Chapter 42

Spock is eleven years old, and he knows when his mother is lying.

"It's nothing, dear," she says as they disembark their private transport at the ShiKahr terminal, and she flashes a warm smile over her shoulder, but, though it's warmed as ever by ungovernable maternal affection, it's brittle, sharp as frost, and it's cracking at the edges. Spock's enquiry after her health, his eleventh of their short journey from the station at Kir, was prompted by an unmistakable stiffness in her bones as she found her feet, a graying of her face and a tight intake of breath, but she is determined to dismiss his concerns. This is not logical, but, as he has cause to know very well, his mother's logic does not always bear close scrutiny.

They have barely spoken since leaving his grandparents' house, and this is not unusual: though he is aware of her Human disinclination towards conversational lulls, she has been married to a Vulcan for more than a decade, and she is content to allow her husband and son to practice silence as they require. It's only that Spock has a lifetime's experience of decoding his mother's many expressions, and every reticent shift of muscles, every furrow of her brow, tells a story without words. He believes she is ill, though she has now denied it so many times that a trace of irritation has begun to cloud her tone when she answers him. Spock cannot understand why she insists upon refuting what is manifestly true, but he is old enough to know that she will have her reasons, and that they are likely to be uncomfortable.

He is experiencing some difficulty with his controls.

Amanda does not reach for his arm as they descend the steps of the transport to the sand-scattered ground; she will not breach protocol so flagrantly in a public space. But her movements are taut, labored, and her knuckles are white where they grip the handrail. Her son watches her carefully, eyes fixed on her feet, alert for the first sign that her balance has become unstable, and so he does not see the look that crosses her face as she scans the concourse, the flash of unexpected and unrestrained joy as she finds a face there that she does not expect to find. He doesn't see it, but he doesn't need to see it: he hears it in her voice.

"Sarek!" she says, and her tone is like a Terran summer: caramel-soft, warm and rich. "Spock, look. Your father has come to meet us."

He feels his Vulcan self lock down all traces of Human distress, like armor snapping into place, and he glances up in search of the ambassador, but his eyes flash first to his mother. It's an old habit, a child's habit, and he knows he must break it as he approaches adulthood, but for today at least her frailty is his absolution. Spock raises his gaze to meet Sarek's, all steely Vulcan decorum, and they exchange the ta'al as formally as if they had met this morning over breakfast, but that stolen glimpse, a brief impression caught in the moment before he becomes his father's son once more, is a window into a private world where Spock does not belong. Amanda's face is open, bright-eyed and shining, and the love that she turns on her son when she thinks he doesn't see is woven like gold and silk into her smile.

"He should be resting," she says in an undertone, but there's no censure in her voice; only a kind of indulgence that Spock recognizes from the way she speaks to her husband and son when she's pretending to agree with them. "I shall have to have a word with Taaval when we get back."

She won't, though. Spock understands this as he understands that the slight falter in her step, her uneven stride as she crosses the bustling terminal lobby, belongs to a part of Amanda that he will never really know; the part of her that was a wife before she was ever a mother. Whatever her instructions to her husband's assistant, however flagrantly they have been ignored, it's not displeasure that she's trying to conceal as she enters the glass-walled waiting room where the Ambassador stands alone, face impassive, eyes darkened by shadows, cheeks more hollow than Spock remembers. It's not exasperation that twitches at the corner of her mouth; it's not irritation that quickens her step as she approaches. It's the opposite of these things, the bright light that crowds out their shadow: it's love, the simplest of feelings, and it's shining from his mother's face.

But Spock is tired and anxious and eleven years old; it will be many years before he understands this. And it will be many more again before his mind's eye sees it in the answering look that his father turns upon the woman he chose to share his life.

-o-o-o-

In the privacy of his quarters on a ship that he barely recognizes, Spock sits alone, cross-legged on the floor, and, in the absence of an asenoi on which to focus, contemplates the wall. The trance will not come, but he's not surprised; he really wasn't expecting that it would. Moreover, he finds that this is not a source of any particular concern. He needs to think, and meditation, he is coming to realize, is not the same thing.

It is a little under four days since the galaxy was a simpler place. Four days ago, he knelt at the altar of Gol and prepared to step into another life, and the world was comfortably monochromatic: a clear division of black and white, logic and illogic, emotion and serenity. Four days ago, the Enterprise was an unquiet memory on the fringes of thought, an old wound that needled from time to time when he relaxed his guard too far, but no more substantive than the whispers of other consciousnesses that drifted to him on the meld. It was an idea, a cipher, a pictorial representation in the vaults of his mind of a time and a man which had slipped into history: it might exist, somewhere, in physical form, but not for Spock. Four days ago, this was not a state of affairs that he ever expected to change.

Four days ago, he knew who he was-or at least he thought he did. He was certainly clearer about what he wanted.

Everything is different now. He is surprised and somewhat unnerved to find that this is not the source of greater disquiet: the work of almost three years of constant struggle has been lost in the time it took for a voice in the darkness to breach the walls of his mind, and everything he has labored to achieve is gone. He has failed Kolinahr; not only failed, but actively abandoned, and he cannot even begin to imagine how that's going to play over the dinner table back home. But in a strange and manifestly illogical way, Spock suspects that a sizeable portion of his father's inevitable tight-lipped disapproval will be for show-Ambassador Sarek didn't raise a quitter, after all-and that the silent reproof, when it comes, will be not for the fact that he has left the sanctuary with emotional imbalance intact, but that he set out for Gol at all. He's not sure how he knows this, but there are many things that Spock's not sure about right now, and most of them make no sense. Everything is different now, but, in a manner that Spock is entirely at a loss to explain, it is also just exactly as it was.

A feeling is not much to go on, he remembers telling Kirk many years ago, in another time, on a different ship, words spoken from the lips of a different man. And the captain's answer-sometimes a feeling, Mr. Spock, is all we Humans have to go on-was as predictable as a warp equation, and so comfortable, so expected, that Spock allowed it to fall, uninterrogated, into the general pattern of their discourse. Now he wonders if perhaps it's something he should have put a little more effort into pulling apart, considering, interpreting and understanding. It has not been far from his mind, these past few hours, and it's quite bewildering, really, the connotative difference that a small shift in aspect can make. Captivity, he told his friend in a cafe by the Bay, is often a question of perspective, and he's beginning to understand that he has been a prisoner for the past three years; it was only that he did not have the sense to see his chains.

He loves James Kirk. He is in love with James Kirk. So it has been for eight years; so it will continue to be, and there is no force in the universe that can change this. And he is done fighting. He no longer has the energy.

What remains, then, is to work out what to do next. Is it possible, he wonders, that he has spent almost a decade wrestling with this problem and yet completely neglected to contemplate a solution that didn't involve running away from it or pretending it didn't exist? It seems… unlike him, but the facts are what they are. Approximately two hundred yards along this corridor stands the door to the captain's quarters, inside which, despite the lateness of the hour, serenity or repose is unlikely to reign, and yet it might as well be on the other side of the sector for all that Spock can begin to contemplate the journey from here to there. That sounds very much like running away from to any analysis that meets with scientific rigor, and he's not sure that the fact that he came back to the Enterprise of his own accord mitigates significantly against this.

Spock's eyes drop to his lap, where his hands are resting neatly on his thighs, and he spends some moments considering the beginnings of a hangnail on his left index finger. He wonders, absently, if he ought to wander down to Engineering and check that the recalibrations to the antimatter conversion chamber are holding, but he finds that he cannot face the soft-eyed look of understanding that will cross Mr. Scott's face when he notes the return of the ship's First Officer no more than 2.7 hours after Spock's most recent visit. If the Commander could be relied upon to assume that Spock's continued interest indicates some measure of skepticism about Scott's ability to maintain his own warp coil, that might be acceptable-Spock has coped with enough aggrieved Celtic protestations in his career aboard the Enterprise to be assured of his ability to manage another outburst-but the fact is, he probably won't. Far too little remains private on this ship, and, if there's one thing Spock has learned from forty years' close proximity to Humans, it's that their preoccupation with determining the exact nature of oblique non-verbal cues verges on the obsessive. If there's one thing he hasn't learned, it's how to give them nothing whatsoever with which to work.

Enough. He's exhausted and he's supposed to be convalescing, and if he happens to forget either of these things, then the inside of his skull is always ready to remind him with a low-level burst of throbbing pain that spirals out from his psi-center like a shallow earthquake, whiting out his vision for the moment that it takes to make its point. Left to his own devices, what he'd really like to do is lie down on his bunk, engage the privacy settings on the doors to his quarters, and settle into a day-long healing trance while a couple of thousand bruised and reeling neural pathways stitch themselves back together, but the circumstances are hardly opportune. In the first place, he very nearly died yesterday, and this is not something that has passed unremarked in the Enterprise's sickbay; it was nothing more than operational necessity that got Spock released back onto the bridge once his eyes were open and words were coming out of his mouth, and the only reason he didn't get shipped straight back into a biobed the moment they warped out of Earth's orbit was because he continued to stand up straight and function appropriately during the hours that followed. Any comfortable illusions he might have entertained that his corporeal performance was no longer of any particular interest to Doctors Chapel and McCoy were unceremoniously shattered by the appearance of an orderly at his door 3.5 hours ago, carrying a tray of barkaya marak and an urn full of hot, spiced tea and an admonition from the Enterprise's CMO concerning the lack of activity on Spock's diet card in the past twelve hours. It seems not only likely but actively guaranteed that any descent into kappa waves on his remote-monitoring readout screens will have him readmitted to sickbay before he has passed the second level of the tow-kath. In the second place, he suffered a major psionic injury fewer than twenty-four hours ago, and, so long as the inside of his brain continues to feel as though it's pumped full of water and startled birds, his mastery of the Disciplines is proving capricious. Spock is not actually certain that he can achieve a healing trance right now, acolyte of Gol or not, without the presence of a mind-healer, and he is not inclined to aggravate his headache by trying.

And, in the third place… Jim.

Jim. It is not logical to base the decision to forgo the tow-kath, even in small part, on a disinclination to surrender to unconsciousness any moment of this newfound proximity to his erstwhile friend, but nor is it logical to pretend to himself that he doesn't know that this is exactly what he's doing. And the rationalization, as it turns out, is less traumatic to his sense of self than he might have expected of a man who was almost Kolinahru. It is less than one Terran week since Spock knelt on sand-dashed flagstones to watch the dawn break over the desert basin on the last day of his old life, but it might as well have been a thousand years. The memories feel as though they belong to another man, as though he's heard the story second-hand: the legend of the acolyte whose Path ended as the Elders prepared to place the symbol of ultimate logic around his neck. He left the altar in a haze of confusion and shame, a cloud so dark that he could barely find his way back to the sanctuary, and all he remembers from his passage across the plateau is the understanding that the srashivu at least would not be there to greet him, and the attendant rush of relief that he lacked the energy to suppress. He remembers making his way through empty corridors that echoed to his unsteady footfall, to the cell where T'Kel waited to receive him, and he remembers that he could not speak to her of what had happened; she had to read it for herself in the meld.

She was silent for many minutes after that. Spock kept his eyes fixed on the floor, his hands clasped in his lap, and attempted to seek his composure in the silence. But where was composure to be found when the world he thought he knew had shifted, collapsed, crumbled into dust?

I once named this bond ashaya, she said after a moment. Her voice was cool, soft in the shadows of her cell, and he thought he caught, on its edges, the faintest trace of reproach. It was only much later that it occurred to him to wonder which of them it was for.

Yes, Master, he answered, and the words felt as though they were carved from stone.

He caught her faint nod in the shift of the still air. Together, she said, we worked to break its hold over your katra.

Yes, Master, said Spock again. He could not meet her eyes.

And T'Kel sat back on her knees, head bowed, face shadowed in the half-light of her cell. She sat back, hands folded in the sleeves of her robe, and motes of dust danced on a shaft of sunlight that pierced the high window above: the first breath of a new day.

Perhaps, she said quietly, we were wrong to do so.

His knees, un-cushioned by the cradle of meditation, have begun to protest the severity of the cabin floor; it's time to acknowledge that the trance has defeated him once again. Chapel, who apparently served her Xeno rotation on his homeworld, warned him when he was discharged from sickbay that it might prove elusive for a day or so, while his mind rebounded from the neural shock of a meld with the sum total of all knowledge contained in the universe, and this is logical, but there's a great deal of associated baggage that the Human half of Spock's subconscious attaches to a failure to achieve the tvi-sochya, and so he has tried a little harder than, perhaps, is sensible. The last time this was a problem for him, he ended up in Gol, and that was not precisely a thundering success; he can know, rationally, that the two situations do not bear close comparison, but there's a part of him that will forever be his mother's son, and this is the bit that's currently responsible for the creak in his knees that almost bends him double as he gets to his feet. Perhaps there is something in the doctors' injunctions after all, though, barring further acute neurogenic shock and the associated liberation of his emotional reserve, neither McCoy nor Chapel will ever hear these words from Spock.

The urn that arrived with his dinner tray has long since cooled, but he has reprogrammed his synthesizer to approximate a herbal blend that that he used to favor back when he was in the habit of taking tea in the evenings, and he crosses the room now to dial in a request for a fresh pot. Some incomprehensible failure of spatial logic has caused the ship's designers to devote a substantial portion of his living quarters to the placement of a wide, low table, the purpose of which escapes Spock, but the chairs that surround it are his only option in terms of seating unless he counts the bed, and drinking tea in bed just seems a little too like something a man who belongs in sickbay might do. It's alarming, really, the speed with which his thought patterns have reverted to metaphor and symbolism after three days in the company of his mother's people, but, nevertheless, when a tinny buzz signals the production of something not entirely unlike theris-masau, it's onto one of the rigid, uncomfortable stools that he elects to lower himself, steam curling in twists of bar-kas and kh'r'fal from the mug in his hands. Sleep is likely to be no less evasive than a meditative trance; at least at the table he can maintain the illusion that he has some say in the matter of his wakefulness.

In fact, it has been several days since that has been the case. Four, to be precise. Four days since the universe veered abruptly off course and carried away with it any prospect of serenity or rest.

When his transport docked with the Enterprise, Spock still believed he was following a troubling theoretical conjecture to its logical conclusion and that, afterwards, emotional revenants silenced at last, he would return to Gol, unfurl his reed mat on the floor of the neophytes' cell, and begin his Path anew. He thinks he continued to believe this-or, at the very least, ignore all evidence to the contrary-right up to the point where he opened his eyes to the bright, clinical lights of sickbay, buoyed by the kind of certainty he'd spent three years searching for in all the wrong places, and it was suddenly no longer possible to pretend that Kolinahr was an option. The truth is, though, that his shields were fraying well before the turbolift doors slid open onto a bridge on which he'd never thought to set foot again, and it doesn't take a near-death experience to understand that it was always going to be this way; that it could be three years or three hundred, but the sight of his captain's face lighting up with a kind of radiant joy, the sound of Spock's name breathed through incredulous lips, would always be enough to break through those frozen walls he's constructed so painstakingly over nine long seasons.

Perhaps, said T'Kel, we were wrong, and she spoke of the rarity of a bond strong enough to carry across the empty depths that separated worlds. Her voice was low and even, the stripped monotone of an Elder of Gol, but there was a hush to it, a restraint, that Spock could not name at the time but which he has come to think of as a kind of reverence. An awe. The bond that she described was known to few, a scientific curiosity found scattered indiscriminately throughout the pages of history, but all Spock could think of as she spoke was that he would trade the stars in the sky above him if he could only be free of it.

Many things have changed between that moment and this. He feels freer now, lighter, as though he's been wearing a cloak woven from iron and clay for many years, and he has finally worked out how to cast it away. He loves James Kirk. He is in love with James Kirk. This is no longer in question, and he is no longer prepared to deny it. The problem is, he already knew that. He's known that for years. What he doesn't know is what to do about that, since, no matter what he's managed to make himself believe, love has never actually been their problem.

Reaching for Jim's hand in sickbay was an act of instinct-more than that, it was an act of necessity, in a manner that he cannot adequately explain to himself. It was not so much that he forgot that they were not alone, it was simply that, in that moment, everything suddenly fell into place with a clarity that he'd never known before, and any lingering objections were silenced by the magnitude of his discovery. Love, it seemed, was both the problem and the solution, and he'd laughed because he could not believe that he'd never seen it before. He knows this is correct, and yet… the truth is, it's a little more complicated than that. If Kolinahr turned out to have no answers for Spock, it's because his questions were wrong: it seems that he ought not to have been asking how to purge himself of the misery of a love that had woven itself into the very fabric of himself, but, instead, how he'd allowed that love to become the source of misery in the first place. His error was in mistaking suppression for control; small wonder he failed. But that doesn't change simple biological fact, and the fact is that love is only the basis from which the larger issue grows. He'd shrouded it in Discipline so as not to have to examine it directly, but, if it turns out that love is neither illogical nor incompatible with the scientific method that underpins the very essence of his identity-if the reverse, in fact, is true-then all that does is throw the physiological problem into ever starker relief. And no matter what else has changed, he still doesn't know what to do about this.

In some ways you are my son, said his mother, once upon a time. In other ways, you are Sarek's. If ever Spock has had cause to doubt the truth of her words, he has three long years of frozen denial to remind him that some things cannot be wished away. His parents' marriage is an error of compatibility that should never have been allowed to happen, and he has understood as much since he was a boy of eleven, watching his mother's footsteps falter as she descended the steps of a transport in ShiKahr: the focused scrutiny of a lonely child without peers or friends, whose world was constructed around the certainty of Amanda's regard. Since the moment Spock identified his attachment to Jim as love, the fear has haunted him that he will be driven, inexorably, to follow the path of his father's mistakes, to ignore the simple facts of biology in favor of a desire that, by any reasonable exercise of logic, ought to be intercepted, dismantled, and repurposed to more productive ends, and it has been so sharp, so insistent, that he has never stopped to examine it directly. Spock has carried it with him, wrapped in layers of filial disdain, and assured himself that he knows better, and, if he does not, that he, at least, will not fail.

You're right, Mr. Spock, he remembers Jim saying that last time they spoke: bitter words, designed to bruise, as sharp and final as the slamming of a door. You are nothing like your father. At least your father had the courage of his convictions.

Spock's spine was so straight, so rigid, that his muscles were trembling with the effort of holding himself in place. My father's convictions, he'd answered in a voice like frozen steel, were fuelled by an illogic equalled only by its capacity to do harm. This is what you refuse to understand.

Jim had barked harsh laughter at that, and, before Spock had finished speaking, he'd turned and paced three steps across the room to his desk. His head was bowed, his eyes hooded, unreadable, and he'd gripped the back of his chair so tightly that his knuckles had been points of white in the shadows.

And what you refuse to understand, he'd said, is your own arrogance in acting on decisions that are not yours to make.

Bitter words, designed to bruise, and they had, because James Kirk is nothing if not proficient at getting under Spock's skin. But they'd said a lot of things that day. Anger clouded the room and poisoned the air between them, and this made it possible, afterwards, to reject the recrimination that had fuelled it as artifacts of acrimony and frustration. He's certain that he's not the masochist he was named in an early shot across the bows, nor is Jim wilfully blind to nuances of cultural sensitivity, as accused by Spock in a moment of intemperate spite. Bitter words, designed to bruise, fuelled by regret and terror and love and the certainty of loss.

But not, perhaps, without merit.

Because the truth is, he just doesn't know anymore. This confidence, this absolute absence of doubt, has been an article of faith for so long that he has never thought to question the reasoning that sustains it. A child's reasoning; a conclusion drawn without context and blind to everything but the fear that the ground on which he stood might crumble while his back was turned. For years, Spock has assumed that his father's logic was uncertain when it came to his mother, and he has held onto this as though it were scientific doctrine, without ever stopping to wonder if, in fact, his mother would agree.

And he remembers her smile in a terminal station in ShiKahr, the joy in her voice and the way it lit up the air around her when she saw the man she had chosen to share her life, waiting for her in a glass-walled reception room across the concourse. He remembers the exhaustion on his father's face and the way he walked a half-step behind his wife as they made their way out of the terminal; the protectiveness of that small gesture; the care. Spock remembers all of these things now, and he wonders why it has never occurred to him before that there were two people in the marriage, and that both of them had a choice.

Both of them had a choice. That's something that, on further examination, he might have considered earlier.

He is definitely not getting any sleep tonight.

-o-o-o-

A/N: Many, many thanks to the talented and generous penguin_attie, beta-reader extraordinaire, who has been keeping this fic in order for more than two years now, and to the talented and generous miloowen (author of the best damn TNG fic in existence - if you haven't already checked out A Million Sherds, quick, go find it on AO3) who has agreed to take over beta-reading duties as of this chapter. I am so lucky with my beta-readers! They are the warp coil that keeps this ship running and I am more grateful than I can say.