A/N: This would be a story about the chaotic, troubled wonderings of Spock's mind when he realizes certain things. It might be a little hard to follow because I might have maybe been high on sleep deprivation when writing it. And I have no idea if this was a good idea. Sorry, darlings. Also~

BECAUSE I forgot, everyone knows Star Trek isn't mine, right? ^_^' It belongs to Roddenberry's ghost and those shiny new movie guys. (I just use its men for my own fictional needs, heheheheh…)

It is not a romance story.

Life is hard and gritty and contains just as much ugliness as beauty; just as much suffering as elation. This does not change when he falls in love. Perhaps, really, they don't have time for romance.

It's actually more that any peril that could have existed at all is strengthened tenfold. Emotions, he has been told, run deep in his race. His seem to simmer beneath the bones, cage themselves in his ribs, rush through his blood and make it burn or freeze, make his pores more open to the air and his eyes (human eyes) collect data and life and any image of simple beauty with a kind of hunger he is unused to. Something in him has been shortened. Some potential has been ripped away from all of this, though the possibility of something great has still never been riper.

Jim is beautiful to him, yes, but he is still the same. He is certainly not flawless in any sense, and never was. It was not love at first sight, the almost painfully unreal cliché that so many other stories have centered around. It took time, and did not come with an epiphany, did not come after hours of trying to loose themselves in the other's body. The realization was sharp, existed beneath each layer of him and would sometimes cut into reality, make him act out and reveal himself in moments of desperation and anger, fear and longing. He knew it, and didn't think about it. Didn't let himself think of it at all. Any acknowledgment he might have had was slow and almost sickly, taking up residence in himself and making him shut his eyes for a moment after he had nearly lost Jim or felt the other man too close, hand on his hand or on his shoulder, face slack and pale or broken into that almost ludicrously happy smile. It felt almost sweet, yet curled around him like dread.

Ah. I love him. That would be the reason.

Something unimaginably guilty in it. Something addicting.

Something to be avoided at all costs, and something thoroughly unavoidable.

The simplest feeling he had ever felt and yet still the hardest to concur, evidence of it seeming to grow into the cracks of him after he thought he had cleared it all away. And he couldn't simply love and ignore any other emotion, any more than he could simply hate and leave the rest of chaos behind. Hate would come with this small, glorious breach in his controls: violence, greed, jealousy, desire, anger, happiness and joy, belonging, everything. It would all follow, he could feel everything sharper in him from this one unchecked feeling that seemed to erase him and make him sharper and better in the same moment.

He tried to rid himself of it. And he failed. A simple emotion, a simple failure, and he knew, simply, that he was better. Better off or a better person, he didn't know, yet he really never needed to. Certainly not a better Vulcan, though the importance of being so seemed lost to him, on some selfish days.

As he already knew, this is not a romance story. He doesn't want to think about what kind it is when they avoid, yet again, the imminent and unavoidable threat of death. When they press forwards into the uncharted blackness of space; when they are nothing, really, but a speck amongst the thousands of other possibilities, of planets and galaxies and people, of so much other life. He doesn't want to think about it when Jim says quietly in the light of a fire "I've always known I'll die alone."

So he doesn't. None of this has been easy to pin down. When they touch or kiss, when they fight or make peace… it is all new, and no one has ever done it before.

He knows, logically, that this is an absolutely ridiculous assumption to make, but it is the way he feels. Admittedly, joyously, it is all the way he feels.

So he catches possibilities. Feels each moment of life leave him, because it has all become harder to grasp. At first, it was subconscious, working out how long their life will last. Because that's part of it- Jim has his own life, Spock has his own life, and then there's their life in the middle, a stretch of space and time that will be solely theirs.

But their life-

Jim is human. On the chance, the very rare chance, that he survives his own personality and career, the average is 110. 110 years before death from the very vague 'old age' which normally, he's realized, involves the breaking down of a heart or a mind, the decay of a human's inner body shutting them down.

There is the much more likely chance that one of them will be killed in action. This is, eerily, more comforting to him. He can not pin down 'killed in action' and when he considers this as the more likely scenario, there is both the fact that it might be his own life that ends first and the fact that he doesn't have to deal with the idea that he can not imagine Jim with more than a few grey hairs, that he can't imagine that faith deflated, youth lacking in the eyes and the lines of the mouth deepening until each grimace and smile of his life is permanent, etched into pores old skin, and these thoughts flash through him too fast, until it is difficult to breathe, and that chaos he knew would come is there, and he must meditate…

Despite the fact that the reason he can't imagine Jim as an older man is obviously because KIA is the more likely scenario.

It's not logical at all. He doesn't dwell on it anymore. Consciously.

So they live. They play chess, they kiss, they make love, and they do reckless, spectacular things with the life they have. They exist together, and he's happy. He's unbelievably, incredibly happy, even though he knows it can't last. That nothing gold can stay. That what they have now is fleeting, and that they are small in a galaxy, and this story of theirs will not have a happy ending.

This is not a romance. It will not end with them together, with the implied elation to exist forevermore after the story is finished. If so, this, at this moment, would have already been their ending.

So he will take a tragedy, if he must.

None of it is logical.

And he knows, fiercely and truly, that he could never just release love from his control. Everything else would follow, will follow. Love, comfort, happiness. Terror, confusion, grief.

He'll take the world of emotions, though, if he can have just this one.

A/N: Yeah, this wasn't one of those bits of Star Trek where Spock gets groovy with hippies. XD Sorry. And sorry for any OOCness that might have been there...

OH. And thank you so much for the reviews! I really do enjoy those things. :-)