Final Definition
Written for Anna Amuse, based on her wonderful piece 'Should I Fall Behind.'

I already know, but I sure as Hell don't admit it to myself. Not even in the privacy of my own thoughts.

I'm only human. I don't like admitting it, but it's the truth. Well, I take that back. Sometimes I do like admitting it, especially when it makes a difference in whatever argument I'm trying to make. Life-form posing as a Greek god? Sure. Haywire computer thinks I'm its Daddy? Yeah. Giant confused satellite fries Spock's brain? Hell yeah. I'm human.

I don't let myself think about it.

I don't ignore it, either. I know on some level below thought, and it makes every action I take mean something different. It feels different. I'm not scared. You know... no, I'm not scared. I might know, but you don't live my life without looking for a win even while you're facing the loss and often finding it.

Spock gives it to me.

I give it back.

"Permission granted."

Bones looks confused. Scotty looks like it flew over his head. I guess it probably did. I guess I wanted it to, too, even if I didn't. Does that make sense? That I want to acknowledge something to them, and myself, without ever actually doing it? I guess it does, when you're human.

I tuck Bones into bed that night, after he nearly passed out on his desk. Maybe he knows, but I don't want him to know until it's time. God, I want to protect him. He's always so sure he has the answers; Mister 'I'm the sage country doctor' -- there are times I've laughed in his face at his bullshit. I want to protect him from this. From himself, and from me, and from this. I want to protect him with everything in me. I almost want him to come with me, but where I have to go, only one man can follow.

I put my hand on his cheek, and his eyes are closed so he doesn't see that my laugh is just in my voice; my face is twisted and my heart is twisted, and I tell him to sleep. And I'd be lying if I said that it isn't the one moment in all of this where I am really scared. Where I come as close to admitting it all to myself that I could. It's hard to look at 'never'.

I go back to my quarters, and spend the night with Spock in near-silence, and then it's time.

You can live in moments, you know. You can live a whole lifetime in one, if you want it badly enough. It's something human in us, I think, that lets us win in the face of the inevitable. When the whole universe has it in for you, when there's no way to win, something in us flips a switch and suddenly time stretches to a single moment.

And that becomes our everything. Our final definition. Our final answer.

"Captain," he says, a salute, and it burns in his eyes and through our contact, and it's just us.

This is me. This moment.

"Thank you, Spock."

This is him.

I remember that Bones and Scotty are there, then, and I want to feel guilty that I forgot. But I don't. I should, but I can't. But I look at them down there. They both know. They just don't realize it yet. I don't waste time, I order the energize and the last time I see them is through a curtain of blue energy.

We do what we have to. It doesn't matter what it is. We do what we have to because that is the kind of cloth we're cut from, he and I -- that is the kind of men we are. It's not that we've never given into questioning it, rebelling against it or otherwise. We both know what this will lead to; we both know that we are doing more than what our orders tell us, more, even, than what base instinct demands. Predictably, the odds fall badly. Did we expect anything else?

No.

I live my life looking for a win in the middle of a defeat. He gives it to me, and only now do I admit it to myself: This is our ending. The world of 'never again'. And yet somehow, I know that this is the best thing we could have found in this universe or any universe; that this is the way it should be. For us. That any other way would lead to something worse. Something more damaging. Something where there could be no win, only defeat, a slow crawl into Hell. Where we lose ourselves and never again know our answers.

He reaches for my hand through the pain; I reach for his through my own.

Our final definition.

We touch.