Title: Flash
Rating: G
Written for: Anna Amuse
Disclaimer: The character's are Paramount's; the story this is based off of is Homerun, Part III. So I doubt it'll make sense, if you haven't read that.
Notes: Anna, thank you.
--
Warm summer rain on his face. The sound of laughter. He laughs because he's happy, for no other reason. The fire, singing in the fireplace. He's wrapped in a thick wooden blanket. A mug of hot chocolate in his hands. Sweet, spicy. He's staring at the chess set, trying to solve another problem. He sees the solution. Triumph. His fingers caress the smooth shape of the piece. Checkmate. Wind, whistling in his ears, as his skis are carrying him faster and faster, adrenaline making his eyes shine. A face full of snow, and he laughs yet again. Soft warm fur under his hand, as the old cat is watching him with an inherited arrogance and leniency of his kind. A magnificent view at his feet. Happy pain in his muscles, as he had just finished his ascent. He feels so free.
'Jim. Jim. Come back.'
'Did you like it, Spock? It was all for you.'
'It was most fascinating. Thank you'
-Homerun, Part III: The Finish Curve
--
He grasps hard to the flash, to keep it. No words. He did not want words. He wanted the image to come back again, if only for a moment. It had only been a split-second frame, sizzling through his mind with the speed of thought amidst the myriad others. A gift. He had not expressed his gratitude enough for it.
The image slipped away, however, and Spock found himself automatically rehearsing what he had seen in words, in the quiet of his own thoughts, nearly before he realized he had done it.
No.
It was a gift. It was a gift that, in this singular moment, he wished to keep. Not words, but an image. He tried again; he ran through his memory, so precise for so many things, to come back around again to the point where he had seen that image and had no words for it. When Jim gave it to him, that flash frame slipped in among so many others, all of them in that moment tangible and real and colorful. He could not reclaim all of them to the immediacy which they contained, at least not without Jim's help, but he wanted to reclaim this one.
It flashed by again, and left him only with the echoing words that did not describe the gift he had been given.
No.
Some of it was undoubtedly still fatigue. Even he could not claim to recover so swiftly from such a long, hard mission, even though he wished to and often did try to claim just that. But in the privacy of his own thoughts -- "Jim. Jim. Come back." -- he could not deny exhaustion in this moment. It was not all physical. Some of it, much of it, was the toll that controlling himself for this long had taken.
Some of it was the mind-meld, where he briefly found himself sharing his mind with someone who thought in pictures and colors, to whom life was immediate and vibrant and often edged with a desperation that even Spock could not quite understand. At least, not yet.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the flickering flame of his meditation candles from his vision; focused internally. But not to control himself, not this time. This time, he only wanted an image, a moment, a gift that had been given to him. He knew that it may already be too late to properly express, in words or pictures, how much that gift had truly meant to him. Perhaps the only gratitude he could show would be to grasp onto it, and refuse to let it dissolve into words.
He grasped for it again.
Again.
It flashed past.
Again.
It flashes past.
No.
Again.
It...
...stops.
Blue moonlight, sparkling on snow, over a field of harvested corn, under a blanket of stars. Cold wind, but he does not feel cold, because the man -- boy -- who is here giving him this gift is not cold. He feels the steam from his breath, before it crystallizes and clears. He hears the near-silent whisper of snowdrifts blowing against ravaged cornstalks. He smells the ice in the air.
He breathes out, looks up. The sky is bright, reflects off of the snow, strings the inside of his nose; nips his ears, but he is not cold. Cornstalks, and whispering snow.
Spock breathes.
Across the years, he feels hope.