Chapter 21

They part at Command HQ at Spock's request. An extra thirty seconds will carry them as far as the Academy, but Spock demurs - he wants to walk, he says, and there aren't really any convincing grounds on which to argue the point, so Kirk concedes.

However, his pride can't help but comment. "Afraid I'll show you up in front of all your learned friends?" he says with genuine grin, but he's not sure how much of the question is playful banter and how much of it is intended to bruise the flesh behind those immutable Vulcan shields. Spock, of course, does not react.

"On the contrary," he says, which is one of those phrases he uses that sounds like it means something until you pick it apart and find that there's nothing beneath the scrupulously-polished veneer. "I simply prefer to take advantage of the clement weather."

"Clement?" says Kirk, whose temperature gauge read forty degrees when he left his apartment this morning.

A patrician nod. "Comparatively speaking."

Kirk regards him levelly. "Comparatively? Compared to, say, a desert planet?"

"Compared to many of the winter days I passed in this city as a child," says his companion mildly.

Kirk knows when he's beaten. He grins. "Of course," he says. "I'll leave you to enjoy your clemency, Commander." Spock nods and begins to get to his feet, and Kirk adds, quickly, "Let's not leave it so long next time, though?"

It wasn't supposed to be a question. That hesitant note, the tone of manifest uncertainty: that wasn't supposed to be there. Moreover, it's useless to think that Spock won't notice; his hand has already frozen in the act of moving towards the door release. Damn.

Gently, Spock says, "Indeed."

Indeed? Indeed yes or indeed no? More to the point, which one of those means, I am inclined to repeat this experience? But Kirk has already given away more than he intended, and there's no way to ask the question now. So he simply says, "I've missed our talks."

Spock inclines his head. "As have I."

It's not an answer. But it's a start. Kirk smiles, considers raising the ta'al, scraps the idea before it's half-formed, and, before he can change his mind, reaches out and closes a hand around his friend's arm. He feels the flesh beneath his fingers freeze, muscles stiffening as though his touch is electric, as though it burns. But no fleeting ghost of distress passes across the impassive eyes; Spock makes no effort to pull himself free from the grip. He simply holds himself still until Kirk lets go.

"Until next time," says Kirk.

"Until then," says Spock.

-o-o-o-

Perhaps he has a point, though. It's cooler in Horseshoe Bay than on the Presidio, but the sky is visible above the clouds for the first time in forever and the air smells fresh, like distant rain and growing things. As Kirk follows the short path down the gentle slope that leads from the arrivals lot to the Bozeman Center, he can feel the morning's fug lifting from his soul like mist evaporating on the Bay. Until then, said Spock, and, if it wasn't exactly committal, neither was it dismissive. Kirk has plenty of reason to recognize a brush-off from his former First, and that wasn't it. It's possible this is going to be all right.

Xeno is currently cresting the clamorous peak of one of its daily cycles of meltdown and complicated recovery, and the lobby is a tide of moving bodies and noise and information. Kirk weaves through the crossfire with practiced ease, circling quickly around an Ensign with an armful of PADDs and paper heaped in a precarious tower that stretches from her belly to her chin, and glancing absently towards the screens in case they might hold any hint as to what's set off the current commotion. A frantic wave from the far corner draws his eye towards his Yeoman, one hand pressed to her earpiece as she carries on a conversation with persons unknown, the other fluttering insistently in the air above her head. Kirk smothers a grin and shoulders his way across the floor to her cubicle.

She's nodding along with her unseen speaker, although her terminal screen is blank and non-verbal cues are unlikely to pass successfully along an audio-only line. "Uh-huh, yup," she's saying. A glance up. "Lieutenant Commander, can you hold for just a moment? Thank you, ma'am." To Kirk, as she mutes the line: "Sir, the latest reports from OpTacs and Expansion are on your terminal. Commodore Kel needs to reschedule your 1500, but he says he's about forty-eight hours away from a green light on opening up Epsilon Delta Rho, which puts Barsamin IX back on the table. Also, sir, you might want to check the feeds from Sector 44C; there's been some chatter from the Cincinnatus indicating a possible outbreak of hostilities in 16 Cygni B. And Admiral Ciana wants to see you when you have a moment, sir - she's with Admirals Appiah and Bell just now, but she's due to finish at 1445."

It's always safest to wait a couple of seconds after Sanders stops speaking, just to be sure, but when nothing more is forthcoming, Kirk says, "Thank you, Yeoman."

"Thank you, sir," she says, and she's back to the Lieutenant Commander before she's drawn another breath, "Ma'am, thank you for holding - I can tell you that Xeno does hold the files for the settlement proposals, but I can't give you details of the precise location… Uh-huh… Yup, I understand that…"

She's not looking at him, so there's no point in hiding the buoyant grin that's struggling to break free across his face as he battles his way across the short space to the cool quiet of his office and lets the door slide shut on the tumult outside. He hasn't crossed this threshold yet today and the windows are still darkened from the night before, but they lighten with a gentle command, and the powder-blue and silver of the Bay beyond rush in to fill the room. Weak, low sunlight casts a pearlescent sheen on the glass, just enough to reflect the ghost of himself back at him, shaded in washed-out, ethereal grays against the San Francisco skyline, and he wonders, vaguely, what Spock saw when he looked at him this morning. He wonders if he's the same man that lost sight of his friend in a crowded room on a crowded night. He wonders if…

No. He's not going there. That door is closed.

Kirk crosses to his synthesizer and punches in the code for coffee: very hot and very strong. From this angle, it's possible to see that his terminal screen is tastefully but insistently blinking a summons, but he ignores it and turns back to the window. The work will wait for him; it's not as though anyone's life is dependent on Kirk's presence behind a computer screen in the next fifteen minutes. And how often does he get the chance to simply stand quietly in the early afternoon light and rifle through his thoughts? He feels as though he hasn't seen his native sun in too many years to count: other suns, a hundred others, but his own has been an afterthought at the very back of his head, dismissed when he considered it at all. And home is important. He said as much to Spock, once upon a time.

Maybe the meeting was a mistake. Damn it, there are a lot of ways in which it was definitely a mistake. For example, to pluck one particularly pertinent fact straight out of the air, there's the fact that the first thing - the very first thing - that registered in his mind when he turned over his shoulder and found his gaze locked with his erstwhile First Officer's, was a violent surge of attraction that clamped steel fingers around his chest like a vise. There is no getting away from this. That same buzz; the gently gnawing thrill that creates a kind of whisper inside his gut and sets his bones on edge; the kinetic disquiet that fires off little haphazard commands to all his motor receptors and forces him to vigorously repress the urge to fidget like a twelve-year-old boy outside the principal's office; the pooling warmth in his belly and the rushing tide of desire; all of this slammed into his central cortex like a Saladin-class starship at Warp 8 in the instant it took him to process the sight of Spock standing just across the lobby.

It's funny. He'd have sworn that drinks with Ciana in the Casa Lavanda was leading somewhere, but the next day they were right back to Kirk and ma'am and uniformed salutes. She's easy with him - open, kind, accommodating - but she's been easy with him since he started, and nothing has changed these past days. He looks at her sometimes, stolen glances in idle moments, and wonders if he's sorry he went home alone that night. There's no question that she's attractive, but is he attracted to her? Shouldn't he know if he is? They were talking this morning, half business, half pleasure, and he was watching the play of the unexpected sunlight on her skin, the way it drifted across her shifting face, the way it caught on the warmth of her smile and amplified it, and he could see that she was beautiful, but the knowledge was abstract, as though he was learning how to see it. And then he turned over his shoulder and saw a figure in science blues standing on the edge of the shadows, and there was nothing academic about it. Ciana is beautiful, but she's just… not Spock.

As if on cue, his door buzzes, and he knows by the way that it opens before he has a chance to call out a response - and by the way she seems to have made some kind of arcane art out of turning up as soon as he starts thinking about her - that it will be his CO.

"Hey," she says. "How was lunch?"

"Good," he says. "Your recommendation was excellent, thank you. I heard about 16 Cygni B."

"Ugh." She rolls her eyes. "It's a fiasco. How many times did you tell them? Maybe now they'll actually start listening to the guy they put in charge of making sure this kind of thing doesn't happen, but I guess I won't hold my breath."

Nor will Kirk. He says, "There's a chance our presence precipitated the outbreak…"

But Ciana shakes her head. "It's not an outbreak per se, more like a pissing contest got out of hand," she says. "It'll simmer down. The Cincinnatus is going to hang back and observe for a few days, but this is their business, Kirk. Official line is we're staying out of it. They weren't ready."

He shrugs his eyebrows. "I believe that's what my report said."

"Yup, the one I saw sure read a lot like that." She sighs, crosses her arms. "Talking of reports," she says. "You won't believe what just landed on my desk."

Kirk looks up. "The Concordat?"

She nods - a sharp, utilitarian gesture. "You got a minute? You should really see this."

-o-o-o-

The image on the screen looks very much like a Federation starbase might look if someone turned out all the lights and left it suspended in space, black against black in the center of the void. Searchlights caress the edges, picking out blank viewing ports and airlocks, a shuttle bay with the doors firmly closed, escape pods in a neat circle, motionless and unchanging beneath the rhythmic sweep of a starship's unseeing eye.

"The grid was down for five days all in," says Ciana. Her voice is soft in the silence of the room. "Cold as Andor, but auxiliary power kept central life support running on the command floors; I guess everyone just kind of cosied up together in there and held tight."

Kirk's eyes widen. "There were survivors?"

Ciana smiles faintly. "Not just 'survivors'," she says. "No goddamn casualties. Not so much as a grazed knee, Kirk. Everyone made it."

He releases a breath, wonders where the sense of relief has gone. This ought to feel different. He says, "It… doesn't make any sense. What happened?"

"Damned if anyone knows," says his CO. She sits back in her chair, stretches her arms above her head. The action pulls her tunic tight against her chest, and he carefully keeps his eyes averted from the outline of her figure. "There was no declaration of hostilities, no attack, nothing. Just - one minute, power, the next minute - darkness."

"So it was - what? A burned-out fuse?"

"Uh-uh." She shakes her head. "A burned-out fuse wouldn't make the entire central cortex just… disappear."

"Disappear?"

"It's gone. Nothing but a whole bunch of trailing wires and a big goddamn hole in the middle of the duotronics floor. It's why they couldn't send out a distress beacon. They had enough power, but the subspace link was dead."

"But… an operation like that takes… hours, certainly. At the very least. Someone must know who's behind it."

She shakes her head again. "They've got nothing. Commodore Hansen swears he saw no nearby vessels on any of the readout screens."

"All that means is that the vessel that attacked them was cloaked."

"Well, sure."

"Which means that your theory about the Klingons…"

"Is just as plausible as any of maybe half a dozen other races out there, most of whom wouldn't exactly be sorry to see Starfleet - or the Federation - take the occasional hit."

Kirk gets halfway to opening his mouth to argue, but aborts the motion before he's drawn breath. Because she's right. The Federation exists in an uneasy equilibrium with a handful of other powers, known and half-known, and any one of them could have decided that this was the week to start re-balancing the authority equation. And there's not one of them that can be safely accused, let alone set straight on the etiquette of galactic relations.

"It doesn't fit anymore," says Ciana now. "A retaliatory smackdown? That I can see. But this…"

No. It doesn't fit. "Someone on the Starbase must have seen something," he insists.

"They say no," she says.

Kirk throws up his hands, paces to the center of the room. "How is it possible," he snaps, "That the heart of a starbase can be cut out and not a single man or woman on board can say how it happened?"

"It was pitch black," Ciana points out mildly. "Life support was failing. They needed to get to the bridge before Hansen had to seal the lower decks. Whoever did this knew what they were doing. This wasn't a blood feud; this was calculated, planned."

A beat. "And the com chatter?"

Now Ciana rolls her eyes. "You ever meet Hansen?"

Kirk shakes his head. "No."

"I knew him at the Academy - he was an upperclassman my freshman year. Good guy to have at your side in a firefight, but…" She sighs. "Some ways, he's dumber than a bag of hammers, other ways he's so sharp you could cut yourself. And he knows how to play the game. He's set to look pretty damn stupid regardless; last thing he needs is to start looking paranoid too."

"He's denying the message?"

"He's denying our interpretation of it. He says they were reporting second-hand rumors, says that the word 'attack' was never in his original transmission. And he's right, or he could be - you've heard the tapes. There's no way to be sure." She looks up, shakes her head. "It's over, Kirk. We count this one as a win and move on. Nobody got hurt, nobody died. There'll be ripples. It'll be investigated. But not by us."

Kirk twists on his heel so that he's facing out of the long, curved window. The sun scatters silver frosting on the surface of the bay, sculpted and chased by a brisk February wind. Spock will be back behind his desk at the Academy by now, buried in numbers, cocooned and oblivious and radiant with discovery. He feels closer than he has for weeks, maybe months, but Kirk needs him at his side right now. He thinks better when he's there.

Slowly, he says, "Very well. You have my report."

"Yeah," she says, and he knows by her tone that she will disregard it. Not because she wants to, but because nobody died and so they count this as a win and move on.

"I take it this puts Draconis back on the table?"

She tilts her head, raises her eyebrows. "Maybe. We'll see. Could be we've lost our window."

"I'll have Vasiliou pull together the original files, just in case."

"Good idea." She releases a breath, but the tone speaks of an unfinished thought. So it's not entirely a surprise when she says, "Kirk…"

The trailing sentence. Never a good sign. He says, "Yes, ma'am?"

"That's not the only news I got today."

He blinks, sucks in a breath to cover the sudden spike of anxiety that pools deep in his belly like ice-water. An eyebrow quirks, and he says, more steadily than he feels, "No?"

"No." Her brow furrows. "This welcome-home ceremony…"

The ceremony. The goddamn ceremony. He almost laughs out loud, so submerged is he by relief.

"Ah," he says. "They haven't forgotten."

"You know brass," she says. "They don't let go when it's something they want. Like a dog with a damn chew toy."

He acknowledges the truth of that with a thin smile. "I take it they've set a date?"

"April 17th. Cochrane Day." A beat. "I guess… Seems they liked the symbolism."

Kirk sighs. But maybe it's better, after all, to finally put this to rest. Cochrane Day is some seven weeks away yet, and every day he feels a little further removed from his old life. Maybe, by then, it'll feel like it's possible to say goodbye.

It also gives him an excuse to comm Spock. It could be that the ceremony has its compensations.

"A few hours of hand-shaking and smiling for the holocams," he says. "I believe I'll survive."

She grins, but there's an edge of relief to it. "I'd get you out of it if I could," she says.

She would? That's… unexpected. But he smiles and straightens his spine, and says, "Thank you, ma'am, but that won't be necessary."

Ciana's lips curl upwards, but the look she trains on him is speculative. "Good," she says. "Okay then. I'll let you get back to work."

Kirk nods. "Ma'am," he says, and turns towards the door.

-o-o-o-

But he's restless, and mundane does not come easily when his mind is animated like this. In another life, he'd have handed the conn over to Chekov or Sulu and sought out Spock for a spot of long-term strategic planning, because strategy is infinitely less tedious when it's something you live and not just something you do. But the infinite variety of that other life was an artifact of distance and the autonomy it necessarily imposes; wired into the command network and readily available at the whim of the admiralty, it turns out that the collective inclination is to commit every tiny fluctuation of brain energy to written or verbal communication, and convention apparently dictates that every such missive requires a response, regardless of merit, relevance, or inclination. Kirk's screen is still blinking when he lets himself back into his office, like the pointed and relentless clearing of a duotronic throat, reminding him that he has - his brow furrows - seventy-three new messages since last night. It's amazing anything ever gets done in this place, the amount of time everyone spends sending messages to everyone else. At least seventy-two of them will be small roadblocks in the path of progress: gilded no's or budget restrictions, or maybe just wasted time that could be spent in more productive pursuits. Maybe one of them will be a step forward, but that's a hell of a lot of back-steps to counter.

His coffee stands, tepid and disregarded, on the edge of his desk, and he pushes it irritably to one side as he lowers himself into his seat, considers dialing up a fresh cup, decides against it. Resignedly, he tells the computer to scroll through his mail, flicking disinterestedly past lines of blank, impersonal text, and the opening strands of an AV monolog or two, voices flaring and dying like blaring horns or crow-calls beneath his impatient skimming. He has half an idea what he's going to do even as he's pretending he doesn't, skipping irascibly from contact to contact as though each of them has personally offended him by not being from the one person he actually wants to hear from, but it's important, for some reason, to maintain this air of reserve. And there it is, buried beneath three days' worth of irrelevance: two lines of impersonal prose, remarkable only for the name attached and the cold rush of anxiety and elation that it shook out of his furiously scrambling brain on the night it arrived.

Two lines. Two lines. His eye scans them now quickly, quietly, almost against his will: Commodore Kirk, greetings - I have received word of your promotion. I therefore request a meeting with you at your earliest convenience to offer my congratulations. Regards, Commander Spock, Starfleet Academy. Kirk has no idea what he was expecting when he finally found the words to snap a terse command to the computer; he had half an idea that he'd scroll through thirty-some pages of incomprehensible equations only to discover, at the bottom, that the communication had been sent to the wrong person, so anything over and above that was a bonus. Poetry was never likely. But Hello might have been nice. Maybe, How are you, Jim? Are you well? Are you content?

…Is your work satisfactory? Would you wish for more, or simply greater variety? Are your associates tolerable or do they incite in you that cold fury that always made me raise one eyebrow in silent disapproval? Does your brain try to feel the motion of warp speed through the floor in idle moments? Does it seem as though you are sleepwalking through your days; have you drawn a mental calendar behind your eyelids that you check off every morning as soon as your brain achieves consciousness, just so that you can convince yourself you're twenty-four solar hours closer to release? Do you glance up from your desk after long periods of solitary industry because some part of you that wasn't paying attention thought it heard familiar footsteps outside the door? Do you fail to glance up at the picture I gave you because every sight of it is a brand new wound cut deep into some part of you that feels as though it will never mend? Do you find yourself whispering little words in Vulcan when the strangest things remind you? Do you avoid looking at the night sky in case you remember which star is mine? Am I your constant companion, day and night; your conscience and your shadow? Am I the last face you see before you sleep?

Of course it said none of these things. It was from Spock. But the austere, indifferent missive - thirty blank, featureless words, words that would have been more at home on a subpoena or a planning application - was like an insult by proxy. Better to have sent nothing at all. He went to bed furious and stayed that way for almost forty-eight hours. But in the end… In the end, he guesses, he just missed his friend.

It was good to see him. And if nothing has changed in the weeks that they've been apart, if the thin flesh of his lips tingles just beneath the surface every time he remembers dark eyes canted upwards from hooded brows, cautiously distant across the table but unmistakably fixed on Kirk; if the recollection of corded muscles beneath science blues, rigid beneath a stolen touch, tugs incorrigible desire from the base of his spine to twist and pool in his groin; if the memory of his scent, unmistakable, warm, and exotic, persistently and inexorably drags his reverberating mind back to the milky light of an alien world suspended under unfamiliar skies and the press of coveted skin against skin… kaiidth. He'll manage.

His communicator is halfway across the table, lying where he tossed it haphazardly on his return from lunch. There are probably a million reasons not to do this, but one of the reasons he's the youngest flag officer in the fleet is because there's a corner of his brain that processes the should nots and filters out the ones that it makes more sense to ignore. The jury's still out on this particular decision, but it has the added advantage of being what he wants to do, and there's little enough of that in his life right now. He dials.

The pause that follows his opening hail is neither pronounced nor dismissive, but speaks very clearly of a consternated eyebrow. "Commodore?" says that familiar voice, and Kirk, because he is unobserved, sees no reason to leash the wide, delighted grin that spreads across his face.

"Spock," he says cheerfully. "How are you fixed for lunch again tomorrow? I have some news."

"Ah." Disembodied, it's impossible not to fill in the slow, elegant nod, the slant of his brows, the expressive shift of his eyes. "No doubt you are referring to the report from the Concordat."

He wasn't, of course, but it'll do. "How is it," says Kirk amiably, "That I outrank you now by two full grades, and I still have the impression that you got the news ahead of me?"

A small hesitation, and it occurs to Kirk that this momentary silence on an audio-only line is perhaps the aural equivalent of the smiles that never cross his friend's face. Then Spock says, "I was approached by Admiral Getz with an enquiry as to how much data might be recoverable from the Starbase's central cortex."

Kirk's brow furrows. "But the cortex is missing."

"Indeed," says Spock.

"How does he expect you to recover data from a cortex that isn't there?"

"This was, broadly speaking, my response to the Admiral." A beat. "However, I believe this answer came as a surprise."

Laughter surges, warm and irrepressible, from somewhere deep inside Kirk that had gotten used to being cold. He says, "So, how about it - lunch tomorrow? Your choice of venue."

"Tomorrow is difficult," says Spock. "However," he adds, as cold reality prepares to lance a spear right through the heart of a promising until then, "I believe that Wednesday would be suitable."

The smile stretches, threatens to engulf the lower half of his face. "Wednesday, then," says Kirk, and signs off.