I'm excited about this chapter. It was fun writing it :)
As always, notes and translations at the end
There was an old song his mom used to love because his dad loved it. She didn't play it anymore (she would have to be here to play it) - but it saidlife goes on within you without you.
This was life, within them and without them.
They could see T'Kasi, Earth, their human mothers and Vulkhansu father. They didn't feel anything, felt everything (wished to feel nothing, maybe it would be easier) (it wouldn't. Not when they come for your existence because your existence
because your resistance
is futile).
They were a hybrid. A human-human-vulkhansu hybrid. They know they had a purpose going into this, but it's lost. Lost in the shared consciousness; in the hybrid that shouldn't be real. Antiquated, futuristic DNA-DNA hybridisation that cooled to a perfect match. Different DNA for the same being. (Where were his shields). They had two childhoods, looked at one moon and felt one, two, three suns with one father beside them and one in the stars. (Did he need them?) Sybok and Sam left them, their silhouettes overlapping and becoming one. Their mothers were gone, by force and by choice and Frank was coming for them if the escape capsule wasn't repaired soon because there wouldn't be a signal to send out they'd be stranded here and what if their father stopped looking. (Did he want to shield this?). He might. He'd say kaiidth to comfort their mother which would tear her apart and they'd lose another father to the stars.
They knew happiness and hid it, knew sadness and forced it down. Their blood ran iron red and copper green, hearts beat in chests and by their sides.
Life.
Within them. Without them. Before them. Before anything. (Was it better this way?).
Life.
When Spock started to pull away, Jim could feel his body again. He wasn't a consciousness, he was human (-human-vulkhansu hybrid). He was alive. That wasn't like the meld with T'Pring, wasn't like any bond he knew of. He did know that Earth didn't have enough suns. And T'Kasi scared him. Them.
Although, they'd never admit it.
"Spock…?" Jim said, and promptly passed out.
He awoke to a hand stroking his hair. Jim opened his eyes, and it stopped. Anxiety wormed its way through the back of Jim's skull and settled down next to the rest of his new, alien knowledge. God, he could taste the desert air even though he'd never set foot out of Riverside, could feel sehlat fur under his fingers, map the Beta Quadrant with his eyes closed.
"Jim?" Spock asked, and, oh, that was new, "Are you well?"
"I am… something." Saying that made the anxiety spike weirdly, but his head was too full to dissect it.
"You will tell me the star date, your age and your full name immediately," Spock said.
"It is sometime in November, the year of our lord nineteen-eighty, I am fifteen, and my name is Jimothey Tiberius Kirk."
"It is not."
Jim grinned up at Spock, the worry ebbing from his mind. "You're right, it's not. You're always right - hey Spock, how come I know you're always right? I thought it was just going to be some kind of Tamaranian-esque language transfer.
"If it were as simple as kissing I would have already known English," Spock said, blushing.
"Heh, yeah, I held your hand- whoa okay it's weird how I know that. It's weird that I did that. This whole thing is weird."
Spock was tense. And worried. It wasn't on Spock's face it was in the back of Jim's mind because they knew rejection, knew T'Pring was barely there at all.
"I apologise," Spock said, "it appears that my mental shields were more damaged than I first estimated and I… I did nothing to prevent what happened in the meld. I was under the expectation that Humans are psi null and their compatibility to Vulkhansu was limited."
"Spock, I don't think it's humans. I think its us."
A beat of silence.
"That might be true," Spock acquiesced, "but nonetheless I made an error of judgement."
"It's ok," Jim said, "although I don't know how I'll be able to live a normal life now that I know about a whole 'nother planet."
Spock looked even more sorry for himself (as sorry as Vulkhansu could look) and Jim laughed. "I'm kidding, Spock - as if I could ever have a normal life anyway."
"It is logical for a singularly unique being such as yourself to not have a 'normal life,'" Spock said.
Jim stared at Spock in disbelief. There was an alien on his bed, and he was the "singularly unique" one? Spock had an intensity to his gaze that Jim was beginning to understand was completely normal for him. Jim had never heard of a boring alien, ever, but Spock had an intensity to him that outshone the big screen tenfold. It was like Spock had an internal walkman playing the music you hear when the main character's about to die, or for the climax of the end battle.
Jim blinked. "Anyway, we, uh, need to do something about your ship. Don't want you to get left behind."
Although, some small part of him wished Spock could stay. Jim as a general rule didn't have many friends, but Spock was something else entirely.
"I agree, however there are some issues we must fix before that," Spock said, surprising Jim.
"What issues?"
"Frank-"
"Frank can't be fixed, believe me," Jim said, "I'll probably just take off when I'm able to make money somehow anyway."
"Frank," Spock insisted, "is an issue."
Jim stood up abruptly. Talking about Frank made him feel like he was being examined from every angle, every reaction catalogued and judged and put on a checklist. "One that can wait until later," he said resolutely, "and he's probably out by now anyway, he works early on Tuesdays - c'mon, let's check the barn."
"You know what Vulkhansu do in situations such as these" said Spock, and he did. Dishonour and exile and loss of citizenship be the spoils to the parent that hits their kid. Those who commit such an atrocity can no longer call themselves Vulkhansu. Jim kicked his bookshelf.
He unlocked the door and wrenched it open. "Well we're not on T'Kasi" he snapped, "and humans are too illogical for it to happen only once in a blue moon , remember?."
A strange feeling washed over him, the kind that made him think he'd forgotten something, only it was more… urgent? Maybe? The kind of feeling that made you go 'hey wait a minute, go back there it was important.' He ignored it, and they walked down the stairs in silence.
Then: "humans are illogical enough to have an idiom based on purely qualitative measures."
Jim scoffed good-naturedly. "We have better ones than that, even."
"If by "better" you mean "increasingly nonsensical," then I agree," Spock said from behind him, "pigs will never fly."
Jim opened the back door and pushed it a little as he went through the doorway so it would stay open for Spock. "Yeah, that's kind of the point," he said, turning right and heading for the red-ish barn off to the side, "but you can't pretend that Vulkhansu are strangers to metaphors - veh sasu mokuhlek satau na' wuh fa-wak, right?
"Your pronunciation is abysmal.
Jim laughed, and rolled open the barn door.
"So," he said, feeling lighter than before, "we have fuck all in terms of baffle plates, but we have a couple of screwdrivers and a microwave we can go nuts on."
The barn was mostly full of hay, despite the lack of animals to feed it to, but there was also a decades-old car boasting a peeling lime green coat that Frank was slowly restoring, various old metal tools, and some sad buckets in a corner.
"Vulkhansu do not have emotions, but I find myself feeling something akin to regret for knowing the meaning of "to go nuts" on an object," Spock deadpanned.
"Ah, that's because you're only half . Half stoic elf and half stupid monkey."
"Are humans the stoic elves or the stupid monkeys in this metaphor," Spock asked so seriously that Jim had to turn around from where he was rummaging in a tool box and could immediately tell he was being laughed at. Stoically.
"I'm gonna find whoever said Vulkhansu don't have a sense of humour and punch them in the mouth," Jim muttered, taking out a screwdriver and brandishing it like an achievement, "so! Even though I've been in your head I only know that fixing your ship is going to be different than building a computer. It's like I learnt addition and then quantum physics but nothing in between."
"An apt description," Spock said, looking around the barn, "humans are centuries away from warp capability - so much so that my being here is potentially dangerous."
They collected more tools in silence, a moment of silence for the potential results of people other than Jim finding Spock.
"Well, like father like son I suppose," Jim said, holding out a tool box, empty with the exception of a wrench and a screwdriver. Spock had collected an assortment of nails, the big hammer Frank said he was too young to use, and a blowtorch, all of which he placed into the tool box.
"We need to get to my ship," Spock said, "although how we intend to reveal it in the field while remaining undetected by Frank I am unsure."
Jim paused. "Could we move it in here? It's not as heavy as a D'kyr support craft."
Spock gave him the dryest look yet, and Jim laughed.
"One day I'll hear you laugh at one of my jokes," he said, "and it'll be the best day in the world."
Spock abruptly turned away to look at the barn wall. "I suppose it is only a small emergency vessel. We might be able to move it."
"We might - if we use the right tools," Jim smirked, staring at the half-restored car.
Spock looked back at him at his odd tone, and then to the car, and then back to Jim, eyebrow raised.
"Frank will, to borrow a turn of phrase, kill you," he said.
Jim grinned at him.
"Even though this machine is primitive, I remain the more experienced. I shall drive."
(If it's not clear Spock is the one saying that last line)
Translations:
- one man can summon the future (I got it of a wikiquote list of "vulcan proverbs" which weren't really... vulcan proverbs... as such. I was looking for stuff like "once in a blue moon" or "a stopped clock is right twice a day" and it gave me "my mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts")
- T'Kasi is what Vulcans call the planet Vulcan (well it's one of the ways. I've found the info a couple of times before but as I am writing this I Cannot so if anyone knows Where in memory alpha it is that'd be great thx)
Also! DNA-DNA hybridisation is a Real Thing that doesn't exist yet for Jim. It's a way of telling how far apart two species are from one another, genetically speaking. You get two strands of DNA from two different species, separate the double helix and then p much just fuse the two strands from different species together with heat and see where the bases didn't match up. For example: human and chimp dna, as our bodies are pretty similar, our dna codes for basically the same stuff so there won't be many "missing links." A human and a jellyfish on the other hand would barely link up at all, as our bodies do very different things, showing that humans and jellyfish diverged from each other very far back on the evolutionary path.
So when I said "cooled to a perfect match" this is what I was referring to
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