seemed a bit on edge, but that probably had more to do with why they were here to begin with.

The door slid open, and the man Spock had been dreading came into the room, walking toward them with a measured, confident stride. He was in civilian clothing, but a mixture of simple monotone grays that looked like a uniform, with a Starfleet badge flashing gold on his chest. He felt Jim slightly relax.

“Captain Ash Tyler, Starfleet Intelligence,” said the man, offering his hand to Jim and then the ta’al to Spock. “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Jim chuckled, now delighted. “Sounded like one hell of a divorce, glad you’re still with us, Tyler.”

In Jim’s eyes, perhaps, Tyler was a dashing spy, a double-agent who had been the late Klingon High Chancellor’s kept man before he’d faked his own death. Spock folded his arms, in a worse mood than before, if that were possible. Or if he got in “moods.”

Tyler flashed him a small smile. “I’ll cut to the chase, gentlemen. Starfleet Command has classified orders for both the two of you and the Enterprise that will require a great deal of personal risk.”

Jim nodded. That much had been obvious.

“We want you to steal a cloaking device prototype from the Romulans.”

Jim blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“We know the route of the D7 cruiser carrying the prototype to a classified Romulan Intelligence installation. We will need the Enterprise to intercept this warbird, and contrive a reason for you and Mr. Spock to be taken aboard, where you will steal the cloaking device. We’re going to go over the logistics today, but I wanted to pause first and see if either of you had questions so far.”

Spock had an immediate question come to mind. “Will this mission involve entering the Neutral Zone?”

“Yes.”

Jim whistled. “I want to know why you would want the Enterprise and its most senior officers to do this. Talk about high profile.”

“The reason for that risk has a great deal to do with why we’re stealing the prototype in the first place.”

“I was wondering that too,” Jim replied. “No offense, but won’t they be able to make any intel from the prototype obsolete fairly quickly?”

“Absolutely,” said Tyler, nodding seriously, his eyes warm. “This particular prototype is designed for long-haul flights at high warp-factors, with greatly increased reaction and cooldown time - cloaking and uncloaking - in a combat situation. This is technology they’re already offering the Klingons - for a price - and that they have an agreement to share with the Breen. We believe this cloak is key to the Romulans’ plans to expand their territory into the Alpha Quadrant. If it is compromised, the technology loses value, and we’ve bought ourselves a crucial few years for key diplomatic missions in the Alpha Quadrant. We have no plans to introduce cloaking devices in the Federation - we feel it violates our ideals and misrepresents our intentions towards prospective member worlds.”

Spock frowned again. He had never heard such an argument put forward for or against cloaking devices. Also, the very definition of Section 31 was the willingness to violate “our ideals.”

“Back to your question,” Tyler continued. “If the mission succeeds, we believe this will work as a show of strength to the non-aligned worlds in the coreward Alpha-Beta corridor. We also believe that the Enterprise has the best chance of escaping the encounter unscathed, as the Romulan navy has standing orders to capture our flagship. And, well… a big part of it is the pretext for the mission. Which is to make it appear as though Captain Kirk has become unfit for duty and gone rogue and that this has pushed Mr. Spock to consider defecting to the Romulan Star Empire.”

Great.

 

***

 

This was how Spock found himself, a few days later, grateful for his Vulcan temperament when he found himself in the brig of said Romulan warbird, staring at the expected occupant of the cell, Captain Kirk, and the improbable, highly inconvenient Dr. McCoy. McCoy being here was not part of the plan.

To be fair, very little at this point was going “according to plan.” Apparently covert operations, both Jim and Tyler had unnecessarily explained, were more a matter of strategy, clearly defined objectives, and contingency, leaving ample room for improvisation. Having a “plan” was the act of the inexperienced or the desperate. The reason for Dr. McCoy’s presence was obvious. The captain, rather than extricating himself from detainment by himself and proceeding with the theft, had decided to remove himself from the brig via what Jim had called a “Vulcan Hail Mary.” 

Presumably, he had tried to feign some malady in order to bring them back together so that Spock could apply Vulcan neuropressure in such a way that the captain would appear dead. The most logical destination then would be whatever passed for the morgue, which was surely less well fortified than the brig. They had discussed this possibility. What they had not considered was that the Romulans would bring in the doctor. It seemed far too charitable, and therefore likely a trick.

Spock could see three hundred and forty-three ways this could “go south,” all due to the doctor’s inherent unpredictability. This expanded to one thousand and eight-seven the second the doctor, sharp as ever, had a shocked expression on his face as the commander said that his assessment of Jim “confirmed Spock’s testimony.”

“I don’t believe it,” McCoy swore, eyes flashing. “There’s no price you could pay that would make him sell out.”

Of all the times to defend my moral character -

“The matter is not open for discussion, doctor.”

“What do you mean, the matter’s not open for discussion?”

This was getting out of hand, and got further away from him in the next ten seconds as the Romulan commander chastised McCoy, which felt more like one hundred seconds.

First, the doctor did something unpredicted, not envisioned in any of the five thousand eighteen ways the situation could play out. Something almost crackled in his mind, rather like a sound. He quickly determined the cause.

The doctor had dropped every mental shield he’d been maintaining. Every single one.

Before he could think, he projected into the doctor’s mind from across the room. The captain and I are working together under Starfleet orders. I am about to induce a torpor in him that will appear like death. Please certify it as such.

The reply was swift, crisp, and clear: Induced rha-tel-pan?

Yes.

Got it.

The matter, again defying his expectations, then proceeded smoothly. He would have called Dr. McCoy’s outrage at the captain’s “death” a bit dramatic, but McCoy was always like that, so it appeared authentic enough.

So authentic that contrary to the most logical contingencies they’d discussed with Starfleet Intelligence, the Romulans beamed both McCoy and the captain’s body off the ship with suspicious efficiency.

Leaving him with a dinner date and one primary objective: stall.

“You have nothing in Starfleet to which to return,” the commander said across the table. “I offer - we offer - an alternative. We will find a place for you, if you wish it.”

Spock had anticipated this conversation taking place anywhere other than a very attractive Romulan woman’s personal quarters, but the variations of the conversation itself had been practiced and rehearsed. “A place?”

“With me. Romulan women are not like Vulcan females. We are not dedicated to pure logic and the sterility of non-emotion. Our people are warriors. Often savage. But we are also many other pleasant things.”

Spock had not rehearsed this variation of the conversation. 

“I was not… aware of that aspect of Romulan society,” he said, mentally shifting gears. He hadn’t gotten that far with the captain’s “sexpionage lessons” (Jim’s words), but he had some basic principles. 

If the target initiates a seduction, encourage it and subtly escalate it. You want to take back the assertive role to slow down the pace of the encounter.

“As a Vulcan, you would study it. As a human, you would find ways to appreciate it.”

Taking the cue from her admittedly excellent pickup line and her seductive body language, he carefully reclined onto her divan. He raked his eyes over her - again, admittedly excellent - figure stuffed into her very fashion-forward uniform. The angle was provocative, she had moved from kneeling by his feet to half lying, odalisque, onto the low sofa. He made sure to linger pointedly on her cleavage. He was fairly certain this was a common courtship signal of human males, though he and Jim had not yet made it to the “unit” on “eye fucking.”

“Please believe me,” he said, pitching his voice slightly deeper, “I do appreciate it.”

Somehow this turned into the commander leaving him alone in her dining area while she, as the Terran saying went, “slipped into something a little more comfortable.”

He took the brief window of opportunity to comm the captain, while rapidly trying to calculate the odds of sexually satisfying a Romulan woman if necessary. Impossible to calculate. There were too many unknowns. On the other hand, being able to touch her could be extremely useful.

She returned in a thin silk gown that showed off her figure to significant… advantage. “Is my attire now more appropriate, Mr. Spock?”

He stood, and approached her, a plan forming. “Commander, your attire is not only more appropriate, it should actually stimulate our conversation.”

Then he formed the ta’al, and she did the same, and they pressed their hands together. Not remotely a kiss, fortunately, very promising. Now was not the time to think that sexualizing the ta’al may have been the most depraved and libertine physical act of his life thus far. He let some of the nervy charge at the obscene gesture flicker through his psi-points. She gave a soft gasp, her eyes widening. 

Her skin was humming with arousal, pulling him closer with a rather curious mental gesture as muscular as a Vulcan’s but but psionically opaque. He smoothly moved his fingers, two of them, over hers, then the back of her hand. She seemed almost enthralled. Spock himself was finding this far more taxing than he expected, as he’d never engaged in such a… filthy make out while sober and on-duty. The hardest part was hiding his revulsion in the mess of his volatile ambivalence. The revulsion was surprising, as he could feel his body responding highly favorably. She was trembling, a shock of pleasure racing across her hand, more responsive than any Vulcan lover, the novelty viciously erotic. He realized that the revulsion was not directed toward her, but at himself for his… infidelity. To… the doctor? What? After one assignation? That’s completely illogical - I don’t have time for such self-reflection -

Then the door chime went off, and Spock shunted aside his feeling of relief.

“Ah,” she said, removing her hand easily, eyes brightening. “Right on time! Come!”

The door hissed open.

Spock blinked, his hands swiftly going numb. 

“I thought you would benefit from meeting a fellow novice to the Way of D’Era, my new friend… Kelondra.”

This “Vulcan defector” glided into the room, in a colorful silk tunic and shawl, paneled after the style of the uniforms. Her thick dark hair was tousled into a "V" down her forehead, and cut close along her skull elsewhere. How could this be happening?

“Her father actually gave her that name, Kelondra,” the commander continued. “He was a hero of the Tal Shiar, and lived many years on Vulcan. Oh - but you know of him, don’t you! My dear, what was that lovely Vulcan name of yours?”

The woman looked at Spock and gave a shockingly expressive, disdainful smirk. “Commander Spock would know me as Colonel T’Nura.”

Colonel T’Nura. A high-ranking member of the VEG. Leo’s friend, who’d followed him to Cerberus. His mother’s ex-lover, the woman who’d almost broken up his parents’ marriage. She’s half-Romulan? The daughter of a Tal Shiar agent?

“T’Nura,” the commander purred. “Gorgeous. Almost a pity to lose such a name, though you’ll forgive me of course if I prefer your Romulan sobriquet, Kelondra.”

T’Nura gave a small, warm smile to the commander. “Call me what you wish,” she said.

The commander gave a happy smile, and leaned away from Spock to catch T’Nura’s mouth, giving her a wet, open-mouthed kiss that went on for a considerable amount of time. 

Despite this being inefficient from a tactical standpoint, Spock studiously examined the carpet, hoping this would be over soon.

“Ah, I believe Spock’s mood has, hm, flagged,” said T’Nura. “Perhaps we should draw this out, explore this surprise with words first.”

“Delicious,” said the Romulan woman, now beaming, and pulling T’Nura back down to the low seating, where the taller Vulcan sprawled, the commander tucked between her legs, leaning back on her chest. Spock slowly made his way over and sat as far away as he deemed prudent, and relaxed his posture as well.

“So,” the commander purred, “you know each other?”

“We run in the same circles,” said T’Nura. “I was romantically involved with this mother for several years.”

“Titillating,” the commander replied, in much the same way Spock called something “fascinating.”

“This might be quite a shock for him,” T’Nura drawled.

“This is new information, certainly,” Spock said, “but I am more curious than shocked.” Both lies.

“This is why I wanted you to meet Kelondra, even before things got more exciting. I think you’ll find her story compelling as you break ties with the Federation. She’s been with us for a few weeks.”

“There’s not so much to tell,” said T’Nura. “I was already disgusted with the manner in which Vulcan treated their part-Romulan neighbors, particularly as I am half-Romulan myself. Hiding became tedious. The recent dissolution of the VEG showed a lack of both strength and principle by Vulcan. I am tired of serving weak-minded hypocrites.”

“Not to mention reckless,” said the commander, idly stroking T’Nura’s thigh. “How are we supposed to interpret their absorption of Starfleet except as a direct challenge to Romulus?”

Spock was confused, which was almost interesting, but a bit disorienting in his current position. Spock decided to make the most of this bizarre situation. After all, the objective was to stall. “How so? I’m not sure I understand that reasoning.”

“Ah!” The commander looked quite pleased. “Now, this is an excellent opportunity to unravel your Vulcan indoctrination first-hand. I am referring to, of course, the fact that Vulcan has been trying through overt and covert means to conquer or at least neutralize us. Every war we’ve ever waged with them or their proxies has been defensive.”

Spock wasn’t sure what to make of this extraordinary statement. He glanced at T’Nura.

“Quite so,” she said, with a jarring, haughty expression on her usually neutral face. “It was fairly obvious that Vulcan was in an expansionist mood at the time of the Romulan war with Earth and its allies. How else could the Empire interpret their machinations that have given them the Federation as their tool? Vulcan-controlled territory now almost doubles that of Romulus.”

Spock reined in his not inconsiderable logical objections and questions at what, on its face, appeared to be an absurd interpretation of history. “Interesting,” he said. “But does not the Romulan Empire aspire to expand its territory as well?”

“‘Empire’ is a crude translation,” said the commander, who waved her hand. “We’ve certainly never had an empress, or any aristocracy. We merely follow the Way of D’Era, the way of the ‘endless sky.’”

“Romulans believe,” T’Nura offered, “that our race was created or engineered in a place called Vorta Vor by a superior civilization, whose technology and culture far surpassed our own. We were created as the caretakers of the galaxy, since our progenitors had transcended the material plane and gone to places unknown. The names are not the same, but it’s not that different from Vulcan mythology about Sha-Ka-Ree. Presumably they derive from the same ur-myth.”

“Yes! We would never take territory we could not hold and enrich, nor would we expand merely for expansion’s sake, unlike the Vulcans’ Federation,” said the commander. “You will notice that we’ve never lost territory.”

“Fascinating,” said Spock, and meant it. “I had not realized Vulcans were perceived as such… aggressors by the Romulans.”

“Of course,” said the commander. “How else would we see them? Our ancestors barely escaped Vulcan with their lives during the Sundering. We persevered and triumphed, and we’re proud of our society. In many ways we’ve even surpassed Vulcan; soon we will have done so in all ways.”

“On Vulcan,” said Spock, “the limited information we had was that the Romulans were the ones who ‘marched under the raptor’s wings’ and rejected the teachings of Surak.”

“Disgusting,” said the commander, who shivered. “Who in the stars would leave their home planet on sublight ships with no destination because of a philosophy? Our ancestors were refugees. Mostly, refugee children.”

That first point actually made sense. The second was quite puzzling. “Romulans believe those who left Vulcan were mainly children?”

“That is our meticulously researched history, yes,” she replied. “In the time of great wars, the last warlord to fall to the armies of Shi’Kahr, ‘Sudoc’ - your ‘raptor’ I believe - performed the act of sundering on a small contingent of children, to raise them up as superior warriors. When he was defeated, the victors were so disgusted by the children that they had no homes, no meaningful place on Vulcan. Only a wise old man, Tellus, had compassion for them despite the cruelty of the Surak devotees. He and a small crew, all sundered adults, took the children in search of a better life.”

“The act of sundering?”

“The Judgment of Sudoc,” said T’Nura.

Spock felt a thrill of fear somewhere below his thoughts. The Judgment of Sudoc was the most despicable and unthinkable thing that could be done by or happen to a Vulcan. According to legend it had been created or at least perfected by Sudoc, who had also been a powerful mindlord, one of the last, and reportedly responsible for the death of Surak. The technique rendered a telepath unable to form persistent bonds and mental links with others, a disfigurement of the katra itself. In almost all historical cases it was a prelude to an execution, a destruction of the soul before the body. Only a few adepts of Gol likely knew how to do it. And, he remembered, my alternate self in the Terran Empire, apparently. The idea that this could have been done to children, a group of children…

“I can see why we were not taught this on Vulcan,” he said, finally. 

“But you don’t immediately discount our version,” said the commander, now more keenly observant than seductive.

“I have no logical reason to discount it prima facie, at least as a common and genuine belief of many Romulans.”

“Which have always interested you, the beliefs of Romulans,” T’Nura said, “haven’t they, Mr. Spock?”

The commander smiled again. “I knew it. He had an air about him.”

“I was referring more to the weapon in his left boot that your centurions missed.”

With a bright, unreadable expression, the commander leaned over and efficiently relieved him of said knife in his boot. The expression became legible: renewed delight.

“Now where in the stars did you acquire a Romulan honor blade?”

“It was a gift,” Spock replied.

T’Nura regarded him, her expression bored. “From Lorian?”

Spock forced himself not to flinch.

“Oh,” said the commander, “that half-Romulan politician’s son? T’Pol, who was run off by those Vulcan bigots in disgrace? I always assumed he was a Tal Shiar agent.”

T’Nura shrugged. “I don’t know either way. Starfleet keeps a very close eye on his activities.”

“Naturally,” said the commander, gracious. “Presumably we do as well.”

“Lorian is a family friend of Spock’s,” T’Nura offered. 

“And a kinsman of yours, of course,” said the commander, swilling her drink. “Is that rumor also true?”

T’Nura tipped her head in acknowledgment.

What?

“How titillating. Let’s take a look at this, shall we?”

The commander smoothly drew the blade from its sheath. 

Then, immediately, she froze, her face seized in a grimace. T’Nura glanced over it, collected. His captor turned sharp eyes to Spock.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“I believe the preferred translation is ‘absolute candor,’” Spock said.

The commander scowled, her hands gripping the small knife’s hilt. “I know what it says. I’m asking why you have an emblem of the Qowat Milat on your person and why the fuck you brought this thing on my ship.”

“I am unfamiliar with the Qowat Milat,” he said. “Who are they?”

“Who are they…?” The commander seemed to shake herself. “They’re a dangerous and seditious death cult that started on Remus, a barbarous planet. They are bloodthirsty and faithless, blinded to everything except their bizarre vendettas. Their motivations are highly… illogical, let’s say.”

Frankly, Spock really had slipped the knife into his boot on a whim - he refused to concede it was something like a talisman from the mysterious Lorian - but he had to admit that throwing the commander off-balance was a boon at this point in the operation.

“Kelondra, do you have any insight?”

“Into Spock’s connection to the Qowat Milat? No, I don’t. Into Lorian’s? Probably no more than you do. As to Starfleet’s view of the Qowat Milat, to the extent anyone in Intelligence knows of them, their information comes from the V’Shar archives. Whether there’s some truth to the Romulan theory that they were a psyop perpetrated by the Vulcans of centuries past to foment insurrection among the Remans, I cannot say. It’s certainly possible. To my knowledge - limited as it is - Starfleet and the VEG view them as a potential ally or asset, but do not have extensive dealings with them.”

“That does not account for the Federation’s own Tal Shiar.”

“The supposedly quiescent Section 31? Perhaps not.”

The commander gave Spock a sidelong glance. “You’re Section 31, aren’t you? So is Lorian, isn’t he? Damn. And this had been such a good day.”

Spock wasn’t sure what to do about this accusation. He doubted that if he denied it he would be believed. He shoved aside nascent shame and humiliation that the thought that Lorian was a Section 31 agent after all hadn’t even crossed his mind after their mindmeld. It certainly wasn’t impossible.

The commander then waved her hand, as though brushing off the issue. “The details don’t matter, of course. The motive can be profound or facile - the trouble is the same.”

This almost had the air of a proverb. Spock also shoved aside the yawning cavern of thought prompted by hundreds of years of secrets T’Nura had revealed so casually to the Romulans. And what this implied about what she was capable of.

“I’m sorry to say this changes things, Mr. Spock,” she said, looking very put out. “Being your advocate could suggest I am in league with the Qowat Milat, which might even be a death warrant for me and my crew. On the other hand, acting against you might put a target on my back for those terrorists. And would align me with the conservatives I have opposed my entire career, who would not accept my sudden interest even if it were in good faith.”

“What will you do, then?” 

“I need you off this ship,” she said, drumming her fingers on a silk-clad thigh. “As this is a covert mission, I presume you have some sort of escape plan? What do you need to do?”

“Stall,” Spock said.

T’Nura rose elegantly from the low couch and sauntered over to a computer console. “That has become more difficult, your centurions are on their way to you as we speak. Probably with bad news for us and good news for the Federation. I should go.”

The commander leapt up as well, and Spock stood carefully. The moment balanced on razor wire. 

“Go,” said the commander. “The centurions will find me and Mr. Spock in the same compromising position we failed to resume when you arrived.” She glared at him. “I will do what I must as an officer of the Romulan navy. If I must arrest you, ask for the Right of Statement, an opportunity to declaim one’s final words prior to execution. That’s all I can do for you.”

“I understand,” said Spock, looking her in the eye. Behind them, the door hissed shut, T’Nura having left without further comment.

“Well, go on, then,” she said, her eyes hard with fury and something like despair, “touch me.”

He lifted his hands back to her face and hands. He wasn’t sure what sort of feelings he was projecting, but she still shivered.

“It’s hard to believe,” she said, unavoidably sincere under his caresses, “that I can be so moved by the touch of an alien hand.”

Everything happened very quickly after that. The captain had apparently come back aboard trying to pass as a Romulan - which had absolutely not been a part of the contingency plan. He beamed off again, cloaking device in hand, just as they arrived, surrounded by centurions. The commander made a show - though an unfeigned one - of putting him in custody in a fury. 

He felt his mind settle on the present moment. All he had to do was stall. He would be rescued or he wouldn’t. It was almost peaceful until, as he was frogmarched back to the commander’s quarters, he caught a glimpse of someone at the opposite end of the corridor, unnoticed, darting past the wall. Someone in a full EV suit.

The stranger turned back then, and Spock caught a sliver of her face behind the shield of her helmet before she disappeared entirely. T’Nura. Her expression was arresting. Gone was the cynicism and contempt of “Kelondra”: instead, her expression was calm. Vulcan, again. 

He moved through the next half an hour as though through ice-cold water. He only regained something of his equanimity back aboard the Enterprise, with only the commander surviving the destruction of her ship. He volunteered to take her to “guest” quarters.

“Deck two,” he said, when they were alone on the turbolift. “It is regrettable that you were made an unwilling passenger. It was not intentional. All the Federation wanted was the cloaking device.”

“The Federation,” she repeated, her expression dull. “And what did you want?”

The keenness was gone. Her interest in his machinations had dwindled down to an ember. 

“It was my only interest when I boarded your vessel,” he said, deciding she deserved honesty.

“And that's exactly all you came away with.”

“You underestimate yourself, commander,” he said, with an odd sense of guilt.

“You realize that very soon we will learn to penetrate the cloaking device you stole.”

“Obviously. Military secrets are the most fleeting of all.” He paused, and looked at her. “I hope that you and I exchanged something more permanent.”

He wasn’t exactly sure why he was saying this, why he wanted her to know that even if he didn’t accept the Romulan point of view, he had heard it. That his admiration and tenderness in their brief intimacies had been genuine on some remote, animal level.

“It was your choice,” she replied, as they stepped out of the turbolift.

“It was the only choice possible,” he pointed out. “You would not respect any other.”

She looked sad now. It didn’t suit her. “It will be our secret,” she said.

She was silent the rest of the way to her quarters, two guards already in position. She looked up at him, resigned. “But not for long,” she said.

He didn’t sleep, but instead meditated for a full eight hours, coming to no certain conclusion. What had she meant, why was she so resigned? And what had happened to Colonel T’Nura? Had she survived? What was her true agenda? He couldn’t dismiss his unease. It came into horrible fruition, when he received a call from sickbay, from the captain.

The commander was dead.

He went to sickbay immediately, though there wasn’t any reason to do so. He waited with Jim, who was uncharacteristically silent, in the CMO’s office for ten minutes before Dr. McCoy returned from the med lab morgue down the hall. He was scowling, barely containing his ire.

“What the hell is going on, Bones?” Jim started pacing back and forth, as McCoy slung himself, testy, into his chair.

“I haven’t found anything inconsistent with suicide,” he said, as though it were dragged out of him. “The toxicology suggests an internal delivery system. No signs of external poisoning.”

“Like a dead switch? Like biting down on a tooth?”

“Maybe, though I couldn’t find conclusive evidence of the mechanism.”

“You don’t believe it’s suicide,” Spock said.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” McCoy burst out. “She had immunity; she would have been going home. She wasn’t being interrogated. Granted, we don’t know much about Romulan culture, but we’ve seen no evidence at all that suicide is typical after a defeat you can walk away from. They’re obsessed with honor, but they’re not Klingons . And even Klingons don’t do this.”

“If I were the Romulans,” Jim said, “I’d want her alive to debrief, even if execution was the next step. If she did this to herself, she got some message. The Romulans have some way to talk to people on the ship.”

“Or, the Romulans weren’t the ones who wanted to silence her,” said McCoy, voice dark.

Jim grimaced. “Are you really suggesting we have multiple spies from different governments onboard?”

“I cannot see the logic in assuming otherwise, Jim,” Spock said, stiffly. “This is the flagship.”

Jim sighed, rubbing his eyes. “Well, at least we can rule out our own people. Starfleet doesn’t do assassinations.”

McCoy stared at his desk, his anger sharpening his face. “No, Starfleet doesn’t,” he said.

I still have the honor blade in my boot, Spock thought, a non sequitur. He hadn’t removed it since the mission. He hadn’t seen the need to.

Jim groaned. “Well, I have to go make a million calls and write ten million reports. Let me know if anything comes up or we’re at war with the Romulans now or something because we couldn’t stop someone from getting murdered on my fucking ship.”

Both Spock and McCoy, a bit uncharacteristically, let this hyperbole slide. Spock lingered as McCoy angrily straightened the padds on his desk.

“She was humiliated,” he said, at last. McCoy looked up at him, intent. “By the incident. By my… deception. She intimated that her position and life were in jeopardy because of her failure in recruiting or containing me.”

“Did anything about her behavior indicate she was so humiliated she considered life not worth living?”

“No,” Spock said. “My… impression is no. If anything, she seemed to be anticipating some sort of attempt on her life. However, I did not know her very well or for very long.”

McCoy studied him, his gaze softening. “It’s normal, you know, to ask yourself questions like that. I’ve worked with folks who’ve come back from undercover missions. Things get blurred, sometimes. And that’s people who’ve been trained by Starfleet Intelligence. You haven’t been. Fact is, we don’t know what happened. I don’t care what side she’s on, as far as I’m concerned it’s a damn shame that the young lady is no longer with us.”

Spare me your generic platitudes, doctor, he meant to say, but instead he said, “Are you otherwise occupied after your shift? I was interested in your opinion on some reports one of the bio labs submitted to me after our last away mission.”

McCoy quickly fought a smile and then slouched back in his chair. “I’m sure I can find the time, sir,” he drawled. “I’ll swing by your quarters later.”

 

***

 

“Is it hers?”

“Is what hers?”

“The voice I’m hearing, supervisor, a young woman’s telepathic projection. Is that her, Agent Selek?”

Those wide, static eyes narrowed, brows knitting together in concern. “I do not know what you are referring to, Commander Spock. There are no traces of psionic energy in this room apart from myself, the computer, and yourself. You say you are receiving communication from a young woman?”

“She knows me, but I don’t know her. She appears to be concerned for my welfare and may be trying to intervene in some situation that is completely opaque to me. She's reaching out to me quite persistently.”

Gary Seven relaxed, but also hissed, perhaps in realization. “Damn,” he said. “My apologies, Mr. Spock. The exchange you’re engaged in hasn’t happened yet, and I cannot register it in my mind or on my instruments in this century. This procedure has caused more damage to your midbrain than I had hoped. I will speak to your supervisor, who has more experience with Vulcan neurology. You may rest assured that I will be held accountable for this injury I have done you.”

“My supervisor? I have an Aegis supervisor?”

“I know for a fact that the young woman trying to communicate with you is not Agent Selek.” Gary Seven had apparently decided to ignore his question altogether.

“How can you know that if you can’t even perceive it?”

Gary Seven blinked. “Agent Selek has no desire to speak to you.”

 

***

 

Spock, having become once more ambulatory after his mind meld with Dr. Miranda Jones, promptly collapsed to the ground, with McCoy bolting to catch him and the captain having run off in search of the telepath, who had either healed him or with whom he had fought a duel to (his) death. “Easy, easy,” the doctor said.

The room slipped away again.

When he awoke, there was the familiar beeping of a biobed. He was having a hard time opening his eyes or moving his limbs. He could hear voices.

“ - have half a mind to get you kicked off this assignment,” hissed, he was fairly certain, Dr. Tola.

“I’d like to see you try. I have been chosen by Ambassador Kollos,” said a very stiff Dr. Miranda Jones. “There is too much at stake. And you haven’t proven I’ve done anything wrong.”

“Bullshit, Dr. Jones,” McCoy said. His voice was glacial, almost unrecognizable. “Now, we hadn’t met before this, and I’ve held my tongue out of professional courtesy, but you know damn well that you’re not the most trustworthy person when it comes to psychic safety, not even your own. After what happened to Nancy -”

“Nancy Crater has nothing to do with any of this, Dr. McCoy,” she snapped. “Accidents happen - you can’t seriously still blame me for that. Don’t project her suffering onto me. You have to get over the choices we all made during the war.”

“I’m less worried about your wellbeing, Miranda, than the fact that you did an extremely invasive and sloppy deep mind meld with Spock after he formed a link with and then ogled a fucking Medusan,” Dr. Tola snapped. “Look at these numbers! How is he even alive?”

Because of me,” Miranda replied. “Because sloppy or not, I pulled him back from the edge. No one has ever survived seeing a Medusan with their sanity intact until today. Until me.”

“Very impressive,” Tola said, with an almost audible sneer. “So convenient that he just happened to fuck up the most obvious and simple safety procedure -”

“As I’ve told your captain, I had nothing to do with -”

“Let’s take a step back,” McCoy said, his voice still cold and strange. “Big picture, there’s nothing we can do to stop you from bonding with Ambassador Kollos. Not in time. But I want you to understand something. If you ever so much as breathe wrong around Spock or any other telepath in Starfleet, you’re not going to get away with it.”

“Is that a threat?”

“If it is,” said Tola, “it’s one I’ve already put into action. You’ll be hearing from the Vulcans soon, I’d expect. I wouldn’t be surprised if they strip you of your affiliation to the Adepts of Gol.”

“It’s not a threat,” McCoy continued. “It’s an observation. I meant what I said at dinner. Whatever I may think about your ethics as a scientist, you have a beautiful gift. And all you’ll ever see is a distorted reflection of it in mind so different it drives human beings to madness and death. If you can’t act in your own self-interest, at least consider that once they have their hooks in you, you may not even have the ability to be petty.”

“Do you talk to your own daughter in such a patronizing way?”

“When she’s mad at me, I’m sure she’d say I’m even worse,” said a voice that could have been Dr. McCoy’s. “I get it. We’re ragging on you. I think you did save Spock, even if you feel threatened by him. Of course your research into human telepathy has been crucial to people like me and my daughter. But you can’t keep - Kollos isn’t going to fix you. The Medusans aren’t going to even you out so you can take bigger and bigger risks. You’ve got to know that.”

“Well, you certainly are the expert in getting lost in better telepaths’ minds.”

“Okay,” said Tola. “This is getting pointless, and we’re bothering Spock, who has definitely been awake for most of this conversation. You and Leo go slug it out or kiss and make up or whatever humans do. I’m still going to get you in trouble with the Vulcans, because I don’t like you, and I know what you did was wrong.”

Somehow, Spock fell asleep again.

Although Spock hadn't had much experiences with “hangovers" in his life, it still seemed the closest analogue to his experience upon finally waking and leaving sickbay. He blearily dressed himself for Ambassador Kollos’s departure, exchanged niceties with the newly bonded Dr. Miranda Jones. She seemed distant, clearly overwhelmed by her Medusan partner. He could detect a strong melancholy in Dr. McCoy’s surprisingly warm farewells. The source was obvious, even to a non-telepath: Dr. Jones simply wasn’t there anymore, not in the way she was before. It was… disturbing. He decided that he didn’t have time to consider the matter further, and forced himself to show up for bridge duty, which seemed interminable.

“Commander Spock,” said Uhura right at the end of his shift, with a strange expression on her face, “you’re receiving an urgent comm request from the Vulcan Science Directorate.”

Now that was an institutional title he hadn’t heard in quite a while. “I will take the call in my quarters, lieutenant. Mr. Sulu, you have the conn.”

“Aye, sir.”

The Vulcan Science Directorate. Historically the most powerful branch of the Vulcan government after the Awakening, and still administrator of both the Vulcan Science Academy and the Vulcan Expeditionary Group. The directorate had faded from public view off-Vulcan - and to some extent on-Vulcan - as a gesture of respect towards the newly formed Federation Science Council and Starfleet. In practice, as the Vulcan Science Academy was the most prominent and largest initiative of the VSD, it was the face of the directorate, particularly as far as aliens were concerned. Technically, however, the VSA was an academic and research institution. For the request to come from the directorate explicitly suggested a much higher level of seriousness. There were only a few origins for such a call. In light of the incident with the Medusan ambassador, there was only one.

Sure enough, when he checked the incoming call signature, there it was: Keslovar Research Academy . The VSA’s premier and clandestine research institute of psionics, where even illegal telepathic practices and devices were studied and tested. The political and scientific arm of the Adepts of Gol. 

The institution that made Sybok’s life on Vulcan impossible.

Still, it took him a moment to process, when his viewscreen flickered on, that he was speaking with the director himself, Kythek, the most prominent kolinahru and adept in Vulcan public life. Also, the closest thing Sybok probably had to a childhood friend. Or ex-boyfriend. Sybok had never really explained. All Spock knew was there had been some sort of early scandal involving them that everyone seemed to blame Sybok for, but that Kythek had been one of the most adamant of Sybok’s small but vocal supporters during his murder trial. 

“Commander Spock,” he said. “The readings and scans we received after your contact with the Medusan ambassador from your psionics ethicist, Dr. Ashratolabor ch’Miraph, require follow up.”

“I wasn’t aware sharing records with Keslovar was common practice for Vulcans serving off-world.”

“It is not,” said Kythek. “The request was made due to your family’s reputation and the… uncertainty of your psionic disposition. Even full-blooded Vulcans with your profile and training would have difficulty being unconditionally cleared for a deep space assignment.”

“What reputation? What profile?”

“The S’chn T’gai family is on the rolls of Mount Kolinahr,” said Kythek. That is, his family was one of several that could trace its lineage back to some “mindlord” clan pre-Awakening. Every child on Vulcan was regularly tested for psionic potential, but children with certain family histories were required to be tested more frequently. “I am surprised you were not aware of this. As to your profile, you scored in the 90th percentile for psionic potential as an adolescent and have no training in psionic disciplines beyond what your father or brother may have taught you.”

Spock wasn’t so much surprised as embarrassed that he’d never really considered those two pieces of information as connected, nor was he aware of some sort of ban on high-potential telepaths leaving Vulcan. Or, to be precise, being posted to a deep space assignment. Though, considering how leery Vulcans were of their telepaths having out-of-control “threshold” experiences, this made a certain amount of sense.

“I was not aware an exception to policy was made in my case,” said Spock. “This is the first time I am hearing of this.”

Kythek had no reaction to this. “There was some protest made at the VSD over your commission in Starfleet going through without examination and quarantine by Keslovar, but Minister T’Pol’s legal staff made a successful argument that intervening would be a violation of your rights as a citizen of United Earth. The VEG’s willingness to relax certain requirements for you was political in nature, and you never would have been posted on a deep space mission.”

What? And more importantly: had Sarek known about this? When had he known about this?

“I see. I assume the matter was not brought to my attention as the matter was moot and required no action on my part.”

“That is a reasonable speculation.” Kythek’s stare sharpened. “Commander Spock, have you ever considered attempting the Kolinahr?”

“Of course,” Spock replied, now surprised. “In fact, I had been considering pursuing the practice sooner rather than later in life. I’ve always… looked forward to it.”

“I would encourage you to continue considering it. We at Keslovar would be less apprehensive about your continued service if you trained with the Adepts of Gol. Your readings after your link and mind meld with the Medusan and Dr. Jones strongly suggested some sort of threshold event, even if Dr. ch’Miraph assures us that they found no evidence of one occurring. At the present time, the adepts are still requiring the successful attainment of Kolinahr. Please direct any questions to us.”

Spock was probably projecting upon the kolinahru’s neutral expression, but he had the sense that Kythek perhaps was not one of the adepts that were in favor of keeping that requirement. Projection or extrapolation: Kythek, despite being traditional in his demeanor and life choices, had not made predictably conventional decisions as the director of Keslovar. There’d been a reason he and Sybok had been close, whatever that reason had been.

“I will do so,” Spock said. Then he paused. “If you have the time, I do have a question of a… theoretical nature, which may be of strategic importance to my work with Starfleet.”

“Proceed,” said Kythek. “I am tolerant of hypotheticals.”

“What would be the impact of the Judgment of Sudoc being used against a Vulcan child? What about a group of children who underwent this assault and lived apart from other Vulcans, creating an isolated settlement?”

This was a very morbid “hypothetical” to pose, but Kythek, obviously, had no reaction.

“There are no documented cases where a child underwent the Judgment of Sudoc, and very few suggestions of such a thing in our archive of ancient texts. I can therefore make no conclusive statement as to the impact of the Judgment of Sudoc on children in a particular or general case. However, I believe it is reasonable to speculate that the impact on a telepathic child would be profound. The longest recorded amount of time an adult survived after the Judgment of Sudoc was one year, and that adult was Surak himself.”

“Surak,” said Spock, stunned. “Surak suffered the Judgment of Sudoc?”

“By the records of the Adepts of Gol over the millennia, yes, there appears to be some evidence to substantiate those rumors. Nothing conclusive, of course. Making them public would be highly controversial and have little point.”

“But Surak’s katra was recovered a hundred years ago, laid to rest in a new katric ark on Mount Seleya.”

“A psionic echo of unknown provenance containing several plausibly accurate memories of Surak was allegedly transferred from a katric ark to Syrran, then to then-Captain Jonathan Archer, then to a priestess, and then back to an ark. There is a symbolic monument in the catacombs of Mount Seleya, but the artifact itself has been kept at Keslovar since the Romulan war. The engrams accessible now are highly degraded. It is impossible to say what exactly was stored in the katric ark Syrran claimed to have melded with. Considering the political ramifications of introducing doubt into the authenticity of the Kir’Shara as vouchsafed by ‘Surak’s katra,’ this precise chain of possession has also not been widely publicized.”

“Surak’s katra may be fraudulent?”

“It’s possible. It is also possible that what was stored in the ark was a memory imprint or a katric shard. We also have no way of dating the entity. As with many things in the distant past, we have some evidence and some ideas, but little proof. I mention the matter merely to state that there is record that the longest lived victim of the Judgment of Sudoc was one year. I would think the survival of a child would be unlikely. The survival of a child that was not completely insane, even more so.”

“And a group of children?”

“That is an interesting hypothetical,” said Kythek. “Children are vulnerable but also highly adaptable. Some adepts, scholars of bonding and its pathologies, have posited that many of the deleterious effects of damage to the bonding pathways are social in nature, as the individual is ostracized by other Vulcans. However, a group of children could possibly re-establish some sort of social equilibrium based on their present condition.”

“What would be the disposition of a hypothetical, isolated colony of such individuals and their descendants?”

Kythek paused again, for longer. “Very difficult to speculate with any certainty. However, it occurs to me that a study of such a population might lead to many fascinating insights into telepathic development among Vulcanoid species. The Judgment of Sudoc is of course not hereditary. However, it is not clear how much psionic potential such a population could maintain without bonds and basic abilities being modeled across generations. Let alone the impact of no psionic bonding occurring in utero. To this day, few Vulcans would raise a child off-world or in a colony of any less than a thousand Vulcans. More of our abilities are imprinted on us in the first years of life through parental bonds and weak communal bonds than we commonly acknowledge.”

“A population of Vulcans with that background may have latent telepathic abilities, then, even after thousands of years?”

“That is not an unreasonable speculation. After all, that length of time is nothing on an evolutionary time scale. Presumably, the genetic and physiological structures remain.” Kythek raised an eyebrow. “If these sorts of matters interest you, I must recommend my earlier suggestion more strongly. Many researchers at Keslovar are asking similar questions, due to recent… interstellar events. Such research requires delicacy and security precautions. I urge you to consider working with the adepts.” 

Kythek’s glance was mild, but Spock knew that the man had realized the actual question behind the vague hypothetical. Interesting. Keslovar was aware of and studying something very like the Romulan commander’s claims. He hated to admit it, but the director’s insistence on his telepathic training was rather flattering, even if there was no practical way to pursue the Kolinahr any time soon.

“I have a logical obligation to inform you that the public perception of the Kolinahr is reductive,” said Kythek. “Although there are many valid reasons to require neophytes to be kolinahru at the time of their training, many adepts in good standing, including your father, were kolinahru for a time and then lapsed. This path would require significant personal sacrifice and time, but it is not a binary proposition.”

Spock had long suspected this was the case, but he had to admit it was reassuring to hear confirmation from the director of Keslovar. “What is the logical nature of your obligation to inform me of this?”

Kythek hesitated. Probably. He paused, anyway. “I have a logical obligation to Sybok in light of his absence on Vulcan. And he has always affirmed a relationship of logical obligation to you.”

“Always?”

“Yes. When he was first sent out onto the sands to seek the Kolinahr at seven, the age other children would be considered for the koon-ut-la , he named you, his infant brother, whose existence he’d just discovered. I was at the monastery school at the time and recording these notes was one of my duties.”

Spock felt a throb in his side, a wave of emotion probably inappropriate to feel in the presence of a kolinahru.

“This is my personal line,” Kythek said. “It would be logical to seek me out should there be a situation you cannot navigate alone. Or to discuss other such… theoretical concerns.”

“I will meditate on all you have said for a long while,” Spock said. “Peace and long life.”

“Live long and prosper.”

When Spock went to meditate next, however, he found his thoughts turning to McCoy instead. To McCoy and his daughter to be precise. For lack of a better term, Dr. McCoy had seemed to take Dr. Miranda Jones’s subsumption into the mind of Ambassador Kollos rather personally. Dr. Jones had suggested as much, that this was an experience with which Dr. McCoy was familiar.

Human telepaths were rare enough that there wasn’t, to his knowledge, any information available about human mating bonds, or the character of the intersubjective complex in the human midbrain. There was a modest amount of research on human responses to mating bonds with members of telepathic species, Betazoid and Vulcan, mainly. But he had next to no information about what a human telepath’s midbrain even looked like. If Joanna were a powerful telepath, it stood to reason her father, Joss, would have been one as well, especially as his mother had described him as McCoy’s “bondmate.” Perhaps there had been something flawed in the man’s ability to bond itself, and that McCoy’s experience of a persistent telepathic bond had not been representative of what the experience could be like for him.

He credited himself with enough self-awareness to know that he didn’t not have a personal interest in the question. Even if he had no interest in pursuing some sort of serious romantic relationship with Dr. McCoy, McCoy having accurate information about being intimate with telepaths seemed relevant to their harmonious interaction. It was therefore logical to explore this possibility, which he did as soon as he met with Dr. Tola for their weekly “meditation session,” giving them a succinct summary of his speculations and what relevant research he had been able to dredge up.

“Wow,” said Dr. Tola. “That’s sure… a lot of… something.”

“What is your assessment?”

Tola had a very strange and intense look on their face, as though they were restraining the urge to laugh or scream. “So, there’s some basic premises in there, upon which you’ve built this palatial and scary theory about human telepathy as it pertains to McCoy and his daughter. What have you done to double-check your premises?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh,” said Tola, very obvious sarcasm seeping in, “I don’t know, asking some of your friends, most of whom have met Joanna more than once, your parents, or even, bear with me, Dr. McCoy himself? Have you ever just looked up ‘Joanna McCoy’ in the personnel database? The one that literally everyone on board has permissions to?”

“It doesn’t matter if the records are basically public,” he said, with a frown. “I had no valid work-related reason to look her up.”

Tola stared at him. “Avenging angels and polar lights,” they breathed, eyes huge. “Vulcans. Incredible.”

“Dr. Tola -“

“As the ranking psionic ethicist onboard, I request that you, as the most senior class 10 telepath in the fleet, look up Cadet McCoy’s records and any related staff records, and that you use all of your security clearance privileges to do so. I’m in charge of the Academy telepath certs this year, and I need another certified telepath to sign off that they’ve read her information and that it seems to be in order. Dr. Miranda Jones is, uh, no longer available. A formality, but considering Joanna’s the first cadet to go up for multiple classes of psionic skills up to ten since, well, you, I think you’re just the man for the job.”

“I -“

“Will you fulfill my request, sir?”

“Yes, Dr. Tola.”

And so, several shifts later, he finally could make the case that he had time to attend to what was a minor administrative issue for Starfleet Academy. It was unexpectedly difficult to say the simple statement: “Computer, please pull up full records pertaining to Cadet Joanna McCoy.” He stared at his screen while absentmindedly giving his asked for authorization code, which would allow him far more demographic and professional information than a casual search. The computer, of course, was prompt. As computers, his computers, tended to be.

Full Name: Joanna McCoy sh’Valrass
Designated Form of Address: Joanna McCoy
Species: HYBRID (Human - Aenar)
Sex: HYBRID (Human sex: Intersex; Andorian sex: shen)
Gender: Female, she/her
Rank: Cadet, senior-grade
Posting: Starfleet Academy (student, undergraduate)
Citizenship: United Federation of Planets, Vulcan
Permanent Residence: Shi’Kahr, Vulcan

A young, heart-shaped face followed on the screen, with familiar large eyes, this time hazel. Her hair was the bright white of an Andorian, and her antennae were prominent but delicate. Her blood, a mix of red and blue, gave her skin an almost washed-out lilac hue. Otherwise, she looked like a narrower and prettier Leonard McCoy.

Oh.

He continued scrolling down. And, there, all along, was another answer to a question he had not let himself ask:

Archived profiles for Joanna McCoy sh’Valrass (Joanna McCoy): Starfleet dependent, linked to 

  • Lieutenant Commander Leonard Horatio McCoy (Leonard McCoy), MD, PhD; CMO, USS Enterprise (active); CUSTODIAL PARENT/GUARDIAN
  • Commander Jhoznithelin th’Valrass (Joss Thelin), PhD; First Officer, USS Ticonderoga (deceased); PARENT (NON-CUSTODIAL)
  • Lieutenant Nhimurhemmer ch’Valrass (Hemmer), MS; Chief Engineer, USS Enterprise (deceased); TEMPORARY GUARDIAN/RELATIVE

Oh.

Notes:

Episodes: Assignment: Earth -> Bread and Circuses (lines quoted) -> “Spock’s Brain” (post episode) -> “The Enterprise Incident” (lines quoted) -> “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” (post episode)

On Thelin:

Muahahahahaha and so the entire premise of the fic is revealed. Commander Thelin is the first officer of the Enterprise in the timeline where Spock died at seven in the TAS episode “Yesteryear.” He rules, actually!

It’s also my pet theory that the entire reason Aenar are pale is because of the gray color palette in that episode (which was incidental and not that deep). I also am convinced that Hemmer in SNW is a deep cut reference to Thelin, since they look and sort of act similarly.

The full name “Thelin th’Valrass” is from beta canon, following the later convention of Andorian names, and he does die when he’s first officer of the Ticonderoga.

On Gary Seven:

It’s my current headcanon that Gary Seven is a Coppelius android, but it’s not important to this story, so whatever.

As to Aegis vs Federation time cop jurisdiction, I sort of made this up, but circumstantially I’m thinking about how Daniels had to secretly send Archer and T’Pol on a mission to 2004, and had them mess with 1944 in a Hail Mary attempt to stop the temporal (hot) war. Also that of all the many time travel episodes to 20th/21st-c Earth, the only canon appearances of “adult supervision” from time traveling agents are the Aegis/Traveler supervisors, in TOS (Gary Seven, 1968) and Picard (Talinn, Wesley Crusher I guess, 2024). This also, to me, explains why something as messy as First Contact could have been allowed to happen slash a variety of other deeply silly time travel shenanigans. Remember that one time Quark did Roswell?

Also, I’m sorry if those segments were confusing. They were supposed to not entirely make sense, and no you should no know whose “voice” Spock was hearing, though you might be able to guess.

The chapter title is a reference to how "Assignment: Earth" was a backdoor pilot for a time-traveling Gary Seven show. And also a sex joke.

On “The Enterprise Incident”:

Drozana Station is a location in Star Trek: Online that’s close to the Klingon neutral zone. There’s actually a whole mission where McCoy and Scotty run afoul of some “ghosts.” I chose it mostly because it’s easier to describe and the station itself is creepy and absolutely a place where Section 31 would meet someone. I’ve been playing the game mostly for the Romulan content.

The “Way of D’era” is from a Romulan RPG sourcebook, as is Tellus and the myth of Vorta Vor.

I have no evidence that Remans are related to the Qowat Milat, but it makes sense to me because they’re the Romulan ethnicity that is renowned for martial prowess and are (in beta canon) closer to Vulcans and at least telepathic (in alpha canon). The idea that the Qowat Milat is a suspected Vulcan psyop cracks me up.

Yes, I am implying that T’Nura is T’Pol’s half-sister (more on that soon), and this is actually an idea from the Enterprise showrunners. They were considering having one of the MACOs be her half-sister and a Tal Shiar operative in season five. I wonder what she was actually up to, hmmmmm.

On Miranda Jones and Keslovar:

“Is There in Truth No Beauty?” is my canon resource for human telepathy and the philosophy of Vulcan telepathic disciplines (well, apart from Study Hour With Tuvok).

So, no joke, I hypothesized the existence of some psionic research institute on Vulcan (based on “Gambit” in TNG mostly) and was going to reference it, but then Star Trek: Picard just gave me Keslovar on a silver platter in the second-to-last episode.

All conspiracies about Surak’s katra are my own lmfao. As is the idea that there are particularly powerful lineages of telepaths. I don’t really like the “special heir of special family” trope, but there does appear to be variation in the relative strengths of Vulcan telepaths, and heredity being relevant seems reasonable.

I’m using the beta canon Andorian sex system. We’re not going to get prurient about Joanna’s reproductive situation in this series, but it’s occasionally relevant. I feel a little weird about just flatout having that information in Joanna’s personnel file - I go back and forth.

Like if you too believe TNG Romulan uniforms are a travesty when we could have had the uniforms in “The Enterprise Incident”; comment if you have an opinion on how much of a service top Spock is - I go back and forth.

In all seriousness, how surprised are you that McCoy has a half-Aenar daughter? Who did you think McCoy’s late partner was? Are you proud of me that he's a canon character?

Chapter 13: The Empath (Nyota's Version)

Summary:

Spock has more on his mind than usual and less of it is coming from him.

Notes:

Thanks so much to everyone who commented in my unplanned hiatus - I'm posting! I'm doing it! I've already split the chapter and it's still uh 20k, but hopefully that means I'll update again soonish. I've moved the "changelog" of edits I've made since S2 of SNW to the beginning of this fic.

The title structure is a Taylor Swift reference obvi.

Also, this is the most meta chapter of this fic hopefully.

Content Note:
Mentions of wartime trauma and concern over being a soldier expressed by a student, mentions of mirror universe events from previous chapters, discussion of a "Title IX" type situation that is more or less resolved immediately, discussion of miscegenation laws and interspecies racism that has parallels to uh reality, reference to symptoms of physical illness, discussion of breakup, references to sexual content (not onscreen this time), references to "heat" cycles in alien reproduction, difficult emotional convos abt a confusing ongoing sexual relationship while drunk, references to canon non-con in "Plato's Stepchildren," depiction of PTSD, canonical deaths of minor characters, discussion of events in "The Empath," discussion of ancient Vulcan "women as property" references in canon with a light brush with the concept of "social death" and slavery if you squint.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

[circa 2268, USS Enterprise, Alpha and Beta Quadrants]

“Wow,” Nyota said. On the viewscreen in her quarters, a young face frozen in uncertainty. Big hazel eyes, wide, violet-blushed cheeks fading into frosty lavender skin.

“Um,” said her interlocutor, “I know it’s different from what we talked about last time. I’m sure it’s too… childish.”

“Well, you calling your beautiful new song childish is the most childish thing about your work at the moment, Jo,” Nyota said, leavening the cadet’s anxiety with measured praise. Nothing was worse for a new songwriter than getting attached, either way, to other peoples’ opinions about their music.

Cadet Joanna Eleanora McCoy sh’Valrass gave a half-smile and a knowing, embarrassed shrug. A teenager’s pantomime of how wearily she’d feel it, when she was actually older, when reminded of behavior she should have outgrown. The behavior of someone used to the company of adults, who grew up too fast: now, confronted with the cognitive dissonance of becoming an adult instead of a child who acted like one, realizing that the whirlwind of passion and doubt inside did not simply abate and maybe never would. Nyota knew this all too well. Then again, this lack of experience itself was the root of Joanna’s insecurity about the turn in her songwriting of late: it took time for objectivity and tenderness for the raw power of youthful expression to grow.

“At the end of the day, I believe that music is a composition that speaks to a listener’s feelings. The mechanism of music, all its moving parts, is very complex and ambiguous, mathematical axioms and how you slept last night merged when you step up to the mic. I think you’re uncertain about writing something so confessional and lyrically direct because you’re trying out trusting the music - your learned and intuitive knowledge of the art - and letting go, which is a newer experience for you. Or, writing pop, to cut to the chase.”

“Honestly, I just thought it might be a bit corny.”

Nyota grinned. “Thinking something is corny is just the mind’s reaction to emotional influence that doesn’t feel earned. It feels weird that people's feelings just matter to us, despite the tests we make up for feelings to size them up. ‘Earning it’ is the artifice - but then again, that’s art.”

“Huh, I hadn’t thought about it that way,” Joanna said, looking off slightly, weighing and listening to everything in her head. “Just to double-check, you don’t think my new song is corny?”

“No, I don’t think your song is corny, Jo,” Nyota said, feeling indulgent and fond. “I’m really impressed by how sophisticated your style has become in such a short time. You’re Andorian, the species that single-handedly reignited the karaoke and recreational recording industry in the Bay Area, so it’s not really surprising that you’d be singing and writing songs in your spare time. But you seem to have a drive to polish your efforts and create a consistent sound, and to be thoughtful about your influences. Have you been performing any of your songs?”

“Yes,” she said, faintly blushing, a dark bloom of purple on her lilac cheeks. “I’ve played most of the open mics in SF and Oakland, and got invited for a showcase down in LA a few weeks ago. Actually, I wanted to talk to you about something that came up, um, down there.”

“Shoot.”

“Well, some folks came up after and asked if I was interested in being a vocalist for a band. Their band. They liked my voice and my, um, stage presence.”

Nyota took a second to digest this. This was a tricky one: discussing the merit of this particular offer was easy enough, but the implications of getting more serious as a songwriter and performer were pretty significant for a cadet about to finish her third year, especially one who was being aggressively headhunted for helm positions. She was balancing an overloaded schedule this term, having to speed-run all the tactical and combat requirements of the piloting track that she’d put off. She wasn’t even taking a Vulcan lit class this spring, and she seemed a bit worn around the edges. If she didn’t find her balance soon, Nyota had considered being direct with her: if Joanna was resistant to her current path for the reasons she suspected, the problem wouldn’t go away.

“What are they called? Do they have any records out?”

“The band is called Sevrin. They’ve released two EPs, and are about to record their debut album. The sessions they have booked on Cait sort of overlap with summer term, which isn’t… not possible.”

“Summer break” at the Academy, as at most undergraduate institutions, was a bit of a misnomer. Rotations, internships, special study programs off-world were typical. For third-years, particularly, the last summer was key. For future helm officers, it was practically unheard of to not do a piloting and tactical rotation cruise. For a precocious pilot like Joanna, she should be setting her sights on a Constitution-class cruise, if she wanted to be in the running for a coveted ensign bridge post on the Enterprise, like Chekov, which everyone assumed she did. 

Sulu, in particular, was keen on the idea that they would scoop both Jo and her boyfriend-slash-Rigel-Cup-teammate, Torias Kolvoord, and had already poached the fourth-year Trill: he wouldn’t shut up about how “cute” it would be to get Joanna too, even as poor Pavel got twitchy and subtly brooding whenever in earshot. Joanna, however, had never said she wanted to serve on the Enterprise, and Nyota had never asked. It wasn’t appropriate, and besides, she had a strong suspicion the answer was “no” and the girl was just putting off telling her father. Who, she happened to know, didn’t want her on the Enterprise either, or to be assigned to a combat-ready vessel in general. He wasn’t saying anything because he wanted to support her unconditionally and knew, if he got too protective, that everyone could and would rightly call the doctor a hypocrite. No one on the ship had less of a self-preservation instinct except Spock.

The last time they’d talked about it, he’d compared his situation to the one Ambassador Sarek had bungled with said Spock, and had glared at her while she laughed for several minutes at the idea of Leo thinking he was or could be anything like whatever tangle of repression, entitlement, and messiah complex Sarek was. Though, she couldn’t help thinking, as she watched Joanna’s composed face and poise, with her intense and expressive hazel eyes, that she did remind her of Spock. A much younger Spock, anyway. She toyed again with the thought of introducing them, but set the thought aside. Who knew on any given day if Spock was going to be your knight in shining armor or a wounded child or a pure-hearted intellect or a petty douchebag? A cadet exposed to that behavior would likely blame herself for whatever weird ambivalence she got, and Nyota wasn’t about to let that happen on her watch.

“I haven’t heard of Sevrin,” she said, “but I’ll look them up. That could be a really good place to start if you feel the music is a good fit. Sometimes you learn the most about yourself by seeing how you fit in someone else’s mold. What’s their vibe?”

“Um, they’re into some kind of retro acid rock thing. Terran psychedelia throwback. It’s cool, and I do think I’d learn a lot.”

“A lot of Andorian influences, too, right? I mean, if they’re going with a name like ‘Sevrin.’” Sevrin had been the name of the Vulcan ship that made first contact with Andoria centuries ago, and, through various quirks of history, became part of the Andorian fleet. There was a visionary book ascribed to an Aenar philosopher and historian onboard, which was considered way ahead of its time in its assumptions about different species’ cultures and their similarities. There was a kind of fad on Earth about it, treating it like a pseudo-religious text, just one that could mean whatever you wanted and didn’t demand respect based on fraught millennia of lived history. Like white people and yoga on pre-Contact Earth, probably. The hippie, psychedelia angle made sense, actually.

“Oh,” Joanna said. “The music doesn’t really have any Andorian influences. No one in the band is Andorian. They talk about how much they love Aenar existentialism in the notes on their second EP, The Way to Eden.”

Oh, hell no, Nyota thought. We are nipping this in the bud. She paused, regrouping.

“Huh,” she said. “Again, I’ll look them up. I have to ask, though, Jo, that sounds pretty different from your own music: how are you going to make time for your own songs?”

“I’m just an amateur,” she said, blushing violet again. “I figure I should get more real-world experience before committing to a style.”

“Tell you what,” Nyota said, thinking on her feet. “I know you’ve recorded some of your songs - I want you to put together a demo. Minimal editing, just enough so it plays smoothly. M’Ress will ask her brother to listen and tell us what he thinks: where you’re at, and how you should be thinking about next steps.” 

Nyota mentally crossed her fingers. She hadn’t exactly asked M’Ress beforehand, but she hoped her previous restraint around M’Ress’s older brother M’mneirr being an up-and-coming music producer on Cait - the Nashville of the Beta Quadrant - would pay off and she’d get the favor easily enough. She knew M’mneirr liked her and M’Ress’s music, at least, maybe too much for the amount of time either lieutenant had to devote to it.

“I… wow,” Joanna said, almost hiding her discomfort. “As long as it isn’t any trouble for anybody, I can do that. Um, thank you.”

Nyota smirked internally. Gotcha. Joanna had become too acculturated to Vulcan mores. Gratitude was rude, and so was refusing a gift for any reason other than airtight logic. After all, to demur was to question the logic of the giver. She wondered how fraught the conflict between Joanna’s inner Vulcan and inner southerner was on a daily basis.

Pressing her advantage, she went a bit further. “Speaking of future plans, have you taken a look at the Interstellar Cultural Studies program at Berkeley that I sent you?”

Joanna folded her arms, appearing skeptical, but amused. “Yeah, I looked at it. I’m guessing you think I should apply.”

“I think you’d love it and you’d benefit from the flexibility and multiple disciplines. Xenoanthropology, translation studies, interspecies psychology, comparative literature, even some support for occupational and bio-engineering. Sometimes these kinds of mix-and-match programs leave you hanging, but the professors involved are being super intentional about setting up important and coherent research directions for their grads. I can think of ten different Starfleet careers you could pursue with that doctorate.”

She hoped, anyway. Her Academy roommate, Gaila, who probably would have been voted least-likely-to-become-a-professor-at-Berkeley, hadn’t exactly put it like that, but the Orion had been intrigued enough by the prospect to accept an invitation to join the group from the STEM side despite her distaste for any and all “service” work and general lack of patience with the humanities.

Joanna still seemed skeptical, but was wavering. “I don’t think I can be stationed in the Bay for at least half a year at a time and still pilot. You kind of need to be on a ship for that.”

“That’s probably true,” Nyota said.

Joanna just looked at her.

Nyota looked right back.

Joanna folded first. “So you don’t think I should be a helm officer? That’s a first. Well, other than Sarek, who’s, well, Sarek.”

“I think,” she replied, choosing her words carefully, “that you’re not completely convinced that piloting is the right path for you.”

Joanna rubbed her eyes, her rather dainty antennae twitching like dandelions in a stiff breeze. “I know what you mean, it’s just… It’s frustrating because it’s come up with my… but you’re not here to talk about him, um…”

“I don’t need you to prove to me you’re a self-reliant woman,” she said. “You can talk about your boyfriend.”

“Okay,” said Joanna, letting out a breath, “yeah, I’m having trouble maybe changing directions and Torias is part of that. I’m not sure it’s his fault. He’s just being really persistent about getting me on the team for the Rigel Cup this year. He’s coaching the team, and it’s very important to him: I think his test pilot rotation at Utopia Planitia this term is kind of boring, and you don’t get to do much as a cadet. You know how much pressure he feels, being a candidate with the Symbiosis Commission. Everything he does has to be exceptional and unique and also extraordinary service to society. Most service to society doesn’t get you a trophy to put on a shelf. He thinks I’d be a role model and give us all an edge. He’s right that it can’t hurt for my career, if I want a good piloting post. I just… don’t want to. I almost had a nervous breakdown and flunked spring term the last time I was on the team.”

“He’s not listening to you when you say you’re not interested?”

“I think he just doesn’t get how much doing it would bother me, so he feels unsupported. And if he doesn’t get me not wanting to do the Rigel Cup again…”

“You’re concerned he’ll be even less understanding about you wanting to drop out of the piloting track altogether.”

“Yeah.” Joanna winced. “Okay, I can see you’re making a face. The ‘dump him’ face. I don’t want to do that either.”

“Girl, you need to prepare for any grown woman to lead with that when you have boy problems. But this is about what you want.”

“I just feel like piloting is our thing, and we can be close both in our careers and interests and off-duty. Sulu always talks about how ‘adorable’ it would be if we were both on the Enterprise. And I like that - feeling so close to someone all the time. And I worry too that I’m just doing my… usual wishy-washy bullshit.”

Nyota’s eyes narrowed. “He said that to you?”

“No,” Joanna said, quickly. “Of course not. I just get insecure because he’s so focused. Meanwhile, I’m in the Rigel Cup one year, winning the Skon Prize the next, and now I’m maybe going to be in a band? Oh, and Dr. Jones put me up for class 10 telepath certs before she left without telling me, and I don’t have a good reason to pull my name. I’m all over the place - I can never commit to anything. Like what kind of Starfleet post is that?” She gave a bitter chuckle. “Maybe I can be Starfleet’s first floater.”

Amazing, Nyota thought, composing her face and swearing internally. She managed to turn her accomplishments and many gifts into a character flaw. Virtuosic self-deprecation, really, and that was coming from her. You’re just young, she wanted to say. You don’t have commitment issues, you’re genuinely figuring out who you are. Someday you’ll see where your steps have been guiding you, and it will be like a revelation.

But, of course, she didn’t say any of that. When she was Joanna’s age, she wouldn’t have been placated by that. “Two things, Jo. It’s a good and not a bad thing to be drawn to different things. Most of the best commanders have some surprising road-not-traveled or niche talent: it shows creative thinking and curiosity. Being an ensign is humbling no matter what you’re doing. Being locked into a path right now isn’t, well, logical. Second and more importantly, and I want you to really listen to me, Jo.” She waited until Joanna was fully attentive. “You don’t have to be in Starfleet, and there’s no deadline to say ‘I’m doing this forever.’ It’s not like marriage. Or, it is, in that marriages can and do end. It’s not like death. Death is the only thing that’s just itself.”

“But -”

Nyota waited.

“I thought you were going to cut me off,” Joanna admitted.

“I want you to actually tell me what that ‘but’ is about.”

“I’m being hard on myself, but I am a good pilot. A really good pilot. Even if I want to throw up after combat drills, I’m still the best shot in my cohort. My instructor told me I have an intuitive defense against the ‘fog of war’ since I’m so in-the-moment when I fly. Me being at the helm could… save people’s lives.”

Well, that was a telling hesitation. Nyota never had been able to make sense of the tradition that had helm officers also part of the tactical crew. Ortegas complained about that all the time, and said that it made more sense to collapse navigator and pilot into one role as the nav computers got better than to have pilots be gunners as well. She considered how to bring this up.

“Like your father?”

Joanna sighed. “Which one?”

“Both. Either. I think you know what I’m going to say.”

“That I can save people’s lives in lots of ways, especially with languages - I mean, just look at you! -, and it’s just as valuable to do something that makes those lives better outside of a crisis?”

“Well, sure, but no. I think you’re avoiding the fact that being at the helm is not about saving lives, because that wouldn’t be your whole job.”

Joanna swallowed. “I’d take lives too. In saving some lives, I’d be taking other lives, by my direct actions. And it doesn’t feel the same as fighting face-to-face, in self-defense.”

“Yes,” said Nyota, nodding, “I think that’s actually the issue you have with a helm post.”

“It makes me feel like a coward or selfish,” she whispered. “Why do I get to be spared the hard choices? I know I could do it, be a - a warrior, but I don’t want to be the person I’d become. Though that probably makes me a shitty Andorian.”

“Because your dad wasn’t spared, and it feels like a rejection? And I do mean your thavan, this time.”

“I have no idea how he did it,” Joanna said. “I’m only half-Aenar, and it’s tearing me apart. And I’m afraid that - that it did tear him apart. There was this feeling I’d get through our bond, especially during the war, that he was crying when he definitely wasn’t - on the surface of his mind he wasn’t even upset. I think he was scared and ashamed a lot of the time. Daddy’s all but confirmed that thavan was on the frontlines the whole time.”

“I think,” Nyota said, deciding to take a risk, “that you also know a big part of him would give anything, did give everything, so that you’d live in a world where you didn’t have to make the choices he did. You can be close to him by honoring his gift, not becoming just like your memory of him.”

“Yeah,” she said, softly. “I feel like there’s all this pressure on me, but I know thavan wouldn’t have wanted that. Daddy definitely doesn’t. He’d probably love it if I joined a band and dropped out of Starfleet, if it made me happy. I don’t know where this weight is coming from. Also, none of this has to do with Torias and the Rigel Cup - it was just an easier problem to think about.”

Nyota didn’t know where the weight was coming from either, though she suspected once Jo teased out what it was, a lot would change. “This is why,” she said, “you don’t need to be ashamed to bring up stuff about your boyfriend. It’s never really about the man, in the end.”

Joanna laughed, relaxing. “How’s M’Ress? You moved in together last week, right?”

M’Ress, at the moment, was sprawled on a thick rug in the room area, in a pile of blankets and pillows, limbs akimbo and with so much hair fanning out, in her underwear, a cami and tiny boxer briefs she wore as though it were sexy lingerie. Nyota didn’t want to admit this, but she kind of liked that she was the only one at the moment who got to see her girlfriend in her natural hot girl element, unafraid, in their little world, to cherish one another for their sensuality and physicality as much as everything else. M’Ress gave the tiniest meow and rolled over, her lionine tail curling around her like an actual cat.

“She’s wonderful, as usual,” Nyota said, knowing a dopey smile was on her face. “She barely had one box to move. Well, aside from her synths and strings. We made the other sleeping alcove into our little studio.” 

M’Ress had the overall demeanor of an absentminded slob in private spaces, but also had the wisdom to embrace minimalism as a countermeasure. Nyota had initially been concerned her preoccupation with organizing and cleaning would freak her girlfriend out, but it’d been surprisingly easy. The Caitian had been content to exist harmoniously within the systems Nyota needed to feel comfortable, without judging her. She did insist, however, on organizing the music alcove in a way that made sense to her.

“How’d you score shared quarters? I thought you had to be married.”

“We swapped our singles for some junior-grade lieutenants’ shared suite. It’s actually slightly more room.” 

Spock, on a day where the gods of his inner nature decreed he’d be a total sweetheart, had, when rejecting their application, noted that a double was more room than family quarters, and that he’d arranged the swaps with eager, more junior officers. He’d apparently done the same for Dr. Tola and Dr. Noel, and she vaguely wondered if he had a soft spot for lesbian couples. Maybe just an odd gentlemanly streak.

Their conversation wound down, an easy exchange of gossip and banter. When the call ended, Nyota went to their low-yield synthesizer and put in an order for a large bottle of water. She went to her bureau and retrieved an extra-fuzzy, soft blanket she had seen M’Ress petting at an Andorian shop at the last space station stopover. After a pause, she fetched one of her skants she’d planned to wear again before doing laundry, and took that and the blanket and water over to M’Ress.

Her girlfriend went for the skant and then the blanket, burying her nose in the former, and wrapping the latter around herself, then tucking the skant over one of her many pillows strewn about her eclectic nest. Nyota had to tap the water bottle lightly on her shoulder to get her to take it.

“Have you put in for medical leave yet, baby?”

“Yes,” M’Ress hiss-murmured. “I am fortunate our doctor so harasses us for checkups. Leo caught my hormone levels spiking early. He already approved your leave in advance - you can call him instead of Mr. Spock when it is time.”

“Leo’s good like that; drink all of it.”

“I will be very well-hydrated this time,” M’Ress said, after chugging half the bottle. “You are a very capable mate.”

Nyota was proud that she only faintly blushed. She had been completely panicked the first time M’Ress’s yearly… cycle had come up, primarily because M’Ress had tried to keep her out of it. “Humans, they do not like to think of primordial mating behaviors,” she’d said, dismissively. “Afraid of instinct.”

Now, Nyota kind of liked it. Not the inconvenience M’Ress and every Caitian went through, but knowing she could actually take care of someone. It was all very physical, erotic, grounded.

Speaking of: “I saw you skipped lunch today. What can I bring you from the mess?”

“I wish for the Terran comfort food: chocolate ice cream,” she replied, her tail twitching as though daring Nyota to challenge her choice. Like she would. M’Ress was probably the most solicitous partner she’d ever had when it came to her own monthly cycle, and had been an ardent adopter of the old Terran PMS standbys.

“You got it,” Nyota said. “Whipped cream and caramel sauce?”

“Yes, my darling,” she said, and gave a little purr, before turning around in the blankets again. With a small smile that just wouldn’t stop, she walked purposefully from their quarters, debating whether she, too, required ice cream.

She turned the corner and Spock ran right into her, sending her stumbling.

“My apologies, lieutenant,” he said, looking - for Spock - frazzled. “I have… for Dr. Tola, for the Academy. I will think better with a walk. Since Dr. Jones -” He stopped himself and straightened up. “My apologies, as well, Nyota, for my outburst. Excuse me.”

He then walked quickly to the turbolift. Wow. She didn’t even know what version of Spock that was. Not my circus, not my monkeys, she said to herself, firm. Nothing was on her plate for the next sixteen hours except sleep and babying her hormonal girlfriend. 

After all, as the old saying goes: Speak of the devil, and he will appear.

 

***

 

After his embarrassing mid-corridor collision with Lieutenant Uhura, Spock was relieved to find the observation deck mercifully empty when he arrived, so he could pace across the entire lounge, back and forth.

The defining features of ampliative arguments are their fluidity and their relative definitions of correctness. Based on a certain set of assumptions, he had inferred a series of conclusions. Now he had more information, and the shape of the knowledge changed. This was to be expected, the variability of abductive logic. 

First Assumption: Dr. McCoy maintained certain boundaries between himself and aliens. Even if these boundaries were slighter than his curmudgeonly grousing at green blood and Vulcan austerity initially implied, there was still some final limit nothing unhuman could cross.

Second Assumption: Dr. McCoy would not produce offspring with an alien.

Third Assumption: Joss, Dr. McCoy’s late bondmate, was human.

Fourth Assumption: Joanna McCoy is human.

There were other related assumptions that had also skewed his results.

Assumption: Joss’s relative absence from McCoy’s and his daughter’s lives meant he was a civilian and not a member of Starfleet. And certainly not a member of the Command Division.

Assumption: Human-Andorian hybrids were impossible.

Assumption: Any discriminatory treatment Joanna had received on Vulcan was orthogonal to her non-Vulcan genetics and not based on bitter historical precedent due to her specific heritage.

Assumption: Dr. McCoy’s ambivalence about Vulcans was irrational and more inherently xenophobic than rooted in concrete negative experiences with Vulcans specifically.

Assumption: Sarek’s interest in the McCoys’ plight was to some degree irrational and apolitical and parallels to his own difficulties in childhood were tangential.  

Assumption: His parents’ involvement with the McCoys was an aberration, and there were no extensive social connections between the doctor and himself.

He could see why he had arrived at these assumptions. He had made a point of not voyeuristically intruding into the doctor’s personal life, the same as any other member of the crew. His reasons for keeping his distance from the social minutiae of the crew’s lives were logical and sound. This was merely a downside of this specific approach to interpersonal relations. He simply had to adjust the narrative, the timeline. Nothing was wrong.

At some point early in his career, Dr. McCoy had bonded with a fellow Starfleet officer, Commander Thelin - why was that name familiar? - an Aenar. He had given birth to a half-human, half-Aenar daughter before he was twenty-two. The doctor had developed the standard for hybrid species medical records soon after for reasons of necessity, not mere intellectual interest. His later work on Vulcan with Cardassian hybrids followed this research trajectory. During the Klingon war, Joanna had lived with an “uncle,” who was evidently the late Lieutenant Hemmer, an Aenar and engineer Spock had considered his version of a friend and confidante, and had been Lieutenant Uhura’s beloved mentor. This fit what he knew. When the Enterprise had been sent away from the front, Hemmer had requested a transfer back to the shipyards orbiting the gas giant Andor, where he’d served until the end of the war, and then he’d returned to serve out the remainder of their five-year mission.

Around that time, Dr. McCoy had accepted a transfer to the Enterprise, to serve under Dr. M’Benga. And Thelin - ah, this is part of it - Thelin had as well. La’an Noonien-Singh had been a last minute replacement for their new tactical and second officer, an Andorian named Thelin, who had died in an accident during an away mission. There had been some excitement about Thelin, he recalled, though he hadn’t noted why. A matter of weeks was the difference between their lives now and a reality where he and McCoy would have both served under Captain Pike, and Joanna would have had the benefit of three powerful telepaths on one of the most resilient and well-armed ships in the fleet: Hemmer, her own thavan, and Spock himself, who was also half-human. In that case, Spock realized, he and McCoy would have almost certainly been on friendly terms from the beginning, not separated by rank and stripped of ten years of wear and tear on Spock’s capacity for valuing human friendliness.

He was distracted from his recounting: even after Thelin’s death, McCoy had won his transfer to the Enterprise on his own terms. Surely Joanna would have benefited from a familial telepath and from Spock’s own presence, even if she were experiencing emotional difficulties. Not that he would have expected McCoy to think of him at all, but Hemmer should have been enough. He had no particular facility with children, but he knew he would have diligently applied himself to her development where appropriate: his younger self at the very least would identify an immediate and implacable logical obligation to the girl, just as Amanda and Sarek had. After all, despite his emotional ambivalence toward his father, he had always trusted his judgment and reasoning. He had also been so much more willing to offer compassion unprompted ten years ago. Dr. McCoy wouldn’t have had to resign his commission, become ensnared by his father’s dubious patronage, become particularly distrustful of Vulcans, lose his United Earth citizenship, move his daughter to a remote and bleak colony world, threatened by raiders and starvation. If he had just tried -

No, Spock told himself. No hypotheticals, I am reviewing a more likely explanation of events.

After Thelin’s death, due to Joanna’s difficulties, Dr. McCoy resigned his commission and went in search of telepathic experts, leading him to Vulcan. Here was the first step in this revised timeline that did not make complete sense. McCoy had said that Joss’s family did not have the resources to tend to her needs. That had seemed reasonable when he assumed “Joss” was a human telepath: it made far less sense in light of Thelin being Aenar. Aenar telepathic cultural practices were profound, ancient, and robust, if not as systemized as Vulcans’ were. Furthermore, Hemmer had clearly not taken a larger role in Joanna’s life prior to his own death, which was puzzling. He would set this matter aside until he had more information.

The rest was mostly the same. The McCoys falling in with his parents, his work with Vulcan-Cardassian refugees, his transfer to Cerberus, and his eventual arrival on the Enterprise. He winced when his memories of the doctor’s misadventures in the Terran Empire universe reassembled themselves, now making perfect sense. The imperial Terrans were human fascists, with Vulcans or high-status Vulcans, anyway, also making the cut. Bearing a half-alien child absolutely sounded like something that would lose a human their Terran citizenship. If Vulcans had any degree of influence in that universe, Andorians would certainly have been considered inferior and hostile. Even as a decidedly non-fascist version of Vulcan society, most Vulcans a generation above him and beyond also (in private) considered Andorian culture inferior and hostile. She would have been considered a doomed “abomination,” and she would have been a material liability to that universe’s McCoy - the other Spock had not made a snap judgment based on no evidence. Loath as he was to admit it, his counterpart’s thought process had been more logical than he had assumed. No less appalling, of course. 

The obverse of this murderous ethno-supremacist rationale was what he could extrapolate from his father’s known motivations. Being the patron of an exceptional human girl merely supported the longstanding and uncharitable notion that his father had an exceptional preference for human women. He had seen Michael’s humanity ultimately marginalized in his family’s public image, despite early threats towards her that were more about him and his hybridity. 

Championing the Vulcan education and Vulcan citizenship of an Andorian hybrid, and a telepathic Aenar at that, was an adroit and obvious extension of his agenda as Vulcan’s ambassador to the Federation, the sort of move that was evidence of aptitude for being a Federation ambassador-at-large. Sponsoring Joanna was a statement, not a fetish. And yes, to the extent his father was motivated by compassion - as his mother certainly was - her being a telepathic half-human hybrid being targeted by Vulcan chauvinists was absolutely a reminder to his parents of his own childhood difficulties. The parallels were much sharper than he had assumed.

He told himself this was all very reassuring - that things that had seemed bizarre, when placed in context, were far less outlandish. Still, though, the desperation of McCoy and his daughter after Commander Thelin’s death seemed puzzling. And there was something he was missing about Thelin, something he should know.

Reminding himself of Dr. Tola’s request, he began to peruse Thelin’s personnel record on the padd he’d brought with him. The gap in his knowledge was almost immediately apparent and shamefully obvious. He had somehow neglected to remember that Thelin th’Valrass had been one of the more famous pilots in living memory, as Ortegas and now Sulu occasionally interspersed into their ex tempore lectures on “flying.” He was particularly lauded for his single-handed rescue of the Yorktown from a deadly subspace anomaly in a one-man vessel due to what he’d been assured was “fancy flying.” Years ago, Thelin had captained the winning Starfleet team in the Rigel Cup for five years straight. He, in fact, had been on the same team as a young Christopher Pike. Spock wondered if they had even been friends. They had attended the Academy around the same time -

He stopped. That was an entirely new piece of information. Thelin th’Valrass had been approximately the same age as Christopher Pike. He checked the exact dates. Thelin was more than twenty years older than Dr. McCoy. He added a new assumption he’d made: Dr. McCoy had formed a romantic and co-parenting partnership with a peer.

With a sinking feeling, he more closely scrutinized Thelin’s service record. He then saw something he had never seen before. Thelin had risen through the ranks, helmsman, tactical officer, XO, and attained the rank of captain. Then, after he had become captain of the USS Yorktown - McCoy had been posted there at the same time -, dovetailing closely with Joanna McCoy’s birth, there was a gap in his service record of six months, after which he had a post on a science research station. At the rank of commander. Spock didn’t even know that was possible, to be demoted from captain to commander. There was, understandably, a flag from Starfleet Command linked as a footnote to his last command as captain, which simply read REDACTED.

Spock, of course, had the permissions to see past the amended record. It was a court martial. The charges had been dismissed. The charge: sexual misconduct.

Spock walked back and forth on the observation deck, purposeful and going nowhere. The tatters of the old timeline, the new narrative lay scattered on the threshing floor of his mind. He carried it with him as he went through his weekly routine, fairly uneventful aside from a surreal interlude in a recreation of the “O.K. Corral.”

“So,” Dr. Tola said during their “study hall” after thirty-seven minutes of silence in the psionometrics lab, “I take it you looked Joanna up.”

Spock did not dignify this with a response.

Tola huffed, irritated. “Oh, come on, I know you have questions.”

He did. “How many people onboard are aware of Joanna’s unique heritage?”

Tola rolled their eyes, and seemed to be considering not dignifying this with a response. “Probably every single one of them, Spock. You’ll remember she won the Rigel Cup as a very perky and attractive teenager. She was splashed over sports news and ‘life and culture’ sections for weeks. Lots of talk in interviews about how her ‘daddy’ and her thavan were inspirations for her Starfleet career.”

Yes, the Rigel Cup. He felt legitimately reproved by this detail: he had never believed news covering “social interests” valuable sources of information. In this case, he was clearly in error. If he had paid only slightly more attention to the event, a lot of erroneous thinking could have been avoided.

“Any other questions?”

“I found the notation about Thelin’s court martial,” he said. “I confess to a personal interest in knowing whether Dr. McCoy’s relationship with his late… partner was in any way coercive.”

Tola went stiff, their face rigid with shock or possibly rage. “Oh, so they still have that in there, do they? So much for expunged records.”

Spock remained still, warring with his own impatience.

“Well,” Tola said, conceding to something in Spock’s posture and expression, “the only authority on that subject is Leo. But I can say that usually in cases of sexual misconduct there’s a complainant, whether one of the people involved or a bystander who feels the relationship constitutes harassment or corruption. This one did not. The evidence upon which Starfleet filed charges against Thelin was the mere fact of Leo’s pregnancy and a DNA scan. Fraternizing between a captain and an ensign isn’t against regulations if they don’t serve together - it’s also possible when they do, if you squint at the regs. 

“There was never any evidence that Leo and Thelin were romantically involved on the Yorktown, and Leo’s assignment to that post was a last minute change made somewhere deep in Starfleet Medical. As you might imagine, a viable pregnancy between diploid and double diploid species came as a surprise. I got the impression they’d been casual before the Yorktown because of the age gap and professional concerns but had feelings for each other. Thelin pretty obviously did, at least to an Andorian. He was acting like a self-sacrificing romantic thaan stereotype out of a melodrama. But feelings aren’t against regulations either.”

Spock could tell he was frowning, if only slightly. “That does not make sense,” he said. “As you say, the mere fact of pregnancy does not violate any regulations.”

“It does,” said Tola, now bright with controlled rage, “if someone in the Judge Advocate General’s office creatively interprets the regulations on genetic augmentation as a sign of ‘corruption’ and ‘conduct unbecoming an officer’ that triggers a sexual misconduct case. But really, it felt like a verdict in search of a charge. That someone really didn’t like the idea of Starfleet personnel making half-human hybrids with any species that could do more than humans could. Or just the idea of being such a person: part of the case was trying to get Joanna banned from serving in Starfleet before she was even born.”

This was appalling. If he hadn’t borne witness to the travesty of Una Chin-Riley’s court martial for simply serving while being Illyrian, he would have considered it surprising. What he did find surprising, however, was that he personally had never heard of such an interpretation of his own genetics. 

“I am curious as to why I was never considered an augment myself then, and no barriers of that kind have presented themselves in my own career.”

“Yeah, I bet you are, and who wouldn’t be? Well, turns out this deranged case got cooked up and jammed through the military courts at the same time Starfleet Academy was assessing an application from a certain half-human telepath. Would it surprise you to know that, as far as I can tell, this was all Vulcan in-fighting?”

Another addition to the revised timeline: Spock would have been in the process of applying to Starfleet Academy during Dr. McCoy’s pregnancy.

“No,” he said, his voice sounding dull, even more monotone than usual, “I suppose it would not. Would a Vulcan named Pasalk happen to be involved in the case?”

“Yes,” they replied. “He was the prosecutor. I’m not sure why they called off the court martial, but I do know that Thelin’s legal team got swapped out midway through with some civil rights heavy hitters - the ones that rubbed elbows with the more progressive element in Vulcan-Federation politics. There were even rumors among the Andorians that the ambassador had involved himself. It didn’t really surprise me to learn Leo got connected with him later - Ambassador Sarek seems the type to keep track of the pawns he collects along the way.”

Indeed. He was bemused, an odd feeling, and he said: “Sarek was staunchly opposed to my career in Starfleet, so I would find that inconsistent with his behavior.”

“Maybe as regards you personally, but it sure as frosty hell is consistent with his political agenda. I mean, the highest rates of out-marriage in the Federation are between humans and Vulcans. Highest rates of hybrids, too, your generation and after. The Far Horizons bloc is staunchly opposed to miscegenation laws on the whole, finding them draconian and detrimental to expanding the Federation. As Vulcans and humans were a focal point, it made sense for the Vulcan guy with the human wife to elbow in. I mean, if the rumors were true. Could have just been T’Pol’s people, in retrospect.”

Spock wanted to say that this couldn’t possibly be true, but in fact he did not know either way. Species demographics and sociological shifts in marriage trends also went into the category of “useless information to follow.” Though he would have to meditate further on the fact that he may have gone out of the way to avoid the topic: being constantly reminded of the fact that many people viewed him as a “specimen” was counterproductive to his emotional control. In some ways, McCoy’s persistence in taking his Vulcan identity at face value during their public arguments was refreshing.

“I wasn’t aware of this broader political context,” he said.

Tola, to his surprise, nodded. “It’s not your job to know about it. You’re the one who has to actually deal with the consequences of everyone’s bad behavior and bad faith.”

“I do find it odd, however, that Vulcans and humans would find each other attractive,” he said. “In many ways, a human and Andorian couple seems far more likely, in terms of average temperament.”

“Okay, first of all, Andorians don’t really do couples like that except with aliens; our marriages have four people. Also, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but after a thousand years of Vulcans poking around the quadrant, humans were the first species to actually get along with them well enough that they went and founded a whole interstellar society with them. It’s like you’re obsessed with each other.”

“That has not been my personal experience.”

“Well, that’s because you’re an asshole who bullies anyone out of a positive interest in you, for any reason, including you being Vulcan. Also, you do realize - Vulcan or human aside - that the crew is either intimidated by you or admires you, right? You have their respect, and the people who get to know you tend to like you. I even like you, and I was prepared to barely tolerate you.”

“I see,” he said. He wasn’t sure what else to say.

“No, I’m not sure you do,” they muttered, and said no more as the rest of the hour slipped away. 

 

***

 

“Huh,” Nyota said, once she’d heard one more new song Joanna was debating adding to the demo for M’mneirr. 

“I know it’s a departure,” the girl said, looking away. “You seemed to really like the direction I was going, with the confessional style…”

“Stop,” she said, holding up a hand. “You can’t get attached to where you think I wanted you to go. You’re the artist. You’re the one who’s going to show me what I need.”

“I don’t think anyone needs a concept album about the thoroughly rejected woman-centered apocrypha of the Time of Awakening.”

“I don’t know,” Nyota said, though she did. “A lot of people have read Queering Sha-Ka-Ri, even if the Vulcan Science Academy avoids it unless logically necessary for citation. To be fair to those old farts, it is kind of weird when a monograph that reads like a novel or poetry is written under such a nondescript pen name as ‘Xaverius.’ I love that book. And definitely, I always loved the author’s gloss of accounts of ‘the demon bride of Sudoc.’ Honestly, I think most ‘foreign’ women who are invested in Vulcan culture feel attached to her. That’s who’s singing the lyrics, right?”

“Oh, so you got that,” Joanna said, relieved. Then she tensed again. “I’m not being too obvious am I?”

“Not at all,” she assured her. “I’m just a feminist nerd about Vulcan classical literature. It’s good if it’s obvious to someone like me.”

“You’ll call me out, maybe,” Joanna replied, “but it’s hard to write sometimes without seeing Sarek’s face all disapproving.”

Nyota didn’t offer a rejoinder like “how could anyone tell if his face always just looks like that?” That would be rude.

“What exactly does your inner Sarek object to?”

“Probably not the things grumpy traditionalists would object to,” she said. “I don’t think he cares about historical consensus or even showing that time through the point of view of a woman of dubious genetic origin. I don’t think he’ll approve of the fact that I’ll end up bringing the fal-tor-pan into it.”

Nyota vaguely knew what that was - something to do with old Vulcan “soul magic” and immortality that no one wanted to talk about anymore.

“Too, um, sensitive?”

“I think he’d say that there are an infinitesimal number of situations where discussing the fal-tor-pan would be logical. Anything else would be sensationalism. After all, it’s not like there’s a good reason why it exists.” 

Right. It had something to do about Sudoc or other old warlords turning themselves into some sort of lich, essentially. The katra, in whole or in part, existing outside of its living body. In stories strongly believed to be apocryphal, the “demon bride of Sudoc” invented the fal-tor-pan and used it on said warlord after he’d executed Surak so that he would be mortal again and able to die. 

If she remembered her literature classes from the Academy, this was objectionable for several reasons: one, Surak had not been “executed” by Sudoc, but rather died of radiation poisoning after an attack on Mount Seleya; two, the more credible accounts of Sudoc’s death saw him falling to the military forces of Shi’Kahr or the last mindlord of Gol (usually Sanshiin, the Kolinahr Master himself) or both. It was far more logical that if any degree of “necromancy” were involved, it would have been performed by learned telepaths who knew what they were doing, not a young “demon” girl who almost certainly didn’t exist and for whom there’d never been concrete evidence.

“Maybe,” Nyota said, “you can think more about what resurrection means spiritually. It’s just as human a concept as it is Vulcan: the myth of Osiris, Koschei the Deathless, folklore all over the world.”

“That’s a good point,” Joanna said, perking up. “If I do more songs about this, I was thinking of having a narrator anyway who can frame it. Someone who can walk between worlds - past, future, dream, reality. A guide.”

“That’s an interesting idea! Anyway, this is definitely enough to send to M’mneirr.”

They kept chatting, Uhura becoming increasingly aware of how Joanna was avoiding any segue into their last conversation about her future. She didn’t seem less stressed out, certainly, but she couldn’t get a clear signal that she should push. She ended the call to straighten up before everyone came over, still a bit on edge. Something was up with that kid.

Nyota was somewhat surprised that M’Ress was amenable to hosting a “wine and whine” night so soon after her “heat.” Still, her girlfriend was the one who knew her own body, so she called the shots.

Christine and Leo were lounging on the rug by the sofa with them all. Well, Christine was lounging. Leo looked sort of… awful. He squirmed, couldn’t get comfortable, and settled back into the couch, separate from the group.

“It’s been a while,” Nyota said, after greetings had been made and wine had been poured.

“Yes, I apologize,” M’Ress said, “that my biology has interrupted our social lives.”

“Don’t apologize,” Christine said, rather severely.

“Yeah,” Leo said, “Chris and I just had an extra marathon night last week.”

This was the first Nyota was hearing about it. “Marathon?”

“We usually watch a few episodes of some pre-Contact television show and eat our weight in popcorn,” Christine said, looking slightly embarrassed.

“Christine is having us watch some show about ghosts or angels or vampires - I’ve never been quite sure. It’s called Supernatural.”

Christine took a suspiciously long sip of wine, tipping her eyes up to the ceiling.

“Ah, Supernatural,” M’Ress said, “a very important work in comparative narrative studies on Cait.”

Nyota whirled on her girlfriend, suspecting a setup. “I’m sorry, Supernatural is what, now?”

“I mean,” said Christine, “it’s still a guilty pleasure cult classic even a couple hundred years later, and I’ll argue that it’s actually pretty good and holds up, but I don’t think it has much, um, historical value.”

She glanced at Leo, who shrugged, and said, “First time seeing it. Old-timey television is a good time mostly because of who you watch it with. Everyone’s easy on the eyes, and I really like that angel fella.”

“You and everyone else,” said Christine.

“I don’t know,” Nyota said, “I always liked Dean.”

Everyone stared at her, clearly skeptical.

“Not like that,” she whined, feeling thirteen-fucking-years-old again, “I don’t like like him. I just remember really feeling for him. He pulls off so much and is brave when there’s big stakes, but inside he’s just driven by how he can’t let go of people he loves. He acts tough so no one notices he’s the mom friend, even though people close to him definitely do notice. It’s almost like he gets used up; he’s kind of tragic, actually.”

Christine nodded. “Everyone’s still mad about how the show ended, both for Dean and for -”

Leo glowered and said, “Hey! Spoilers!”

“You still haven’t explained why this show is significant to Caitian scholars, babe,” Nyota said.

“Mainly for conversations like these,” she said. “Are you familiar with the genre of ‘fanfiction’?”

Christine winced, so she definitely was.

“Uh,” said Leo, “I’m guessing it's what it sounds like?”

“At its simplest definition, yes,” M’Ress said. “It can also be the fodder for transformative work, particularly that meets the creative and emotional needs of those marginalized by the current cultural hegemony. In the case of Supernatural, an offshoot of this phenomenon created the mechanics of a fantasy genre on Earth that became enormously popular on Cait after we joined the Federation, called the Omegaverse.”

Christine actually spit her sip of wine back into her glass and coughed. “Wrong pipe,” she said, voice hoarse.

Nyota and Leo glanced at each other and shrugged at the unfamiliar term.

M’Ress elaborated. “In this genre, humans are imagined to have additional genders that supersede their designations in the ‘real world.’ There are the alphas, who can impregnate, but may be any gender; omegas, who can conceive and may be any gender. ‘Betas,’ I suppose, are humans exempted from these distinctions. The alphas and omegas pair-bond and have ruts and heats on a regular cycle, where fertility and sexual needs greatly increase.”

Now Nyota and Leo were staring at M’Ress, while Christine stared resolutely at a bulkhead, blushing.

“Caitian mating behaviors and fertility cycles are somewhat similar to this fantasy; we ourselves have a yearly ‘heat’ or ‘rut’ cycle. Humans were so strange to us, so we enjoyed imagining them to be more like us.”

Christine was engaged now, despite her resolute blush. “Wow, that actually does make sense. Are there gender implications for how that plays out?”

“Not on Cait as such. The type of hormonal drives activated are less remarked upon than the fact that we all experience the same intensity of urge. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it is as if we are all omegas. Or alphas. It is somewhat difficult to generalize. During my recent cycle I displayed many traits and desires of an omega, despite the fact that usually, in terms of our mating, I behave more like an alph-”

“Okay,” Nyota interrupted. “Sweetheart, would you maybe get us a pitcher of ice water? Leo looks a bit parched.”

“I’m fine,” the doctor said, airily waving his hand. He ruined the effect by coughing harsh and dry, which he had been for a few weeks. He was pretty pale actually.

“Ah, a human taboo, I will desist,” M’Ress said, and rose to go to their small kitchenette.

Christine was now staring at Leo with narrowed eyes.

“I really don’t like that cough,” she said. 

“Well, neither do I, but as I said, ain’t nothing to do about it.” 

“I can’t believe the captain hasn’t made you take some time off,” Christine said, tone severe.

M’Ress tipped her head, curious. “I can: Kirk does not notice his own bodily needs and besides that sort of concern is the job of Mr. Spock.”

“Spock doesn’t care,” Christine said. “He probably hasn’t even noticed.”

Nyota glanced at Leo, who gave a small frown. That had been a weird thing for her to say, and rather inaccurate. She had seen Spock publicly harangue the CMO on more than ten occasions in the past couple weeks on his death cough. Not exactly in a polite or conventionally… supportive way, but he certainly wasn’t disinterested in Leo’s health. Although she hadn’t seen it, she’d assumed at some point Leo had blown up at him for hovering, as Spock this week had been visibly sulking whenever they were in the same room.

They had been silent too long, and Christine glanced around, confused. “I mean, this is Spock we’re talking about,” Christine said, her glance knowing, confiding, “you know what he’s like.”

Nyota surprised herself by speaking her next thought out loud: “I don’t think you get to say that, Christine.”

Christine froze, and an uncomfortable silence descended over the group, M’Ress avidly observing, and McCoy looking around the circle, trying to discern what he’d missed.

“Um, Nyota,” she said, her voice soft, “what do you mean by that?”

Holy shit, she thought. Holy shit, abort, abort, abort - “I mean, that you don’t get to casually talk about how he expresses his feelings and make it seem like he doesn’t really feel them. You hurt him badly enough that you should know better.”

The silence deepened and reached a new level of awkwardness. Leo looked like he was about to say something, and then like he decided against it.

“Nyota,” she said, her voice rising in cautious outrage, “what are you talking about?”

“I believe she is referring to the time you dated him immediately after the breakup with his fiancee, and willfully ignored his struggle with feelings of abandonment while also communicating that his efforts to support you emotionally were deficient. Willfully ignored, I assume, because having conducted an emotional affair with him that was a factor in his broken engagement, you did actually know better,” M’Ress said, matter-of-fact, in that perfect tone of hers that said she was just calling it like she saw it and didn’t judge. 

“Or,” she continued, “perhaps that you broke up with him publicly in the rec room cantina while singing and executing choreography that involved flirting with all the women present including your future wife, saying how much more your career mattered than he did, and that leaving him was part of your liberation and self-actualization. That is what I gathered from Nyota’s accounts.”

Leo looked confused. “Singing?”

Christine’s jaw actually dropped. Nyota winced, but sent a silent thank you to her girlfriend.

“I can’t believe you, of all people, Nyota, would make me responsible for a man’s emotions or suggest expressing my sexuality creates some sort of obligation to -”

Why, because I’m (mostly) a lesbian and therefore contractually obligated to always take your side? Nyota was glad she didn’t actually say that part. 

“That’s not what I think,” she said. “I get why it sounds like that, but that’s not - Look, you have every right to have boundaries and autonomy no matter what someone else feels. There’s nothing saying you had to have a serious relationship with him or not dump him. I’m just saying that you did know he was emotionally vulnerable, and, knowing that, you didn’t act in a way that showed you cared about that at all. Which is also totally your prerogative! You’re the main character of your own love life, and how you were feeling matters the most from your perspective. I do have an issue, though, with you making generalizations about his capacity to feel as though he was somehow… asking to be treated callously. I mean, look me in the eye and tell me he was a bad boyfriend, or even noncommittal. To you or that Vulcan cop, for that matter.”

Christine now appeared stunned, but also pensive. She did not look Nyota in the eye. “Okay. Okay. I just… I can see - he does talk like that about himself, though. It’s not - I don’t mean to make excuses but - I also felt like I should go along with what he says… about himself. It’s not my place to… pry. Because I… it’s not my place, anymore. Leo - you know what I mean, right? You call him out on being cold and unfeeling all the time!”

He raised his hands slowly as though held at gunpoint, with the universal expression for “leave me out of this” on his face, though with far more panic than Uhura would have expected.

“I get that,” Nyota said. “I guess I have a very particular perspective. I was the first person he talked to after your, um, musical number. Well, sang to. He sang me a… song about it.”

“Is anyone,” Leo muttered, “going to explain why y’all were singing?”

“Subspace anomaly that changed the local rules of reality so that everyone lived in a twentieth-century Terran-style musical,” M’Ress offered. “Songs and dance numbers had to be narratively relevant and compelled by intense feelings. The Enterprise and some Klingons sang at it enough and it exploded.”

Fine, ” Leo said, raising his eyes to the heavens. “Weirder things have happened this week, I suppose.”

“He was in a lot of pain,” Nyota said, pressing on. “He felt like his feelings for you weren’t reciprocated, and that he’d set aside his need to be analytical about everything to make you happy and was now left with no tools to help him move on. He talked - sang - about it like you hurting him was punishment for trying to break out of the Vulcan habits he relied on. Blamed himself for not being good enough for you and for not being ‘strong’ enough not to be hurt. After that, he just got more and more shut-off from everyone and started acting like a dick more and more often, which hurt everyone else. I’m not defending his reaction - it’s a goddamn toxic masculine cliche -, but it’s a human one, Chris, not some inscrutable robotic one.”

Christine swallowed.

That explains a lot,” Leo muttered even more quietly, and then started coughing again.

“He never told me,” Christine whispered, unshed tears brightening her big blue eyes. Then she seemed to steady herself and said, thoughtful: “I wasn’t a safe person to tell.”

“Well,” Leo said, in between coughs, “end of the day – we’re just folks – doing our best. I reckon – that’s enough talk ‘bout – someone who ain’t – here. Why don’t we – open another bottle of –” 

A wave of coughing cut him off, as though he actually were attempting to “hack up a lung.” Christine’s eyes were now trained on him, intent and clinical. They widened, as she shot to her feet.

What is that? ” She pulled at his hands, revealing what she must have seen: blood on his palms.

Nyota leaned over to him. “Leo, are you okay?”

“‘m fine,” he said, voice hoarse.

Absolutely not, ” Christine snapped. “I’m running a battery of tests on you right now.”

She dragged him to his feet and proceeded to frog-march him out of their quarters.

“I did not realize human ‘girl talk’ rituals were so eventful,” M’Ress said. “I would have joined this activity earlier.”

Nyota could feel a headache coming on. “Let me get that other bottle of wine.”

 

***

 

The nasty shock he received upon the doctor’s illogical decision to marry some technologically repressed teenager and abandon his post in the wake of a terminal diagnosis surprised him a great deal. Even moreso than the doctor’s terminal diagnosis of xenopolycythemia itself and the indignity of learning of McCoy’s condition from Jim after he had already collapsed on this benighted mess of an away mission to an artificial satellite on course to destroy a planetary population center. Xenopolycythemia was a problem with a solution, even if the solution remained elusive at the moment. There was no solution to outright nonsense.

He was so consumed with trenchant analysis of the doctor’s errors that he did not immediately notice he was not alone in the lab he’d reserved for working on the Fabrini medical archives, which might contain a cure for Dr. McCoy’s condition. Christine Chapel grimly unpacking several crates of complicated equipment seemed like yet another indignity, absurdity, that of all the medical staff -

He took mental hold of himself and forced himself to work on setting up the extraction software for the data in silence, because now he was being unforgivably irrational. Chapel was a highly trained researcher in the field of medical archeology, that is, exactly the kind of expertise needed to turn any hint of a cure in these ancient records into an actual treatment.

A few minutes later, Chapel quietly asked him to flag certain terms in the archive to help her figure out the basic mechanics of their pharmacology, which he sent over to her terminal. They worked in silence, talking occasionally, as he solved issues with degraded data on the fly as she refined her conversion into their current technology. Neither of them, without conferring, left the lab, taking shifts so Chapel could sleep and Spock could meditate. Every few hours some new or old face would come by with food and water, a blur that included Uhura, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, Dr. Tola and Dr. Noel, and the captain, among others.

Fifty-eight hours in, they had a prototype. By seventy-three hours, they had a formulation that at the very least wouldn’t make their test subject any worse. 

Spock accompanied Chapel to sickbay to administer the first dose, and watched her face as she checked his stats above the biobed. He couldn’t bear looking for too long at McCoy, who’d been sedated due to the pain. His face seemed sunken, the shadows under his eyes more like bruises. There were actual bruises, he now knew, under his uniform: legs, arms, stomach. Or there had been, should have been. He again tried to focus on Chapel’s face, to distract himself from a flood of anger.

After their first sexual encounter, Spock hadn’t known exactly how to proceed. He hadn’t clarified his objectives going into the affair, and it did not become clearer after they’d been intimate. He was somewhat displeased to note that he still had the same instinct he’d had as a more callow lover: to request that the parameters of the relationship be defined, to baldly inquire after social, sexual, and emotional expectations. He was at least in enough control to refrain from making such demands, now experienced enough to know that sometimes humans thought they were demands instead of merely valid questions.

He’d been somewhat pleased by his spontaneity in inviting the doctor back to his room after his demoralizing foray into espionage in the Neutral Zone. It was true that McCoy had playfully shoved him against a wall before dropping to his knees to pay sustained and skillful attention to his sexual needs. The evidence that he was “being cool” about it rang a bit hollow in light of the fact that remembering, ruminating on, and rehearsing their sexual encounters seemed to dominate his thoughts if he let them idle. The mark of an obsession, really, which only seemed to get worse as their trysts became more frequent, more than weekly, at unpredictable times.

Yet none of this fixation had alerted him to the very simple fact that most sexual contact was initiated by McCoy and, after their first night together, he rarely let Spock bring him pleasure directly and when he did, he orchestrated how Spock touched him. Aside from a highly illuminating evening where the doctor had convinced him his prostate was an erogenous zone after all (the VSA’s speculative anatomy charts be damned, apparently), they hadn’t had sexual intercourse, and Spock couldn’t tell if that was going to become part of their repertoire at some point. 

He didn’t expect intercourse and he didn’t exactly mind taking on a more submissive role, and regardless he came away from their time together greatly satisfied on a physical level. Really he could describe McCoy’s attitude in bed as “doting,” which had never been his experience before. But, well, emotionally he felt a bit uneasy. He could tell there was something McCoy was avoiding, and he didn’t know if that was par for the course in the “friends with benefits” pattern they were apparently in.

When he and the captain had taken the doctor to sickbay after escaping that odd colony on the rogue asteroid, McCoy had admitted to a livid Nurse Chapel that for weeks he’d been healing bruises and minor bone fractures in secret to manage the symptoms of his progressing blood disorder. She’d essentially stripped him where he stood, revealing deep bruises all over and a fractured wrist he’d sustained just on the away mission alone. His private behavior with Spock lined up neatly with his greater deception.

He almost wished the doctor had been evasive because he just didn’t find Spock or having sex with Spock interesting or desirable. 

So, now confronted with this impossible, illogical man, even unconscious, he tried to focus on Nurse Chapel.

“Oh thank God,” she said, a huge grin breaking out across her face, “we’ll have to see how the other doses go, but this is working even better than we expected.”

Spock felt his whole body relax. He hadn’t even realized he was tense. 

“Um, Spock,” she said, looking a bit nervous, “I’m sorry if this has been… awkward for you. Working on this with me.”

He blinked. It took him well over a minute to deduce what she could possibly be referring to. They’d been drawing on the expertise that had led her to leave the Enterprise and him for a research fellowship that she returned from not only enlightened but also involved with and soon engaged to her mentor, Dr. Korby. Frankly the association hadn’t occurred to him. He did realize, for the first time, that he’d never expressed real interest in her research. Considering his intellectual support was one of the few things he could guarantee in a friendship, this was an oversight on his part. He had “forgiven” Christine Chapel long ago, as she’d of course done nothing wrong, but this part of their mutual respect had never been restored.

“On the contrary, Christine,” he said, actually managing some warmth, “despite the pressing nature of our project, I’ve found it fascinating. We should write a paper on the process and our findings - with you as first author, of course.”

Chapel’s eyes widened and her smile changed from a relieved grin to something almost gentle and lighthearted. He hadn’t seen that smile since the beginning of their friendship, and he found its re-emergence gratifying. He really should consider ways to make her smile that way again.

“I’m glad,” she said, “and I’d love to. Our work is going to do a lot of good. Though honestly I just want Leo to be healthy again.”

“I am in complete accord,” he said, feeling freer than he had in years.

It didn’t last. Getting back into the rhythm of shifts on the bridge and follow up in the lab did not distract him from his concern and percolating displeasure with McCoy’s recklessness and the specter of his demise. He was quite preoccupied with maintaining his composure when he and Jim went to sickbay to congratulate him on his first day back on shift. 

However, this concern was rendered entirely moot when Jim, upon entering the CMO’s office, punched Dr. McCoy in the face. Before he could think he had moved between them, and knelt down to check on the doctor.

The doctor rubbed his jaw, eyes guarded. “Did that make you feel better, Jim?”

“No,” said Jim. “Yes. Dammit Bones. Seven years, seven years you’ve been lying to me.”

“I didn’t lie to you.”

“As good as.”

Baffled but oddly pleased, he decided to interject. “And what has the doctor lied about?”

“Xenopolycythemia,” he said. “The starvation disease. A genetic mutation as a side effect of an IV nutrition replacement, an old one that’s been banned for thirty years on starships, though the remote colonies still have it.”

This was not exactly clarification.

“Jim,” said McCoy. “I said what I had to, that we had more time - to stop the colonists from panicking and turning on the ill and the elderly and forcing them on the drug early to deny them food rations. I and the other med staff and colony admin volunteered to go on it early. I was healthy, and I tolerated it well. This risk was the price.”

“You didn’t put me on the drug! I was an officer, and healthy as a goddamn horse.”

Ah, this was about Cerberus. For the captain, it was ultimately about Tarsus IV.

“No, Jim, I didn’t.”

“I’m glad I punched you,” Jim snarled.

“Gentlemen,” he found himself saying, plucking the doctor’s decanter of Saurian brandy from behind the desk, “perhaps we would be better served by engaging in what Admiral April called ‘officer thinking.’”

“Officer drinking,” Jim supplied automatically, the other half of the joke.

“Hallelujah,” McCoy said, grinning and rocking back and forth on his heels.

The tension abated for the moment, but Spock still felt somewhat numb hours later as Jim and McCoy got progressively drunker while sprawled on the captain’s bed, though he still remained in attendance, sitting on the floor against the nearby wall, mostly silent.

Jim collapsed into McCoy’s lap and whined. “Leo, you can’t ever leave me! Don’t ever do that again!”

“Sure Jim,” he said, and ruffled Jim’s hair. “Just for you I’ll never die.”

“Though perhaps your wife might also have some preference in the matter,” Spock found himself saying.

Jim started giggling and McCoy just snorted and rolled his eyes. When Spock didn’t say anything they blearily looked at him with a strange intentness.

“Wait, Spock, you’re not serious? Bones was just playing along.”

“She’s younger than my daughter,” McCoy said with a shudder.

“It was a rather involved deception as you actually married the girl,” said Spock, now feeling pins and needles.

“If I recall,” drawled McCoy, “that was officiated by some robot god that ID-chipped me like a poodle, which you’ve already reprogrammed.”

“Yeah,” said Jim, who snickered. “He sure did reprogram the fuck out of that computer immediately.”

They both ignored this outburst.

“According to the mission report, you kissed her,” Spock said.

“She kissed me.”

“That was the most awkward Bones kiss I’ve never seen,” said Jim, solemn. “Bet you looked like you were dying. I can see it now.”

“I was dying, Jim.”

He giggled again and then started lightly crying. “Which you’re not allowed to do again.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You did not wish to stay with her?”

“No? Of course not. I mean, I was more devil-may-care than usual on that mission as I was dying, but no, Spock, I did not want to stay with an eighteen-year-old who decided to marry me after five seconds and didn’t know what a sky is.”

“But once she does, the boys better look out,” Jim said. “She’s a babe. Or is she not your type?”

“She is, again, eighteen, so there is no conceivable answer to that question. Also, I’m notoriously gay. Mostly.”

“I’m gay for you, Bones,” said Jim and then laced their fingers together in a gesture that for one second turned Spock into a full Vulcan who found it disturbingly obscene.

“Jim, I’ve told you a hundred times that’s not a thing.”

“This is - it’s bisexual erasure!”

“I’ve also told you as many times that’s not what that means.”

“Hey, remember how Spock is bi,” said Jim.

“He’s also, again, in the room, Jim.”

“No, but like, we’re all queer, did you ever notice?”

“Yes,” said Spock and McCoy at the same time. 

“In fact,” said McCoy. “I thought y’all were boyfriends the first year or so.”

They had already touched on this charming topic after the koon-ut-kal-ifee while also intoxicated. Why was he bringing this up again?

“You did? I still got it,” Jim said dreamily, a big smile on his face for no reason Spock could immediately discern.  He apparently also didn’t remember they’d already discussed this.

“It went on my list of reasons Spock maybe hates me. Like I was after his man, when really Jim’s just… sociable.”

“It was a real list,” said Jim, “He wrote it down; it was extremely long and detailed. A bit concerning, actually.”

“Hating you would be illogical,” said Spock, before he could stop himself, earning a soft “whoa” from Kirk, so he deflected, deciding to play into this highly redundant conversation topic. “For what reason did you think the captain and I were romantically involved?”

“I mean it just makes sense, you know, the hotshot golden boy and the sexy Vulcan prince or whatever.”

Spock blinked. “Vulcan hasn’t had any monarchies for millennia.”

“My favorite thing about Spock is how he’s secretly very vain,” said Jim. “See how he’s not denying he’s sexy.”

“Is that really your favorite thing about me, Jim?” Spock, to make up for being a pill, gave his version of puppy dog eyes.

“‘S not mine,” said McCoy, with an air of enlightened self-satisfaction.

“And what, pray tell, is your favorite thing about me, Doctor?”

“Mm,” he said, and smiled, beatific. “The ears.”

Kirk giggled so hard he rolled off McCoy’s lap, and snorted into the quilt. Spock didn’t see what was so funny. By Vulcan standards he had rather comely ears, though they were considered more “cute” due to their smaller size. Perhaps the irony lay in the absurdity that the doctor would favor such a superficial quality. He was quite certain, due to the doctor’s volubility and enthusiasm in bed, that there were other physical features the man preferred. If the doctor’s appreciation of him was merely sensual, that is. Which would be logical, but would bother him for some reason, were it true.

McCoy frowned into a mostly empty whiskey glass. “When did you two break up, anyway?”

Is anyone paying attention to what I’m saying? “You’re extrapolating based on a faulty assumption, doctor. The captain and I have never been romantically involved.”

“Not for lack of trying,” Jim said, sounding genuinely mournful.

Well, that’s news to me. Spock tried not to roll his eyes and said, “Although I appear to have missed a sexual proposition, he is correct that I would have declined had I been aware an offer had been made.”

“See,” said Kirk, drunk-solemn.

“Why?” McCoy blinked owlishly. It wasn’t a leading question; he seemed baffled.

“The captain is dear to me, a shield-brother, friend. Logically speaking, however, we are not compatible as mates. Perhaps if we did not know each other we could have had a brief dalliance. I am aware we have sexual chemistry.”

Kirk giggled. “So do we, Bones,” he whispered very loudly. Then the man actually pouted. “But I can’t have you either.” He frowned as though puzzling through a complex chess move. “Before, I could. Maybe, again. After?”

McCoy looked at Spock as though underwater, not paying attention to Jim at all. “Do you only sleep with people you think would be compatible mates? Regularly?”

“That has been my pattern of behavior. Of course, for a time-limited affair of hours or days, I do not have such criteria.”

“Huh,” he said. “Well, Jim, you can’t have me or Spock right now but otherwise the world is your, uh, oyster.”

“Can’t have the mother of my only son,” said Kirk, mournful. “Don’t even see my boy. He’s ten, maybe.”

McCoy’s eyes were huge, and his mouth dropped open. Spock didn’t even try to not stare.

“You’re shocked,” Jim whispered loudly again, eyes wide. “Appalled. I have secrets too. I’m very… deep. With pain that’s… deep. Secret pain that’s deep.”

McCoy actually rolled his eyes now. “Jim, you infant, I’ve known about David for years.”

“Betrayal,” muttered Jim, and pointed, waveringly, at Spock. “Conspiracy.”

“I have never disclosed that information,” said Spock.

“Setting aside for the moment that you apparently told Spock and not me, no one was telling tales, Jim. You gave some absurdly trusting permissions to Dr. Marcus in terms of your personal records, and she’s called me about your medical history off and on for years. That boy has as many esoteric allergies as you do. Didn’t seem my place to bring it up with you.”

“Oh,” said Jim, eyes leaking tears again. “Sorry.”

“What in the Sam Hill are you sorry for, Jimmy?”

“For being a bad friend who makes you clean up after me. For being a terrible father.”

“I’m your doctor, and it’s not even a hard part of my job. As for being a terrible father, seems to me you’re playing the hand you were dealt. You’re an absent father, not a terrible father.”

“That’s not better.”

“I have far too many advanced degrees in psychology to have this conversation this drunk off my ass,” said the doctor after a pause. “But we’re talking about it tomorrow.”

McCoy stumbled out of the bed and seemed to be attempting to leave. Spock wordlessly rose and took him by the elbow, steadying him. Jim just kept giggling from the bed.

He escorted the doctor down the corridor in silence to start. 

“The captain once said he had been sexually intimate with you,” said Spock, despite himself, who wondered if this was a gray area, asking a very drunk McCoy for personal information.

“Well, I should hope so if you’re cleared to hear about his secret love child,” said the doctor, who stumbled a bit and rested his head on Spock’s shoulder, sagging into him.

“He said he set a boundary with you prior to the start of the mission,” said Spock, who definitely found it questionable that he was not also including the information that Kirk had done so to avoid rejection.

McCoy snorted, appearing a bit affronted. “Oh he set a boundary, did he? I’m his goddamn doctor and CMO - obviously that would be a conflict of interest.”

They reached McCoy’s quarters, and Spock used his override to enter, walking the doctor in and to his bed.

“You are sexually involved with me,” said Spock. “Does not the same conflict of interest exist?”

“That’s different,” said McCoy, flopping down onto his bed in a graceless heap. “See, Jim just has me - well, before you, now he has you too. If we were sleeping together, living on top of each other, it’d be serious. I’d have all this influence. You, you have attentive, rich parents who have your back even when you’re telling them to fuck off - which I get, I’d tell them to fuck off too, but still. You don’t care about me.”

Spock felt as though he had been slapped as he hovered at the boundary between the living and sleeping areas of the doctor’s quarters. Which was illogical, as, despite the phrasing, this was a validation of a realistic and prudent approach to sexual involvement between senior staff.

“You believe a sexual relationship with the captain would emotionally compromise the two of you in a way that you believe it would not compromise you or me.”

“Yup, n-nicely put. ‘Cept it’s just you. Obviously, I care.”

Spock again felt the faint prodding of his conscience, that maybe this was not a conversation they should be having this way. “You are emotionally compromised by our sexual relationship?”

“Not in a way I lose sleep over, but of course I am,” McCoy said from the bed, somewhat listless as he rolled over to his side. “It’s like I’m a teenager, I think about you all the time but all my fantasies of real life together are just playing house. I know you don’t want that. I’m no good for that, not for you. When you’re good and ready and not before you’ll marry some nice genius and live in your fancy castle on Vulcan like your daddy, all dignified, and have perfect lil pointed-ear babies. I’m practical. This is a fling.”

Spock almost stepped forward, furious, before repressively forcing his feelings down. He was really bringing this all on himself. I should really stop talking and leave. “You seem to have a great deal of insight into my romantic preferences despite never having asked.”

“I do,” he said, not catching the sarcasm. “I think I’d know if you were courting me. I know about you. You were a good boyfriend, a gentleman. You committed, you were clear, you put in the effort. Girls told me.”

Spock rapidly revised his hitherto positive impressions of “girl talk”: he hadn’t realized it could also reinforce misinterpretations.

“I’m not complaining,” McCoy said, probably (hopefully) misunderstanding his long silence. “I’m really not. I’m really, really happy we’re friends, that there’s no bullshit. I know you respect me. I enjoy having sex with you, a lot. A lol a lot. Makes me feel like life is starting up again. Doesn’t need to be more; frankly I’d find anything more too… overwhelming.”

Spock was silent. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say, but had the feeling that this was not remotely what he had wanted the doctor to say.

“If we must revisit this topic again,” Spock said, “let us do so sober. Good night, doctor.” There. Without looking back he walked quickly out of doctor’s quarters to his own, sinking down onto his meditation mat for lack of a better idea.

The doctor was completely right and completely wrong. He was not acting in a way that communicated honorable intentions, and frankly had never had intentions he could describe as honorable or even intentions when it came to their sexual relationship. But the doctor was wrong that he didn’t care. The pain over the man’s words was searing, intense, and seemed to only get worse as the words sunk in.

He got no further into this reflection, as he somehow fell asleep on the mat, waking with a start after two hours and seventeen minutes, seeing a figure move in the living area of his quarters. He rolled up to standing in a flash.

“Hi, Spock,” said Dr. Tola as they took a seat in one of his armchairs. Their hair was in a new style, a profusion of braids in their white hair woven into a loose chignon. They were not remotely in uniform, in a contoured and textured gray jumpsuit with an unfamiliar insignia where their Starfleet badge should have been. Also, they were in his personal quarters in the middle of the “night” shift.

“Dr. Tola,” he said. “Your sartorial choices at this hour are… interesting.”

Tola snorted. “Understatement,” they said. “What do you think of my hair?”

“It is very… intricate,” said Spock.

“Right,” they said, and smiled. It was oddly wistful. “Well, I don’t know a non-awkward way of saying this, but we need your help stopping Section 31 from doing something monumentally misguided and megalomaniacal.”

Spock stared at them. “What?”

“About which part?”

“Most parts. All of the parts possible. Who is we? What is Section 31 going to do - why do you need my help? Why are you involved?”

Tola, as usual, did not seem moved to urgency by Spock’s obvious - Vulcan-obvious - distress. “In about eighteen hours, you’re going to find the USS Defiant trapped in a mysterious spatial anomaly. All souls lost. Shortly after you and an away team begin investigating, the ship start will phase out of this time and space, eventually disappearing completely. During the brief window you have onboard the Defiant, we want you to wipe a particular classified and buried listening subroutine from the ship’s computer.”

“What… subroutine?”

“It basically spies on everything and sends it back to a central AI to do, uh, computer things. Risk assessment. Usually, you’d call it Control. ”

Spock went very, very still where he stood, looking down on the Andorian. “Control? There’s a version of Control on the Defiant?”

“There’s a version of Control on every ship in the fleet,” said Tola, matter-of-fact. Spock evidently did not hide his alarm well enough, because they continued: “Not the super killer AI one from the future. The regular one that always existed in this century. Also, don’t even think of finding Control on the Enterprise or the Section 31 agent onboard will get murdery again and we’ll have a whole other problem. This one’s sort of jittery and impulsive, despite the last one being, arguably, more stabby.”

“Section 31 swore that Control had been destroyed,” Spock snarled, pacing forward. “If you think for one moment I will let this stand, on my ship, on my computers -”

Tola glared up at him. “Spock, Section 31 has told the admiralty that Control has been decommissioned. Right now, it’s more or less true that it’s turned off, that there aren’t computer resources allocated to the central AI, but it’s still passively collecting and transmitting data. This is a subroutine that has been built into Starfleet vessels for decades. They were never going to gut every ship in the fleet, and why would they?”

Why would they? It was self-evident! “Because all it takes is one or two changes in leadership in Starfleet or Section 31 and Control could be turned back on.”

“Well, yeah,” said Tola, who Spock was now fairly convinced was somehow not “his” Tola. “Obviously. That’s why you need to wipe it off the Defiant.”

“But not the Enterprise? I fail to see the logic of your request. Or the limited scope of it.”

“You need to wipe it off the Defiant,” said Tola, “because the spatial anomaly is going to send the Defiant 113 years into the past of a parallel universe, which everyone seems to be obsessed with calling the ‘mirror universe.’ In the early twenty-fourth century, Control is going to be turned back on, and it will become increasingly sophisticated. A hundred years or so from now, Section 31 is going to have the bright idea of using Control to weaponize the mirror universe. The last quarter of the twenty-fourth century is a nightmare for temporal operatives; it’s worse than the 2150s, which, believe me, is saying something. Technically claiming doing this fixes a temporal incursion is kind of a stretch, but trust me, Section 31 imperial Terran shenanigans is the last thing we need when it’s showtime. Which is why we’re asking you to do it.”

Spock sat down in the chair facing them, and said nothing for a long time. He looked at Dr. Tola, really looked. They didn’t look that different, but there was something firmer and more… muscled in their telepathic presence. They were stronger, their powers more refined, but still transparent to his mind: they weren’t lying or under outside influences, as far as he could tell.

“Aegis supervisor,” said Spock, curt, “or temporal agent?”

“The latter,” said Tola, with an approving nod. “This kind of grunt work is beneath the Aegis. Rule of thumb, temporal agents are trying to triage things that break and being sneaky and thrifty about it; Aegis supervisors are perfectionists trying to make sure something happens the way it’s supposed to and play hero with fancy gadgets.”

“That’s… informative,” said Spock. Gary Seven had certainly not given him as much context when requesting his aid.

“I have the majority of the code here, and you should be able to finish it and choose a delivery mechanism on your own. Any questions?”

“Who is Agent Selek?”

Dr. Tola - Agent Tola - tipped their head. “Never heard of them. But then again, we give all sorts of names in the field. Do you know what they look like?”

“Negative,” said Spock. “She is tall and athletic. Telepathic.”

“That’s like half the department.”

“She has worked with an Agent Daniels.”

“Oh,” said Tola. “I see the issue. So, I’m an agent with the Department for Temporal Investigations in the twenty-ninth century. Agent Daniels is with a future version of our force in the thirty-first century. Or will be. They just started the committee proceedings to decide who Daniels is going to be - it’s going to take them that long to agree on the candidate. He’s the only agent from that time period I know of by name, though I have my suspicions about who their director is. We de facto handle the twenty-third through twenty-eighth century Federation stuff. Obviously the other guys can pull rank, but they try to be pretty discreet and keep us out of the loop. I’ve never even met anyone from that century in-person. So if your Agent Selek is from then, I wouldn’t know her.”

“Ah,” said Spock.

“Now I have a question,” Tola said. “Why do you want to know who this ‘Agent Selek’ is?”

“An Aegis supervisor asked me to deliver a message.”

“Which supervisor?”

“Gary Seven.”

“Goddammit, Gary,” Tola said with a sigh. “As I said, it’s super rare that you’d get an actual visit from the men in black. That must be some message.”

“Men in black?”

“The Terrans at work call the thirty-first century agents that. I just use it because they notoriously all seem to wear skin tight black ‘tactical’ catsuits. It looks like fetish gear.”

Spock blinked. Sure. Okay. He nodded.

“When are you supposed to deliver this message?”

“He did not specify.”

“Is she expecting this message?”

“He didn’t say, exactly, but I do not think so.”

Tola frowned. “That… is extremely odd.” For the first time in their acquaintance, Tola actually looked nervous. “Any contact you had with an operative would need to happen within a pretty defined timespan.”

The unreality of treating his natural life as an abstraction suddenly rose to the front of his mind, and he sunk it back down. “My death is not a definitive enough deadline?”

“No, actually,” Tola said, rubbing their arm, their narrow chest caving in slightly. “Your exact time and cause of death is classified, from me or any field agent. We’re in a brief window where regulations are a bit looser, and this particular encounter we’re having is a massive exception, since we’re pretty sure you’re the one who wipes Control off the Defiant. Unauthorized contact is an automatic temporal burn notice.”

“That must be severely limiting to agents’ autonomy,” Spock said, not fully convinced that could possibly be how this organization worked. Certainly, the cavalier attitudes of time travelers he’d encountered before did not suggest any particular sort of discretion when it came to making contact.

“No,” they said. “Not unauthorized contact in general. Unauthorized contact with you means an automatic burn notice. You’re on a list.”

How ominous. “What is the nature of this list?”

“Obviously, I can’t tell you that.”

“I see,” he said, though he really didn’t. Much like another temporal incursion from the late twenty-fourth century by a hapless pair of ensigns, which he at all times endeavored to put out of his mind, here was yet another, well, augur of his historical… importance. 

“Any other questions?”

“Do you know about any of this? You, now. Did you work in… intelligence?”

“You mean, was I a spy? Or, am I a spy, the me that you know?”

“Yes.”

“Ahm Tal,” they said. “Andorian Intelligence. Retired before I took this post - I was actually into the whole psionic ethics thing - wasn’t a cover like being a Starfleet historian. You don’t need to worry about that, though. Right now, I’m just keeping an eye on my Section 31 counterpart and investigating the death of one of my agents. Ruled an accident, but I suspect foul play. Correctly, it turns out.”

Despite knowing “Agent” Tola’s likely response, Spock lost his patience again. “Who is the Section 31 agent onboard? I must insist for the safety of the crew -”

“Spock, come on! And don’t give me that look - you’re a big boy, don’t be so scandalized. I mean fuck them, for sure, but spare me the pearl-clutching. Any other reasonable questions?”

“You say you do not know the time and cause of my death. But are you aware that I have an Aegis supervisor?”

“Yes,” they said. “We’re aware.”

“Do you know why I have one?”

“Yes. Spock, where are you going with this?”

“I am concerned my personal timeline has been contaminated by the very fact that I know it has some sort of significance. And the things that I’ve heard -”

“Okay, I get the existential crisis, but what have you heard? You shouldn’t have heard anything specific.”

“I was told several years ago by a young man from the late twenty-fourth century that my emotional… expressivity at the time due to my romantic life was alarming to him. That in the ‘books’ he had read about me, I never smiled, and I was nothing more than a paragon of Vulcan self-control. I set the matter aside, naturally, to avoid any sort of predestination paradox as best I could.”

“Good call,” Tola interjected.

“But in subsequent years I did lose my romantic attachments: in fact, my only socially respectable option as a member of Vulcan society at this point is to become kolinahru, which does fit the ensign’s vague description of my reputation. If the stakes of my life are as high as you are implying, I want to know…” 

Actually, Spock wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to know.

“You want to know if history falls apart if you fall in love,” Tola said.

Spock did not deny it.

“Let me put it this way: how likely do you think it is that at any point in your life you cooperate with these alleged biographers interested in your private life? Considering, let’s say, that a psychologically harmful amount of timeline contamination is a part of you that never gets fixed and you now know it.”

“Highly unlikely.”

“There you go. History is ruthless to the individual; don’t do it any favors.”

“Very well,” he said.

“Speaking of predestination paradoxes, I better shut up. Go beat up an evil computer for us.” Tola - Agent Tola - rose from their seat. “It’s good to see you, old friend,” they said, their tone softer and more fond than he’d ever heard from the Dr. Tola he knew.

“It is always good to see you, Dr. Tola,” he replied, and offered the ta’al. “Peace and long life.”

“Well, I got the long life part covered,” they said and snorted. But they offered the ta’al in response. Then, with a pop and a dazzling displacement of air, they were gone.

An hour later, when he had finalized the code to wipe Control off of the Defiant, the most obvious implication of this extraordinary social call hit him: at some point, to even become a temporal agent, Dr. Tola was going to die, extracted at the end of their life, which did not appear to end in old age. They had been speaking from personal experience.

History, ruthless indeed.

 

***

 

Nyota hadn’t bothered canceling her weekly sparring session with Spock, but unreasonably hoped he just wouldn’t show up. She’d arrived at the gym early, before their private room booking, and was jogging a bit too fast on a treadmill for a warmup. 

She’d been working nonstop since they’d gotten back from Sahndara, taking everyone’s extra shifts. She’d already gotten a full two months ahead on her Romulan language coursework, and had reorganized their quarters five different times, earning her several feline ears-flat-against-head stares from M’Ress. Leo wouldn’t stop pestering her to come in for a psych eval with Dr. Noel, and Christine was straight up ignoring her. She had a call with Joanna in an hour and a half, and she was seriously considering standing her up. She wouldn’t do the cadet any good anyway. It had been arrogant to act like she’d had anything to offer as a mentor. She felt moody and out of control and therefore pathetic, which she knew was immature and even sexist. She’d had her body violated again for some aliens' entertainment, had been forced to kiss the captain. Of course she was upset. Of course she wasn’t pathetic.

She’d become compulsively fixated on that weird song Spock had been forced by the Platonians to make up and sing on the spot. It had sounded so familiar, like he had been riffing on something, and she’d gone on a musical odyssey to suss out influences. She’d struck gold in the middle of the night, when, with the phrase “their velvet prime” intrusively chirping at her every hour, she’d come across a song from the 1960s, “Some Velvet Morning” by Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra, which then unlocked the answer: their song, “Summer Wine.” Spock’s - she supposed - “Maiden Wine” was the most like “Summer Wine,” just with less villainous (and less powerful) women. She found herself humming along to the former song, which had the eerie opacity of a high’s inspiration.

Some velvet mornin' when I'm straight,
I'm gonna open up your gate:
And maybe tell you 'bout Phaedra,
And how she gave me life,
And how she made it end,
Some velvet mornin' when I'm straight -

The Nancy Sinatra part of the song was extremely creepy, the voice of nature in the sing-songy assurance of a little girl. Learn from us, very much. Look at us, but do not touch. Phaedra is my name… Even more unnerving as Phaedra, the treacherous wife of Theseus, seemed to have fuck all to do with any of it.  M’Ress had been woken up by her rustling about several hours early and, upon seeing her pinning up bits of paper by her desk and drawing lines between various “discoveries” - Joanna McCoy actually did look like a purple Nancy Sinatra, that had to mean something, right? - had finally convinced her to at least consider submitting to that psych eval.

She increased her speed on the treadmill right before Spock, of course, arrived at their session exactly on time. It was annoying, really. Ever since getting the captain back from the Defiant, Spock had been in a weird mood. Well, weird if you hadn’t known him as long as she had. She unfortunately, due to his “secret” relationship with Christine, could recognize the subtle signs that he’d gotten thoroughly laid. Which apparently was happening practically every day now. She'd thought Spock and McCoy were going to kill each other on the bridge during the Tholian crisis and the captain's loss, and this had clearly been a turning point in the "secret" romance between Spock and Kirk. She’d even landed a kick on him last week that had messed up his neckline, revealing fucking hickeys, plural, on his collarbones. She was happy for him and the captain, she supposed, but he shouldn’t still be so punctual.

“Lieutenant Uhura,” he said, with a frown, “you are pursuing much more strenuous cardiovascular activity than you require before a sparring session.”

“Sorry,” she said, slowing down and stepping off, cursing herself for apologizing. “I got a bit distracted and checked out.”

“Are you, perhaps, experiencing intense emotions that you find difficult to express?” Spock peered down at her, apparently a total sweetheart today, which she was not in the right mood to appreciate.

“If I am, I’d find it hard to answer that question clearly,” she said, tone tart. 

He looked slightly puzzled and then shrugged.

I should ask to skip this week, I should ask to skip this week, I should ask to skip this week, she chanted to herself, but said nothing, striding purposefully to their reserved room.

Really, she reflected almost an hour later, drenched in sweat and collapsed on the floor after Spock had taken her down yet again, I think I wanted him to notice and ask if I needed to skip this week. She couldn’t even be angry with him. She’d known all too well that if that was the kind of support she needed, Spock was absolutely not the friend most likely to give it to her.

She felt a bit faint in the sonic shower, having forgotten to eat lunch before her workout, and frustrated that she couldn’t even cry. She screwed a smile on her face and opened the comm line to Joanna.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Nancy Sinatra?”

Joanna wrinkled her nose. “Who’s Nancy Sinatra?”

“Pre-Contact singer, mid-to-late twentieth-century. ‘These Boots are Made for Walkin.’”

“Any relationship to Frank Sinatra?”

“Daughter,” Nyota said, wondering at her own randomness.

“Oh, a nepo baby,” Joanna said, dismissively. “I remember now. I like that song she did for that Kill Bill movie. ‘Bang, bang, my baby shot me down.’” She stiffened. “Wait, am I a nepo baby now?”

“Nah,” Nyota said, forcing herself to not rant about the Kill Bill soundtrack and the timing with Nancy Sinatra’s discography. Or speculate on whether in fact Joanna was now a nepo baby. “So, how are you?”

“Oh, you know,” Joanna said, with a vague wave of her hand. “Hanging in there.”

Nyota swallowed down frustration that absolutely didn’t have anything to do with Joanna. “What’s going on with the Rigel Cup?”

Joanna winced slightly but otherwise didn’t react to her bluntness. “I’m on the team,” she admitted. “I made sure Torias has alternates picked out, though. I only go to half the practices.”

I should probably raincheck, Nyota thought. “Why are you doing that?”

Joanna blinked. “I couldn’t come up with a good reason to say no.”

“You don’t want to do it, that’s a good enough reason,” she snapped. “You’re going to resent that boy, and it won’t be his fault.”

Joanna looked away. “There’s only a month or so before graduation,” she said. “He’ll have to go back to Trill before his posting on the Enterprise starts. I don’t know how we’ll do with indefinite long-distance. I don’t want to ruin our last weeks together.”

“Do you think he cares about ruining your last weeks together? Because that’s what he’s doing by pressuring you to do this Rigel Cup shit. If he’s not a douchebag, he’d want to know. He wouldn’t want you to be miserable.”

Joanna’s lips trembled slightly. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a small voice. Nyota felt even angrier. Call me out, kid, on taking things out on you. Don’t you dare apologize for not being able to stand up and end your own suffering.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, instead. “Be better. Let yourself have something better. M’mneirr got back to me.”

Joanna stiffened, clearly terrified, because this, unlike her piloting career, actually mattered to her. She had no responsibility to her music: she just wanted to write and sing.

“He was impressed,” she said. “He really liked the demo, personally, even if it’s not what he does. You need a real producer and better instrumentation, but you have real talent. He’s offered you a summer position as a studio musician at his record company, backup vocals, at least. You’d have a lot of different experiences, meet a bunch of people, be introduced to a lot of people, and have studio time. Plus, as you know, just living on Cait is like a masterclass in contemporary music. Live shows everyday in every venue down every street of the capitol.”

Joanna gasped, her eyes huge. Huge with longing, clearly. Nyota felt it like a stab to her heart as the girl’s eyes dimmed, as she could see her arguing herself out of what she wanted. “Everyone, the professors and the advisors, says I have to do a cadet cruise this summer. I’m supposed to choose one by the end of the week.”

“You’ve had weeks to choose,” she said. “You already know which piloting rotation you’d prefer. You haven’t confirmed because you actually don’t want to do it. You have so many people supporting you, so many resources: let them actually help the real you.”

“It’s not that simple,” Joanna said, finally with a bit of fire. “I can’t just do whatever I want. I don’t have unconditional support. I have amazing opportunities because I’ve had to be the best at things people actually care about. Sarek wouldn’t even buy his own son a shuttle ticket to Earth, and that was to join Starfleet, not to bum around on Cait.”

“You’ll be paid three times as much on Cait than you would on a cadet cruise; you’d hardly be ‘bumming around.’ You’d still have everything on the table when you went back for fall term. Your CV, even for piloting, is impressive and you have people actively recruiting you: you don’t need to be the absolutely perfect candidate for that one job.” 

Joanna gave a frustrated sigh. 

“Joanna,” she said, “why do you want to be in Starfleet?”

Joanna stared, mouth hanging open in shock, as though the question had never occurred to her. Why would it have? She’d been raised on Starfleet ships.

“Starfleet is… it’s family,” she said, at last. 

Nyota Uhura had nothing whatsoever to say to that. Like an alarm bell, the thought rang through her mind that basically no adult in her life would be able to challenge that belief without looking hypocritical. Her father, the captain, Sulu, Pavel, Erica, and even her. Especially her.

“Just think about it,” she said, without much conviction, “okay?”

“Of course,” the girl said, her antennae drooping. 

When the call wound down after that, Nyota considered punching a pillow for thirty-seconds, before deciding to do a guided meditation while falling asleep. 

She almost felt like she’d woken up into a new world, several hours later. She’d kept her appointment with Dr. Noel, and agreed to talk to a counselor every other week. She’d called Joanna back and apologized, then actually listened to her. Then, she actually opened up, told the cadet about some of her own struggles at her own age, her own guilt and sense of responsibility. They’d had a long heart-to-heart about perfectionism.

She’d forwarded M’mneirr’s contact information, but was happy for Joanna when she heard she’d accepted a test pilot rotation on a sister ship for the Reliant on Erica’s suggestion, where she’d be able to just fly. She was proud of her when she told Nyota she’d had a candid conversation with Sulu and Erica about her choices, and that she was talking to Pavel more often. She gave a little cheer when she heard that after a big fight with her boyfriend, Joanna had quit the Rigel Cup team, staying on as an advisor and making tentative plans with him to have a real weekend trip away together after the race. She was pleasantly surprised to hear the boy had been bringing her flowers and taking Joanna on quick, cheap student dates despite their busy schedules.

Her friendship with and mentorship of the young woman was, as always, a bright spot in the kaleidoscope of her life on the Enterprise. She'd been collecting bright spots, at her counselor's prompting, retraining the workaday muscles of mental health. Joanna was a bright spot for more people than she perhaps realized, Nyota thought, as she and M’Ress toasted to Joanna finishing her finals in the captain’s quarters with Leo, Christine, and even Spock. “Girls’ night” (plus Leo and sometimes Spock) had been preempted by a need to decompress after that mysterious mission to Minara II that had left Leo looking rather worse for the wear and Spock and the captain looking pissier and more solemn, respectively.

With an almost Pike-like expansiveness, Kirk sprawled at the head of his table, and asked, “Where’s Sulu? He owes me some of Scotty’s good stuff he won in that poker game I’m not supposed to know about.”

“Jim,” Leo said, “you just sat in on that game this week and cleaned everyone out.”

“Doesn’t mean I know anything about it,” the captain replied with a wink.

As though on cue, the door chimed, and in came Sulu and… Pavel. Nyota sat up straight in her seat. The helmsman was pale and empty-handed. Pavel’s hands were shaking. Kirk’s eyes sharpened.

“It’s the Academy,” Sulu said, voice rough, “there’s been an accident.”

Leo shot to his feet.

“Jo- Cadet McCoy,” Pavel said, eyes shooting to Leo’s, “is safe, sir, but -” The boy swallowed, and Nyota noticed with alarm that he was almost in tears.

“That cadet I recruited, Torias Kolvoord, was coaching the Rigel Cup team this year,” Sulu said. 

“Her boyfriend,” Leo hissed, “is he -”

“He was having the team practice his signature move, the starburst,” Sulu said. “They were drilling like crazy, having to practice with an alternate after someone dropped out. It all went wrong. All - all five cadets are dead. There’s going to be an investigation.”

“Oh my God,” Christine whispered into the horrified silence.

“The Academy didn’t want anything announced till they’d talked to the cadets’ families, but several students contacted Pavel over the past twenty-four hours.”

“I’ve been calling her,” Pavel said, eyes fixed on the doctor. “Joanna. She was the one who dropped out. She won’t pick up, no one could reach her. Her roommate… she was on the team. Torias finally went to her dorm, and her bunk and drawers were empty. No one knows where she is, but her ID was logged on a shuttle to Earth Spacedock.”

Leo swiftly crossed the room and left, the captain and Spock just a beat behind him. Nyota was half out of her seat. She should go call Joanna too, maybe she would - M’Ress put a hand on her arm, to slow her down. She found herself shaking all over, and then crushed into her girlfriend’s chest, soft fur against her face as she was held firm and secure. She wasn’t sure where she was, suddenly seeing a grassy field, a charred shuttle wreck still burning where her family should have been. Then Hemmer, who walked out of the ship into nothing so they wouldn’t see him die, torn apart from the inside by Gorn hatchlings, who would haunt her, still, in every phase of decay and death-agony. Her safe place, her mentor, now the stuff of nightmares.

She breathed with M’Ress, trying to ground herself, remember where she was. She could hear Pavel and Sulu speaking, concerned, at a distance, Christine’s voice soothing. God, Pavel must know those cadets, Torias and Joanna were his best friends, she had to keep it together. She had to -

“I am taking Nyota back to our quarters,” M’Ress said. “She will likely check in later. Goodnight, friends.”

An uncertain amount of time later, M’Ress was curled around her in bed, softly purring, an upgrade from her weighted blanket in years past. 

“I can’t stop thinking about the empath on Minara II,” she said, her first words that hour. M’Ress said nothing. “They asked me to review the mission logs, add comments on nonverbal telepathic language systems. Leo’s the only one who gave her a name. He called her Gem. Some sick fucks calling themselves Vians kidnapped her and then tortured our guys to see if she’d intervene, to see if her species was ‘worth saving’ from a supernova. Leo almost died. Actually, she almost died. He knocked out the captain and Spock so the Vians would take him as their torture subject. When he was dying he begged Gem not to take on his injuries but was too weak to stop her. In the end she did, the last person willing to die for the others, so the one who would die, if they hadn’t called off the test.”

“That sounds very stressful for a triad with such deep emotional and erotic ties,” M’Ress said, who could not be convinced the three senior officers weren’t all dating each other, a minority position in the "triumvirate" romance pool. “Leo’s actions seem true to type. He is of them the only one practical enough to actually pull off his stupid nobility.”

“I was just thinking about how futile it all was,” she said. “He went to the trouble of almost dying to protect everyone else and at the last moment the person they were all trying to protect took it all away. I was thinking how common it is to imagine dying for someone else, but actually you can’t. You don’t have any control anymore when you lay down your life, and then you’re just dead.”

“That is very morbid, my love, but probably true,” her girlfriend murmured. 

“I think I’m angry with Spock,” she said, surprising herself.

“Were you at some point not angry with Spock?”

“Uh…”

“You have behaved as though you are angry with Spock for the entirety of our acquaintance,” M’Ress said, matter-of-fact.

“I guess what’s bothering me is I don’t even know why anymore.”

“Perhaps that indicates your relationship preoccupies your thoughts far less than it did previously.”

“That just makes it sound healthy, baby,” she said. 

“I actually do not believe you are truly angry with Spock,” she said. "Not anymore.”

Nyota twisted her head around to look her girlfriend in the eye. “You don’t?”

“I believe your expectations are now more realistic, and the Vulcan has become more skillful in representing his capacity honestly. And still, after all this, you cherish him. I think you understand each other the way old friends do. You both keep your distance because you don’t expect to be understood by others. You are similar in this.”

“We’re similar in that we share the universal experience of existential isolation?”

“You also enjoy singing with him, though not as much as you enjoy making music with me.”

“Well, that’s because you’re a genius, and I’m in love with you,” Nyota said. M’Ress chuckle-purred into her hair as she nuzzled her neck, which turned into gentle kisses down the line of her shoulders. Nyota shivered at the sensation and cuddled in closer. Amazing to be able to feel perfect contentment and panicked despair within the span of the same day. She wondered if Joanna knew that was possible right now. It was an important thing to know.

“This conversation did not pass the Bechdel test,” she murmured, sleepy.

“What is the Bechdel test?” M’Ress yawned catlike and hugely behind her.

Before she could answer, her lover had fallen asleep.

She only managed a few hours before her anxiety kicked back in, and she carefully extracted herself from her warm Caitian bedmate. She sat on the floor by their bookcase near the kitchenette. She’d missed a message from Joanna sent a few days before, with an attached instrumental track, the beginnings of a melody, simply titled “Selek.” She put in an earpiece and listened, smiling. Selek was the name of a Vulcan-Cardassian girl who’d shown up in her dreams since Joanna was a kid living on Vulcan. Thought she’d be a good starting place for the figure of the guide, the girl had written in the body of the message.

She wiped her padd and loaded her heavily annotated copy of Queering Sha-Ka-Ree, flipping through the sections on the demon bride of Sudoc, a favorite topic of good old Xaverius, whoever they were.

The demon bride of Sudoc was by every account not enthusiastic at best and unwilling at worst when it came to her marriage to the last great villain of Vulcan history. In fact, aside from her presumed connection to her demon kin, the bride was most associated with the Kolinahr Master, Sanshiin. Some sources said she was his apprentice, others that she was some sort of kinswoman to the last mindlord of Gol. Some very unpopular sources even said she was his lover, his woman, a comfort in his eremitic repose, an existential threat to Vulcan ascetic ideals. In most accounts, Sudoc demanded her as a concession, usually explicitly as his bondmate, while negotiating a surrender with the lords of Shi’Kahr. Not a single source mentioned why the demon bride had agreed to do this. Had she done this to protect Shi’Kahr? Had she done this at Sanshiin’s request? Did she and Sudoc have any kind of prior relationship? Had she even thought she had a choice?

The only archeological evidence of Vulcan marriage customs from this time actually came from fragments of the records at Sudoc’s great palace, where he maintained an extravagant creche and system of concubinage. Documents about the women read more like bills of sale and deeds than anything else. What ownership meant, precisely, no one knew, but it was likely that Sanshiin had relinquished ownership of the demon bride to Sudoc. Or perhaps Sanshiin had merely ignored his “right” to the young woman due to his mystical withdrawal from society and the lords of Shi’Kahr had disposed of her as common, civic property. This prospect bothered Nyota almost as much as Sanshiin handing her over himself. Abandonment was abandonment.

She’d never understood the claims that after Sudoc’s death, the lords of Shi’Kahr had driven the girl (and possibly her child or unborn child) beyond the city limits, presumably to live or die in exile. This was always recounted with complete neutrality, as though the reason was self-evident. As far as she could tell, the Demon Bride had been the one who made Sudoc’s defeat possible, a real Judith and Holofernes moment. Even if she’d done nothing, it’s not like she was there because she wanted to be. Hadn’t Sanshiin cared what happened to her at all? She had betrayed her bondmate, which was abhorrent, even if she had always been Sudoc’s enemy. But she had been Sudoc’s bondmate, polluted, so she was anathema. It had always seemed very unfair. Illogical. Human - in a bad way. These were supposed to be the “good” guys, the ones who followed Surak.

How could anything ever be okay if someone had to carry a burden so crushing their personhood became unrecognizable to everyone else? Who always had to work harder, yell louder, run faster, think smarter? She wondered if the imaginary Selek would have any insight on the matter. She doubted it. She was a dream girl. She didn’t need to worry about whether she was a person.

The following day she and Spock arrived at the gym at the same time for their sparring session. She didn’t make it very far into the session before Spock called a halt.

“I do not think sparring is an effective use of our time today,” he said. “You are too distracted.”

Nyota didn’t have the energy to take offense.

“I too find myself distracted,” he said. That was new. “You will have heard that Cadet McCoy has withdrawn from her summer piloting rotation and is en route to Cait for some sort of temporary employment.”

Nyota nodded. Leo had also mentioned that Joanna hadn’t registered for fall term yet, but that was a problem for another day.

“Dr. McCoy’s concentration and efficiency may be severely impacted,” he said, as though he needed to justify being worried about a friend’s daughter, which, being him, he probably thought he did. Then, as an afterthought, he added, “Understandably.”

“He may surprise you,” Nyota said.

“That would be consistent with his essential disposition,” he granted and her lips perked up into a smile. Another similarity, then: they both noticed Leo’s mysterious and maddening unpredictability.

They stood in relatively companionable silence until Spock continued, hesitant, “I wished to inquire whether the tragedy at the Academy and its personal repercussions triggered any adverse symptoms of post-traumatic stress.”

Her smile dragged downward, now wry. “Why? Worried about my efficiency?”

“No,” he said, “I am concerned for your well-being. I am making myself available to… listen.”

She sighed. “It’s very difficult to put into words.”

Spock gave a nod of acknowledgment.

“I could show you,” she said, greatly surprising herself. “Through a mind-meld, I mean.”

Spock looked visibly shocked. “I… I would be honored to share such an experience with you, as long as you do not require… reciprocation in terms of sharing my own memories or feelings beyond any inchoate reactions to your own.”

“That’s fine,” she said, feeling her shoulders loosen. “Reciprocation and mutuality doesn’t have to be symmetrical, you know.”

“I see,” he said, as though this hadn’t really occurred to him.

They sat on the soft floor of the sparring room, and he reached out his hand. She leaned forward.

Notes:

Takes place immediately after "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" and ends after "The Empath."

“Sevrin” is a reference to the benighted episode “The Way to Eden,” which was the slapped together replacement episode made out of the scraps of D.C. Fontana’s script treatment for “Joanna,” which introduced McCoy’s daughter. Sevrin is the name of the leader of the terrible space hippies and seems like the sort of person who would name a band after himself. If you recall, Chekov has a romantic subplot with a character who “replaces” Joanna, who dropped out of the Academy and ran off with the hippie band. This is still a profound mercy considering originally KIRK was supposed to have the romantic subplot with Joanna.

I stole the name M’mneirr from my STO crew member. You had better believe the crew is hot Romulan and Reman ladies and this catboy.

I hope you all like that Gaila AOS Easter egg.

A reminder that Torias Dax was a pilot, hmmmmm.

The combo of tactical and piloting is a unique feature of TOS that they mostly abandon later. The setup with La’an on SNW is anachronistic: it’s not clear there’s such a thing as a “tactical” officer in the 2260s.

There are times when we see Uhura’s quarters in TOS: please just imagine that out of frame is evidence that she lives with her hot Caitian girlfriend, lmao.

Pasalk and weird Federation race laws are featured in Number One’s trial episode of SNW S2.

I spent a very non-zero amount of time trying to figure out the chromosome math of a human-Andorian hybrid once I realized triploidy wasn’t a thing that could work.

For some reason, Christine and Bones watching Supernatural together makes perfect sense to me.

Caitians having “heats” is actually canon in Lower Decks, so I stand-by their scholarly interest in the Omegaverse.

I decided the symptoms for xenopolycythemia were in the general ballpark of blood disorders and cancers, thus coughing, fragile bones and skin, fatigue, etc.

The reference to “officer thinking” is a joke in ST6 that Kirk makes with Valeris.

I’m not exactly sure whether we know that Spock and Bones DON’T know about David Marcus, so I think it’s fair game. It is now canon that Kirk knows Carol is pregnant as of S2 of SNW.

The Defiant being sent back to the 2150s in “The Tholian Web” is a plot beat in S4 of Enterprise and mentioned in Disco.

Section 31 messing with the mirror universe in the 2380s is something that happens in a beta canon novel starring Julian Bashir, though not in the way I’m implying here.

D.C. Fontana noted that Joanna McCoy should look like “Nancy Sinatra or Bobbi Gentry.”

Now my Rigel Cup gambit pays off: five cadets dying while doing the Kolvoord Starburst “a hundred years” before the events of the TNG episode “The First Duty” is why it was banned. I’d done the math, and having that happen in 2268 was too tempting to pass up, especially as I wanted a less damning reason for Joanna to consider dropping out of Starfleet as she would have in "Joanna."

Chapter 14: Hellguard (E)

Summary:

Spock loses an argument with a Section 31 agent about The Merchant of Venice.

Notes:

Haha, remember when I was like "I'm splitting the last chapter"? I split it again, so let's just buckle in for a Joanna arc, shall we?

Content Notes:
Explicit sexual content, references to mental health institutions in old-fashioned ableist ways (by ppl who probably have internalized ableism abt mental health), child soldiers, children in danger, idk Section 31 as a general warning.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

[circa 2268; USS Enterprise, Beta Quadrant]

Spock hadn’t exactly worked out how he was going to say what he needed to say when the call connected to Starfleet HQ. This was, simply, not something he did.

Admiral Batel, current Chancellor of Starfleet Academy, and Captain Pike’s ex-lover, flickered onto his screen.

“Hi, Spock,” she said, looking bemused. “Haven’t heard from you in… years.”

“I appreciate you making the time, admiral,” Spock said. “I’m calling to inquire about the academic status of a cadet.”

“You are,” Batel said, as though she found the prospect dubious. “Uh, why?”

“Because I believe I am the only one who can make this call,” he said.

She leaned forward, looking at him with greater interest. 

“I want to know if Cadet Joanna McCoy sh’Valrass is still in good academic standing, and, if there is some obstacle to her progress toward her degree, how it may be overcome.”

Batel blinked. Her face softened with sympathy at Joanna’s name, but she still seemed guarded. “And why do you think this is any of your business?”

“I am a member of the faculty in her academic track and one of her instructors of record.”

Batel’s eyes widened. “You’re what now?”

This was the most tenuous maneuver of the entire scheme. Since his promotion to first officer, he’d been fielding offers from Starfleet Academy several times a year for various bits of work, which he’d always declined. He’d combed through his inbox once the initial crisis of Joanna McCoy’s disappearance had abated, when it occurred to him that while Joanna’s status with the Academy wasn’t as immediate a priority as her emotional well-being and safety, there was something he could actually do about this problem. After rereading every regulation related to academic appointments and student affairs (as well as material conflicts of interest), he’d accepted two offers that were technically adjunct positions.

“I am designing the Kobayashi Maru test for the upcoming year’s graduating class, which makes me adjunct faculty in the piloting track, among others.” Why exactly the Academy had been hounding him for years to design a test he’d never taken hadn’t been totally clear to him. The most likely explanation was an extremely long and concerned missive he’d sent the administration as an ensign pinpointing all the flaws in the program when a former computer science professor had asked him to take a look at a “hack” to the Kobayashi Maru scenario that particular year. At least this pedagogical chore wouldn’t be too taxing. “I have also accepted the position of psionic examiner for the telepathy certification board, replacing Dr. Miranda Jones, which makes me her instructor of record.”

“Wow,” she said. “So,” she said, with deceptive casualness, “you want to discuss her case as a colleague as opposed to, say, a friend of the family?”

“Correct,” Spock said.

Her shoulders relaxed. “As a lawyer, that’s a hell of a stretch, but as an educator, I’ll take it in a heartbeat. Let’s jam.”

He got a screenshare request, and he watched as she zoomed through various records related to Joanna McCoy.

“I just know the broad strokes,” she said. “Hell of a thing. The memorial service for the cadets was very rough for everyone on campus, and even though the cadet who was coaching was cleared of all wrongdoing, no one could convince him to stay in Starfleet. I’ve heard the Trill Science Ministry has snapped him up as a test pilot, at least. We’re banning that wretched Kolvoord Starburst thing, of course.”

Well, that was one way of failing upward, he thought. Five young officers dead from a high-risk maneuver with your name on it, and you get a prestigious position with the best advanced astro-engineering research institute in the known galaxy. Even the VSA didn’t contend with Trill when it came to warp and FTL propulsion theory. He was being illogical to view the unfortunate Torias Kolvoord’s plight with cynicism, but he had to admit he had been emotionally compromised by Dr. McCoy crying himself to sleep after a call with Joanna, wherein he girlfriend the girl’s breakup with her “first boyfriend” and panic attacks over her “guilt” had been discussed.

“Hm,” Batel said. “The good news is that she’s all good in terms of her coursework. She finished her finals before the accident, I see, did well. Pulling out of her cadet cruise was… unfortunate, but not cause for disciplinary action. Her current activities, however, are unknown and unapproved by the faculty. The Academy’s not like any university, you know. You’re also a commissioned officer even during the summers and have to keep everyone in the loop.”

“Cadet McCoy is pursuing research in xenoanthropology on Cait at the moment,” Spock said, “in preparation for future doctoral study.”

She was working as a studio musician for Lieutenant M’Ress’s brother, but Uhura had assured him she knew how to spin it.

Batel raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Supervised by whom? There’s nothing on file with the Linguistics and Anthropology department. Don’t tell me you’re also somehow an adjunct in ethnomusicology now.”

“She is being supervised by a professor at UC Berkeley in the Interstellar Cultural Studies program as well as by Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, PhD, a renowned linguist and working musician. UC Berkeley, as I’m sure you know, already has a preexisting consortium relationship with the Academy. I believe the paperwork can be post-dated under special circumstances, at the discretion of the Chancellor.” 

Said professor was in fact in the engineering department and Uhura’s Academy roommate, but Professor Gaila was affiliated with the research group and had been game to do whatever Uhura asked if she shouldered the majority of the mentorship responsibilities.

“Oh, can it now?” Betal now looked rather amused. “I’ll double-check, but if you get it on my desk, I’ll approve it. The humanities people love her, I hear, so I don’t think it’ll ruffle any feathers. Is she coming back for the fall semester? I see she’s not registered.”

Here was a delicate matter. Joanna had barely agreed to Uhura’s “research project,” let alone made a decision about Starfleet Academy. “Her research may extend into the next term, but she’s aware of future registration deadlines.”

Betal frowned, and pulled up her transcript. “She’s taken enough credits that she can technically graduate with just the spring semester. Not in the piloting command track, but with a humanities degree in Linguistics and Vulcan Lit, sure. If she’s willing to stay in the program for an additional summer or fall term, she could still finish her command track requirements. She does have to pass her telepathy certs. If she doesn’t, she’ll have to wait another year to qualify for ensign positions.”

“Understood,” he said.

“I’m really glad you called, Spock,” she said. “There’s no way checking up on her situation would have occurred to me. I’m swamped all the time, and I can’t tell you the last time I looked at an individual student’s case outside of a disciplinary hearing. I remember her dads being put through the ringer when I was clerking for the Judge Advocate General. Really fucked up. They were getting railroaded until someone pulled strings and got them a decent legal team. Cadet McCoy is clearly a very special young person, and I’m glad folks are still going to bat for her, not just for the kids of the Federation elite. I mean, Kolvoord’s case got white glove service and his career is fine - not that the poor kid needed to be kicked while he was down.”

“She is certainly worthy of support,” Spock agreed. “I am confident in the logic of my intervention.”

“Here’s to logic, then,” she said, and gave him the ta’al.

Once they’d ended the call, he sent a message to Uhura, confirming she could send along the paperwork. To his surprise, ten minutes later, she was at his door.

Her expression was not… pleasant. “Spock, what did you do?”

“I have ascertained that the paperwork for Cadet McCoy’s extended research project will be sufficient to maintain her academic standing and progress towards graduation,” he said, wondering how much clearer he could have been over comms.

“I mentioned to you that Gaila and I had come up with this scheme and ran it by Joanna, but we had no idea how to make the logistics work.”

“And I have arranged for the logistics to ‘work,’” he said.

She folded her arms. “How?”

“I called Admiral Batel.”

“You called… Admiral Batel. The Chancellor of Starfleet Academy. You were just like, ‘hey, can you sign off on this so this cadet doesn’t get penalized for fleeing Earth without telling anyone,’ and she was like, ‘sure.’”

He blinked. “Essentially, yes.”

With a sigh she collapsed onto one of his armchairs and rubbed her forehead. “You are unbelievable.”

Well, that didn’t make any sense. “How so? Did you mean the colloquial sense, suggesting I have made a faux pas? Should I have refrained?”

“Yes,” she said. “No. I don’t know. It’s fine, great even. Even if Batel still greets me with ‘hey girl’ whenever she sees me, I would never have had the audacity to just call her up. You’ve used your awkward Vulcan superpowers for good this time. I just wasn’t expecting it.”

Spock had been nervous someone would notice his unusual investment in Cadet McCoy’s predicament. “You… were not?”

“That you’d figure out how to navigate hierarchy and leverage your social capital for someone else? Sort of, yeah. I never doubted you could pull a Sarek; I just assumed doing so wouldn’t occur to you on your own.”

The unsavory implications of “pulling a Sarek” aside, he was pleased it had been his methods not his intentions that had drawn attention.

“I merely followed logic to the most likely solution,” he said and raised an eyebrow.

“Of course you did,” she muttered. 

He watched her face relax, her posture ease, clearly comfortable in his presence. “May I ask you a personal question?”

Surprise flashed across her face. “Um. Okay, I guess.”

“After meditating on our mind-meld, I realized that I had noticed your behavior had changed towards me by the start of this five-year mission. I deduced you were displeased with me and perhaps angry. I did not know why. Recently, however, you have been more… friendly toward me. Our mind meld reinforced this interpretation. I wanted to hear your perspective: was I correct that you had put distance between us? If so, what has changed?”

Uhura stared at him, eyes wide with shock, and was silent for a while. “The initial reason was petty and immature. I had to take Christine’s side in the breakup to preserve harmony in my friend group, even though I actually didn’t like how she handled that situation at all. However, I still cared about you, so avoiding you was the only way to do that without being insincere. Any time I didn’t, I’d end up being your confidante, and that was super uncomfortable for me. Eventually I just thought you didn’t… care. I’m used to being the one who puts in all the effort with others, and I saw our friendship that way. I was angry about that pattern and just thought you were an example of it.”

Spock absorbed this. The chain of her reasoning felt foreign but was intelligible enough.

“As to what changed… First, I grew up a bit and realized that no one had to take sides. That was mostly it. I think we’ve also been working more closely together again, and I’ve paid more attention to you day-to-day. You know, I bet you’ll hate this, but I stopped seeing you as some uncaring monolith when you and Leo started sparring and you let yourself be petty and playful again.”

“Hate would not be logical in this case,” he said. “Despite a certain amount of aggravation, I have found my association with Dr. McCoy conducive towards ‘loosening up.’ For all his provocation, he is quite… understanding, accepting, even, of less than harmonious sentiment.”

Uhura smiled brightly. “So great to hear you know that. I like that about him too. This is what I’m talking about. There’s also the fact that you’ve made a real effort to show you care about me more recently. You’ve just been… nicer to everyone, I guess. If you’re paying attention.” She gave him a careful look. “I’m glad you have someone close to you again.”

Spock froze. What? What did she know? How did she know? Who else knew?

“It’s okay, Spock,” she said, tone gentle, “no one has a problem with you and the captain being together and people don’t really gossip about it. We respect you both so much and it’s sweet, honestly.”

“The captain,” Spock repeated. For all his bewilderment at the continued assumption of a romantic relationship between him and Jim, it occurred to him that the misunderstanding had unexpected benefits. Though he would like to figure out what exactly about their behavior gave everyone this impression.

“I don’t expect you to confirm it,” she assured him. “I just want you to know that now I will listen to any boy problems you have even on the vaguest information.”

“I… appreciate that,” he said. He wasn’t sure what could be gained from discussing his… complex relationship with the doctor in the abstract, but this was probably a human thing that might be relevant due to McCoy’s intense humanity.

“Any time,” she said, rising from the chair. “Maybe let me know about any power moves with the admiralty I’m a part of beforehand, though, yeah?”

He nodded.

He anticipated McCoy’s arrival within the next hour, depending on how long treating Jim for the woman Elaan’s aphrodisiac tears would take. Despite the fact that the captain’s love for the Enterprise had allowed him to cross their “guest’s” will despite his unwilling attachment, the doctor had, of course, insisted on actually getting the toxin fully out of his bloodstream. Based on McCoy’s patterns of behavior, which he’d observed at much closer quarters in the past month, he would seek Spock out for sexual contact after a trying day. However, since their encounters had become significantly less restrained and more frequent after the incident with the USS Defiant and the Tholians, for reasons Spock could not entirely articulate in a cogent fashion, his “observations” were likely merely guesses.

He spent time fine-tuning his new surveillance program that he’d cobbled together from the code he’d used to wipe Control off the Defiant. He’d taken Agent Tola’s warning not to look for Control on the Enterprise somewhat to heart, and would have felt smug about his workaround if he were human. He had tapped into the communications server that Uhura used most often and expanded the default background scans for outgoing messages behind a firewall. A star ship was a noisy thing. It would have been impossible to truly account for every signal that deliberately or incidentally left or came to the ship. This was part of why the comms officer was so essential: the finely-tuned ear of a living being listening for meaning could still outperform the computer most of the time. The combination of a sentient being and the computer beat automated programs on their own every time.

He’d begun by isolating everything that “wasn’t” tagged as an outgoing transmission, assuming any sub rosa communiques would be hiding in the dross. After all, this was how he sent messages to Sybok that had so far gone undetected. Among the “static” he’d been experimenting with various pattern-matching approaches. Admittedly, he hadn’t honed in on how Control was sending data yet, but he did think he was closing in on a pattern that could indicate regular messages sent from the ship from a single point of origin. He suspected they might be the work of the unknown Section 31 operative on the ship, though he supposed they could also come from Dr. Tola, now that he knew they were Ahm Tal. Or the Klingons, the Romulans, the Orions… someone who regularly and secretly contacted someone outside the ship rather soon after any incident of note had occurred and mission reports had been filed, sometimes within minutes.

He considered asking Uhura for help, but he did not like the idea of a “murdery” Section 31 agent taking note of her, even if they apparently were less “stabby.” 

He shut off his terminal as the doctor entered his quarters.

The doctor approached his desk. Not the doctor. He had been conditioned over the past month - Do not call me doctor in bed! - to let McCoy transform, in private, into Leo. He even said it out loud now. 

“What’s on your mind, Spock?”

“Methods of encrypting subspace communications,” he said, and rose from his desk, catching Leo’s hand by the wrist and offering his fingers in a kiss.

“Sweet talker,” Leo said, and stroked his fingers over Spock’s.

He felt a frisson of arousal run through the psi points in his hands and felt his body respond quickly. Without speaking he raised their hands and nipped at his lover’s fingers, drawing them into his mouth to suck. 

“Goddamn,” Leo muttered, shivering. 

Too talkative. He released his prize and took Leo’s mouth instead as he opened to his firm kiss. His blunt nails scraped over Leo’s scalp, the pads of his fingers stroking his face and neck. Leo meanwhile had wrapped his arms around his waist and pulled them together, firm pressure making his sheath all of a sudden wet. He cupped Leo’s face and began kissing down his neck, fighting the temptation to leave marks.

“Uh - ah,” Leo said, breathy and low, “what do you want, sugar?”

Endearments, always endearments. A Terran cultural tic. He let the scene drip into Leo’s waiting mind - so well-trained, so receptive in the space that the human chose to open - driving into his lover’s body beneath him, Leo’s wrists pinned by his head. Ole reliable, came the amused - aroused thought back down their line of psionic contact.

Spock pulled back slightly from Leo’s mouth. Are you amenable?

“Ask,” Leo said, breathing more heavily but smirking. “Use your words.”

He kept his voice flat, here willing to admit precision was a tease, “Do you consent to penetrative intercourse, Leonard?”

Leo leaned forward and lightly bit the tip of his nose. “Be nice, now.”

He let his hands fall from Leo’s face, and settled them at his waist underneath the hem of both his undershirt and surgical blues, unwilling to break physical contact. He leaned forward and said, close to Leo’s ear, “May I fuck you, Leo?”

The human shuddered and seized his face, pulling him into a frenzied kiss. With barely adequate coordination, they pivoted to his sleeping alcove, stripping each other’s clothes off without fanfare and leaving them strewn on the floor, a decadence. Leo shoved him down onto the bed and climbed on top of him on hands and knees, leaning down to kiss him again, his brown hair escaping the day’s professional neatness and falling down his forehead.

Spock submitted to his attentions, as Leo pinned his hands by his hips, and kissed down his chest, giving sharp then soft bites to both his nipples, to his sheath. Something a bit predatory coiled underneath his pliability. Leo knew it and was delighted, if somewhat coy, as he placed his tongue flat on Spock’s sheath, teasing him out with his mouth and strong hands, moaning approvingly. Spock hadn’t historically had much interest in blowjobs, but Leo’s were of great interest. Absent was the sense of acceleration of sensation to inevitable conclusion typical of the act in his experience, and instead Leo knew what to do with him in each phase of his erection. Firm strokes and licks to draw his cock out, then light strokes at the base and taking him deep into his mouth, moving slowly. Letting his cock know where it was going. He preferred such touch as foreplay for intercourse, and this was already a bit out of order - he hadn’t even touched Leo yet.

He was about to pull Leo off him, altogether too aroused, when he looked up between his legs and gave him a wolfish grin. Spock drew him back up as though for a kiss, before neatly flipping them over, curled over his lover, and kissing him then. A thought twisted into his mind, a simple projection from the man below him, and he rutted his dripping cock through the folds of Leo’s cunt as he considered. 

Eating a lover out and opening them up with his fingers were some of his favorite sexual activities, but he was intrigued by the notion that Leo was already ready for him. A playful challenge drifted over his skin. Giving him an unserious, reproachful glance, he slipped a hand between them, gathering some of his own lubrication and played with Leo’s cock anyway, remaining externally impassive as Leo writhed and sort of moan-grumble-whined. Between them, arcing from mind to mind, was the soft light of laughter-wanting-opening .

Leo was shaking and at some distance Spock knew he was now verbally complaining and giving orders. He let his hand go lower and felt how very wet Leo had been for quite some time now, testing inside with two fingers then three, before Leo whined in a way that was somehow imperious.

Spock reached for a pillow he had acquired with the right dimensions and firmness, and slid it under Leo’s hips. He pressed in slowly, focusing on the sensations and sending them skin-to-skin. Heat, the generous glide of lubrication from two reproductive systems. You’re tight. You want this now, can’t wait? Let me in. Leo moaned at the reproof and panted over the stretch, loosening slightly as he seated himself fully, using a very Vulcan amount of discipline to remain still.

“Fuck, Spock, fuck me , goddamn it,” he heard Leo swear.

Ask, he projected. Ask without words.

Leo glared at him, but sent back, Fuck me, you’re hard for me, let me have it.  

Apparently telepathic projections could be defiant, and Spock found himself moving before he could think, slowly at first. He didn’t hold down the man’s wrists or hold himself over him as he’d pictured, but instead fucked into him more quickly as both his hands pressed and rubbed circles around and against Leo’s cock.

He sent a sly question inquiring if this was Leo’s desired outcome. He received back a somewhat jolting suggestion that if he couldn’t tell maybe it wasn’t, maybe he wasn’t paying attention. Spock lifted one of his legs onto his shoulder and drove in deeper, harder, and slowed down slightly.

He could feel Leo’s delight, filled with cock and wild abandon. My cock. You’re taking my cock. You need it. Mine. An easy and free yes yes yes yes flew over him through Leo’s skin. You’re beautiful like this, open to me, your sharp mind and what you feel, it overwhelms me. Leo began to make a series of quick, low moans as he began to twitch around him. Just us, right now, Leo sent. You and me and nothing else. Spock felt his heart burst with nameless brightness as Leo gasped and began shaking as he came on his cock, moaning as he pulsed and clenched tight around him as Spock, almost surprised, came, hard, deep inside with a gasp, feeling his abdominal muscles quiver.

Leo panted and Spock breathed a bit more heavily than usual as their hearts slowed and muscles relaxed, nuzzling each other and kissing, aimless, with hands and mouths. Spock carefully pulled out of Leo’s body as his cock retreated in a leisurely fashion back inside of him. He rolled over and wrapped his arms around Leo, pulling him over so his head rested on his chest. They breathed together for a few minutes, the easiest form of meditation, sated and empty-headed. 

Leo yawned and rolled up to use the refresher as Spock rolled a quick sonic cleaner over the mussed sheets and gathered their clothing and placed them, folded, on the bureau. He’d finished replicating two glasses of tea and found Leo had come back, under the covers in sweatpants and a regulation undershirt, looking rather soft and content. He looked this way in bed, rarely outside it. Leo took the mug happily and blew on the hot water.

They lounged and napped (in Leo’s case) for the next few hours - all quite pleasant and relaxing. Their time alone was a peculiar kind of stimulating peace, able to navigate each other’s need for introspection effortlessly. Although he was extremely careful to not push into Leo’s mind, and certainly reached nowhere near a telepathic state for bonding, he was almost surprised that a bond wasn’t forming considering their accord when they’d shared both body and mind with one another. It was almost as if their light telepathic exchanges were complementary to some instinctive, wordless understanding, which was the opposite of Vulcan expectations for intimacy that deprioritized the physical. How odd to feel awe when they could just read and catch up on messages in bed with little distance or tension.

Until, of course, the safety and ease Leo felt also allowed him to take a call. He’d reluctantly pulled back from leaning on Spock’s shoulder with a groan, and answered the call on his padd once settled with Spock out of view.

“Oh hi, T’Nura,” he said, and grinned.

Fortunately the doctor had his eyes on his “friend” and did not see Spock’s body lock up dramatically, on high alert. The doctor. Leo had become Dr. McCoy again.

So, “Colonel T’Nura” or “Kelondra” did survive the destruction of the Romulan ship.

“Greetings Leo,” said a calm, Vulcan-sounding voice. “I have a concern I thought appropriate to express to you.”

“Oh? What’s up?”

“Ambassador Sarek contacted me yesterday to request my services as personal security for Joanna McCoy on Cait. I had to decline due to prior commitments, as you know, but he indicated he would be seeking alternatives.”

McCoy’s eyes narrowed. “Jo didn’t tell me Sarek was doing that.”

There was a pause. “I believe it’s possible that Joanna may not be apprised of the existence of her new security detail. I am unsure whether or not I should inform her.”

“I’ll do it,” McCoy said, rubbing his eyes, “after I get the skinny from… oh hell, probably the Lady Amanda. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the, er, thought behind the gesture, but Jo won’t, and it’s more likely she’ll be actively figuring out how to avoid her bodyguards. She’s been talking more about not being a 'nepo baby,' whatever that is. After all, she’s not in any danger, except, debatably, from her own emotions. Though I suppose Sarek wouldn't really be able to tell the difference.”

“Vulcans do indeed have different definitions of caution and control of others as well as less rigid distinctions between internal and external sources of influence,” T’Nura said, now with a hint of amusement.

“Yeah, remind me again how effective repression is in regulating feelings if the impulse of a grown man is to post a literal guard around a girl’s broken heart.”

“Doing so would be illogical, as I already know you would not agree.”

“Damn straight.”

“That was my primary purpose for this call, but I also wished to inquire if you were available to consult on a personal matter.”

McCoy glanced over at Spock. “Now’s not the best time - I’m with Spock right now. Can I call you later?”

“Affirmative, I hope your evening is enjoyable,” she said, and the call ended.

He should take a moment to consider his next words as he let the doctor fade back into Leo again, but he did not. Spock’s hands convulsed. “ Colonel T’Nura knows we are sexually intimate?”

“I hardly give her a play-by-play,” Leo said, looking at him, his eyebrows creeping up his forehead.

“Who else knows?”

Leo flopped down on his back. “Hm, three friends who aren’t on the ship, not in our chain of command, and who aren’t mutual,” he said. “T’Nura’s one of them. I suppose she does know your folks but Vulcans don’t gossip. Well, like humans gossip, anyway.”

Spock was stunned. He wasn’t sure what was registering on his face, but Leo frowned up at him.

“Look, there’s a fine line to walk between privacy and secrecy, and I’m very aware of it, Spock. I don’t do totally secret lovers even if I am a human hermit crab - whenever I tried it as a kid it blew up in my face. Healthy secrets have expiration dates. I mean normally I’d tell Jim, Chris, Nyota, Tola, and Erica, but those are all your friends too, so I don’t mind not saying anything right now, especially if you felt the need for a confidante yourself. But it’s a normal human impulse to talk about the person you’re dating.”

Spock now felt like the stiffness in his hands had migrated to his brain or, quixotically, the back of his neck. Several very infelicitous trains of thought and reaction were fusing together. Of course it was a normal human impulse, and that the doctor - that Leo - was so mature should be an intense relief. It was gratifying that the doctor - Leo - was acknowledging their arrangement wasn’t casual, as he could not deny his own… seriousness. 

He’d also been uneasy flirting with the edge of fraternization regulations and it was a positive development that Leo did not feel shame or pressure to hide their connection, merely a desire for privacy that he could not find fault with as it frankly was even greater than his own. He himself had not confided in anyone merely the thought hadn’t occurred to him, but he would not have been so discriminating.  As a counterpoint, however, Leo was disclosing sensitive information about their sex life that could certainly be leveraged by unscrupulous third parties to someone who, as far as he knew, was a traitor to Vulcan and the Federation as well as a Romulan asset. Who had slept with his mother.

The collision of these two realities seemed to be coming out as deflection and a bid for distance, as he said, “Dating, doctor? Is that what we’re doing?”

Leo actually had the innocence or gall to look mildly confused. “Don’t call me doctor in bed. What else would you call it? We’re spending most nights together, most of our free time together even if we’re not having sex, and are involved in each other’s personal lives. I mean, obviously you’re not my boyfriend, but if it quacks like a duck, you know…”

Obviously?

“Our social entanglement is not a feature of our sexual activity or even our friendship - we seem to move in similar circles either way. I believe the increase in our time spent together is most closely correlated to the increase in our sexual activity. I have noticed a marked change in my libido, which has led to a logical series of behavioral changes.”

Leo rolled onto his side, and propped himself up with one elbow. “Jesus Christ, Spock, seriously?” Then the frustration receded as he said, “Changes in your sex drive are very interesting, and it could be revealing to tease out what’s a result of human hybridity and what’s a result of behavioral impacts on the Vulcan male libido and pon farr cycle. Not that you should volunteer for such a study, fuck that. And not that I can do it, now there’s an obvious flaw in experimental design if I ever heard of one…”

Spock had now rolled onto his side and was staring at Leo. This man was impossible. Everything he knew about human behavior and romantic attachment styles suggested that he should be livid and defensive and critical of his impersonal approach. Why was he simply accepting his statements and responding in kind?

“I believe such a clinical approach to this discussion does not align with the paradigm of ‘dating.’”

“Pretty sure it does when there’s two blue shirts on the floor and a bed with the Enterprise’s two most senior science officers in it.”

“Our uniforms are no longer on the floor,” he said. But, touché. For some reason, Spock felt signs of renewing arousal and tried to dismiss them. “I am surprised you are so nonchalant. The last time the subject of our relationship or lack thereof came up, you had indicated that ‘anything more’ was ‘too overwhelming.’”

Leo again did not seem angry. “The last time the topic came up I was extremely drunk and my actions up to that point had been mighty impacted by me thinkin’ I was dying.”

Spock felt his eyebrow twitch. “A very significant factor in the situation of which only you were aware.”

Leo, again, did not respond appropriately for a human. Defensiveness or apology were warranted. Instead he merely blinked, calm. “I think we have different values around sex and intimacy. Feeling connected to someone or sleeping with them or being open to the possibility is just my daily normal. I think it’s not for you, and engaging that part of your brain is a big event, which makes sense, not just for a Vulcan - it’s a human pattern too. I’m just saying I don’t see much of a contradiction between giving you a blowjob and not telling you I was dying.”

“I find that attitude highly illogical,” he replied, and was satisfied with how cold he sounded, “and indicative of an inconsiderate and dishonest tendency in your character.”

Leo scowled, finally, finally getting agitated. “I hadn’t even told Jo yet, you entitled, green-blooded… infant. That was what I was preoccupied about, how to tell her, when to tell her. I still haven’t told her. Oh, also, I was dying, and I wasn’t exactly thinking with the whole front of my brain. I was scared! Angry! Ashamed! Your future disapproval of my boundaries around the very sensitive topic of my death was not exactly top of mind, so sue me.”

Spock felt white-hot rage shoot through him. After breathing through it, he realized that he couldn’t accept what the doctor was saying - which did, in the convoluted and baffling inner world of Leonard McCoy, make sense - in light of his subsequent behavior with the Vians mere weeks ago. If he cared so much about his daughter and the effect his death would have on her, why had he incapacitated both his superior officers, his best friend and his lover, and offered himself up to near certain death?

“How enlightening,” he said, tone still icy. “Despite the tumultuous nature of your emotional obsessions, it seems we are still in agreement that our mutually satisfactory sexual arrangement does not meet either of our criteria for romantic involvement.”

Leo’s mouth dropped open in shock, and Spock braced himself for recriminations or even calm rejection, the doctor slipping out of bed, back into his uniform, and leaving him. Instead, with a growl, the man dramatically rolled to his other side, his narrow back now facing him towards the far edge of the bed. 

“Touch telepathy goes both ways, asshole, we’re dating,” Leo muttered, and then pulled the blankets around him, intending to sleep or pretend to sleep. “If you want to stop, break up with me. Just know that picking fights about convoluted rationalizations you don’t believe in with won’t get the job done.”

Spock’s tattered emotional shields swirled in his mind as he rolled onto his back again and attempted to do something like meditate. Mostly, there was confusion. Why was Leo still here? Angry with him, well aware that Spock, if he were honest, was angry at Leo, yet still here. Even more confusing was the fact that the human’s irrational, continued presence seemed to be lessening Spock’s anger at the back of his mind. There was something he was missing. Well, other than the fact that they were dating, that elusive human concept.

Maybe he should take Uhura up on her offer of advice, if he could just figure out what to say.

 

***

 

Before he could arrange a time to chat with Uhura over the next few, busy days, he received an unexpected call from his mother’s line at the family estate.

“Spock, help,” she said without preamble, looking a bit frazzled but filled with brio as usual. “I have a million things to do before Sarek’s reception for the Vulcan diplomatic corps and T'Nura's stopover, but I really wanted to have a new Andorian guitar delivered to Joanna on Cait. You know what she likes, could you do it for me?”

Uh.  

“Mother, why do you believe I would know Joanna McCoy’s preferences in Andorian stringed instruments?”

“I mean, you know her and you know stringed instruments.” 

Spock blinked. “I have never met Joanna McCoy.”

“You haven’t?” Now his mother looked confused. “Not even over a subspace call?”

“Negative.”

“How bizarre, sorry I asked, I suppose,” she said. She seemed to be considering leaving the matter alone and then deciding against it. “Have you ever asked Leo why he’s keeping you two apart?”

“Negative.”

“Spock,” she said, suddenly suspicious. “Are you sure Leo has been keeping her from you?”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re referring to.”

“When did you find out he had a daughter?”

“A few months after he joined the mission.”

“Huh, that’s strange that you were spending so much time together and he never mentioned it.”

“We weren’t,” Spock admitted. “Spending time together. When we did we discussed our research or ship’s business or sometimes sparred over differences in opinion about situations, in a… playfully adversarial manner. We started spending more time together soon after that conversation.”

“So,” she said, “you’re the one who kept him at arm’s length. That makes way more sense. He’s very personable but very… cautious. He’d only talk about himself if he thought you actually cared.”

“I have observed this as well.”

“Okay, so you were being shy or you were distracted, and you find out he has a daughter. Then what?”

“The next piece of information I received was on the way to the Babel conference, where I discovered you and Sarek were acquainted with the McCoys.”

He did not think it prudent to volunteer that he’d only recently learned Joanna wasn’t human, more than a year since the Babel conference.

“Spock,” she said, eyes huge. “You’re kidding. Wait - do you dislike Leo McCoy? I can’t believe - somehow I just assumed that you’d be instant friends. You have a lot of common interests, and you’re both such sweethearts. So conscientious! Dammit. I knew, I just knew I should have introduced the two of you. I just didn’t want to meddle.”

“I do not dislike Dr. McCoy,” he said. “Within a year I considered him one of my closest… friends. I still do.”

“But you never ask him questions about his past or people he cares about? I know that’s not really where you shine, Spock, but it sounds kind of like you only talk about things you want to talk about.”

Spock was silent. This already was not going well for him.

“Sometimes he brings up personal details or feelings about a situation or individual of his own accord,” said Spock. “I often don’t know how to respond, but usually I am polite and express interest. I do not always ask… further questions.”

“Huh,” said his mother, looking floored. “You know, for the first time I’m not sure what to say. Part of me wants to tell you to step it up and be a better friend to him, but if you’ve been that… uninvested, I’m not sure - if I didn’t know you - that I would encourage Leo to give you a chance.”

Oh, I am in so much trouble, he thought. “I see.”

“I thought -” She hesitated. “Well, I don’t want to tell you now.”

“I wish to know your thoughts, mother, and I will not take them as a mandate.”

“I know he’s gay,” she said, “and that he’s been single for a while. He doesn’t admit it, but I think he likes his little townhouse in Shi’Kahr and even Vulcan city life in doses. I didn’t think too much about it, as there’s no way to predict chemistry, but I always thought it would be cute if you two got together. It’s actually the first time your father and I have agreed on your love life. I suppose I can say it now, but I never liked T’Pring. Sarek has a very high opinion of Leo, of his, hm, character. On a selfish level, I’d have an excuse to spoil Leo and Joanna without making up plausible cover stories anymore. Jo’s one thing, but Leo’s so stoic it makes my teeth hurt.”

He wasn’t sure what could be gained by doing anything other than deflecting, but that was what he’d always do by default. Going on gut instinct, he, all of a sudden, decided to do something different.

“There has been a… sexual component to our friendship of late. We are not in a committed relationship, but are, I am told, dating. I have wondered, at times, whether he would be willing to explore a more structured… - If he were interested in…”

Really, ” said his mother, her eyes almost sharp and almost… calculating. “That’s very, very interesting, Spock.”

Spock blinked again.

“Okay, I take it back. You are invested. You’re both crazy about each other and terrified, that’s why you’re being so cautious and second-guessing what you do or say.”

Spock glanced away.

“Spock?”

“Yes, mother?”

“I think you should ask Leo out on a date. Be sweet to him, be a gentleman. Let him know you’re interested in who he is as a person. I know that this all sounds very human, but you are half-human. It won’t kill you to act like it sometimes. You have to change your behavior first if you want to lock him down in a Vulcan way.”

“I will consider it,” he said, meekly.

“Don’t worry too much about it,” she said. “Your father and I can care about people who have nothing to do with you, and our relationship with the McCoys has always been separate from ours with you. However it turns out is fine.”

He did not find this particularly reassuring, as he did not think this could possibly be true.

 

***

 

The next week and a half had been so busy that he really hadn’t given proper consideration to his personal relationships, or plotted out his next conversations so that he could communicate more interest in personal matters. So he frankly reacted first with irritation when he found himself faced with the last person he wanted to see, when caution would have been more logical.

He’d been deposited in a holding cell in the Elba II detention center for the “criminally insane” for the second time that day, currently in a stalemate with the fifteen residents who had “taken over” and were attempting to coerce Kirk into giving them access to the Enterprise. The situation was chaotic but boring at the same time. He almost wasn’t surprised when a tall Vulcan woman in what appeared to be an EV suit had walked calmly up to his cell, apparently invisible to the guards. Colonel T’Nura’s hair was different yet again, now cropped back into a normal Vulcan style, but tousled in a not very Vulcan way. It took him a moment to realize that she must have just had a natural curl pattern.

“This is not the best time or place for a conversation, colonel,” Spock said.

“On the contrary, Mr. Spock,” she said, “you will have a good few hours before the inmates remember you. As for the location, this detention facility is quite secure. There are few times or places where we could speak more freely.”

“No Starfleet officer would ‘speak freely’ with a Romulan defector, Kelondra.”

T’Nura raised an eyebrow and said nothing, stepping closer to the force field. He could see, now, that her all-terrain EV suit was Starfleet issue. The grand mystery, in the end, was fairly obvious.

“You were undercover,” he said finally.

She gave an affirmative tip of her head.

“I wasn’t aware the V’Shar had been absorbed into Starfleet as well,” he said.

“It has not,” she replied. “I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of Vulcan Intelligence.”

“Then I must congratulate you on your new career in Starfleet.”

He kept looking for traces of the contempt and lassitude of her Romulan persona, but she remained neutral and unmoved. 

“You will cease your investigations into and sabotage of classified Starfleet computer infrastructure,” she said.

Spock swallowed as discreetly as he could. He knew something, an alarm at the back of his mind, knew what this was, prior to anything approaching dispassionate logic.

“On whose authority do you demand such a thing?”

“On whose authority did you begin this investigation? Dr. Daystrom, an unwell scientist who was unwittingly committing treason? Under no one’s authority, you have also considered yourself quite free, Mr. Spock, to destroy Starfleet resources that are part of a highly classified operation with barely any information about the Defiant and its purpose. Do you really want to receive this order through official channels? It would be surprising if it did not come with a court martial and likely the ruin of your father’s political career. Or you could simply pursue the logical course and cease your pointlessly destructive actions.”

Again, Spock strained to hear some sort of contempt, some evidence of weakness, that T’Nura was lying about who she was. There was none he could discern. The rebuke was given in the measured tone of any mature Vulcan past their first century. He was viscerally reminded of T’Pol, perhaps for good reason, if that part of her “cover” were true. Spock could not, however, allow the matter to remain in prudent implication. He needed to hear her say it.

“I am curious, colonel,” he began, “how it is, exactly, that we crossed paths in the Neutral Zone. I believe it would have been protocol for Starfleet Intelligence to have informed me and the captain of your presence due to the nature of the mission. Captain Tyler made no mention of you, certainly.”

“That is indeed Starfleet Intelligence protocol.”

He tried again. “Then I ask again, on whose authority -”

“This is becoming tedious, commander. I really don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish with this line of questioning. You have your suspicions. My refusal to corroborate them is also an answer.”

Spock didn’t have an immediate comeback. It was illogical, really, that he needed her to confirm it. She was right, however, that this had become tedious.

“You could still be Romulan intelligence, rather than Section 31,” he said, calling her bluff.

“If I am Tal Shiar, then taking these orders at face value would be of no consequence, because if the Tal Shiar was capable of accessing you here the Federation is doomed either way.”

“This is a Section 31 facility,” he realized. “The inmates, if they are mad, don’t have control of the facility at all.”

T’Nura said nothing.

“Regardless,” she said, “that is why I am appealing to your logical nature, the only authority a Vulcan ultimately recognizes.”

“The logic of your request is tenuous without evidence.”

“Indeed,” she said, and then disabled the force field of his cell and then entered, re-enabling the force field, now with both of them confined. 

Not for long, however, as T’Nura walked past Spock, removed the glove on her left hand, and pressed it on the back wall. Which, after a second, promptly recessed with an almost inaudible hiss, revealing a doorway to a dark corridor lit only by guidance lights on the floor. She stepped in and turned back, raising an eyebrow. “Coming, commander?”

Spock stared at the passageway. “What is the purpose of taking me further inside this classified facility?”

“We are requesting that you stop investigating classified computer architecture,” she said. “Such a request is logical because you now have the opportunity to satisfy your curiosity. A one-time offer to do so.”

Spock blinked. This was a bad idea; however, he knew that no logical argument would convince him to not follow her into the dark, the wall to his cell sliding back behind them.

The walk wasn’t long, the path straightforward and easy to backtrack. The corridor soon gave way to a control room overlooking a truly massive installation of server racks through the window that went on beyond the distance he could see.

Once by the console, T’Nura turned to him. “This base is one of the nodes in a network that sustains the intelligence gathering and scenario modeling of an AI called Control. I will answer your questions to the best of my ability.”

Spock started forward, as though mesmerized. “Interesting. A demon-class planet, a reason for the maximum security and defensive capabilities of this compound, no reason for any regular interaction with the rest of the galaxy but enough reason to be connected to the subspace relay network. A perfect fit for this use-case, but not an obvious one. I assume the other nodes don’t include more intuitive locations like Memory Alpha or the Starfleet Archive in San Francisco?”

“Affirmative,” T’Nura said.

He became absorbed in the control panel, figuring out the basic principles of the operating and file system, which was really quite simple, almost crude. All the most basic assumptions of a Starfleet computer seemed to apply. The data storage and analysis functions of Control were the most obvious in design. Almost too obvious.

“The data pipeline is very rudimentary,” he said. “Why would Section 31 opt for something so inefficient and resource-intensive?”

“This part of the architecture is the oldest,” T’Nura said. “At its inception this was state-of-the-art.”

Yes, that was the simplest and most likely explanation. “How long has Control been in operation?”

“Alpha testing of Uraei, as it was called, began in the 2140s,” she said. “However, the first working version of Control went into operation during the Romulan War. What you are seeing is a reflection of that first design, the product of the work of a highly-regarded Terran scientist who was… secluded from public life at the point he became involved in the project.”

“Which scientist?”

“That information is classified,” she said, “but not particularly difficult to deduce.”

He went back to the console. It took a moment to understand how the AI program was connected to the rest of the system. Then he realized why.

“This is Vulcan,” he said. “This system design follows the standard principles of the VSA computer science group. When was this incorporated into Control?”

“Gradually over the course of the later twenty-second century and the early twenty-third,” she said.

“Does the Vulcan Science Directorate collaborate with Section 31?”

“Yes and no, depending on how you define collaboration at different points in time. VSA training is not an unknown background for our operatives or assets.”

He frowned. That didn’t seem consistent with Vulcan political norms. Not the clandestine nature of the project so much as the ceding of control to an external entity. Even now, it was somewhat scandalous that he, a graduate of the VSA, was a working scientist outside of Vulcan circles. The implication that Section 31 had been quietly planting or recruiting individual Vulcans in the VSA was… troubling.

He looked further into the code of the AI, which was, again, fairly straightforward. The most recent updates were familiar: they followed the work of Richard Daystrom, and were an advanced application of duotronic programming, similar to the “mind” of the M-5 ship’s computer that had such a disastrous debut on the Enterprise over a year ago.

The AI’s architecture was impressive, ground-breaking, and still at least five to ten years ahead of Starfleet’s capabilities. He had never seen something that could so easily synthesize and direct such diverse resources across Starfleet and Federation infrastructure. If an AI this sophisticated were made public, the impact on society would be revolutionary. If something like this were active and accessible on a star ship or a space station or a very tech-enabled dwelling, one could simply talk to the computer as though it were in the room and receive very complex information and initiate amazing amounts of automation. This was, frankly, what Spock had been dreaming of for years. He had half a dozen toy projects on the Enterprise servers that trended in this same direction.

Control was also nowhere near achieving general intelligence, let alone sentience. 

This was, as the late Admiral Cornwell claimed on the Discovery, a threat-assessment tool based on intense surveillance that could offer very powerful strategic recommendations. Not “the killer AI from the future” Agent Tola had named, the one he’d fought and lost his own sister to. There was no way it could become anything like that Control for, he estimated, centuries at the current rate of advances in computer science. Unless this were an extremely elaborate smokescreen, but the expense alone of just this one node suggested it was not.

Finally, he accessed the server logs, and confirmed that the entire node had been in “standby” since 2259, exactly when Section 31 said it was taken offline. Only the oldest and most rudimentary parts of the system were operational, processing regular data packets and training the AI on them at a slower, more energy-efficient pace. In fact, he now suspected that he couldn’t find how the Enterprise was sending data to Control because the transfer only happened in drydock or when directly networked into a Starfleet subspace node for operating system updates. The connection was not functioning as the continuous link Control would need to control a ship in “real time.”

Ironically, this, if anything, also supported what Agent Tola had told him as much as it supported Agent T’Nura’s assertion that there was “nothing to see here.” 

“My initial curiosity is satisfied, and my investigation has, indeed, been rendered moot,” Spock finally said, and almost meant it. This was several orders of magnitude more information about Control than he ever could have hoped to be able to discover on his own. If he had the human propensity for self-hatred, he would revile his impulse to ask how he could get involved in the project himself. He imagined that was the main point of this exercise: an intellectual frontier, the perfect bribe for a Vulcan.

“Then, will you comply?”

“I have not been primarily motivated by curiosity,” he said. “I am motivated by ethical concerns demanded by my oaths as a Starfleet officer and Federation citizen, even my duties as a nominal VSA member. I can think of fifteen different data privacy and security laws Control is violating, both military and civilian, and I am hardly a legal expert or ethicist.”

“I find that motivation highly unlikely, Mr. Spock,” she said. “I think it more likely you are motivated by the trauma you sustained as collateral damage during an unfortunate chapter in Section 31’s history.”

Spock couldn’t find the energy within himself to be offended by such a damning accusation of un-Vulcan behavior. 

“The cause is irrelevant,” he said, echoing the Romulan commander’s words, “but the trouble is the same - that was the substance of the adage. Section 31 is more than just Control.”

There was an edge now to the traces of her solicitous interest in her eyes.

“Tell me, Mr. Spock, do you remember what happened the first time you took command of the Enterprise?”

“My memory is eidetic. As first officer, when I -”

“You did not first assume command of the Enterprise as first officer. You did so as a mere science officer and lieutenant in 2259 when not only the captain but the three most senior officers were off the ship.”

He actually had to work to remember the incident. “You’re referring to the false flag operation on the part of war profiteers that the Enterprise stopped, thus preserving our treaty with the Klingons.”

“I am referring to the occasion upon which you commandeered the Enterprise, convinced the rest of the crew to commit mutiny, and, in direct violation of the admiralty, committed what was arguably an act of war based on the dubious intelligence of a former colleague who wasn’t even a commissioned officer at the time.”

Spock had enough dignity and discipline not to wince. “I will of course concede my actions were highly irregular. I took responsibility and would have accepted any appropriate censure for my actions.”

“What did Admiral April do?”

“He… told me that the ‘hangover’ I had incurred by concluding the confrontation with a Klingon captain over copious amounts of bloodwine was punishment enough.”

There it was - the edge he could discern, now - it was contempt. “Did that not strike you as odd?”

“The penalty I received was, again, highly irregular, but all of us have become accustomed to such irregularities when we take decisive action to protect the Federation.”

“Ah, and therein lies the difficulty. You’ve extrapolated based on your exceptional experience a strategic attitude that is limited. Time and time again, you appear to have believed the outrageous liberties you’ve been able to take are merited by virtue of your superior judgment. In fact, you are merely a highly visible political pawn by virtue of your father’s notoriety who has operated without a full measure of accountability. A perfect illustration of this point is the fate of your own sister, Michael Burnham. Her symbolic worth was negligible; Ambassador Sarek himself did not intervene when she was sent down for mutiny.”

Spock tried not to be too taken aback. She evidently had enough confidence in her position in Section 31 to directly refer to Michael.

“Even if there is substance to what you say,” he said, “I am satisfied with my service record and, overall, with the risks I take in command settings.” Not my strongest retort.

The helpful posture and the contempt was gone now. There was merely attentiveness, focus.

“I am not attempting to chastise you, Mr. Spock. I am merely trying to bring your attention to your tendency to act decisively on incomplete information. Such instinct is necessary, even exemplary, on the bridge of a starship or in the heat of battle. The same cannot be said about classified matters and intricate political and military considerations that require entire organizations of people to triage. Section 31 is, indeed, far more than Control.”

Spock also did not have a reply. He gave a curt nod.

“You have lost sight of the fact that what you oppose is an organization devoted to the security of the Federation. On what basis do you claim our objectives and motivations to be in bad faith?”

“I understand the rationale for such an… organization’s existence,” he conceded, “and I do not claim such an organization would necessarily be acting in bad faith. The way in which we protect the Federation matters. If we betray who we are, what Federation is there to protect? I can understand why you would be persuaded by the logic of Section 31’s methods - in some ways, its ruthless lack of sentimentality is quite Vulcan. But if you knew what they were capable of -”

“You are correct,” she interrupted, serene, “that an institution of that nature would have been shaped by Vulcan influence. I myself was the first Vulcan recruit during the Romulan War.”

Ergo, T’Nura had been a Section 31 agent for over a hundred years and ten years.

“Captain Ash Tyler is not the head of Section 31,” Spock said, before he could think. “He started the war against the Federation and was a former Klingon Intelligence agent, there’s no way he could be.”

“Captain Ash Tyler answers to the admiralty on Section 31’s behalf,” she said.

It was at this point that Spock realized that he was out of his depth and had been for this entire conversation. Even if T’Nura herself wasn’t the director of Section 31, and he saw no reason why she would be, her existence indicated layers upon layers of operatives with profound experience and continuity of leadership. Then the full weight of what she had just said registered. T’Nura was in her early hundred-twenties.

“You’ve been a Section 31 agent since the Romulan War? You would have been a child,” he said. “What… legitimate institution would recruit a child?”

“Depends on the child,” she said, amusement creeping into her face and tone.

“I find that very hard to believe. What could a Vulcan child have offered of military value?”

“To begin with,” T’Nura said, staring him down, “by blood I would not be considered Vulcan at all.”

To his chagrin, for a split second, he took her admission of Romulan ethnicity to be a confession of treason, when it was clearly the opposite. 

“Your father,” he said, “he was a member of the Tal Shiar.” Then, another piece clicked into place. “Lorian’s grandfather. You are T’Pol’s sister.”

“Half-sister,” she replied. “My mother was the child of Tal Shiar agents on Vulcan, adopted into a Vulcan family. This was a common tactic - her ‘authenticity’ was a resource the Tal Shiar could exploit once her heritage was revealed to her later in life. Such a fate likely awaited me as well. Instead I discovered my father’s true agenda and exposed it, and I worked with Section 31 to thwart his efforts. He in fact declared blood vengeance upon me before I was even sixteen, which I imagine is somewhat irregular, even for Romulans. For this and other reasons, I saw no logical reason to stop after the war had ended. T’Pol had similar objections to yours. She made many arguments against my recruitment as a minor out of a sense of logical obligation, which were ultimately unsuccessful.”

Spock said nothing. His thoughts were racing. He felt almost lightheaded. Because she had just said something else very important. Something he probably should have guessed when Lorian shared the memory of Section 31 saying his human father’s service record as a spy during the war threatened the very foundations of the Federation.

Section 31 had known that Romulans and Vulcans were the same species for over a hundred years.

His mouth dropped open as something else occurred to him. “The Treaty of Cheron,” he said, voice rough.

“Ah,” T’Nura said, with a slight smile highly reminiscent of Sarek.

“The Coalition had destroyed most of the Romulan fleet at the Battle of Cheron. The strategic thing would have been to take the fight to Romulus, complete the demilitarization of their society, and end the threat. But we didn’t. We signed a treaty instead.”

“Yes,” she said, “and it was a, what’s the phrase, a good deal.”

“I remember at the Academy being taught that the Coalition was concerned that because the Romulans are a proud people, they would have retaliated instead of accepting peace, had they been so completely dominated.”

“But that does not, in fact, make any sense, does it?”

“Negative.”

“Of course the Romulans are a proud people; they are, after all, Vulcans. But no, the Coalition came to the table because the Romulans still had leverage: the ability to make their faces seen and their history known. No one would have trusted the Vulcans ever again. Andoria would have declared war on Vulcan. The Federation would not exist. The Treaty of Cheron more or less guaranteed that it would.”

“It took Vulcan a year to commit its forces to the Coalition of Planets,” he said in a low voice barely above a whisper. “There had been an entrenched Romulan presence on Vulcan, including your own father. How close did the Vulcan High Command come to allying themselves with the Romulans?”

“Too close,” she said. 

He was silent for a moment.

“You appear perturbed, Mr. Spock.”

Again, ignoring the insult he said, “I do not know what to say. I am now aware that our discussion will inevitably lead to an impasse: I would not think your position on Section 31 could alter or that you could sympathize with my… opposition.”

“Highly unlikely, I agree,” she said. “I serve the needs of the many in the way that I do because the Federation is necessary to my existence. A true interstellar society, diverse and interdependent and benevolent, is the only place someone like myself can live. You have no idea how far we’ve come, and you have a finite view of how far we still have to go. Mine is perhaps somewhat less limited. I, too, am satisfied with my service record.”

“Including the death of the Romulan commander while in Starfleet custody?”

T’Nura, at least, minutely winced. “That was not done on my orders or guidance. The operative involved made a judgment call. I perhaps would have made a different one.”

Spock believed her. Spock found himself somewhat sympathetic, in point of fact. T’Nura’s position and agenda made sense, and the orders from Section 31 also made sense. And yet…

“What does Section 31 want with Dr. McCoy?”

T’Nura did not seem surprised by this question. “Ah, your… paramour, Leonard McCoy: a disappointment. He was a very promising candidate.”

“Does that mean he is no longer a candidate for recruitment?”

“We have no use for the good doctor at present.”

He braced himself. “Am I a candidate for recruitment?”

“Not at all, Mr. Spock. You would be ill-suited to the role of spy, I assume you’d agree. Your contributions are adequate at your present level of involvement.”

He swallowed. “My contributions?”

“Indeed. You have been a very valuable asset for Section 31 over the years. Unwittingly, at times. You are easy to maneuver, but difficult to manipulate. You did excellent work during the Red Angel crisis.”

Spock again didn’t know what to say. To suggest that the work he’d done to fight a Section 31 gone rogue had actually been in service of Section 31 was mind-boggling. He wasn’t even sure she was wrong.

“What about my mother?”

T’Nura’s expression was absolutely neutral. “What about your mother?”

“Did you even care about -” Spock cut himself off as T’Nura looked at him, polite and blank. There was no way he was getting anything on that. He gritted his teeth. “Is Section 31 still manipulating her?”

“I can tell you that she is no longer relevant to my current activities and hasn’t been for quite some time. Now, as interesting as I’m sure you’re finding this line of questioning, I must insist on confirming your intent to comply with your orders.”

“To no longer investigate the presence of Control on Starfleet ship computers or attempt an intervention?”

“Correct,” she said.

“That’s all?”

“At the moment.”

He stared at her from across the server control room. “What happens if I refuse?”

“As I stated previously, some kind of escalation that may be deleterious to your well-being. Nothing punitive, of course, but you really must stop these… vigilante actions. I hope you can appreciate that this is a courtesy call.” She looked almost concerned. “I requested to be the one to talk to you, as I would prefer if you would consider the ramifications your affair with your subordinate would have on said subordinate. Leonard McCoy would do well to avoid you and your father entirely, but, as that is unlikely, I can merely suggest that you become more aware of the potential opportunities for harm.”

Spock tasted something acrid in his mouth. That was a threat. “Do you still claim to be Dr. McCoy’s friend?”

“Vulcans do not have an analogous form to human friendship, Mr. Spock. I would not say I am not his friend. My actions, however, are not for his benefit, but rather for the security of the Federation. Will you comply?”

Obviously he was going to say he’d comply. To be honest, he likely was going to comply, at least for now. As disorienting and just wrong it felt to cooperate with Section 31, she did have a point. He didn’t have a plan, and he couldn’t explain the threat without giving her enormous leverage by divulging his engagement with temporal agents. On the other hand, he also knew, with rare conviction, that if he didn’t act on his anger he might go mad.

“I have conditions,” he said.

She maintained her polite expression as she asked, “Your continued loyalty to the Federation’s security is subject to conditions?”

“I have conditions for complying with your request,” he said, careful to be precise.

“Name them, and I will assess whether they are reasonable.”

“First, I want Michael’s criminal record expunged or sealed. If she makes contact with Starfleet in the future, I want her to have a clean slate.”

“You may be gratified to know that this was done soon after Captain Tyler was promoted. He saw to it personally, for the same reasons. He added several commendations to the personnel records of the Discovery. What else?”

“I want you to disappear,” he said, something sharp and cold singing through his veins. “I want you gone from public life, where you can exploit your commission in the VEG for clandestine ends. I want you gone from private life, as well, where you can manipulate the people close to me. Faking your own death would suffice, but I’ll leave the details to you. Under no circumstances should you have any contact, whatsoever, with my mother or Dr. McCoy.”

T’Nura stared at him. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking or feeling. “This is what you want? You have no concern for the impact on current missions or even my logical obligations to others?”

“I do not,” he said, cold with conviction. “Presumably, as a spy, you should have contingencies in place personally and professionally in the event of your death. And you would not need to actually die or even deprive Section 31 of your services.”

For a split second he saw a pained flash of weakness flit over her face: ah, perhaps she had not arranged her affairs quite as well as she’d like. No matter - it was none of his concern.

“Perhaps you overestimate your leverage, Commander Spock,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow. “You tell me.”

She stared at him, expression unreadable. “The quality of mercy is not strained,” she murmured. The serenity of her face now seemed brittle. “What an interesting form of cruelty you’ve embraced, S’chn T’gai Spock.”

“Careful, colonel,” he said, “if you’re comparing me to Shylock, you may be reacting emotionally.”

“Is that what I’m doing?” Her tone was even, but there was something in the tilt of her head, the light in her eyes, that said she thought she had won. Regardless, there was nothing Spock found less appealing than arguing about antisemitic themes in The Merchant of Venice in an insane asylum with a Romulan Section 31 agent and former child soldier who’d slept with his mother.

“Are we agreed? Will you do what I’ve asked?”

“We are, and I will,” she said. “I’ll be ‘dead’ within the week. Now, let us return you to your cell. The inmates are ready for your next move.”

He hadn’t thought at the time of how he would actually check whether she’d followed through, but that turned out to be unnecessary. He knew immediately when T’Nura had “died” because he was eating lunch with McCoy and Uhura when the doctor, looking winded, handed his chiming padd to Uhura, whose eyes filled with tears and who quickly excused herself from the mess hall.

McCoy was staring at the table blankly, his head bowed. Spock felt a twist of sympathy and bitterness on his behalf. T’Nura had posed as his friend, which was the same in some ways as being his friend, and of course he would be grieved by this “loss.” Despite his distaste for emotional displays, he saw a clear logical obligation in this case to practice patience and empathy with the man.

“T’Nura is dead,” he said, voice low. The doctor sniffed, and seemed to be fighting back tears. “That poor little girl,” he said, voice hoarse.

Spock went still. What?

McCoy glanced at him. “She only told us about her a month ago, damn self-effacing Vulcan. She’d decided to coparent with one of the scientists, a kolinahru, on Cerberus after Joanna and I left. T’Nura left her with her father when the VEG called her up again to keep her safe . The man passed away recently, and the kid was supposed to be on her way to Vulcan, but the Federation lost contact with Cerberus two weeks ago. There are increased reports of Klingon and Breen ships in the area, but Starfleet and the VEG can’t send anyone, not for ages. T’Nura was going to take leave and go there herself. She was on her way to meet a civilian freighter.” His voice was flat, almost robotic. Then it trembled as he said, “Her daughter’s barely four years old.”

Spock could only compare his emotional reaction to the sensation of a sudden change in gravity. 

“That is highly unfortunate,” he said, stiff. “Very much so. My condolences.”

“You should check on your momma,” McCoy said. “I need to call Jo.”

He walked back to his quarters in a daze. His call to Amanda’s line at the estate went through directly, but he saw Sarek on the screen.

“I have heard of T’Nura’s death,” Spock said. “That there is concern about the status of her child.”

Sarek looked more impassive than usual. “Your mother left Vulcan this morning,” he said. “She’s heading to a civilian freighter, the Symmetry, en route to the last port of call before Cerberus. She intends to do… something to retrieve the child, and has insisted she become our ward. She was not amenable to discussing the practicalities or the wisdom of her plan. According to my information via diplomatic channels, several crews of Klingon pirates have plans to set up bases on Cerberus and cut off communications with what may remain of the colony. There have been numerous skirmishes with the Breen and the Romulans. There is no logical way any civilian could reach or move freely on Cerberus unscathed.”

“Perhaps mother will be more open to this reality as she approaches the colony,” Spock said dully.

“Perhaps,” Sarek said, tone similarly bland.

They looked at each other.

“I have no more to say,” Sarek announced. “I will contact you with updates as soon as I receive them and request that you do so as well.”

His father cut the call.

Spock lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling. Almost an hour passed before he was able to sit up and key in an encrypted line to his brother.

Is there any way for non-military personnel to approach and land on Cerberus, he typed, in order to retrieve civilians?

A good twenty-five minutes passed before he received a reply: Why?

Amanda’s friend is dead and her young daughter is trapped on Cerberus. Mother has left Vulcan to try and get near enough to retrieve the child and adopt her.

He thought for a moment and then added: The child is T’Pol’s niece, Lorian’s cousin.

A few minutes later he received a reply. A says no-go. You’d need to hire a crew, mercenaries. Expensive, and not something his holiness the ambassador can do.

Then: This situation sounds unbelievably shitty, but as badass as Amanda is, she’s smart enough not to actually try and go all the way there on her own.

Finally: A will keep an eye out, ask around.

Sybok cut the line, and Spock stared at the screen. Captain Angel likely knew what they were talking about. 

T’Nura’s not dead, he reminded himself. She’s a Section 31 agent, she’s extremely senior in the organization, surely she has contingency plans or is on her way. But no one knew that, and he couldn’t tell anyone. And her competence wouldn’t mean anything either way until the little girl was found.

He listlessly double-checked the crew roster for the next week, and annotated some rather dry papers on "positronic" theory by a protege of Richard Daystrom, Jr. that he really couldn’t do much with now that he’d given up his investigation.

McCoy came in without a word, pulled the padd out of Spock’s hands, and sat on his lap, straddling him, nuzzling the side of his face. 

“She didn’t take it well,” Leo - having completed his metamorphosis to Leo - murmured.

He let his arms come around the man and settled his hands on the small of his back. “How so?”

“She kept talking about different routes to jump into orbit of Cerberus and all the different landing approaches. She kept forgetting to add 'hypothetically' half the time.”

Spock frowned, and began stroking the doctor’s back slowly.

“My mother appears to have had a similar reaction,” he said. “She left Vulcan this morning to try and reach Cerberus.”

“Jo was telling me they don’t call it Cerberus anymore, not for a couple years,” he murmured. “The Terran mythology reference didn’t mean anything to most of them. They call it Hellguard now.”

“Logical,” Spock said, stroking his back a bit more firmly. “My mother intends for the girl to become her ward. This development for my parents is… unexpected.”

“Adopt Saavik? Damn, I mean, any kid would be lucky to have your folks looking out for them, but she needs love and attention more than anything, I’d bet. Those poor kids - trauma at this developmental stage for Vulcan children or any child is devastating. The interruptions in telepathic bonds alone…”

Indeed. “From what I understand, T’Nura did not have many close ties by blood on Vulcan,” he said, more dour in mood than ironic. “As the father was kolinahru, neither did he. Some logical obligations among distant kin, perhaps, but none as motivated to raise a child with many intensive needs as my mother is.”

“Well, this will end well,” Leo muttered, wrapping his arms loosely around Spock’s neck.

Saavik. The half-Romulan, half-Vulcan child of a spy, alone on a harsh colony world named for the guardian of an unforgiving afterlife. Hellguard. Cerberus. A child whose mother had abandoned her at Spock’s demand. Acting decisively on incomplete information. A logical obligation to the child that would follow them both till death. His attempt to excise Section 31’s insidious influence from his family as personified in T’Nura had bound their families together in a more permanent way.

“Your logic escapes me,” Spock said, and indulged himself by stroking two fingers against the doctor’s flushed cheek. “I find that highly unlikely.”

Notes:

Meanwhile, at Section 31 HQ:
Sinister Agent 1: Spock, the Vulcan ambassador’s son is involved with the ship’s doctor, candidate X-EF-594, note that in his file.
Sinister Agent 2: Okay, but are we SURE though that Spock and Captain Kirk aren’t boning?

“Elaan of Troyius -> Whom Gods Destroy”

Captain Batel is Pike’s long-distance gf in SNW. She was in dire straits in the S2 finale, but let’s cross our fingers and say she has a desk job now. “Chancellor” is a position named in ST:PIC, but seems like a thing that would usually exist. She was the prosecutor in Number One’s trial, as apparently being a captain-lawyer is a thing.

Established in STWOK that Spock Prime “never took” the Kobayashi Maru, which I also think is more canon support for Spock not having necessarily gone to Starfleet Academy in a normal way. You get one guess which cadet’s “hack” had Spock so concerned.

Torias Dax was a test pilot for the Trill Science Ministry when he was joined/died in the 2280s, when they were apparently working on transwarp, according to Jadzia Dax.

The looseness with which Batel and Spock are talking about “humanities” with ling/anthro is deliberate in the sense that I highly doubt Starfleet Academy has an extensive liberal arts curriculum or that Batel or Spock would care about it. Similar re: Joanna’s standing. I figure the Chancellor has discretion to say things need to happen, but she’s absolutely, 100% not the person who knows anything about guidance counseling.

Batel does in fact give off distinct “hello fellow kids” energy whenever she talks to junior officer women on the Enterprise in S2.

This version of Control’s design draws the most from the novel Control, though I did try to keep it consistent with Disco. Frankly, I feel like a HERO for rewatching S2 Disco eps AGAIN this week to try and figure out their version of Control. It makes so little sense that if pressed I might just ignore canon. My apologies for any made up computer stuff, but tbh my bs might still be better bs than Disco’s bs.

The scientist who “made Control” during the Romulan War would be obvious to watchers of Enterprise S4. It’s not a secret for y’all but I find it unlikely T’Nura would just drop a bomb like that for no reason.

The privacy/security concerns of Control are more from the novel than Disco despite the fact that it SHOULD HAVE been in Disco.

The incident T’Nura is referring to is in the season premiere of SNW 2, “Broken Circle.” I might have an axe to grind tbh, but how easily/often Spock commandeers the Enterprise continues to be hilarious.

Another axe to grind: yeah, no way mf VOQ is the real director of S31 come tf on.

I feel like some Starfleet/Vulcan people knowing the Romulans were Vulcan is arguably alpha canon and def beta canon. T’Pol having a Tal Shiar dad and an “evil” half-sister was a plot beat for the unmade S5 of Enterprise.

My explanation for the Treaty of Cheron is also my head canon tbh.

Vulcan dragging its feet on the Romulan War is from the ENT novels based on S5+ notes, and the Romulans manipulating Vulcan High Command is a S4 plot development.

The Merchant of Venice reference is, of course, to the SNW remix of “Balance of Terror,” “Quality of Mercy,” as well as to Luther Sloan referring to it while creeping Julian out at a party in “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges.”

"BASHIR: That's the spirit, sir. Never say die.
CRETAK: What an odd expression. What does it mean?
SLOAN: It's a line from an old Earth poem. Forgive me for interrupting. I couldn't help overhearing and etymology is one of my hobbies. The phrase 'never say die' is originally from a nineteenth century poem based on Shakespeare's 'Merchant of Venice.' Now, it's since passed into the vernacular as an exhortation never to give up, no matter the cost."

The Saavik and Hellguard stuff is from a beta canon novel, where Spock on the Symmetry rescues baby Saavik from some sort of Lord of the Flies situation with Vulcan-Romulan hybrid kids on a planet in the NZ called “Hellguard.” Then Amanda and Sarek actually raise her. The pun on “Cerberus” occurred to me like as I was writing this section originally. As well as including Saavik, which appeared as a bolt from the blue. If I must address the “pon farr” in SFS ever, I will write around or straight up ignore the “Saavik sleeps w soulless teenage Spock” interpretation, which was almost canon (she was going to be pregnant in VH) because EW EW EW. EW!!!!!

Like if you think Section 31 shouldn’t be allowed to quote Shakespeare anymore; comment if you think other intelligence agencies other than just Section 31 know that Spock and Bones are knocking boots before any of their friends.

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