Chapter Seven: Talisman
Disclaimer: I neither own these characters nor profit from writing about them.
"You're going out now?"
Gaila sounds more annoyed than surprised. Sprawled on her bed on her stomach, her chin propped on the heel of one hand, she flicks idly through the screens of her newspadd.
"It's not that late," Nyota says, trying not to sound defensive. "Besides, you aren't one to talk. I didn't even hear you come in last night."
"That's different," Gaila says, setting her newspadd aside and sitting up in the bed. "I was out having fun. Having to go back to work after you've already manned the lab all day—well, it's wrong, Ny. You ought to report Commander Spock to the TA union."
Pausing in the act of slipping her comm into her pocket, Nyota gives her roommate a hard glare. Surely Gaila is joking.
"If it wasn't important, he wouldn't have asked," Nyota says, "and I'm not doing anything right now anyway. If I were busy, I'd have told him no."
She reaches to the bedside table and picks up her key card, putting it in her pocket with her comm.
"Sure you would," Gaila says, smirking.
Leaving her dorm and heading across the campus, Nyota resists the temptation to pull her comm from her pocket. She's read the message on the screen three times already, a rare text from Spock.
Please come by. I need you.
"Your comm chimed," Gaila had told her as she came of the shower a few minutes ago, unpinning her hair. "Sounds like a text came for you." Something in Gaila's announcement sounded odd, and for a moment Nyota was certain her roommate knew more than she was saying. Had she read the message?
But the comm was where she had left it, on the table with her key card and a half-eaten granola bar.
Spock almost never contacts her this way. He's much more likely to flag a note to her computer mail. Those messages are usually direct and specific: changes in the next day's schedule, for instance, or questions forwarded from students being tutored in the lab.
Please come by. I need you.
Direct but not specific. Not like him at all.
Needs her how? For what?
And suddenly she gets it. This isn't about work. He isn't waiting for her at the lab. He's at home.
Grinning to herself, she veers off the path to the language building and heads straight across the campus to the faculty housing. What had she told Gaila? That she would have told him no if she had been busy?
What a lie.
At the apartment building, Nyota sees two people standing in a pool of light at the outside entrance key reader. Both are people she has seen before though she's never spoken to them. The more striking is a young blonde woman who obviously lives here. The other is an older man in some sort of work overalls who is fidgeting with a small box mounted beside the door. The building supervisor, then. Nyota steps up beside them and watches for a moment before either looks her way.
"Just a sec," the supervisor says. "Power surge blanked the reader. I've almost finished resetting it."
The blonde woman turns toward her and frowns slightly. Nyota gives a hesitant smile back but the woman looks away.
"There," the supervisor says, pressing several buttons in succession. "It ought to work now. Try it."
In the few seconds that it takes the blonde woman to flick her key card under the reader, Nyota notes her carefully manicured hand—the short, stylish, buffed nails, a thin gold bangle around her wrist. With a self-conscious glance at her own right hand, she sees where she has nibbled away the dark polish from the nail on her thumb.
A loud snick and the lock on the outside door opens. The blonde woman pushes the door and the building supervisor reaches up and catches it before it closes, nodding for Nyota to go on through.
"Thank you," she says as the door swings shut behind him. He opens the utility room just inside the hall across from Spock's apartment and goes inside. The blonde woman's footsteps echo loudly in the hall and Nyota cranes her neck to see where she is going. The lift, probably, or the steps further on. But the woman stops abruptly at the apartment before the lift and swipes her card, disappearing inside and leaving the hall suddenly silent.
Only then does Nyota notice a small slip of paper stuck with some sort of adhesive to the door of Spock's apartment. She recognizes his small, careful script, his letters with odd flourishes and arabesques in unexpected places still managing to look neat and lean.
Apartment 12B.
Her confusion is matched by her disappointment. They aren't going to…be together…alone?
Apartment 12B is almost directly overhead on the second floor. Taking two steps at a time, Nyota hurries up the stairwell and backtracks to the right apartment.
Like Spock's door, this one has a narrow rectangular frosted glass inset along one side. For a moment she lets her hand hover over the door chime as she bobs her head, trying to see something through the glass. Nothing. She mashes her finger on the chime and waits.
Footfalls and a shadow passing before the glass—and suddenly the door opens and Nyota is facing another student, a second year cadet she has seen in the computer science department. Anna? No, Janna. Janna Lin. Professor Carter's aide. They've spoken before, briefly, when Spock introduced her to his colleagues in that department. The social gathering at mid-term? And once in Spock's office when he and Professor Carter were working out the logistics of his schedule when he was tapped as an adjunct to the language department.
"Hi," Nyota says, and Janna opens the door wider and waves her in. "I got a message—"
"They're in here," Janna says, and Nyota walks down a short hall to a room on the right. Inside are Spock and Professor Carter sitting side-by-side in front of three large computer monitors on a long table. Both look up as she and Janna come in.
"Thank you so much for coming," Professor Carter says. Almost as tall as Spock and as thin, she wears her straight sandy-colored hair in a short bob tucked behind her ears. Judging her age is difficult, though Nyota suspects she isn't much older than 30. From time to time she and Spock have collaborated on projects for their computer science students and Nyota has helped with scheduling lab time. Other than that, her contact with Professor Carter has been limited to the same social gatherings and random meetings in the hall that characterize her interactions with her aide.
Before she can protest that she doesn't know why she is here, she sees Spock shift in his chair and raise his brows—an apology, of sorts, for catching her off guard.
"Professor Carter needs someone to set up a language subroutine to test her scanning program," he says.
"Oh!"
No asking if she is interested, nor offering any praise for her proficiency in Federation xenolanguages—not to mention her ability to problem solve software glitches in the lab on the fly. For a moment she is annoyed.
Professor Carter seems to sense her hesitation.
"If I weren't presenting at the Feynman Conference I wouldn't ask," the professor says. "And if it isn't convenient, Janna and I can rig something. The Commander just thought that you would be able to come up with something more…elegant."
"The conference? You're going?" Nyota asks, sweeping her gaze from Professor Carter to Spock.
"I got the notification yesterday," Professor Carter says as Nyota gives Spock a look.
For months he and Professor Artura have been waiting to hear if their proposal detailing their new lab protocols will be accepted for the conference. Apparently not. The lab rotation improves language acquisition and retention by a statistically impressive percentage over the traditional programs—but, Nyota thinks ruefully, it isn't very flashy or earth-shaking. She wonders if Spock is disappointed.
"What exactly does your scanning program do?" she asks Professor Carter, looking over her shoulder. Janna moves to the head of the table where a metal container the size and shape of a shoebox sits plugged into a number pad.
"Here," Janna says, sitting and motioning to Nyota to take the chair beside her. "The scanner sorts naturally occurring stellar noise from artificial sources. You can adjust it to read light waves or electronic pulses or even gravimetric shifts. A starship with a multi-scanner like this can tell if it is within 1.45 parsecs of another life form without having to do a more detailed biological survey."
"Then why do you—"
"Need a language subroutine?" Janna interrupts. "Because we've had two instances of false positives. Some stars emit radiation that the scanner misidentifies as being the syntactical signature of language."
"That's where you come in," Professor Carter adds. "The scanner is being fooled because the signals have the same ratio of regular and random impulses that most languages exhibit. Commander Spock has an idea for an algorithm that could better judge which signals are too regular to be actual language."
"And you need me to establish exemplars for as many languages as possible," Nyota finishes. At first blush it is an overwhelming task. She would have to somehow quantify the average number of distinct utterances in a measured unit for every language, then run a metrical count and an inflection and tonality check. It could be done—but it would take days.
"You're right," Professor Carter says, tipping her head up at Spock. "She's good."
She flushes at the unexpected compliment. What exactly has Spock said about her to Professor Carter? She meets his gaze across the table.
"If you like," Janna says, "I can help with the data entry. That should make things go much faster."
For the first time Nyota looks carefully at Janna. Her features suggest some Asian ancestry, her skin so pale that it is almost luminescent. She wears her hair cut in an unflattering frizzy dark bowl around her face. Shorter than Nyota and stockier, she has a habit of tilting her head to the side, her eyes hooded as if she is watching everything with detachment.
"Do you mind?"
This from Professor Carter. It isn't how Nyota had hoped to spend the evening, but it might be an interesting challenge. She gives Spock another glance and then says, "Of course not. I'd be glad to help."
Professor Carter and Spock push back and stand up, switching places so that they are sitting near the scanner and Nyota and Janna are in front of the computer monitors. On one screen is Spock's equation to rate the likelihood that a particular signal is artificial or naturally occurring. On the other two screens are lists of known languages, both Federation and others. By assigning each linguistic characteristic a specific weight, Nyota can plug in a number to Spock's equation and send it to the scanner for review.
She runs Standard and Andorian and Vulcan through the equation—easy languages that she knows well—and the scanner correctly identifies them. The work is slow at first—counting the average number of stressed and unstressed syllables in a 10 second utterance, for instance, takes an inordinate amount of time until she gets used to it.
But Janna is a quick study and soon both of them are calling up text samples and running them through the program.
"This is going to take forever," Nyota says after they have finished logging in two dozen samples. "Maybe we should skip the better known languages and focus on the ones further out in the quadrant. After all, any communications officer worth her salt would be able to identify an Andorian signature and wouldn't really need the help of the scanner."
Spock looks across the table at her and says, "The technology will also be available for commercial use. Not every ship equipped with a scanner will be large enough to have a communications officer."
"Yes, but," Nyota objects, "even on a small private yacht a pilot would be able to tell the difference between a solar flare and a radio transmission burst from Andoria."
"Not if the pilot is from a different quadrant and is unfamiliar with the Andorian language."
"How likely is that?"
"The statistical likelihood is less than .0342 percent."
"Then," Nyota says, triumphantly, "it is more efficient if we use our time programming the less familiar languages. The ones that a pilot on a small yacht—"
From the corner of her eye she sees Spock squaring his shoulders, a telltale sign that he is preparing a verbal riposte.
"—from the furthest corner of the galaxy might not know. Given our time constraint, it is only logical to choose the most useful languages."
Spock flicks his eyes down and then up again, as if he is consulting some inward data bank, which, Nyota thinks, he might be.
"Programming them all makes the scanner more accurate," he says, and she nods.
"More accurate," she agrees, "but we have to weigh the accuracy against how much input time that would take. Cadet Lin and I—"
And here she turns and looks squarely at Janna, intending to pull her into the argument. To her surprise, Janna's face is pinched and skewed.
"Are you okay?" Nyota asks quickly, and Janna pulls back slightly, as if the question needs careful deliberation.
"Yes," she says at last. "I'm just—hungry."
Professor Carter laughs and says, "It won't do if I get a reputation as a slave driver. I have some sandwiches in the refrigerator. Let me get you something."
"No, really," Janna says, sounding to Nyota's ear as if she is stressed. "I'm fine. Let's keep working."
They do, making their way through a quarter of the languages listed before Professor Carter calls time.
"I've kept you both too late," she says, checking her wrist chronometer with an exaggerated motion. "The conference isn't for a week. I have enough to go ahead to test the prototype now—and Cadet Lin and I can finish up inputting the other languages before we leave for Leiden."
When she turns off the monitor and stands up, Nyota stretches her arms behind her back and meets Spock's eye.
Too tired? It is both a question and a dare.
That same flick of his expression—some internal check—and then he stands up, too, and says to Professor Carter, "We can be of assistance later this week if you need us."
At the door Professor Carter thanks them again, and with a start, Nyota realizes that Janna is leaving now, too. That's inconvenient. As they descend the stairs she casts about for some reasonable excuse for stopping at Spock's apartment and letting Janna make her way across campus alone.
She needs to check with him about something for work? Or, he has something for her that she needs?
She grins at the double entendre.
Spock's stride is so quick that she and Janna soon fall behind. By the time they come abreast of his apartment door, he has keyed it open and is standing in the doorway. Nyota opens her mouth to say something, anything, to gain entry, but he beats her to it.
"As you are both residents of the same dorm," he says, "I assume you can accompany each other adequately."
Nyota's heart gives a little flip. He doesn't want her to come in? The indifferent light in the hall makes reading his facial expression impossible, but she pauses and looks at him as closely as she dares.
"Do you—" she begins, and then stumbles to a halt. If she says too much, Janna may wonder what's up. Better to say nothing now and talk to him later.
Disappointment rushes through her.
"Do you—need anything else?" she says, and Spock gives a curt shake of his head.
"I am expecting a call from my mother," he says. "I will see you in the morning."
And with that she is dismissed. Without turning around she can hear his apartment door shut as she and Janna make their way out of the building.
"I didn't know it was so late," Janna says, and Nyota makes a noncommittal sound.
It is late, but late is relative. Up late working is up late. Up late…visiting…well, time doesn't matter then.
Dimly she is aware that Janna is watching her and she pushes her shoulders back and tries to walk upright into the chilly night air. A subspace call from his mother. She berates herself for being petulant. His mother—how can she resent time he spends with his mother? He has lots of news for her, too—chief among them his recent interview with Captain Pike.
Only Nyota knows what a disappointment that interview was—how poorly it had gone.
Her own tears when he had told her, the realization that he would not be on the Enterprise—she pushes that memory aside. Don't think about the future. Focus on now.
Or on tomorrow. Now she is freezing as she makes her way across campus, trying not to let her irritation show.
"How long have you…known Commander Spock?"
An odd hesitation, or is she being paranoid? Nyota darts a glance at Janna before answering.
"Let's see," she says, pumping her arms back and forth to ward off the chill, "I took one of his classes the second semester I was here. And then last spring I was in his dual credit seminar. And I've been his aide since September. So two and half years, I guess."
"He's brilliant," Janna says matter-of-factly. Because they are in between the circles of light cast by the overhead lamps, Nyota can't see Janna's face, but her tone of voice is quiet, almost reverent.
"You've taken one of his classes?"
"Three," Janna says, surprising Nyota. "Every time he teaches a computer class, I try to take it."
Even in the dark Nyota can see Janna angling her body toward her as they walk, as if she is trying to make herself heard in a crowd. For a moment she wonders if this second-year cadet is confessing to a crush—not unheard of, certainly. Nyota has overheard more than one cadet speculating about Spock's anatomy, his ability, his availability.
At one time she had dismissed such talk as idle gossip. Now it makes her angry on Spock's behalf.
And perhaps on her own.
She pauses, considering how to respond. If she says too much, she could give their relationship away. Janna is no fool.
"And Professor Carter, too. I'm so lucky to be her aide. For a long time I wasn't sure Starfleet was the right place for me. They've made me feel like…well, I'm sorry to be rambling on."
A small rise in the ground affords them a view of the dorm as they make their way forward. The building looks black against the background of navy sky, the bright windows a jumble of lit squares.
"It always looks like a rainbow at night," Janna says, and for a moment Nyota looks around. The dorm? The ugly pile of bricks and glass? Not a rainbow by any stretch of the imagination.
Janna isn't looking at the dorm but at the commons nearby, where students are walking singly and in pairs, crisscrossing the grass or following the asphalt pathways. Nyota squints into the scene—the tall overhead light poles, the stars shimmering, the cadets still in uniform.
A diverse crowd, certainly. But not a rainbow, not exactly.
"Hmm," Nyota says, not willing to contradict Janna. After all, everyone sees things differently. Or doesn't see things at all.
At least, that's what she hopes.
X X X X X X X
When the door chimes, the room is flooded with a bright yellow light.
"Would you mind?" Professor Carter says, and Janna hops up from the table and heads to the door. Through the frosted glass inset she can see a vague shadow—Commander Spock's aide, undoubtedly. Janna had overheard the Commander telling Professor Carter that he would ask her to join them.
She doesn't know Uhura well, but she's always been pleasant enough when they see each other at department gatherings. In fact, Janna muses, she probably knows Uhura better than she's known any of the Commander's other aides. In the year and half that she's been working with Professor Carter, she's seen four or five cadets try—and fail—to work with the Vulcan.
Until Uhura. Maybe it has something to do with her being in the communications track instead of computing. Most of the Commander's other aides were in the computer science department—not the easiest people to get along with anyway. Not so…friendly. Or flexible. Or something.
Not that she's complaining. She herself is rather self-contained and private. Conversation tires her. Numbers are easier.
When she pulls open the door, Uhura says,"Hi," and the familiar nimbus of white light illuminates everything for a moment—the light that means recognition. For as long as Janna can remember, sounds have been augmented by waves of color. Voices, especially, evoke auroras of colored light—white lights when people see each other after a separation; green auras surrounding parents and their children, or lovers when they speak to each other. Angry voices shine orange. Fright or worry bathes the speaker in violet.
She was eight years old before she discovered that not everyone saw the world this way, that some cross-wiring in her brain blends sounds and colors so that she can't have one without the other.
"Please do your work quietly," her teacher had chastised her one day as she conjured out loud the numbers of a math problem. When she said the numbers they jumped into the air, colorful, dancing in front of her eyes. Odd integers were always pastels—pale yellows and pinks. Even numbers were red or blue, primary, dark. When she added a row she could tell at a glance if the sum was correct if the colors matched up. Equations with the wrong answers appeared gray.
With practice she was able to work silently, to see the colors just by looking at the numbers. Dubbed a math whiz in elementary school, she was given a series of tutors she quickly outgrew until now, at Starfleet Academy, where she has finally met instructors who take her speed and accuracy for granted, who match her gift with their own.
It hasn't always felt like a gift. She learned not to mention her synesthesia to new acquaintances, but they always found out eventually—a slip of a tongue, perhaps, when she confided her fondness for certain music because it looked bright red. Or more often, rumors that caught up with her, whispered asides and nervous looks as people dodged her in the hall or avoided sitting near her at lunch.
Perhaps her isolation is the reason that reading people continues to be difficult.
Would be impossible if voices didn't appear as washes of color, sometimes the words as distinct as if they are written in the air with a paintbrush, at other times a waterfall of hues.
Once years ago at a regional math competition she met a synesthete who told her that rather than seeing colors, certain sounds made him feel ripples of heat or cold on his skin, and she began to pay closer attention to her other senses. Green, for instance, that indicated love—it was always the same spring grass green, but the feeling it called up had shades of differences.
"I love this ice cream," someone might say, green light flickering around the edges of their image, but that wasn't the same as when Janna heard a mother caution her young daughter about crossing the street.
"Be careful!" the mother called, and a veritable wall of green washed across Janna's vision, as if the mother's words were trying to refashion the world for her child.
How inconvenient that the same color could describe one's attachment to a dessert that denoted a parent's desire to keep her child from harm.
And lovers—they radiated a saturated green. Flashes of green like sparkles when they talked. A green veil enveloping them as they walked together, chatting. But something else, too. For months Janna tried to parse out what made lovers different from ice cream eaters—and finally she knew.
Hunger.
"Come here," she heard one of her high school classmates say in the hall one day, his hand outstretched to a girl, a tendril of green vapor wisping around them—and Janna felt her stomach twist in a knot.
Romantic love and hunger felt the same. How bizarre, she thought.
Until she fell in love, and then the sensation of emptiness and longing convinced her otherwise. Surely the ancient speaker who coined the metaphor of hunger to describe love must have been a synesthete.
The object of her affection—of her hunger—was a popular girl named Marie, someone Janna saw often but spoke to rarely.
"Weirdo bitch," she overheard her mutter once under her breath, Marie's blue dislike floating in the air like a cloud over her head. No matter. Janna waited for quiet opportunities to draw close in the art class they shared, once picking up a notebook Marie had dropped on the floor, holding it up like an offering.
"Leave my stuff alone," Marie said, and Janna nodded as if she had been justly rebuked.
It made no sense, to pine after someone so unkind, so unworthy of her love and devotion.
And yet there it was. A green hunger whenever she heard Marie speak, a willingness to endure a scornful glance if she strayed too near.
She had always thought that people chose who they loved, or at least, that love had reason.
Now she knew better.
"I got a message—" Uhura says, and the white light of recognition is tinged with the pink of uncertainty, the way odd numbers teeter unbalanced.
She follows Uhura down the hall to the room that Professor Carter has set up as an office. Along one wall is a rectangular table with three computer monitors connected to the prototype scanner. Professor Carter and the Commander are sitting there, talking, their comfort and familiarity with each other like flickering lights in shades of yellow.
To her astonishment, when the Commander turns and speaks, his aura changes instantly to a deep, vibrant green.
"Professor Carter needs someone to set up a language subroutine to test her scanning program," he says, and Janna watches Uhura's reply, just as green and tinged with orange. Love? And anger?
Janna blinks but the colors stay the same.
And then the Commander sends some signal with his eyes—his brows rising to where his hair is cut straight across his forehead, and the cadet sends some signal back. The orange shimmer fades and disappears.
Fascinating.
And disturbing. Unless, of course, their affection is simply that—mutual admiration and respect.
Somehow Janna doesn't think so.
No matter what Commander Spock and his aide say to each other, the green light glimmers around them. Even during their protracted argument—especially during their argument—Janna watches their words like bolts of green lightning ricocheting around the room. Not a real argument, then, not one with anger or distress, but some sort of verbal jousting, some playfulness with words that Janna has never seen before.
Her stomach aches from the emotion.
When Professor Carter pushes back her chair at last and signals the end of the work for the evening, Janna's relief is palpable. Being in their company is exhausting.
To her dismay, Uhura and the Commander follow her to the door and leave when she does.
"As you are both residents of the same dorm," the Commander says after he opens the door to his own apartment, "I assume you can accompany each other adequately."
Nothing about his words implies anything affectionate or even emotional—yet Janna sees them gleaming, green, cramming the space in the hall and fluttering to the ceiling. She almost doubles over with the longing in his tone.
Yet Uhura seems unaware. When she looks back at the Commander standing there, her words are pale pink hesitation—"Do you—need anything else?"
An odd number, trembling in the wind like a bird balancing on a branch.
Don't you see, Janna wants to say to Uhura, pointing to the Commander's words still lingering in the air like smoke. Don't you understand, she wants to say to the Commander as Uhura's hurt and uncertainty flutter by.
But she says nothing, watching, instead, as Commander Spock fills the hall with his affection and arousal as Uhura says farewell.
"I didn't know it was so late," Janna says, watching the green aura around Nyota fade.
An experiment.
"How long have you…known Commander Spock?"
"Let's see," Uhura says, "I took one of his classes the second semester I was here. And then last spring I was in his dual credit seminar. And I've been his aide since September. So two and half years, I guess."
There it is, the telltale shimmer of love. Are they, in fact, intimate with each other? Lovers? How risky—how…unexpected.
How…sad.
"He's brilliant," Janna says. She means it, too. Commander Spock is the only person she's ever known for whom mathematics is as clear and beautiful as it is to her.
"You've taken one of his classes?"
Uhura's words are light tan—curiosity, not jealousy or anger.
"Three," Janna says. "Every time he teaches a computer class, I try to take it. And Professor Carter, too. I'm so lucky to be her aide. For a long time I wasn't sure Starfleet was the right place for me. They've made me feel like…well, I'm sorry to be rambling on."
Until she came to the Academy, she had felt freakish, a weirdo bitch. Her refuge in the computer sciences department is just that—a safe place. She can't imagine doing anything to risk it—would not do what Uhura is obviously doing, courting a reprimand, or what the Commander is doing, risking dismissal. No green, stomach-twisting relationship can be worth that. Can it?
And yet—
An image of Marie's face comes to mind, and with it the ghost of desire that always haunts her memories. Would she risk her career for love?
1230 at least—yet the commons is far from empty. She scans the people walking across the grass, the paths, some heading purposefully this way, others in deep conversation with companions at their side. Where she can make out their words, Janna sees flashes of color—like light bulbs going off in the night. Green and pink and tan and white—comforting and beautiful and promising, too, a future that might be hers someday.
"It always looks like a rainbow at night," Janna says, aware that Uhura will not understand her.
"Hmm," Nyota says, her single yellow utterance spoken in kindness, a talisman, Janna hopes, against a future marred by pain.
X X X X X X X
Spock's call to his mother ends as most of his subspace calls to her end—with an unsettled ambivalence about what he said and what he didn't say.
About what he said because he never knows how his mother will interpret his words, mining them for hidden meanings, as if she expects him to deliberately mislead her—as if Vulcans are not always as straightforward and honest as they profess to be.
Which, of course, they aren't.
About what he did not say because his mother is still waiting to hear a verbal declaration of his feelings for her. Is still waiting, perhaps, for such a profession from Sarek.
But even thinking about how to phrase what his mother means to him…the idea makes him stumble, his words trapped in some filter between his heart and his tongue.
His mother spoke first about her planned visit next weekend for her regular radiation treatment, a necessity because of the incomplete light spectrum on Vulcan. When she comes she stays most of the time with her sister Cecilia in Seattle, though she always winkles at least a few hours from Spock. When she initially planned her next treatment, he had warned her about a potential conflict. If his proposal was accepted for the Feynman Conference, he would be in Leiden that weekend instead of in San Francisco.
"Since I have not heard from the conference planners, I assume I am not going. Other presenters have already been notified," he told his mother, thinking of Professor Carter's announcement that morning. He had immediately quashed any professional jealousy. Professor Carter's scanner, after all, had far-reaching implications and a military application, something the conference was designed to showcase.
"I'm sorry," his mother said, and he gave an almost imperceptible shrug. It was illogical to be disappointed about what couldn't be changed.
And then his mother had steered the conversation to a topic he hoped to avoid—his father's recent trip to Earth.
"You look well," Amanda began. It was a statement of fact that required no response, though Spock had the feeling, as he often did when he spoke to his mother, that she was secretly amused by something. "Next time I'll double the amount of soup I send."
Her symbolism wasn't lost on him. He felt himself flush but struggled to keep his expression neutral.
"Your father was very impressed with your teaching assistant," Amanda continued, and this time Spock blinked. An annoying warmth was spreading through his torso. "Is she the same assistant you had when you were here back during the school break?"
His mother doesn't instinctively calculate the odds of everything the way he does, yet he was certain that she was toying with him, that she knew for certain that the assistant he called while he was visiting Vulcan is the same assistant who works for him now.
"Yes, Mother," he said, giving her a look fraught with asperity. "I hired Cadet Uhura at the beginning of this school year."
"How fortunate for you," Amanda said, "and for her."
Spock could think of several different possible meanings of her words, only one which was not freighted with sexual innuendo. He frowned and his mother said, "I apologize if I've made you uncomfortable."
"You have not," Spock said, the lie coming to him so easily that he was astonished. "But I do have work to do, Mother."
"I won't keep you then," she said, her face suddenly serious, "but I need to ask you something."
At once Spock was alarmed. As if she sensed his distress, Amanda smiled and said, "It's nothing unpleasant, at least, I hope not. It's just that Aunt Matilda's estate is finally settled and the lawyer wants to get all the cousins together at the same time to sign the papers. I told Cecilia I'd ask you about your schedule."
"The land deed," Spock said, and Amanda nodded. Her aunt had left a large tract of property to Amanda's and Cecilia's children—Spock and Chris and his sisters—with the understanding that they would conserve it as parkland. None of the cousins were interested in buying out the others or living on the land—its remoteness making it impractical.
Going to Seattle to sign legal papers was not convenient, but Spock agreed at once, as he always agrees to his mother's requests, his substitution for the words he cannot say.
"Maybe you can make a fun day of it," Amanda said. "Take that assistant with you, give her a break from all the work. Your father says you were very concerned when she was sick."
Before he could stop himself, his eyebrows flew into his bangs. His father had been commenting on his worry about Nyota? An educated guess, an intuitive leap on his father's part. Spock was sure he had been careful not to let his feelings show.
But he resolved to be more circumspect in the future.
Powering down the subspace radio after their call, he picks up his comm from the table and makes his way to his bedroom. By now Nyota will be in bed, possibly already asleep. His finger hovers over the contact button for a moment and then he pulls up her number.
A text. He can leave her a message that she will see in the morning as soon as she checks her comm.
Illogical to do so, of course, since they will be together in the lab by 0900. A message now is superfluous. A waste of time and energy.
Not for the first time, he watches his body rebel against his conscious mind. His thumb presses her contact number and he taps out a quick note: Thank you.
What will she make of such a cryptic message? That he is grateful for her help with Professor Carter's scanner, of course, but more than that. His conversation with his mother has left him restless, unhappy with himself for what he is unable to say.
Thank you is a start. He hopes Nyota understands.
As he often does when he is too restless to meditate, he picks up his ka'athyra from its place on his dresser and lets his fingers drift across the strings. For a few minutes he sits on the edge of his bed, working his way through the chord progressions he learned as a child, finding solace in none of them. Finally he sets the ka'athyra back and reaches for a small elasticized band instead.
It is one of Nyota's hair bands, a simple rubber circle wrapped in scarlet threads—presumably to match her uniform. She wears this kind of band often, pulling her hair back from her face and up, accenting her cheekbones in a way that never fails to delight him.
This particular band is one he found behind the sofa cushion several days ago. If Nyota misses it, she hasn't bothered to track it down and he hasn't bothered to tell her that he has it. Doubtless she hasn't thought about it at all—so ordinary, so utilitarian an object having almost no intrinsic value, and easily replaced.
But since he found it he has used it as a talisman, holding it between his thumb and forefinger, rolling it gently back and forth as he calms himself before slipping into a light sleep.
At some level he is ashamed, as if what he is doing is a sign of weakness or an admission of his need.
That doesn't stop him from sliding it over the thumb of his left hand, running his fingers against the grain of the threads, imagining that he is touching her hair, the soft skin along the line of her jaw.
When the comm chimes he is momentarily startled and drops the band onto the bed.
"I got your message. Are you okay?"
She isn't whispering, but almost, implying an intimacy that exasperates him with its absence.
"It seemed unwise to invite you in," he says.
"Your mother," Nyota says. "She called?"
"Indeed. She asked me to attend to a legal matter in Seattle later this week."
For the second time that night his body is taken over by some entity other than his logic and he hears himself, as if from a great distance, say, "Would you care to go? My business should not take long and Chris will be there. He asks after you often."
That's so; his cousin Chris met Nyota two months ago when a hover bus accident landed Spock in the hospital for a couple of days. Since then Chris has asked about her every time he calls—innocent inquiries, though it might be instructive to watch the two of them interact.
"Of course I would!" she says at once, the tone of her voice unmistakably joyful, even to his ear.
Too late, his reason kicks in. This…lark…is a mistake. Taking time from work and traveling together on public transport without an official reason could invite scrutiny. His cousins will be curious and may ask questions—may even say something later to their parents or to his. The potential for something untoward happening is disturbingly high.
He parts his lips to tell her that on further reflection he should go alone—but before he can, he hears her say breathlessly, "Gaila's coming! Got to go!" and the comm goes dead.
So.
He sets his comm on the bedside table and looks around for the hair band.
Worry about what cannot be changed is illogical. Disappointment about what cannot be changed is illogical.
An ineffective mantra tonight. He runs his hand over the duvet, feeling around for the hair band.
It must have fallen on the floor, but no, it isn't there. Nor under the bed. Nor behind the headboard.
Tugging the sheets from the bed he shakes them, gently at first, and then with enough force to send them snapping from his hand.
Still, the hair band is missing.
He lies down reluctantly, wrapping himself in the duvet.
It will turn up. All things that are hidden eventually are seen, are found out.
The thought is both disturbing and a comfort.
He falls asleep, anxious, hoping.
A/N: Chris Thomasson, Spock's cousin, appears in multiple fics, though he first meets Uhura in "The Visitor" (which also details the hover bus crash).
That red hair band is still around. Amanda finds it in chapter 5 of "The Interview."
Thanks to everyone who reads, and double thanks to everyone who takes the time to review. Your words are my only pay! (And I confess that my students—I teach high school in RL—have gotten papers back later than they should because Spock and Uhura demanded some attention when I should have been grading tests.)
Thanks, too, to StarTrekFanWriter. She's cooking up a new story that will knock your socks off. Look for it soon!
