Chapter Seven: Lorelei
Disclaimer: I did not create these characters and I do not profit from putting them through the ringer.
Tiny warning: This chapter skates along the edge of an M rating...if you squint. Nothing smutty...just suggestive.
He slips into the dream so gradually that for a moment he is caught up in its reality. One minute he is lying on his back in his bed, mentally reviewing his lecture for Monday, and the next he is standing on the wide marble steps in front of the language building.
The Academy commons stretches out before him—green and lush, crisscrossed with asphalt pathways, uniformed cadets walking purposefully or strolling or pausing to chat—and J. C. Ellison standing at the bottom of the steps, waving to someone.
That's when Spock knows that this is a dream. J. C. shipped out on the Camden three weeks ago right as the fall term began. Spock has heard from him once—a short note thanking him again for what J. C. called "pulling strings" to get him aboard, though in reality sending a letter of recommendation to Admiral Nefting wasn't that unusual.
That J. C. appears in a dream isn't surprising. After all, since J. C.'s departure, Spock has thought about him often, especially now that Cadet Uhura has stepped in as Spock's teaching assistant. He hired her reluctantly—and has regretted doing so ever since—both consciously, and apparently subconsciously, too, if his dream is telling him something.
Not that she isn't a capable assistant. In fact, she far exceeds any aide he has ever had—exceptionally intelligent, a self-starter, persistent.
If only she weren't such a…distraction.
The noise, for instance. When she works at the small desk he has set up in the corner of his office, the sounds are unhinging—the squeak of her chair when she leans back, the rustle of her skirt when she shifts position, the click or her blunt nails on the keyboard, a slow exhalation suspiciously close to a sigh.
And then two days ago he upset her when she picked up a package for him from the campus post office. He recognized the handwriting immediately on the carefully wrapped box—his father's small, precise print—and had opened it while Cadet Uhura looked on.
To his astonishment, the package contained a family heirloom—his father's ka'athrya, the Vulcan lute that had been in the family at least 300 years. Made of delicate shirskah wood, the ka'athyra could be damaged by the oils in a human touch—something Spock had learned when his father called him to account for leaving finger marks on the headstock.
When Cadet Uhura stretched out her hand to touch it, he had stopped her—and at that moment, he saw her expression fall and heard dismay in her voice.
Not just dismay, but the same sort of rejection he himself had felt when his father had chided him.
At the time he had not known what to say—and so he had said nothing. Since then, she has been unusually uncommunicative when she is in the office or the lab. Even when she works at her desk in his office, she holds herself under such a tight rein that he has to strain to hear her ordinary noises.
To his surprise, he realizes that her silence is even more of a distraction than the noise.
Here she is now in the dream, and that is not a surprise. From where he stands on the steps, Spock watches as she makes her way across the commons, one hand thrown up to return J. C.'s wave.
A memory, then, as much as a dream—the kiss he witnessed almost a year ago, forced to watch it again.
Spock dreams rarely, and when he does, they are usually lucid dreams where he is the author, in control, like someone on the side writing a story and watching it unfold.
Not this dream. Against his will he sees Cadet Uhura swaying forward, feels himself descending the steps. J. C. moves aside and disappears in the way that things come and go in dreams. Spock's heartbeat begins to race as Cadet Uhura—Nyota—lifts her gaze to his own.
If he stays here she will raise her face to his and kiss him—of that he's certain.
His heartbeat is so loud that it sounds in his ears.
A gulf seems to separate them as she makes her way across the commons—twenty meters, ten, and then she is so close that he inhales her particular scent—soap and lavender and the simple, clean starch of her uniform jacket, newly pressed.
The heat is oppressive, and with the part of his mind that knows this is a dream, he thinks how unlike any real San Francisco weather this is—almost brilliantly lit and so hot that his brow is sweaty.
Without a word she raises her hand to his face and lets one finger drift across his cheek. Her touch is cool and he leans into it, fevered, closing his eyes.
Her other hand cups his face briefly before sliding down his chest.
In the haze of the dream he tries to step back.
This is wrong, he thinks. This is unwanted.
But if it is wrong, it is not unwanted—and with a start, he recognizes a truth he has tried to hide from for months.
Of their own accord, his arms slide around her and pull her close.
How lithe she is, how cool and contained.
When he presses the small of her back with his thumb, she dips her head to his neck and exhales so slowly, so close to a moan, that he is instantly aroused, the heat from his brow washing down his neck and flooding his torso with an almost painful insistence.
He feels her leaning back and he opens his eyes and sees her tipping her head to watch him, her large dark eyes studying him, not with the sort of blatant curiosity that characterized too many of his early sexual experiences with humans, but like someone trying to look beneath the surface of who he appears to be.
That thought both excites and panics him—and in a rush he circles her again with his arm and pulls them together so tightly that he feels the buttons of her jacket on his chest, feels her knees pressing against his—and then parting, inviting him, his fingers twined in the material of her uniform, twitching it away, his heart throbbing so hard that he feels it in his throat, in his lok—
And then falling, tumbling—waking as he surrenders and explodes, gasping, the early morning light leaking around the window shades startling him.
For a minute he doesn't move—hot and sticky and entangled in the sheets.
A dream, he tells himself, not so much to orient himself in time and space as to absolve himself of shame. Who can be held accountable for a dream?
Saturday morning. He has no classes today—indeed, he has nothing he has to do. Standing up, he pulls the corners of the sheets loose and gathers them into a pile. Then he strips out of his wet t-shirt and sleep pants and adds them to the sheets.
The washer and dryer are in a recessed closet in the hallway, and as Spock pads down the hall with the sheets in hand, he remembers another morning when he had done the same—sometime after his 15th birthday, his mother looking up from her morning tea with a knowing glance as he headed to the family washroom.
It was shortly after he had spent an afternoon with T'Pring and her family at their summer house in the L-Langon Mountains. The house was really more of a small cottage than anything else, but the K'Loh'r T'Mirs went there frequently during the hottest part of the summer to take advantage of the steady mountain breeze.
By then he and T'Pring had been bonded seven years—and he had no illusions that they were friends or were ever likely to be.
But T'Pring's company was pleasant enough, and on that particular afternoon she had seemed interested in showing him a pond ecosystem her father had installed behind the cottage.
"The pump is run by solar panels," she said, stepping to the edge of the sandy pond and running her hand along the small pump house. "On the sunniest days, we are able to lift twenty liters a minute from the well."
"What is the purpose of the pond?" Spock asked, and immediately he knew T'Pring was annoyed.
As she often was. Her anger continued to catch him off guard—though at some level he accepted that he was responsible. For whatever reason, his questions were inappropriate, or his actions didn't meet her expectations.
Now, for instance, she was offended, and he let his hands fall to his side, unsure how to proceed.
"You suggest that my father should not have made the pond," she said, her dark eyes narrowed, her upswept locks pinned back in a way that made her look older than he remembered.
"I suggested no such thing," he said, and again he sensed her anger, not just from watching her facial expression, but through the tentative bond.
When they weren't together, Spock struggled to feel T'Pring's presence. He had mentioned this casually not too long ago to his mother and had seen a flash of alarm in her eyes. Soon afterwards, these afternoon get-togethers with T'Pring and her family began.
So. His difficulty sensing her wasn't typical. His human heritage, undoubtedly.
"Just because you are unable to discern its purpose," T'Pring said, "doesn't mean it isn't clear."
It was intended as a hurtful riposte—and Spock would have accepted it as such if T'Pring hadn't turned so swiftly that she caught her toe in the sand. With a little huff of surprise, she tumbled over and landed in the shallow pond.
One stride forward and he was in the pond with her, pulling her to her feet. Before he let go of her hand he glanced at her closely, at her damp clothes and wounded dignity.
Through her fingertips he felt her embarrassment—and something else, too, that he couldn't name.
Curiosity? They hadn't seen each other much until recently, and both had changed a great deal since their last meeting.
T'Pring, for instance, had changed her shape—was, Spock decided, curvier than she used to be. How had he not noticed that before?
As T'Pring stepped out of the pond, Spock noted how her wet robe clung to her in a way that was…appealing? Yes, that, but he felt the same strange stirring he had felt earlier.
The rest of the afternoon was far less interesting—but that night he had a rare dream, of him and T'Pring back at the pond but this time embracing and stroking each other until he woke, soaked and surprised.
Sarek would have been the obvious source to ask for an explanation—but Spock resisted, worrying that his experience was more proof of his humanity and something unknown to Vulcans.
His research didn't yield much help, either. As matter-of-fact as Vulcans could be about every other aspect of their biology, about sexuality they were almost silent, assuming that what needed to be known would be passed down in hints and hushed stories.
Humans, on the other hand, wrote copiously about sexuality. Indeed, Spock often had trouble finding human music or literature or stories in popular culture that were not centered around sex. He didn't have to look long to find his answers about his dream.
The one person he wanted to share it with was the one person he knew would be most likely to be disgusted by it—T'Pring herself. Did she have similar feelings about him? Had he ever wandered through her dreams?
It took him months before he got up the nerve to ask, and then longer still before he finally told her what he wanted to try.
To her credit, she heard him out before she responded. After all, young Vulcans often explored their sexuality before marriage, particularly with bond partners. There were no proscriptions against it, the way Spock knew some humans postponed sex.
T'Pring, however, seemed not so much upset as disinterested.
"If you insist," she said, "though I see little reason for it."
Later Spock would think of their coupling as more anti-climactic than disappointing. He had expected something different, something more, than what it turned out to be.
"A pleasant enough release," T'Pring said, describing her own perception. It was, Spock thought, an underwhelming commentary, though he couldn't disagree.
Was this all there was to it? Something merely physical, almost predictable? Didn't his parents feel something else, a connection that was emotional, mental, durable? Something that didn't drift away as soon as the act was completed?
For as long as he could remember, he had felt relieved about his bonding, even grateful that his parents had settled the matter and assured his future.
But now he began to feel resentful, too.
Not because he was disappointed with T'Pring sexually—or with sex in general—but because that disappointment seemed a portent of something else, of some larger, deeper failure.
When he left Vulcan for the Academy the separation was almost a relief. In the months leading up to his application to the Vulcan Science Academy, he and T'Pring had quarreled frequently and with increasing tension—and for a time after his departure they had not communicated at all.
Spock had been too busy to be concerned. His Academy coursework wasn't particularly challenging, but living among humans was a trial. His occasional explorations of human sexuality were just as fraught, and after several less than satisfactory experiences, he came to the conclusion that his own life was going to be different from what he had imagined or even desired.
So be it. Regrets were illogical.
That was, until Cadet Uhura.
In every way what he feels is dangerous, wrong.
And what is even more troubling is his inability to not feel, to control his emotions.
No amount of exercise, of meditation, of immersing himself in such long work hours that he falls into bed exhausted has given him any peace.
Perhaps this is what it is like to slip into pon farr? Somehow the stories of blood fever have a different tenor, a tone that doesn't quite resonate with what he is feeling.
Perhaps his experience of pon farr will be different, tempered or changed by his humanity?
Possible, though that doesn't ring true either.
If he and his father had a different kind of relationship, he would ask him. The idea, however, is daunting, and as Spock steps into the shower, he dismisses it.
His mother, on the other hand, might be a more useful resource.
He needs to call her anyway, to ask why the ka'athyra has been sent, and after his shower, after he eats the last carton of yogurt in the cooler, he turns on the portable subspace transceiver in his living area and settles in front of it while the call to Vulcan is relayed through Starbase Four.
Amanda's surprise and delight at hearing from Spock is obvious—and with a pang, he resolves to call her more often.
"You aren't ill, are you?" she asks, pulling her robe around her shoulders. "You look flushed."
"I am well, Mother," he says hurriedly. "I called because I received father's ka'athyra in the mail this week."
"He told me he had decided to send it. He hardly has time to play it anymore."
"But I have the one you gave me," Spock says, not hiding his confusion.
At that his mother takes a breath and lets it out slowly.
"I suppose," she says, "we should tell you."
His heart suddenly racing, Spock leans closer to the subspace monitor.
"There's something wrong with your father's heart," his mother says, her shoulders sagging forward. "I don't know how serious it is," she says, answering his unspoken question. "The healers want to try some medications first before resorting to surgery. We're hopeful—though I think Sarek is having some intimations of mortality."
"The ka'athyra."
"Yes," Amanda says. "He wants to make sure you have it, in case—"
Her words drift off and she blinks and looks away for a moment.
"Mother, I—"
As soon as he begins to speak, he isn't sure what he wants to say. To reassure her? He knows nothing about his father's situation and any reassurance would be based on speculation rather than facts.
To offer to come home? He's long overdue for a visit, but the beginning of the new semester is a difficult time to get away. His father will understand that, if his mother doesn't.
To ask her advice about what it means that he is having trouble focusing, that his resolve is being sabotaged by feelings he cannot control? That he is living in a miserable limbo that he doesn't understand?
He falters now as he watches his mother's face, realizes that she has tried to spare him from her own worries about his father.
"I'm going to be on Earth next week," she says suddenly, and he sits up in surprise. "But in Paris at the Federation Conference. I don't know if I can get to your neck of the woods."
She tells him that she's traveling with the Vulcan delegation in Sarek's place—that against his will and after much arm twisting by his healers, Sarek is taking sick leave to rest and let the new heart medications work.
"It's ridiculous, I know," his mother says with a rueful smile. "I'm not an ambassador, but your father has bent my ear so long about his plans for the subcommittee meetings that it's just easier for me to go and help set things up. Stoval will be the official in charge, of course, but he doesn't know all the committee members and I do."
"My mother, the ambassador," Spock says drily, and his mother rewards him with a laugh. "They ought to go ahead and deputize you."
"Oh, no," Amanda says. "They tried that once before. I wanted no part of it!"
Spock feels his eyebrows rise into his bangs.
"You were offered a position in the embassy?"
"Haven't I told you that story?" she says, and Spock is relieved that his mother's mood is lifting. "Well, maybe one day I will."
"I am not busy right now," Spock says. "Indeed, I have nothing at all on my schedule."
X X X X X X X
"You're going to get killed on that hoverbike one day," Amanda said as Sarek pulled a spanner from his toolbox and made some adjustments to the intake valve. He glanced up at her and gave her a look that made her laugh.
"I trust that your powers of prediction are faulty," he said, making her laugh again.
Picking up another tool, he eyed the engine of the hoverbike and tapped on it experimentally. Amanda gave an exaggerated sigh and ran her hands over her bulging midriff.
"If you're going to tinker out here all morning," she said, "I'm going to take a nap."
She could feel Sarek's eyes following her as she made her way carefully to the front door.
Seven months pregnant, she was often tired—and the healers expected the pregnancy to last longer than a normal human gestation. More than the ordinary weight gain and realignment of bones and ligaments that made every pregnant woman feel off-balance and weary, the regular chelation therapy to filter the baby's errant copper blood cells from her own circulation meant Amanda needed more sleep than usual—and more calories.
"I feel like a beached whale," she complained more than once when Sarek brought her a meal while she lay in the bed or stretched out on the sofa.
To his credit, Sarek never complained. On the contrary, Amanda never felt more cared for, more cherished, than she did as she made her way inexorably through the long months of her pregnancy.
"I have to go in to the office," Sarek called out as she headed into the cool of the foyer, "but I will be back in plenty of time to take you to the appointment."
Without turning around she lifted her hand in acknowledgment. She was both glad to have Sarek with her during her visits to the healer and aware that his presence was unusual. The first time they had appeared together for a regular appointment, the healer had lost her composure briefly, her eyes broadcasting her surprise.
"Ambassador," the healer said, her tone unmistakably disapproving, "your attendance is not necessary."
The healer, a woman not much older than Sarek, her dark, upswept hair covered by a heavy veil, glanced briefly at Amanda. To her dismay, Amanda felt her face flush.
"Nevertheless," Sarek said evenly, "it is desired."
He waited a beat before adding, "By both of us."
There it was, Sarek's hard-earned attention to her needs—his willingness to break Vulcan tradition when she needed human understanding—and to put Vulcans on notice that it was his choice to do so.
As she made her way to the bedroom, Amanda heard the engine of the hoverbike turn over and catch. Stretching out across the bed, she noticed the bike revving and then shifting gears, and Sarek was off.
In the gloom of the bedroom, Amanda closed her eyes and slowed her breathing. At once the baby kicked her so hard that she pressed her hand to her belly and curled over to her side. The kicking stopped and Amanda tried to center herself the way the healer had suggested, reaching out to her son.
Vulcan mothers, she knew, developed a telepathic connection to their unborn children—though the healer had been uncertain that Amanda would be able to.
"Are you aware of his consciousness in your own?" the healer asked her shortly after she began to feel the baby move several months ago, and she had to admit that she didn't. Not the way she recognized Sarek's thoughts—or sensed his moods or his activities when they were apart.
The healer made a notation in her log and Amanda felt judged.
It was her sister Cecilia who reassured her. During her pediatric residency, Cecilia did a rotation in a Vulcan ward where one of the healers told her that strong telepaths were sometimes silent in the womb—an interesting idea that Cecilia passed on to her sister during a regular subspace conversation.
"Or maybe there's something wrong with me," Amanda said sourly.
"Well, we know that's true," Cecilia said, laughing, and despite herself, Amanda smiled. "Besides, the healer I talked to said that those weird dreams you've been having could be evidence of a telepathic connection."
"Or not," Amanda said. "Plenty of human mothers report having weird pregnancy dreams."
"I'm hanging up now," Cecilia said. "Call me later when you get out of this snit."
As she lay in the dark bedroom, Amanda sent out a tendril of attention into her thoughts, searching. There was Sarek, preoccupied with his hoverbike—the intake valve was still misaligned, he was thinking as he evaluated the engine noise.
She cast about for the baby—any hint that he was there, that he was, at some elementary level, aware, bonded to her.
Nothing.
She ran her hand over the taut skin of her middle and sighed.
What if she never developed that bond? How would that handicap a Vulcan child? She and Sarek had chosen a Vulcan phenotype for their son—had agreed that he should appear Vulcan, would be raised as a Vulcan.
But would he be Vulcan?
The baby kicked again so hard that Amanda gasped.
She sat up in the bed, her heart suddenly racing. Something was wrong.
Instinctively she sought out Sarek—and that's when she realized that he was gone.
His voice in her mind was silent, his presence dark—as if he had left her in a room alone, turning off the lights behind him.
With an effort, she pulled herself up and grabbed the personal comm on the bedside table. If Sarek's secretary was surprised to hear from her, she didn't let it show. Instead, her voice was a maddening contrast to Amanda's worried tone.
"When he arrives, tell him to call me at once," Amanda said, hearing how odd the request sounded. Why couldn't she simply communicate the thought to him directly? The secretary would, no doubt, assume she was being hysterical, the overly emotional human most Vulcans expected her to be.
When she hung up she considered calling the healer—perhaps the unexpected silence was an artifact of the pregnancy?
But something stayed her hand.
In the kitchen she poured herself some kasa juice and paced, the fingers of one hand rubbing an ache in her lower back. If he didn't call in ten minutes, she would…what would she do? Call the secretary back? That was…illogical. Why ask her for the same thing twice? A Vulcan would take such a request as an insult, a commentary about memory.
She could alert the authorities—but again she hesitated. Perhaps Sarek was so busy with something that he had let their link go dark? If she had a close Vulcan friend she could ask—has this ever happened to you?
That she didn't have anyone to ask felt like a tremendous oversight at that moment.
She tried to lie down but was up again in a few minutes, restless, walking back and forth between the front door and the kitchen where she made a cup of tea but left it cooling, unsipped, on the table.
The baby, too, seemed restless, and when Amanda sat for any length of time, she felt the odd slide and twirl of fetal gymnastics.
"This is silly," she said at last, grabbing her coat from the hall closet and heading out to the flitter. Her plan was simple—she would trace Sarek's journey from the house to his office, keeping an eye out for his hoverbike—likely broken-down beside the road, his mind too preoccupied with repairing it to notice Amanda's absence from his thoughts.
The explanation was clear, obvious, and she comforted herself with an imagined scene—herself pulling up in the flitter, Sarek's relief palpable as he hefted the broken bike into the boot.
She was so convinced that she would find him that she was startled when she arrived at the embassy empty-handed.
"Lady Amanda," Sarek's secretary said, her voice betraying the slightest hint of surprise. "The Ambassador has not yet arrived."
At that Amanda felt the first real panic. Something had obviously happened to him on the way—an accident, an abduction?
"Call security," Amanda said, but Sarek's secretary met her gaze evenly and said, "And what should I tell them? That the Ambassador is late for work?"
"He's hurt," Amanda said, suddenly sure. "Something's happened to him. He would be here by now otherwise."
"Perhaps he changed his mind," the secretary said, "or took a detour?" Amanda shook her head.
"No! I can't…feel…him."
She knew that Vulcans didn't describe the sensation of being bonded with each other as a feeling—and indeed, the word didn't come close to expressing the awareness she had of Sarek—his personality and perceptions and presence always in her thoughts, always part of who she was.
"He is blocking you," the secretary said matter-of-factly, with a hint of smugness, and Amanda felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle.
"He wouldn't do that," she said.
At least he never had before. Could it be true, that Sarek had tamped down their connection deliberately? And for what reason?
She rejected that idea.
She looked closely at the secretary sitting primly at the desk. Is that what other couples did? Blocked each other? Hid things?
This new bit of information rattled her.
"Perhaps you should return to your home and rest," the secretary said, not unkindly.
"But I'm sure—" she began, and the secretary said, "When the Ambassador arrives, he will contact you."
Even though the secretary's face was impassive, Amanda had lived long enough on Vulcan to read the skepticism in her eyes. The secretary did not believe her, did not seem to accept that Amanda's bond with Sarek was authentic.
The police would be equally skeptical.
Amanda felt her face go hot with anger.
On the ride back home she replayed the scene several times, each time amending what she had really said with far wittier rejoinders. The first thing she would do when Sarek got home was to give him an earful about his secretary—
As she pulled up to the house, she was disappointed that his hoverbike wasn't there. She had half-expected to see him waiting for her with some reasonable explanation.
When he wasn't home by the time she needed to leave for the medical appointment, she called the healer and canceled it. An hour later, she called the local police and reported him missing. As she expected, the authorities dismissed her concern.
"Are you telling me that people can just go missing and you won't bother to look for them?" she said into the comm, hoping her ire was obvious.
"You saw the Ambassador less than six hours ago," the call clerk said. "No reasonable person would label that missing."
It was a calculated insult but Amanda was too upset already to hear it.
"But his silence! It was sudden—"
"If the Ambassador does not contact you by this time tomorrow, call again."
And just like that, the comm line went dead.
Amanda's head was swimming. Food—and rest. She needed both—the baby needed both. But the leftover grains she tried to eat were like sawdust in her mouth, and after choking on a mouthful, she gave up.
She lay down on the sofa in the front room where she could see the flitter pad from the window. With an effort she slowed her breathing and tried to relax. A patch of late afternoon sun fell across her feet, warming her, and she closed her eyes.
She slipped into the dream so gradually that for a moment she was caught up in its reality. One minute she was lying on her back on the sofa, listening to the ambient noises of the house—a drop of water escaping a leaky faucet in kitchen, the whir of the attic air exchanger—and the next she was struggling to keep her footing on a sandy incline.
Looking up, she saw that she was in the desert near her house—the distinctive rock formations to the south clearly in view. The wind soughed loudly behind her and she turned to see a loose plant like an Earth tumbleweed cartwheel across the sand.
The place looked both familiar and new, like a room turned upside down or lit from a different angle.
I'm dreaming, she thought, understanding why everything looked so odd. She felt ill-at-ease, as if someone was watching her, and she turned around, expecting to see someone there.
Instead she saw a jumble of boulders the color of soot and a darker pit behind them. As if she were being tugged by a magnet, she took a hesitant step toward the dark boulders.
Amanda!
Sarek's voice!
She woke with a start. The patch of late sunlight had moved and faded. Outside in the twilight she saw the flitter parked on the pad but the hoverbike was not there.
A call to Sarek's co-worker Stoval yielded no information.
"Lady Amanda," Stoval said with his characteristic soft lisp, "it is too early to be concerned. The Ambassador has an important trade meeting with some merchants from Kir. He may have decided to travel there instead."
"Yes, but—" Amanda began, but she let her voice trail off. Yes, but Kir was 400 kilometers away. Sarek wouldn't have left without telling her where he was going, she could have said.
Other Vulcans she knew would have left without hesitation, without informing anyone, if it suited their purpose to do so. Their families would not have worried, would not have thought it unusual, would not now be making a fuss.
"If you hear from him—" she said, and Stoval said, "I will have him communicate with you."
She lay down then, cradling her arms around her stomach as she curled in the middle of the bed.
"Oh, baby," she said, feeling a heel or an elbow rolling under her palm. "Where is your father?"
Blinking back tears, she searched for any sense of Sarek at all—a tiny spark, a ghost of a hint, that he was still tied to her. Under her hand the baby grew still, as if he was listening with her.
That night she slept fitfully, starting at the sound of every flitter making its way past the house. In the morning she was bleary eyed and stumbling with exhaustion—but as she forced herself to drink some tea, a vision came to her so clearly that her hand shook.
The dark rocks. The sandy outcropping.
The same as in the dream, except rosy with morning sunlight.
Not a dream but a reality.
Standing up so quickly that she knocked the wooden chair over, she hurried to the door and out to the flitter. She knew where Sarek was—or knew how to find where he was.
Just as she had the day before, she aimed the flitter toward town and flew slowly, scanning for any sign of the hoverbike or Sarek. Just as the day before, she saw no sign of either.
For a kilometer she flew over desert terrain that surrounded her house. When the first small buildings on the outskirt of the city came into view, she turned the flitter around and headed in the other direction. This time instead of looking for the hoverbike she kept out an eye for the boulders of her dream.
She was almost all the way back home when an outcropping of dark stone caught her attention. Not the boulders she had seen—not exactly—but something drew her closer.
Carefully she banked the flitter off the roadway and headed closer to the rocks. Slowing the flitter until the engine began to sputter, she flew so low that she heard the scrape of low bushes.
She was almost all the way around the outcropping when she saw it—the same arrangement of boulders, the darker shadow behind them. Setting the flitter down in the sand, she picked her away across a rocky field.
And hidden behind the thick shrubbery was the hoverbike, the front deflector torn back, the steering bar bent and half-buried in the sand.
Sarek, however, was nowhere to be seen.
"I'm here!" she called out, moving as quickly as she could toward the boulders. From this distance Amanda could see that what had looked like a dark shadow was a shallow indentation in the sand, partly protected from the sun.
In a flash she knew Sarek would be there.
And he was—bruised and sunburned and dehydrated and unconscious.
For the first few hours after he was taken to the medical center in Shi'Kahr, Amanda sat at his bedside and kept her fingers twined with his, indifferent to the occasional pointed looks she received from the healers as they moved in and out of the room. She wanted to know as soon as he was awake—to feel his presence through her touch and in her mind.
As the day wore on most of the embassy staff stopped by—Stoval first, and Sarek's secretary, both having the good grace to look abashed. Stoval actually came close to apologizing to Amanda for not believing her—but she was so tired that she could only nod.
Someone—perhaps even the healer who had looked at her askance earlier—covered her shoulders with a blanket when she fell asleep at last, scrunched awkwardly in the chair she had pulled next to Sarek's bed.
Hours later she woke with a gasp. Sarek was looking at her, his eyelids puffy with sunburn, a cut across his brow turning a dusky shade of green.
A flood of warmth cascaded through Amanda so fiercely that she shivered.
You're back, she thought, and she felt the tenderness of his reply as much as she heard it.
Because of you, he said.
The next three days were a blur—fluid therapy, a broken tibia set, a skin graft behind his ear where the sunburn had done too much damage to repair easily.
And complicating his recovery was Sarek's insistence that he could work from his hospital bed—until the healers forbade him from using his comm and threatened to ban any of his embassy co-workers from visiting.
"Your recovery will proceed more quickly if you rest," the healer said in Amanda's hearing, and she raised an eyebrow at her husband and said, "I told you so."
"But the trade delegation from Kir is already on the way here," he said. "The documents they need are in the study at home. I need to get them and—"
"You don't need to do anything but what your doctor tells you," Amanda said. "I'll get the trade papers and take them to your office."
That first chore led to a second one, and then a third, with Amanda scurrying between the medical center and the embassy, meeting with the merchants from Kir and relaying Sarek's instructions to them. When suppertime came she offered to show them to a local eatery. When it was time to retire for the night, she gave them directions to a family-run hostel and promised to meet them in the morning with further details about the negotiations.
By the end of the week Sarek was able to put weight on his broken leg and the healers reluctantly agreed to let him go home if he promised to stay immobile a few more days.
"Do as your healer recommends," Stoval told him. "The Lady Amanda is a more than adequate substitute in your absence. The Director has suggested that we make her an adjunct to the department. That way she can sign the legal documents rather than ferry them back and forth to you."
"No, thank you," Amanda said when Sarek relayed the offer. "As soon as you are back on your feet, I'm getting off mine. I have a feeling I'm not going to be getting much rest once this baby is born."
X X X X X X X
"I was right, too," Amanda says, laughing. "You were a lot of work."
Spock isn't sure how to respond. His mother's laughter is at odds with her words. A joke.
On the subspace screen he sees her smile fade and she is serious again.
"What do you hear from T'Pring?"
The question is so unanticipated that he blinks.
"I have heard nothing from her," he says uneasily. In fact, he has tried to contact T'Pring twice in the past few months, each time unsuccessfully. "Why do you ask?"
"She left a message on the house comm a few days ago," Amanda says, frowning. "She said she needed to talk to you."
T'Pring's calling his house could mean nothing—or everything. On one hand, she could simply be returning his messages, though if she had wanted to talk to him directly, she could have called him instead of leaving a message at his parents' house.
On the other hand, she may be feeling the same grinding loneliness that has characterized his past year—may be feeling his loneliness through their bond, the way his parents are atuned to each other's moods.
If so, that connection is a surprise, and new—maybe even something T'Pring does not welcome.
He lets his confusion show on his face and his mother is quick to notice.
"What's wrong?" she asks. "Is something going on between the two of you?"
With a shake of his head, Spock says, "Uncertain. I have been…unsettled…lately."
The dream from the morning flashes through his mind and he flushes. Of course. The troubling longing he feels when he is around Cadet Uhura—the unwanted thoughts that interrupt his meditation, that drift into his careful routine…his long separation from T'Pring is the reason. Why hadn't he seen it before?
He feels something akin to relief. His professional life isn't coming unwoven. He isn't losing his control.
He simply needs to attend to his personal life—to follow that thread of connection back to T'Pring and steady himself again.
At the mid-term, then, he will make a trip home to check on his father and talk to T'Pring.
More than talk. He flushes at the idea that sexual frustration is at the bottom of his recent distress. How…human.
The call to his mother leaves him strangely lightheaded, like someone waking up free from a long-standing headache, newly energized. Needing something to do, he packs some student work in his satchel and heads across the commons to his office. If he's lucky, he can finish his grading and revisit his planned lecture notes for Monday—something he had started doing when he fell asleep that morning.
Before the dream.
Setting that memory aside, he hurries into the language building and takes the stairs two at a time to the third floor. Rounding the top of the stairwell, he sees a light on at the end of the hall. Not an emergency light or a hall sconce but a light coming from his office.
He knows at once that Cadet Uhura is there. No one else has a key to his office.
He stands transfixed, unsure whether to continue or retreat.
And then he hears a sound—a wordless, tuneless humming that pierces him like a hook below his navel. He moves forward against his will.
She jumps when he steps into the doorway.
"Commander! You scared me!"
"That was not my intention," he says, setting his satchel on his desk. From the corner of his eye he sees that she has several PADDs and a paper notebook strewn on the little desk where she works. She's been here for some time, then.
She starts to stand up and he waves her back.
"I, well, I needed to get some studying done," she says, looking down at her open backpack on the floor, "and my roommate is sleeping in this morning, and the library isn't open yet—I'm so sorry! I didn't think you would be in today."
"That was not my intention either," he says, watching her closely, hoping his repetition is amusing, wanting to lighten the heaviness that has settled between them. He adds, "I seem to be doing many things unintentionally lately."
He means it as an apology for hurting her feelings when she asked to touch the ka'athyra, but at once he realizes his mistake. The words hover in the air between them, suggestive.
Cadet Uhura frowns and nods her head slowly.
"I see," she says, her eyes on his.
And suddenly he sees, too—that T'Pring is not the reason for his misery.
What a foolish hope that was.
"Please," he says, sitting in his chair, motioning toward the pile of work on the little desk in the corner. "Don't let me disturb you."
"I won't bother you?" she asks, and he tells her no, that he'll hardly know she's here.
A smile brightens her face and she turns around, the squeak of her chair, the rustle of her skirt, the sound of her breathing like some siren song, pulling him onto the rocks.
A/N: The scene where Sarek sends Spock the ka'athyra is Chapter One of "What We Think We Know."
"Lorelei" is both a dangerous rock in the Rhine and a mythical woman who unwittingly distracted sailors, causing their doom.
Here's the funny thing about chapters that skate close to M ratings: they draw the most readers and the fewest reviewers! My guess is that as much as we enjoy reading stuff with an edge, we are shy about letting anyone know...
Don't be shy! Reviews are the only way fanfiction authors know they are being read. Did you like this chapter or found it too much? Let me know! You literally keep me writing.