This story takes place prior to Nero's destruction of Vulcan and the upset of Commander Spock's logical, intellectual world.
I don't own Star Trek nor any of its characters, if I did, I would not be attempting to do a re-take on a story-line that has already been written a number to times. I would be boldly taking the reader where no reader or watcher has ever imagined going before. But, of course you already know that.
It had been two years, ten months and three days, Spock reflected. Many of his students in this graduating class would be done with their studies in four weeks. They were all busy, finalizing a dissertation, or for some completing a thesis. Others were scheduling a session to take the infamous Kobyashi Maru simulation for the first time. Only one student had taken it twice and was trying his level best to get another appointment to take the simulation for a third and final time. In the future, Commander Spock reasoned, the KM would have to be limited to a one-shot only exercise and only for those students who were the command track specialists. Certainly, he reasoned, if a student could not discern the purpose of taking the exercise the first time around, its meaning would clearly be lost on any subsequent attempts and said student had either failed to identify or devised a different meaning.
Many things were coming to an end. His time as an instructor at Starfleet Academy would also soon be over. He already had his orders for his five-year mission aboard the fleet flagship the USS Enterprise in the dual role of First Officer and Chief Science Offer aboard the command ship. He was now tasked with assigning students from the graduating class to serve as crew members on the Enterprise as well as familiarizing himself with the ship's computer and engineering systems. All this was in addition to his duties as an Instructor at the Academy.
The tasks at hand were daunting, but, Commander Spock was used to handling such heavy workloads. It had been his very vigorous training since a child to carry heavy study loads and workloads such that the average human would be overwhelmed. But, the Commander was not your average human; he was a Vulcan-Human hybrid. A defect that disqualified him as far as Vulcans were concerned. However, it was his Vulcan-ness and strict disciplined up-bringing that enabled him to do far beyond what a human could readily endure. The Commander was not at all shy about letting everyone know that he was Vulcan, he seemed to be just the opposite when it came to his human heritage. A fact that marginalized him as far as humans were concerned. Here-in lay much of his dilemma.
He was content to have so much to do. It kept him focused, and kept his mind occupied. It kept him from having extra time on his hands to think about his former bond-mate, T-Pring. It had taken Spock nearly a year to stop thinking about the hurt and the betrayal he had experienced through the loss of that relationship-of-sorts. He was still dealing with the loneliness he felt with the expunging of his bond to her. Parted from me but never parted, touching yet not touched… these words haunted his memory. She weighed on his mind now, more than she ever did when they were a bonded pair. When they were linked, he rarely if ever thought about her, and she never seemed to want to get to know him.
He had cried for weeks at the age of seven when he was bonded to her at his father's behest. It was not something Spock understood and certainly not something he wanted. But, he endured it, because he was expected to. He had known from the very on-set of the bond that T'Pring did not want him and as the years passed, it became more and more apparent that she did not at all wish to be bonded to him. The truth was that his bond-mate loathed nearly everything about him, his human heritage, his decision to come to earth to attend StarFleet Academy, and finally his commission as Officer aboard a starship. When she learned of his prolonged assignment to the Enterprise, she made it quite clear to him that she did not wish to be his consort and that she had taken up with Stonn, whom she very much wanted to be with and he with her. The only thing she did not despise about Spock was his wealth and the status of his family name and clan. This she coveted and cruelly told him as much.
Her news came to him at a time when he had finally settled into the fact that it was time to go through with the arranged pairing and perform his duty to T'Pring to take her openly as his mate, it was the logical thing to do. They would be together and she would have his children. Something that she vehemently rejected. So she demanded by reason of logic that he release her from their commitment. When he agreed to break the bond with her, he was sullen and hurt, because of the loss of her presence in his mind, because of her cold rejection of him. After all he had dutifully kept himself pure for her and her alone. He had honored her as his bethrothed, for twenty years he had not allowed himself to reach out to another and would barely look at any other woman as if to desire her. He had disciplined himself to want only T'Pring, want her beside him and inside of him, want her in his arms for him alone. Because Spock was, by nature, possessive that way, and when he made up his mind about something, his mind was pretty much made up.
There were many beautiful women at Starfleet, human women, and many of them were more than willing to do whatever he could imagine, because outwardly Commander Spock was "the whole package", an extremely intelligent, handsome, well-built, mysterious, and sexy male and he was very well off financially. However, he was totally unaware of the string of women that would do anything to get him to notice them.
Then there was a Cadet Nyota Uhura, an extremely gifted xenolinguistics major who was a beautiful, studious over-achiever who had enrolled at Starfleet Academy and had taken all of his advanced language classes over the past 2.5 years. He noted that she had always presented herself as the professional she wanted to become, besides she had always been very kind to him and he had appreciated that. He knew that she had been enamored with him in her first semester at the Academy, but Spock felt that she would out-grow her juvenile crush on him and remain the extremely capable and intellectually stimulating young student that he had come to know her to be. For the past year, Cadet Uhura always made it a practice to speak to him only in his native Vulcan dialect, a gesture that he was profoundly appreciative of. She never made her personal feelings about him obvious to anyone, not even him, but her enamourment was neither juvenile, nor was it a crush. She had fallen in love with him when she first met him and that love had only deepened as she matured. However, Commander Spock's very keen intuition and awareness of the way he carried himself around his female students had blindsided him and he did not pick up on Cadet Uhura's true feelings for him. He was only more than relieved that the Cadet had finally seemed to mature beyond what he deemed to be a childish infatuation.
As her instructor, he admired her almost Vulcan-like discipline and her focused study habits. The Cadet was among the few highly prized students at the Academy who could write her own ticket to any starship assignment she desired. She had worked hard for it and she had earned it. Reflecting on her early days at the Academy, Spock remembers that Uhura, caused him to do a double-take when she first entered his classroom nearly three years ago, she was beautiful, even more-so than T'Pring and she smelled like someone he could sink himself into. Now, a year into T'Pring's absence, and one month before Cadet Uhura's graduation and assignment to a starship, he realized just how pleasing Cadet Uhura was to look upon and be around. In a rare moment, while contemplating her assignment, Commander Spock allowed himself to think of the Cadet's qualifications, her grades, her overall performance, her reliability and language skills. He found all of these things to be perfect and in order. Then his mind wandered to her appearance, always neat, never so-much as a hair on her head out of place, she had long silky hair always in her high swept pony-tail. She had such long lovely legs, golden brown, and she always, always smelled delicious. She even seemed to be perfect after working out in the gym, physically fit and slightly flushed and with the sheen of perspiration that caused her skin to appear to have a golden radiance, her presence was inspiring.
When the Commander released himself from the thoughts and visualization he had been absorbed in, he was rubbing this thumb across his lips and realized that he was feeling the discomfort of his now awakening need. It was surprising to him that he was in such a condition when he clearly was not thinking about the Cadet in an inappropriate manner. "Fascinating", he said to himself. Then with alarm he silently chastened himself for how easily he had allowed his tightly disciplined mental control to slip.
As he continued assigning the new graduating students to the starship, Spock made a mental note to spend an additional hour in meditation prior to going to sleep tonight, he wanted to think about what it would be like to travel through the sol system and beyond with such a beautiful star to gaze upon. He also wanted to meditate deeply on how pleasing it would be not merely to gaze but, the most logical and appropriate way to make that star his very own.