'One sperm different and it would be as if your brother had been born instead of you.'

Spiralling through a silent maelstrom, ships spinning and blasted, fire exploding outwards then being snuffed out by the vacuum. Bodies arcing into weightless freefall and freeze-drying in an instant. A loss of life so great that Spock could feel it, could sense it in his mind, despite the fact that Vulcan minds made up an insignificant proportion of the whole.

The spiking of adrenaline through human minds, then panic, terror, acceptance and eternal silence.

The silence was stifling, horrifying.

And then he saw it – saw the marbled globe below around which this fire fight gravitated – electrons circling a nucleus, bees to a hive. The vivid oranges and reds, the hopeful clouds wreathing the higher latitudes, the oh-so-familiar outlines of continents and mountain ranges tracking across the marble skin.

Vulcan…

Vulcan, attached – now he saw it – attached to a pseudo-organic tentacled ship by an umbilical of fire. Vulcan, being pierced to the heart with white heat, space strewn with fractured wreckage and frozen beings that had been ships and lives. Vulcan suffering an orgasm of destruction as the beam drilled further into its deepest core.

Had he been human panic would have clenched his heart, but even here, in this dreamscape, he was controlled. More controlled, because of the panic around him.

Dream… This was a dream, and as such it could be manipulated and understood.

But it could not be manipulated. The run of events was remorseless.

He looked about himself, at the bridge of a ship that was familiar and yet so different, at Starfleet operatives at their proper stations, in their proper colours, but with faces that were different, with a different cut to their uniforms, with voices of odd cadence and unfamiliar turns of phrase. Everyone was familiar, but a stranger to him. He heard the word Uhura said with biting urgency, and he turned to the subject without recognition but with a knowledge that this stranger anchored him amid all this chaos …

Control, observe, control…

The vision skewed. Any attempts to understand and control were mocked by the nightmare that held him, and he was in the heat of Vulcan, breathing the sharp, arid air in panting breaths as he ran, the heat of the world cloaking around him.

The ground… The ground was trembling under his feet. Not an earthquake… He knew that much. It fitted no known parameters. Vulcan was heaving through forces outside of any natural agonies of tectonics.

Panic… Panic splitting into his mind despite all attempts to quell the feeling. Panic and effort forcing his heart to thud under his ribs. Shouting exhortations to leave, to escape he knew not what, to save what was left of –

'Mother!'

Spock awoke from a dream that had sifted through every Vulcan discipline and permeated his deepest thoughts, clutching at the most vulnerable, most childlike part of his psyche in a way no waking experience could. For a moment he knew little more than the word 'Mother!', hanging on his lips like a plea for life itself.

And then he remembered…

'Computer, lights,' he snapped, and his cabin was flooded instantly with brightness.

He looked around the room, trying to shake off the memory of a cooler, more metallic room almost in the shape of this one, decorated with items that were almost identical to his own.

He closed his eyes, opened them again, looked around.

The ship was undeniably his, and whole. That other ship was a ghost ship, hovering over the image of this one, but it was not real.

Feelings flooded over him again. Regret, great sadness, the awesome weight of responsibility and a damp, hollow sense of loneliness. Alone, yet not alone… There were three selves vying in his mind – his own self, that which he undeniably was, and a younger more volatile self, and a greatly aged and sad and lonely self.

He shook his head. Was he going mad? Should he consult McCoy?

That thought was dismissed as soon as it was made. What would McCoy do but indulge in human teasing, then put these feelings down to overwork? The last thing he needed was to be placed on restricted duties.

Instead, he called Jim. It was the middle of the night, but he called Jim, and the captain came through into his cabin without argument, with an expression of concern on his face.

'What is it, Spock?' he asked.

Spock sat at his desk, fully dressed now, his fingers steepled before him. The dream should have faded by now but it was still vivid in his head, like another universe living there. Slowly and carefully he explained everything that he had experienced in his dream, the loss of his mother planet and his mother together, the horror and the magnitude of the destruction circling in silent space.

'I saw Miss Uhura, and felt love,' he said with wonder in his voice. 'Nyota. She was Nyota to me, and – she centred me amid all that destruction.'

Jim smiled.

'I glad that you had that, Spock,' he said truthfully. 'That that Spock had that. By your account he was otherwise alone.'

'Yes,' he said, perplexity still furrowing his brow. 'Yes, otherwise he was utterly alone. I would not choose that path.'

'But what about the other Spock?' Kirk asked in curiosity. 'The older one. He was very old, you said?'

Spock nodded slowly. That other Spock sat in the recesses of his mind, an observer, an old and tired man full of guilt. That was the thought that haunted him the most, the one he least wished to dwell on.

'Yes, very old,' he mused, 'and more alone still.'

The two fell into silence. In the dim light the edges of the cabin seemed to fade away into nothing. Spock sat and pondered on that other Spock, old and threaded with arthritic pain, and closed into a universe that was not his. He thought of that Spock, somehow so much more familiar than the first, and he was afraid.