Chapter 16

Kirk is inside his new quarters for all of 45 seconds before he decides to take the admiralty up on their offer of pre-assignment leave.

It's well after midnight. San Francisco's January air is heavy in his chest, thick with the scent of moisture, and cold in the way that seeps through Human skin and settles into the bones beneath. His head is muzzy with lack of sleep and Starfleet-issue bourbon, and his face aches from hours of relentless smiling. His legs are leaden and sluggish, as though he's walking through soup, and he slumps against his door as it slides shut behind him, closing his eyes before they have time to take in the contours of his living space, bathed in the chilly white moonlight of a clear winter's night.

Kirk toes off his boots and kicks them across his unfamiliar carpet. They skitter off into the shadowy depths and fail to strike an opposite wall; fail to connect with any other solid object, in fact, in a way that describes the dimensions of the room all too clearly in relation to, say, the stateroom of a Constitution-class starship. This is when he realizes he's not getting any sleep tonight.

He turned his back for 30 seconds, to answer a question from Admiral Fitzpatrick, and then 30 seconds became two minutes, became five, became ten, and when he turned around again, Spock was gone. Ciana was apologetic: I guess he just seemed really uncomfortable. Seemed kind of insensitive to keep him here. It's you they want, anyway, Captain. And he had to smile and make some self-deprecating comment, the kind of fawning politesse that he abhors, and she laughed and rolled her eyes, and he'd swear she was just a little bit disappointed that he thought she'd be impressed by 'Fleet diplomacy. And Spock was still gone, to God knows where, and they didn't even say goodbye.

Five years of friendship, and they didn't even say goodbye. He's not sure where that leaves them. He's not actually sure he wants to know.

His overnight bag is untouched and sitting on his unfamiliar bed. Kirk grabs it and slings it over his shoulder, retrieves his discarded boots, and walks straight back out the door.

-o-o-o-

Iowa is the obvious choice, and he dismisses it immediately. He doesn't want home. Home is a reminder that he's tethered to this soil, and the thought of it tightens his chest and constricts his throat, as though the past has thrown a thick blanket over him that cuts out the light and the air. In his mind's eye, the undulating oceans of featureless prairie telescope into infinity and he feels himself being sucked into the loamy farmlands, pinned to the cornfields and staring impotently up into the endless night sky. So instead he buys a ticket on the red-eye to Boise, jamming himself into a corner of the airtram behind an elderly woman who smells of peppermints and rosewater, and a young, bucolic couple with a sleeping toddler drooling a dark, damp patch on the woman's shoulder. Kirk pillows his arm against the window, pulling his overcoat tightly around his dress golds to shield them from curious eyes, and manages to snatch forty-five minutes of fractured sleep.

It's still dark when the tram's sudden descent shocks him out of a twilight daze halfway between oblivion and drowsy wakefulness, and he blunders into consciousness with a sickly lurch. The moon always seems three times bigger in the Idaho sky, and it casts a milky shimmer over the thick winter snows that cover the Rockies. Like a tumbling waterfall of white, they drift down the mountains and over the city itself, hanging in the trees and on the rooftops and, this early in the day, in pristine sheaths on the sidewalks, glowing pools of orangey-yellow beneath the streetlamps.

The frigid air hits him like a wall of ice as the doors hiss open, and Kirk suddenly realizes that he's scarcely dressed for a Californian mid-winter, let alone the glacial grip of Idaho in January. He burrows into his coat as the frozen wind sneaks through his cuffs and his collar, and crosses the concourse to the soundproof booths, where he flips open his communicator with fingers that have turned a worrying shade of lilac.

It's 0230 hours on a Thursday morning. He's expecting an answering service, or at the very least a lack of response. So it's something of a shock when Admiral Ciana answers with a sleepy, "Yuh. Kirk. What can I do for you?"

He hesitates. "Admiral - my apologies. I was planning to leave a message."

"Well, you got me. What's on your mind, Captain?"

Now, there's a question she doesn't want an answer to. He says, "I… it seems a little foolish, now that I'm talking to you, ma'am. It could have waited until morning."

"I think you'll find it is morning," she says, and he can hear a smile trickling through the fatigue. "Don't worry about it, Kirk. I was awake anyway. You might as well just spit it out."

"I was just… It was a courtesy call, ma'am. To let you know I've taken the leave you offered. I'm in Idaho now."

She laughs softly. "Didn't waste much time, huh? Did we spook you that bad?"

"No, ma'am," he answers automatically. But he can't think how to finish the sentence in a way that doesn't contradict himself, and doesn't mention Spock.

There's a pause, during which she's clearly waiting for him to speak. Then she says, "I think that's a good idea, Kirk. I do. This is… it's gonna take some getting used to, I get that." A beat. "You know, for what it's worth, I really am looking forward to working with you. I'll see you Monday morning, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed."

"Thank you, ma'am."

"Now, for God's sake, go get some rest. You think I don't know you're running seven hours ahead of us? No - wait. Mountain Time, right? So you lost another hour. Sleep - that's an order, Kirk."

He grins. "Yes, ma'am."

"Don't 'yes, ma'am' me with a tone that says you're planning on ignoring me," she says, but he can hear her answering smile.

"No, ma'am," he says.

-o-o-o-

He rents a car from an all-night place he remembers from a trip he took with Sam during Spring Break his second year at the Academy, and sprawls on the tattered leatherette seats as it carries him into the belly of the mountains. The sky above sparkles with the effervescent sheen of a frozen winter's night, and, as he glides out of the haze of city light, it's possible to pick out the relentless glint of industry in the dark vaults above: a beacon flash from the orbital dockyards, a silvery streak against the black depths, a sudden flare as distant metal catches the trailing starlight. Kirk trains his eyes earthwards and watches the play of shadows on snowy branches instead.

The farm was his uncle's, before he moved offworld, and, when he died, it passed to Kirk's father. Kirk remembers him only vaguely as an indistinct shock of brownish hair, an easy laugh, and a ready supply of the kind of candy that forever captures the hearts of small boys; in his mind's eye, his uncle has become the house he left them. It's more tangible than the man himself. When his parents are on Earth, they spend their weekends here, and, during their long absences, a woman comes up from the local village to air the place and to keep the pipes from freezing. So it's chilled but not derelict when he opens the door: the damp scent of snow fills the cavernous main room, but there's ashes from a recent fire in the grating, the drapes are drawn, and the environmental controls spring to life at a single, spoken command. They stutter once - it's the middle of nowhere, after all - but bounce back online, and Kirk can feel the air begin to defrost around him, tugging the perfume of warming wood from the walls.

He grabs a synthesized mug of coffee in the kitchen, and hoists his bag over one shoulder as he climbs the narrow staircase. The back of his eyes has begun to hum a keening, background ache that gouges little tendrils of pain when he glances to either side, and his muscles feel stringy and elastic with fatigue. Dawn comes late in the midwinter mountains and the sun is still buried behind the looming rocky crags; he ought to take his CO's advice and scrape a little downtime out of what's left of the night. The cloistered air of his bedroom has heated more quickly than the open, communal spaces below and it blasts a soporific lullaby as he opens the door to find the lights on low and a lavender-scented comforter, hand-stitched and fraying with age, cast across the wide bunk.

Kirk switches off his communicator, kicks off his boots, and climbs, fully-clothed, beneath the sheets.

-o-o-o-

He doesn't dream. At least, not that night.

Rather, his body plunges him into a syrupy black coma that freezes him in place until it has taken what it needs, and then it wakes him up with a grumbling stomach and an electric jolt of poorly-defined panic. Thin, white sunlight curls around the edges of the drapes - floral; he can't imagine whose choice they might have been in a family of men headed by a matriarch with decidedly un-floral leanings - and the bedclothes are barely disturbed around him. Kirk sits up, slowly, and the creaking protest along every inch of muscle confirms his suspicion that he's scarcely moved in - he glances at the chronometer - eleven hours. Eleven hours? It's been a long time since he's had the opportunity to just sleep until he's done with sleeping. The angry ache beneath his ribs gives a violent twist.

He hasn't washed in over thirty-six hours; hasn't eaten in nearly twenty-four, aside from canapes fashioned from four parts air to one part cobweb, or ingredients of similar nutritional value. There's no food in the kitchen, but the synthesizer's programming is attuned to the Kirk family's collective palate and there's no CMO here to bellyache about red meats and saturated fats and cholesterol, so he orders up a stack of silver dollar pancakes with syrup, hash browns and bacon, and a pot of hot coffee to replace the frigid mug sitting untouched by his bedside. While the aged machine has a think about how to do that, and in what order these things ought to be produced, Kirk takes himself off to the shower and washes the memory of space out of his hair and off of his skin in a steady jet of steaming water that's just the right side of scalding.

There are things that need to be done. There is a protocol for returning home after a long period of absence, punctuated by brief, infrequent calls on the shaky subspace lines reserved for personal communications. The last time he saw his parents was in the medical examiner's office on Starbase 12, where they met the Enterprise to take custody of their grandson and the bodies of their eldest son and his wife; the last time he spoke to his mother was easily six months ago, maybe more. He's been gone for five years, but he hasn't disappeared from the historical record: there are friends with whom he ought to reconnect, places where he ought to show his face, familial expectations that must be met. The thought of these things sends a fresh wave of fatigue crashing through his endocrine system, and he buries it with coffee as he gazes idly out of the picture window and into the near horizon.

He's not prepared for the memories that assault him from every corner of his recollection, with every footstep and every glance and every unguarded moment. He ought to be safe from them here, and yet the Human brain is subtle and recondite, and it finds prompts in the least likely cues. The shade of refracted light off a crystal decanter sparks a thought-ricochet that spirals relentlessly into a quiet evening in his quarters between missions: Bones and Kirk and a bottle of decent brandy, and the warm rush of pleasure that follows Spock's unexpected arrival. The faintest trace of ozone on the sharp winter air and he's suddenly back in the bowels of the Enterprise, crawling through a Jeffries tube behind an agitated Scotsman and tailed by a Vulcan whose copious intellectual gifts incorporate a savant-like ability to calculate probabilities of success and failure, and absolutely no grasp whatsoever of when it's appropriate to communicate these things to his colleagues. Even the chatter of winter birdsong outside the windows throws him headlong into recollections of a dozen, two dozen planets where the air was similar, the plant life familiar, and the sunlight fell in the same spectrum - and yet subtly, exquisitely different, enough to keep the fires of discovery burning in his belly. His old life is everywhere, trailing him like a restless ghost. He wonders if this is how it's going to be, now.

So he throws himself into physical labor in an effort to settle the uneasy shadows in his mind. There is a small pile of wood by the fireplace and a larger stack under a tarpaulin in the woodshed, but winter is long in the Rockies, and one thing that will always be necessary is firewood. And there's an instant, gratifying catharsis in swinging an ax and shattering pieces of trees: it's the kind of mindless, repetitive activity that shuts down exterior thought and allows him to exist only in this moment. Snow litters the ground around him, curling damp tendrils of cold through the soles of his Starfleet-issue boots and pooling a trailing seam of meltwater up the leg of his jeans, but he quickly works up enough of a sweat to throw off his jacket, then roll up his sleeves. Swing and crack - splinters of wood exploding as the ax falls, shattering the log as it strikes. Swing and crack - frustration riding a tidal wave of kinetic energy along his arms, discharging in a blaze of focused destruction. Swing and crack - a myriad poisonous little hurts erupting, fracturing, purging. Swing and crack. Swing and crack. Swing and crack.

When the early evening wraps fingers of nebulous gloom around the yard, Kirk tosses the ax to one side, grabs a handful of snow-scented, chilled kindling, and carries it indoors to the fireplace. His shoulders flare burning streaks of pain down his back and arms, and his hands are raw and scoured beneath his heavy gloves, but the dull weight of fatigue has settled into his skull, clouding out the turbulent buzz of disquiet. He scrapes the ashes from the grate and builds a stack of tinder and narrow shards of firewood, pinned in place with dry logs from the hearth, and leaves it to catch while he showers off the afternoon's exertions. When he pads back into the darkened room, it's bathed only in the warm yellow glow of the flickering firelight, shadows skulking on the edges of the den and dancing up the walls. He pours a drink from the liquor cabinet - Kirk's penchant for fine whiskies is his father's genetic legacy, and the decanters are always well-stocked - and carries it with him to the fireside without bothering to turn on the lights. This is one of the simple pleasures in life: to sit in front of a healthy blaze fashioned from one's own exertions, and for a moment he allows his eyes to unfocus as they settle on the coruscating flames.

Spock.

It ambushes him out of nowhere, startling but not unexpected. Not really. The knowledge that he's been waiting for the word to verbalize itself in the savage quiet is quickly followed by a perverse sort of relief, as though the struggle to contain it is more difficult, in the final analysis, than simply letting it happen. Unleashed, memories charge at him in a rush of words and voices: warm glances from the science console; the pleasure of an unexpected brush of long fingers against his arm; the glint of quiet triumph as his First moves his knight into the killing position against the Captain's king. He remembers pacing in Spock's quarters in the hours after they warped away from Neural, arguing with him about his decision to arm Tyree's people against the men of Apella's village and their Klingon weapons. Arguing at him, rather; Spock was still weak from his injuries and sat quietly at his desk, hands steepled in front of him, pretending he wasn't exhausted or exasperated, while Kirk raged out his ambivalence in restless movement and unfocused anger.

Jim, he said at last, is this an attempt to convince me? Or yourself?

This was long before The Sneeze, of course. Long before that hopeless hunger had burrowed into Kirk's gut and started the process of unravelling the rare and unanticipated intimacy between them. Long before a series of poor decisions led to precipitous actions that led to him turning over his shoulder into a sea of unfamiliar faces to scan for the one that mattered, and finding he'd left before they could say goodbye.

Kirk is not a man to waste time on regrets. There is so much that he would have done differently, had he only had the foresight to understand where this would inexorably lead, but self-reproach is pointless now. What he remembers instead is that those quiet words, spoken softly but with that presence Spock has when something is important to him, softened the edges of Kirk's private register of remorse and moved them past the Captain's impotent anger at the way things sometimes are. And they segued into gentler things, reminiscences of Lieutenant Kirk's first sojourn amongst the hill people, and the winters there that reminded him of Idaho, a place that Spock had never visited.

I'll make you a deal, Commander, said Kirk, and grinned. Keep me alive for the next three years, and I'll show you the Rockies when we get back to Earth.

And of course Spock protested that he needed no vacationary incentive in order to perform his duty to the best of his ability, of course he did; it was part of the dance and part of the reason Kirk suggested it in the first place. It was an opening into that place they inhabited when the conversation flowed easily between them, and it was still a new place, and it hadn't lost any of the sheen of novelty or the visceral thrill of amazement.

Kirk wonders now if he meant what he said, and suspects that he did. It's easy to mean these things, though, when there's never much chance of the favor ever being called, but that's not it. Or not all of it, at least. Part of him wanted, even then, to bring his friend to this place, if only for the light that he gets in his eyes when he's trying to pretend that Vulcans don't waste time getting excited about aesthetic beauty. The Sneeze was when Kirk realized what he felt, but it must have been building even then.

The memory swims before his mind's eye in the flickering firelight; becomes a pale face beneath a trellis of roses under the milky light of T'Khut, becomes a sudden spike of electricity in the air, then and now. It becomes the taste of copper and spice, of cool flesh pressed up against Kirk's. Becomes fingers grabbing fistfuls of his hair and an urgent tongue twisting in his mouth, becomes an insistent hardness writhing against his own.

In the semi-darkness, Kirk reaches beneath his robe and curls one hand around himself, as images of Spock hover behind his closed eyes.