Chapter Eight: Touch
Disclaimer: As much as it pains me to say it, these characters aren't mine and I make no money from writing about them.
As soon as he steps onto the hover bus, Spock realizes he has made a mistake. Instead of the usual thin crowd this time of the morning, the bus is full—more than full, every seat taken, a few people standing awkwardly in the aisle.
In the three seconds before the door shuts behind him, he considers turning around and waiting for the next bus. There's no guarantee that it will be less crowded, however. In fact, the odds are high that all of the buses today will be crowded; indeed, that all of the public transport will be crowded for the foreseeable future until the damage from the recent earthquake has been repaired and the transportation hubs are back to full capacity.
He should have foreseen this. If he were thinking clearly, he would have.
The tremor in San Francisco last week had been relatively mild, but it disrupted the power lines and a gas transfer conduit that ran under the Academy commons, detouring cross campus foot traffic. Otherwise Spock would have walked to his office from the faculty housing the way he normally does.
If he exits the bus now, he won't get to the language building for at least 37 minutes, ten minutes after Cadet Uhura is scheduled to open the lab. Repressing a sigh, he presses down the aisle of the bus, careful to hold his arms closely to his side, bracing himself when the doors hiss shut and the bus judders forward.
From the corner of his eye he sees the woman in the seat to his right looking up at him with undisguised attention. As long as he's been on Earth, Spock is still uneasy with the unwanted scrutiny he draws—stares, both surreptitious and oblique, and comments muttered in passing. Or worse, questions asked of him directly—well-meaning, most of the time, though Spock often thinks of his mother when he's approached that way.
"Put yourself in their place," she's told him more than once. "They're curious. Surely you can appreciate how that feels."
She's right, of course. Of the Federation founding members, Vulcans are the most underrepresented in Starfleet. Except for embassy staff, business owners, and scientific researchers, few Vulcans spend much time on Earth. Any Vulcan at all, much less one in a Starfleet uniform, is a rarity.
Still. On this morning he has no wish to indulge anyone's prurient interest. Deliberately turning his face away from the woman to his right, he watches the scenery hurtling past the window.
To his surprise, the earthquake damage is more extensive than the holovids have led him to believe. When the earthquake struck, he had been on Vulcan—a hurried trip during the Academy break—and he didn't return until late last night. How odd that he hadn't noticed the cracked sidewalks, the inoperative street lights, the store signs tumbled off their hinges. The lateness of the hour when he arrived, no doubt, was the reason—and the fact that he had been preoccupied on the short shuttle hop from the transport station to his apartment with a comm call to Cadet Uhura—Nyota—to let her know he was back safely.
And if he is honest, to hear her voice.
His trip to Vulcan had been so sudden, so unplanned, that he had told no one that he was leaving—a misstep, apparently. When communications were inoperative after the quake, Nyota had spent several days concerned for his safety, unaware that he wasn't in San Francisco. When he finally called her from his parents' house, she had been angry.
No. Furious.
"The worst part was not knowing where you were, or if you were hurt. You should have told me that you were going to Vulcan. Then I wouldn't have worried."
Spock had tried to reason with her. "If I had been on Earth, we would have been out of communication because of the power failure, and you still would not have known where I was or if I were hurt. I fail to see how my being on Vulcan—"
"I would have known you were okay, but instead I spent several miserable days imagining you hurt somewhere, in a hospital, unable to speak—" Even over the static of the subspace he could hear the distress in her tone. "Please don't do that again. I need to know….if you are safe."
As astonishing as her words were, the ones left unspoken were even more so.
He needs time to consider what to do about them.
In one way his life is less complicated than before. With a healer's help, he and T'Pring are no longer bonded, a choice they had been moving toward for quite some time.
Or so he had assumed.
But T'Pring's anger when his father arranged the annulment two days ago caught Spock off guard. He had expected her to be as relieved as he feels. As free.
And there it is at last, the word he means.
T'Pring is free to pursue a relationship with Stonn, one Spock suspects they have already begun.
And he himself is free—
He's free from the weight of TPring in his mind, like sand in his bed or a splinter in his hand.
Free from.
Not free to.
The bus lurches to a stop and several more people come on, forcing him further down the aisle. A young woman standing behind him sways suddenly but he steadies her elbow with his hand and she grabs the rail as the bus begins again.
Although she looks nothing like Nyota—the woman on the bus is short and stocky and with bright pink and orange hair—when Spock touches her and keeps her from falling, he remembers a day not too long ago in his office when Nyota stood up and tumbled forward, her recently injured ankle giving way.
As he had caught Nyota around the waist with one hand and cradled her elbow with his other, an electricity leaped between them—and he knew that his unshielded emotions revealed a contradiction of restraint and desire, affection and uneasiness, and underneath it all, an astonishment that he still isn't sure was his own or hers.
Neither has said anything about it. Or maybe they have, though not with words.
He needs time to think about that, too.
The bus tilts to the left so hard that a shopping bag in the overhead grate flops over, scattering the contents. A few passengers titter uneasily.
Spock glances out the window. Market Street—only halfway to the gate nearest the language building. Perhaps he should have walked after all.
And then it happens. Thirty feet above the street, the bus gives a violent shimmy and people scream. Reaching for the handrails, Spock fights to keep his footing and succeeds, barely.
For a sickening moment the bus rocks from side to side, and then with a mechanical whine, plunges down into the crowded street below.
Glass and metal shards fly everywhere. The bus groans and buckles and rolls over on its side like a tired dog. People are tossed into heaps like bloody rags.
He isn't certain how long he is unconscious, but when he comes to, Spock is pinned against a broken bus seat, his left wrist bent in an unnatural position. Every breath is a struggle, the acrid smoke scorching his lungs. Lying on top of him, several passengers keep him pressed to the ground.
In the distance he hears a siren and he beats back his panic with the reassurance that help is on the way. A sharp pain in his ribs makes him gasp. He slips once more into oblivion.
When he comes to again he is in the medical center, too weary to open his eyes.
He feels a cold, metallic pressure on his chest and hears someone saying, "I think he's dead."
The cold drifts to his side and a rougher voice says, "His heart's here. Don't you know anything about Vulcans?"
He's too tired to be alarmed. And in too much pain. His control is completely shattered, the edges of his consciousness as ragged as an old piece of cloth.
Dimly he senses his mother's distress through their bond. A stronger presence is his father, hovering in the recesses of Spock's thoughts.
That they are aware of the accident isn't surprising. What is more surprising is his cousin Chris. Why is he here at the hospital, his voice low and breathy, as if they are children again sharing telepathic images in the touch of a fingertip? Mailman, his cousin Rachel called it.
And there, Chris' attempt to send him a message through his palm, the coverlet tugged away, the air cold and damp and unpleasant on Spock's hand, on his arm.
The pain replaced by intense nausea—his head swimming at the slightest motion.
The medications, surely, fogging his brain. Wandering through the haze like someone lost in a swamp, ponderous and slow. A light growing brighter ahead, and then Nyota appearing from the mist, her hand outstretched, her fingers drifting across his own.
I need to know…if you are safe, she says—the same words she had scolded him with when he called her from Vulcan.
"Nyota," he says, opening his eyes, struggling to keep them open, failing.
"He's overmedicated!" he hears Nyota say.
Yes. Please. Stop.
His gratitude at being understood, and then finally, his father's voice, telling him to rest.
You need to heal, his father says, and Spock sinks into the timbre and certitude of his father's words. He needs to heal. He needs to let himself slip into the necessary trance but something holds him back.
Help me, he says, and he feels his father's strength of will surrounding him.
Attend to what I say, Sarek says, and like a small child, Spock lets go of his pain at last and waits to see where his father will lead him.
X X X X X X
The year that Spock turned 12, Sarek came so close to striking him out of anger that he wished he had studied kolinahr more seriously in his youth. The utter lack of emotion aspired to by its practitioners would have served him well in dealing with his younger son.
In retrospect he couldn't pinpoint the origins of the undercurrent of growing discontent and, yes, why not admit it, at least to himself, disappointment that he felt about his relationship with Spock. All he knew was that when he thought of Spock at 12, he called up a series of moments so fraught with anger that even now they make his heart race and his hands shake.
The first one involved what Sarek had assumed was an act of carelessness or easy vandalism that might have been overlooked if Amanda hadn't noticed an uptick in their garden water use one month.
As soon as Sarek checked the rain gauge, he knew that Spock was responsible. Before the evening meal, he called him into his study.
"Explain," Sarek said, holding up the broken gauge. He settled back in his chair at the desk and waited for Spock to answer. From the other side of the desk, Spock stood with his chin tucked down.
"I needed it."
A deliberately evasive answer, short on the required details. Sarek set the rain gauge aside.
"Elaborate," he said more forcefully.
"I needed it," Spock said, looking up, "for an experiment."
At once Sarek flushed. Spock's repetition was a calculated insult. His tone bordered on insolent.
At 12 Spock had not yet hit the growth spurt that would hint at his eventual adult height. His face still had traces of what Amanda called baby fat. Nevertheless, Sarek found himself reacting in anger, as if a reasonable, rational person and not a child were mocking him.
In one corner of his mind he felt Amanda stirring, alerted to his mood. In a moment he heard the door to the study open as she walked in. Spock flicked his eyes toward her before looking down at the floor.
Slowing his breathing, Sarek said, "Are you aware that your mother requires the gauge to set the garden sprinklers properly?"
Spock met Sarek's gaze and nodded. Behind him, Sarek heard Amanda let out a breath. At the same time, he felt her irritation and realized that she was holding back her own impulse to chastise their son.
"Then explain," Sarek said, emphasizing the word, "to your mother and me why you appropriated an object that does not belong to you, which the family requires, for which you asked no permission, and used it for your own purposes."
Even in the late afternoon gloom of the study, Sarek could see from Spock's expression that he was considering how to answer. Good. He needs to learn to reflect before speaking.
Or before acting. The scuffle last week at school—letting himself be provoked into violence—
Sarek's face heated up at the memory of the call from the headmaster telling him to fetch his son.
Now Spock stood mute, his expression a confusing mixture of anger and anguish.
"Answer me," Sarek said, but Spock said nothing.
"Spock." Amanda took a step forward, her hands out like a supplicant. "What's going on? Why won't you answer us?"
Her frustration echoed his own. Why indeed?
That Spock was so recalcitrant at times, that he kept his thoughts partitioned from his parents with a vigilance Sarek found unsettling should no longer be surprising. For as long as Sarek could remember, Spock had been this way—private to a fault, and more than that—willful, excessively so.
If Sybok weren't as willful in his own way, Sarek would have been tempted to look to Spock's humanity as a reason for his strong-jawed stubbornness.
But as Amanda pointed out long ago, Sarek himself was the common denominator, the author of their genes and their environment. Either way, he could look to no one else to blame.
"I did not break it," Spock said at last, glancing at the rain gauge on the desk.
Not disguising his skepticism, Sarek said, "You deny you are responsible?"
"I have improved it," Spock said. The note of defiance in his voice was provocative.
"What are you saying?" Amanda said, stepping closer to the desk. Sarek picked up the gauge and held it up. The automatic drain had been jimmied open and soldered back. The fill line was partly obscured by a thin metal loop on the narrow end, and what Sarek had at first thought was a broken debris screen was, on closer inspection, a small solar cell.
"What is this?" he said, looking up. Spock was watching him closely, his dark brown eyes so like Amanda's that Sarek felt a catch in his throat.
Spock held his hand out, palm up, and Sarek realized with a start that he was asking for the gauge. No, not asking. Demanding. Through their bond he felt Amanda's amusement and he sent back a trickle of irritation.
We shouldn't indulge him, he thought.
"This," Spock said, pointing to the metal hoop on the gauge's narrow end, "is a magnetic resonator. It links the water molecules together and prevents them from escaping through here. That is, as long as there is a power source. That is why I have attached a solar cell."
He tipped the gauge toward Amanda, making her his sole audience. Sarek recognized the deliberate slight but said nothing.
"This chip," Spock said, thumbing a small metal disk on the side of the gauge, "sends the water level readings to the computer each night and opens the gauge to drain. I have programmed the gauge to turn on the sprinklers when the water level falls below the monthly average for five days in a row. Now you will not have to reset the gauge by hand or turn on the sprinklers."
His tone was an odd mixture of triumph and grievance. It infuriated Sarek.
Amanda, on the other hand, blurted out, "Well done!"
"Except," Sarek said sourly, "that does not explain why the water use is higher than it should be."
Spock's expression fell immediately.
"The magnetic resonator fails 22% of the time," he said, darting a glance at Sarek. "The sprinklers come on because the level readings are artificially low."
Despite himself, Sarek had to admit that Spock's idea was sound, even if his actual execution was faulty. For a moment he was silent.
"The solar cell is inadequate," he decided. "Replace this with a larger one and try again."
It was as close to an apology as he was able to offer. He saw comprehension in Spock's eyes as he nodded to his mother and left the study.
"He was only trying to help," Amanda said from behind his chair, letting her hand slip to his shoulder. "Don't be so hard on him."
"He should have asked permission," Sarek said. "Or at the very least, he could have asked for advice. I could have instructed him on the appropriate size of the solar cell."
Amanda leaned forward and draped her arms around his neck, pressing her cheek to his.
"But he wanted to do it by himself," she said soothingly, and Sarek felt his irritation ebbing away.
The garden sprinklers were the source of tension again, this time in late summer when the plomeek shoots were most susceptible to dehydration. At least twice a day and usually more, someone had to supplement the automatic sprinklers with old-fashioned soaker hoses dragged along the rows of plomeek. It was time-consuming, messy work that fell mostly to Amanda, though Sarek helped on the days that he got home before dark.
Spock was expected to help as well, though recently it seemed to Sarek that Spock was making himself scarce when the watering needed to be done.
"That's your imagination," Amanda said, but the next time that he came home and found Amanda in the garden, soaker hose in hand, he marched into the house and found Spock in his room, writing on his PADD.
"Is this a requirement for school?" Sarek asked, trying to control his annoyance. Spock shook his head and Sarek went on. "Then explain for me why your mother is outside working while you are inside doing nothing of value."
As far as Sarek was concerned, that should have been the last of it, but two days later he came home and found the same thing—Amanda outside while Spock sat in his room.
Sarek was instantly angry with them both—Spock for laziness and Amanda for allowing it.
"This is unacceptable," he said, directing his attention to Spock as they sat at the table for the evening meal. Spock set his spoon in his bowl and let his hands drift to his lap while Amanda shifted in her seat across from him.
"What are you talking about, Sarek?" she asked.
"Spock's unwillingness to help with household chores," Sarek said, and Amanda frowned.
"If you're talking about today, he and I agreed—"
But he cut her off.
Stop making excuses for him.
"I'm not," she said aloud, but Sarek set her words aside impatiently.
Turning to Spock, he said, "Why have you avoided helping your mother with the garden?"
"I do not like working in the garden," Spock said promptly.
Sarek blinked in surprise.
"Your feelings about the matter are unimportant," he said. "The garden must be watered. Your mother requires assistance. You will render it. Do you understand?"
"Sarek—"
"Amanda," he said more testily than he meant to, "Spock has to contribute to the family's well-being."
He felt her about to reply when Spock spoke up first.
"Actually," he said, his dark eyes sweeping from his mother to his father and back again, "the Federation charter includes a provision about the rights of children. If you like, I can show it to you. It prohibits forcing children to do manual labor or work deemed too onerous for their size and ability."
He lowered his eyes and picked up his spoon, dipping it slowly into his stew.
Sarek was stunned.
Amanda burst out laughing.
When she caught her breath, she said, "Well, Sarek, I think our son has outlogicked us. What do you think of that?"
Placing his hands carefully on the table, Sarek said, "Unlike your mother, I do not find your words humorous. Until I tell you otherwise, you are forbidden to do anything other than sit in your room and meditate on your duty to this family."
The tsunami of Spock's emotions crashed over Sarek—his son's pent-up feelings unleashed through their family bond, a swirl of fury and distress and embarrassment and neediness—and images, too, of Vulcan school boys waylaying Spock when the teachers were preoccupied, taunting him, baiting him with words that even now Spock tried to hide from his parents, to keep them from hearing. Sarek's own anger rose and tangled with his son's, and underneath it all, Amanda's keening sorrow and dismay nearly bending him double like someone in agony.
"Spock—" he started to say, but Spock stood up abruptly, his cheeks flushed.
"I wish you were not my family," Spock said.
From the corner of his eye Sarek saw Amanda, pale and stricken, her hand on her face as if she had been slapped. Her misery made his stomach lurch.
For the first and last time in his life, Sarek felt his arm lifting of its own accord and he knew that he would strike his son.
Amanda's horror stilled his hand and he stopped, motionless except for the heaving of his chest.
"Leave," he said hoarsely, and Spock stumbled out of the kitchen.
Across the table Amanda sat unmoving, not meeting his gaze.
I would not have—he began, but he faltered. He wasn't certain what he would have done; his loss of control was that complete.
A blast of cool air ruffled his hair at the same time that he heard the front door slam shut.
Spock! Amanda called out silently, but the connection that had flared between them was muted again, Spock withdrawing into silence.
"Sarek," she said, but he was already on his feet and heading to the door. Surely Spock had enough sense not to go far in the dark. Even this close to the house, the desert was dangerous. Several times recently Sarek had seen le-matya tracks on the edge of the garden. A neighbor's pet sehlat had disappeared, presumably carried off by predators.
Tonight Vulcan's sister planet T'Khut was only a tiny sliver in the sky, not enough light to help him navigate. With a start, Sarek tripped over a rocky patch as he circled the house.
"Spock!" he called, but even as he did, he knew Spock wouldn't answer.
For a moment Sarek seriously considered leaving him outside.
In the distance a wild sehlat yowled. The wind soughed through the young plomeek plants knee–high in the garden. Now that Eridani had set, the sand gave up the heat of the day and the night air shimmered and settled in a cooling mass.
"Spock!" Sarek called again, rounding the house near the porch.
"Spock!" Amanda shouted from the front yard.
Sarek could feel Amanda's worry blossoming into real panic as the minutes rolled on.
"He cannot have gone far," he said, starting up the flitter.
His search was slow and methodical, looping in an outward spiral with the house as the hub. A hundred meters, then two, and outward until he was so far from the house that it disappeared behind tall shrubs and boulders.
And still no sign of Spock.
Setting the flitter in a dry gully, Sarek centered his thoughts and ranged outward, looking for his son in his mind. His presence was so dim that at first Sarek was sure he was hurt or frightened. But when he tried to approach him, Spock skittered away, shielding himself like someone hiding under a blanket. At last Sarek gave up, restarted the flitter, and flew home.
Amanda's face fell when he walked in alone.
"I'm calling the authorities," she said as she rushed past him to the comm in the study.
Neither one slept at all that night, Sarek vacillating between shame about his own actions and vexation at Spock. When he tried to take Amanda's hand in his own, she pulled away, such an uncharacteristic rejection of his touch that he was alarmed.
"You should rest," he suggested. The glance she shot him was so withering that he knew better than to say anything else.
When Spock opened the front door and walked in the next morning—his hair dusty, a tear in the knee of his pants—Amanda cried out and ran toward him, her arms outstretched. From the back of the entranceway Sarek saw Spock hesitate for a moment before letting his mother pull him into an embrace. When she let him go at last, Spock's fingers slid across her palm so quickly, so lightly, that Sarek almost missed it.
"I apologize," Spock said, his voice raspy, looking first at his mother and then turning to Sarek, "for speaking to you out of anger. I said words I did not mean."
"I know that," Amanda said. "We all say things we don't mean sometimes."
She looked toward Sarek and he recognized that she was giving him a cue.
Speak to him, she thought.
Speak to him. Sarek was at a loss for what to say.
For hours he had thought of nothing other than this moment—Spock safely back home. Not lost, not hurt, not the unimaginable loss that only a few hours ago had seemed not only imaginable but probable.
His son standing tired and dirty and genuinely sorry for the trouble he had caused, his grief radiating outward to both Amanda and Sarek, and his gratitude, too, that they were here now, waiting for him.
And Sarek's own unspoken love for his son like a bruise on his heart, inexplicable, gigantic, almost frightening in intensity, threatening to overwhelm him, to swallow him whole if anything should ever happen to this child, this boy, this young man whose features were a shadow and an echo of his own, of Amanda's.
If anything should ever happen to him—
My logic is uncertain where my son is concerned.
His heart welled up with relief and contentment. Amanda looked at him again and said, Speak to him.
He opened his mouth to say something, anything, that would carry his feelings forward.
How hard it was to find the right words.
Or even adequate ones.
"Your mother was worried," he said, the words wrong and thin, hoping Spock could hear past them to his meaning. "Don't ever do that again. We need to know if you are safe."
X X X X X
Spock flexes his fingers experimentally. Despite the medic's assurance that a lingering stiffness in his wrist is normal after two weeks in a cast, he is disconcerted by how much effort it takes to make a fist, to pick up anything heavy, to curl his fingers through the handle of a tea mug and lift it.
As he does now. Sitting across from him at the break room table, Nyota cups her hands around her own tea mug and watches him with a critical eye.
"This calls for a celebration," she says, startling him. His expression apparently gives him away because she adds, "You know, because you're free now."
An image of T'Pring as she was the last time he saw her flashes through his mind. The annulment had been short, formal, tense—his father and T'Pau in attendance, T'Pring's family conspicuously absent.
Annulments on Vulcan were rare but not shameful. That he had initiated it, however, had been…at least from T'Pring's point of view. She had not bothered to hide her anger.
But he's told no one on Earth about the annulment, not even Chris, the closest person he has to a confidant. Nyota must be referring to something else.
"From your cast?"
Ah, of course. He nods and says, "Indeed."
He looks down at his hand and has another memory, this one from earlier today when he had stood behind Nyota as she worked at the computer, and leaning forward to pick up a stack of PADDs she had set to the side, he let his fingertips slip across her forearm.
Nothing blatant, nothing extraordinary. Something one human might do to another without a thought.
But his touch was planned and much anticipated, his shields up to keep his thoughts and hers separate, partitioned away from each other. As much as he desired a brush of her mind, he had settled for the touch of her skin, cool and silky, with hair so fine that it was barely visible.
It was something he had wanted to do ever since he woke up briefly in the hospital, calling out her name.
And if he is honest with himself, something he wants to do again when the opportunity arises.
That revelation unsettles him. Where, exactly, does he think this is going?
"So what are you going to do?" she asks, startling him again. "To celebrate?"
"Is it required?" he says, quirking the corner of his mouth. She rewards him with a smile of her own.
"Absolutely," she says. "If you had broken your leg, you would have to celebrate by going dancing."
"And a broken wrist?" he says, holding up his arm, his hand turned palm up. "What does that celebration require?"
For a moment she continues to smile, but then her expression shifts, as if she is gazing inward at something remembered.
"I think," she says, sliding her eyes toward him, "that when a broken wrist heals, you are required to wave more to your friends."
She laughs lightly and raises her hand as if preparing to wave.
"To tell them goodbye?" Spock says, playing along, and she says, "To tell them hello."
Before he realizes what she is planning, she lowers her hand and grazes his wrist.
Her touch is quick and teasing and so unexpected that he doesn't have time to corral his thoughts.
She blinks once and frowns slightly as she pulls her hand away.
But not before he knows what she knows—that he had not fooled her earlier in the lab with his pretended nonchalance, that she knew as soon as his fingers brushed her arm that he was doing it deliberately.
And she had not minded. Had, in fact, welcomed it.
"Commander, I—" she starts, and he is suddenly fearful of what she might say.
That she's had time to reconsider her response. That this is ill-advised.
"I owe you a meal," he says to keep her words at bay. "Now that my wrist is healed—"
"Oh, that's right!" she says, and just like that, the tension dissipates. "I never did get to eat that meal I cooked at your apartment!"
A good thing, as it turned out. Spock had come home from Vulcan with one of his mother's recipes and had offered to cook for Nyota soon after he was released from the hospital. The cast, however, made preparing the meal difficult and Nyota had taken over the chore.
Exhaustion had sabotaged the evening. Before he could eat, he fell asleep on the sofa and Nyota had slipped away, leaving the uneaten vegetable tagine in the cooler.
The vegetable tagine laced with plenty of cinnamon—which, he recalled later, his mother had warned him about.
"Some Vulcans can't eat it," she told him, "including your father. It works like cacao—only more so!"
While he was eating the vegetables, he didn't know they would make him as tipsy as a mug of hot chocolate. He's still relieved that Nyota wasn't around to see him afterwards—
Now he has an opportunity to do the evening right, to prepare a meal they can share. To enjoy each other's company.
To decide what all that entails.
Against his better judgment, he lets his imagination drift. A meal, and conversation, and the feel of her skin—
"Tonight," he says, and she looks up. "I could cook for you tonight. At my apartment."
Her smile lights up her face.
"I'd like that," she says, but then her expression darkens and his heart begins to race. "But not tonight. I have chorale practice. We're getting ready for the spring concert and I can't miss."
He's disappointed and relieved in equal measure.
What a foolhardy idea, what a needless temptation to put himself through. What was he thinking?
His father's recent words come back to him unbidden.
I would not have—
An odd parallel, the images his father shared during his healing trance—of himself as a challenging 12 year old, his father's patience pushed to the brink of violence.
Spock has always admired his father's control, his unnatural equanimity in the face of provocation. Yet the image of his father caught in the nexus between love and fury, his hand raised against his son—
Skirting the edge of control, but barely, Amanda's voice calling him back from the brink.
That Sarek wrestled with the same gap between reason and emotion is a strange source of comfort to Spock now.
I would not have—
"Another time, then," he says, blanking his expression to hide the truth.
The truth that his intentions in inviting her tonight are suspect. That he has no assurance that they would have shared a meal and nothing more, nothing compromising, nothing that would have brought their careers crashing down.
That he is his father's son after all, mute and stumbling in his love, capable of wounding with a careless touch.
A/N: Okay, so technically this chapter breaks the pattern…Sarek tells this story and it is more his than Amanda's…but he spoke up and I had to listen.
I've written before about Spock's bus accident, but not from his point of view. That story is "The Visitor," and in my little timeline where I play in the Star Trek universe, it comes right before Spock and Nyota finally become lovers in "The Word You Mean."
Even when I love certain characters, I think to be believable they have to have darker moments from time to time. Some readers object to that, so I hope you weren't troubled by the way I show Sarek and Spock in this chapter.
Thanks for reading this story and leaving reviews. Those reviews are like chocolate!