A/N: Star Trek belongs to Paramount Viacom, the commas and most of the nice bits of the story belong to the ever-awesome Dizdayn, and the caves are common property of the fandom (A frequently used and most beloved spot to vacation, I've heard). I can't believe I didn't realize I'd put freaking CAVES into a K/S story back when I was plotting. So far that's being stranded on a planet because of an ion storm, mentions of Pon Farr, bonding, and, of course, caves. Not all at the same time, but still, can I have a prize for filling out my cliché bingo card now, please?

Inadvertent clichés aside, this chapter was great fun to write. Another bit I'd been looking forwards to for a while; not least because from here on to the end of the story it's pretty much from the ashes to the fire. So, have some gratuitous action with your plot. :)

XI. Out of the Sky

Spock didn't know what time it was when Daelus shook them awake. He was disoriented, and wanted badly to breathe fresh air, but he felt more rested than he had in weeks. Kirk was on his side a few inches away, both their uniform shirts stuffed under his head. He'd be an absolute headache to share covers with, Spock thought wryly. He left Kirk to pull his shirt on and sort himself out. Their lanterns had dimmed quite a bit while they slept; the blue liquid was barely brighter than glow sticks. With Daelus' blessing, Spock added a trickle of water to each lamp. Re-fueled, they shone a little more clearly, though not as much as they had at first.

The combination of rest and the prospect of seeing sky after so long underground gave their group light feet, and it wasn't long before the tunnel began to grow progressively brighter. Daelus made them walk the final stretch in increments so their pupils had time to adjust. Even he couldn't keep Kirk back once the mouth of the passage finally came into view. The captain seemed to shed his weariness like an old coat. He tore along, stopping just at the edge of the cave mouth, and looked around nervously. He cast a quick look over his shoulder at the others and, apparently satisfied, disappeared into the sunlight.

Spock kept close to the rock wall as he emerged. He clung to the lip of the cave mouth with one hand, using his other to shield his eyes from the suns as he tipped his face upwards. Arcas and Callisto had moved considerably, and Spock calculated their positions to calibrate his internal clock. It was like solving an equation that had been nagging him for days. Everything snapped into focus and resumed its natural rhythm.

Kirk all but skipped across the ledge to join him and Daelus. He was grinning madly, and his teeth were preternaturally white against the grayish-red layer of dust and mud caking his skin. His hair stuck out in irregular tufts, fanning into a crest where he had slept on it. His clothes were torn, and save for his obvious glee at being outside, he looked like nothing more than someone who slept in a shuttleyard with a bottle of saurian for company. Judging by the smile Kirk stifled when Spock patted down his hair and straightened out the remnants of his shirts, he wasn't much better off himself.

"Rakish," Kirk muttered under his breath, and then, out loud: "I can see why you moved outside. Better ventilation out here. It's my turn to fly now, isn't it?"

Daelus gathered the packs and stowed them with a dignified air. "Very slowly," he said. "Following the map-thread. Proximately to Aegle, I'll overwrite you."

Kirk nodded eagerly. "Of course."

Spock felt like his knees were threatening to give out. "Captain?" he ventured.

Kirk turned to face him, and a rapid flicker of emotions chased across his face: happiness first, curiosity, worry, realization and disappointment. Briefly, Spock considered shaking his head, saying 'never mind' and leaping into the cockpit with some glib one-liner to convince Kirk that he was fine, thank you very much.

"Daelus," Kirk said. "I think maybe we'll leave the experimentation for another time."

Daelus frowned, puzzled, then realization dawned. "Self-evidently. I'll black the lion's bits and pieces of the crystal."

"I-" Spock folded his hands behind his back, considering. This was a very bad idea. "The flight mechanisms seem straightforward. Often, if one is unfamiliar with a craft, one is very careful. Newly graduated Starfleet pilots are often the slowest." At least until they disengage the inertial dampeners, he added in his head. "I will enter a healing trance during the flight. Do not concern yourselves on my behalf."

The comment had only the barest traces of logic to hold it together, but Kirk smiled at him anyway, eyes lighting up in the way that made the rest of the world dull in comparison. Kirk was decent at captivating people when he tried. When he was sincere, he was radiant.

"Are you sure? I don't mind, Spock, really. I have a ship of my own."

"I will need five minutes to prepare myself for the journey." Spock bit his teeth together, and walked across to the spore. Copying Daelus' earlier gesture, he felt along the edge of the windshield. His hands found a faint ridge, and he hooked his fingertips into it and gave a quick yank. There was a minuscule flutter against them, like a spark of electricity, and the cockpit opened. Before he could regret it, he hoisted himself into the middle seat and strapped himself in.

"Perhaps," he said, unable to prevent traces of nerves from leaking into his voice. "You would care to instruct Captain Kirk as to the location of the safety equipment and stabilizers while I meditate."

Daelus hummed. "Yes, yes."

The Phaetan launched into a detailed description of the more advanced functions of the spore, and Spock could hear the sound of someone rummaging around in the seat in front of him as he gradually disengaged himself from reality. He had gone into a healing trance several times before. New lifeforms and boldly going meant a lot of new and unexpected ways of getting hurt. The trance required some control over both body and mind. It wasn't much good when you were actively dying - such as the time with the halberd - or when you were out of your head with fear. However, it excelled at speeding up the natural healing rate of the body. In addition to this, pre-Surak warriors had utilized it as a way to withstand torture. It effectively separated the mind from the processes of the body, to a degree controlled by the warrior. If escape or rescue was impossible, the warrior would shut down their heart rather than face dishonor.

Spock kept himself from falling too deeply. He hovered just below the surface of his consciousness, monitoring his vitals. Fragments of sound and sensation reached him from above muted, as through water. He had no sense of direction. He simply waited.

After a while, there was a faint stirring in the world, and the sensation of hovering increased.

It wasn't so bad.

Tentatively, he put his ear to the surface, and he could hear Jim's voice, even though it was muffled.

"How does it...? It's like it can read my mind." A brief slide, a jolt, and Jim was laughing, breathless and delighted. He sounded absolutely carefree, and in his limbo, Spock smiled. You couldn't hear laughter like that and not feel lighter somehow.

"I don't get how you ever get yourself out of this thing. Seriously, if I had one of these, Spock would have to drag me out by my ankles whenever anyone wanted to talk to me. Maybe sedate me."

Jim rambled, and Daelus would make interspersed comments whenever Jim paused to inhale before continuing off on a tangent. Then Jim just flew and hummed to himself. Spock recognized the Top Gun theme song from the time Sulu had gotten Ferengi pox, and Jim had piloted the ship for a shift. Disassociation was pleasant. With a brief effort, Spock checked on the scrapes on his knees and elbows. They were scabbing over nicely. He dozed a bit, drifted, and everything was the pleasant blue-black of his katra, like a blueberry's skin or the night sky. Spock imagined stars on the expanse of it, with lines marking their movements for clarity, and little labels with both their relative and absolute order of magnitude. Between Alam'ak and Behr'ak he added a tiny speck of luminescence for Vulcan. It couldn't be seen from Earth even when it still existed, but the point was that he knew it'd been there. It'd left a mark. If Ambassador Spock had gone back and led to the destruction of Vulcan before Spock had been born so that Spock would never have seen his home planet, he would never have forgiven his other self.

Pursuing that line of thought, it wasn't so pleasant in his head. He wondered if the black hole where Vulcan used to be physically slipped under his shields and that was what pulled him in, not his emotions.

Ah. There was Jim's voice again. It was like a fishhook, sinking in to his thoughts and drawing him back towards reality.

"Daelus? The radar's acting odd. It's fuzzy." Spock could hear the frown in Jim's voice, and mentally added a few lines on his forehead to go with the image.

Daelus muttered something under his breath in Phaetan. The phrasing was uncertain, but the intent was clear. It sounded like one of Nyota's sharp words, the ones she used when everything malfunctioned, and for which she would gut anyone else for using within Chekov's range of hearing.

"Why is the fuzz moving towards us?"

No reply.

Then, Jim again, just as sharp as Daelus had been: "What is it, Daelus? It's moving twice as fast as we are. Daelus!"

"They're rare as snowballs in hell," the Phaetan moaned. "I double-cross checked before we flew. It must have formed while we were in the earthcut."

"Just answer the goddamn question!"

"Thunderstorm. I'm overwriting, now..." Daelus twitched, and things sped up exponentially.

That was bad, Spock remembered. He'd read about storms on Phaeton. The data was in there somewhere. Keeping one ear tuned to the voices, he began groping around in the dark for the relevant information.

"We aren't grounded. It can't hurt us. Right?"

There! His mind spit out the answer to Jim's question per reflex. Not unless the manipulated magnetic field can be destroyed locally by powerful electrical surges, Spock thought, as would be logical.

Daelus didn't answer. Apparently, that was all Jim needed to know.

"Ok - so, we land. Wait out the storm."

Daelus' voice was strained. "Lasts for hours and hours. We'll icicle when the suns drop." When he continued, it was in the tone of someone talking to themselves, ticking off on a list. "No landing. No flip-flopping around it. Magnet's field -"

"Spock said Aegle had a protective dome. Can we make it there?"

"Wind's too fast." Daelus said. "We are a kite. I've failed."

"Failed?"

"The Marin said to make sure you stayed alive." Someone was tapping rapidly onto a screen. "Epia said to make sure I stayed alive. I'm a superlative Touch. I will try."

"Damn right you will. How can I help?" The sound of Jim twisting in his seat, and then an awestruck; "oh, shit."

If there were any more sounds, they were drowned out by the growing roar of the wind.

Even partially separated from his body, the ensuing jolt shook Spock to his bones. There was a brief window; a moment where he felt both the peace of the submerged world in his head and the pandemonium raging around him. There was his nightmare; suspended in a hostile sky, waiting to fall and crash. He could already feel tendrils of gravity reaching out for him, ready to drag him down, down-

"Don't wake Spock," Jim commanded. "It'd be cruel."

-down, stretching the line Jim's fishhook voice connected to almost to the breaking point. It was very easy. If he just waited a bit, it would all go away, and he wouldn't have to make any choices at all.

He wondered if Jim would wear the same expression of surprise and panic his mother had when she died.

He wondered if this was his Kobayashi Maru: courage in the face of fear, courage in the face of death. He wished he had an apple.

Spock took a deep breath, and surfaced.

The world drowned in noise. It had been loud before; now it was deafening. The storm howled and battered at the spore like a tortured beast. Sand scraped along the windshield and wings, and the aircraft shook so hard that Spock's teeth chattered reflexively. It was instantaneous and terrifying, like walking out of your front door and directly onto a battlefield.

"The magnetic field is severely weakened above the clouds." Spock gasped it out as quickly as he could. He kept his eyelids pressed shut with enough force that green spots danced before his vision. "We would have minimal control - and even that high, the wind would be strong enough to destroy the craft should we err."

Kirk's heartbeat increased a fraction, and Spock seized on to it with the determination of a drowning man grasping a lifebuoy. Don't think! He held Kirk's and Daelus' vitals clear in his head and began calculating the tensile strength of the different components of the spore. There is a storm howling, but you cannot hear it.

"No false moves, then." You could have lit a furnace with the warmth in Kirk's tone. The bond echoed with it - and Spock decided to let it be. He needed all the help he could get. "Glad you decided to join us, Spock."

"It is our only option," Daelus agreed. He snipped his mouth closed over the end of the sentence, distracted by a sudden gust of wind. The spore was propelled sideways, and Spock hoped that Kirk had strapped himself in properly this time. He tried to keep a hold of his composure. If he couldn't calculate the tensile strength of the spore, there was no way he could calculate the pressure it could stand before shaking itself to pieces. There was an unearthly groan. Daelus swore, and the spore tilted then shot upwards at an almost ninety-degree angle. The shock forced Spock's eyes open.

It was simultaneously worse and better than he'd expected. He couldn't see the ground, thank Surak, but neither could he see any chance of salvation. The cockpit was dark. Outside, a blue-black maelstrom of clouds and dust whirled. The spore was completely clear, and Spock could see the storm reaching up beneath him, licking swirls of sand across the crystal hull. They were enveloped; now, they would be crushed.

"Stabilize us!" Daelus yelled at Kirk.

"On it."

Spock caught a brief glimpse of Kirk reflected in the windshield, pale-faced and grim.

Then the lightning began.

There was a flash of pale pink, casting Kirk's silhouette into sharp relief, and a brief suspended moment. The following crack was a sharp stab to Spock's ears, superhuman Vulcan hearing telling him nothing, but that it was close, and that it hurt. Spock dug his fingers into the edges of his seat. Heartbeats, heartbeats - he needed to be able to hear them. He couldn't afford to think of anything that couldn't be counted, measured, or calculated. Daelus kept them moving upwards, though they jumped and dodged, trying to avoid the lightning. Flashes of pink burst continuously. Lightning strikes up, not down, Spock thought. Because of the - the charges - the particles moving against each other in the clouds - That wasn't what it looked like. The lightning struck up, but the light struck down, falling in sharply-angled rivers, tearing the air asunder with each bend.

"Turn!" yelled Kirk. The spore flipped into a corkscrew. There was a flash, and a hiss. For a moment Spock was blinded by light as a bolt of lightning narrowly missed them. Daelus tried to get the plane under control at the same time Kirk did, and they overcompensated, leaning 34,2 inches too far to the left. A gust of wind caught the rear of the spore, and forced them into a tailspin. The roar grew.

Spock focused on the cold crystal beneath his feet and fingers. This was a thousand times worse than their run through Aegle. His vision blurred, and he bit the inside of his cheek. Kirk's heart was beating 1.7 times its usual speed.

The next bolt of lightning hit the rear of the craft, and for one terrifying moment, his heart stopped altogether.

A shower of sparks exploded from the screens. Someone screamed, inhuman and loud, and Spock tasted copper. Panicked, he scrabbled at his harness.

"Jim!"

Spock reached forward and grabbed Jim roughly by the shoulder. The captain flopped backwards, limp as a doll. Ignoring the ringing in his ears, Spock poured his consciousness into the bond between them, looking for thoughts, a heartbeat, anything.

He could feel the breath in his lungs - his lungs? His thready heartbeat and a jolting pain where his palms had been pressed to the screen -

"Spock?" Jim asked, dazed. "Spock? Daelus?"

"Captain." Spock's voice was hoarse. Daelus didn't answer.

"Daelus! Is he alive, Spock?"

Spock listened. His left ear was still ringing, and his right felt like it had been stuffed with cotton. Something hot trickled past his earlobe and down the side of his neck.

"Jim, get us out. We need to get out of this storm."

Kirk swore. "I know that. My screen isn't responding."

There was a momentary pause, and the Spore twisted on itself as the winds dragged it every which way. The shaking intensified. Nothing beyond the borders of your presence. There is no storm outside, no sky and no earth, just you, Spock! Just you. He couldn't do it. He was going to get them all killed. Just like he'd failed his mother. Help me, Jim. Spock reached for the bond, relishing the familiar glow, before dragging the end of it out beyond his mental barriers. Unshielded, Jim's fear and determination were vivid, eclipsing his own panic. How long had it been since he'd allowed himself to feel something completely? He sent up a silent prayer that Jim would be able to keep himself together well enough for both of them.

Tentatively, Spock slid his fingers into the brackets on his own screen. The metal tightened around them automatically. He choked back a gasp as the residual electrical charge ran through his hypersensitive nerve endings, burning his hands. Then - nothing. The screen was dead as well.

There was a hair-fine crack where the screen was attached to Jim's seat. Leverage.

Spock tore the Starfleet insignia off his chest, and rammed the point of it into the crack. He twisted it, lifting off the screen. The wires behind it were a burn tangle. Spock began twisting them in loops to circumvent the burn sections as fast as his damaged hands could move.

"Hurry up!"

Ignoring Jim, he jammed the screen back into place. It responded to his fingers with soft warmth. Spock tilted it backwards as far as it would go. Up, out of the storm.

The spore groaned, and emitted an ugly snapping sound before tilting wildly.

"Shit!" Jim said. "Fly properly, Spock!"

"Perhaps you should -"

"I can't move back -"

Spock saw a flash out of the corner of his eye and instinctively threw the plane to the right.

"Good. Now get us out!" Jim was yelling, adrenaline and fear making his voice wild. The desperation thrummed along the bond, making Spock's hands shake. He wasn't used to this. He couldn't think, not with every nerve in his body humming along to Jim's emotions.

Spock shoved at the bond and tried to see the patterns of wind and lightning. There had to be a predictable order to the updrafts, the sparks. They were variables in an equation. His earlier error had broken something inherent to their stabilization, and it made a difficult task nearer to impossible. The storm was too fast, too random. Every time Spock reacted to a calculated variable, some other factor destroyed the maneuver and sucked them further into the eye of the storm. He couldn't contain it all not with Jim all but shouting emotions at him. He was dodging lightning by tenths of seconds. One bolt singed the side of the spore, leaving a sooty, black trail in its wake.

"Use your insignia to open up your screen. You can circumvent the damaged circuits and restore power," Spock yelled.

"I'm trying," Jim snapped. "Its-" A metallic tearing cut him off, and Spock glanced to his right. The stabilizer had dislodged itself completely. He couldn't predict their movements. He was helpless. He could feel Jim's eyes on him in the windshield, bright and blue as twin flames. There was no place for emotion in this. Jim would die, but Spock would have done all he could, and he would die trying to save him - there was no shame or guilt in that. No-one could survive the Kobayashi Maru; that wasn't the point.

Still, Spock gritted his teeth to force back his anger at the unfairness of it all, the wasted potential of what was and could be - if only he were Jim, if only there were some way to cheat the system, change the parameters -

His hands froze on the screen. He couldn't pilot a Spore very well. He didn't have the gift of flight, that odd mixture of intuition and practice required to read the winds.

But Jim did.

Spock looked up to meet Jim's eyes. "I am sorry," he mouthed. For the second time in minutes, he let his mind rush through the bond connecting it to Kirk's. Tendrils of golden light wrapped around him, welcoming him deeper. Spock's katra wove outwards to touch the fire, changing to a clear, incandescent white wherever it came in contact. He was warm throughout, and whole. Then the ache in his hands came jolting back. He was Jim, and Jim was him, and throughout his consciousness, Spock blazed red and golden emotion. He couldn't contain it; it was too much, too fast - anger, determination, love, fear, exhaustion, hurt - and he wanted to block them out from the sheer pain of it.

Trying to fly the Spore by drawing on Jim's instincts might not have been the best idea. It was a bit like trying to illuminate a room by holding up a handful of glowing coals - yes, it gave you light to see by, but the agony was too distracting for you to notice anything else.

Jim moaned, and his head lolled to the side.

"The hell? - Spock, what are you -?"

Meditate! Spock mentally howled at him. Control yourself. Center yourself. There is nothing beyond the border of your presence - nothing for you to react to, nothing for you to feel anything about. Kadiith. What is, is.

I'm fucking trying, aren't I? Jim snapped back. A brief stab of surprise echoed through them. Oh. Center myself. Got it. Not thinking about anything, not thinking about anything -

Even as Spock felt the barriers he'd painstakingly constructed to keep his emotions in check crumble, he struggled to keep the walls in place that separated Jim's thoughts from his own. Emotions and specifically broadcast communication was one thing, the raw thought process another. Spock blinked, trying to clear the fuzzy images running through Jim's head from his vision and was surprised to find water leaking from his eyes. How could humans bear this, day after day? Was everything always this sharp and alive?

The screen hummed under Spock's fingers. He had to - oh, Surak - he had to get them out of the storm. He tried to measure the angle needed to get them above the clouds while intersecting with the least possible disturbances, but he couldn't contain and isolate the equation. A wind buffered them from behind. Logic dictated he tilt back the spore, compensate for the unequal force, but Jim's reactions drove him up. He looped into the gust, riding it forwards. It was a fierce and wonderful feeling. He reacted to the storm as quickly as it changed, moving as part of it. It was touch and go, every second, and Spock was immeasurably grateful for his Vulcan reflexes.

Jim was at the back of his head, humming to himself, and listing off crewmembers. Even so, his elation sang along every inch of the bond. Spock could barely hear their individual heartbeats over the roaring in his functional ear, and he knew his blood was thick with adrenaline. Around him, the clouds blurred into one another.

Read them, Jim commanded. See that big lump of -

- cumulonimbus -

- yes, that, see how it moves, means there's a gust of wind there -

- like injecting dye into a closed model of water currents to see where they lead -

- exactly! Drop, Spock, now.

A massive front charged them head on, and Spock dove a few yards, only to sweep upwards at the next wind. He twisted up a winding spiral, and unexpectedly, they fell over the crest of the clouds into blinding sunlight.

Spock blinked at the sudden brilliance, turning away his head from the twin suns. He caught a brief glimpse of Daelus, limp against the side of the spore. Everything about the Phaetan was lifeless; he'd lost his own personal battle with gravity. His jaw and shoulders hung, his spine curved gracelessly downwards and his shoulders slumped. Even his blood ran towards the centre of the planet - it trickled out of his nose and ears in thin lilac streams and dripped onto the floor.

"We can't do much for him now," Jim said. Spock realized he must have broadcast the image accidentally. I think maybe I can figure out how to darken the crystal a bit so you can see. There was no indication Jim had noticed he'd swapped methods of communication between sentences.

Spock focused on flying. The spore had slowed to what felt like a crawl. As suspected, the magnetic field was severely weakened above the clouds. It was all Spock could do to maintain a steady course with the wind at an angle.

"Do not concern yourself overmuch. My eyes are adapted to desert planets. Focus on navigation. And Jim - Surak, control yourself!" Jim's side of the bond flared up like a beacon at Spock's voice, drowning him in a wave of relief. We made it! We're all right! Spock - that was amazing - I can feel you, in my head - I can sort of... Smell you. Taste you. You're like incense and Academy auditoriums and vanilla and theris-whatever the fuck you call it and none of those things, but all of them at the same time -

Spock withdrew as far as he could manage without submerging himself in his katra - he couldn't afford to lose concentration. Jim did not have the sixth sense required to accurately interpret psychic phenomena without a full bond to facilitate it, so he interpreted Spock's mind with the senses he was given. He would have a terrible headache later, Spock knew. Thankfully, Jim's thoughts receded slightly, occupied with whatever he was doing with his screen. Outside the spore, harmless-looking tufts of cloud drifted by, and Spock wondered how they could conceal something so deadly below them with such ridiculous ease.

Concentrating on keeping the spore on an even keel was hard, even without Jim's endorphins still on an unbridled rampage through Spock's veins. Spock kept getting distracted by small things; a pretty color, the way Jim's heartbeat was even, memories of the Academy or Vulcan. He couldn't focus on any one thing before the next wave of emotion swept it away, bringing a fresh tide of sensations. Just above the horizon, the sky was a deep cornflower blue - it looked like the summer sky over Iowa, and tasted like raspberry popsicles. His skin was nut brown from a mixture of sun and dust, except for a collection of scars and scabs on his knees. The scabs were from baseball, the scars - most of them - were from a tumble down a cliff side, long ago on another planet. He'd been dizzy and weak from hunger, too foolish to watch where he set his feet -

Spock bit his lip hard, using the sharp spike of pain to center himself in his own body.

After a while - the seconds had grown fuzzy again, and susceptible to human conceptions of whether a certain period of time felt long or short, rather than what it actually was - Jim straightened in his seat.

"Got it." The thin colored line faded into view on the windshield, reaching off into the distance. "This is the one Daelus had already coded in to the memory - it should go from Aegle to the canyon." Jim craned his neck, attempting to get a better view of the cloud landscape. "Which direction to you think Aegle's in?"

Spock looked up, and attempted to triangulate their position based on the suns. Then he swerved off to the right. They'd been fortunate; even though the storm had blown them off course, the prevailing winds had led them a good deal closer to their destination than Spock had hoped. It wasn't long before the guiding line dropped below the clouds. Spock guessed they must be directly above the city.

Do you think we should wait it out up here? Jim asked. "It seems a bit safer. What do these things use for fuel?"

Spock shook his head. "Storms can last for hours. I do not think fuel is a concern, but Daelus cannot afford to wait that long."

"He's alive?"

"I cannot adequately ascertain his status at the moment."

That settles it, then. In his mind, Spock felt Jim reach out for him. Once more into the breach?

Spock twined his thoughts firmly with Jim's, allowing the faith he had in the other man's abilities to shine through. Then he gritted his teeth and dove. They were plunged into darkness and chaos, and all Spock could think to do was to keep them falling downwards. Jim was blazing again, keeping the choking panic threatening to envelop him at bay. Spock was blinded by the tangled rope of indigo and red-gold threatening to sink hooks so deep into his soul he'd never get them out, but that was alright; Jim had eyes to see with, so Spock flew by those. It was through Jim's eyes he realized they had broken into clear air, and were weaving amongst the spires of the city.

Aegle was covered by a completely transparent dome, and outside the storm was pressing in on all sides. Raindrops fell unhindered through the barrier, thick and fast, but the wind abated. Lightning struck certain points of the dome again and again. They collided with a crack and spread across the surface of the barrier in sunbursts of pink light. They ducked under a low hanging bridge as Spock managed to straighten out the course of the spore to glide along parallel to the colored line. He recognized the courtyard they'd launched from earlier and tilted them down for landing. The spore touched down with a nasty, grating sound. They were going much too fast and were too desperate for solid ground to care. Sparks trailed behind them as the spore slid along the stones to collide heavily with a pillar. There was a resounding crack, and they were finally still. Spock moaned and rested his head against the screen in front of him. Raindrops were hammering down on the cockpit. From the corner of his eye, he could make out blurry figures running towards them. He had seconds before they reached the spore.

Spock snapped open his harness and reached forward to touch Jim's temples. Jim was dazed by the impact and leaned into Spock's hands. There was a gash along his scalp - Spock couldn't tell how bad - and his hair was matted and clumped with blood and filth. Spock shut his eyes and willed the golden fire from his mind. The bond glowed iridescent as he untangled what he could, shoving Jim's katra back along their connection to where it belonged. The damage was already done. Their tentative, gossamer-thin connection had taken root, and while not a consummated mating bond, it would take out a sizable chunk of Spock's katra when severed. Jim inhaled sharply at the intrusion, his eyelids flickering, and Spock couldn't bring himself to regret what he'd done; they were both alive. Still, he kept going, hunting down every stray thread of gold and forcing it into Jim. After the rush of unrestrained emotion, regaining control was like watching the world fade into shades of gray. As the last of the fire faded, Spock tightened his grip on Jim's face involuntarily. Jim was watching him with the disorientation of someone on the verge of passing out. His eyelids were heavy, and his breaths grew deeper and slower as he slumped in his seat. The dusting of stubble on his cheeks scraped against Spock's palm as he moved, and Spock bit down on his lip to swallow a moan.

"S'fine, Spock," Jim mumbled. "Did good. Sleep a bit." He raised one hand to brush against Spock's. They had touched hands before, but this was the first time Spock felt it: desire, completion and love- so much of it, humming through his fingers as though a circuit had been closed somewhere. His mental barriers were razed to splinters, and the spike of emotion ran straight into his blood.

Spock let his hands drop, let his head loll onto his shoulder, and tried to convince himself that this wasn't a complete shambles.