[Disclaimers/warnings at top of Part I]
Many thanks to Linstock and Spockchick for valuable advice!
Part IV
Uhura.
I have to meditate. It's driving me mad, hell, Spock is driving me mad, here but not here, watching me all the time as if I'm going to say something to set him off, and I'm afraid if I do say something I will set him off, and my mind has been tracing circles in circles. I realized this afternoon on lunch break that I had spent almost the whole hour worrying. Stupid me, eating alone, but Gaila was handling an Engineering emergency, and M'Ress was on duty, and who wants to look at my gaunt distressed face anyway?
Plenty of other people would be sympathetic –M'Ress and the other two Bridge Comms officers are friendly with me – but not like Gaila and I are. I've never felt comfortable airing my personal business with anyone but Gaila because she's been through it all with me. We were roommates when Spock and I fell in love. She's seen us from the beginning and at every stage of our …. What is it now, an affair? A former affair? A once-in-a-lifetime love that's over and dead? Our love relationship – until now – has always been rock-solid but discreet (because Spock is the First Officer and I'm a Department Head); only Gaila understands how sacred I hold our secrets, Spock's and mine. As for working with him … lately that's been awkward.
I realize how alone I truly am on this ship. Len McCoy would listen, but he'd feel torn between friendship and his professional position as Chief Medical Officer; he'd feel he needed to refer me back to the psychologist, who's quite good, but I need more at this moment. I need to stop discussing and worrying about my problems, I need to set my mind free of them for a little while, and I know (and Dr. Tamargo has told me) that meditation is one of the best ways to do this. God knows dancing hasn't worked to release my anger. Kickboxing, yeah … later. That will get my body tired and ready for sleep. But right now I just need some freedom ….
I go to my closet and get out the box Gaila gave me after my mission to Al'Rugh, things I'd forgotten when boarding Enterprise for the second time at Earth, after repairs of the damage done by Nero. Inside is the asenoi – red and umber, terra-cotta and golden, the colors of Vulcan – the artisanal clay "firepot," that Spock got for me from the Vulcan artisans near the Embassy in San Francisco. Since Nero – and until recently – Spock and I have meditated together, sitting before his asenoi.
And here is the incense … he brought this to the Enterprise from the collection he had at his apartment off base; it came from Vulcan desert plants and smells heavenly. Just its scent brings back our hours in these quarters, sharing meditation … and those early, delicate and lovely evenings when I would leave the Academy to visit his off-base apartment and find him meditating …
My commander. My professor, then mentor. My lover. The days when we discussed our different personal histories and ways of thinking, when we wandered through fascinating conversations as if traveling a landscape … the days when he and I were first discovering each other's bodies, and the way he took his time with foreplay until I was inwardly screaming for him to get – in – me – now.
He didn't teach me meditation – he didn't bring me the incense – until after Nero.** I had never really thought I needed to meditate before but then we suddenly needed to find peace, together – I inhalel sharply to compose myself in this moment – it is so hard to be composed nowadays – and send up a prayer Masa taught us after Baba left: Ee Mungu nguvu yetu – oh God you are our strength.
Yes – now I must constantly look outside myself for strength.
Spock.
I have tried to meditate without success. I can count my breaths, but find no stillness. I have no need to master my feelings; I seem to have no feelings at all. Lately with Nyota, I have been "going through the motions." I am apart from my normal sense of self, as if disconnected by a transparent wall. I know who is on the other side but cannot reach him. He is not so distant, he has flashes of humor; he is Vulcan without the cold exterior, at least in private, but now I resemble my father in aspect, the father I recall from times in my childhood, the forbidding monolith.
Now there are only the five senses. Except for performing my duties, my Vulcan mind seems dead, the telepathic connection with Nyota is useless now; there is nothing left to communicate in that way. I hear, acutely, murmurs about all that "seems wrong" with me, I hear my world crumbling; I see evidence in my acquaintances' brows wrinkling as I walk by, my juniors straining to understand what I require of them; I smell the scents of my home world everywhere on the Enterprise, where they do not belong and never were; I touch cold bulkheads and panels, perceiving warm rock; I smooth my hair so it lies correctly, but feel disheveled; I check my uniform's appearance constantly; I taste ashes, ashes of what once was, carrying the scent of Vulcan.
Uhura.
I wipe a tear that has seeped out of the corner of my eye. I wipe the back of my hand on my uniform.
Okay, do the things that precede calm. Dress in your meditation gear – leggings, your small soft t-shirt, your meditation robe. Put the incense in the bowl and kneel. Place the asenoi before you with reverence for clarity of mind. A few deep breaths before you light the pakuv vil-yai. Assume the loshirak.
I light the incense, assume the lotus position (only Spock can hold the leshrik, kneeling posture, for long) and holding my hands palm-up, open at my knees, middle fingers and thumbs touching, I breathe. One.
This is not counting, although it can serve as such; it is an affirmation that I'm one with my higher, wiser self, that I'm one with … him, that I'm one with my family/my friends, with this crew, with human- and Federation-kind, with all the races of the Universe, capital U. That we all breathe, that we all share breath.
After what seems like half an hour, but is probably far less time, I begin breathing deeply and peacefully, free of shallow thoughts, in contact with the endless depth, height, and width of the universe—
The door slides open, surprising me. It's too early for Spock to get here; he's not been here before zero hundred hours for weeks and weeks.
Spock stands in the doorway for a second, then strides over to me. The energy coming off him is making me tremble with apprehension. I'm frozen, stupid with fear, in a way I would not be in my professional life.
He snatches up the asenoi, pinches the ember off the incense, yet the smoke still fills the room. "What are you doing with this?" he shouts at me. Yes – shouts.
I've been so stressed I can't recall my private decorum with him, but lately he's violated that over and over. I smell a whiff of burnt flesh. How dare you?! In a flash I jump up, reverting to sailor talk, scarcely knowing I'm shouting back at him: "I was trying to meditate, you clueless moth—" I'm actually about to say motherfucker, that couldn't be more wrong –– "what the fuck is wrong with you!" I'm shaking with anger now.
He says nothing, just stands there in a towering rage, his eyes as black as I've only seen them twice before, recently when I kept asking him what was wrong and the time he almost killed Kirk. I hear a deep … snap, a crunch, and glazed red pieces of the asenoi and green drops of blood fall to the deck as Spock stalks out the door. I run out the door, but away from him, in a different direction, sobbing with every breath.
/\
He has come back to our quarters and cleaned up in my absence. I see the broken asenoi, in the box in which Spock originally gave it to me. When he left in a rage, I ran straight down to the gym to kickbox until I was exhausted. I've returned sweaty and tired to see him sitting at the desk, his back perfectly straight, and I'm sick of him not looking at me when I come in and his remote expression when he does look at me. I shout at him from the bottom of my gut.
"How can you continue to do this?! To me – to us! You're not just neglecting our love – you're doing whatever you can to destroy it!"
Spock stands and examines me. There is no scrutiny like his. His eyes take in every centimeter of me, from my feet up to my angry, teary glare.
"You are unhappy."
It's as if he's forgotten an hour ago when he broke the firepot – when he crushed it in his bare hand.
** see my story, The Way Back
To be Continued.
A/N: A short chapter, I know. The ones to come will be short or long, depending on dramatic flow.
If you'd be so kind, share some comments; they keep us fanfic writers writing and improving. What did you like? Did anything distract or pull you out of the story?
More angsty stories (e.g. Loss, The Way Back) at my FanFic site SpockLikesCats; you'll find humor (Put Your Junk in the Box, Sketches of Sparrow) and romance (my Hot Tubs stories) there as well!
/\ Glossary /\
Asenoi: fire-bowl [used for incense]
Baba: father
Ee Mungu nguvu yetu: oh God you are our strength.
FAS: Fleet Admiral [chief] of Starfleet
Hir: 'him or her'
Loshirak: lotus position, seated, knees wide apart, lower legs folded against inner thighs, feet tucked, soles up, into the fold of the opposite inside knee.
Masa: mother [ki-Swahili]
Ozh'esta: the touch of the first two fingers of each partner's hand, a "Vulcan kiss"
Pakuv vil-yai: "odor flame," incense coil [author's construction from Vulcan words]
Plebe: an Academy midshipman/cadet just reported for the summer before the first academic year; one who hears constant swearing at and condemnation of, hirself, the better to get hir to conform to all the new rules; one who engages in constant swearing with hir fellows in private moments; one who is obedient to all above hir; the lowest life form at the Academy.
Zero hundred hours: midnight