"So, how's it going, with you and Spock?" McCoy asked, inevitably. So far, their shift had included filing three routine encrypted reports, implementing a course diversion to avoid a Romulan vessel and a running commentary on the food replicators in tones of Southern indignation. The doctor sat, now, nursing a coffee before the end of the shift, having made it more than clear that nothing in the coffee was likely to provide any significant obstacle to his approaching engagement with oblivion. "'Course, you know, Jim," he had said, "coffee is actually supposed to have caffeine in it. Too much to ask of Starfleet to figure out the programming and I'll bet you anything you like they've purposely decided to include caffeine in the list of prohibited substances, anyway. Should have applied the same effort to replicating a decent set of sleeping quarters. How in the blazes am I supposed to go to sleep on that rubberised shelf they call a cabin, anyway? Just as well, not as though I can trust Spock to remember how to count in double figures any more, probably better to stay awake anyway."

Kirk had listened to all this with rather less than a twentieth of his brain, rather enjoying the familiar background noise. Few people would have deemed it as relaxing as a Beethoven string quartet, but then it arose in few people an incorrigible association with the happiest and most fulfilling period of their lives, which they had once believed lost forever. And then the tone had shifted, just a fraction, as McCoy's drawl became a little less Georgian summer evening and a little more Enterprise CMO. So, how's it going, with you and Spock?

He said, ducking the question with an ease born of a long habit of ignoring forty five percent of McCoy's commentary on the ship's First Officer,

"Bones, what's wrong with the sleep inducer?"

"You're kidding, right? Sleep inducer, my God – the very name's enough that you'd rather take cordrazine. Look, Jim, if I want to go to sleep in a hammock with a fresh breeze and someone playing the fiddle a long way away, I'll go home and sling myself up in the back yard, and pay the neighbour's boy to strike up someplace not too near. I won't adjust the ambience controls in a metal box the wrong side of the Neutral Zone in an attempt to fool myself I'm not in Romulan space on a shuttle too small to be a decent refrigerator, and to pretend I'm not in all likelihood about to die an invisible death on a fool's errand."

Kirk smiled at McCoy through a rush of familiar memories.

"Why are you here, then, and not in your back yard, old friend?"

"And leave you and Spock to look after each other? You don't know how tempted I was, Jim, but you'll never sort him out without me. Which brings me back to where I started. You going to answer my question? Why were you talking to him about Flint and Rayna?"

Kirk looked up, mystified.

"I wasn't. I never mentioned either of them. Don't know what you're talking about, Bones. What was it I'm supposed to have said?"

McCoy shrugged.

"Nothing – actually, he never said you brought it up. Just that he mentioned them to me, and I made an assumption. Started me thinking about it again. Hadn't remembered them in years. Don't mean to trample over sensitive places, Jim, but they were an odd pair."

"Flint and Rayna? The android girl? I guess so. No sensitivities for me, Bones. Never think about them myself, either. Not the most memorable of our escapades. But of course," his voice changed tone, "you'd remember it differently. It was Rigelian fever, wasn't it? – and I know we lost some good men before we found the ryetalyn on that planet – Holberg something. Flint's planet. Neither of us was ever much good at it, were we? At losing people. I know why you remember, and I shouldn't have forgotten. You did all you could for them, Bones." He laid a brief hand on McCoy's arm, and the doctor looked down at the hand in recognition, remembering all over again the Jim Kirk of the five year mission whom men would follow too far from home and too near to alien terror. He wondered if Kirk ever knew that sometimes it came down to a hand on a sleeve, a smile, a look of understanding – whilst knowing that it both did and didn't. Kirk was born to command and a starship captain simply knew how to lead with a natural economy of effort which came from sheer instinct.

He said now, curiously, to the owner of the hand of command,

"Actually, I meant Rayna, Jim. You took quite a knock over her, and I knew she'd meant something special to you because you never spoke of her, ever again. It was like it never happened. Not like you."

"Rayna?" Kirk stared. "She was an android, Bones, for God's sake. I do remember, now – Flint made a very good fist of it and she was a pretty thing and highly impressive but – you're way off beam. She never meant anything to me."

McCoy looked at him, consideringly. "Not what it looked like at the time, Jim. I didn't spend so much time as Spock did with you and her – I was off trying to process ryetalyn with that damn robot, but the two of you were pretty friendly, seemed to me."

Kirk laughed, unbelievingly.

"Think you should use the sleep inducer a bit more, Bones. You're off your game."

The blue Georgian gaze was unwavering. "Maybe. Why don't you ask Spock?"


Which was why he was playing chess again with Spock and waiting for an opportunity to ask him why he had been talking to McCoy about Rayna Kapec, the last years of an ancient wanderer and a fever which had nearly claimed the lives of his crew in a distant star system a long time ago.

"Gravitational field density," he said, suddenly. Spock looked up with a keen glance which said that he knew exactly what Kirk had said and why, and that their thoughts had been in the same place. Kirk nodded at him,

"That was what she wanted to talk to you about, wasn't it? Remember? Rayna Kopec. You were her big chance to discuss gravitational field density."

"That is correct. It was a fascinating conversation. She was exceptionally well advanced in the study of sub-dimensional physics."

Kirk's smile broadened.

"I am sorry, Mr Spock. I can't help feeling that we so often fail you, in very many respects." And then, before the Vulcan could comment, "So? Why did you bring them up, Flint and Rayna, to McCoy? You seem to have given him some slightly strange ideas."

"Sir?"

"Never mind," Kirk said, hastily. "Was there anything you wanted to discuss about Flint?"

"I was seeking," Spock said slowly, "to verify a memory."

Kirk frowned.

"Oh? Why that one, particularly? Why talk to McCoy about it? You certainly piqued his curiosity."

There was a pause, in which Kirk's eyes were pulled away from a bishop in peril to study his friend. It was very unlike the Vulcan to hesitate. What could be troubling him about that long ago errand of mercy?

"Spock?" And then, to lighten the atmosphere and try another approach, he said,

"Wonder if McCoy is struggling with this mission more than I thought. He's not using the sleep inducer, apparently."

"Are you?"

"Me? No." Kirk was a starship captain and when you were a starship captain and you were lying horizontal and the part of you which was half-flesh-half-warp-core told you that the engines were functional, that there was no immediate crisis and that you were off duty, then you went to sleep, simple as that. Because none of those things might be true in five minutes' time and you learned to switch off and regenerate whenever you could, because the ship depended on the crew and the crew depended on the captain and the captain, at the end of the day, depended on certain biological realities, inconvenient though they were. "No. But then I've not been fabricating fantasies about android romances."

He knew that somehow McCoy's strange comment in the last shift was linked to Spock's odd behaviour when Spock said without so much as a raised eyebrow,

"Please specify."

"He's convinced himself I was in love with Rayna Kopec," Kirk said irritably, discovering that the words had found a vulnerable spot somewhere. "There are times, if you want to know, Spock, when this god-damn reputation for womanising really gets to me. I had fewer relationships, and God knows far fewer meaningful relationships, during the whole of the five year mission, than the average man in the street in Iowa, and that's with more women throwing themselves in my path than anyone will ever know. Not that I take that sort of stuff seriously," he added, hastily. "They go with the uniform and the position. Ask any other captain. Truth be told, it's a lonely place to be. I know you know that, you of all people."

He looked at the person who had ensured that it was not a lonely place to be, who had been by several light years the most meaningful relationship of the five year mission, and wished that there was a way of saying so, that this Spock could understand what he was failing to say. The Vulcan looked sombre, even by his usual standards, and Kirk's courage failed him. Spock said, in the tone of one continuing not to answer the question,

"Is the idea of an emotional attachment to a non-human offensive to you, Captain?"

His head snapped up.

"That's damn unfair and I'm not even going to answer it. And there's a hell of a difference between non-human and non-sentient."

"That is self-evident," Spock said. "However, Flint's android was sentient and you did, in fact, form an emotional attachment to her."

There was a brief pause, and then Kirk said,

"Utter nonsense. Maybe you need the sleep inducer, too, Spock. It just didn't happen."

Spock turned to him, then, his eyes more opaque than usual, his words so unexpected Kirk didn't at first understand what he was saying.

"Captain, the reason you are not aware that it happened is that it was never entered in the ship's log and your memory of the salient events was subsequently altered."

A beat, and then – because Spock was so obviously telling the truth, the only possible question,

"By whom?"

"By me, sir."

"Are you serious?"

"That is invariably the case." It would have to be now, Kirk thought irrelevantly, that Spock was making his first joke since Mount Seleya. Or was he? Did Vulcans suffer from nervous tension? What on earth was Spock trying to tell him?

"Are you telling me," he said, in a dangerous voice, starship captain to junior ensign, the atmosphere in the cabin a very long way from the encouraging intimacy of the last few days, "are you by any chance telling me that you deliberately engaged a Vulcan mind technique in order to alter my recollection of an official ship's mission, with permanent effect?"

"Yes, sir."

"And do I take it," he continued, torn between anger and astonishment, "that I gave my consent to this?" Although, he thought, how would he ever know? Spock could tell him he'd been AWOL for the relevant timeframe assassinating the Romulan Head of Command, and that he had himself asked Spock to remove the memory in order to protect everyone on the Enterprise from detection by the Romulans, and he would never know the truth. He could instead have discovered Spock in flagrante with a sehlat and Spock could have removed the memory to protect himself.

But it appeared that nothing so exciting had taken place - assuming Spock was telling the truth – because the Vulcan said, simply,

"No consent was given."

Of course, Spock would never have made up a story about assassinating the Romulan Head of Command to protect himself anyway, because Vulcans don't lie. Right?

A thousand things fought to be the first to Kirk's lips, and what won sounded like a cork flying from a bottle,

"You had no right."

Spock bowed his head while Kirk struggled with an overwhelming sense of betrayal. He had fought to believe that Spock was himself, that the friend he had loved was not permanently gone with his beloved ship in the death fires of Genesis but that the person next to him who had, in any real sense been absent from every day of the five year mission, was still his old familiar companion. He had deliberately taken him down memory lane in the hope that he would somehow meet himself coming back – for his own sake, of course, but also because Kirk wanted that connection back, wanted it so much that on a bad day, when he thought it wasn't going to happen, loneliness reached out for him at night with a cold and unaccustomed touch which made him realise he'd never once really experienced it in all the years on his ship with this person by his side. And it had worked – talking to Spock about Gary, about Edith, even about Garth had actually helped him to see things he'd not seen at the time and to deepen his understanding – Spock's, too – of what they had lived through together.

But this? It turned out that the trust they had built had been a fragile thing. Would this altered Spock in fact do the opposite – not only fail to exist within the personal connection which had meant so much to Kirk, but in fact unravel his memories to show that they had never been what he had thought – had been somehow less than what he had remembered?

How on earth, in fact, would he know what he remembered, now?

And that was when he realised the irony of the situation.

Neither he nor Spock, in a true sense, in their current incarnations, had been there on that planet, whilst McCoy processed ryetalyn in a desperate bid to save the crew from Rigelian fever.

He stared at the Vulcan, and asked the only question he could.

"Why? Tell me why, please."

"As I mentioned, sir, you had formed a deep attachment to Rayna Kopec. You suffered a not insignificant emotional trauma as a result of her death, which was caused by an inability to assimilate and adjust to the competition for her affections between you and Flint. It was Dr McCoy's desire and your own that you could forget what had transpired. Unlike Dr McCoy, I had the means to achieve this. He was not complicit in my actions and, in fact, remains ignorant of them."

Kirk thought through this explanation. It put Spock back where he had always been, not alien mind-stealer but loyal and protective friend, but it still didn't make sense and it did absolutely nothing for the mounting fury inside him. McCoy, had he not, in fact, succumbed to slumber even without the assistance either of caffeine or sleep inducer, could have told him, had he been present, that the anger was only partly caused by Spock's revelation and was also the result of days of stress and frustration and an overwhelming and still largely unvoiced grief only partly assuaged by the events on Mount Seleya. But McCoy, as a result of the earlier conversation with Kirk, was dreaming of the hammock in the back yard of his home in Georgia, with a slight smile on his lips in the darkened cabin twelve metres away.

And so Kirk proceeded to blaze a path to release.

"Look, Commander. I realise that the health and well-being of your captain is legitimately your business. And I also realise you acted from good intentions. But even assuming all this is true – and please don't tell me Vulcans don't lie, this is not a good time for that particular fantasy – it was an outrageous thing to do. It's my mind, damn it! Mine, not yours. What the hell did you think you were doing? What am I, if not my memories? They are what makes me who I am, and so is your so-called emotional trauma. How can I take on board what happens to me and grow and move on if you take the experience away before it's finished? How can I be who I am if I can't remember?"

He paused for breath, all hazel fury, and knew from the look on Spock's face exactly what he had said. He might as well have told Spock in words of one syllable that he doubted the essence of Spock's own identity. They were back to that moment of realisation on day one of the Polaris mission, except without the careful reaching out to one another, the willingness to pretend and to heal which had been what carried them through till now, to this torrent of anger and grief, of havoc and destruction. He knew he should stop, but the relief of letting go was too strong.

"And you could have given me the credit, frankly. I know you were always very mindful of your duty to the ship, but don't you think this was carrying it a bit far? I wasn't a teenager, Mr Spock, I could have picked myself up and carried on and kept the ship going and delivered the missions and even kept filing the damn reports. That's what was bothering you, right? The reports? How dare you? What made you do it – go on, tell me now. I've got a right to know; frankly, a right to know if I can trust any other memory of the last couple of decades you may have changed without telling me. How am I supposed to know, Spock? Why did you do it? Tell me why."

Vulcan eyes looked back steadily at human accusation, and Spock remembered the bright colours of his waking dreams, now almost at his peripheral vision, spiky, with sharp edges, sharp enough to slice and cut. Was this how humans lived? Was this what he had courted, allowing Kirk to draw him back into the past – into their past? And what did it mean, this smarting sensation, as though Kirk's words had fists which could aim a blow, and land hard?

His memories of Rayna and Flint had been consciously accessed only after the conversation about Edith Keeler the day before, when Kirk had questioned how much he, Spock, knew about falling in love. He'd heard McCoy's words then - I feel sorrier for you than I do for him, because you'll never know the things that love can drive a man to. And he'd gone away and remembered the whole episode, Rayna's golden perfection which had been programmed in such a way that Kirk had never stood a chance. Flint's manipulation. His own helplessness to do anything, even to forestall the revelation awaiting Kirk in Flint's laboratory. He had said to Kirk Let me go alone, Captain, but it had been the wrong thing to say and a strategy unlikely to be successful. Letting other people go alone had never been Kirk's forte.

He had become accustomed, over a period of time, to seeing Kirk with women. They had come in various shapes and sizes and they had never lasted. His own reactions had ranged from a concealed and passing concern for the women to a more lasting worry about Kirk's own vulnerability and the restless searching for the next emotional high. He had come to realise, of course, that there was an inevitability about the dynamic, that Kirk was never going to form a permanent relationship – would probably never do so even outside the confines of the mission. There were other starship captains who did, but Kirk was not of that breed. The women had ranged from the In-Another-Universe (Edith Keeler) to In-The-Line-Of-Duty Manipulation (Deela of Scalos) to the Serious Mistake (Janice Lester). They had been safety valve, physical release and occasionally a way out.

Rayna had been different and this had been a part of the reason for Spock's action. He watched the anger in Kirk's face and knew that the accusation was deserved, that it was years over-due. It had been an unforgiveable trespass. He had given in to the impulse set off by McCoy's words in part because Rayna had not been a casual affair, a matter of hormones or frustration or even the complicity of smiles on a dull day at the store. Rayna had been a trap, if not set for Kirk then still a trap, a matter of deliberate programming and multi-processor chips which had nothing to do with Edith Keeler or Miramanee, with love or escapism. In that sense, Kirk had been right – not that love outside homo sapiens was unthinkable, but that this had not been natural and because of that, Spock had been uncertain what recovery would look like. Or when it would come.

Of course, the other reason for what he had done – the main reason – had been McCoy's words. Even now, looking back decades from the perspective of Mount Seleya at what could almost – but not quite – have been another man's actions, he heard the casual, condescending, dismissive echo of You'll never know. And he remembered his own stubborn reaction, a moment of rebellion from his human half which had refused to be classified as ignorant, along with Flint's earlier prototypes of Rayna - all now, along with the android herself, reduced to cold microchips with no difference any longer between the circuits which had loved and laughed and those which had just never managed it. He had looked at Kirk's face, haunted even in sleep, and thought simply, I do know, and he had proved it both to himself and to a sleeping Kirk whom he would never tell; had put his hands on Kirk and felt passing through his fingertips the loss, the humiliation, the grief; had stood back a moment to watch his captain sleep, the lines on his face restored and then, feeling as though he were trespassing, he had dialled down the lights and left the cabin. Still later, in meditation next to the blackness of the porthole in his quarters, he had consciously set free the distress he had carried away from Kirk, had looked out into the stars and given Rayna a final, silent salute from the man she had loved.

Kirk was still waiting for an answer. And Spock offered him the only one he had, perhaps because he had no other way to deal with Kirk's anger, perhaps because Flint and Rayna and even his hands on Kirk's face still felt like things which had happened to someone else.

"Dr McCoy and you yourself both expressed a wish that you would forget."

Kirk batted it away, like an angry bull bothered by a fly.

"Hardly a reason to steal part of my mind, Mr Spock, although I naturally appreciate the sympathy from both my senior officers. I need a science office and a medical officer, not a personal shrink or a baby-sitter."

The truth, then.

"At the same time, the doctor suggested that I was unable to understand the experience from your perspective, Captain. He felt that your condition was preferable to the absence of any empirical knowledge of emotion."

He could not say more. He willed Kirk to understand. And with a sense of relief washing through him like a thing palpably physical, he saw that, somehow, Kirk did.

The two looked at each other. Kirk was still breathing hard, his anger ebbing from the knockout blow it had just received but adrenaline still flooding his body. Vulcans do not experience adrenalin rushes, nor do they experience fear, but for all that Spock kept absolutely still, like a man exploring debris after an earthquake who knows he may have taken a step too far and sees neither a way forward nor a way back. He waited for the sound of falling buildings, for the ground to give way.

And Kirk, from a different vantage point, in fact felt not very different. He was sufficiently an expert on any Spock to understand exactly what the Vulcan had just said. He wasn't entirely sure that it justified stealing bits of Kirk's brain, but that seemed, for the minute, rather less relevant. His whole being was centred on Spock's words, on this admission, decades after the fact.

It occurred to him that Spock would never have made this admission before Mount Seleya and, after Mount Seleya, might have struggled with the act in the first place, with whatever had driven him to take away Kirk's grief like a modern-day scapegoat. Was that the difference and was it because the Vulcan, like Kirk, saw the past as something which had essentially happened to someone else?

And then Kirk noticed Spock's absolute stillness and knew that this was too simplistic an explanation. Give me time, Spock, he thought, then. Give us both time. Whether it was the release of anger or the extraordinary benison of Spock's confession – still flooding through him like the warmth of the first rays of sun after a hard winter – he knew he had to stop seeing Spock as two different people. The person in front of him was the one who had once refused to be told that he didn't know how to love. It was as simple as that.

He said, very gently, because he had to,

"Please don't ever do that again, Spock," and immediately wanted both the reassurance that the Vulcan wouldn't use a mind-meld again without permission, and also for Spock not to see this as an invitation to renege.

Spock said,

"I have taken your queen, sir." Startled, he glanced down at the board, and said,

"That wasn't actually what I was talking about."

"Evidently, Captain. You only have one queen. In fact, at the current time, I fear you have none at all." There was a moment when their eyes met, and then Kirk laughed, let laughter take the tension instead of anger, forgetting to worry that he might wake McCoy. He heard a noise in the other cabin and stood to stretch, still smiling.

"Guess it's my turn to leave you with the con, Mr Spock," he said, and as he passed the Vulcan, he dropped his hand and gripped Spock's shoulder hard. It was the only answer he could find for Spock's confession, and he thought it was enough.