PART I: VULCAN
Chapter 1
Kirk's hand is tingling.
It's something of a surprise to find that he's aware of this small fact, buried as it is beneath the strata of chaos that have layered over the general maelstrom of his daily life. But it's dark now and he's alone with far too many thoughts clamoring for attention inside his aching skull, and one of them - a particularly vociferous and insistent one; the Admiral Komack of thoughts, if you will - is demanding that he pay attention to the network of nerves that stretch beneath the skin of his right hand. Because they are alive with remembered touch.
The ship is as silent as a ship at warp can ever be, which is to say that the engines thrum on the limits of hearing, vibrating through the fabric of the hull and into the bulkheads and across the air that touches them. The hint of voices carry imperfectly through the walls as assorted crew pass along the corridors outside. Things that are supposed to reassure their Human masters that they're working efficiently periodically go beep, the air filtration system rumbles obstreperously, the replicator sighs, water sings in buried pipes, and beneath it all, outside the range of Human hearing, but available to a man who knows his ship like a father or a lover, is the hum of life living itself, minute by minute.
It's usually comforting. Tonight, it tap-dances along the fine line between oppressively silent and shut the hell up.
His hand is tingling.
A portion of his rational mind insists that the gesture could not have been intentional. It must have been a reflex action, automatically applied and then impossible to unobtrusively correct. There is just no way that Spock deliberately reached for his Captain's hand. Even if he was distracted by the fact that Kirk was temporarily inhabiting the body of Janice Lester, there is still no way that Spock intentionally wrapped his fingers around the wrist of an unknown woman in full view of Dr. McCoy, three security officers and someone who looked like the Captain. It just didn't happen. It must have been an instinctive reaction, born of the fact that Kirk was trapped in a body without physical strength and four men were bearing down on them, one of whom had already demonstrated his ample capacity for violence. They're a logical race now, but Vulcan society is founded on the principle of the warrior caste. Buried beneath that rational exterior, there must be a remnant of the inherent drive to protect the vulnerable. It was a visceral, throwback reaction - like the thousand times the First Officer has illogically thrown himself into harm's way to protect the Captain - and there can't be any significance to it.
So why didn't the hand stay fixed around his lower arm? Why did it snake downwards from its initial encircling grip to close around his fingers? Why did it stay there for almost half a goddamn minute? Why didn't it spring away from his at the first press of flesh on flesh as though Kirk's skin burned?
Why won't his hand stop remembering the touch of the long, cool fingers brushing against his?
He should be angrier about the whole insane day, but all he feels is heavy, sad, and confused. He should be swinging between horror and fury at what nearly happened, but instead he's almost swamped by a rushing swell of pride when he remembers what his senior crew was prepared to do. His mind is full of should, and in fact the only really important should just now is the one that ends with be asleep, but his eyes roam restlessly over the shadowed bulkheads and he knows there's no point in even pretending to himself that this is likely. A more realistic should involves getting started on his report to HQ, in the hope that he can sedate himself with paperwork. It's a should with an outside chance of success. He swings his legs out of bed and calls for the lights.
It's been in the back of his mind for weeks now – twenty-three weeks and four days, in fact - that the remainder of the mission can now be measured in months. He scarcely bothers to convert the stardate back to the Gregorian calendar anymore because every date that passes is a reminder that the next time it comes around it will find him altered: grounded at Fleet HQ, perhaps, or spirited away to another ship. Maybe he'll still be on the Enterprise, but she won't be his Enterprise. The faces will change, the command crew will disperse to the promotions they are long overdue, the pulse of the bridge will be different. Uhura is much too talented to waste any more time behind a communications console, Chekov needs to flex his intellectual muscles, Sulu is itching for command. Scotty is practically welded to the bulkheads, but Bones hasn't got the heart of an explorer and he's ready to take a planetside assignment, maybe start mending some fences with his daughter before she gets any older. And Spock...
Spock.
Kirk remembers the exact moment he realized he had fallen in love with his First Officer. It's not the stuff of Brontean romance; it would barely make it past the first draft of a substandard romantic comedy. But it's been his limited experience that all of the truly meaningful attachments of his life have had their genesis in similarly stupid circumstances. He asked Ruth to marry him on impulse in the moments after a ground car careened through a curbside puddle of infinite proportions as they passed on the sidewalk, because when she looked up at him, San Francisco winter street-water straggling her elegant blond hair and trailing caterpillars of mascara down her face, instead of the expected fury she burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter, and he decided that three months' courtship was enough to know that he wanted to be with her forever. He met Carol and impregnated her with their son after a poetry reading they were both attending during a shore leave on Earth turned out to be so spectacularly dull that the only way to enjoy it was to make better use of the complimentary wine than was necessarily advisable. Gary, he kissed on a dare, before he'd even admitted to himself that gender wasn't particularly important to him as far as attraction went. If Spock is different, it's because it's the first time in his life that Kirk has allowed an infatuation to simmer after he's acknowledged it, and this not because his feelings are ambiguous. They were a long time establishing themselves, but they are nothing if not decisive. There was a day, a quiet day between missions when no-one was shooting at them, no-one was trying to invade the ship and no-one was in any imminent danger of death, when they were sitting in the officers' mess after an ordinary dinner, and Spock suddenly sneezed. That was all it took: one single autonomic function that wordlessly and effortlessly crumbled the wall of imperious Vulcan detachment, and something incandescent ignited in Kirk's belly. In retrospect, the embers had been smoldering for many, many months, but by the time his First Officer looked up to find the Captain's eyes fixed on him and shining, the blaze had gone nuclear.
"Bless you," said Kirk, and received a quirked eyebrow for his concern.
"Well, I'll be damned," said McCoy, leaning back in his seat with an expression of enraptured delight. "How come nobody told me Vulcans sneeze?"
And that was it. The bickering started, predictable as atomic decay, and Scotty turned up to watch for a while, and afterwards everyone went about their business as if nothing had changed. And nothing did change, because what are you supposed to do? No-one has ever been so manifestly, self-evidently unattainable as his Vulcan First. It's not only that he's never given the Captain any reason to think that his feelings are returned, it's that he's actively given him reason to think that they are not. In the year and a bit since The Sneeze, there have been two women in his First Officer's life - one of them unabashedly courted in the Captain's presence - which is an increase of 100% over all the preceding years of the mission, and those are terrible odds.
It's not the end of the world. It's not even the first time he's had to dial his needs down to friendship when his instinct pushes for more. He is certain that he can be content with this, as long as Spock is in his life. And this is guaranteed, barring accidents and general mayhem, for as long as the mission continues.
Kirk has come close to asking several times. They talk together so easily now that it's difficult to remember the awkward, hostile silences of his first months of command, when his every effort was met with a blank wall of antipathy. These days they find an excuse to spend time together most evenings - chess in the rec rooms or their quarters; drinks with Bones or Scotty or just the two of them, settled either side of the Captain's desk with Kirk's stocking feet propped on the table and a poorly-concealed mask of offended sensibilities pretending to manifest itself on Spock's face; long, Sisyphean workouts in the gym where the Captain tries to preserve some modicum of pride on behalf of the Human race and fails repeatedly; nights spent doubling as a lab assistant - to the horror of the junior members of the science team, who scatter like startled pigeons when the Captain appears - when something is particularly urgent or significant, or simply when his friend is excited about something and wants to share. Many times, companionable silence has settled around them like a comfortable coat and into the lull, Kirk has wanted to ask, so - have you given any thought to what you might want to do after the mission is over? And every time he has caught the words before they can leave his lips. It isn't just that he knows - he knows - that Spock will answer, very logically, that he will have very little say over his next posting and that he'll go where Starfleet puts him. It's that he's afraid that he won't say this, and that Kirk will have to hear that Spock has plans for his career that don't involve his Captain.
He's still sitting on the edge of the bed, and he realizes that his eyes have fallen upon the bathroom door and stayed there. He sighs. It's not the first time this has happened, and he's very, very glad that nobody knows this but him. He can just imagine Bones' face if he knew that sometimes Kirk lies in bed at night and watches the door to the head as if it's the portal to a magical land where dreams come true. He knows what he's going to do but he pretends that he doesn't for a little while, even as he stands up and walks across the room. Right up to the point where his feet have to carry him one way to his desk or another way to the smallest room, he pretends that he's going to settle into stultifying duty, and he is, it's just that he's going to go and stand in the bathroom for a while first.
By mutual consent, they've agreed on a median temperature halfway between Vulcan and Terran standard, which means that both of them have spent the past four years being politely uncomfortable and, to the Human nose, the head has the distinctive odor of drains in a hot country no matter what maintenance try to do. Heated air hisses into the damp cool of his bedroom as the door opens, and Kirk crosses to the john for a justificatory pee. Pride will not allow him to glance up at the second door, where a single Starfleet-issue towel is the only evidence of the room's other occupant, but he can feel it lurking in the corners of his peripheral vision. On the other side, the temperature climbs precipitously towards a simple, single bunk, mirror of the Captain's, on which sleeps an undreaming figure, undoubtedly in a logical manner. No declarative sound escapes the cocoon of desert warmth, though the bulkheads are narrow here and admit the noises of daily life: no rustling of bedcovers, no somnolent mutterings, no ragged in-drawn breath. It could only possibly be a Vulcan on the other side of the walls, and this is really not helpful to the Captain's current state of mind.
A Vulcan curled his fingers over Kirk's.
He finishes his ablutions before his little mind can make any connections between fingers and the organ they currently grip - or else he really won't get any sleep tonight - and crosses to the small vanity to wash his hands. His eyes fall on his reflection, underneath the condensation that has gathered in the unnatural heat, and the relief in his eyes is momentarily unsettling. Presumably this too will pass, this sense of minor panic every time he approaches a reflective surface, in case the face that stares back at him has somehow morphed back into Lester's. In the morning, Dr. McCoy will give him the once-over for Starfleet records, to certify that he's fit for duty, but if Janice can pass the standard test used to measure psychological stability then Kirk is pretty sure he has nothing to worry about - which is actually kind of worrying, come to think of it. He runs his fingers across his chin, now reassuringly prickling with stubble, and exits the head before he can do something really humiliating like rest a wistful hand against Spock's bedroom door.
He has spent four years carefully observing all manner of proprieties and social codes, none of which come easily to a Human, and especially not a Human with a propensity to communicate through touch. He didn't even try to shake hands on their first meeting - not that it earned him any points or went any way towards dispersing the manifest air of you are not Christopher Pike that hovered around his First Officer like a cloud of angry wasps for at least the first six weeks of the mission. He has caught himself in the act of delivering a friendly backslap or slinging an arm around his friend's shoulders more times than he's slipped up, he's certain, and he has absolutely, positively never reached for Spock's hand. He thinks. No, he's pretty sure about this. He'd definitely remember. And anyway, if he has, it's been a fleeting touch, an indiscriminate brush of skin that's vanished before either one of them has noticed. Nothing invasive, and certainly not a twenty-five second grip that deliberately closed all five fingers around their counterparts and pressed tightly into his flesh. He knows what it would mean to Spock. It must have been instinct.
Maybe he should mention it.
But he dismisses the idea before it's even formed. For a start, what would he say? More than that, what would it even achieve? Either Spock is aware of what's happened or he's not, and either way he isn't going to be exactly jumping up and down with gratitude if Kirk brings it up. The Captain has seen that elegant face lock down too many times in the face of an accidental blunder to knowingly bring on a full-scale Vulcan freeze. No-one, no-one in the galaxy does pissy like an irritated Vulcan, mostly because pissy is virtually unassailable when you deny that it exists.
Which leaves him... nowhere. Nowhere different, anyway. Exactly where he was this time yesterday, thank every beneficent deity, inhabiting a body he knows what to do with, in command of his ship and his faculties, and with plenty to occupy his restless mind. He barks a soft command to the terminal in the semi-darkness of his office area and the shadows light up as the screen comes to life in a stream of messages. Three of them are from Spock, sent earlier in the evening when Kirk was presumably in conference with Admiral Fitzpatrick, one of which bears the unpromising title, Concerns relating to the sub-optimum efficiency of the gravimetric field displacement manifold. None of them look as though they carry even a passing reference to hand-holding. The Captain lowers himself into his chair with half a sigh and issues a dictate command. Softly, although he knows that his voice will not carry as far as his friend's sleeping quarters, and it would scarcely wake him if it did, he begins his report.
"Stardate 5928.5. Having arrived at the archaeological settlement on Camus II, the Captain was accosted by one Dr. Janice Lester, a woman of his earlier acquaintance, who had familiarized herself with the operations of the starship Enterprise. Further research is required into the nature of the technology employed to effect the life-entity transfer employed by Dr. Lester; orders to pursue said research issued to Commander Spock, First Officer and head of Sciences aboard the Enterprise..."
He stops, rubs his eyes, glances at the chronometer, immediately wishes he hadn't.
His hand tingles.