It is late when you get back to the small room that Starfleet has assigned you while you're grounded in San Francisco, and you are tired. It has been, as Jim would say, a hell of a day: fresh rounds of meetings, rooms full of hostile faces, rapid-fire questions, over and over - the same challenges, the same enquiries, only couched each time in slightly different words, as though this might change your response. You reply as best you can, but you have come to understand that it is not information that they seek - it is absolution.

The search for answers is logical. The search for an explanation is not. You have tried to explain this, but they do not want to hear.

Jim, they tell you, is out of danger. It is a strange phrase: curiously imprecise, and utterly inadequate to describe the circumstances of his confinement to a lonely room in the Intensive Care department of Starfleet Medical. The danger was fleeting; the danger was extreme. The danger took his life. As a descriptive noun, it is scarcely appropriate. Nevertheless, the danger, such as it was, has passed. They tell you this with a smile and a nod, and expect you to be content.

And yet, McCoy continues to keep his bedside watch, analyzing and evaluating, stopping only when the human diurnal cycle compels him to take a few hours' rest in the room along the corridor reserved for medics on call. A more accurate measure of Jim's progress is in the pallor of the doctor's skin - the fading gray-white of his face, the retreating shadows beneath his eyes, the whitening of his sclera as the mottling red veins recede. You believe he may have achieved a significant period of sleep last night, and this is encouraging.

"No change, Spock," he told you gruffly, eyes canted towards a particularly engaging biosign readout, as you stood by the door. You have yet to set foot in the room without his express invitation, and you refuse to examine why. "I keep tellin' you, I'll comm you if there's news." He glanced up, locked his gaze with yours, and his eyes narrowed. "You get any rest since yesterday?"

You did not. But the doctor's tone advised against answering in the affirmative, and so you prevaricated instead, knowing that this would not fool him, knowing that he was too exhausted to argue. "How are his vital signs, Doctor?"

A flash of sadness ghosted across his face, and you saw his eyes brim for the briefest of moments before he blinked it away. He said, "Better."

Better. Given the fact that it is no more than 8.3 days since there were no vital signs at all, this information ought to have been more reassuring. But all you could say was, "I had hoped for greater precision in your answer, Doctor."

"Spock." The tone was exasperated, but the eyes had no fire. "What do you want? By every rule of human biology, by every medical textbook ever written, the kid's got no right to have a pulse. Better's as good as it gets." And then, softening: "You look like hell. Guess it's pretty bad over there, huh?"

"The review is both thorough and exhaustive, Dr. McCoy. I would expect nothing less."

"Come in," he said. "Sit with him a bit." A beat. "Seems to me, it'd do you both some good."

And it lingered in front of you: the fragment of an image, a world where you took that step across the threshold, moved into the room, took the seat beside Jim's bed, breathed in his scent, his presence, the strange hum of energy that blankets him like a cloud. But you said, "I will call again at my customary time tomorrow, Dr. McCoy. You will inform me if there is…?"

"…If there's any change." He sighed. "Sure, Spock. Go get some rest."

"And you, Doctor."

A hollow laugh. "Yeah, right."

You left him then, alone by the dark window that looks out over the Bay, where the stars can be seen above the jagged husk of ruined buildings where so many people died. It has been a very long day.

Your door opens with a quiet hiss of pneumatics and you step inside. Immediately, you see that you are not alone, and you pull up sharply, an affronted sense of invasion prickling the first warning signs of a breach in your shields. Your room ought to be dark, but the lamp beside your bed is lit, and your eyes are drawn to it, to the slim figure that sits in the circle of watery yellow, spine straight, chin squared, hands folded neatly in her lap.

Like a Vulcan, you think, and wonder at the sharp spike of pain that twists in your chest in the moment before you can force it back down.

"Nyota," you say, and you can hear the fatigue in your voice; perhaps McCoy is right. "I was not expecting to see you."

There is disapproval in your tone, because arrangements have not been made, and it is neither your custom nor hers to arrive unannounced. But she purses her lips, swallows heavily, and you recognize the signs of distress. Your gut tightens, and you wonder, abruptly, why she is here.

"How is he?" she asks. Her voice is strained, as it becomes when she is attempting to contain great emotion.

There is no need to ask who she means. You say, "There has been some progress. His vital signs appear to have stabilized."

"Then he's going to…?"

"He remains unconscious."

"But he's going to be all right?"

This need… You will never understand it. The human compulsion to force facts from conjecture, as though it were possible to corral a preferred outcome through effort of wanting, continues to confound you. False comfort is no comfort at all; you prefer to know the truth, and prepare accordingly.

"It is not certain," you say. "Though his condition is improved."

She nods, bites her lip. "I just need to know that…" she says, and stops. She tries again. "I need to know that you're going to be… That you won't be…"

You feel your eyebrow arch as she trails into indecision. "My own condition remains unchanged, Nyota."

And she inhales - deep and unsteady - closing her eyes against the tears that suddenly spill over her lower lashes and trickle down her cheeks. They shine in the lamplight.

She says, "I can't do this anymore."

You do not need her to clarify her meaning. The first time she said I don't know how long I can keep doing this, you asked her to explain, and now, in context, you are able to cross-reference her pronoun use against these earlier discussions.

So you say, though you have no energy for debate, "May I ask what has motivated your decision?"

Her head is bowed, but she raises it now, opens her eyes, lifts an elegant hand to brush tears from her cheeks. She says, "This. This, Spock. I tell you we need to break up, and you… This scientific detachment, I just can't…"

You fold your hands in front of your stomach. They anchor you. "I am Vulcan," you say, and you hear the chill in your voice.

"Yes," she says. She stands up, moves to the center of the room, stops just outside of your circle of personal space. Her face, out of the glow from the lamp, slides into shadow and her perfume fills the air. "Yes, you are. And that was enough for me. You were… you were always enough. But I can't keep pretending like I don't know."

You breathe her in, the scent of her skin, her hair, the lavender and citrus pomander that she keeps in her closet that weaves its fragrance through her clothes. And you wonder, abstractly, why this does not cause you greater pain.

Quietly, you say, "I do not understand your meaning."

Her lips twist upwards into a smile that trembles on the edge of courage, and her hand rises, as though she wants to touch you. But she is standing too far away, and so it hesitates mid-air in the void that separates you, before she clasps it, instead, to her stomach.

"I really thought I understood," she says. "For the longest time - I thought it was just who you are. I know that you can't… I know what it means to you to… I know how you need to lock yourself down. And that's all right. It was… I mean, it wasn't all right. It wasn't always all right, but… It was who you are. And I love who you are," she says, and fresh tears pool on her lower lids, spill over her lashes, wash her cheeks with fresh ribbons of moisture that glimmer in the half-light.

"If my regard for you has been in question…" you start to say, but she shakes her head.

"I know, Spock," she says. "I know you love me. But you just…" - and her hand flutters to her mouth, curls protectively over her lips, falls away. "Spock," she says. "I know you love me. But whatever it is you feel, whatever it is we have… you've never cried for me."

You stare at her. Your gaze is level, unblinking, and you know that in all the world only Nyota - and perhaps one other person - would be able to tell that you are silent because you are at a loss for what to say.

You wonder how she knew.

"It's okay," she says now, but her voice is thick with sadness. "I mean - it's not okay, but it's… okay. I'll be okay. And I think you'll be okay, too."

Still you say nothing. You watch her face but not her eyes.

She says, "If we hadn't got him back…"

And you look away, abruptly, before you realize you are going to do so. As your eyes drop, as you shield yourself in evasion from the fear, the horror, the sadness that you cannot acknowledge, you understand that this is a confirmation, as clear as the words that you do not speak. And you understand that she will read it as such.

"I would still have known," she says softly. She presses her lips together, takes a step forward, reaches out a hand to your cheek. Hesitation. And then she draws in, kisses your lips - lightly, chastely: the kiss of a friend. You lean into the contact, dropping your forehead to hers, but when she breaks away, it's only a cool emptiness against your skin that you feel. There is no sense of termination, of loss, of grief. All your grief has been spent, and it was not for her.

She pulls away, crosses the room without a word. You hear the hiss of the door as it slides open, slides shut behind her.

It is several minutes before you move. The room grows cold around you: it is springtime in northern California, and the temperature drops by night. But you stand, silent and still in the cool shadows, as the world reorients, comes back into focus, and you realize that, without understanding it, without knowing that it was happening, you have made your decision. In some ways, it was no decision at all.

You are tired - exhaustion hangs in every muscle, fatigue fills every bone. Tomorrow will be another hell of a day, as Jim would say, but he is alive, he is stabilizing, and he is better. That strange hum of energy that blankets him like a cloud was how you knew that the world had ended, 8.3 days ago, when you no longer felt it just beneath your skin, but it thrums about him now, like a second pulse, like another heartbeat in your side.

You feel it swallow you as you lower yourself into the seat beside his bed in a dark, lonely room from which the ruined husk of the city can be seen beneath the starlight that he loves. You fold your hands in your lap, and you wait for him to wake.