Archive of Our Own

Past one o’ clock. You must have gone to bed.

The Milky Way streams silver through the night.

I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams

I have no cause to wake or trouble you.

And, as they say, the incident is closed.

Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.

Now you and I are quits. Why bother then

To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.

Behold what quiet settles on the world.

Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.

In hours like these, one rises to address

The ages, history, and all creation.

 

—Vladimir Mayakovsky (trans. Hayward and Reavey)

He recognizes the first few signs dimly. A dullness of mind; the gut weighing heavier in its moist cavity. It is easily mistaken for boredom, or fatigue, of which everyone on this ship has far too much. Of which everyone, everywhere in this universe has far too much, where there is not despair and disaster. 

He is on the bridge, sitting at the science station which reports nothing interesting in this sector of very deep, empty space which they have spent the last twenty days crossing. He looks over at the captain, bent over Chekov’s console; Jim keeps a steadying hand on the back of Sulu’s chair as he discusses something with Pavel in a voice Spock cannot overhear. Spock stares at Jim, but Jim does not turn around.

In Basic Humanoid Psychology at the Academy he had learned about stress, about the Holmes-Rahe Inventory measuring the impact of major life events. It had been formulated first for humans, back in the dark ages before warp technology and the Federation; and he suspects humans are still behind the adjustments for other major Federation species, for the numbers do not really differ from variant to variant. Moving or starting a new school scores you 25 out of a possible 100 points; being locked up in prison, 63. Losing a close family member, according to Holmes and Rahe, is exactly as stressful as being in prison, but not nearly as stressful as losing one’s spouse or partner, which is 100 out of 100.

How does one quantify the stress of losing one’s planet?—one’s people? (And then add 63, for one’s mother.)

Somehow, he is all right in those first few months after Nero—mainly, perhaps, because there isn’t time to be not all right. The Enterprise is enormous, a step up from everything they’ve trained for; as her first officer Spock must know everything there is to know about her and her running, in case he must do Jim’s job, which happens more often than you might think. He oversees labs in exogeology, stellar cartography, radiometrics, nanorobotics, bioengineering; he spends every Tuesday afternoon with Nyota in the language lab, and holds hands with her in his cabin after making love. Scotty teaches him his theory of transwarp beaming, and Sulu and Chekov double-team him playing chess and lose, and Doctor McCoy keeps him on his toes now with his waspish turns of mood, now with his impenetrable metaphors. 

And then there is Jim Kirk. Jim to rein in when his daredeviling threatens life and limb and interstellar peace; Jim to puzzle over when he veers off-script during first contact or reacts to an unneighborly Class Five anomaly with a “Looks cool! Nah, we’ll be fine. Helm, take us closer.” On the rare evening Spock’s work does not see him all the way to bedtime, he mulls over what his older self had told him that day in the hangar. The revelation of a friendship—with Jim Kirk? He and the captain get on now, but he does not know if they are friends. He, Spock, is half-human, but how humans as opposed to Vulcans might define friends, and friendship, he does not know. 

(Spock doesn’t really have friends, has never had friends on Vulcan or on Earth.)

“Spock!” 

Jim likes to yell his name while sitting in the big chair, not bothering to turn around. Spock, sitting at his station facing the back of the bridge, has learned not to turn around either; his normal conversational voice carries sufficiently; they are only meters apart.

“How’s that analysis coming along, Spock?”

“A Sokholov Type 3 gas giant.” Spock looks over at his other screen. “It appears to be collapsing at a rate sufficient to initiate stellar fusion in approximately 3.7 million Earth years.”

“… that’s all?”

“For the present, yes, Captain. The sensor probe—” 

“Just busting your chops, Spock.” Now Jim is turned around in his seat, smirking at Spock. “I know the probe’s not deep enough yet, carry on.” 

Spock obeys; and a moment later, feels a rap on his shoulder blade. “Hey.” It’s Jim, standing over him. 

“You okay?” asks Jim, unsmiling. 

Spock stares back.“You seem kind of … flat today.”

Puzzling humans with their puzzling expressions. “I am in a state of emotional equilibrium, Captain, as usual.” He adds, after thinking it over: “I was focused before you distracted me. Sir.” 

Jim burns him with his blue eyes, but accepts the reprimand, clapping and squeezing him on the shoulder. Seconds ago a blow signified concern; now it communicates—an apology? Relief? Approbation? One touch from this man can mean so many things.

The Enterprise-A’s bridge has nearly the same specs as the original’s. In fact the ship itself is more or less a twin; only it has been muscled up where possible. Bigger phasers, double-thick hull plates; and where one needs to see out, laminated hyperdiamond, no forcefields that can fail or polarizing titanium that can shatter. There are thirty-three decks, forty-seven kilometers of corridors, nearly two hundred kilometers of crawlspace. The nacelle pylons are sweeping monstrosities, and have lifts going up to catwalks that span the full three hundred and fifty-seven meters of either nacelle’s length.

“The view of the warp wake out the back,” Scotty had whispered to him their first week out, with religious reverence; and he, Spock, had believed him. He too would like to visit the tip of a nacelle one day, where an arching window of diamond has been built for the intrepid, the romantic. But he is frequently tired these days, and no less busy, so he sits in the library or his cabin after duty and watches the stars stream by.

“Spock.”

It’s the good doctor McCoy, grabbing the back of the seat across from him and swiveling it around and sitting. Lunch rush, maybe a third of the crew are crammed in here, but the doctor does not have a tray with him.

“Spock, your psych evals,” McCoy says.

He looks, the way he’s got his elbows commanding the table with his hands latched onto their insides, as though Spock has betrayed him in some intimate matter, and he is seeking an accounting. “Doctor,” says Spock, “I do not believe this is the appropriate setting.”

“No, it’s not, but you know what I’m talking about.”

Every week, per regulation, they must take these psychological evaluations, consisting always of the same twenty questions. Do you feel you are an integral part of this mission. Do you feel a sense of purpose in what you do. One for strongly disagree, ten for strongly agree. At the end of the assessment, you are informed immediately if you have passed or not, and offered recommendations and resources in the event of the latter. 

“I profess to be perplexed,” Spock says. When McCoy raises his eyebrows: “I always give the same answers.”

“You’re supposed to be honest on those, Spock.”

“I answer accurately, Doctor, to the best of my ability.” 

“Spock, please. Don’t be dumb.”

Spock looks down. Yes: he is being dumb, on purpose. For it is obviously not just about the answers you select—one can lie—and so the app running the evaluation ties into the biometrics collected by its camera, by the biopatch woven into your uniform, and measures your heart rate, your breathing, the dilation of your pupils, the time it takes you to answer each question. That is how it really gets you.

He fiddles with the handle of his spoon. Lunch today is potato leek soup, made of real potato and leek as they are only a week out of Venox III, but he has been slower than usual to ingest the necessary caloric load. “Doctor, I am performing adequately. It is only one evaluation.”

“That’s what you said last time, huh?”

He decides this is where the conversation will end. But he has moral scruples about recycling food that has come out of soil, breathed air somewhere, so he eats and eats and eats until McCoy gets up and leaves.

In those early days he had often observed Jim, watching Jim when he did not think he was being watched. Spock thinks this is because his new captain perplexes him: he is casual where formality is called for, ebullient in deadly serious situations. Asking ordinary crewmen about their pets at home; swearing on the bridge like a Klingon mercenary. It never occurs to him that he watches Jim also as one might the sea, a shower of meteors, a pageant: to be given something to feel. 

And now for a Vulcan riddle. How many molecules do you need to make a droplet? How many droplets make a mist, and when does that mist become rain, the rain a downpour, a downpour a deluge and the deluge a tsunami sweeping you out of your reason? Spock does not know the tipping point, the first time that he crosses it. He can look back only once he has crossed it (he must have, at some point), and see that over there, on the far side, was another country, the man in it not him.

They are in orbit above Nibiru when that happens. Senior staff conference room, flaring tempers; battle lines drawn. Two hours ago the exogeology lab had delivered an alarming report. “If that volcano blows, it’s sayonara for everyone down there.”

“Jim, we’re not supposed to intervene—” 

“Yeah, I know we’re not to reveal ourselves to any indigenous species, or give them any of our technology—”

“That’s not how I interpret the Prime Directive,” McCoy says, folding his arms.

“Do not intervene means, I think, do not intervene,” says Chekov. 

“What about ‘do no harm’?” says Uhura. “I can see that we’re not supposed to get involved if it would harm them, but if they’re facing extinction—”

They come around to Jim’s view—when do they ever not? The nuclear lab, as luck would have it, had been developing an experimental compact cold fusion device. “But why do they say it can’t it be launched remotely? Spock, what’s your take? Spock!”

He jolts awake. “Captain. I will do it.”

“… Excuse me, wait, what?” 

For some time now he has been living in a strange space—one in which he is constantly tired, to the point of feeling unreal, like he is a ghost, sitting on the outside of things till the sound of his name yanks him by the scruff of his neck back into the world of the living. Frequently, these awakenings are accompanied by leaps in logic, which he presently must explain. "As the most senior officer aboard with knowledge of this device, it is logical I should operate it." He neglects to add: logical that I should be allowed to risk my life, if Jim Kirk will risk his. Logical that the task should fall to me, in my current mental state.

For, though he may come off as slow and dull now, in moments of crisis (during which he will rise to the task--he must, he always does) it confers certain advantages, this unearthly state of being. Indeed, he is calm in the shuttle as it shudders in the terrific might of the ash cloud, calm as Uhura kisses his face plate and as he whizzes down, down, down into the exploding crater. It is only when he falls, as he is not supposed to, losing his grip on the handle of the device as he smashes into rock and tumbles end over end, that the spell breaks.

Sitting up amidst fire and belching ash, he knows, faster than thought can take place, that the game is up. Either he will locate the device in time to set it off (thus freezing himself to death), or he will not (thus burning to death). The shuttle, wilting like tin foil in this heat, will have to leave; Enterprise is three hundred meters below sea level, and will not be able to rise up to pluck him out of here without being seen. He feels—something, it is the first thing he has felt in months that isn’t tiredness or deadening boredom; but it isn’t terror plain and simple. He is terrified, because instead of feeling only terror at knowing he will die, he feels also relief.

He is tired of missing his mother, he realizes. He is tired of worrying for the future of his kind; tired of feeling shame at being here not on New Vulcan, despite what his older self had assured him. He is tired of the long nothingness of his days, and tired of being tired. What is there beyond death? Either death is the end of all suffering, a human philosopher once said; or if not, if there is suffering and sensation after death, it is not death. He hopes death is the former, for then that will mean no more remembering Nero and Vulcan collapsing into nothingness. It will mean no more struggling out of bed in the mornings against the weight of mountains, no more looking up from his station in the bright humming calm of the bridge to see Jim parsing him with his worried gaze.

He raises his arms in the whirling inferno, thinking, as the world tears itself apart around him: this is easy; I can do this. I can walk this path we all must in the end. He is doing so well, that when the flame and fury abruptly dissolve and are replaced by the cool glassy calm of the transporter room (there come Jim and Bones, racing in), he is aghast. “You let them see our ship,” he says to Jim.

“Oh c’mon Spock, they saw us, big deal!”

There is nothing Spock can say to this; or to Jim's great big grin. He endures being sprayed with cryofluids, changes out of his suit, showers, debriefs with the senior staff (Jim giddy on adrenaline still, Uhura not looking him in the eye), then returns to his cabin after debriefing with the nuclear lab. He means to file a report, but just sits there stunned. For an instant he has seen through the thick of things, the veiling haze of his insanity, and he is appalled.

It turns out this is the turning point; he looks back that one time and never again. Two weeks later, in Pike’s office in San Francisco, Jim calls him “Pointy”; that evening they are shot up by phaser fire high in a skyscraper; he pursues a madman to the edge of enemy territory, falls almost to earth in a wrecked Enterprise, watches his captain die and wake again. Through all this he is alert, feeling fear at times but competent, efficient, effective; not at all oppressed by the heaviness of existence. The cure for this unearthly state of being is, it turns out, things coming at you too fast.

“You know,” says Bones, the night before Jim leaves hospital, “I never did tell him about those failed psych evals from a couple months ago.”

Spock can only vaguely recall that confrontation he had with Bones, as he recalls but vaguely nearly the whole year’s interval between Nero and now. Bones had banked on Vulcans feeling pride, if not embarrassment: now what will your commanding officer say, Greenie, if he finds out you’re a basket case. Yet Spock hadn’t sought help, and now he thinks he will not need to. He is anything but all right, he is still physically exhausted and hurting and afraid, shattered at having seen Jim die, but at least, now, he feels things; he is back in the world of the living. 

Though you can lay eight football fields end to end by Enterprise-A, and dwarf the Statue of Liberty if you set her down in New York harbor, the cabins even of the senior staff are small: the thinking being, that if you spent more time after duty in the public areas, where you could be found, it would aid crew cohesion, morale, trust. Spock hardly expects to be disturbed in the library at twenty-three hundred thirty hours, but Jim has a way of finding him, as he usually does. 

“Heyo.”

“Good evening, Captain.” 

Jim wears a sweatsuit the palest shade of dawn blue. It’s been years since he wore his hair spiked, as he had at the Academy; now it’s longer, parted differently, swept over the brow. It’s a statesmanly look, as suits his role as first representative of the Federation. He smiles less readily now, but it is a softer, gentler smile. 

“Whatcha reading?”

Spock shows him the cover of his book. “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

Jim plops down in the corner of the L-shaped couch Spock also occupies, puts his feet up. “That twentieth-first century?”

“Twentieth.”

(He has explained to Jim his interest in late modern human literature, taking care to characterize it as a learning endeavor not a diversion. Half-human though he is, he was raised on Vulcan, in a rigorously Vulcan household; what better way to absorb another culture than by experiencing their art?)

“I’ve been wondering,” says Jim. Minutes of silence have gone by; or has it been more? “You call me Jim, but rarely.”

Spock looks up. “Captain?”

Jim is plucking at the fabric at his knee. “It’s been—what, almost five years? I just—” He draws up his leg and clutches it. “I was just wondering if there’s a pattern to when you call me Jim as opposed to Captain.”

Spock, meeting those blue eyes under their heavy arched brows, looks for a hint of whimsy. What he sees is Jim’s negotiating face: intent, slightly pleasanter than neutral, but walled off. He wonders: has Doctor McCoy had a conversation with the captain about his first officer?

“I expect there is none.”

“Oh?”

“‘Jim’ and ‘Captain’ both signify you. They are the same thing.”

Jim says quietly, “They are not the same thing, Spock.”

The library is dim but for the pool of light over Spock’s shoulder, illuminating the adventures of Estraven and Genly Ai on the great Gobrin Ice. The light behind Kirk had snapped on, too, when Kirk had sat down, only to snap off moments later after having detecting no book or device in Kirk’s lap. Spock feels like he is in a stagelight, exposed, and so thinks to get up.

“So,” says Kirk, “how—how’re those flight sims coming along?”

By Surak, not that again. It had started at the dinner he and Jim had had at Pike’s apartment, seemingly a lifetime ago but really it has been four years, ten months and two days. Pike had still been in a wheelchair, but was recovering well, and felt up to cooking for the two of them. Nero had been dead a month, the Enterprise a week away from re-launch.

“He is terrifying, but you’d be surprised,” Pike had said, smiling at Spock, and Spock had known at once what the good admiral had been up to. Call it one human boosting another; call it the veteran captain, a consummate expert in crew psychology, mitigating his replacement’s embarrassment at having leapfrogged Professor Commander Spock in rank. “Indeed, Admiral,” Spock had replied, all equanimity, “no one is perfectly competent at every—”

“But, like, basic shit, Spock. Tell us, how many times did you fail your pilot’s cert in your senior year?”

Jim’s eyes had widened comically at this. “Admiral,” said Spock, “I fail to see—”

“Answer the question, Commander.” 

No way out. An order was an order. “Three times.”

He had been quick to remind Jim, even as they had been walking out of Pike’s building, that he’d piloted the jellyfish (“Twenty-fourth-century tech, Spock! That ship flies for you. It was built for you. It reads your brain or some shit.” “Perhaps in the twenty-fourth century there will be no need for pilots.” “Your Vulcan ass wishes.”) Even at this distance, his guts flutter when he recalls Jim’s disbelieving cackle in Pike’s dining room; he remembers the sim trials half-jokingly assigned on the old ship (“Use it or lose it, Spock! Practice makes perfect!”) and how, after the party given to celebrate Enterprise-A’s successful space trials—was that really only four months ago?--Jim, plastered to hell, had dragged him from the rec room to the nearest sim suite, much upgraded from those on the old ship. “C’mon, Commander, progress check!” Jim had crowed, booting up the training program, and each time Spock had gotten them obliterated on the side of an asteroid, in the girders of a Dyson sphere, he had rolled around shrieking. 

In the present Spock says, “I still have yet to successfully navigate the maximum difficulty setting, Captain.” 

“Well,” says Jim, and on his face is that old cadet’s smirk of his. “The Expanse is hairy. Even Archer and Mayweather found it tough going.”

“I am grateful we have Mr. Sulu. And even Doctor McCoy, in a pinch.” Spock closes his book and stands. “Good night, Captain.”

“Hey, Spock, wait.”

Spock turns at the library entrance. “Captain?”

Jim searches his face long. “Never mind.”

Spock says good night again, returns to his cabin and brushes his teeth. He changes into a robe, sits cross-legged on the edge of his bed, and breathes in a practiced rhythm with his eyes closed. But it isn’t working. Since he has settled in on the new ship, meditation has felt only like a charade of meditation; his thoughts slow to vacate, the absence of thought unnerving. He opens his eyes and stares at a woven wall-hanging. He lies down on the bed, very straight and still with his legs together, pressing his hands tight over his face.

There is no reason why Jim’s words should land on him like this. He is thoroughly familiar with the human propensity for teasing—it shows affection; and even were Jim in all seriousness, it is illogical to be upset over one’s (real) shortcomings. He, Spock, is no pilot, and may never be one deserving of the name; and he frankly does not care. So why does he feel like this? He feels small and frail, like he has just been struck a glancing blow, lying here thinking of Jim having come to the library in the dead of night just to needle him about sims, to dispute the difference between “Jim” and “Captain.”

He keeps his hands over his face, and is awake a long time. 

He had learned in Basic Humanoid Psychology of the condition called depression; but he preferred the term melancholia, from an ancient dialect of humanity, which the course textbook had also mentioned. The black bile illness sounded more expressive, more just, to him than the common term, which one might also have used to signify a mere dip, a geographical feature. A lowering of air pressure presaging foul weather, but not the storm itself.

In Vulcan the closest analogue is ras’t, meaning heaviness; but it is a spiritual not medical condition, a state of inner imperfection. Even so, he remembers realizing after the volcano, perhaps there has always been something off with him, imperfect. He remembers childhood afternoons, the oppressive feeling of the rich afternoon sunlight. He remembers himself almost a man, gazing upon the red plains bounded in peaks like teeth from the terrace of his parents’ house; and always, always tired and disconsolate.

Naturally, this is what happens when you feel you do not really belong; and on Earth things had been lighter at first amidst the chaos, the freewheeling diversity. He would march through the Academy, graduating with highest distinction; but on the Constellation under Pike he would feel frequently tired, despite his perfect medical examinations, and so would return to the Academy after his first five years were up to help train Command-track cadets. He would design a final assessment, one that would become legendary for its pernicious difficulty, and lead survival hikes around Big Sur. To help stave off the boredom he so often felt now, he would volunteer as a section leader for advanced diplomatic and academic Vulcan, and take special note of the cadet always seated at the far end of the long table, directly meeting his gaze with her beautiful, serious face.

The first time he takes Nyota back to his flat, she expresses considerable interest in his collection of books. “You like poetry,” she says, as she settles back into the crook of his naked shoulder with the volume on his bedside table. “Of course you do.” 

The ribbon bookmark in the volume opens to several poems; she asks which one it is he likes returning to. “This one. I have a particular interest in human depictions of the cosmos.”

She trails a finger down the page, reading aloud softly: “'Past one o’ clock. You must have gone to bed. The Milky Way streams silver through the night. I’m in no hurry …'” She finishes and presses the open book to her chest. “I hope," she says, "this isn't how you really feel about love."

He presses a kiss to her hair, solemnly and unsmiling, by way of saying, of course not. He neglects to tell her what had happened to the man who wrote this; what purpose this poem of his had served in his last hour. For, beyond a doubt, Nyota is dating him for his calm and reasonable demeanor, his Vulcanness; she must not learn of his attraction to the insane.

In the morning when he gets up he is slow, but his attempt at meditating, has, it seems, done some good; he is able to put his conversation in the library with Jim out of mind. He makes the rounds amongst the labs, reviewing interim reports from two long-term experiments: everything that is sent on back to Starfleet Research requires his signature. Today is assessment day, and he meditates strenuously before answering his twenty questions.

The following evening McCoy growls at him in the turbolift: “It’s not going to get better if you just ignore it.”

He lets this wash over him. All due respect to the doctor, he had pushed through it the last time; and if no crisis were to come along this time to bring it to an early head, it would probably lift anyway, as it seems always to have.

Then, in the morning, he is aware upon waking and sitting up in bed that the idea of heading outside of his cabin inspires dread. He analyzes it dispassionately: there is nothing logical in this anticipation of negative things, when so far this deployment has been uneventful, and they have in the past proven capable of handling even the least imaginable exigencies. He has no enemies aboard the ship—no one who even openly dislikes him; in the four-and-then-some years he has served as Jim Kirk’s right-hand man, he has earned unanimous respect, established the reputation that he is fair, considerate, even compassionate in his straitjacketed Vulcan way, if unemotive and rigorous. 

He tries meditating, though he is not used to doing so first thing in the morning. He allows himself fifteen minutes (he is always, always out and about by eight hundred hours), dresses and heads out and consumes half a green smoothie in the mess. Lately these, and weak tea, are the only things he can tolerate. Since he knows he is well deficient in caloric intake, he takes a couple of nutrition bars from the snack bar, and will remember to take bites at regular intervals throughout the day.

He spends an hour on the bridge, then is amongst the labs, then is back on the bridge. When he sits down at his console he realizes that he has trouble understanding what his screens are telling him. 

“Spock?” He feels a touch on his elbow: it’s Uhura, his neighbor at comms. “You all right?”

He looks at her, then back at his screens. They belch lines that rise and form scrolling walls of nonsense. He cannot make out whether these are even words or numbers, Standard or Klingon. He looks around. Jim is in the chair, reading reports while sipping coffee. He likes to pass time like this on the bridge, instead of doing desk work in his ready room. Jim appears not to have heard Uhura.

He stands, tugging his shirt straight and whispering: “Excuse me, lieutenant.”

No one follows him into the turbolift. He leans against the humming wall, palms splayed at his sides, head back, eyes closed. He will take one hour in the privacy of his room, he decides, then go out to face the rest of his day. An hour passes and he is no better. He routes all data from the bridge’s science console and everything requiring his attention from the labs to the screen in his room.

The next morning he wakes trembling, with a dry mouth and a heaving stomach. It is all he can do to reach and flip open the communicator on his nightstand. “Doctor.”

“What?”

It’s not yet six hundred hours; this is the surest way to get a reaming from McCoy. “Doctor, I require twenty-four hours’ medical leave.”

Within minutes the doctor is at his door. “If you think I’m gonna beat you up for finally doing the right thing, Spock, you’re wrong,” McCoy says. He has ordered Spock to stay in bed while he finishes scanning him. “As I thought, your vitals are actually all right, but …” He looks tired; indeed he has not expressed an iota of anger, annoyance, even smugness toward Spock. “Have you spoken to Dr. Zheng?” 

The ship’s psychologist? “No.”

“Talk to her. I’ll set up an appointment.”

“Doctor, I fail to see how —”

“You need to talk to her, then we gotta consult before we decide on your meds.” To judge from the good doctor’s breath, McCoy hasn’t brushed his teeth; his stubble gives his expression a savage edge. “Unlike you lot, we’ve medicalized this condition a long time ago, but it still isn’t something that can be cured just by popping some pills. You need to discuss your feelings with someone, Spock.”

Whoop-dee-doo. How is he to talk about his feelings when he would describe this condition as being, principally, the absence of feeling? McCoy, out of consideration, sends Dr. Zheng to his room instead of asking Spock to report to her office in the med bay. She is young, and wears her hair in a high ponytail, like Nyota; her voice is soft and calming and her reactions to his answers concise, compassionate, non-judgmental.

A few hours after her visit McCoy is back, balancing a tray. “Since you’re half-human, we’ll see how well human meds work on you.”

There is half a jab buried in this. Perhaps because ras’t is a spiritual state, thought to be controllable through clear thinking and a change of routine, Vulcans are tyros in the science of heartache; there is not even an herbal remedy for ras’t. On McCoy’s tray are three bottles, a tall glass of green juice, a banana sliced over toast and a bowl of imitation plomeek soup.

McCoy has him eat half the banana-toast first, then tips one pill from each of the three bottles into his palm. “They do something with your neuroregulators, don’t ask me to explain what exactly. This one helps specifically with your sleep. That one’s for your anxiety.”

Anxiety?

“Yeah, man, you’re actually anxious as hell, don’t you know?”

He cautions Spock that it may be days before there is improvement; that the “cocktail” might have to be tweaked. “Side effects,” he says, without further explanation. Spock is already better the next day—there is no dry mouth or nausea at least, and he can eat—but before the day is out he knows what McCoy is talking about. The fear and discombobulating mist have lifted a little, and in its stead there is—nothing. He floats through the hours, along the hallways dispassionately. Clear-eyed and unfeeling, he plows through his day’s list of tasks, imagining that this is what it must be like to be a god: nothing can touch him, nothing he does can do ill.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Scotty shouts.

Except, unless, you are in Engineering, helping to supervise an experiment for the quantum lab for which thirty percent of the warp core’s power is being borrowed. Scotty is reaching an arm into his personal space, pointing at a toggle next to the one he had been about to flip. “It’s this one you want, mate, that one shuts off the coolant regulators.” 

He stares. So, the Chief Engineer is right. The knowledge he has nearly caused a plasma overload and a failure of antimatter containment affects him not at all. “Thank you, Mr. Scott.”

That evening in the med bay McCoy is apologetic: “I’d like to think we’re better at this than we were three hundred years ago, but the brain’s still a mysterious organ.”

He adds another pill to Spock’s three; then takes two away. According to him and to Dr. Zheng, it is about finding the right level of anxiety to let through: too little of it is dangerous, just as too much of it would be incapacitating. He is slightly more aware the next day of the consequences of mistakes; then newly afraid to step out of his room. One night, having trouble sleeping, he takes an extra quarter of the perfelixavor, and wakes at ten hundred hours, feeling as though smothered in a blanket of lead.

He is a man of unimpeachable focus and drive; no one would consider it unusual if he were not to show his face in the rec room for days. He excels, too, at staying “all business,” “on topic,” use whatever Standard expression you please. One look from him, and your will to socialize evaporates; many on board might sooner face a Gorn defenseless than casually ask of Commander Spock at the mess how his day was, what he thought of the latest episode of Saturday Night Live.

But James Tiberius Kirk cannot be avoided forever. “Hey, uh, Spock.”

Every Monday at seven hundred hours they have breakfast in Jim’s cabin. This is a habit they began months into their first deployment together: a way to discuss ship’s business in confidence, without worry of interruption. Captain and first officer, keeping house. Through nearly five years of shared service they have observed this institution religiously, unless one or both of them happened to be incapacitated or, on more than one occasion, incarcerated in alien prison. 

Spock has managed the last several meetings adequately, but the eighth day after he starts medication Jim stops him as he is rising from the table. Jim, whose glib confidence could power all the whizzing tramlines of Yorktown, seems almost to stammer. “Bones told me about—we had a conversation about—”

So, it has happened. Spock meets his captain’s gaze level. Do not count on a Vulcan to read human expressions accurately; but to Spock, it is as though Jim were the one who has just had a bad secret revealed. 

“I’m sorry,” Jim is saying. “I—I didn’t know you were having a bad time, Spock.”

Two or three years ago he might have said: I didn’t know Vulcans could get depression. Well, call that progress, Jim Kirk.

“I am finding my time on the Enterprise interesting and profitable as ever.” Before Jim can speak he adds: “And I am functioning adequately. The doctor’s medication has been helpful.”

“Well, that’s. That’s good to hear.” Jim’s knuckles crack as he squeezes a fist. Spock does not know why Jim does not push back on the functioning adequately bit. Also, he cannot understand why Jim looks the way he does. Depression is no one’s fault, humans are quick to insist; and so why does Jim sound like he is apologizing? Why does he look, standing there fist-handed, eyes anywhere but on his first officer, as though he has somehow been the cause of Spock’s fear of these bright corridors, been the weight forming his ras’t? “Take it easy, okay, Spock? We want you well.”

You are taught in Basic Humanoid Psychology that, even within individual species, “well” is relative; one person’s thriving is another’s barely functional. One can live in a windowless city flat, another must breathe and range the green of forests. One person might go a lifetime mateless, happy with adequate professional success and alternative sources of personal enrichment, while the same condition would drive another mad in months.

He has been on medication eleven days, and working adequately through all of them, when McCoy takes him by the arm in the med bay and sits him down. “Spock, I’m relieving you of duty for two weeks.”

Only yesterday Spock had been in Dr. Zheng’s office, describing yet again to the best of his ability his state of mind while she had nodded her head, softly saying of course, I hear you, I understand. She had seemed to approve of everything she had heard. “Doctor, I do not understand.”

“You’re still kind of all over the place, the way you’ve been responding to these meds.” McCoy looks and sounds pissed; which is to say, he is his normal self. “You had that close call in Engineering—” 

And nothing since.

“—and this morning, that moment when—where the hell were you, man? What was happening?”

Right, yes. Deck Thirteen forward, en route to stellar cartography. Quite suddenly the walls had seemed to close in, and Spock had retreated to the bulkhead, sinking almost to sitting, breathing deep ragged breaths. His biopatch had, of course, translated those impending feelings of disaster and death into streams of data relayed to the med bay’s server.

“Why didn’t you come straight to me? Your heart was doing a fucking thousand a minute.”

The moment had passed, quite simply. “I was able to resume duty,” he tells McCoy.

“It’s the Vulcan half of you. Sorry—I meant—” McCoy squeezes his eyes shut and rubs them. “You’re a sample of one, okay? We don’t know how that half of you is fucking up the biochemistry of the meds, but it somehow is. Sherry and I need time to get this right. In the meantime, even if you manage to stay sharp out there, we don’t want you having panic attacks. If for no other reason than that they suck.”

“Doctor—”

McCoy thumps his med padd down on the table. “And this was Jim’s order, not mine, so take it up with him.”

If Kirk and Spock make a formidable team, so do Kirk and McCoy. Ten minutes after Spock is back in his quarters from the med bay, the captain is at Spock’s door. Spock knows Jim has interrupted his stint on the bridge to be here; and a thousand to one, Jim knows of the panic attack Spock had. 

“It’s like when you’re injured physically, Spock. If you keep using the part of the body that’s injured—”

Their quarters are opposite one another at the end of a U-shaped corridor, same as on the old ship; and yet, Spock realizes, he has never seen Jim Kirk leaning in his open doorway, whether in or out of uniform, until now. It is always Spock who crosses those two and a half meters to be in Jim’s space, Spock who accepts tea from Jim’s kettle and breathes in the vapor of Jim’s recent shower and glimpses the foot of Jim’s unmade bed through a doorway (Jim, as captain, has the privilege of a separate sitting room). Not that Spock has ever forbidden a visit from his captain: if he must guess, he thinks Jim has extrapolated from the Vulcan aversion to touch that they consider personal space sacrosanct; to be bared, as certain parts of one’s body are, only to lovers and physicians.

“Relieving me of duty would make things worse,” he tells Jim. By Surak, what is going on with his voice? “The lack of stimulation would leave me prey to the worst impulses of my brain.”

He has aimed this well. Jim hesitates, looking away; when he turns his gaze back upon Spock, he is a different man. “Well, you’re not a hundred percent, Spock, would you dispute that?”

No. No, he wouldn’t. 

“Okay. You’re not at a hundred percent, and I cannot have anyone not at a hundred percent on this ship.” His gaze is hard as flint, his voice low. “Especially not my XO and chief science officer. What if shit hits the fan and you’re the guy on the bridge dealing with it?”

Let it be known that Cadet Kirk had, in fact, paid attention at the Academy: “‘Half a second is all it takes’—remember that? Half a second of indecision, inattentiveness, panic, or just being two percent slower because you’re at ninety-eight and not a hundred percent, and we’re all dead.”

Spock has no answer to that.

“So then, please, Spock. Rest up and be well. If we weren’t in the middle of fucking nowhere, I’d—” Jim sighs, looking, for an instant, as though he is on the verge of his own episode of panic. “I’m sorry I can’t let you off this ship, but do whatever you feel like doing, okay? Except work.” He pats the doorframe, looking as though he is about to say more, but does not and lets the door hiss closed.

In Spock’s quarters are: a violin; a sand painting kit; a chess set; and copies of two Le Guin novels he has finished but not returned to the library. He does not have to stay locked in, of course; Dr. Zheng has suggested he make use of a sim suite, transport himself to anywhere he wishes in the galaxy, even beyond—Trantor, Coruscant, Tattoine; but he has never liked sims—he prefers hard reality; and in any case he does not feel like being anywhere else but here, now that he has been involuntarily put on leave. He removes the sand painting kit from its place on a shelf. It had been a joke Christmas gift from Bones, that winter they had been waiting at Yorktown for the final touches to be put on Enterprise-A; it is still unopened. The knowledge it can be used only once fills Spock, for some reason, with regret. He puts it away. The chess set stares at him from a table below. It cannot play him; it is not “smart” like so many human objects are; but he is in no mood anyway to think of openings, gambits, forks. He thinks of the violin in its case in the closet, where it has been since Enterprise-A’s launch. His mother had been a wonderful violinist, a talent that had transferred well to playing the Vulcan lute; he had thought to pick it up finally during their shore leave on Yorktown, spending a large chunk of his personnel account balance on a genuine handmade instrument from Cremona, Italy. Now he would sooner endure a knife stroke than draw a bow across a string. 

He flips open his communicator, scrolls down a list of contacts. While you are on enforced mental health leave, no one is permitted to contact you—not even the captain; only the CMO and attending psychologist are exempt; anyone else, to be able to get through to you, must be personally exempt by you. Tapping down the list which is ordered by rank, Spock selects first Scotty’s name above Bones’s, then Uhura’s below Scotty’s. He selects Chekov, Sulu, reaches Sherry Zheng’s pre-highlighted name, then scrolls back up to the top of the list. He hesitates before tapping on Jim’s name.

No one calls in. Though Bones cannot have told everyone, and Jim surely knows to practice discretion too, how is it that no one, not one of his senior colleagues is concerned he is out this long, when Commander Spock has never taken more than three days off, and that only for serious bodily injury? Bones checks in on him three times a day, bringing food which he watches Spock consume. “And try to get in some exercise, if you can help it,” he says.

Spock is glad this, too, can be accomplished in the safety of his room. He tries a few floor exercises recommended in the Starfleet Health and Fitness Guide, but his limbs do not cooperate; even his breathing feels labored. He tries with a similar lack of success to read. He sleeps halfheartedly.

On Day Three of his leave, someone who is not Bones or Sherry finally messages him. You don’t have to respond to this, just letting you know I’m thinking of you: Lt. Nyota Uhura at 13:01:57.

He does respond; and that evening it is she who shows up at his door, managing a cart that has not only dinner on it but also a stack of books. “I forget how quickly you read,” she says, setting the books down on his desk.

He is genuinely glad to see her; glad as he can be of anything these days. It is like some small, feeble device, a watch face or an emergency switch, awakening within the vast gloom of his cavernous condition: insufficient to throw light on anything, but, temporarily, there is something other than unbroken black. Nyota, who knows better than to ask how he is, sits and chats a while, though not before asking him to activate the holoscreen over the hyperdiamond bulkhead that is his ceiling. 

“Does it bother you to see nothing outside?” he asks her.

They have ceased seeing even stars: it is thirty-four days and counting in this void now. Even before his own descent into ras’t he had heard of the number of people overwhelming Counseling Services. “I don’t know,” says Nyota. "It just does stuff to you.”

The lengthy entry on “void madness” in the Starfleet Encyclopedia corroborates her; as do the many first-hand accounts in ship’s logs of disintegrating consciousnesses. In the early days, when low warp factors had stretched journeys out by years, not a few ships had been lost to mass hysteria and mutiny. “It’s just … really frightening not to have anything out there. What, you don’t agree?”

Nyota thinks Spock, who has been living with this view of unbroken black overhead the entire time, is brave. And, true: a completely healthy Vulcan would deem it illogical to fear space in itself—space, without which the existence of solid things, you and me, cannot be possible. But Spock is not well; and he is afraid. He has just been trying to relearn courage and reason, without success. For a void is where Vulcan used to be. A void is all that is left of his mother; and what there will be when he is no more.

That night he dreams of fire, and mountains crumbling into endless depths. He is running into a dim cavern, except this one extends eternally, and he will never reach his parents in time, he will be crushed before he sees their beloved faces again.

When he wakes he is aware that his bed is shaking, as the world had been in his dream. It—the ship—gives a sharp buck, then is knocked aswirl; his books and devices and chess pieces fly. When he sits up from where he has been thrown onto the floor he becomes aware of the red, pulsing glow under his door.

In an instant he is on his feet, donning his blue shirt and boots, running out. The turbolift accepts his command to bear him to the bridge, despite his duty status being “inactive.”

It is just past two hundred hours, but there in the big chair is Jim in full uniform. “Spock!” he exclaims.

“Captain. Report.”

“Spock, go back to your quarters.”

“Report,” Spock demands of Lieutenant B’Lars at the science station, at the same instant as the ship lurches again. 

“Proximity alert—” shouts Ensign Cobolli, Chekov’s night counterpart. 

“I’m reading another one—” yells Lieutenant Shelton at the pilot’s station.

“Spock, out,” says Jim. “Off the bridge, now.”

“Captain—”

“That’s an order, Commander!” Jim roars as the ship heaves.

No way out. Spock meets Jim’s crazed glare, then stumbles back into the turbolift. As he gropes along the hallway to his quarters he tries to shut out what he is feeling. He is terrified, in the same way he had been in the volcano. He has never, ever wished for the ship to be obliterated and everyone else along with him to be dead.

He is back in his room not ten minutes when the wild motion stops, and red alert is stood down. They had been knocked out of warp, but the blue warning lights are already going back on; there is that familiar shudder coursing through the ship’s frame as they pass the light speed boundary, setting objects a-rattle on their surfaces. Then someone is pressing his door chime, one of six exemptees on his list of contacts.

“Well, we got them off our asses,” Jim says. He leans heavily in Spock’s doorway as he says something bordering on nonsense about metaphasic entities, massive pulsating branes: a hitherto undocumented form of life, if life it can be called. “We couldn’t see anything but they were like, giant fucking space hands or something. A whole lair of them. Grasping at us. Probably disturbed their beauty sleep tearing through the area.” He does not need to be precise, even correct; Bio and Astro and Quantum are already furiously analyzing everything their sensors have scooped up; the full report will be there in due time for Spock to browse at his leisure.

“Anyway,” Jim sighs. “Look, Spock, I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

Spock stares at the wall-hanging opposite his bed.

“Spock, look at me.”

He refuses.

“Commander. Eyes on me.”

Slowly, he looks around. 

“Hey. Bro. We survived, didn’t we?”

He says nothing.

Jim’s hair is mussed, from all the carding it has surely received in the throes of breakneck decision-making. “You know what, Spock? Like—” An exhausted, exasperated grin is seeping onto his face. “You’re not gonna like hearing this, but—I know what you’re thinking. You're thinking it was a mistake for me to order you off the bridge—”

“I was simply reporting for duty, Captain.”

“Which you are not allowed to at present—”

“I was merely offering my assistance in an emergency.”

“Spock.” Now Jim is laughing. Spock has grown to love Jim's laugh; but right now the sound of it is awful to him. “Look, man, I get it. We all like to think we’re indispensable. Sure as fuck I live under the same delusion a lot of the time. 

“But truth is, if something were to happen to me, everything would be fine.” Kirk has, for emphasis, planted a splayed hand on his chest. “Because you’d take my place, and you’d do great. And if you can’t do your job, like you can’t now, someone else in Science will step up to it, and we’ll be fine.

“We have”—Kirk counts on his fingers—“a deputy chief science officer. A deputy deputy chief science officer. Chekov. Montgomery fucking Scott. Sulu, who happens to be a PhD in astrophysics while also being the best fucking pilot in the galaxy with two hands and ten fingers. Plus a whole bunch of other PhDs who also know how to aim a phaser rifle in zero-G while doing EVA.

“B’Lars was great on the bridge just now. She’s been great the whole week. Carol has been great, everyone down to the fucking assistant mess hall attendant has been great since day one, and will step up to it when necessary. Because this is Starfleet, and no one gets into Starfleet who isn’t fucking amazing at what they do.” Jim levels a glare at Spock. “Now, please, until Bones says you’re out of the woods, you are not to lift a finger. We. Will. Live.” 

Spock sits long on his bed after Jim is gone. His room is a disaster; he ought to set things to rights, but he just sits and stares; when he finally rises, it is to look for the bottle of perfelixavor, the sleep medication, which was last on the counter of his bathroom sink. He finds it lying ignominiously along with his metal toothbrushing cup against the jamb of his shower. He picks it up, tips out one, two, three pills instead of the one he is supposed to take every twenty-four hours. He pours out more, and is about to take them all when he thinks of what Bones will do, when he presses the chime in the morning to no answer. And what Bones would feel; and what he would say as Spock comes to in the med bay from his act of narcissism and stupidity. Unseeingly he stands there several minutes—an hour?—then returns all but one pill to the bottle. This he bites in half; he swallows one half, then the other. The effect is immediate; he sinks slowly to sitting against the bathroom wall with his knees to his chin.

Soft lights; soft hum. The lights eventually snap off, and he is borne along smoothly in the dark with Enterprise, now unmolested by space hands. The doorbell chimes. Another harangue from Jim? Or it is seven hundred hours already; and that will be Doctor McCoy outside with his breakfast. Another chime, a third one. There are beeps and the door latch whirrs: McCoy has used his medical override.

“Good God, man,” he says, seeing Spock.

Spock stares back, blinded by the bathroom lights coming on again. “All right, c’mon,” says McCoy. He helps Spock to standing, guides him over to the bed and lays him down, putting several pillows behind his head, so he is at an angle to take food and drink. He waves the tricorder over Spock, then patiently tips green juice into his mouth. The disastrous state of the room, he ignores. Trust McCoy above anyone else to see to what is important first.

As he gently wipes Spock’s mouth clean he says, “Some fucking rodeo that was last night, wasn’t it?”

He is going on and on now about broken bones, one rather serious case of a spinal injury; yesterday night both he and Spock had gotten off very lightly indeed, being tossed about like that. Spock listens without speaking. When Leonard McCoy is just trying to fill silence, and trying without a whiff of irony to sound casual, you know he is worried; and Spock does not want to compound his worries. He closes his eyes. When he comes to, the lights are dim, the room set to rights. The scattered chess pieces have been put away in their box; the tray with his breakfast now has a sandwich on it. 

He wants to know the time. 14:35, says his communicator; and his next, instinctive, habitual move is to flip it open to check for messages, but he does not want to. He knows, somehow, that there will be no messages for him; and he is afraid of confirmation of the fact, of facing stark proof of his uselessness and superfluity aboard. He puts away the communicator. He tries to return to sleep; but instead he finds himself thinking of that time on Altamid, when he had been impaled by a piece of metal, and there had been only rusting implements in a box, the tools of a dark age, to treat him in his agony. See Jim’s worried face hovering above his in the dark. Feel Jim squeezing him on the arm, as McCoy had worked on him on the long, stiff couch in the Franklin’s mess. You must focus your efforts on helping the crew, Captain.

That’s why I need you around, Spock.

Dully he compares this with Jim’s words from twelve hours ago, and concludes that, on both occasions, the captain’s logic had been sound. On Altamid he, Spock, had at least been mentally competent, only physically compromised; yet he could have died of his injuries; hence the urgent need to restore him to duty, make him usable. Where, on the other hand, is the danger when one is drowning in ras’t? Danger there may be, to ship and crew, not to oneself. Not that there have not been Vulcan suicides. Wherever there is life, there is despair, and the will to end it by ending life. But these were the poor souls who had abandoned logic, who had demonstrated an inability to think through their condition with the appropriate rigor. Who that is sane discards a perfectly functional body? Who that is this insane would ever be permitted to be useful on a starship, useful to Jim Kirk?

Reaching out, Spock grabs his communicator and flips it open. Zero messages. Of course: reports of him being ordered off the bridge by Jim Kirk have made the rounds, and his colleagues, Chekov, Sulu, Scotty, even Nyota are all disgusted.

He rolls off the bed and gropes his way to the bathroom. This, too, McCoy has tidied; and for an instant Spock is worried the doctor has been proactive—but there it still is, in the drawer by the flossing pick and the tube of shaving cream. His is not a genuine Vulcan razor: he’d had one, but it had been lost along with all his other effects on the old ship. The meditation robe, the ritual implements, the carvings. The new wall-hanging, done in the traditional Vulcan manner, had been procured in Yorktown from a highly skilled human hobbyist who had studied traditional textile weaving on Vulcan. Spock picks up the razor by its metal handle and unfolds the blade. Vulcans, being unusually dexterous as well as sensible among hominoids, have never needed to invent safety razors: this is essentially a folding knife. He lays the flat of the blade against his skin, assessing, wondering. Carbonized electrum, the Ferengi salesman at Yorktown had proudly declared, showing him the certificate of manufacture: you would not have found better quality on Vulcan itself, though this was made on Lavaris, a planet famed for its artisans. He was an honest man, Pog at the emporium on Inner Circle, South-South-West Sector Seven, Level Five: he would never cheat his customers or deny them a good deal. 

Better perhaps to try it on something else first. A towel hangs behind Spock on its rack: with only light pressure, the blade slides through the microfiber silently, fluidly as through butter. Spock turns the blade this way and that, eyeing the spangle of bathroom lights on its flat. The door chime sounds; he snaps the razor shut and puts it away.

It is Doctor Sherry Zheng, come to check on him. “I am fine, but I do not wish to talk,” he tells her.

She leaves without protest; but hard on her heels is McCoy. “Eat your lunch, Spock,” he says, seeing the sandwich undisturbed.

He is not hungry.

“You weigh five kilos less than you did a month ago.” McCoy looks around, glaring. “Where’s the other bottle?”

What other bottle?

“The venlafaxine. Where’d you put it?” Right, of course: McCoy has already removed the sleep medication which Spock had abused this morning, but he has forgotten also to take away everything else.

You were the last to arrange my belongings, he thinks to answer; but McCoy has located the bottle and is now saying,

“I’ll be bringing you your—hang on, yeah?”

He has flipped open his chirping communicator and is speaking into it. Through the device comes Jim’s voice, distantly filtered. “No, no, I’m with him now,” McCoy says. “Okay. Okay, yes, okay.” He flips it shut and glares at Spock.

“He’s still mad at you, you know that? And I haven’t even told him about that little trick you pulled this morning.” Spock does not think he has reacted; but McCoy’s expression changes as he says, “Look, you know how he is about heroics, right? He’s the only guy allowed to perform them on this goddamn ship. But he sure wasn’t happy about yesterday, and I’m with him on that. So. No more dramatics from you, okay?”

He leaves, after waiting vainly for Spock to touch his sandwich. Spock sits down on the bed, then lies down on his side, curling in on himself. Pain in the mind, in the soul, produces pain in the body. He draws tighter in on himself, clenching every muscle against a cry. What is your problem, says a voice rather like Jim’s in his head. Bones told you no more dramatics; and now there are more from you? Incredible. Preposterous. To be sidelined in your state, and scolded to boot, is only fair and just and logical. He curls tighter, groping for something, anything, to take him out of his unreasoning stupidity, out of the human side of himself. Ego, ego. Ego means me in the extinct human dialect of Latin and in Golic Vulcan ego is nash-veh but it is also pach-te, the fount of want against which he is struggling and losing, because he is weak, and contemptible, and illogical, and he would have gotten everyone killed if Jim hadn’t sent him off the bridge, and Bones was right to be angry with him too about this morning, he needs something to think about, something beautiful and abstract and crystalline in its perfection to make him accepting of his insignificance, his imperfection, his nothingness. A Euclidean proof. Surak’s syllogisms. Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Milky Way. He looks upward, and sees smooth black where always there used to be stars. By now, one of Astro or Bio or Quantum would have a preliminary report on just what the fuck last night’s rodeo was. 

Slowly as a night flower unfurling, he comes out of his curl and reaches for a padd on his bedside table. He plucks at one corner with a finger till there is enough of it for him to grasp. Through this device one may access all the knowledge of Starfleet and the Federation, the known universe, but all he wants to see are the goddamn reports. He inputs his lock code to access Science’s servers; the screen flashes a message. Access unauthorized while on enforced leave. 

He puts the padd down and squeezes his eyes shut. He thinks he sleeps; when he wakes, when he is able to sit up, doing so by dropping his legs over the side of his bed then rolling upright, he goes to the bathroom. He stands a long while over the sink, then gets the razor out of its drawer. Pressed to the inside of his wrist, it produces no sensation; but there is a line of green that is beading, overflowing: he has pressed only just a little bit harder, having felt no pain. He drops the blade: it clatters to the floor with the ring of struck crystal. Blood is oozing through his fingers—he has clapped a hand to the wound, squeezing as tightly as he can. Still no pain, even as the blood streams down his arm and patters on the floor. One, two drops land by his bare foot, green as the redwoods of Big Sur, green like the pigment called viridian which is hydrated chromium oxide. His mother, jewel of her species, had also liked to paint. Vertigo overcomes him and he slumps against the towel rack.

He ought to call sickbay; but if he releases his wrist to use his comm, if he stops applying pressure to his wound, the blood will pour, and he may lose consciousness. Though he is in a simple long-sleeve shirt and sweatpants, and barefoot, he steps out of his room as he is, walking swiftly, holding his wrist close to his chest. A few doors down he begins to run.

“Nurse,” he says, as he steps into the med bay. The poor woman turning around gasps horribly. “I require first aid.”

She is swift, competent, decisive; she is only shaken at first because it is Commander Spock who has walked in like this. He is still being treated with the dermal regenerator, feeling the fizzing pain of the cut (now it hurts, it burns), when McCoy bounds into sickbay, out of uniform. “Doctor,” says Spock.

McCoy shoos the nurse away and grabs him by the wrist. The incision is still there: it takes more than a few passes of the dermal regenerator completely to erase a cut this deep.

“Doctor.”

Now McCoy is off to the side, priming a hypospray.

“Leonard.”

“Here.” McCoy grips Spock’s bare shoulder—the nurse had gotten him out of his blood-soiled shirt after stabilizing the wound—and the pain at Spock’s wrist flares, as it had when McCoy had grabbed him just there to look at the cut.

Then all sensation fades as, with a hiss, something is injected into the base of Spock’s neck. “You’re staying here tonight, Spock.”

“Leonard, please—”

“Don’t talk.”

“Leonard, I beg you, do not tell the captain.”

McCoy looks away, still gripping Spock’s shoulder, and Spock thinks he is about to turn around and scream in his face, slap him: so much rage courses through that touch. But when McCoy turns Spock sees that he is crying.

“Lie down,” McCoy rasps. “Take it easy.” Spock goes willingly, for the nervous relaxant is already having its effect; it does not send him to sleep, but bears him up on a cloud, suspending him tenderly between two layers of gauze. The colors of sickbay take on a candied tinge, and he feels but a whisper of the blanket being drawn over him, of the fingers taking his other wrist and inserting an IV. The line is taped back of his hand. The biomonitor twitters as he lies, listening to it and to the warp core’s steady thrum. Why didn’t the doctor use this on him earlier? The hummingbird trill of his pulse is pleasant to listen to. The pain needling his wrist in time to his pulse is like static now, the tingle of a limb coming back online. There is peace after all in this universe. 

He does not know if he sleeps. He exists outside time now; he simply is. As the candied tinge of the lights fades he becomes aware of a presence standing at the foot of his biobed.

Jim. Suddenly, he is afraid, lying there with his bare shoulders exposed above the blanket. Vulcans do not dream, and human-Vulcan hybrids only very little; but he has had dreams frequently since going on meds; let this be another one.

“Hey,” Dream-Jim whispers. He approaches, perching himself on Spock’s biobed. Spock feels the gentle pressure of Jim’s hip against his thigh. Dream-Jim puts a hand on his bare shoulder; he rubs up and down his arm slowly. A very real dream, this. “Oh, Spock,” Jim says. He does not sound angry. He is not scolding Spock. He sounds like his heart is breaking. Jim rubs and rubs his arm, then lays himself, the warm length of his body, over Spock’s, turning his face to press his cheek against Spock’s. 

“That is wild,” his human classmates had invariably exclaimed, during the unit on telepathy in Comparative Xenoneurology; or whenever they worked up the gumption to ask him. He, the first Vulcan to attend the Academy, the ambassador and guinea pig of his species. “You mean, just by touching—?”

“Skin to skin, yes,” he would answer.

They would volunteer in droves, obstinately and cheerfully, holding out their hands to him. As students, fellow cadets, they had felt permitted to indulge their curiosity, to express their amazement, in a way they would not as colleagues, commissioned officers, subordinates. They would insist on experiencing the phenomenon first hand, even after being told it did not work both ways; they would simply feel whatever they were feeling in the moment; it was he who would abruptly understand them in a surge of sympathy. 

“Still. That is so cool.”

To them he had been a magic trick; a tuning fork. They did not think it annoying, wrong, for him to be commandeered like this by another sensibility. “But it’s kind of like—me telling you how I feel? Except I’m not telling you— you’re finding out first hand?” No. Would you, the victim of a betrayal, force a friend to experience your feelings of being betrayed vicariously, make them feel as though their partner has also cheated on them? 

Jim knows this. Jim, who has, in fact, paid attention at the Academy, and has always been scrupulous never to touch Spock except where he is clothed. Now his hands on Spock are rough, his cheek warm and moist. Through the press of warm skin Spock feels the tidal heave of his emotions: sorrow, and remorse, and guilt, and a love so vast and simple, it would enfold his whole being, every quivering cell, holding and embracing and loving till all is melded, dissolved, unified in love, and overcome by it. Slowly rubbing both arms, Jim presses himself to Spock, breathing in time with him. A shield against the void. Let me take all your pain for myself.

When Spock wakes again, his captain is on the biobed by him, half propped up against the headboard so that Spock’s head is against his shoulder. Jim is asleep, and a hand of his rests over Spock’s hand; on his face is the peace of angels.

He is in sickbay two days, during which he gets, not exactly a stream of visitors, but it is a veritable stream compared to what he got during the handful of days he spent in his quarters. 

First is Chekov, at ten hundred hours. Shouldn’t he be on the bridge, navigating? “Good news, Commander! This region of space we are in—fascinating, truly. If we hadn’t run into those anomalies the other day, we would not have known—”

He is saying something about space here being like a conch shell—which they all know can happen, from Astro 101; but they seem to have burrowed themselves into a particularly tight swirl, into which the ordinary light of stars, indeed most forms of energy, could not penetrate. They ought to have known something was off when all their models, extrapolated from calculations performed a millionfold a second off the known lay of the galaxy, had estimated this patch to require three days’ journey, maximum. “Now, it just remains for us to find a shortcut out.” Spock thinks Pavel has never been this cheerful, young, enamored of the unknown; he seems almost to be giving a performance of himself. Strangely, this touches him. 

Then, early in the afternoon, Scotty comes in, balancing a cup of tea on a saucer. “Well, we could’a used you on the recalib yesterday. As much as Shrav likes to bang on about his nimble appendages”—Shrav was an Andorian lieutenant, very proud of his tall, mobile antennae—“but no one can listen to the ship like you can, Spock, even I’ll admit that.”

Uhura and Sulu visit him together at 17:07 exactly, which is seven minutes after shift change on the bridge, a seven minutes' journey from med bay. They perch on either side of the foot of his biobed; they radiate good cheer, the satisfied weariness of those who have done a day’s work well. “It’s like that thing they do in The Matrix.” “What thing?" "What, you haven't watched--?" "No, he hasn't. Explain it for him. Spock doesn’t watch TV.” Spock does not mind being referred to like this, in the third person. He contributes a little to the conversation, but is mainly content to lie and listen as they chat with each other, exchanging banter.

He is still on a bit of the relaxant, and has hardly eaten; but because he is on IV this whole time, this does not concern McCoy too much. “Look at you, lounging while I work my ass off,” the doctor grumbles as he criss-crosses the floor, now carrying hyposprays, now nose-deep in a scan.

He has not said much today; but while doing the deep scan of Spock’s brain before Nyota and Hikaru’s visit he had laid a hand on the bare juncture of Spock’s shoulder and neck, warmly and frankly. I’m sorry. I love you, and I would do anything to make you better. “I know, doctor,” Spock had said out loud; and there had been a shyness to McCoy’s manner and posture the rest of the procedure that had said everything.

To feel Leonard’s love like this is comforting; also, it is different. Spock lies as the hours pass, thinking on and off about this difference to the extent that he can. He does not know what the doctor has given him, but he knows his fellow Vulcans would go gaga for this stuff. Pure thought, almost entirely unaccompanied by emotion. He thinks of Jim’s embrace, but in abstract, intellectualized terms: he cannot revive that feeling in this drugged state, it must come from without.

When Jim finally visits him again, it is already technically the next day. At this dead hour, the med bay lights are dimmed to twenty percent, but Jim is still in uniform.

“Long story short, Stellar Nav thinks we might be out of here in about seventy-two hours.”

He has walked in talking about this, as though they had last seen each other hours ago, and have spent the interval engrossed in nothing but this problem in their separate ways. Indeed Jim must not have thought of anything else all day: he looks tired as hell. 

Spock feels no disappointment. He merely thinks his disappointment as he says, “Do you regret that we are in this situation, when we might have avoided it entirely?”

It will have been forty days all told, spent traversing absolute nothingness, if Chekov and Stellar Nav are indeed correct, and they do not need to retrace their path out. “I don’t know that this was unnecessary,” Jim says. He is rocking from soles to heels, hands in pockets, an arm’s length before the foot of Spock’s biobed. Spock expects Jim to add something about mistakes sometimes being unforeseeable, unavoidable. “Sometimes,” is what Jim says, “going off course teaches you a lot.”

He eyes Spock with an expression that, in this dim lighting, looks to Spock like weary resignation. He comes no closer. Spock thinks, as he watches Jim sway on his feet, of those rough hands in their pockets; of his own lying in his lap. He wears a jumper now, but still feels cold in this space that is maintained for human comfort. Come to me, his soul howls, come to me. Jim does not. There are others in this space, trying to sleep; and his first officer is no longer suicidal. Jim stands there a little longer, seeming furtive and ill at ease, then leaves. 

(But of course. One of them must be dying, or threatening to be dead, or freshly undead, for them to embrace; Jim had been the latter, that one other time this had happened.

Two months after Khan; a gray and wet spring day in San Francisco. In all of two months, he, Spock, had been to see Jim twice at Starfleet Medical; for now, High Command and the UFP Subcommittee on Domestic Security were done investigating Marcus and Section 31, and were demanding to know why Enterprise hadn’t shot Vengeance down before it could pulverize half of downtown San Francisco. "It's public opinion, sir, they're doing this for show. It'll pass." His lawyer, during a break in an interminable hearing. He had never needed a lawyer in his goddamn life. 

He had just gotten back to his flat, exhausted from a day giving evidence, when the knock had sounded on his door. Earlier in the day, McCoy had sent him a text, which he had read then reread before putting down his device. He had been so distracted, he had opened the door without glancing at the camera to see who was outside.

Jim, in a leather jacket. Arms spread. “Heyo!”

Spock is aware he must look and sound very stupid. “Captain. It is good to see you.”

Jim is crestfallen. “Fresh outta of the hospital, risen like Jesus, perfect bill of health, and that’s it? You’re not—ecstatic?”

Spock says nothing. Jim’s sarcastic smile fades; his whole body seems to soften. “Hey man, are you okay?” Still nothing. Spock can hardly explain what he, what they all have been through. That they had lost sleep and weight, worrying first over whether Jim would live; then what state he would be in, if alive. Vegetative, non-verbalizing, special needs? The hearings had only been an excuse. He had been afraid to visit after seeing Jim finally come to, because he had been afraid to learn more. 

“I heard they’re trying to nail our asses,” Jim says. “Bones told me—”

He stops, because he has seen something he did not think he would ever see again. A tear beading in the corner of Spock’s dark eye. “I am sorry, Captain,” Spock says. His voice is hoarse. “It is simply—”

“Spock—”

“I saw you die. I saw you die—” He swallows; the tear falls sparkling to the doormat. “It is good to see you well, Jim,” he says, looking down.

A long look, from captain to first officer. Jim lays a hand on Spock’s arm, then closes the distance, putting both arms around Spock. He presses a cheek to Spock’s cheek, placing a palm gently, deliberately on the nape of Spock’s neck. "Hey. I'm here." Alive. Brother. Warmth. Love.)

When he is cleared to return to his room, he finds the bathroom immaculate, supplied with new towels; in the drawer with the flossing pick and shaving cream is a human safety razor. His wall hanging lies neatly folded on a shelf with the string removed.

He has only an hour or to himself when the chime rings. “Hey,” says Jim.

He is out of uniform. Watching him come in and sit, Spock thinks, for some reason, of their weekly breakfasts. Of course: they see each other out of uniform quite often, but it is the fact they are out of uniform in private quarters, in a room with four walls and a bed, that is salient. The first few months of their breakfasts, Spock had refused to show up in anything but uniform; when he had finally capitulated, Jim, always fresh out of bed at seven, disheveled and smelly, complaining about Vulcans being weird and formal, now declared it weird to see Spock like this, in sweats and a plain jumper.

“One can never win with humans.” (Vulcan poker face, eyebrow cocked.)

“Exactly. You can’t.” (Cheeky, beautiful, brilliant smile.)

In the present Jim is muttering: “Bones gave me a good yelling a couple of days ago. Says I’m to blame, along with him.”

Spock looks at his lap. Two and a half days in med bay, when the sight of Jim, even tired, distracted, thinking of ship's business rather than his business, would have comforted him ... Now, Jim has come by his room, with no one watching; and he has the urge to turn Jim out.

"No one is to blame," he says.

Jim looks like he would disagree. He is carding his hair, smoothing a hand over his beautiful face.

“Why, why is this so fucking hard,” he groans. 

He works his strong hands together. “It’s because—it’s because you never lose your shit, Spock, that we—we—”

He is up on his feet, pacing. “You know, I’ve been getting this ass backwards. What I said about being needed …” Oh, Surak’s eyebrows. James T. Kirk, come to apologize, is instead now giving another lecture. “Obviously," says Jim, speaking rapidly to his own gesticulating hands, "we’re all needed on board this ship. And even—screw that. I don’t believe in anyone, anywhere, not being needed, in some way or another.

“But even someone who isn’t needed—everyone deserves support and love, just by existing, you know, Spock?”

Spock closes his eyes. He wishes Jim would stop talking and leave. Because this is unbearable. To hear Jim Kirk say the word love, to form it on his lips when all he has to do is reach out and touch Spock, is unbearable. 

“But let’s talk—let’s talk about needing instead, Spock. I’m actually bad at that, like you. I was bad.”

He had learned self-sufficiency the hard way, and so had been loath to discard it. Survivor, as a child, of horrors too great to mention; at the Academy, where he had cut an image of enormous, careless cheer, he would have died before being caught showing vulnerability, admitting loneliness. “Actually, it was sitting in the big chair has taught me a lot about needing others? You know”—Jim laughs short and sharp—“sometimes I feel like I’m the biggest baby on board? The most useless person? Strange but true,” he says, seeing Spock open his mouth to challenge. “I need the rest of you guys, or I’m dead. Without you guys I’m just one dude with an oversized ego and a ship he can’t operate by himself. I need Scotty because I can’t fix things for shit, and Uhura because I can’t listen or translate, and Hikaru because he’s a better pilot than me, and Chekov because he’s a genius, and Bones because he’s Bones and you because—because I can’t fucking manage without you, all right?

“Will you let yourself need others, Spock? Will you let yourself need—me?”

Spock lifts his head. Jim is backed to the wall where the hanging used to be; he looks desperate and furious.

The very last dregs of McCoy’s magic elixir are still addling his green blood; or else, he would get up and grab Jim by the throat right about now. Maybe slap him, for good measure. Does he need Jim Kirk? Does he? Like yin needs yang; like living things need sunlight and air. He is furious that he needs Jim Kirk like this. He is furious not to have known this sooner, and furious he can do nothing about it; he is furious Jim will not cut out this bullshit and come and hold him instead of condescending to him like this.

(He is furious because he knows, he knows, that Jim would do this for anyone on this ship who asked: he has laid his life down for them already once.)

“The person I need, Captain—”

“Yeah, Spock? Tell me.”

He clams up. He knows what he wishes he could say--maybe someday he will say it; but first, Jim needs to be punished a little. Jim needs to be told where he truly ranks in S'chn T'gai Spock's hierarchy of being needed.

It is only, in the end, telling the truth. He says to Jim, his eyes brimming,

“The person I need more than anyone else is no longer with us.”

Indeed: in San Francisco, where he had thought himself happy at first, thriving in the experiencing of new things, he had still called his mother once a fortnight, sometimes once a week, asking carefully after her health. 

Then, abruptly, she had shown up at his place one day; confusing him, for Father’s posting had ended a month into his time at the Academy, and there was no summit or conference scheduled on Earth. But then she had laid a hand on his face, right there at the door to his dorm, and he had known how little he knew himself; how lonely and unhappy he had been. 

“You must let love in someday,” she had told him, holding his head in her lap that night. 

He had. He had tried; and still he had parted ways in the end with Nyota; not because he did not love or care for her, but because he could not burden anyone else with his need, his ras’t, like this.

Who but the person who gave birth to him would love him like this, endure him like this? 

In the present Jim approaches Spock on the bed. He goes on his haunches in front of Spock, and puts a hand, not on Spock's hand, but on the back of his wrist where he is clothed. 

"I'm sorry," he says simply. He stays there awhile, saying nothing, eyes downcast. His lashes are dark, blurred with moisture. Then he gets up and leaves.

Spock lies back and cries. 

Days pass. He eats, sleeps, takes new combinations of pills. Bones and Sherry seem to be making progress, for he can think of moments beyond the one he inhabits now; he even tries meditating for short spans. Though still off-duty, he is allowed now to browse the science servers.

He is swiping through some slides from Exogeology when a fresh wave of grief knocks him flat. This is progress; in the worst of his ras’t, even in the immediate aftermath of the Immeasurable Loss, there had been no such moments. He sits back, looking at his screen, which shows images from a survey done before Altamid, of a planet high in iron. Marbled pink and orange and brown from space; like one he had known. Over its rufous crust are etched blue veins, reminding him of fair human skin, motherly hands.

It is past twenty hundred hours; by now, Jim has usually finished dinner, and is probably dealing only with light paperwork. “Captain,” Spock says into his communicator.

“Mr. Spock.”

“May I see you in my quarters? At your convenience, sir.”

Jim is there in seconds, all the same; from just across the hall. “Sir,” says Spock. Jim is tense, wide-eyed. He has seen the look on Spock’s face; he probably hears the quaver in Spock’s voice.

“Spock, what's wrong?”

Spock looks at his hands. He has, at last, reached the end of everything. “Sir, you spoke about needing, as opposed to being needed.”

“Yes.”

“That evening in the medical bay—”

“Yes.”

It feels like a capitulation, what he says next. It is the most difficult thing he has ever had to do in his life. “I was experiencing high levels of distress. Your physical proximity was—was--”

Jim is just inside the door. Perhaps he will stay there—but he is walking over to the bed where Spock is sitting. 

He sits down next to Spock, resting a hand, lightly, on the back of Spock’s wrist. “It helped?” he says. Even while speaking, he retracts the hand. He puts an arm around Spock, and gently has Spock tip into his embrace. “It helped,” he says again, not a question; he tucks Spock’s head under his chin, so that Spock’s forehead presses against the warm awning of his jaw. And there it is; Spock feels it. Love, vast and simple; complete and completing. A shield against the void. There for him all this while. 

Six months after Nero, four months after re-launching from Spacedock, they had come upon a planet named Taurus-Epsilon III.

It had that name, because its star had been named Taurus-Epsilon in a survey. An arbitrary, impersonal name; in their hearts, they were already renaming it a dozen things. Eden. Better-than-Risa. Jewel of the Black.

It had large ice caps, but a belt of warmth at its equator; fantastic mottled greens over browns, but there were no fauna, only forests. They had ended up staying in orbit four days, beaming down in groups to a coastal area that had first drawn the gaze of Exogeo.

Spock had been among the last group; and only because Jim had made it an order. While the enlistees and ensigns had frolicked in a cove, they had wandered off, just the two of them, along a stretch of straight beach around the corner.

On their right were cliffs; on their left, the sea, purple in the sunset light. The sand was a fine, gray-pink powder, silver and mirror-like where the tide had been.

“You ever been to a planet where the seas aren’t H2O, Spock? Like—ammonium. Or chlorine.”

“Yes.”

“That sounds unpleasant.” 

“Simple, Captain. We do not beam down to those places. Or we go in a vehicle, if we must.”

They are walking where the surf can just lick their feet; their boots keep their socks from getting wet. Behind them their twinned footprints meander to the horizon. “Warm,” says Jim, crouching and putting a palm to the withdrawing water.

He looks up at Spock, smiling; Spock returns his look. Jim Kirk is twenty-five Earth years old. He did not even graduate, in the end, from the Academy; they had just given him his commission and Enterprise, and pushed him off into the black, saying, Godspeed. Kirk’s unlined, smiling face shines with that simplicity and wholeness special to the very young and callow. 

And yet, by now, Spock has seen flashes of humility, alongside the murderous bravado. A capacity for introspection, that does not in the critical moments inhibit swift action. Kirk, though hardly old enough to be a father, shows a fatherly concern for his crew; and on occasion, even the simple curiosity of a scientist. Spock is confident now, if he talks about Science’s findings, that Jim’s interest will hold.

He talks. While there are no land fauna on Taurus-Epsilon III, there is a rich, teeming marine ecosystem; in a few million Earth years, or perhaps a few hundred thousand, the fishes will crawl out onto land, and a new chapter will begin. “And in a million more years there’ll be casinos and resorts here, right?” says Jim.

Spock gazes out upon the waves. He is thinking about the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which he had found fascinating on his first and many subsequent visits. On Vulcan, there had been no true oceans. Meanwhile, on Earth, birthplace of this species so loath to stay still, ever expanding to new reaches of the galaxy, they were still learning new things about their own seas. 

“Does it daunt you?” he asks Jim. “The vastness of creation.” He means, that we can never finish what we are doing. That on this one world, speck of sand on one beach among numberless beaches, is knowledge beyond the might of generations to uncover.

Jim stops, facing the waves. He tilts his face to the breeze. “I don’t know, man. This here is kind of enough for me.”

This here?

“I mean this. This moment.” He spreads his arms. “You and me. You from your speck of sand, me from mine in my corner of the galaxy. Right here on this beach. This is the miracle.”

He stays in that attitude a moment, feeling the breeze, as though taken with his own pronouncement. Then, quite suddenly, he turns, striding up to dry sand. Spock thinks he is done with this outing, and is about to ask to be beamed back up, but Kirk is taking off his shirt, his undershirt, discarding his belt. When he has removed every stitch of clothing he runs back down, charging the waves, whooping. “Hey Spock!” He is falling over into the surf, allowing the water to buoy him back up. “Spock, the water’s warm, it’s glorious! Spock, get in here with me!”

Spock watches him in the waves. Then he turns away, walking up to where Kirk has left his clothes, and takes off his boots and socks. He sticks his socks in his boots, neatly rolls up his trouser cuffs, and walks back down to where the sand is wet, to where the surf will tickle his feet, advancing and retreating; and no more. He feels the water's hissing rush, while in the distance Jim bobs and whoops, a golden thing in the declining light. He watches Jim; he feels the breeze, and raises his face. Skies grading pink into lavender; where the silvery points of stars can be seen emerging, it is almost the blue of lapis. One, two three moons hang like pendants in the deep. 

Taurus-Epsilon III, according to Astrogeo’s estimates, is 1.03 Earth masses, 1.06 Vulcan masses; but here and now, he feels light. 

He is lighter these days; not all at once, but gradually. He returns to duty; eats bigger meals, sleeps better. He meditates one evening without a single thought intruding.

At night, many nights, Jim holds him. They lie looking up through a pane of diamond at stars once again numerous and blazing. One night Jim presses a kiss to his brow; then to his eyes; then to his mouth. 

He tells Jim afterwards: “The doctor says I may be on medication indefinitely.”

Beneath him, Jim’s chest rises and falls in a sigh. Twenty-three hundred thirty hours. The low purr of an untiring warp core.

“It’s okay to need things forever,” Jim says. “We can’t survive without oxygen.”

He adds, “We can’t survive without love.” 

Spock raises his head from where it lies in the crook of Jim’s neck. Under starlight, Jim’s face is soft, ageless; a canvas of possibility. 

“Forever is a long time, Jim,” he says.

Jim is not a touch-telepath like Vulcans are. He may need years to begin to read what Spock does so effortlessly, and to feel of Spock in his core what Spock feels of him, pressed to him like this. 

But, he already does. And he can already finish Spock’s thoughts for him, too. “Not for me, Spock,” he says, drawing Spock closer. “If you will have me.”