Spock spun the apple in a small hand. He watched with wide brown eyes, a touch too big for his young face, the pads of his fingertips spinning around the green skin of the fruit, making quiet squeaks as they rubbed against the wax coating.
"Fascinating," he muttered to himself, then tipped his head up to his mom, "Mother, may we get one of these?"
Amanda, who was inspecting a package of cilantro, dropped the leaves in the wire basket of their shopping cart and regarded her son's discovery with a smile folded warmly into her cheeks. She bent down to him, sliding her palms over the hem of her reindeer sweater to rest on her denim covered knees.
"Ah, so you wish to try the forbidden fruit, my dear?"
Spock's lips twitched into a grin he hadn't quite learned how to conceal yet.
"If you are referencing the Terran bible mother, then you should know that studies of the geography described in the passage of Adam and Eve suggest that the forbidden fruit was likely a pomegranate, not an apple."
Amanda chuckled, a happy sound that popped and bubbled like wind chimes over the earth holiday music and the stream of chatter from the other shoppers. Spock decided it was a far superior to the background noise.
"You never fail to amuse me, darling." she said as she smoothed a hand through the neat black tufts of his hair, "And of course you can try one. In fact, why don't you get a couple. I'm going to go wait in line and see if we can get grandma a nice fat turkey. You stay right here, ok kan-bu?"
"Yes, ko-mekh," Spock said, wrinkling his nose at the mention of poultry and again when his mother's damp lips pressed briefly against his forehead. Feigning distaste at her affectionate human manner was almost a reflex now, as that was one of his peer's favorite targets of scrutiny. Secretly, and never to be admitted to his father, he loved those touches, loved them in a way he was coming to realize was wholly un-Vulcan.
He watched her file into a line on the other side of the store. At the front of it there was a man with ruddy skin and chins that wobbled in time to the loose skin under his arm as it swung when he handed customers neatly folded paper packages. There were red blots, no doubt shreds of animal organs and blood, crusted on the crease of the packages and the man's gloves.
He sighed in the long suffering way only a six year old Vulcan can, and turned back to the apples, tugging a plastic bag loose from a container that was perched precariously on the side of the display table.
It was not so much that he disliked Terra, he reasoned as he scanned the neat rows of a green fruit pyramid for ones within his height range that were without the brown dents and scrapes that signified bruises. After all, it was unreasonable to dislike such a large place after only seeing the small portion of Burlington Iowa his human Grandmother lived in. The Ambassador's son traveled quite a bit and Earth was hardly the worst planet he's been to. It was certainly better than Tellarite, and there was something comforting about a planet of people who carried a similar warmth that Amanda Grayson stamped in even the single sound of her laughter.
But it was messy; everything seemed at the wrong angle, from his Grandmother's furniture to tin cans crunched at random on the sidewalks. The world jittered in and out in series of screams and screeches that, to his sensitive hearing, sounded like an orchestra with twisted strings and bows that had snapped hairs, cracked by stale rosin.
Perhaps above all was the fact that Spock always had the illogical certainty he was missing something. Being among the chaos made the feeling throb; an eager reaching hand out from the root of his katra, heavy with the emptiness it carried.
He placed a seventh and exceptionally shiny apple in the bag and waited for his mother as he calculated the terrifically low odds of there actually being an obese Caucasian man who flew to Terran children's houses to give them presents. He had surmised it was a 0.0002% chance and was about to determine the average age a human child would have to reach before coming to a similar conclusion this when a stranger entered his peripheral vision and flung him wildly out of focus.
The stranger was a human boy about Spock's age, perhaps a year or two younger. He was short, with spider-thin limbs that seemed too thin for the full curve of round face and the clothes that appeared to be slipping off of him. Of course, his exact age itself was hard to determine, as most of his face was shadowed under yellow bangs that flopped and jumped eagerly with the movement of his head. All that could be seen beneath them was the upwards tweak of a small nose splashed with freckles and faints puffs of pink that smoothed in rose colored rain from his cheeks to the soft curve of his jaw.
That, and barely visible blue eyes. The brightest blue Spock had ever seen.
The boy approached the pyramid of apples slowly but purposefully, clumsy little feet rocking with determination as he stepped then stopped suddenly in front of the apple table. He tilted up his blonde capped skull upwards and traced the stacks of fruit with his gaze until his head could tip back no more and he was entirely focused on the lone apple at the very tip of the pyramid.
He engaged in a staring contest with the apple for a long moment. Just when Spock had formed the irrational opinion that the inanimate object would surely start quiver under the intensity of slitted blue eyes, the boy's face cracked up in a grin. His lips slid back to reveal blunt white teeth, absent two in the front, that snatched curves of red and green light from the bulbs strung around the ceiling. The light's brightness paled into comparison to the life jolted into those wide blue eyes as the boy stretched up an arm and rolled onto the tips of his toes.
There was no way he was going to reach that apple. Spock reasoned there was about a 0.0001% chance it was possible for a person of his height. This was an even smaller percentage than the possible existence of Santa Claus.
For some reason, the young Vulcan found this immensely irritating. He huffed and wiggled his arms into a cross, securing the bag of apples under his arm as he did so.
"That is illogical," he said.
The boy froze and whipped around to Spock, bright hair turning so fast it looked like streaks of hovercar highway lights. His irises flicked up and down Spock, sizing him up and glaring.
"So?"
Spock glared right back.
"There is only a 0.0001% chance you will reach that apple, and you cannot do so without incident."
It was the boy's turn to huff and he did so dramatically, puffing his cheeks so they stretched in circles and blowing out hard enough to make the drips of hair on his forehead float up. Spock noticed his eyes were even more fascinating when you could see all of it. This information caused him acute annoyance.
"Don't care. It's the highest one and I'm gonna get it."
"But given my-"
Spock was interrupted, by of all things, the earth boy's display of his tongue, the wet tip poking out of the half-moon lines of his lip and directly at Spock.
That irrational behavior stunned Spock to silence- for the moment.
The boy wedged his heels onto the groove at the base of the apple table and began to extend his tiny body as far as it would go. Spock approached him from behind partially because this was surely going to end in disaster and it was logical that he try to prevent it, and partially because…
He was curious about this insolent alien.
The boy's arm crawled upward, passing one row then another, a dark shadow snaking in loops over the fruit and growing the further he stretched. Up, up, he went much beyond the point when it seemed he couldn't possibly get any higher. His little pink fingers forked out and twitched when they got only inches from the apple.
"That is not going to work," Spock stated simply.
"And I told you-I. Don't. Care. Mind your own business Mister," his pinkie skimmed the round bottom of the apple, "Besides, I've almost….got it!"
His fist closed around the apple's girth, grip only large enough to cloak the very edge. For slightly less than a second Spock experienced a feeling he very rarely even glimpsed.
Shock. This tiny, stubborn human had defeated his exact probability calculations as if they had no hold on him. He had done the impossible.
Before he could recover his wits, an apple from a row below rustled against its neighbors, spilling down the pyramid in a slow tumble like a rock scraping against a mountain side. Both Spock and the boy followed it with their eyes as it stopped at the wooden edge of the table, wobbling. It give one finally rock then bent over the side, bouncing once on the tile floor of the grocery store with a dull thud and rolling in an arch to rest at Spock's feet. The human's stare met his own.
Then the pyramid collapsed.
The boy flailed his arms desperately, but he toppled back with the stream of apples that were rushing from the cart, clunking on the ground.
He fell. Directly on top of Spock.
The warm body was light to his Vulcan muscles, but as the back slapped into his chest Spock fell too. They landed together in the mess with apples pressing into Spock's shin and bruising his legs. There was apple after apple raining on them, apples jammed in the nobs of their necks, apples coating their stomachs.
In the pandemonium, the moment the stranger's skin touched his, that emptiness in his katra flamed to life and moved his limbs by its own violation. He tucked the human's head beneath his chin and whipped the fragile frame beneath his own, shielding him from the waterfall of fruit.
He did not know why he did it. Could not understand what made him try to protect the boy. But he had to.
When the last apple had plunked atop Spock's knee, they were completely buried and he could hear his mother's frantic exclamations and yelling that likely came from the store's supervisor. Her soft hands found his torso and she yanked out with surprising strength disentangling him from the earth child who sat up, blinking with his blonde hair shocked up in every direction.
"Sweetheart, are you alright?"
He nodded, but she patted him down anyways, turning his head in her hand and ghosting over every patch of skin for injuries. All Spock could feel was a tingling sensation that buzzed in his veins from his mind to his stomach to the circles of flesh above his fingernails.
He wanted to touch the human again.
Just then, a man with grayish skin splashed an unpleasant shade of red with anger thundered over, tugging the boy from the pile of apples by the shell of his ear. The boy yelped as he was pinched and scrambled to his feet. The man dragged him away, far enough that only Spock's superior hearing allowed him to understand what they were saying.
"Why you little bastard, you can't go one lousy day without making trouble, wait till your mother comes home, of course by the time I'm done with you there won't be much punishing left to do."
Spock wanted very much to hurt this man.
The boy pushed tiny elbows the man's grip on his wriggling free as he choked out, "It was an accident, I swear! I didn't mean to-'"
The man smacked the boy's cheek with a sharp sound the seemed to pulse off the walls.
"Don't talk back to me boy! We're leaving before someone sends security on you and I have to pay for all this shit."
From where was sitting in his mother's arms, Spock could see a glob of sweat sludge down the man's temple as he yelled. The child flinched and struggled against the massive arm that slung around his shoulders and steered him outside. He shrieked "You're not my father!" And Spock could feel his pain as if it is his own.
The doors slid open and the boy's image grew smaller as he vanished into orange street lights and folds of falling snow. The doors closed again, and all Spock could make out from where he was is the sheen of the plexi-glass window.
Amanda gathered him up, talking to the managers and collecting apples in the plush wool of her sweater. Spock only registered dim notes of the conversation, too consumed with the overwhelming completeness that fluttered in his stomach.
In the end, they leave with three shopping carts of apples. His mother just giggles and says it's a good thing Sarek likes applesauce, because they are going to have a years' worth.
He's more quiet than usual at Christmas that year, but by the end of their stay, that nameless human boy who had to have that apple on the very top is only a memory and a distant hum somewhere is his blood.