To hell with waiting.
Title: For love is sufficient unto love.
Author: possibly_thrice
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Spock/Uhura
Summary: For the prompt 78. "But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,/Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,/Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears." --Kahlil Gibran had no way of knowing about Vulcans. And there are no seasons in space.
A/N: Many thanks to kayliemalinza for whipping this, and me, into shape.
Nyota goes to his quarters after the shift is over. “Can you tell me what we are?” she asks, putting one hand on the doorframe. The hum of the ship through the metal is like bees inside her.
Spock says her name, very softly. He is sitting on the bed.
She walks to him, and he looks up.
“Here,” she says, extending her hand.
He takes it. He takes it and he squeezes, until the bones roll under his thumb, and he makes their joined hands into a shape she does not have a good name for.
“No,” he says, eventually. “Will you tell me?”
And he presents his ear.
She leans in to run her tongue's tip over the fine folds of the lobe. He does not start. At the edge of her eye she can see the edge of his mouth, tilted toward her, and open, and so green. She takes her time, though, sliding her cheek along his; she kisses him leisurely, or, to look at it another way, too quickly to separate the kissing from the spaces in between. The sounds they make are like the sounds of something snapping.
His pulse gets mixed up with hers in the well of her palm and in his mouth's deep corner.
When she draws back he lets go.
Her fingers, she discovers, feel weightless and warm, once freed. She wiggles them. They curl more easily than before, like lips loosened with kisses, the muscles working fluidly in her bare forearm.
Spock raises an eyebrow at her, a clean pull upwards of one half of his face. “That was telling?”
“Very,” she says.
He looks amused, in a subterranean way, and pleased. He pauses.
“Would you like tea?” he asks.
“God, yes,” she says, and drops down heavily onto the bed beside him. Her first shift aboard the Enterprise was just stars and silence, but she is tired. All through it she couldn't stop smiling (it was everything she could do to keep from crying, in point of fact, but what the hell, they were all a little bright around the eyes, excepting him.)
He goes to fiddle with the replicator. She watches the slight hunch of his shoulders under his shirt. The tea, once made, is the color of his eyes, opaque but bound up in knots of light. Nyota wants to touch his eyes. There is a shell over the soft part, a second transparent eyelid; it wouldn't hurt him. Instead she wraps both of her hands around the glass and lets the heat push into the curve of her palms.
“This brew is meant to ease the mind,” Spock says. “When I was very young, my-- my mother made me drink a liter of it after each physical altercation I engaged in. At the time I am afraid the only thing it eased was my bladder. However...”
Nyota laughs and coughs up tea. She moves to wipe it but he gets there first, his tongue cool after the scalding liquid, and her nerve ends rise to meet it, sharp under the skin. When she's clean he continues downward to trace the underside of her jaw.
She sets her tea gently on the side table. It sloshes a little, because she's trembling, but it does not go over the rim. Spock follows her example without lifting his nose from her neck.
She has other questions. She leans back.
*
She is gazing at the ceiling, feeling the slow unclenching of muscles inside her, like her hips are breathing.
Spock is breathing. His head on her shoulder; his breath condensing in the hollow of her throat: a sheen of alien humidity.
“My father informed me,” he says, “that he married my mother because he loved her.”
“That seems logical,” Nyota murmurs, his hair catching on her teeth.
“Many things do,” Spock says.
“I love you,” she says. “Not in the way my mother loved my father.”
His outermost eyelids shut, briefly.
“You are important,” he says.
As if she didn't know.
*
Her mother loved her father.
She remembers how they raged at each other, lovingly, their anger filling the house like water or light. She was fluent in four languages, by then, but the challenge, when they fought, was to take the meaning out of the words she knew so well; to make music out of the madness.
Breaking syllables up and recombining them, in her head. These days, she decodes, but then she wanted to give the nakedness of their insults a veil.
Her mother stood over her in the sunlit kitchen, her cocked hip level with Nyota's eyes, and said, “We're good for each other, your father and I.”
In the moonlit shuttle on the way to boarding school, her father told her to be a good girl, and she wondered who to be good for. Who to pull open.
He also told her to think coolly and not to take anger with her. She thought of pointing out that anger was not like the colored scarves or the kanga or the comm she had packed that afternoon: it was there or it wasn't. But this was not the time for correcting him, so she said,
“Don't worry. I don't want it."
“You will,” he said, sad and sweet and her father and, as it turns out, almost entirely wrong.
Here. Lightcenturies later. Look.
She has many things that she wants. She has the job she used to dream of, during the days, disdaining gravity and unrecycled air and heat. It was worth dreaming of.
She has a lot of sex. Some of it is unpleasant. Some of it is amazing. In both cases, she ends up staying several hours. She has someone to tell about her parents.
She has someone who meditates in the same room as her, give or take a curtain.
While he meditates, she reads, and sinks deeper into the words than she has sunk since she was a girl.
“There are always bonds,” he says, when she mentions it. “They form with or without deliberate forging.”
“I hear you,” he says. “On occasion.”
Nyota thinks about this.
*
“I am collecting your answers,” says Spock, “to your question.”
“Scientists don't use anecdotes,” she mumbles into his chest.
“I am a scientist, and other things.”
Nyota grunts.
“Do you wish to sleep?”
“You obviously wish to talk,” she says, rolling off him with a sigh.
“Not at all,” he says, and hesitates. “I-- wish to meld with you.”
“We've been melding plenty,” she begins.
Then it clicks.
“Oh.”
“Yes,” he agrees.
She covers her head with her arm, for a moment. “Yeah, okay,” she says. Because she trusts him, and among all the other things she wants is: she wants to know him.
“You will have to remove your arm,” Spock says, after a while.
She snorts, and does.
He smooths the long free wisps of hair off her forehead. “You are certain--”
“Yes, yes,” she says. “Yes.”
His fingertips settle in a rough arc at her hairline, his thumb brushing her cheekbone, his pinkie laid flat along her temple.
“Be ready,” he says.
“Yes--”
He draws her down. It's not really as frightening as it seems like it should be. But then sometimes a fall is just a fall.
In his head, they are walking up a mountain that no longer is, anywhere. The rock is red. The dust that clings to their ankles is like rust.
He did not take her very deep into the memory. She can still feel the sheets of their shared bed, cool on her back; and his palm over her eye. She is walking on a narrow path, but she is also lying, still, stomach up, his shoulder against her shoulder.
Listen, thinks Spock.
Nyota listens. The wind through the rock makes sounds like someone learning to speak after a lifetime of silence.
Spock looks at her, expressionless. There is a softness in his calm face, the muscles relaxed, the quiet of his features natural; organic. This is his self as he would see it.
He is, as ever, beautiful. She doesn't mind, so much, that he is not opening. It is good to see what he has distilled from her stories, and next it will be her turn.
Is this, she wonders, but does not finish.
We are here, he says, his mouth unmoving. Here, and here, and here.
Author: possibly_thrice
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Spock/Uhura
Summary: For the prompt 78. "But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,/Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,/Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears." --Kahlil Gibran had no way of knowing about Vulcans. And there are no seasons in space.
A/N: Many thanks to kayliemalinza for whipping this, and me, into shape.
Nyota goes to his quarters after the shift is over. “Can you tell me what we are?” she asks, putting one hand on the doorframe. The hum of the ship through the metal is like bees inside her.
Spock says her name, very softly. He is sitting on the bed.
She walks to him, and he looks up.
“Here,” she says, extending her hand.
He takes it. He takes it and he squeezes, until the bones roll under his thumb, and he makes their joined hands into a shape she does not have a good name for.
“No,” he says, eventually. “Will you tell me?”
And he presents his ear.
She leans in to run her tongue's tip over the fine folds of the lobe. He does not start. At the edge of her eye she can see the edge of his mouth, tilted toward her, and open, and so green. She takes her time, though, sliding her cheek along his; she kisses him leisurely, or, to look at it another way, too quickly to separate the kissing from the spaces in between. The sounds they make are like the sounds of something snapping.
His pulse gets mixed up with hers in the well of her palm and in his mouth's deep corner.
When she draws back he lets go.
Her fingers, she discovers, feel weightless and warm, once freed. She wiggles them. They curl more easily than before, like lips loosened with kisses, the muscles working fluidly in her bare forearm.
Spock raises an eyebrow at her, a clean pull upwards of one half of his face. “That was telling?”
“Very,” she says.
He looks amused, in a subterranean way, and pleased. He pauses.
“Would you like tea?” he asks.
“God, yes,” she says, and drops down heavily onto the bed beside him. Her first shift aboard the Enterprise was just stars and silence, but she is tired. All through it she couldn't stop smiling (it was everything she could do to keep from crying, in point of fact, but what the hell, they were all a little bright around the eyes, excepting him.)
He goes to fiddle with the replicator. She watches the slight hunch of his shoulders under his shirt. The tea, once made, is the color of his eyes, opaque but bound up in knots of light. Nyota wants to touch his eyes. There is a shell over the soft part, a second transparent eyelid; it wouldn't hurt him. Instead she wraps both of her hands around the glass and lets the heat push into the curve of her palms.
“This brew is meant to ease the mind,” Spock says. “When I was very young, my-- my mother made me drink a liter of it after each physical altercation I engaged in. At the time I am afraid the only thing it eased was my bladder. However...”
Nyota laughs and coughs up tea. She moves to wipe it but he gets there first, his tongue cool after the scalding liquid, and her nerve ends rise to meet it, sharp under the skin. When she's clean he continues downward to trace the underside of her jaw.
She sets her tea gently on the side table. It sloshes a little, because she's trembling, but it does not go over the rim. Spock follows her example without lifting his nose from her neck.
She has other questions. She leans back.
*
She is gazing at the ceiling, feeling the slow unclenching of muscles inside her, like her hips are breathing.
Spock is breathing. His head on her shoulder; his breath condensing in the hollow of her throat: a sheen of alien humidity.
“My father informed me,” he says, “that he married my mother because he loved her.”
“That seems logical,” Nyota murmurs, his hair catching on her teeth.
“Many things do,” Spock says.
“I love you,” she says. “Not in the way my mother loved my father.”
His outermost eyelids shut, briefly.
“You are important,” he says.
As if she didn't know.
*
Her mother loved her father.
She remembers how they raged at each other, lovingly, their anger filling the house like water or light. She was fluent in four languages, by then, but the challenge, when they fought, was to take the meaning out of the words she knew so well; to make music out of the madness.
Breaking syllables up and recombining them, in her head. These days, she decodes, but then she wanted to give the nakedness of their insults a veil.
Her mother stood over her in the sunlit kitchen, her cocked hip level with Nyota's eyes, and said, “We're good for each other, your father and I.”
In the moonlit shuttle on the way to boarding school, her father told her to be a good girl, and she wondered who to be good for. Who to pull open.
He also told her to think coolly and not to take anger with her. She thought of pointing out that anger was not like the colored scarves or the kanga or the comm she had packed that afternoon: it was there or it wasn't. But this was not the time for correcting him, so she said,
“Don't worry. I don't want it."
“You will,” he said, sad and sweet and her father and, as it turns out, almost entirely wrong.
Here. Lightcenturies later. Look.
She has many things that she wants. She has the job she used to dream of, during the days, disdaining gravity and unrecycled air and heat. It was worth dreaming of.
She has a lot of sex. Some of it is unpleasant. Some of it is amazing. In both cases, she ends up staying several hours. She has someone to tell about her parents.
She has someone who meditates in the same room as her, give or take a curtain.
While he meditates, she reads, and sinks deeper into the words than she has sunk since she was a girl.
“There are always bonds,” he says, when she mentions it. “They form with or without deliberate forging.”
“I hear you,” he says. “On occasion.”
Nyota thinks about this.
*
“I am collecting your answers,” says Spock, “to your question.”
“Scientists don't use anecdotes,” she mumbles into his chest.
“I am a scientist, and other things.”
Nyota grunts.
“Do you wish to sleep?”
“You obviously wish to talk,” she says, rolling off him with a sigh.
“Not at all,” he says, and hesitates. “I-- wish to meld with you.”
“We've been melding plenty,” she begins.
Then it clicks.
“Oh.”
“Yes,” he agrees.
She covers her head with her arm, for a moment. “Yeah, okay,” she says. Because she trusts him, and among all the other things she wants is: she wants to know him.
“You will have to remove your arm,” Spock says, after a while.
She snorts, and does.
He smooths the long free wisps of hair off her forehead. “You are certain--”
“Yes, yes,” she says. “Yes.”
His fingertips settle in a rough arc at her hairline, his thumb brushing her cheekbone, his pinkie laid flat along her temple.
“Be ready,” he says.
“Yes--”
He draws her down. It's not really as frightening as it seems like it should be. But then sometimes a fall is just a fall.
In his head, they are walking up a mountain that no longer is, anywhere. The rock is red. The dust that clings to their ankles is like rust.
He did not take her very deep into the memory. She can still feel the sheets of their shared bed, cool on her back; and his palm over her eye. She is walking on a narrow path, but she is also lying, still, stomach up, his shoulder against her shoulder.
Listen, thinks Spock.
Nyota listens. The wind through the rock makes sounds like someone learning to speak after a lifetime of silence.
Spock looks at her, expressionless. There is a softness in his calm face, the muscles relaxed, the quiet of his features natural; organic. This is his self as he would see it.
He is, as ever, beautiful. She doesn't mind, so much, that he is not opening. It is good to see what he has distilled from her stories, and next it will be her turn.
Is this, she wonders, but does not finish.
We are here, he says, his mouth unmoving. Here, and here, and here.