"He might just leave. He might already be gone."
"Bones, he wouldn't do that. Not without telling us."
"Oh yeah? He did once before."
Kirk sighed, letting his tired body sink into the well-known curve of the sofa in Spock's temporary quarters. He'd never been here before, and yet everything about the apartment was intimately familiar. There were ten thousand twins of this sofa, alone, just in this solar system. Ten thousand end tables, just like that one over there. Ten thousand narrow beds in ten thousand Starfleet standard apartments... But just one, singular, unique, hybrid Vulcan genius. Manifestly not here.
"It's different now," Kirk said, closing his eyes. "He'd tell us if he were going back to Gol."
Bones snorted and pushed himself up off the sofa. He grabbed at the sofa cushion to right it, then gave it a shove instead.
"Because of those simple feelings?" He asked testily and took the few steps necessary to get over to the small kitchen area. It was unsurprisingly bare and pristine.
"Yes," Kirk responded in a low voice.
Quiet reigned for a few moments. San Francisco fog, as always stubbornly resistant to modern weather managment techniques, hid them from the rest of the megacity and lapped against the neighboring Starfleet high-rises. In the distance, the fog lights of Golden Gate blinked steadily. During his five years as Chief of Operations here, Kirk had spent too many evenings on the other side of the bay, alone, staring at those lights, thoughts on a stone monastery sixteen light years away.
He cleared his throat.
"Bones, I don't think he'll leave with her... that priestess that you saw him talking to... without saying anything. But if you wonder if he'd make the decision to go back... That, I don't know. If he sees his unfinished tenure at Gol as a failure, he might, if they gave him that opportunity."
The cleanup and organizational shakeup after Vger had taken six months of hard work, and both of Kirk's closest friends had been at his side daily. There had been neither time nor cognitive space for personal decision, there had only been needs and duty. They had all fallen back into achingly familiar roles and functions, and their natural affinity and the absolute certainty of who, where and what he was had thrummed in Kirk's body. But now, finally, there was some space, and a new Enterprise, and new five year mission, almost, almost within reach. And with that came the realization that none of them had really had a discussion about the future.
The doctor made a frustrated noise. He had opened one of the kitchen cabinets, and glared at the four cups in there.
"The hobgoblin has been in this apartment for half a year!" He jabbed at the cups, disturbing their perfect alignment. "He hasn't even touched these."
"Mr. Spock is a man of simple needs, Doctor," Kirk said, slightly defensively. "There's food at HQ, he hasn't been starving."
"Spock is a man of simple wants, Jim, not simple needs. He can subsist on almost nothing, but that's just surviving, not living. His apartment on the Enterprise looked nothing like this, it was properly lived in."
"Doctor, Spock is one of the most self-sufficient, capable people we know. He needs..."
"He needs a home, Jim."
"He needs us to respect his wishes and his integrity!" Kirk didn't even realize he'd raised his voice until he was already standing. "My god, Bones, we shouldn't even be here. We weren't invited, we just..."
"Your invitation and welcome is unconditional," a quiet voice noted from the doorway. Spock stood just inside the door, thin droplets of rain dusting his black hair. If he was surprised at seeing that he had guests it did not show.
"Spock!" Bones exclaimed. He took a step towards the Vulcan, an empty cup dangling from his left hand. "Where have you been?"
The Vulcan peeled off his gloves with economical motions and raised an eyebrow.
"Most recently, I have been walking from Napa."
"And who were you with in Napa?"
"Bones! That's enough with the interrogation," Kirk interrupted firmly.
Now that the admiral saw that the Vulcan was still here on Earth, the earlier panic seemed an embarrassing overreaction. He'd let himself get riled up by the Doctor's frantic assertion that he'd seen Spock in a meeting with a Kolinahr high priestess - a singular event since the priestesses almost never ventured off world. The scene that Bones had painted had become entangled with the memory of how Spock had, five years ago, resigned his comission and left without a word to anyone. Clearly the memory had overruled Kirk's common sense. And his common courtesy. They all had blanket digital permissions to each others' access keys, but this was not the manner in which that should be used.
"Spock, I'm sorry." He made a small gesture encompassing both of them and the apartment. "We should leave."
He took a breath. "I could explain our presence here in your apartment, but it just boils down to embarrassing human emotionalism. We were worried, and we... aren't anymore. Please accept my apologies."
He reached out towards Bones, ready to physically remove the recalcitrant doctor from the room, but then his hand stopped, almost by its own volition, half way there. He remembered the night of the farewell party after the first five year mission. He remembered putting his hand on Spock's shoulder then, the last time he'd seen the Vulcan before his sudden retreat to the monastery. How many times since then hadn't he thought about what he should have said that night?
He found himself now turning, placing his hand on that bony shoulder again. Gripping it.
He knew what he wanted to say, but he also knew what he had to say, to be worthy of the friendship and trust that had grown between them.
"I just need you to know something." He managed. "Bones saw you talk to a Gol priestess, earlier." His grip tightened and he took a deep breath, ruthlessly pushed down his selfish feelings and reached deeper down into a friendship that had become one of the foundations of his self:
"The Kolinahr discipline is justly revered throughout the galaxy and should you choose to return to it, they should be honored to have you. No one but you knows where your path best lies, Spock. Whatever you decide to do, I support you unconditionally."
The doctor let out a strangled sound.
Spock tilted his head. "I see," he said simply. Their eyes locked, and suddenly Kirk felt his earlier struggles melt away.
Behind him, Bones rolled his eyes.
"How touching. Now listen here, Spock. The Kolinahr is a predatory sect that lobotomizes people's emotions..."
"Bones!" Kirk spun halfway around
"...and if you are even thinking of returning there, I am going to lock you in this room and sit on you until you start to see sense again."
"Doctor, damn it, what the hell makes you think..." Kirk rounded on the doctor, the deep sense of communion he'd felt with Spock washed away by frustration and embarrassment.
"You're taking the coward's way out here, Jim, leaving all the real talk to me! If you think for a moment that I would let Spock go back to that..."
"It's not our place, Spock's his own man..."
"Spock's half a year out from a sect that controlled his every moment, and from a mind altering experience with a telepathic computer! He shouldn't even..."
"You can't call the Kolinahr a sect, Bones, that's xenophobic and arrogant and..."
Spock cleared his throat. He was calmly removing his light grey jacked, revealing a Starfleet Science uniform underneath.
"Just how would you manage that, Doctor?" he asked when he had the humans' attention.
"Manage what?" Bones asked, derailed half-rant.
"Manage to lock me in this room and sit on me?"
Bones sputtered. "I... I'd sedate you first and then change the locks."
"An unsurprisingly sub-optimal plan, Doctor."
"Why you...!"
"Especially now that you have informed me of its contents," Spock noted serenely and made an inviting gesture to his two guests towards the sofa. "May I offer you some tea?"
Bones turned red but then he let out a heavy breath. Slowly he began to smile.
"You're not leaving, are you?"
"No, Leonard, I am not," Spock said, simply.
"But you..."
"The priestess offered to sponsor my return to the monastery. The circumstances surrounding my departure were irregular and out of my control, as she put it."
"And you told them you'd rethought the whole lobotomy angle and opted out?"
Spock gave the human what would have been a quelling glance, but was stopped by the sheer relief and fondness in Bones' face, so at odds with the sharp words.
"I told her... that my answers lay elsewhere."
His eyes went to Kirk again. The admiral had sat down on the arm of the sofa, uncharacteristically quiet. Kirk smiled and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, Spock found he could not break their gaze.
"I give you my oath that I will not leave your side willingly." He said quietly.
"We don't need any oaths between us, Spock," Kirk said, shaking his head. "But in a week, or two, I will have a ship. Will you come?" He rose and held out his hand and Spock gripped firmly.
"I will."
"Bones?"
"This is how staffing decisions for a multi-billion credit Starfleet mission are made? No wonder the papers are always accusing Starfleet of nepotism..."
"Bones!" Kirk stopped him before he could get all steamed up. "Are you coming?"
"Yes, God help me, of course, I am. But I am giving any medievalish oaths of loyalty and I am not, well," he flicked his fingers at their hands, still joined in a tight grip, "whatever that is. So help me, at some point the two of you have to actually sit down and talk with proper long words and 'I feel that...', and not rely on dramatic gestures, and..."
The doctor continued on the topic for quite some time, but as he did it while coaxing Vulcan tea and Terran coffee out of the synthesizer, his two friends decided not to break his flow. Instead they went to the bay windows and stood together, shoulder to shoulder, and watched the fog clear over San Francisco and the promise of the universe expand above them.