Chapter 16: Prelude
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters and make no money here—and little enough elsewhere!
Spock is stepping out of the shower when he hears the chime on his subspace console. His mother, obviously. Although it's 3:44 AM San Francisco time, his mother knows he won't be asleep. On Vulcan her day is just ending. He can picture her putting a pot of soup on the cooker before parking herself in his father's study to make a call.
He's usually the one who calls—once a week at a scheduled time—but he senses nothing through his family bond that makes him think the call is an emergency. Indeed, if anything, his mother seems more remote than usual. Unwelcomed news, perhaps, or something unpleasant she's gently shielding from him even as she thinks he needs to hear it. Nothing dire. More heart surgery scheduled in his father's future? That must be it.
He slips his arms into his thick white robe and tugs it closed before answering the chime. At once his mother's face swims into view on the screen. As he expects, her brows are furrowed and she isn't smiling, indications that she is concerned or in mild distress.
"Mother," he says, but before he can continue, she says, "I wanted you to hear it from me first."
Immediately Spock is alarmed. No preface, not chitchat, no human niceties. Not like his mother at all.
"Father—" Spock begins, but his mother shakes her head.
"No, your father is well. This is…something else."
At that, Spock feels his mother's rising anxiety and he takes a deep breath. She glances away for a moment before continuing.
"It's about T'Pring," she says, and he looks up in surprise. He hasn't seen or heard from T'Pring since he formally broke their bond on Vulcan last year—not that he expected to. She had clearly been angry—or more likely, embarrassed—that he had taken the initiative in ending a relationship neither felt was satisfactory. "She's bonded again," his mother adds.
"I see," he says, struggling to blank his expression.
"Her kal'telan was announced last week," Amanda said, frowning. "I don't recall to whom."
"Stonn," Spock says immediately. His mother's eyes flick open a fraction and then narrow. Anger. On his behalf.
That T'Pring has been bonded again this soon is almost scandalous—in Vulcan society, at least. It is also a calculated insult, Spock is sure. She must have been very angry indeed to risk censure from the Vulcan elite.
He feels his mother's turmoil as she weighs what to ask him.
"You knew about…Stonn?"
"I suspected," Spock says, feeling his own anger competing with his mother's. "They were traveling together during her tour on Earth last year. I spoke to him in New York."
"Oh, Spock!" his mother says, her voice anguished. "Why didn't you tell me?"
He says nothing.
For a few moments he senses her distress and he tries to keep his gaze steady to reassure her.
I am…okay.
It's true, relatively speaking. He certainly doesn't regret breaking his bond with T'Pring. Long ago he had given up the notion that they might be friends or companions—T'Pring's disinterest was evident. But he had reconciled himself to the idea of themselves as partners pooling their economic resources and raising a family—not as satisfying as a genuine friendship, perhaps, and not approaching the intensity of the emotions his parents feel for each other, but a workable arrangement, and probably not that rare.
Still, when he traveled to New York unannounced to surprise T'Pring while she toured with a group of architects from Vulcan, he had been dismayed to find Stonn in her room, smirking, barely civil. If Stonn were a sexual dalliance only, Spock wouldn't have cared. After all, Spock's own sexual history isn't an empty page. As a student at the Academy, he had engaged in sexual relations with several other cadets, none involving an emotional attachment or even an expectation of one.
By the time he graduated he had satisfied any curiosity he might have had about human sexuality and was resigned to an abstemious life as an instructor at the Academy.
Until he met Nyota.
As astonished as he was to find himself pulled toward Nyota—attracted to her intellect while she was his student, attracted to her sexually as well when she was his student aide—he was careful not to act on his feelings until after he had dissolved his formal ties to T'Pring.
Perhaps that, he thinks, is the reason for his lingering anger with T'Pring—all the misery he endured out of a sense of fairness to her; a lack of similar restraint on her part.
Or maybe, he admits, his anger is a symptom of something more shameful—mere wounded pride, for instance, that she prefers someone else over him.
Or closer to the truth, that she prefers Stonn—the schoolyard bully who, if Spock is completely honest, dogs his childhood memories with his relentless, pointed, undisguised hatred.
That, and the fact that her relationship with Stonn is not just a convenient sexual release but something more, something deeper—something she refused to grant him, despite holding a piece of his consciousness in her own.
"You know," his mother says, "that you can tell me anything. If you need to."
She looks at him with the kind of earnest intensity that always made him uncomfortable as a child, unsure exactly what she wanted from him. When he complained once to his father, Sarek was unsympathetic.
"Your mother's concern for you is justified," he said. "Your decisions are not always wise."
That, too, is true, Spock admits to himself. His relationship with Nyota, for instance…his decision to ignore the cease and desist order established at the conclusion of his disciplinary hearing.
He shares none of that with his mother—because he knows he isn't being wise.
When the silence stretches between them a beat too long, his mother folds her hands in front of her and sighs.
"Mother, I—"
He pauses.
In one way it would be a relief to tell her what she wants to know—the details of the hearing, an explanation of what led up to it, what has transpired since.
What Nyota means to him.
But he isn't quite ready to answer that yet. To do so—to speak on Nyota's behalf about a future they might have together—feels presumptuous, like taking the choice of how to navigate her career in Starfleet away from her before she's had time to fully consider it.
The worried frown on his mother's face prompts him to stumble on.
"We do need to talk," he says, and his mother's expression brightens at once. "But not now. And not like this, over subspace."
"Then when—"
"The end of February," he says quickly, settling the matter for them both. "I'll come home during the Academy spring break for a few days. If I tell Captain Pike now, I can reschedule the shipyard visit planned for then."
He feels more than sees his mother's disappointment—and her resolve not to pry. He sends back a wave of gratitude.
Reaching for the subspace controls, he hears his mother say, "It's not easy," and he pulls back his hand and waits. She wants to tell him something, though he's at a loss to know what.
"Even when two people are truly committed for each other, it's not easy," she says, and he realizes that she is talking about T'Pring.
"I've told you before, Mother," he says, feeling a flash of irritation at the human capacity to forget, "that I do not regret the bonding. It made me feel more…typical…less isolated."
They've had this conversation before—or parts of it—her uncertainty about bonding Spock as a child driving her guilt.
"I'm not just talking about being bonded," his mother says slowly. "I mean letting a friendship evolve into something more. Vulcans have it backwards, as far as I'm concerned. You have to be friends first. Without that—"
She lets her words drift off.
That his parents haven't always been friends catches Spock off guard—not that obvious truth, but the fact that beyond asking his father once about why he married an Earth woman, Spock has ignored the how of their relationship.
Picking up on his confusion, his mother looks up.
"I've told you that story before," she says, the corner of her mouth turning up. "About how I had to educate your father about what it means to be a friend?"
She's smiling now as she conjures up some image, the happiest she's looked since the call began. Spock nods.
"You have," he says, his own lip quirking up at the realization that for once he knows what his mother needs, knows how to make her happy. "But I would enjoy hearing you tell it again."
X X X X X
If Amanda's rent hadn't been due, she would have quit the first week.
No, that wasn't true. She was far too stubborn to let a bunch of snooty Vulcans run her off. Not the first week.
Her part-time job as cultural aide to the Vulcan embassy—navigating the adjutants and junior ambassadors through the shoals of Terran customs and behaviors—paid too well simply to walk away, even if she weren't staying partly to prove a point—not to the Vulcans with their maddening indifference but to herself, at least. She had been warned by more than one skeptical human that the job was untenable, that no one could work for any length of time with the Vulcans at the embassy. That despite their trumpeted belief in IDIC—infinite diversity in infinite combinations—Vulcans were notoriously insular, even chauvinistic.
Before she met any Vulcans, Amanda had been impatient with that sort of talk, dismissing it as bigotry. Now, however—well, it was galling to see the gap between her liberal ideology and the reality of being snubbed daily by people who treated her with barely-disguised contempt.
Even Sarek, the junior ambassador who hired her, had proven difficult to get to know. And not very helpful, either.
Like the matter of where to work, for instance. Amanda spent one frustrating day trying to figure out the logistics of a work area—literally walking from office to office in the gray stone embassy looking for an empty desk in the corner of a room where she could set up a computer connection. No one offered to accommodate her. In fact, the blank or disapproving expressions the staff members gave her made her hesitant to even ask.
She resolved to ask Sarek to help her, and the next afternoon when she returned to the embassy, she saw him and an older Vulcan walking ahead of her at the far end of the corridor. Hurrying to catch up, she felt a wave of frustration as they turned the corner.
"Wait!" she called out, but she was sure they had been too far away to hear. She redoubled her speed and rounded the corner—and plowed right into the elderly Vulcan.
"I'm so sorry!" she said, instinctively grabbing the man's forearm to keep him from rocking backward. From the corner of her eye, Amanda saw Sarek take a step away, his exotic features radiating mild shock.
She dropped her hand at once. If she didn't know much about Vulcans, she did know that touch was taboo. Her face instantly flushed.
"I'm so sorry!" she said again, darting a glance from the older man to Sarek. The elderly Vulcan's expression was flat, impenetrable, but Sarek's eyes were narrowed slightly with the same ghost of amusement she remembered from her interview weeks ago when she accidentally tumbled her chair over.
"Ms. Grayson," Sarek said evenly. "I do not believe you have met Ambassador Somak. Ambassador, Ms. Grayson is our new cultural aide."
The ambassador said nothing, nodding slowly. Nothing in his expression changed but his disapproval was palpable.
She lifted her gaze to Sarek and raised her eyebrows.
I've already apologized. Twice.
The same flutter of amusement crossed his brow.
For a moment she stood flushed and tongue-tied.
"You asked us to wait?" Sarek prompted, and Amanda flushed harder.
"Yes, well," she stuttered, "I wanted to see about finding a workspace. If you could—"
"Of course," Sarek said, turning away and continuing down the corridor with Ambassador Somak.
A dismissal, clearly. Amanda hesitated only a moment before calling out, "When can I—"
Sarek didn't pause but looked briefly over his shoulder. This time he didn't look amused.
"I will contact you when it is appropriate," he said. Amanda silently fumed.
Several days went by before she saw him again, this time when he stuck his head in the door of the office of the adjutant she was coaching in Standard slang.
"I have a place set up for you," he said without preamble. She waited for him to continue and when he didn't, she sighed.
"Do I have to guess where it is?"
He blinked in obvious confusion. Now it was her turn to be amused.
"I'll come to your office as soon as we are finished here," she said, looking him in the eye and then deliberately glancing away. Perhaps that was being too cheeky? She looked up but he had already disappeared.
She was still feeling amused—and cheeky—when she entered Sarek's office an hour later. Immediately she spotted a desk set up in the corner, a portable computer terminal in its packaging on top.
"This is where I'm to work?" she said, moving past Sarek who sat at his own workstation. "Are you sure I won't bother you?"
For all her missteps, he must find her company acceptable after all. She grinned in spite of herself.
"There was no other place," Sarek said. "Everyone else objected."
Amanda's grin evaporated.
"Oh!"
"As I am away from my office more than I am here, your presence will not disturb me."
She was surprised at how disappointed she felt.
For the next few weeks she hardly saw Sarek at all, or if she did, he was busy, preoccupied, rarely doing more than looking up from his computer to acknowledge her.
Most of her time at the embassy she spent tutoring various members of the staff on everything from Terran dressing habits to how to engage in casual chitchat. Usually someone would have a very specific request—how do I select an appropriate gift for a human celebrating his own nativity; please explain the significance of so many different types of human footwear—that she could answer quickly and concisely, though sometimes the requests were more complicated and she had to spend a great deal of time organizing her response.
Please offer information about any topics not suitable for discussion with humans, for instance.
"You know," she said one day when Sarek was in the office as she was finishing up, "instead of just waiting for individual questions to come up, I think I'm going to offer a discussion forum for anyone who wants to attend."
She looked over at Sarek to gauge his response. As usual, his attention seemed elsewhere, and when he didn't reply, Amanda assumed he wouldn't and she turned back to her computer. He did that sometimes; not, as she had thought at first, out of rudeness, but because he had nothing to add. She had to admit that her comments often didn't require an answer—although a human would have felt compelled to give one.
Today, however, his silence niggled at her and she took a breath to continue. Instantly she saw his posture stiffen.
She was bothering him? Too bad. He could afford to learn a few human manners.
"You probably think that's a waste of time—"
"And effort," he added without missing a beat, annoying her.
Shifting in her chair, she angled her body toward him and said, "Do you care to explain, or would doing so be a waste of your time and effort?"
She was dismayed at how prickly she sounded, how aggrieved. Blinking and taking a breath, she tried to reign in her anger.
"Perhaps you are unaware," Sarek said, turning to face her, "that Vulcans prize self-improvement highly. The individuals who seek your expertise are motivated to rectify some perceived deficiency in their functioning. They need no discussion forum to identify the gaps in their performance and knowledge. Your time would be better spent addressing their needs in private tutorials."
For a moment Amanda sat, flustered, her mind racing. Surely Sarek wasn't saying that Vulcans were so self-aware that they never made errors. She told him so.
"Not the kind of errors you mean," he said. "Not the errors in judgment that humans routinely make."
"Such as?" Amanda said hotly, and Sarek said, "Such as assuming that Vulcans would participate in a discussion forum."
He turned back to his computer screen, as if the conversation were over.
"I see," Amanda said, biting back her words. "Errors in judgment such as assuming that Vulcans could set aside their barely hidden xenophobic arrogance and learn something from a mere human!"
She stood up then, too angry to collect her bag or close down her workstation. From the corner of her eye she saw Sarek watching her march to the door.
She should have quit that first week instead of waiting to get fired.
"Ms. Grayson," he said, stopping her. She didn't turn around but consciously slowed her breathing. "The second floor conference room is unoccupied every evening except Mondays. If you need it."
She wasn't being fired?
The junior ambassador's words were not quite an apology, not quite an invitation. Certainly not explicit encouragement. But Amanda felt her anger lessen, felt a rush of appreciation. She turned and looked at the man sitting behind his desk.
Sarek was staring at her, his eyes so dark that she couldn't read his expression. Of course, reading his expression always was a challenge, and since she started sharing office space, he had actually become harder to measure. Instead of becoming more familiar, the way a human companion might have, Sarek seemed more remote, ignoring her, or at best, tolerating her presence.
"I thought you said it was a waste of time," she said, and this time Sarek's expression did waver. His left eyebrow rose a fraction. The corner of his mouth turned up.
"And effort," he said.
He was teasing her?
Not likely. Still, she stepped back toward the desk.
"Then, yes, I'll send out an invitation to the staff about a discussion forum."
She emphasized the words with more annoyance than she felt.
"If you prefer," Sarek said, "I can send the notice for you. If it comes from my office, the staff will feel compelled to attend."
At once Amanda felt her anger return.
"And they won't come unless they are compelled to?"
"Precisely."
"No, thank you! I don't want to force anyone to do something against their will! That's not what humans do!"
At that Sarek looked unmistakably flustered.
"It is my understanding," he said, "that quite a few behaviors are imposed on humans against their will. Vaccination against disease, compulsory education, traffic signals, laws forbidding—"
Amanda shifted and crossed her arms.
"Okay, you've made your point! But I still don't want you to force anyone to come. It takes the fun out of things."
"The discussion forum is supposed to be…fun?"
Again the baffled look. With an exasperated sigh, Amanda said, "Vulcans never have fun? Is that what you're telling me?"
Canting his head slightly as if he was mentally scanning something—which, Amanda realized later, he probably was—Sarek said, "Fun, as in amusement or pleasure."
Uncrossing her arms, Amanda said, "Yes. Doing things you enjoy."
"Such as doing a job satisfactorily."
"No, not really," Amanda said. "You can do something well that you don't enjoy. I mean doing things that make you happy. Fun isn't serious. It's lighthearted, like when you spend time talking or visiting with friends."
"As we are doing now."
"No! You and I are not friends. We are…co-workers, or colleagues, or something," Amanda said as she made her way back to her desk and sat down. "Friends call each other by their names, know things about each other. Do things together."
"I see," Sarek said, though his voice sounded less sure than he usually did.
A week later Amanda paced at one end of the conference room as the time for the first announced discussion forum came and went and no one showed up. For fifteen minutes she ticked off the possible reasons—the staff hadn't gotten her invitation, or if they had, they had forgotten when and where the forum was being held. Some emergency might have tied them up, or there was another meeting happening right now and no one had thought to tell her.
Nonsense, of course. Vulcans didn't make those kinds of errors.
More likely, she thought, finally packing up her PADD and turning off the lights, Sarek was right—that Vulcans might seek out her expertise privately but wouldn't attend a public meeting.
The next day she waited for Sarek's I told you so.
"You might have better attendance," he said mildly without looking up from his computer screen where he was manipulating columns of numbers, "if you offered a particular subject for discussion. Leaving the topic open-ended sounds inefficient to people who might otherwise have been interested."
She recognized that he was pulling his punches, that her planning had been disastrous. With a rueful smile, she said, "What was it you said? About human errors in judgment? I guess I proved your point for you."
Abruptly he looked up from the computer and gave her a hard stare.
"My words were poorly chosen," he said, and Amanda was so taken aback that she didn't know what to say.
The following day she sent out a notice that she would be free to discuss human eating habits and customs for anyone planning to attend a Terran function involving food. At least twice she'd been startled during a tutoring session when someone asked unsolicited advice on the topic.
Why do humans consume animal flesh?
What purpose does conversation serve during meals?
Is the human predilection for refined sugar an indication of their suicidal tendencies?
Considering how many dinner parties and large public gatherings the staff had to attend, she could be a valuable resource. And it might even be fun.
This time two Vulcans arrived early for the forum and Amanda was hopeful that more would show up. However, the only other person who came was Sarek, who slipped in the door right as the hour sounded. He settled into a seat near the back of the room—the way a supervisor might stay aloof in order to better observe her.
The idea made her nervous.
"Before we get started," she said, turning her attention to the two Vulcan women sitting on the front row, "do you have particular questions you want answered?"
"How long will this forum last?" the older woman said, hitching her dark gray robe around her shoulders.
"Uh, I'm not sure," Amanda said, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. "I think we can cover everything I've prepared in about an hour, but if you—"
"So you cannot be precise."
To Amanda's astonishment, the woman stood up and made her way down the short aisle to the door near where Sarek sat.
"I can go faster if you need me to!" Amanda called, but the older woman exited the door without looking back.
From his seat near the door, Sarek watched Amanda with such a steady gaze that she flushed.
He came here to see me fail. The thought made her flush again.
"Do you have any questions before I begin?" she asked the remaining Vulcan woman, half afraid what she might say. But the woman shook her head and Amanda flipped off the lights and began the audio-visual she had made to accompany her talk.
Forty minutes later she was finished, as spent as if she had run a race the entire time. When she turned the lights back on, the woman got up without a word and walked out.
From the back of the room, Sarek stood and came toward her.
"Go ahead," Amanda said. "Say it."
"Say it?"
"That I wasted my time and energy."
"I found the talk informative," he said, angling his hands at his side like someone at attention. Amanda sighed.
"You don't have to lie to make me feel better," she said.
"Vulcans do not lie, Ms. Grayson."
She flicked her eyes up to decide whether or not to believe him. As always, his face was impassive, his expression—if not serene—then steady.
"Well," she said at last, "I'm glad someone found it informative. I just wish I knew how to get other people to share your view."
"If I may," Sarek said, motioning to Amanda to proceed down the aisle ahead of him, "I have some ideas about how to appeal to more participants. Would you care to discuss them, perhaps over a meal, the way humans do?"
"A meal? Now?"
"Neither of us has eaten an evening meal," Sarek said. "And I would like to practice some of the suggestions from your talk."
For a moment Amanda felt a wash of disappointment that what had at first sounded like a dinner date was actually nothing more than a typical Vulcan itch to try out something learned.
More disturbing was the implication beneath her disappointment—that she had wanted it to be a dinner date—that she had stopped seeing the junior ambassador as her nominal employer; that his unapproachable aloofness had morphed into something else, something she found disturbingly appealing, even attractive.
She gave him an appraising look as they walked into the corridor. Junior Ambassador Sarek was proverbially tall, dark and handsome, his long robes accentuating his broad shoulders and his lengthy stride.
This would never do.
On the other hand, she was hungry.
Nothing in their conversation over a quick meal at a nearby diner hinted at anything other than pure professionalism—again to Amanda's disappointment. By the time they parted—he to return to work, she to head to her apartment across town—she was determined to squash what she recognized as that swoony, butterfly-in-the-stomach feeling that signaled the beginnings of real attraction.
They were colleagues, that was all. Not even friends. Nothing but people who happened to share an office space at work.
And she was going to make sure it stayed that way.
Her resolve foundered two days later when a parent of an elementary student in her afternoon program at a local school gave her two tickets to the symphony.
"Not me," Amanda's roommate said when she asked her to join her. "I'm not a classical music fan."
Her downstairs neighbor wasn't interested, either. The only other person Amanda knew well enough to ask was a waiter at the Moroccan restaurant around the corner.
"If it weren't tonight, I'd go," he said, shrugging as he folded napkins before the evening rush.
Amanda could, of course, go by herself. But having someone to share the experience was part of the fun.
Part of the fun. Fun that Vulcans didn't seem to know how to have.
She'd ask Sarek.
Normally she didn't work at the embassy on Fridays, and she wasn't sure he would be there—but as soon as she started down the hallway toward his office, she saw that his light was on.
Despite her determination to stay cool and detached, her heartbeat sped up.
If he was surprised to see her, he didn't show it. Instead, Sarek leaned back in his chair as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
"Ms. Grayson," he said.
"Amanda," she said. "You always call me Ms. Grayson, and it feels so…formal."
Folding his hands on his desk, Sarek leaned forward.
"I understood that when two people of unequal social status were in communication, honorifics were used among speakers of Standard. Was I mistaken?"
Unequal social status. Amanda felt a weight settle in her stomach. Well, it was true, wasn't it? He was a junior ambassador and she was a nobody. No, that smacked of self-pity. She was an underemployed certified teacher looking for a full time job while working as a part-time cultural aide.
There. That sounded better.
"It's just," she stuttered, "that the difference in Vulcan and Terran traditions about names make things more awkward. By human standards, I should also be addressing you the way you address me, by your family name. When you call me Ms. Grayson and I call you Sarek, it's…out of balance. I don't even know your family name."
Suddenly feeling that she was being overly familiar, Amanda looked away.
"You couldn't pronounce it," Sarek said after a moment, and Amanda looked back up and frowned.
"Because I am a human?" she said with a hint of irritation, and Sarek said, "Exactly."
There it was again, that dizzy motion of one step forward and two steps backward in getting to know him. Prickly son of a—
"Did you need something?" he prompted. "This isn't your scheduled time to work."
"Oh! Well, you probably wouldn't be interested."
"You are making an assumption that might prove incorrect."
Amanda snorted.
"Like your assumption that I couldn't pronounce your name?"
A shadow flickered across his expression. Annoyance? Good. She was tired of being the only one to feel it.
The silence in the room stretched between them like something physical. From down the hall Amanda heard someone cough. The overhead air handler clicked on and she felt the brush of air on her cheek.
Sarek blinked.
"S'chn T'gai."
"I beg your pardon?'
"My family name."
"S'chn T'gai?"
She mangled it, she knew. Her spoken Vulcan was more than adequate, but the fricatives in his name were rare, her tongue refusing to curl properly. She tried again.
"Mr. S'chn T'gai," she said, a burble of laughter ruining her attempted seriousness.
"I did warn you," he said, the raised eyebrow, the quirked lip she had come to associate with his amusement giving him away.
"Mr. S'chn T'gai," she said again, squelching her laughter this time, "I came to invite you to the symphony tonight. Someone gave me tickets, and I thought you might find it fun."
"I see," Sarek said. "I appreciate your tutelage, Ms. Grayson. This might be instructive."
He was watching her with an intensity that made her distinctly uncomfortable—and slightly aroused.
This could be a problem.
"Does that mean you accept?"
"Indeed," he said, and she felt herself grinning almost foolishly.
"On one condition," she said, stepping to the doorway. "I won't insult you by mispronouncing your name anymore tonight if you'll call me Amanda."
"The way friends do," he said, and Amanda felt her cheeks grow hot. How long ago had she scolded him, telling him he was not her friend?
Her words may have been poorly chosen.
"Just so," she said. "Like friends."
X X X X X
By the time he finishes his call with his mother, Spock has sent a notice to his computer aide to begin class without him. His aide, a young man skilled in programming artificial languages, will be surprised. Spock never misses class and almost never adjusts a class schedule, something that has earned him a reputation for being a hard-ass among the less motivated students and a devoted following among the ones who appreciate predictability.
A month ago he had returned from the shipyard at Riverside to see Nyota waiting in the shadows for him, the long walk back to the Academy an imperfect substitution for a real visit. Since his disciplinary hearing, however, those kind of cadged moments are the norm. He rarely sees her at a distance on campus, much less in private. Fortunately, the run-up to the Enterprise's launch takes so much of his energy that it blunts the relentless, grinding, wearying frustration that characterizes his mood most of the time.
As his mother spoke this morning, he had a growing awareness that his frank unhappiness in the past few days has been because Nyota was unreachable, away visiting her family. Not that being in Nairobi made her any more unreachable than when she is working across the commons in the language lab. Either way, they are living at a distance.
It isn't logical, of course, but when she is nearby, even though the reprimand stays his hand and keeps him tethered to her mainly through comm calls, he feels better.
Finishing dressing, he makes what is probably an ill-advised decision to meet her at the airport, the way she had surprised him last month. What was it his father told him? That his mother's concern was justified because his decisions were often unwise?
The shuttle from Nairobi is actually thirteen minutes early, but Spock gets to the civilian air terminal long before that. If he waits in the luggage retrieval area, he has less chance of being noticed among the crowd. On the other hand, if he is at the landing pad when the shuttle arrives, they will have an extra 22 minutes together on the walk through the terminal.
He heads to the landing pad.
Because the landing pad is open to the weather, few people meet passengers there. Only three other people wait, all civilians, judging from their clothes; all humans, which makes Spock pause briefly, the way he reflexively does when he enters a group with no other off-worlders. A quick scan of the crowd, a silent accounting. He's heard other visitors from distant worlds mention doing the same.
Soon enough the warning lights flash and the shuttle comes into view—first as a pinpoint of light, and then swelling in size until it rocks gently on cushions of air and settles on the pad.
When a gush of air signals that the hatch is unsealed, the first person out is a well-dressed man carrying an old style briefcase. Behind him are a couple in traditional African robes, and then a young woman in a school uniform.
More people in single-file—most of them with the stretched, weary faces typical of humans when they fly for any length of time. By contrast, five young adult men trundle out in a bunch, laughing loudly.
And then nothing.
Spock's heart flutters in his chest. Could she have missed the flight? He fishes his comm from his pocket. Surely she would have alerted him if she had.
Or maybe not. She wasn't expecting him.
Closing his eyes, he stops listening to the ambient sounds around him. He ignores the steady hiss of the shuttle engines, the clank of the passengers moving past him toward the terminal door. A breeze from the northeast—he blanks it out. The pilots chatting, still inside the shuttle. Their voices fade.
A birdcall, distant traffic noise, his own heartbeat. One by one he eliminates them and strains to listen.
And there, when everything is silent, he hears her—her familiar footfall, muffled on the carpet of the shuttle aisle, the rasp of her breathing as she struggles with something. He opens his eyes and suddenly she is in the doorway of the shuttle, a huge lopsided bundle in her arms. The image is so incongruous that he feels himself staring, unable to move forward until he sees her take a tentative step onto the shuttle gangway.
"Do you require assistance?" he says, and she sees him, her face lighting up, all the sounds around him rushing back in noisy cacophony.
Behind her is another woman—tall and dark and statuesque, carrying a bundle similar in size and shape to the one Nyota carries and holding a small child in her arms. A toddler, humans would call it, an apt description of a child learning to walk.
From the look of them, both bundles belong to the woman—not someone Nyota knows, he decides. On her shoulder Nyota carries a travel bag, her PADD still on and tucked precariously in the outside pocket. Until the landing she had been reading, not talking to the woman holding the child.
It would be like Nyota to offer to help a mother with her hands full—something that never would have occurred to him.
That realization gives him an odd twinge in his side.
"Thank you," Nyota says. "If you could take something—"
He joggles the bundle from her and reaches for her travel bag with his other hand, but the handle is snared by her jacket. Tugging experimentally, he calculates whether or not he could use enough force to dislodge it without pulling her off balance.
It seems unlikely. Reluctantly he lets go and Nyota grins up at him as the mother with the toddler comes up behind her.
This close even he can see the exhaustion in the mother's face, the way she is close to breaking. With a scooping motion, he takes the remaining bundle from her.
Her relief is apparent at once. She adjusts the toddler in her arms, who through all the ballet continues to sleep, its dark lashes fanned against round, brown cheeks.
Nyota holds open the door from the landing area to the terminal and they make their way toward the luggage retrieval spot. This isn't what he had planned, not what he wants, walking with a stranger's bundles in his arms, unable to spend the time speaking privately with Nyota.
At last they reach the carousels where their luggage waits, and a tall, thin man emerges from the crowd and greets the mother.
"This woman," she says in lilting Kiswahili, motioning to Nyota, "and her man have given me aid."
Spock is startled to hear himself and Nyota described this way. How has he given himself away? By watching Nyota too closely? By shutting out everything but her walk, her cadence when she leans toward him with a careful, innocuous comment that nevertheless speaks volumes?
As he hands over the bundles to the man, he notices the mother eying him, nodding. It's not a look he's used to getting—especially not now, when Earth United and other xenophobes have taken their protests to the streets in larger cities.
"Thank you, friends," the mother says. "Go in peace."
And suddenly she is gone, swallowed up by the crowd. With a little exclamation, Nyota darts forward and claims her single piece of luggage as it circles the carousel—and when Spock takes it from her hand, he lets his fingers graze hers.
I've missed you! she says wordlessly, and he floods her fingertips with such a barrage of emotions that she gasps. Relief that she is at hand, literally, and sexual longing so intense that his breathing hitches. Disappointment that they are here in a busy public space, about to board a busy public hoverbus—unable to do more than sit next to each other as the bus jostles the 8 minute route to the Academy campus and their inevitable parting.
Go in peace, the mother said, conferring on them a contentment that he tries to feel as they queue up at the bus stop, as he watches Nyota step like a lithe dancer into the bus, as he slides her luggage into the storage rack and swings his torso into a seat, careful not to let his thigh lap against hers.
To anyone watching, they are nothing more than friends.
Which is not to say that friendship isn't key. Carrying bundles for a harried mother, walking in a beeline through the airport terminal, sitting chaste and silent on a bus—it doesn't matter. If they were never alone again he might be able to bear it as long as they have such moments.
But he feels something else, too, that makes him weigh such times with Nyota and find them insufficient. He thinks of his mother's words, that friendship is a necessary prelude. Like all his mother's metaphors, this one leaves him oddly unsettled, not quite sure of her meaning.
A prelude: a beginning leading to a work of broader scope and higher importance.
When he goes home during spring break he'll ask her to tell her story again, and finally share his own.
A/N: Sadly, that conversation never happens, though Spock imagines what it would have been like in "Ceremony," a one-shot I wrote that starts with the Vulcan genocide and ends one year later. The next chapter in this story jumps to February 10...two weeks before the Academy spring break...and the day before the Federation learns about "red matter."
To every faithful reader, please accept my apologies for being so tardy with this update! RL has been incredibly challenging—not always in a bad way—these past two months, but I have some free time looming soon and will flesh out the last two chapters of this story and post them as soon as I can. After that, I hope to jump back in time to tell Sybok's early story with Amanda and Sarek and Spock if that's something that interests you. Let me know! Your comments help keep me going!