Chapter 2
Stonn runs. The landscape is a blur beside him. The local star is hidden behind thick layers of dust from the terraforming process, but he can feel the radiation warming his skin through the clouds.
10 kilometer. 15. Had he run at a normal pace, he could have kept this up for far longer, but unlike the hybrid behind him - Spock has stopped shouting Stonn's name - his greater lung volume lets him double his speed for a short amount of time. His ancestors used that extra speed to catch sehlats or varen beasts, but Stonn is a modern Vulcan living in a modern city and the most he's ever raced to catch are Terran baseballs and Tellarite boomerangs. In any case, it has the same end result. The available glucose in his system eventually burns through and the lactic acid goes from noteworthy to problematic in just a few heartbeats.
It'll happen soon, but not quite yet. For now he's just here, just present, alive and aware of it in a way that only the desert can make him.
Spock's closing in. He's faster than he was seventeen years ago, the last time they ran the Forge. For a moment the physicist-poets who insist that time does not really exist make perfect sense to Stonn. All the times they have run together is the same time, and Stonn wishes he could stay in that interminable now. Maybe, just maybe, Spock will feel the same.
He's almost up the side of a steep hill, and he powers through the last few meters on sheer willpower.
He falls to his knees. His spent muscles can't handle the sudden force and he falls forward and to the left, landing hard on his bent arm for a moment. His body screams at him and he's momentarily stunned as he devotes all his energy to mute the pain.
Spock runs up beside him half a minute later, stands over him, looking down. The half-Vulcan is out of breath, but not dangerously so. It was always like that - T'Pring and Stonn were faster, if they wanted to, but Spock could run for hours.
Stonn tries to say something to that effect, but his lungs aren't yet capable of forming an air stream that is steady enough.
"Don't speak," Spock orders and pulls out a small foldable tricorder. He runs it over the other man, and Stonn lets himself fall backwards, gracelessly. His eyes are fastened at the stern features of the other.
The last time they met, Spock's eyes had been cloudy with plak tow madness. All signs of Stonn's childhood friend had been burned away by the mating fever, leaving only an incoherent creature bound by biology and the deep psychological conditioning of Vulcan tradition. Both these bonds grant Spock absolution for what happened three months previously on those ancient, cruel, blood-washed sands - absolution from both the lore and the law. Until a few minutes ago, Stonn had dared hope that Spock would, at least, have accepted that absolution for himself.
He can see in Spock's eyes, now, that that has not happened.
They are really so much alike, this man towering over him and the mate that Stonn has left back on the freighter. Duty-bound. Proud. Utterly impossible. Surakisi.
Most of the time the three of them are not friends. Friendship is a purely emotional relationship, and in ages past it led to war and strife and never-ending series of vendettas. Vulcan loyalty runs deep: deep and dangerous. Modern Vulcan has learnt to view it with scepticism.
So they are not friends, only associates, in school or during the educational trips they take together. But when they are out on the Forge, Vulcan law and modern Vulcan sensibilities gets hazy like the heat waves off the sand.
By the lore, in ages past, they would be known as a katen, Stonn knows: a self-selected gathering of youngsters. The katen are mostly known from long rhyming songs about raids and vendettas, but Surak himself had a katen, and eventually some of those few trusted people became the heart of his council.
Just as Vulcans should not have friends, Vulcans should not have enemies. But Spock has both.
Stonn and T'Pring have come to know that there are Vulcans who carry and nurture disgust and hate for Spock, just for being alive. They deal with them on a case by case basis. If the haters are Surakisi there are old traditions and ceremonial challenges that they can be used. Because Spock and T'Pring are from the families that they are from, teachers and parents turn a blind eye. The law tries not to tangle with the lore.
Those people are not the most difficult, though. The worst are the serene Vulcans who come up to Spock and calmly state that they consider his very existence to be ethically wrong. That his mother and father are immoral. That he should have been aborted, and failing that, should now be exiled and sterilized. They say it in a polite, dispassionate manner. In school, Spock merely notes their words and says little in return.
Stonn knows that this restraint makes Spock's father proud. So he follows T'Pring's lead and does nothing to interfere.
Later, out on the forge, though, Spock will practice tortuously slow katas or meditate for hours. Stonn tries to get him to talk about it, like they do in the South, to acknowledge their emotions so that they can deconstruct them, deal with them. But that is not the Surakisi way.
Then, when the meditation is, predictably, not enough, they will spar or run for hours until all the confusing emotions, all the anger and frustration, disappears because there is simply no room for anything but the desert and the search for the next breath.
Author's Note: I'll try to update again tomorrow - thanks so much for the reviews WeirdLittleStories, cobalt-blue, PHXYote and starfleetdream!
I am consciously staying a bit vague on some issues here, I think it fits with the theme of Vulcan mysticism. But I'm hoping it's not so confusing that it's frustrating, only tantalizing.
