Spice - Chapter 53
Title: Spice
Author: eimeo
Beta: miloowen
Universe/Series: TOS
Rating: NC-17
Relationship status: Slash
Chapter: 53/54
Pairings: Kirk/Spock
Additional Pairings: Kirk/Lori
Summary: It’s a question of biology. Vulcan biology.
The problem with falling in love with a member of an insanely private species is that it just might take you the best part of a five year mission to work out that the feelings are requited. And then you might discover that he’s already decided that the two of you can never be together.
And what are you supposed to do if he won’t tell you why?
~*~
Chapter 53
It’s dark outside when Kirk opens his eyes, but a quick review of his chronometer-both the one inside his head and the one blinking in the shadows of the nightstand-tells him that he has not slept late; it’s simply that the sun is loath to make its way over the eastern peaks, this early in the year. Beside him, Spock sleeps the ordered, logical sleep of an ordered, logical mind-one hand tucked neatly below his chin, the other pillowing his left ear, sheets drawn up and over his shoulders and falling neatly around his motionless body-and only the regular rise and fall of his chest, the faint flush of cold to his cheeks, and a milky-white line of dried saliva trailing from the corner of his mouth, gives any sign that Kirk shares his bed with another living being. He props himself up on one arm and indulges an urge to just watch, silently, for a moment, as the usual rush of warmth slams into his chest, tightening his throat and hammering at his ribs, because, two days and three mornings later, it still doesn’t get any easier to believe that he’s actually here. He wonders if it ever will.
They need to get away early if they’re going to make the mid-morning briefings, but he can afford to let Spock sleep a little longer yet. And, besides, there’ll be time enough to fall back into the old ways: the casual competition to save each other’s lives the hardest, the protocol, and the exceptions to the protocol. For now, for the next two hours at least, they don’t have to be anything other than lovers who’ve waited entirely too long, and that means that it’s still all right for Kirk to slip quietly out of bed, throw on a robe, and pad down chilled stairs to set the synthesizer to brewing a pot of Earl Grey the way he knows Spock likes it.
Idaho has been a moment out of time; an intermezzo; a prelude to the next act of a narrative of years. He knows this, he thinks, as he carries a steaming cup of coffee to the oriel and watches the sunrise frost the treeline in dazzling ambers while Spock’s tea brews. Tomorrow, they’ll beam back aboard their ship and let their real lives start in earnest: no different, in many ways, to the lives they knew before, but for the fact that the thing that has always been there, that’s burned between them since the hour the transporter beam released Kirk onto the deck of his new command, can now be acknowledged, spoken aloud, permitted to grow. And Idaho will be consigned to memory: a faded photograph caught between the leaves of an old book; something to return to, in years to come, but slipping a little further into history with every passing day.
He’s not sorry, not precisely. He’s going home again. He’s going back to the only place that has ever felt fully real to James Kirk, and he’s going there with the man he loves. A fragment of memory hovers at the edge of recall-something Edith said, once upon a time, back in the days when Kirk was still trying to convince himself that friendship would suffice; that friendship was all he felt: you belong at his side, as if you’ve always been there and always will. She was talking to Spock, but, Kirk thinks, she could have meant either of them. He’s going home again, but the truth is, he’s already there.
Because home is upstairs in his bed, sleeping the logical, ordered sleep of a logical, ordered mind. Home, tonight, will be his billet in San Francisco, and tomorrow it will be on a thin styrofoam mattress built from cost-saving measures and the bitter tears of frustrated designers, while the stars streak Warp 6 past his window. Home is not a place, it’s a person. It always was.
He drains his mug, and makes his way back upstairs with a cup and a steaming teapot, to be there when Spock wakes.
~*~
Travel time to Starfleet Headquarters, the navcom informs them in tones of abject apology, will be two hours and seven minutes, due to a storm front rolling in from the north that’s likely to bring strong side-winds and the sort of weather they’ll have to go around. It’s longer than the hundred-some minutes that Kirk was expecting, but, pressed back into clean, crisp command whites, and with a Vulcan First at his side in a form-fitting uniform that does unspeakable things to Kirk’s libido, he’s slipped back into Starfleet mode without conscious thought, and their departure time will, blizzard conditions notwithstanding, return them to San Francisco with at least half an hour to spare before he’s expected in Nogura’s office. He stows their cases in the trunk of Spock’s rental car, locks the front door, and crosses the few short steps to the porch railings, where Spock is standing Vulcan-straight, hands folded behind his back, looking out over the snow.
Kirk hesitates for only a moment before slipping his arms lightly around his lover’s waist, folding the lines of their bodies together and tucking his chin over Spock’s shoulder to wait and watch with him a moment. The uniforms change things, no doubt about it, but they are, as yet, unobserved. There will be many moments like this. They’ll have to learn to use them.
“We’ll come back again,” he says after a moment, breath curling with Spock’s on the chilled air. “In the summer, perhaps. I promised you the Rockies, after all.”
Spock’s hands unfurl from their clasp at the small of his back, circle around his body to cover Jim’s where they link at his stomach.
“I will be glad to accompany you on a return visit, when circumstances permit,” he says. His fingers are cold where they lace through Kirk’s, and his soft sigh mists the air. “But I do not believe that the mountains, by summer, could be more striking than they are this morning.”
The sun is low in the sky, spilling pale yellow-white sunshine across the western slopes that rise around them; the sky is ice-blue and flawless; the valley is alive with high, clear birdsong stitched, like the threads of a fine tapestry, across a blanket of purest silence. This, Kirk realizes, is how he’ll remember these days: this moment, stretched into hours, tucked around the lovemaking and the quiet conversation and the ease. Spock is right. It doesn’t matter, really, if they return a hundred times: these hills will never be more lovely than they are right now.
He presses a kiss into the corner of Spock’s jaw, feeling the pulse skip restlessly just below the skin. “Come on,” says Kirk. “We’ve got a flight to catch.”
And they watch, together-as he knows they will-the house and the snow and the hillside dropping away beneath them; the smooth slide of the peaks towards sea-level; the thinning of the blanket of white that lines the ground as the steel and asphalt of Boise begins to claim the landscape. They sit together on the seat, hands joined in the lightest of touches, and Spock is silent as the car slices through the miles of empty air, fingers linked through Kirk’s, face turned towards the window. Kirk leaves him to his reverie as they pass south into Nevada, skirting the western edge of the Santa Rosa range, and it’s Spock himself who breaks the hush, turning back into the car with that look on his face, the one he gets when he’s lost in the abstract.
“It is,” he says slowly, “illogical that the return to San Francisco, which is of similar duration and which follows a broadly similar route, should appear to pass so much more quickly than the outward journey.”
Kirk nods. His own thoughts are not a million miles removed from this particular line of reflection. “True,” he says. “But, then again, if perception were always strictly logical, we’d have no need for science.”
He’s expecting an eyebrow arch, but he gets none. Instead, there’s a kind of softening to Spock’s eyes, a glow that few enough but Kirk would recognize as a smile.
“I am attempting,” says the man he loves, “to devise a mathematical model to describe the anomaly.”
And Kirk says nothing to that, because there’s nothing, really, to say, and, even if there were, he’s not sure he has the words to do it justice. So, instead, he just smiles and grips Spock’s hand a little tighter, and wonders if this thing he feels will ever cease to take his breath away.
~*~
The skies above San Francisco are overcast as the car pulls in to the Presidio, the unquiet waves of the Bay spreading out below them in shades of teal and smoke, and, if it weren't for the whisper of spring on the air, the toothlessness of the breeze and the hint of sunlight peering through the cloud cover in bright shards of yellow that scatter the ground, it would be possible, Kirk thinks, to believe that he'd never left. That his office is expecting him, seventeen stories above them in the tritanium-blue tower, with fleet deployment orders to review and diplomats to pacify; that Lori is waiting at for him at his Yeoman's desk, where she knows he can't avoid her, ready to flash that sunshine smile as she sidesteps his questions with the grace and ease of a dancer. It’s so sharp, so present, that Kirk feels his shoulders contract as the gray veil threatens to descend, and, at the edge of his vision, he sees Spock turn his head, eyebrow raised, distraction scented in the air.
And that's all it takes to shatter the image into fragments and send it twisting on the wind. Spock is at his side, hands folded neatly at his back; sharp angles of his pelvis and collarbone too prominent through the unforgiving fabric of his uniform; eyes a little older; face a map of the years they've spent apart. But he's here, beside him, and they're ready to go home. Kirk sucks in a breath, feels the world reorient. Find its center.
"I'm not sure how long this will take," he says, glancing sideways so that Spock can see his eyes; see that the darkness has passed. "A few hours, at least, I'm sure. There's no point in you waiting around--they'll call you when they're ready to talk to us together, no doubt."
"No doubt," says Spock mildly. “I will retire to my lodgings and await further instruction from the Fleet Admiral’s office.”
Of course he has secured a temporary billet in San Francisco. He would have arrived from Vulcan with no reason to think that it wouldn’t be needed, but still. It’s something of an abrupt return to reality, temporarily suspended these past few days, and it is entirely unwelcome.
“Good idea,” says Kirk, who suspects he doesn’t come close to looking like he means it. “But… tonight…?”
He’s not sure how to finish the sentence. They are, after all, no longer sequestered away in a mountain cabin far beyond the reach of prying eyes and ears, but Spock, he thinks, will catch his meaning.
He’s not disappointed. “Tonight,” says Spock, in tones that, in another man, might pass for rich amusement, “should I fail to return to a billet in which I have not yet passed a single night’s rest, I expect that my absence will go unremarked.”
“I… see,” says Kirk. He does not grin from ear to ear. He is, as ever, discreet. "In that case, Commander, I'll leave you to your final pre-mission arrangements. Keep your communicator on, won't you?"
"Yes, sir," says Spock, and there is nothing about his manner that is other than scrupulously correct. Only someone with intimate knowledge of the complex tapestry of mood and meaning that plays out endlessly behind his eyes would recognize the humor that layers his words with all kinds of nuanced and interesting secondary meaning. Some day, Kirk thinks, he's going to have to put some considerable time and effort into processing and coming to grips with the fact that, of all the sentient beings the galaxy across who've tried to find the man behind the Discipline, it is James Kirk to whom Spock has chosen to show this quiet, secret self that no one else sees.
It will, he suspects, be quite the undertaking.
"Very good, Mr. Spock," he says, and, because it's allowed right now, because nobody could suspect or fault him for it, he lets a wide and jubilant smile spread across his face, and raises a ta'al as he turns towards the Phoenix Building.
The world has not stopped turning while they've been buried in the Idaho hills, and 'Fleet HQ, it seems, has yet to catch its breath from the crisis just past. He could have guessed as much, Kirk thinks, from the excitable tone of some of the past week's communiques, and he experiences a moment of mild anxiety as he considers, properly, and for the first time, the look of his abrupt disappearance only hours after his return to Earth. The offices of the Fleet Admiral's staff have the quality of a van de Graaf generator in the moments before a major static discharge, and Chavez, who catches Kirk's eye as he enters the main lobby, in the second before he's able to gather himself to drop his gaze, looks like he hasn't seen the inside of his bedroom in several days.
"Admiral!" he says, with a tight-lipped grimace that might, half a week and thirty-six hours of sleep ago, have passed for a jovial smile. "Admiral Kirk! Welcome back to San Francisco, sir."
Chavez is not the world's most soft-spoken or retiring man at the best of times, but, sleep-deprived to the point of possible psychosis, he might as well have a bullhorn surgically grafted to his vocal chords. Worse, this is an audience still primed for the mention of Kirk's name, and the cubicle farm reacts like foraging meerkats to an unexpected rustle from the brushwood. There are something in the region of fifty officers in the office, ranked Lieutenant Commander and up, and, as one, they turn to Chavez and then in the direction of his line of sight, and immediately break into applause.
Kirk smiles as genially as he can and resists the urge to duck his head and make a break for the command corridor at the far end of the suite. Chavez is leading the ovation, clapping hands raised theatrically above his head as he falls in alongside Kirk en route through the room, and Kirk finds himself abruptly and unexpectedly glad that Spock is not here to witness this. It's not as though he'd say anything, but he'd get that look in his eye, the one that's unquestionably mordant delight, and that would be that for the last vestiges of Kirk's dignity, already under strain and, quite frankly, vulnerable to the lightest of pressures.
The worst of it is, Chavez knows it's ridiculous--it's in the knowing glance he casts towards Kirk as they pause by the exit that leads them out of OpTacs' public face and into the real halls of influence--but admitting as much would open a chink in the brightly polished armor of Fleet PR, and give Kirk the kind of wiggle-room he can parlay into an excuse to avoid the five thousand press events he's no doubt expected to attend between now and tomorrow morning's departure. Lori couldn't stand the man, he recalls suddenly, and he remembers wondering at the time if her antipathy didn't have something to do with the fact that Chavez's job relies, just as much as hers, on the ability to read the people around him like an X-ray film-just directed towards less lofty, high-minded ideals.
Stern is talking in low tones into her communicator as they arrive at Nogura's office, but she breaks away from her conversation, with neither apology nor explanation to her conversational partner, to greet them with her habitual unsmiling courtesy.
"He's waiting for you inside, Admiral Kirk," she says briskly. Exuberance would not be Stern's style under any circumstances yet encountered in ‘Fleet history, but Kirk is grateful, nevertheless, for her restraint. "Admiral Chavez, if you could take a seat over here, the Fleet Admiral will call for you when he's ready."
The briefest flicker of consternation in Chavez's confident smile tells Kirk that this development is not consistent with the admiral's expectations, but he covers it easily enough. "Sure," he says amiably, and offers a corporate laugh. "Just so long as Admiral Kirk doesn't go giving any interviews to the holos in the meantime."
Kirk smiles, offers the expected genial chuckle, and resists the urge to count the hours, minutes and seconds left until he can warp his ship right the hell out of the circus and into the relative sanity of deep space. It’s more, he thinks, as the door to the Fleet Admiral's office slides open, than he wants to know.
Nogura is sitting at his desk, eyes focused on a PADD, but he looks up as Kirk steps inside, face breaking into a smile that, if it's not genuine, is a damned good imitation of what genuine ought to look like. If the past ten days have been difficult for him, there's no sign of it in his face. Kirk knows his CO better than to think that he would ever, in a crisis, consider devolving control of his organization into the hands of a subordinate for longer than the minimal, medically mandated rest-break that he's required, by Fleet constitution, to honor, but his eyes are bright, his lined skin clear, and no hint of fatigue stoops his shoulders as he gets up to greet Kirk with a warm handshake and a hearty slap on the back.
"Jim," he says amiably. "Good to have you back. How was Idaho?"
"Cold," says Kirk, as he lets himself be led to the circle of armchairs, where coffee and pastries await. "But… refreshing. I believe it was exactly what I needed, sir."
"Good," says Nogura, lowering himself into his usual seat and gesturing to Kirk to do the same. "Good, that's good. And now you're back and ready to take charge of the Enterprise again. That’s wonderful. You’ve seen the reports from Engineering?"
"I have," says Kirk. "Commander Scott is extremely thorough. If he says she's ready to head back out, then she's ready."
"More than ready, I hear," says Nogura. "It's quite some time since I've had hands-on control of a starship, but, if memory serves, this fleet has never seen specifications quite so advanced as the refinements to the Enterprise's operating capacity. She’s quite a bird, Jim."
Kirk sits back in his seat, lets a commander's smile play easily across his face. Heihachiro Nogura has never made polite conversation in his life, and he doesn't trade in banalities. He’s leading to something; the trick is to keep pace with him as he gets there.
"Yes, she is," he says. "And she has quite the crew to man her. All we need now is a mission brief, sir."
"Indeed you do." Nogura cannot be rushed. He cannot be cajoled. And there is no point in trying to outmatch him: victory, in a verbal battle with Starfleet's CIC, is measured in how egregiously or otherwise one loses. He leans forward now, helping himself to a coffee from the steam-curling urn, and his movements are slow, exaggerated: the movements of an elderly man. Kirk doesn't believe it for a moment, but he appreciates the effort.
Nogura sits back, saucer in hand, cup cradled to his chest. "Would it surprise you," he says slowly, "to learn that we've had this particular mission in mind for you for several months now, Jim?"
It absolutely would surprise Kirk, whose work with Fleet Ops, these past two years, has involved nothing in the way of starship command. "I guess that would depend on the mission, sir," he says, and Nogura smiles.
"Yes," he says, though there's no way he's mistaken Kirk's answer for anything other than deflection. "I guess it would. Computer," he tells the open air, and a screen descends from the ceiling to cover the wall to his left. "Display starmap T-384 Sigma 14G."
The screen sparks into life, but Kirk's brow is already reaching for his hairline even as it's buffering, clarifying, resolving into scattershot circles of light on black. He doesn't make a habit of memorizing starmap designations--he has a Vulcan for that, after all--but he sure as hell knows that one. He doesn't need a legend to know what he's looking at.
"Ilion," he says, and he has to work hard to keep his voice steady.
Nogura nods. "Ilion," he says.
Kirk swallows; centers himself. "The distress call…?"
"Was not, in fact, a distress call." Nogura smiles placidly. "As I believe Admiral Ciana attempted to point out to you, on several occasions."
Kirk feels his throat tighten at the mention of Lori's name; forces himself to set it aside, to focus, to run through the content of their final conversations. That signal is poorly aimed-if it’s aimed at us at all-and it’s erratic, she tells him from across a gap of weeks. There’s no reason to think that's what it is. And he'd felt his temper fraying, the way it often did when she tried to tell him just a little bit and nothing more, and she probably rolled her eyes and said something sarcastic, and let him simmer for a bit before she flashed her golden smile and found the words to pull him back from that ever-present precipice, the place where he went, three times a day, to do his best to end his career. He’d known, known in his gut, that the signal was another attempt to call for help, to force Starfleet's hand and oblige them to come in and end the war they'd accidentally started, but she'd shaken her head, soothed him with vagaries and fragments of the truth, promised an update that never came.
"The thinking is," says Nogura now, as though Kirk's silence indicates nothing more substantive than the natural progression of their discourse, "that we have an opportunity in you, Jim. This organization has never before, in its 150-year history, granted command of a starship to an officer above the rank of commodore. Giving you the Enterprise affords us the possibility of expanding our horizons somewhat, but we have to be careful. We have to be conscious of what we're doing and make sure that we're using our resources appropriately. A voyage of exploration and discovery is all very well, and I've never had cause to regret the decision-making process that put you in charge of your former mission, Jim, but you're an admiral now--and that rank carries with it certain… connotations. Connotations that we can use."
"Connotations," says Kirk, whose thought processes have not yet moved past the Ilionian signal.
"It was not a distress call," says Nogura calmly. "Not this time." A beat. "This time, it was handshake."
Kirk blinks. Stunned silence is clearly not an option, but he's got nothing, and, in the absence of alternatives, his mouth says the first thing that comes to mind: "The Klingons…?"
"Not the Klingons," says Nogura, "no. The call, when we were able to trace it, turned out to be a preliminary greeting issued by the newly instituted Grand High Office of the Ilion Space Command." A pause for effect. Let nobody say the commander of Starfleet lacks a keen sense of dramatic timing. "They took back their world, Jim, on their own and without our help. And now they want our assurances that we're never going to put them in that position again."
Kirk steeples his hands, drops his gaze to his knees. There's no reason to think it's a distress call, Lori had said, but he'd been so determined, so convinced that he was right. He wonders how much she knew when she came to see him in his office. How much she would have told him when she had the chance.
"The last thing we heard before Ilion went dark," he says, and tries not to think too hard about what else was going on that day, "was that the main thrust of the resistance had been completely destroyed. How certain are we that this isn't a maneuver by the occupying forces? The Klingons have always been less invested than the Federation in the spirit of the Treaty."
Nogura's smile is serene. "Were we not 100% certain of that fact," he says, "we would not be moving on this at all. We had to wait until we had all our cards lined up, Jim. We made the wrong play last time. I have no intention of allowing that to happen again."
All told, Kirk had approximately five hours' sleep last night; maybe the same again the night before. He’s not unaccustomed to sustained periods of activity at the expense of proper rest, but, in moments of heightened threat, the hormone flooding his system has tended to be adrenalin, and that, it seems, makes more difference than he might have thought. He feels like his synapses are firing one beat behind the rest of the world, and that makes them at least three beats behind the man across the coffee table from him.
Carefully, he says, "Several months, you said."
"Hmm?" says Nogura, all wide-eyed innocence. He sips from his cup.
"You've had me in mind for this mission," says Kirk, "for several months, sir. That puts the idea in your head long before I asked for the Enterprise, in any capacity."
The smile deepens, changes quality. "There are men," says Nogura, "whose extraordinary gifts can act as both a blessing and a curse, Jim. Wouldn't you agree?"
"You were always going to put me back in the air." Kirk's voice is flat, even. He’s pleased with that. There is not so much of a trace of accusation to his words. "That was always the plan, sir, wasn't it?"
But Nogura shakes his head. "When you returned to Earth at the end of your mission," he says, "I would have been a fool to lose you to deep space again, Jim. I know you've always understood that, no matter what your personal preference might have been. I needed your particular brand of leadership and charisma here, at home, where it could do the most good. And I stand by that decision--it was the correct decision. That’s been your curse, Jim: you were always too damn good at what you do, and the proper exercise of your talents wasn't always consonant with your own desires. And, let me tell you, it would have taken a hell of a lot to persuade me to let you disappear back into the unknown. A figurehead, I can use; hell, I can even use a martyr, though believe me when I say that's not a story that I ever hope to have to spin to the press. But a shadow? Yesterday's news? A face that nobody sees for months at a time? Whatever good that might do for the advancement of Federation knowledge, Jim, you've been entirely too valuable as a hero and an icon to let you vanish in a puff of smoke. Make no mistake, Admiral Kirk: this was not always my plan. This was never my plan, and it took some considerable persuasion to change my mind."
It’s the persuasion. The persuasion is when he knows. He may be firing a beat behind, but Kirk knows who he married. The persuasion is when he finally understands.
"Lori," he says.
"Lori," says Nogura mildly. "She was a hell of an officer, Jim, but I don't need to tell you that. There are not many people in this world, and a hell of a lot fewer in this organization, who can make me rethink my strategy, but Admiral Ciana was one of them. When her team decoded the Ilion signal, yours was the first name out of her mouth, and she never changed her recommendation, even after I turned it down flat. She insisted that there was nobody else in Starfleet with the specialist knowledge of the Ilionian people necessary to make this assignment work, and she insisted that we could manage your probable demands for a return to deep-space command in a way that worked for the service."
Damn it, Jim-you play a better game than this, she'd said, and Kirk had thought she was just worried that she couldn't trust him to be discreet. "She advocated for my return to active command of a starship," he says.
"On the Camden," says Nogura. "As far as we knew, the Enterprise was Will Decker's for the foreseeable future, but she made the case that we could use a man of your skills and experience in the air, and that Ilion would be the testing ground to see how it could work. She was a hell of an officer, Jim. Don't prove her wrong now."
Kirk's thoughts are a mass of white noise and unsuspected connections falling into place, and it takes him a moment to corral them into something that makes sense. So, to buy himself the time he needs, he leans forward, pours himself a cup of coffee, sits back in his chair. He's neither naive nor arrogant enough to think that this is in any way about him: Lori was a good woman--one of the best he's known--but she was Starfleet before she was a friend, lover or wife. This isn't about what Kirk wants; it's about what's best for the organization, and he knows that. But she also knew what this meant to him. She knew what she was giving him back.
Slowly, he says, "You haven't told me what the mission entails. Sir."
"The mission," says Nogura, "will fall somewhere between diplomacy and negotiation. Ilion wants our assurances that we're not going to ruin their lives again; we want Ilion in the Federation. That hasn't changed. Now they're ready to talk to us, I need somebody in the room who can persuade them that the best possible way to keep the Klingons from their door is to be part of the Federal family and subject to the Treaty. I want you, in the first instance, to be that somebody, Jim."
"They've just got their planet back." Kirk sips from his coffee; figures it can't hurt his processing power. "And you want us to barrel in and start talking to them about mining rights?"
Nogura's smile thins a little. "If that were what I wanted, Jim, I wouldn't be asking you."
"No." It's not hubris; he knows it's not. Ilion is personal. There's probably not another commander in the fleet who can do this; Lori was right about that. "What's on the table, sir?"
"For Ilion?" The smile is back, along with a little, knowing light of victory behind the aged eyes. Nogura knows he's won, but, then again, the outcome was never really in any doubt. "Whatever you need to put there, Jim. You know these people best. For you?" And he sips from his cup, but his gaze never leaves Kirk's, and it's like cold steel. "Get this right, Jim, and you can write your own ticket. Within reason, of course."
Kirk feels an admiral's smile tighten the edges of his mouth. "Of course," he says.
"It's going to be the high-level stuff only," says his chief. "The things I don't intend to trust to those bull-headed idiots in the diplomatic corps. But you have a damned good crew behind you: you know their skills and you know how to use them. I’m only sorry it took Admiral Ciana to point it out to me-I must be getting old."
Heihachiro Nogura, Kirk is privately certain, will never knowingly allow himself to get old. If Lori were here, she'd be shifting in her seat right now and pursing her lips around the sort of grin that her CIC permitted from few enough of his officers, because, whatever he might say out loud, she hadn't won anything, not really, but she'd unquestionably failed to lose. In another world, Kirk thinks, he should have fallen in love with this woman.
"And if I get it wrong, sir?" he asks. "What happens then?"
"Now, Jim." Nogura drains his cup, and sets it back into its saucer with a decorous little click. "You know as well as I do that you won't get it wrong."
No. He won't. Kirk knows that, and Nogura knows that, and, once upon a time, Lori knew it too. Spock is right: she was a remarkable woman.
"Thank you, sir," he says quietly, and he hears the tightness in his voice, but it doesn't matter now. The lines have been drawn, the territories claimed, and there's no further need for pretense. "I won't let you down."
"I know you won't," says Nogura. "But it's not me you should be thanking."
"Perhaps not." Kirk purses his lips, drops his eyes. "But my other options are a little limited these days."
Nogura inclines his head. "That reminds me," he says. "I have something I need to give you, Jim."
It's less likely that he's forgotten than that he's been waiting for the right moment to bring it up, Kirk thinks, and the timing doesn't exactly bode well for his continued peace of mind. He drains his cup and sets it carefully back down on the coffee table as Nogura gets to his feet and makes his way over to his desk, the far side of which, as far as Kirk knows, has never been available to any officer in the corps. A well-oiled drawer slides open with the minimum of fuss, and the admiral extracts from it a rectangular package, wrapped in brown paper, that Kirk recognizes immediately as the proportions of a sturdy, well-filled book. There are few enough people in the galaxy who'd have cause to make such a gift to James T Kirk, and Nogura himself, he thinks, is not among them.
He finds himself hoping it's from Bones, even as instinct informs him, cheerfully and without apology, that it really, really isn't.
"Admiral Ciana came by my office a few days ago," says Nogura as he makes his way back over to his chair, and Kirk, whose mind is still reeling, takes a moment to process the fact that both of Lori's parents held that rank before they retired, and both are still alive. "They don't want to see you, Jim, and nothing I could say or do would change their minds, but maybe give them a little time. It's still raw for them. But they found this in her study when they were closing up her apartment, and it was addressed to you. She obviously meant for you to have it."
Kirk takes the package without a word, fingers closing around a hidden spine where it's buried beneath a layer of paper. There is no way he can open it here, but he's certain that Nogura will understand. "Thank you, sir," he says after a moment, and makes no effort to strip the emotion from his tone. His name is scribbled on the front of the parcel in Lori's untidy script, now forever stilled; he couldn't keep his voice steady if he tried.
"'The life given us by nature is short,'" says Nogura quietly, "'but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.'"
"Cicero," says Kirk automatically. He has never cared for Cicero.
Nogura nods. "I'm going to call Admiral Chavez in for a moment," he says. "Stern will fetch you some fresh coffee, and I'd like you to take some time to go over the mission brief on the PADD she's prepared for you. The three of us will talk again in half an hour, and then I'll have her page Commander Spock to the office. Captain Spock, I guess," he corrects himself, and smiles.
"Captain Spock," agrees Kirk, who likes the way that sounds. Much better, he supposes, than his lover ever will.
He gets to his feet; wonders vaguely if there’s anything else to be said before he takes his leave. Nothing about this exchange feels like business as usual, but protocol is protocol. “Thank you, sir,” he says, and stands to attention. “Permission to be dismissed.”
"Permission granted," says Nogura, who has picked up a PADD and is scrolling absently through its contents. Every muscle in his body speaks of unfinished business carefully withheld, but he will, as ever, not be rushed, and the only thing to do is play along and wait for him to be ready. So it's no surprise, besides his commitment to prevarication, when he stills Kirk's motion, two steps from the door, with a brusque, "Oh-and, Jim?"
Kirk purses his lip, folds his hands at his back, turns back to the room. "Sir?"
"I've kept a lid on the rumors for now," says Nogura, without glancing up from his PADD, "but I'm going to need you to do better than that, if you're going to work with the man. Not everyone knows you as well as I do."
Kirk blinks. "Sir?" he says again, but coldly.
"You know what I mean." Nogura taps his screen; looks up from under hooded eyes. "Idaho wasn't sensible, Jim. You're a command team and two very public faces of this organization, and I can't afford to have it look like there's favoritism or preferential treatment happening on my flagship. So keep it under wraps, will you--at least until you're out of this system."
Kirk clears his throat, fixes his eyes on his boots. He can feel his hands trembling at the base of his spine with the effort it's taking to control his anger.
"I'm not aware," he says icily, "of any rumors, Admiral."
"No," says Nogura. "And I intend to keep it that way. Even Chavez hasn't caught wind of this, Jim, and, believe me, that's how you want it to stay. You're his direct superior, for heaven's sake. Just because I know you'd never compromise the chain of command doesn't mean I can sell that line to the holos if they get ahold of it. Don’t put me in an impossible position, please."
The tips of Kirk's fingers are beginning to lose sensation. "What exactly are you forbidding, sir?" he asks.
"Nothing," says Nogura calmly. "I'm forbidding nothing, Jim. Deep space is a long way from here; that's why they call it deep space. It won't be the first time we've turned a blind eye to natural Human behavior and it won't be the last, but I'd rather not have to go live on holo and defend this organization's actions to the Federation if it looks like we've been keeping protocol violations out of the public eye. It’s the rumors I want to keep under control, Jim, not my officers--your personal life is your own. Provided it doesn't come back to bite me, that's all. Now--dismissed, Admiral. Please send in Chavez on your way out."
~*~
It's early evening when Kirk finally makes it back to his billet to pass his last night for the foreseeable future on his homeworld. The sun is sinking behind the headlands as the door slides open onto the chill shadows of his apartment, unopened package tucked beneath his arm, and he has no idea how long it will be before Spock finds his way over from his lodgings at the bottom of the hill; no idea if he's going to be tired or hungry or pissy; no idea if he'll want to shower or sleep or make love; no convention and no precedent for the situation, and no idea if the day felt as pointless or as leveling to Vulcan sensibilities as it did to Kirk's. He knew it would be long; he just forgot how long a Starfleet day could be.
His Yeoman has been packing for the best part of the week, and he trusts her, he guesses, after almost two years together, to know what can safely be left in storage for the next five years and what he's going to want when he's eight hundred billion kilometres from home. His sitting room is a tower of boxes stacked with geometric precision around the couch, all scrupulously labeled with that ruthless efficiency that made her indispensible to the smooth functioning of his life within four days of his arrival at Fleet Ops, and, he's pleased to note, his bourbon collection has made it into one of the cartons labeled “For Transit,” and bundled by the doorway. Glasses are a little more problematic, but Spock, he thinks, will hardly choose to join him in a drink when he arrives; anything vaguely bowl-shaped will do, since it's not as though anyone's ever likely to know that Rear Admiral James T Kirk, on the night before he shipped out into the great unknown, sipped a fourteen-year-old malt from a souffle pot because his need outweighed his sense of shame. And so it is that, rifling through the box marked Kitchen (Misc) / Fragile (Misc): Handle With Care, he comes across the last, the very last, thing that he would ever choose to leave behind.
It's not as though Ramirez could possibly have known. She'd have seen a picture on a wall-an old clipper, framed in hardwood, with an inlaid brass plaque that bears the same name as the ship he's about to rejoin-and she'd have read nostalgia, perhaps a little bit of the obsession for which he has gained a reputation, and decided that it belonged to the life he was leaving behind. He can't fault her reasoning; he's just glad that he found it in time. Along with an amply proportioned brandy snifter that will hold three fingers of whisky just as efficiently as it's ever held a Cognac, so he'll count the expedition a success.
Kirk pours himself a generous measure from the first bottle that comes to hand, and carries it to the window with his parcel from Lori folded against his chest. His couch is stripped bare and unoccupied by boxes, but he rejects it in favor of sinking to the floor in front of the cool, shadowed glass, swallowing a gulp of Laphroaig and allowing himself no more than a moment's glance at the words on the front of the packet-a dead woman's final farewell-before he tears back the paper to reveal an elderly copy of Tacitus's Germania, bound in tooled leather and easily three hundred years old. They’d talked about it once, he remembers, back when their story was very young, and he remembers her saying that she'd read it for the first time as a precocious child of eight or nine; that it had stirred her love for the Other; that it had been the first time she'd understood that her life would be the study and understanding of cultures beyond her own. And he'd remembered his bookish thirteen-year-old self happening across a copy in the Riverside library, freshly returned from Tarsus and looking for something, anything, to occupy his brittle mind, and feeling like, many years later, those days spent buried in the observations of an old explorer from days gone by were when he'd first begun to entertain the possibility of one day stepping back into the black vaults above.
Tacitus. Tacitus and the Enterprise. She always did read him far too well.
And he knows, because he knows Lori, that there will be an inscription on the frontispiece--it was the kind of casual vandalism of which she approved: fragments of lives preserved for generations to come, safe within the folds of another writer's words. Hers is not the only message passed from one hand to another: a woman called Adeline wishes Henry a very happy twenty-first birthday and hopes he will enjoy this as much as the Agricola, while a Geo. H. Maguire claims the volume for his own on August 19, 1946. But there, beneath the echoes of a long-vanished past, are the words his ex-wife wanted him to read, scrawled in black ink:
Audeat esse aliud atque statuere tuum archetypon.
Vivet vita tua, et ambulaveris sidereo tua.
~*~
Spock finds him there, unmoved, when he arrives three quarters of an hour later, overnight bag slung over one shoulder and a dress uniform, neatly pressed, folded into a garment bag that he carries over one arm. Kirk has drained his glass and made no effort to refill it, but he's allowed his spine to go slack, boneless, as he's rested his head against the window, and he can only imagine how it looks to the casual observer. He doesn't need to imagine, in fact: it's written all over Spock's face.
"Jim?" says his lover, uncertainty clouding his eyes, and this is when Kirk realizes that he's neglected to turn on the lights.
"Yes. Spock," he says, and he hears the fatigue in his voice, feels it in his bones as he struggles to his feet. "I'm sorry. Are you hungry? I think the synthesizer is still online…."
"I am well," says Spock, and the unspoken partner to that statement--the implicit question--hovers in the air between them. Kirk could choose to just ignore it--it's what he'd like to do, really--but, he thinks, he's not the only person in the room who's had a hell of a day, and Spock does not have to be here. If they're going to do this, they need to do it right.
So he bends down, retrieves the book from the floor where he's left it, unread, and passes it to Spock, whose eyebrow only arches halfway before he manifestly thinks better of it and accepts it without a word.
"Nogura gave it to me today," says Kirk quietly, as his lover runs one elegant hand over the binding. "It's from Lori. She was planning to give it to me before she died."
"Admiral Ciana," says Spock, almost to himself, and, because this is what they do, because it's the sort of thing they've never needed to be told in words, he opens it to the frontispiece, scans the writing there, glances up at Kirk. "Latin, I believe," he says. "A language that, I regret, I do not read."
"Spock," says Kirk, and feels the first twitches of a smile playing at the edges of his lips. "You're fluent in seven spoken dialects, conversant in twelve more, and you have the basics of goodness knows how many dozen others. Your failure to learn a long-dead Terran language is hardly reprehensible. It’s a fragment of poetry, translated from Terran Standard. It’s the sort of thing that Lori would do."
"I… see," says Spock, who does not look as though he does. "And this poetry has particular meaning for you?"
The shadow of Kirk's failed marriage is like a presence in the room, darkening Spock's eyes and inflecting his words with an anxiety that Kirk only hears because he knows it's there. There’s no competing with a ghost, he knows; Lori told him as much, once upon a time. Spock wasn't there; he doesn't know the way his memory spilled into the gaps in a threadbare love that was never going to endure; he doesn't know that he was the rock against which their marriage broke. He sees only sentences in a language he doesn't understand, and a woman inviolate whose image can never be tarnished now; a woman whose name has slipped into history and legend; a woman that James Kirk chose when Spock was not there to be sought. Kirk can't explain to him that Lori's final gift to them both was, in some ways, her compromise for the loss of the man that she could never replace; there are no words for something like this, and no way to make them understood. So he doesn't use words. He closes the space between them in two rapid steps, hooks one hand around the back of Spock's head and the other around his hip, and pulls him in for the kind of kiss that will do his talking for him.
This is it. This is who they are. This is home.
And, as the book falls to the floor as Spock's arms close around him, Kirk understands that, for tonight at least, he wants all of this man. The scent of spice loads the air as he shuffles Spock backwards in the shadows, towards the bedroom door, hands fumbling with the clasp of his uniform pants as they move, as he feels Spock's cock lengthening, hardening beneath the fabric. He wants all of him, caution be damned; he wants to know, to feel, that what was lost hasn't been lost in vain.
His nightstand has been emptied, of course, but there hasn't been a man in Kirk's bed for all the time he's lived here; his mother could have rifled through the contents of his bedside cabinet and come away untroubled by the experience. But there was time, on the way home from HQ, to make the kind of purchases that are unlikely to be readily available in deep space, and he's taken the precaution of stowing one small tube in his pants pocket, in preparation for the fact that his apartment is all out of coconut oil. Kirk pulls it free and tosses it onto his bed as Spock's fingers find the opening clasp at his hem, and Kirk buries his groan in Spock's mouth as an elegant hand closes on the length of his cock.
They tumble sideways, striking the mattress together without breaking their kiss, and Kirk kicks off his boots as he shucks his pants free of his legs and onto the floor. Spock is toeing at his own heels as Kirk rolls him onto his back and applies himself to the task of removing his lover's tunic, and Spock, who misses nothing, is already reaching for the lube where it has bounced to the edge of the bed. This is going to be quick and hard, exactly what Kirk needs right now, and he feels himself go boneless as cool, wet fingers wrap themselves around his cock, slicking him from base to tip in one smooth, polished movement.
Kirk tugs his tunic over his head and casts it carelessly into the shadows. The fastening of Spock's pants is hanging open, erection tenting the fabric, and Kirk pulls them down as far as he can without breaking contact with Spock's hand where it pumps his cock with practiced ease. Spock shuffles his legs all the way free of his trousers and Kirk presses in for a kiss, hand snaking down to grip Spock's cock and trail a messy line through the thick layer of lubricant. Spock groans, arching up and into the touch, and this is all the invitation Kirk needs.
Olive oil, he thinks, and grinds his cock down, hard, against Spock's.
He's half-expecting an instant flare of heat, but that's not what makes his breath catch in his throat. Spock makes a sound that's half alarm, half pure pleasure, and Kirk thinks he hears his name in there somewhere, but it's hard to be certain over the rush of blood in his ears. He reaches between them, clutches their cocks together, and this time, when he thrusts, he can feel the first tingle of protesting skin, but it's not painful; not even close. Rather, it's somewhere between the sensation of submersion beneath room-temperature water and an unexpected touch in the dark, and, though the heat is building, it's building gently, inexorably, blood rushing to the surface of his overstimulated skin. He’s going to come, and come hard, if he carries on like this, and that's not what he wants-not yet-but it's not easy to stop; not with Spock's fingers gouging crescent moons in his buttocks, not with Spock's groin rising up to meet him with each roll of Kirk's hips, not with his body and mind registering the wash of chemical arousal on his cock as the build to orgasm. In the end, it's Spock's superior willpower that saves them from a prematurely ruined bed and an untimely post-coital coma, rolling upwards and out from under Kirk, and pressing him into the mattress with a kiss that temporarily distracts him from the sudden lack of contact at his cock.
Not for long-the buzz from Spock's lubricant is good, but it's not that good-but long enough at least for Spock to rock back on his heels and scoot down the bed a little way so that his head is level with Kirk's groin. And, yes, Kirk knows that it's less to do with an overwhelming urge to perform fellatio on his over-excited lover and more to do with a sudden and pressing need to examine Kirk's dick for signs of potential injury; of course he knows this. It’s just that the motivation behind the maneuver seems much, much less important than the fact that his cock is now in Spock's mouth and the man has, it seems, spent the past few days applying his considerable intellect to the task of learning exactly how to make James Kirk's eyes roll in his head and his mouth make sounds that no Human mouth ought to be able to make.
But Spock, brisk and efficient as ever, has taken stock of the situation; has judged, no doubt to the nearest pascal, just how much pressure Kirk's straining arousal can take before his body takes charge of matters and levels all his good intentions. His mouth contracts around the head of Kirk's cock and then retracts, lips swollen and glistening in a manner that Kirk cannot help but lean up and crush to his. Spock rolls them again, hooks a long leg up around Kirk's hip, and his meaning couldn't be clearer: he knows how close Kirk is to orgasm, he knows that, if they're going to do this, it has to be now. The tube of lubricant has worried its way almost to the edge of the bed, but they scramble for it together, and Kirk fumbles the lid as he presses Spock back into the pillows with a hungry, inelegant kiss. Their cocks brush again, and, sucked clean of its protective layer of silica gel, the burn is sharp enough to draw a hiss from between Kirk's teeth.
It ought to be a warning. If feels, instead, like a challenge.
Lubricant spills onto his right hand and he snakes his left in beneath him to work Spock's dick: a diversionary tactic designed to obfuscate the activities of his right as he slides two fingers inside himself. It’s awkward, graceless, necessarily urgent: what he doesn't want is for Spock to work out what he's doing before he's ready to show him why it's what he wants, what he needs right now. His ass is tight, unyielding; his spine is aching with the effort of holding himself in place, unsupported, above Spock, but he works a third finger inside, scissors, thrusts, feels his body begin to respond. He has no idea if the coating of lube he's working into the walls of his anal passage will be enough to dull the heat to a comfortable, background blaze. Part of him hopes it won't.
Spock is breathing heavily now, hips canting in time with the motion of Kirk's hand, eyes closed, neck thrown back on the pillows. They’re both ready. Kirk breaks their kiss as his fingers slide free of his ass, and he sits back on his heels, poised over Spock's groin. His left hand is still gripping Spock's dick, and he shuffles slightly, lining it up with the entrance to his body, holding it in place but moving no further. Spock's eyes crack open, and Kirk reads alarm there, uncertainty, perhaps a little disbelief. But not distaste. Not disgust.
Not refusal.
"Jim…" he says slowly, voice hoarse. He does not say stop.
"If this is not what you want," says Kirk. "If you don't want to do this, Spock, just say the word. Say the word and it will not happen." He swallows. Spock's lube is leaking copiously onto the tight ring of muscle at his anus, and, no, as it turns out, a coating of silica gel is not quite enough to keep the burn at bay. "But if your only objection is concern for my safety-if that's the only thing that's holding you back right now-then… I'm asking you to trust me. Do you trust me?"
Silence. Spock is motionless, but for the ragged rise and fall of his chest.
"Spock," says Kirk again: softly, almost a whisper. "Do you trust me?"
Spock's breath catches in his throat. A beat. And then he nods.
"Yes?" says Kirk.
"Yes," says Spock.
Kirk closes his eyes. Presses down.
It's years since the last time he's done this, but his body remembers. There’s resistance at first, the usual muscular rebellion, and the flare of pain is so sharp, so bright, that his vision flashes white for a long moment and he hears himself suck in a harsh, ragged breath that has almost certainly seriously alarmed the man beneath him. Liquid heat floods his ass, an advancing line of fire that scrapes a trail into his body with the progress of Spock's dick, and he almost cries out; it's almost too much. But he needs this; he needs to feel himself filled and completed; he needs the connection, the sense that he's given as much as he has taken. He wants all of Spock.
Spock does not move while Kirk sheaths him inside his body. He does not move when, having taken as much as he can, Kirk braces himself against his knees and breathes for a moment. He does not move when Kirk takes his own wilting erection in his hand and pumps a little of his lagging arousal back into the slackening shaft. The burn is building to a crescendo but the pain is easing as his skin adjusts-it's like heated silk, now, where before it was like red-hot sand-and he tries an experimental thrust. Lubricant bathes his asshole on the downward motion, but the sting is background noise now. And the head of Spock's dick just grazed his prostate.
He'd forgotten about the prostate.
He moves again, arching up, sliding back down, burying Spock a little deeper, and, this time, the groan that erupts from his throat is of a different quality entirely. Kirk can feel his cock filling again as the burn levels off-chili-pepper hot, but innervating now, like the third mouthful of the hottest dish on the menu-and, this time, Spock's hips flex on the downward thrust, meeting Kirk's motion with the smallest motion of his own. Kirk leans forward, takes his weight on his left arm, presses his mouth to Spock's as his lover's hand reaches up to twine with his around Kirk's cock. Instinct is taking over now, for both of them: for every backwards thrust of Kirk's, Spock thrusts upwards, and there's a frantic edge to his movements now that indicates the rapid approach of orgasm. Kirk understands that very well. He’s not far behind himself.
They come, in the end, almost together, Kirk lagging by no more than a second. He feels Spock shudder and jerk inside him, and then his own orgasm is leveling him and he's pumping thick streams of ejaculate onto the coarse, dark hair of Spock's chest and gripping the pillows on either side of Spock's head with force enough to turn his knuckles white. He thinks he yells Spock's name; he's certain he hears his name on Spock's lips, and this moment, this connection, this thing that he feels that will never cease to take his breath away…. It begins to lay the ghosts to rest.
~*~
A/N: Lori's inscription is a translation of Wilferd Peterson's excellent advice, first brought to my attention by another brilliant woman who was taken too soon. Thanks to miloowen for checking the grammar--it's a long time since I studied Latin.
Chapter 52
Chapter 54
Author: eimeo
Beta: miloowen
Universe/Series: TOS
Rating: NC-17
Relationship status: Slash
Chapter: 53/54
Pairings: Kirk/Spock
Additional Pairings: Kirk/Lori
Summary: It’s a question of biology. Vulcan biology.
The problem with falling in love with a member of an insanely private species is that it just might take you the best part of a five year mission to work out that the feelings are requited. And then you might discover that he’s already decided that the two of you can never be together.
And what are you supposed to do if he won’t tell you why?
~*~
Chapter 53
It’s dark outside when Kirk opens his eyes, but a quick review of his chronometer-both the one inside his head and the one blinking in the shadows of the nightstand-tells him that he has not slept late; it’s simply that the sun is loath to make its way over the eastern peaks, this early in the year. Beside him, Spock sleeps the ordered, logical sleep of an ordered, logical mind-one hand tucked neatly below his chin, the other pillowing his left ear, sheets drawn up and over his shoulders and falling neatly around his motionless body-and only the regular rise and fall of his chest, the faint flush of cold to his cheeks, and a milky-white line of dried saliva trailing from the corner of his mouth, gives any sign that Kirk shares his bed with another living being. He props himself up on one arm and indulges an urge to just watch, silently, for a moment, as the usual rush of warmth slams into his chest, tightening his throat and hammering at his ribs, because, two days and three mornings later, it still doesn’t get any easier to believe that he’s actually here. He wonders if it ever will.
They need to get away early if they’re going to make the mid-morning briefings, but he can afford to let Spock sleep a little longer yet. And, besides, there’ll be time enough to fall back into the old ways: the casual competition to save each other’s lives the hardest, the protocol, and the exceptions to the protocol. For now, for the next two hours at least, they don’t have to be anything other than lovers who’ve waited entirely too long, and that means that it’s still all right for Kirk to slip quietly out of bed, throw on a robe, and pad down chilled stairs to set the synthesizer to brewing a pot of Earl Grey the way he knows Spock likes it.
Idaho has been a moment out of time; an intermezzo; a prelude to the next act of a narrative of years. He knows this, he thinks, as he carries a steaming cup of coffee to the oriel and watches the sunrise frost the treeline in dazzling ambers while Spock’s tea brews. Tomorrow, they’ll beam back aboard their ship and let their real lives start in earnest: no different, in many ways, to the lives they knew before, but for the fact that the thing that has always been there, that’s burned between them since the hour the transporter beam released Kirk onto the deck of his new command, can now be acknowledged, spoken aloud, permitted to grow. And Idaho will be consigned to memory: a faded photograph caught between the leaves of an old book; something to return to, in years to come, but slipping a little further into history with every passing day.
He’s not sorry, not precisely. He’s going home again. He’s going back to the only place that has ever felt fully real to James Kirk, and he’s going there with the man he loves. A fragment of memory hovers at the edge of recall-something Edith said, once upon a time, back in the days when Kirk was still trying to convince himself that friendship would suffice; that friendship was all he felt: you belong at his side, as if you’ve always been there and always will. She was talking to Spock, but, Kirk thinks, she could have meant either of them. He’s going home again, but the truth is, he’s already there.
Because home is upstairs in his bed, sleeping the logical, ordered sleep of a logical, ordered mind. Home, tonight, will be his billet in San Francisco, and tomorrow it will be on a thin styrofoam mattress built from cost-saving measures and the bitter tears of frustrated designers, while the stars streak Warp 6 past his window. Home is not a place, it’s a person. It always was.
He drains his mug, and makes his way back upstairs with a cup and a steaming teapot, to be there when Spock wakes.
~*~
Travel time to Starfleet Headquarters, the navcom informs them in tones of abject apology, will be two hours and seven minutes, due to a storm front rolling in from the north that’s likely to bring strong side-winds and the sort of weather they’ll have to go around. It’s longer than the hundred-some minutes that Kirk was expecting, but, pressed back into clean, crisp command whites, and with a Vulcan First at his side in a form-fitting uniform that does unspeakable things to Kirk’s libido, he’s slipped back into Starfleet mode without conscious thought, and their departure time will, blizzard conditions notwithstanding, return them to San Francisco with at least half an hour to spare before he’s expected in Nogura’s office. He stows their cases in the trunk of Spock’s rental car, locks the front door, and crosses the few short steps to the porch railings, where Spock is standing Vulcan-straight, hands folded behind his back, looking out over the snow.
Kirk hesitates for only a moment before slipping his arms lightly around his lover’s waist, folding the lines of their bodies together and tucking his chin over Spock’s shoulder to wait and watch with him a moment. The uniforms change things, no doubt about it, but they are, as yet, unobserved. There will be many moments like this. They’ll have to learn to use them.
“We’ll come back again,” he says after a moment, breath curling with Spock’s on the chilled air. “In the summer, perhaps. I promised you the Rockies, after all.”
Spock’s hands unfurl from their clasp at the small of his back, circle around his body to cover Jim’s where they link at his stomach.
“I will be glad to accompany you on a return visit, when circumstances permit,” he says. His fingers are cold where they lace through Kirk’s, and his soft sigh mists the air. “But I do not believe that the mountains, by summer, could be more striking than they are this morning.”
The sun is low in the sky, spilling pale yellow-white sunshine across the western slopes that rise around them; the sky is ice-blue and flawless; the valley is alive with high, clear birdsong stitched, like the threads of a fine tapestry, across a blanket of purest silence. This, Kirk realizes, is how he’ll remember these days: this moment, stretched into hours, tucked around the lovemaking and the quiet conversation and the ease. Spock is right. It doesn’t matter, really, if they return a hundred times: these hills will never be more lovely than they are right now.
He presses a kiss into the corner of Spock’s jaw, feeling the pulse skip restlessly just below the skin. “Come on,” says Kirk. “We’ve got a flight to catch.”
And they watch, together-as he knows they will-the house and the snow and the hillside dropping away beneath them; the smooth slide of the peaks towards sea-level; the thinning of the blanket of white that lines the ground as the steel and asphalt of Boise begins to claim the landscape. They sit together on the seat, hands joined in the lightest of touches, and Spock is silent as the car slices through the miles of empty air, fingers linked through Kirk’s, face turned towards the window. Kirk leaves him to his reverie as they pass south into Nevada, skirting the western edge of the Santa Rosa range, and it’s Spock himself who breaks the hush, turning back into the car with that look on his face, the one he gets when he’s lost in the abstract.
“It is,” he says slowly, “illogical that the return to San Francisco, which is of similar duration and which follows a broadly similar route, should appear to pass so much more quickly than the outward journey.”
Kirk nods. His own thoughts are not a million miles removed from this particular line of reflection. “True,” he says. “But, then again, if perception were always strictly logical, we’d have no need for science.”
He’s expecting an eyebrow arch, but he gets none. Instead, there’s a kind of softening to Spock’s eyes, a glow that few enough but Kirk would recognize as a smile.
“I am attempting,” says the man he loves, “to devise a mathematical model to describe the anomaly.”
And Kirk says nothing to that, because there’s nothing, really, to say, and, even if there were, he’s not sure he has the words to do it justice. So, instead, he just smiles and grips Spock’s hand a little tighter, and wonders if this thing he feels will ever cease to take his breath away.
~*~
The skies above San Francisco are overcast as the car pulls in to the Presidio, the unquiet waves of the Bay spreading out below them in shades of teal and smoke, and, if it weren't for the whisper of spring on the air, the toothlessness of the breeze and the hint of sunlight peering through the cloud cover in bright shards of yellow that scatter the ground, it would be possible, Kirk thinks, to believe that he'd never left. That his office is expecting him, seventeen stories above them in the tritanium-blue tower, with fleet deployment orders to review and diplomats to pacify; that Lori is waiting at for him at his Yeoman's desk, where she knows he can't avoid her, ready to flash that sunshine smile as she sidesteps his questions with the grace and ease of a dancer. It’s so sharp, so present, that Kirk feels his shoulders contract as the gray veil threatens to descend, and, at the edge of his vision, he sees Spock turn his head, eyebrow raised, distraction scented in the air.
And that's all it takes to shatter the image into fragments and send it twisting on the wind. Spock is at his side, hands folded neatly at his back; sharp angles of his pelvis and collarbone too prominent through the unforgiving fabric of his uniform; eyes a little older; face a map of the years they've spent apart. But he's here, beside him, and they're ready to go home. Kirk sucks in a breath, feels the world reorient. Find its center.
"I'm not sure how long this will take," he says, glancing sideways so that Spock can see his eyes; see that the darkness has passed. "A few hours, at least, I'm sure. There's no point in you waiting around--they'll call you when they're ready to talk to us together, no doubt."
"No doubt," says Spock mildly. “I will retire to my lodgings and await further instruction from the Fleet Admiral’s office.”
Of course he has secured a temporary billet in San Francisco. He would have arrived from Vulcan with no reason to think that it wouldn’t be needed, but still. It’s something of an abrupt return to reality, temporarily suspended these past few days, and it is entirely unwelcome.
“Good idea,” says Kirk, who suspects he doesn’t come close to looking like he means it. “But… tonight…?”
He’s not sure how to finish the sentence. They are, after all, no longer sequestered away in a mountain cabin far beyond the reach of prying eyes and ears, but Spock, he thinks, will catch his meaning.
He’s not disappointed. “Tonight,” says Spock, in tones that, in another man, might pass for rich amusement, “should I fail to return to a billet in which I have not yet passed a single night’s rest, I expect that my absence will go unremarked.”
“I… see,” says Kirk. He does not grin from ear to ear. He is, as ever, discreet. "In that case, Commander, I'll leave you to your final pre-mission arrangements. Keep your communicator on, won't you?"
"Yes, sir," says Spock, and there is nothing about his manner that is other than scrupulously correct. Only someone with intimate knowledge of the complex tapestry of mood and meaning that plays out endlessly behind his eyes would recognize the humor that layers his words with all kinds of nuanced and interesting secondary meaning. Some day, Kirk thinks, he's going to have to put some considerable time and effort into processing and coming to grips with the fact that, of all the sentient beings the galaxy across who've tried to find the man behind the Discipline, it is James Kirk to whom Spock has chosen to show this quiet, secret self that no one else sees.
It will, he suspects, be quite the undertaking.
"Very good, Mr. Spock," he says, and, because it's allowed right now, because nobody could suspect or fault him for it, he lets a wide and jubilant smile spread across his face, and raises a ta'al as he turns towards the Phoenix Building.
The world has not stopped turning while they've been buried in the Idaho hills, and 'Fleet HQ, it seems, has yet to catch its breath from the crisis just past. He could have guessed as much, Kirk thinks, from the excitable tone of some of the past week's communiques, and he experiences a moment of mild anxiety as he considers, properly, and for the first time, the look of his abrupt disappearance only hours after his return to Earth. The offices of the Fleet Admiral's staff have the quality of a van de Graaf generator in the moments before a major static discharge, and Chavez, who catches Kirk's eye as he enters the main lobby, in the second before he's able to gather himself to drop his gaze, looks like he hasn't seen the inside of his bedroom in several days.
"Admiral!" he says, with a tight-lipped grimace that might, half a week and thirty-six hours of sleep ago, have passed for a jovial smile. "Admiral Kirk! Welcome back to San Francisco, sir."
Chavez is not the world's most soft-spoken or retiring man at the best of times, but, sleep-deprived to the point of possible psychosis, he might as well have a bullhorn surgically grafted to his vocal chords. Worse, this is an audience still primed for the mention of Kirk's name, and the cubicle farm reacts like foraging meerkats to an unexpected rustle from the brushwood. There are something in the region of fifty officers in the office, ranked Lieutenant Commander and up, and, as one, they turn to Chavez and then in the direction of his line of sight, and immediately break into applause.
Kirk smiles as genially as he can and resists the urge to duck his head and make a break for the command corridor at the far end of the suite. Chavez is leading the ovation, clapping hands raised theatrically above his head as he falls in alongside Kirk en route through the room, and Kirk finds himself abruptly and unexpectedly glad that Spock is not here to witness this. It's not as though he'd say anything, but he'd get that look in his eye, the one that's unquestionably mordant delight, and that would be that for the last vestiges of Kirk's dignity, already under strain and, quite frankly, vulnerable to the lightest of pressures.
The worst of it is, Chavez knows it's ridiculous--it's in the knowing glance he casts towards Kirk as they pause by the exit that leads them out of OpTacs' public face and into the real halls of influence--but admitting as much would open a chink in the brightly polished armor of Fleet PR, and give Kirk the kind of wiggle-room he can parlay into an excuse to avoid the five thousand press events he's no doubt expected to attend between now and tomorrow morning's departure. Lori couldn't stand the man, he recalls suddenly, and he remembers wondering at the time if her antipathy didn't have something to do with the fact that Chavez's job relies, just as much as hers, on the ability to read the people around him like an X-ray film-just directed towards less lofty, high-minded ideals.
Stern is talking in low tones into her communicator as they arrive at Nogura's office, but she breaks away from her conversation, with neither apology nor explanation to her conversational partner, to greet them with her habitual unsmiling courtesy.
"He's waiting for you inside, Admiral Kirk," she says briskly. Exuberance would not be Stern's style under any circumstances yet encountered in ‘Fleet history, but Kirk is grateful, nevertheless, for her restraint. "Admiral Chavez, if you could take a seat over here, the Fleet Admiral will call for you when he's ready."
The briefest flicker of consternation in Chavez's confident smile tells Kirk that this development is not consistent with the admiral's expectations, but he covers it easily enough. "Sure," he says amiably, and offers a corporate laugh. "Just so long as Admiral Kirk doesn't go giving any interviews to the holos in the meantime."
Kirk smiles, offers the expected genial chuckle, and resists the urge to count the hours, minutes and seconds left until he can warp his ship right the hell out of the circus and into the relative sanity of deep space. It’s more, he thinks, as the door to the Fleet Admiral's office slides open, than he wants to know.
Nogura is sitting at his desk, eyes focused on a PADD, but he looks up as Kirk steps inside, face breaking into a smile that, if it's not genuine, is a damned good imitation of what genuine ought to look like. If the past ten days have been difficult for him, there's no sign of it in his face. Kirk knows his CO better than to think that he would ever, in a crisis, consider devolving control of his organization into the hands of a subordinate for longer than the minimal, medically mandated rest-break that he's required, by Fleet constitution, to honor, but his eyes are bright, his lined skin clear, and no hint of fatigue stoops his shoulders as he gets up to greet Kirk with a warm handshake and a hearty slap on the back.
"Jim," he says amiably. "Good to have you back. How was Idaho?"
"Cold," says Kirk, as he lets himself be led to the circle of armchairs, where coffee and pastries await. "But… refreshing. I believe it was exactly what I needed, sir."
"Good," says Nogura, lowering himself into his usual seat and gesturing to Kirk to do the same. "Good, that's good. And now you're back and ready to take charge of the Enterprise again. That’s wonderful. You’ve seen the reports from Engineering?"
"I have," says Kirk. "Commander Scott is extremely thorough. If he says she's ready to head back out, then she's ready."
"More than ready, I hear," says Nogura. "It's quite some time since I've had hands-on control of a starship, but, if memory serves, this fleet has never seen specifications quite so advanced as the refinements to the Enterprise's operating capacity. She’s quite a bird, Jim."
Kirk sits back in his seat, lets a commander's smile play easily across his face. Heihachiro Nogura has never made polite conversation in his life, and he doesn't trade in banalities. He’s leading to something; the trick is to keep pace with him as he gets there.
"Yes, she is," he says. "And she has quite the crew to man her. All we need now is a mission brief, sir."
"Indeed you do." Nogura cannot be rushed. He cannot be cajoled. And there is no point in trying to outmatch him: victory, in a verbal battle with Starfleet's CIC, is measured in how egregiously or otherwise one loses. He leans forward now, helping himself to a coffee from the steam-curling urn, and his movements are slow, exaggerated: the movements of an elderly man. Kirk doesn't believe it for a moment, but he appreciates the effort.
Nogura sits back, saucer in hand, cup cradled to his chest. "Would it surprise you," he says slowly, "to learn that we've had this particular mission in mind for you for several months now, Jim?"
It absolutely would surprise Kirk, whose work with Fleet Ops, these past two years, has involved nothing in the way of starship command. "I guess that would depend on the mission, sir," he says, and Nogura smiles.
"Yes," he says, though there's no way he's mistaken Kirk's answer for anything other than deflection. "I guess it would. Computer," he tells the open air, and a screen descends from the ceiling to cover the wall to his left. "Display starmap T-384 Sigma 14G."
The screen sparks into life, but Kirk's brow is already reaching for his hairline even as it's buffering, clarifying, resolving into scattershot circles of light on black. He doesn't make a habit of memorizing starmap designations--he has a Vulcan for that, after all--but he sure as hell knows that one. He doesn't need a legend to know what he's looking at.
"Ilion," he says, and he has to work hard to keep his voice steady.
Nogura nods. "Ilion," he says.
Kirk swallows; centers himself. "The distress call…?"
"Was not, in fact, a distress call." Nogura smiles placidly. "As I believe Admiral Ciana attempted to point out to you, on several occasions."
Kirk feels his throat tighten at the mention of Lori's name; forces himself to set it aside, to focus, to run through the content of their final conversations. That signal is poorly aimed-if it’s aimed at us at all-and it’s erratic, she tells him from across a gap of weeks. There’s no reason to think that's what it is. And he'd felt his temper fraying, the way it often did when she tried to tell him just a little bit and nothing more, and she probably rolled her eyes and said something sarcastic, and let him simmer for a bit before she flashed her golden smile and found the words to pull him back from that ever-present precipice, the place where he went, three times a day, to do his best to end his career. He’d known, known in his gut, that the signal was another attempt to call for help, to force Starfleet's hand and oblige them to come in and end the war they'd accidentally started, but she'd shaken her head, soothed him with vagaries and fragments of the truth, promised an update that never came.
"The thinking is," says Nogura now, as though Kirk's silence indicates nothing more substantive than the natural progression of their discourse, "that we have an opportunity in you, Jim. This organization has never before, in its 150-year history, granted command of a starship to an officer above the rank of commodore. Giving you the Enterprise affords us the possibility of expanding our horizons somewhat, but we have to be careful. We have to be conscious of what we're doing and make sure that we're using our resources appropriately. A voyage of exploration and discovery is all very well, and I've never had cause to regret the decision-making process that put you in charge of your former mission, Jim, but you're an admiral now--and that rank carries with it certain… connotations. Connotations that we can use."
"Connotations," says Kirk, whose thought processes have not yet moved past the Ilionian signal.
"It was not a distress call," says Nogura calmly. "Not this time." A beat. "This time, it was handshake."
Kirk blinks. Stunned silence is clearly not an option, but he's got nothing, and, in the absence of alternatives, his mouth says the first thing that comes to mind: "The Klingons…?"
"Not the Klingons," says Nogura, "no. The call, when we were able to trace it, turned out to be a preliminary greeting issued by the newly instituted Grand High Office of the Ilion Space Command." A pause for effect. Let nobody say the commander of Starfleet lacks a keen sense of dramatic timing. "They took back their world, Jim, on their own and without our help. And now they want our assurances that we're never going to put them in that position again."
Kirk steeples his hands, drops his gaze to his knees. There's no reason to think it's a distress call, Lori had said, but he'd been so determined, so convinced that he was right. He wonders how much she knew when she came to see him in his office. How much she would have told him when she had the chance.
"The last thing we heard before Ilion went dark," he says, and tries not to think too hard about what else was going on that day, "was that the main thrust of the resistance had been completely destroyed. How certain are we that this isn't a maneuver by the occupying forces? The Klingons have always been less invested than the Federation in the spirit of the Treaty."
Nogura's smile is serene. "Were we not 100% certain of that fact," he says, "we would not be moving on this at all. We had to wait until we had all our cards lined up, Jim. We made the wrong play last time. I have no intention of allowing that to happen again."
All told, Kirk had approximately five hours' sleep last night; maybe the same again the night before. He’s not unaccustomed to sustained periods of activity at the expense of proper rest, but, in moments of heightened threat, the hormone flooding his system has tended to be adrenalin, and that, it seems, makes more difference than he might have thought. He feels like his synapses are firing one beat behind the rest of the world, and that makes them at least three beats behind the man across the coffee table from him.
Carefully, he says, "Several months, you said."
"Hmm?" says Nogura, all wide-eyed innocence. He sips from his cup.
"You've had me in mind for this mission," says Kirk, "for several months, sir. That puts the idea in your head long before I asked for the Enterprise, in any capacity."
The smile deepens, changes quality. "There are men," says Nogura, "whose extraordinary gifts can act as both a blessing and a curse, Jim. Wouldn't you agree?"
"You were always going to put me back in the air." Kirk's voice is flat, even. He’s pleased with that. There is not so much of a trace of accusation to his words. "That was always the plan, sir, wasn't it?"
But Nogura shakes his head. "When you returned to Earth at the end of your mission," he says, "I would have been a fool to lose you to deep space again, Jim. I know you've always understood that, no matter what your personal preference might have been. I needed your particular brand of leadership and charisma here, at home, where it could do the most good. And I stand by that decision--it was the correct decision. That’s been your curse, Jim: you were always too damn good at what you do, and the proper exercise of your talents wasn't always consonant with your own desires. And, let me tell you, it would have taken a hell of a lot to persuade me to let you disappear back into the unknown. A figurehead, I can use; hell, I can even use a martyr, though believe me when I say that's not a story that I ever hope to have to spin to the press. But a shadow? Yesterday's news? A face that nobody sees for months at a time? Whatever good that might do for the advancement of Federation knowledge, Jim, you've been entirely too valuable as a hero and an icon to let you vanish in a puff of smoke. Make no mistake, Admiral Kirk: this was not always my plan. This was never my plan, and it took some considerable persuasion to change my mind."
It’s the persuasion. The persuasion is when he knows. He may be firing a beat behind, but Kirk knows who he married. The persuasion is when he finally understands.
"Lori," he says.
"Lori," says Nogura mildly. "She was a hell of an officer, Jim, but I don't need to tell you that. There are not many people in this world, and a hell of a lot fewer in this organization, who can make me rethink my strategy, but Admiral Ciana was one of them. When her team decoded the Ilion signal, yours was the first name out of her mouth, and she never changed her recommendation, even after I turned it down flat. She insisted that there was nobody else in Starfleet with the specialist knowledge of the Ilionian people necessary to make this assignment work, and she insisted that we could manage your probable demands for a return to deep-space command in a way that worked for the service."
Damn it, Jim-you play a better game than this, she'd said, and Kirk had thought she was just worried that she couldn't trust him to be discreet. "She advocated for my return to active command of a starship," he says.
"On the Camden," says Nogura. "As far as we knew, the Enterprise was Will Decker's for the foreseeable future, but she made the case that we could use a man of your skills and experience in the air, and that Ilion would be the testing ground to see how it could work. She was a hell of an officer, Jim. Don't prove her wrong now."
Kirk's thoughts are a mass of white noise and unsuspected connections falling into place, and it takes him a moment to corral them into something that makes sense. So, to buy himself the time he needs, he leans forward, pours himself a cup of coffee, sits back in his chair. He's neither naive nor arrogant enough to think that this is in any way about him: Lori was a good woman--one of the best he's known--but she was Starfleet before she was a friend, lover or wife. This isn't about what Kirk wants; it's about what's best for the organization, and he knows that. But she also knew what this meant to him. She knew what she was giving him back.
Slowly, he says, "You haven't told me what the mission entails. Sir."
"The mission," says Nogura, "will fall somewhere between diplomacy and negotiation. Ilion wants our assurances that we're not going to ruin their lives again; we want Ilion in the Federation. That hasn't changed. Now they're ready to talk to us, I need somebody in the room who can persuade them that the best possible way to keep the Klingons from their door is to be part of the Federal family and subject to the Treaty. I want you, in the first instance, to be that somebody, Jim."
"They've just got their planet back." Kirk sips from his coffee; figures it can't hurt his processing power. "And you want us to barrel in and start talking to them about mining rights?"
Nogura's smile thins a little. "If that were what I wanted, Jim, I wouldn't be asking you."
"No." It's not hubris; he knows it's not. Ilion is personal. There's probably not another commander in the fleet who can do this; Lori was right about that. "What's on the table, sir?"
"For Ilion?" The smile is back, along with a little, knowing light of victory behind the aged eyes. Nogura knows he's won, but, then again, the outcome was never really in any doubt. "Whatever you need to put there, Jim. You know these people best. For you?" And he sips from his cup, but his gaze never leaves Kirk's, and it's like cold steel. "Get this right, Jim, and you can write your own ticket. Within reason, of course."
Kirk feels an admiral's smile tighten the edges of his mouth. "Of course," he says.
"It's going to be the high-level stuff only," says his chief. "The things I don't intend to trust to those bull-headed idiots in the diplomatic corps. But you have a damned good crew behind you: you know their skills and you know how to use them. I’m only sorry it took Admiral Ciana to point it out to me-I must be getting old."
Heihachiro Nogura, Kirk is privately certain, will never knowingly allow himself to get old. If Lori were here, she'd be shifting in her seat right now and pursing her lips around the sort of grin that her CIC permitted from few enough of his officers, because, whatever he might say out loud, she hadn't won anything, not really, but she'd unquestionably failed to lose. In another world, Kirk thinks, he should have fallen in love with this woman.
"And if I get it wrong, sir?" he asks. "What happens then?"
"Now, Jim." Nogura drains his cup, and sets it back into its saucer with a decorous little click. "You know as well as I do that you won't get it wrong."
No. He won't. Kirk knows that, and Nogura knows that, and, once upon a time, Lori knew it too. Spock is right: she was a remarkable woman.
"Thank you, sir," he says quietly, and he hears the tightness in his voice, but it doesn't matter now. The lines have been drawn, the territories claimed, and there's no further need for pretense. "I won't let you down."
"I know you won't," says Nogura. "But it's not me you should be thanking."
"Perhaps not." Kirk purses his lips, drops his eyes. "But my other options are a little limited these days."
Nogura inclines his head. "That reminds me," he says. "I have something I need to give you, Jim."
It's less likely that he's forgotten than that he's been waiting for the right moment to bring it up, Kirk thinks, and the timing doesn't exactly bode well for his continued peace of mind. He drains his cup and sets it carefully back down on the coffee table as Nogura gets to his feet and makes his way over to his desk, the far side of which, as far as Kirk knows, has never been available to any officer in the corps. A well-oiled drawer slides open with the minimum of fuss, and the admiral extracts from it a rectangular package, wrapped in brown paper, that Kirk recognizes immediately as the proportions of a sturdy, well-filled book. There are few enough people in the galaxy who'd have cause to make such a gift to James T Kirk, and Nogura himself, he thinks, is not among them.
He finds himself hoping it's from Bones, even as instinct informs him, cheerfully and without apology, that it really, really isn't.
"Admiral Ciana came by my office a few days ago," says Nogura as he makes his way back over to his chair, and Kirk, whose mind is still reeling, takes a moment to process the fact that both of Lori's parents held that rank before they retired, and both are still alive. "They don't want to see you, Jim, and nothing I could say or do would change their minds, but maybe give them a little time. It's still raw for them. But they found this in her study when they were closing up her apartment, and it was addressed to you. She obviously meant for you to have it."
Kirk takes the package without a word, fingers closing around a hidden spine where it's buried beneath a layer of paper. There is no way he can open it here, but he's certain that Nogura will understand. "Thank you, sir," he says after a moment, and makes no effort to strip the emotion from his tone. His name is scribbled on the front of the parcel in Lori's untidy script, now forever stilled; he couldn't keep his voice steady if he tried.
"'The life given us by nature is short,'" says Nogura quietly, "'but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.'"
"Cicero," says Kirk automatically. He has never cared for Cicero.
Nogura nods. "I'm going to call Admiral Chavez in for a moment," he says. "Stern will fetch you some fresh coffee, and I'd like you to take some time to go over the mission brief on the PADD she's prepared for you. The three of us will talk again in half an hour, and then I'll have her page Commander Spock to the office. Captain Spock, I guess," he corrects himself, and smiles.
"Captain Spock," agrees Kirk, who likes the way that sounds. Much better, he supposes, than his lover ever will.
He gets to his feet; wonders vaguely if there’s anything else to be said before he takes his leave. Nothing about this exchange feels like business as usual, but protocol is protocol. “Thank you, sir,” he says, and stands to attention. “Permission to be dismissed.”
"Permission granted," says Nogura, who has picked up a PADD and is scrolling absently through its contents. Every muscle in his body speaks of unfinished business carefully withheld, but he will, as ever, not be rushed, and the only thing to do is play along and wait for him to be ready. So it's no surprise, besides his commitment to prevarication, when he stills Kirk's motion, two steps from the door, with a brusque, "Oh-and, Jim?"
Kirk purses his lip, folds his hands at his back, turns back to the room. "Sir?"
"I've kept a lid on the rumors for now," says Nogura, without glancing up from his PADD, "but I'm going to need you to do better than that, if you're going to work with the man. Not everyone knows you as well as I do."
Kirk blinks. "Sir?" he says again, but coldly.
"You know what I mean." Nogura taps his screen; looks up from under hooded eyes. "Idaho wasn't sensible, Jim. You're a command team and two very public faces of this organization, and I can't afford to have it look like there's favoritism or preferential treatment happening on my flagship. So keep it under wraps, will you--at least until you're out of this system."
Kirk clears his throat, fixes his eyes on his boots. He can feel his hands trembling at the base of his spine with the effort it's taking to control his anger.
"I'm not aware," he says icily, "of any rumors, Admiral."
"No," says Nogura. "And I intend to keep it that way. Even Chavez hasn't caught wind of this, Jim, and, believe me, that's how you want it to stay. You're his direct superior, for heaven's sake. Just because I know you'd never compromise the chain of command doesn't mean I can sell that line to the holos if they get ahold of it. Don’t put me in an impossible position, please."
The tips of Kirk's fingers are beginning to lose sensation. "What exactly are you forbidding, sir?" he asks.
"Nothing," says Nogura calmly. "I'm forbidding nothing, Jim. Deep space is a long way from here; that's why they call it deep space. It won't be the first time we've turned a blind eye to natural Human behavior and it won't be the last, but I'd rather not have to go live on holo and defend this organization's actions to the Federation if it looks like we've been keeping protocol violations out of the public eye. It’s the rumors I want to keep under control, Jim, not my officers--your personal life is your own. Provided it doesn't come back to bite me, that's all. Now--dismissed, Admiral. Please send in Chavez on your way out."
~*~
It's early evening when Kirk finally makes it back to his billet to pass his last night for the foreseeable future on his homeworld. The sun is sinking behind the headlands as the door slides open onto the chill shadows of his apartment, unopened package tucked beneath his arm, and he has no idea how long it will be before Spock finds his way over from his lodgings at the bottom of the hill; no idea if he's going to be tired or hungry or pissy; no idea if he'll want to shower or sleep or make love; no convention and no precedent for the situation, and no idea if the day felt as pointless or as leveling to Vulcan sensibilities as it did to Kirk's. He knew it would be long; he just forgot how long a Starfleet day could be.
His Yeoman has been packing for the best part of the week, and he trusts her, he guesses, after almost two years together, to know what can safely be left in storage for the next five years and what he's going to want when he's eight hundred billion kilometres from home. His sitting room is a tower of boxes stacked with geometric precision around the couch, all scrupulously labeled with that ruthless efficiency that made her indispensible to the smooth functioning of his life within four days of his arrival at Fleet Ops, and, he's pleased to note, his bourbon collection has made it into one of the cartons labeled “For Transit,” and bundled by the doorway. Glasses are a little more problematic, but Spock, he thinks, will hardly choose to join him in a drink when he arrives; anything vaguely bowl-shaped will do, since it's not as though anyone's ever likely to know that Rear Admiral James T Kirk, on the night before he shipped out into the great unknown, sipped a fourteen-year-old malt from a souffle pot because his need outweighed his sense of shame. And so it is that, rifling through the box marked Kitchen (Misc) / Fragile (Misc): Handle With Care, he comes across the last, the very last, thing that he would ever choose to leave behind.
It's not as though Ramirez could possibly have known. She'd have seen a picture on a wall-an old clipper, framed in hardwood, with an inlaid brass plaque that bears the same name as the ship he's about to rejoin-and she'd have read nostalgia, perhaps a little bit of the obsession for which he has gained a reputation, and decided that it belonged to the life he was leaving behind. He can't fault her reasoning; he's just glad that he found it in time. Along with an amply proportioned brandy snifter that will hold three fingers of whisky just as efficiently as it's ever held a Cognac, so he'll count the expedition a success.
Kirk pours himself a generous measure from the first bottle that comes to hand, and carries it to the window with his parcel from Lori folded against his chest. His couch is stripped bare and unoccupied by boxes, but he rejects it in favor of sinking to the floor in front of the cool, shadowed glass, swallowing a gulp of Laphroaig and allowing himself no more than a moment's glance at the words on the front of the packet-a dead woman's final farewell-before he tears back the paper to reveal an elderly copy of Tacitus's Germania, bound in tooled leather and easily three hundred years old. They’d talked about it once, he remembers, back when their story was very young, and he remembers her saying that she'd read it for the first time as a precocious child of eight or nine; that it had stirred her love for the Other; that it had been the first time she'd understood that her life would be the study and understanding of cultures beyond her own. And he'd remembered his bookish thirteen-year-old self happening across a copy in the Riverside library, freshly returned from Tarsus and looking for something, anything, to occupy his brittle mind, and feeling like, many years later, those days spent buried in the observations of an old explorer from days gone by were when he'd first begun to entertain the possibility of one day stepping back into the black vaults above.
Tacitus. Tacitus and the Enterprise. She always did read him far too well.
And he knows, because he knows Lori, that there will be an inscription on the frontispiece--it was the kind of casual vandalism of which she approved: fragments of lives preserved for generations to come, safe within the folds of another writer's words. Hers is not the only message passed from one hand to another: a woman called Adeline wishes Henry a very happy twenty-first birthday and hopes he will enjoy this as much as the Agricola, while a Geo. H. Maguire claims the volume for his own on August 19, 1946. But there, beneath the echoes of a long-vanished past, are the words his ex-wife wanted him to read, scrawled in black ink:
Audeat esse aliud atque statuere tuum archetypon.
Vivet vita tua, et ambulaveris sidereo tua.
~*~
Spock finds him there, unmoved, when he arrives three quarters of an hour later, overnight bag slung over one shoulder and a dress uniform, neatly pressed, folded into a garment bag that he carries over one arm. Kirk has drained his glass and made no effort to refill it, but he's allowed his spine to go slack, boneless, as he's rested his head against the window, and he can only imagine how it looks to the casual observer. He doesn't need to imagine, in fact: it's written all over Spock's face.
"Jim?" says his lover, uncertainty clouding his eyes, and this is when Kirk realizes that he's neglected to turn on the lights.
"Yes. Spock," he says, and he hears the fatigue in his voice, feels it in his bones as he struggles to his feet. "I'm sorry. Are you hungry? I think the synthesizer is still online…."
"I am well," says Spock, and the unspoken partner to that statement--the implicit question--hovers in the air between them. Kirk could choose to just ignore it--it's what he'd like to do, really--but, he thinks, he's not the only person in the room who's had a hell of a day, and Spock does not have to be here. If they're going to do this, they need to do it right.
So he bends down, retrieves the book from the floor where he's left it, unread, and passes it to Spock, whose eyebrow only arches halfway before he manifestly thinks better of it and accepts it without a word.
"Nogura gave it to me today," says Kirk quietly, as his lover runs one elegant hand over the binding. "It's from Lori. She was planning to give it to me before she died."
"Admiral Ciana," says Spock, almost to himself, and, because this is what they do, because it's the sort of thing they've never needed to be told in words, he opens it to the frontispiece, scans the writing there, glances up at Kirk. "Latin, I believe," he says. "A language that, I regret, I do not read."
"Spock," says Kirk, and feels the first twitches of a smile playing at the edges of his lips. "You're fluent in seven spoken dialects, conversant in twelve more, and you have the basics of goodness knows how many dozen others. Your failure to learn a long-dead Terran language is hardly reprehensible. It’s a fragment of poetry, translated from Terran Standard. It’s the sort of thing that Lori would do."
"I… see," says Spock, who does not look as though he does. "And this poetry has particular meaning for you?"
The shadow of Kirk's failed marriage is like a presence in the room, darkening Spock's eyes and inflecting his words with an anxiety that Kirk only hears because he knows it's there. There’s no competing with a ghost, he knows; Lori told him as much, once upon a time. Spock wasn't there; he doesn't know the way his memory spilled into the gaps in a threadbare love that was never going to endure; he doesn't know that he was the rock against which their marriage broke. He sees only sentences in a language he doesn't understand, and a woman inviolate whose image can never be tarnished now; a woman whose name has slipped into history and legend; a woman that James Kirk chose when Spock was not there to be sought. Kirk can't explain to him that Lori's final gift to them both was, in some ways, her compromise for the loss of the man that she could never replace; there are no words for something like this, and no way to make them understood. So he doesn't use words. He closes the space between them in two rapid steps, hooks one hand around the back of Spock's head and the other around his hip, and pulls him in for the kind of kiss that will do his talking for him.
This is it. This is who they are. This is home.
And, as the book falls to the floor as Spock's arms close around him, Kirk understands that, for tonight at least, he wants all of this man. The scent of spice loads the air as he shuffles Spock backwards in the shadows, towards the bedroom door, hands fumbling with the clasp of his uniform pants as they move, as he feels Spock's cock lengthening, hardening beneath the fabric. He wants all of him, caution be damned; he wants to know, to feel, that what was lost hasn't been lost in vain.
His nightstand has been emptied, of course, but there hasn't been a man in Kirk's bed for all the time he's lived here; his mother could have rifled through the contents of his bedside cabinet and come away untroubled by the experience. But there was time, on the way home from HQ, to make the kind of purchases that are unlikely to be readily available in deep space, and he's taken the precaution of stowing one small tube in his pants pocket, in preparation for the fact that his apartment is all out of coconut oil. Kirk pulls it free and tosses it onto his bed as Spock's fingers find the opening clasp at his hem, and Kirk buries his groan in Spock's mouth as an elegant hand closes on the length of his cock.
They tumble sideways, striking the mattress together without breaking their kiss, and Kirk kicks off his boots as he shucks his pants free of his legs and onto the floor. Spock is toeing at his own heels as Kirk rolls him onto his back and applies himself to the task of removing his lover's tunic, and Spock, who misses nothing, is already reaching for the lube where it has bounced to the edge of the bed. This is going to be quick and hard, exactly what Kirk needs right now, and he feels himself go boneless as cool, wet fingers wrap themselves around his cock, slicking him from base to tip in one smooth, polished movement.
Kirk tugs his tunic over his head and casts it carelessly into the shadows. The fastening of Spock's pants is hanging open, erection tenting the fabric, and Kirk pulls them down as far as he can without breaking contact with Spock's hand where it pumps his cock with practiced ease. Spock shuffles his legs all the way free of his trousers and Kirk presses in for a kiss, hand snaking down to grip Spock's cock and trail a messy line through the thick layer of lubricant. Spock groans, arching up and into the touch, and this is all the invitation Kirk needs.
Olive oil, he thinks, and grinds his cock down, hard, against Spock's.
He's half-expecting an instant flare of heat, but that's not what makes his breath catch in his throat. Spock makes a sound that's half alarm, half pure pleasure, and Kirk thinks he hears his name in there somewhere, but it's hard to be certain over the rush of blood in his ears. He reaches between them, clutches their cocks together, and this time, when he thrusts, he can feel the first tingle of protesting skin, but it's not painful; not even close. Rather, it's somewhere between the sensation of submersion beneath room-temperature water and an unexpected touch in the dark, and, though the heat is building, it's building gently, inexorably, blood rushing to the surface of his overstimulated skin. He’s going to come, and come hard, if he carries on like this, and that's not what he wants-not yet-but it's not easy to stop; not with Spock's fingers gouging crescent moons in his buttocks, not with Spock's groin rising up to meet him with each roll of Kirk's hips, not with his body and mind registering the wash of chemical arousal on his cock as the build to orgasm. In the end, it's Spock's superior willpower that saves them from a prematurely ruined bed and an untimely post-coital coma, rolling upwards and out from under Kirk, and pressing him into the mattress with a kiss that temporarily distracts him from the sudden lack of contact at his cock.
Not for long-the buzz from Spock's lubricant is good, but it's not that good-but long enough at least for Spock to rock back on his heels and scoot down the bed a little way so that his head is level with Kirk's groin. And, yes, Kirk knows that it's less to do with an overwhelming urge to perform fellatio on his over-excited lover and more to do with a sudden and pressing need to examine Kirk's dick for signs of potential injury; of course he knows this. It’s just that the motivation behind the maneuver seems much, much less important than the fact that his cock is now in Spock's mouth and the man has, it seems, spent the past few days applying his considerable intellect to the task of learning exactly how to make James Kirk's eyes roll in his head and his mouth make sounds that no Human mouth ought to be able to make.
But Spock, brisk and efficient as ever, has taken stock of the situation; has judged, no doubt to the nearest pascal, just how much pressure Kirk's straining arousal can take before his body takes charge of matters and levels all his good intentions. His mouth contracts around the head of Kirk's cock and then retracts, lips swollen and glistening in a manner that Kirk cannot help but lean up and crush to his. Spock rolls them again, hooks a long leg up around Kirk's hip, and his meaning couldn't be clearer: he knows how close Kirk is to orgasm, he knows that, if they're going to do this, it has to be now. The tube of lubricant has worried its way almost to the edge of the bed, but they scramble for it together, and Kirk fumbles the lid as he presses Spock back into the pillows with a hungry, inelegant kiss. Their cocks brush again, and, sucked clean of its protective layer of silica gel, the burn is sharp enough to draw a hiss from between Kirk's teeth.
It ought to be a warning. If feels, instead, like a challenge.
Lubricant spills onto his right hand and he snakes his left in beneath him to work Spock's dick: a diversionary tactic designed to obfuscate the activities of his right as he slides two fingers inside himself. It’s awkward, graceless, necessarily urgent: what he doesn't want is for Spock to work out what he's doing before he's ready to show him why it's what he wants, what he needs right now. His ass is tight, unyielding; his spine is aching with the effort of holding himself in place, unsupported, above Spock, but he works a third finger inside, scissors, thrusts, feels his body begin to respond. He has no idea if the coating of lube he's working into the walls of his anal passage will be enough to dull the heat to a comfortable, background blaze. Part of him hopes it won't.
Spock is breathing heavily now, hips canting in time with the motion of Kirk's hand, eyes closed, neck thrown back on the pillows. They’re both ready. Kirk breaks their kiss as his fingers slide free of his ass, and he sits back on his heels, poised over Spock's groin. His left hand is still gripping Spock's dick, and he shuffles slightly, lining it up with the entrance to his body, holding it in place but moving no further. Spock's eyes crack open, and Kirk reads alarm there, uncertainty, perhaps a little disbelief. But not distaste. Not disgust.
Not refusal.
"Jim…" he says slowly, voice hoarse. He does not say stop.
"If this is not what you want," says Kirk. "If you don't want to do this, Spock, just say the word. Say the word and it will not happen." He swallows. Spock's lube is leaking copiously onto the tight ring of muscle at his anus, and, no, as it turns out, a coating of silica gel is not quite enough to keep the burn at bay. "But if your only objection is concern for my safety-if that's the only thing that's holding you back right now-then… I'm asking you to trust me. Do you trust me?"
Silence. Spock is motionless, but for the ragged rise and fall of his chest.
"Spock," says Kirk again: softly, almost a whisper. "Do you trust me?"
Spock's breath catches in his throat. A beat. And then he nods.
"Yes?" says Kirk.
"Yes," says Spock.
Kirk closes his eyes. Presses down.
It's years since the last time he's done this, but his body remembers. There’s resistance at first, the usual muscular rebellion, and the flare of pain is so sharp, so bright, that his vision flashes white for a long moment and he hears himself suck in a harsh, ragged breath that has almost certainly seriously alarmed the man beneath him. Liquid heat floods his ass, an advancing line of fire that scrapes a trail into his body with the progress of Spock's dick, and he almost cries out; it's almost too much. But he needs this; he needs to feel himself filled and completed; he needs the connection, the sense that he's given as much as he has taken. He wants all of Spock.
Spock does not move while Kirk sheaths him inside his body. He does not move when, having taken as much as he can, Kirk braces himself against his knees and breathes for a moment. He does not move when Kirk takes his own wilting erection in his hand and pumps a little of his lagging arousal back into the slackening shaft. The burn is building to a crescendo but the pain is easing as his skin adjusts-it's like heated silk, now, where before it was like red-hot sand-and he tries an experimental thrust. Lubricant bathes his asshole on the downward motion, but the sting is background noise now. And the head of Spock's dick just grazed his prostate.
He'd forgotten about the prostate.
He moves again, arching up, sliding back down, burying Spock a little deeper, and, this time, the groan that erupts from his throat is of a different quality entirely. Kirk can feel his cock filling again as the burn levels off-chili-pepper hot, but innervating now, like the third mouthful of the hottest dish on the menu-and, this time, Spock's hips flex on the downward thrust, meeting Kirk's motion with the smallest motion of his own. Kirk leans forward, takes his weight on his left arm, presses his mouth to Spock's as his lover's hand reaches up to twine with his around Kirk's cock. Instinct is taking over now, for both of them: for every backwards thrust of Kirk's, Spock thrusts upwards, and there's a frantic edge to his movements now that indicates the rapid approach of orgasm. Kirk understands that very well. He’s not far behind himself.
They come, in the end, almost together, Kirk lagging by no more than a second. He feels Spock shudder and jerk inside him, and then his own orgasm is leveling him and he's pumping thick streams of ejaculate onto the coarse, dark hair of Spock's chest and gripping the pillows on either side of Spock's head with force enough to turn his knuckles white. He thinks he yells Spock's name; he's certain he hears his name on Spock's lips, and this moment, this connection, this thing that he feels that will never cease to take his breath away…. It begins to lay the ghosts to rest.
~*~
A/N: Lori's inscription is a translation of Wilferd Peterson's excellent advice, first brought to my attention by another brilliant woman who was taken too soon. Thanks to miloowen for checking the grammar--it's a long time since I studied Latin.
Chapter 52
Chapter 54