Written for the prompt: Jim and Spock lock eyes across the table in the ST:ID Starfleet emergency meeting on the Trek Kink Meme. Pre-slash. Title adapted from a song of the same name by Coheed and Cambria.
GRAVITY'S UNION
Spock sits ramrod straight in his chair, the very picture of Vulcan discipline as Admiral Marcus briefs them on Starfleet's investigation into the terrorist, John Harrison. He studies the man's profile on the vid-screen, the way Harrison's eyes look straight through him. They're bright, almost grey-blue and, even in a still photo, glitter with the intelligence the man is renowned for. Spock feels a shard of something cold and hard in the pit of his stomach, the very sight of Harrison chilling him to the bone for reasons he cannot fathom. What is it that his body knows that he himself does not? Spock may choose not to process emotion, but he would be a fool to ignore instinct when it all but screams for his attention.
It's this sense of foreboding, this insidious clench in his gut, that compels him to look up. Not at the screen, not at Marcus, not at his new Captain, but across the table to the other side of the room. The moment he squares his shoulders and readjusts his gaze, Spock feels at ease, even more so when the man he is staring at lifts his eyes as well.
His perception of time slows.
If Harrison's grey stare is bright, James Kirk's vivid blue is blinding. The ice that hardened and crystallized when he read what happened in the Archives melts under the sheer, dazzling warmth of Kirk's attention. It's impossible, illogical to think that something so trivial as a look could undo the tension that has been building in him since they began - since "do you understand why I went back for you?" and "truth is, I'm going to miss you" and the spaces in between - but Spock cannot deny that he breathes easier, as if a weight has been lifted.
What replaces it is a different kind of tension, an electricity that thrums beneath his skin like a thing alive. It's almost tangible, this connection between them; the ties that bind Spock's destiny to this golden man who is at once both as brilliant and as dangerous as the sun. However far he goes to escape it, Spock knows he will never leave.
He's caged, locked in perpetual motion by his own curiosity, by the promise of something more. It's intoxicating in all the ways that appeal to him most. Kirk is unsolvable, a game with rules that change after every move, a story with no beginning or end, a question mark on the white, blank page.
Despite history, despite reason, despite logic, Spock maintains. He looks into the void and the void looks into him.
James Kirk's eyes speak of fevered urgency, of concern, of fear, of dawning realization as the pieces come together and, most importantly, of relief. Spock, it seems, is as familiar a face to Kirk as Kirk is to him. The last of Harrison's ice-cold trepidation disappears in recognition of the hot, driving pulse between him and his Captain. Spock feels it echo within him, down to his core. The sensation is not an unpleasant one and it is this, more than anything else, that lends him the power to finally look away.
Kirk's eyes ground him, bring him back to Earth, to the present, to the floor beneath his feet.
They always have hit the ground running.
fin
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