Perfectly Logical (Spock/McCoy)
Title: Perfectly Logical
Author: zauzat
Fandom & Pairing: Star Trek AOS, Spock/McCoy
Rating: soft R
Warnings: none
Genre: drama / humour
Word Count: Around 4000
Beta: betaed by the obliging imachar and the lovely shighola. Many thanks to both of you!
Summary: Kirk has had enough of Spock and McCoy's public squabbles. He orders them to sort it out. He just doesn't anticipate the solution they come up with.
Partly inspired by a discussion in comments with realpestilence.
“Enough already! Both of you. Just shut the fuck up!”
Spock stares at his captain, as does the doctor.
“My ready room. Now.”
“But Jim…”
“Captain…”
“Now!” Jim stalks off. McCoy shuffles behind him, hands thrust deep in his pockets, grumbling under his breath. Spock holds himself stiffly upright, as befits an officer. Once they have both preceded the captain into the room, Kirk turns on them.
“I’m done with you two. I’m the captain of Starfleet’s flagship and I will not tolerate my senior crew arguing like children, on the bridge, in front of their subordinates.”
“But Jim, he’s the one who’s smug as fuck, with all his cold green-blooded logic, looking down his nose at mere humans….”
“Shut it, Bones. Now. Grown men in leadership positions in the armada of the Federation, a Federation in which humans are only one of many species, do not go around throwing speciest slurs at their fellow officers.”
“Speciest, the fuck? What d’you think Spock’s doing every time he pronounces us illogical? Our species may not take it so personally but it’s as a vicious an insult as that bunch of pointy-eared robot-former-savages can dish out!”
“Keep quiet or I will stand you down, Doctor McCoy!”
Leonard gapes at him in shock. Spock feels a quiet satisfaction that Captain Kirk has finally seen fit to exercise his rightful authority and remind the wayward doctor of his greater responsibilities.
“And don’t you think that this is all his fault, Mr Spock! I know that you bait him, and it’s damn well not logical.”
“Captain, I only seek clarity of communication from the doctor…”
“Enough! You were brought up by a human mother, you learnt Standard at the same time that you learnt Vulcan. You went through the Academy. You’ve served on Starfleet ships, you’ve taught halls full of mostly human students as an Academy instructor. You’re perfectly well versed in the meanings of human idioms. Leaving aside Bones’ slurs, you know exactly what he means, you just choose to be deliberately difficult. And yes, Bones has a point. Illogical when delivered by a Vulcan is a loaded word.”
The captain’s logic is less inaccurate than Spock would like.
“Now both of you mean a great deal to me, but I’ve a duty of care to everyone else on this ship too. I cannot command the Enterprise with the two of you squabbling like six-year-olds in the backseat of the car. I’m leaving the two of you in here to sort it out between yourselves. If you can’t someone will have to transfer off the ship.”
And with that Captain Kirk stalks out the ready room. The door seems to slide closed behind him with exaggerated care. Spock stands in the centre of the room in icy silence. He is a model officer. He does not get reprimanded by his superiors. He certainly does not get called a six-year-old and threatened with a transfer.
He stares blankly down at the floor, carefully bringing his heart rate back down. It seems to have spiked without his noticing, a regrettable lapse of control. He has no doubt that at any minute the doctor will burst forth with yet another tirade, a turbulent outpouring of the preposterous nonsense that passes for thinking in his disordered brain. And that will make it clear that the only logical choice for the officer to remain is Spock.
He waits in an ever-lengthening silence.
Finally he looks across the room to see McCoy sunk in a chair, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. There is a disconcerting series of fine shudders across the human’s shoulders. The captain is correct. Spock has studied the many ways in which humans communicate and that study included body language. This looks regrettably like that most wasteful, most inexplicable form of human emotional outpouring, the outbreak of tears.
He has reduced students to tears in his years as an instructor but has found that a calm explanation of why the production of excess fluid by their lachrymal glands makes no difference to the logical flaws that have led to their failing grade leads to them drying up and departing most promptly.
That had not been a course of action available to him when Nyota had finally succumbed to tears during the long trip limping back to Earth after the destruction of the Narada. He suspects that his inability to give the reaction she seemed to desire had been the major reason why their relationship had fizzled out on their return to Earth and not been renewed when, at the last minute, he took up his posting on the Enterprise.
He continues to regard the doctor, who continues to ignore him. It is unusual and unsettling. Despite the belief that humans have in their ability to act in unpredictable and surprising ways, in Spock’s experience they all operate within limited modes of behavior and he can foresee their words and actions with a high level of accuracy. Yet today both Captain Kirk and Dr McCoy have ventured outside their normal behavioral habitats, the captain with the ultimatum in place of his usual long-suffering tolerance of their disagreements, the doctor with his complete silence in the face of this ultimatum.
Spock feels oddly at a loss in the face of this variable happenstance. Clearly something needs to be done but he is not clear as to what. He needs more information. Perhaps it is time that he too tries something out of the ordinary. He eyes the bare skin that lies exposed above the neckline of the doctor’s blue shirt, below the short-cut brown hair. The idea is distasteful but attempting to communicate verbally with McCoy has never brought any elucidation.
Never one to second-guess himself once a course of action has been decided upon, he crosses the room swiftly and lays a hand on the bare skin of the doctor’s neck. He expects to encounter a muddy chaos of thought, a polluted river in flood, full of debris catching in awkward places, creating eddies and whirlpools of confusion and flawed reasoning.
The doctor’s mind is indeed turbulent but it is rather awash with strong currents of translucent thought, clashing one up against another in bright sprays of surf. Right now the strongest current is a churning stream of rust-brown and dark yellow. I’ll have to resign. I can’t force Jim to choose. It’s not fair on him. And Spock matters more. They can always find another doctor. Jim needs Spock’s calm and caution to temper his own rashness. Jim’ll be alright. He won’t be abandoned. After all, they’re supposed to have that famous fucking friendship.
The thought stream floods with a deep mottled purple, aubergine and perse, as dark and ugly as a bruise. Dammit! Why isn’t my friendship enough for him? Why does he like the damned Vulcan anyway? The purple is streaked through with swirls of roughly textured umber: Jesus Leonard, still a jealous asshole, grow up, why don’t you?
That purple swirl is jealousy? Spock has felt something very similar, every time Captain Kirk sits joking with the CMO, wasting time, chatting inanely, failing to focus on the needs and responsibilities of his command. Spock has always considered that feeling to be justified frustration at resources being misdirected.
He will need to meditate on this.
The purple current is deflected by a sudden wash of deep saffron yellow. You can’t leave him. He’s been left too often. No one stays for him. You promised. The current is full of fragments of images of Jim and Leonard together: Jim saying his mother had been away a lot while not quite meeting Leonard’s eye, Jim blaming work for staying at the Academy on a holiday while Leonard wonders, Jim looking up with a crooked smile of relief as Leonard finds him in the corner of some dirty bar. And through all of it a word is spinning dizzily, pus-filled sickly white-yellow tinged at the edge with an angry red line of infection: Tarsus.
Spock concludes with some consternation that McCoy knows the captain far better than he has realized and appears to be necessary to Kirk’s peace of mind in a way that he has not appreciated. His oversight in this matter is disconcerting, even dismaying.
A new current of rust and umber floods over the last one. This is my fault, why can’t I just zip my lip, why can’t I just ignore his smug crap, why can’t I think for two seconds before vomiting out my frustration? Images of Spock: hands clasped, an eyebrow coolly raised, a finely etched sneer; words spoken in his monotone voice: illogical, irrational, fallacious, flawed. It is distressing to see himself this way, to see how cold and how forbidding he appears to McCoy. In life he is more slender than the doctor and yet in this incarnation he is a presence as tall and broad and unbreachable as a dam wall and the doctor sees himself as a tiny figure banging bleeding fists futilely against this barren edifice.
And then spiking up through the tempestuous waters comes a sudden awareness of Spock’s hand on his neck, an astonished cognizance of the Vulcan’s higher body temperature, a visceral reaction of heat>home>happiness tinged in shades of sunny yellow. With it comes a bifurcating thought stream, one heading off into clear blues of scientific analysis, of the fascinations of comparative biology and Spock is yet again surprised to realize that this man is a keen and insightful scientist. The other stream is a violet barb of surprise: what the fuck is the Vulcan doing?
Spock realizes that he no longer knows how he should answer that question.
Leonard’s mind hangs for a moment in the violet and blue mix, before it is all washed away by a translucent wave of peach-pink warmth. “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice oddly loud in the silent room. “I’ll resign. Jim needs you. The Enterprise needs you.” And for the first time Spock really understands how emotion can be a conduit to courageous action just as effectively as rational analysis.
“No,” he hears himself reply. “He has need of both of us. It behooves us to find another solution.”
“Us?” McCoy thoughts light with disbelieving laugher, an odd sensation of light-refracting bubbles rising through the intermingling streams of thought. Then there is a strange tremor through his mind, like an aftershock from an earthquake and he raises a hand and places it on top of Spock’s on his neck. Spock speculates that the tremor is the sensation of McCoy’s mind doing something impulsively without thinking it through first. And then all organized lines of thought are lost as he feels that broad cool hand cover his own.
Human men apparently notice breasts or legs. Vulcans notice hands. Despite his impatience with the doctor Spock has noticed how big the man’s hands are, how long his fingers are and how dexterous they are in manipulating his instruments. He has noticed the cleanly trimmed fingernails and he has noticed the way the doctor fiddles with a hypo or a stylus when he is attempting to think, rolling the instrument distractingly through nimble fingers.
He is aware of the mechanics of his physiological response to the touch of hand on hand: rapid pulse, elevated breathing rate, vasocongestion of the skin of the face and neck. He is also aware of warm sparkles of arousal, glittering flickers of silver and gold centred in his hand, now caught between two layers of smooth human skin. No one has touched him like this since Nyota walked away from him nearly nine months earlier. It takes him a moment to process what McCoy is saying.
“So you’re trying to read my thoughts are you? Giving up on trying to talk to me? Can’t say I blame you. I’m not exactly in control of all the crap that tumbles out of my mouth.”
This is exactly the sort of nonsensical statement that Spock would normally react to with his driest logic, but he is distracted by the feelings that accompany the words. There is a resigned acceptance from McCoy that he will never be quite good enough, that he is damaged in ways he himself only partly understands. The thoughts are underlain by flickering images of a blonde woman with hands on her hips yelling soundlessly, a frail man in a hospital bed begging soundlessly, a shuttle on fire with figures in the flames screaming soundlessly, trapped behind an unbreakable wall of glass that the doctor cannot reach through.
The rusty brown thoughts are edged with a shimmering halo of ruby, a tired humor as he puts up with himself and plods on through life as best he can. After all, what else is there to do?
“It can’t be pleasant for you. My mind must be more of a mess than my gramma’s attic and that’s saying something.” An image floats up of a vast space disappearing in murky distance, stale air thick with dust tickling up the nose of the small boy hovering at the door, cardboard boxes with sagging corners randomly stacked, teetering piles of magazines and newspapers ready to collapse the slightest push. The boy hesitates, torn between curiosity and fear, until a skitter of rat’s claws sends him abruptly back into the safety of the house.
McCoy is rubbing his hand gently over Spock’s in a mute apology for the disorganization of his mind. The shimmers of silver-gold arousal sparking up Spock’s arm are interfering with his speech capabilities. It takes him an unacceptable passage of several uncalculated moments to reply.
“Your mind is far superior to your grandmother’s attic. I find this experience enlightening. I have misunderstood you in important ways. My data is badly flawed.”
Admitting to flaws? He sounds upset. Why? Fragments of words float in McCoy’s mind. They are not wrapped in contempt as Spock would once have hypothesized, but rather bob on a sea of wine-red concern.
McCoy twists in his seat so that he can look up into Spock’s face, still keeping his hand over the Vulcan’s. “I wish I could do it - read your thoughts. I damn well don’t understand you and I know Jim thinks highly of you and he may be a risk-addicted self-absorbed brat but he’s also turning into a damn fine captain and he wants you at his side and I’m fucking it up and I don’t understand you. I don’t know how to.” His sea of concern has turned the color of blood and his frustration is popping up through it like gas bubbles in a methane swamp.
“The mental communication is beneficial, it is undeniable. A mind meld would achieve your objective.” Spock is prepared for the surge of revulsion in McCoy’s mind, a vermillion spike rapidly streaked with the violet of surprise and then subsumed in a rising murky fog that seems to have more to do with fear than with disgust.
He is not prepared for it to be accompanied by a brilliant blue spike of scientific fascination: feel another mind, an alien consciousness, catalogue the differences, sense the similarities... an extraordinary opportunity. He is even less prepared for the aquamarine spike of unadulterated curiosity. To finally know what lies behind that damned blank exterior. Then all the colors are subsumed in one overwhelming peach-pink thought: if this is what it takes to keep us at Jim’s side… Dammit man, do it!
McCoy stands abruptly, still holding Spock’s hand as if it is a life preserver in a wild sea. “Fine. Let’s go. Quick, before I lose my nerve.”
Spock is too surprised by the doctor’s agreement to do anything other than lift his hands to McCoy’s temples, taken aback by the loss of color and warmth that came from momentarily losing his touch on the other man. He places the tips of his fingers at the key points, placing pressure on the nerves and blood vessels that will facilitate the link.
“My mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts.”
He holds his own mind tightly in check in an attempt not to overwhelm the doctor. He watches with curiosity as McCoy immediately begins formulating the experience into images that he understands from his own experience. Jesus fuck, okay, breath. In an ocean. Just like swimming far out at sea. Keep your sense of self. Know where the shore line is. Images float by of a young McCoy, all gangly limbs and huge eyes, a set of overlapping reflections of what must have been the same place visited many times over the years, being taught to swim in the ocean by an older man. I’m a strong swimmer. I can do this.
McCoy is thinking of himself as treading water as he cautiously looks around, tries to make sense of the experience. Spock attempts to order the thoughts that will make this encounter the most productive given their immediate dilemma of communication and cooperation in the light of their captain’s requirements.
However he is still a little shaken by his arousal in response to the touch of this man who is now right inside his mind. He never melded with Nyota. She was far too respectful of Vulcan custom to ever suggest it. He has melded with Jim on two occasions to pass essential information on some of their many fraught away missions but it has always been quick and tightly targeted, with time of the essence.
Wait! What?! I was turning you on? Of course. His thoughts are now visible to McCoy just as the doctor’s had been to him minutes earlier. Arousal comes in glittering sparkles that are immediately eye-catching. And then it becomes that experience where the effort not to think of something means you can think of nothing else. McCoy’s sea-green curiosity propels him into the middle of the memory of that touch, hand to hand.
Oh for god’s sake man, call me Leonard. I’m shacked up in your mind and all. How intimate can one get? Spock has no answer to offer, still caught in his shimmering memories. Your hands are that sensitive? Really? The scientific blue of analysis is mingling with the aquamarine green of pure curiosity and the mix is so similar to the contents of Spock’s mind much of the time that he feels oddly at home.
That is until Leonard raises his hands and put them over Spock’s, which remain in place on the meld points. Now this he has never done before. Arousal surges through him, a brilliant phosphorescence that runs across his entire mind, glowing trails running down through his limbs and out across his thoughts. Unlike the touch telepathy where one simply watches a mind, with a meld one feels it. And what he feels, Leonard feels. Oh my lord… that’s extraordinary!
Rather than removing his hands, as might seem logical, Leonard begins to rub them gently across Spock’s, trailing his finger tips down the back of the Vulcan’s fingers, feeling with fascination what happens in Spock’s mind, in both their minds. The glittering trails shift and swirl, glowing with a blue-green light that seems to suggest that for Spock at least his scientific curiosity is not that different from lust.
So sensitive! Leonard is captivated. How can you get any work done if your hands react like this? Spock is shivering now, physically and mentally. Inanimate objects don’t provoke this reaction. Only sentient beings.
Huh! As sensitive as my lips, I guess. And there is that odd tremor again, Leonard acting before he’s thought it through and the man’s mouth is pressed against his, moist lips moving curiously over his own, the tip of a tongue tracing the seam. Mouth to mouth kissing is not common among Vulcans. Spock indulged with Nyota, who enjoyed it. He watched her enjoyment through touch but without the mind meld he did not feel it. He spent the time in a scientific cataloging of her mouth: the ridges of the hard palate, the yielding fall of the soft palate, the slick enamel, the softer gingiva, the papillae on top of the tongue, the lingual frenum beneath it.
But this time the kiss comes with a direct line to Leonard’s arousal. His lust rises in a golden wave that flows like honey. This time Spock is caught in the imprecision of wet and slick and hot, of sucking and licking, small sharp bites and soothing strokes. Leonard’s hands remain tightly over his, their fingers now intertwined and the surging golden honey is lit from within by the glowing phosphorescence.
Emotionless, my ass!
I have never claimed to be without emotion, doctor. However, I am not affected by it.
Oh, pull the other one. Wait, I’ve got an idea. Make me moan!
?
Make me moan! Leonard supplies a helpful image of himself alone and naked on the bed in his cabin, legs spread, one broad hand tweaking a nipple, the other squeezing his turgid cock, head tossed back, moaning softly.
Spock sucks hard on the doctor’s tongue while imagining running his tongue up the underside of that leaking cock.
Oh, fuck yeah!
Spock feels a surge of satisfaction at the shimmering golden result.
See! See! That’s smugness, you smug bastard. I’ve told you time and again that you’re smug!
That is not smugness, Leonard. That is satisfaction at a job well done, a perfectly logical reaction.
Crap! See the light rose bit in the middle? That’s satisfaction! And where it goes all dark around the edges, like the ring at the periphery of an iris? That’s smugness! Emotion leaks into all your so-called logic.
Spock is rather taken aback by this insight. Yet another thing he will have to mediate on.
Oh god, don’t take me seriously. Leonard presses up against him so they are touching from chest to thigh, with mouths still meshed together. I hurt you when I rant, don’t I? I’m an idiot. I manage to both be convinced that you’re denying your emotions, which drives me up the wall, and that you’ve no emotions at all, and so can’t be hurt by my drivel. Very human, holding contradictory ideas!
He can feel Leonard bracing for one of his acerbic retorts, an awkward hardening and darkening beneath their fluid mutual pleasure. He realizes that he too hurts the doctor in ways that have not occurred to him. Your mind is both more beautiful and far more organized than I ever realized, he offers. You have indeed given me much to meditate upon.
There is a warm tumble of sunny yellow happiness, aerated by tiny rainbow-tinged bubbles of delight.
You and me both, Spock. You and me both.
Behind them a door slides open.
“What the fuck! Guys, what the hell are you doing?! This is not what I meant by settling your differences.”
Two virtually identical orange spikes of annoyance at James T. Kirk stab through their minds.
Leonard begins a reluctant withdrawal, body first, then lips, then hands. Spock feels bereft at the loss as he moves to end the meld.
More? Later?
My cabin, after shift?
God, yes!
Not a probably mythical supreme being, Leonard. Just your superior officer.
“You smug pointy-eared bastard. You knew exactly what I meant!”
“Doctor McCoy, I can assure you that my parents were united in matrimony well in advance of my conception and with your imprecision of communication it is seldom possible to ascertain what you mean.”
The thumping noise turns out to be Jim banging his head against the ready room wall.
It is as it always has been - as it always will be.
Except that Leonard’s mouth is twitching at the corners and the skin at the edges of Spock’s eyes is subtly crinkled.
Leonard slaps Jim on the shoulder as he walks to the door of the ready room.
“Man up, Jim! Nobody said being captain was going to be easy.”
Jim stares after him before turning back to his XO. “Spock? What the fuck? You were kissing him?!”
Spock looks at him, his hands clasped precisely behind his back, his face serenely blank.
“It appears that the doctor has a tendency to, as your humans would say, shoot off at the mouth, before he has engaged his brain. It is therefore an effective management strategy when he is in my presence for extended periods to keep his mouth otherwise occupied. Captain, it is perfectly logical.”
- THE END -
Author's note: The idea that for Spock lust and scientific curiosity are much the same thing comes from someone's fic, probably a TOS Kirk/Spock fic but I can't recall which one. If anyone recognizes the idea, please leave a note so that I can acknowledge it properly.
Author: zauzat
Fandom & Pairing: Star Trek AOS, Spock/McCoy
Rating: soft R
Warnings: none
Genre: drama / humour
Word Count: Around 4000
Beta: betaed by the obliging imachar and the lovely shighola. Many thanks to both of you!
Summary: Kirk has had enough of Spock and McCoy's public squabbles. He orders them to sort it out. He just doesn't anticipate the solution they come up with.
Partly inspired by a discussion in comments with realpestilence.
“Enough already! Both of you. Just shut the fuck up!”
Spock stares at his captain, as does the doctor.
“My ready room. Now.”
“But Jim…”
“Captain…”
“Now!” Jim stalks off. McCoy shuffles behind him, hands thrust deep in his pockets, grumbling under his breath. Spock holds himself stiffly upright, as befits an officer. Once they have both preceded the captain into the room, Kirk turns on them.
“I’m done with you two. I’m the captain of Starfleet’s flagship and I will not tolerate my senior crew arguing like children, on the bridge, in front of their subordinates.”
“But Jim, he’s the one who’s smug as fuck, with all his cold green-blooded logic, looking down his nose at mere humans….”
“Shut it, Bones. Now. Grown men in leadership positions in the armada of the Federation, a Federation in which humans are only one of many species, do not go around throwing speciest slurs at their fellow officers.”
“Speciest, the fuck? What d’you think Spock’s doing every time he pronounces us illogical? Our species may not take it so personally but it’s as a vicious an insult as that bunch of pointy-eared robot-former-savages can dish out!”
“Keep quiet or I will stand you down, Doctor McCoy!”
Leonard gapes at him in shock. Spock feels a quiet satisfaction that Captain Kirk has finally seen fit to exercise his rightful authority and remind the wayward doctor of his greater responsibilities.
“And don’t you think that this is all his fault, Mr Spock! I know that you bait him, and it’s damn well not logical.”
“Captain, I only seek clarity of communication from the doctor…”
“Enough! You were brought up by a human mother, you learnt Standard at the same time that you learnt Vulcan. You went through the Academy. You’ve served on Starfleet ships, you’ve taught halls full of mostly human students as an Academy instructor. You’re perfectly well versed in the meanings of human idioms. Leaving aside Bones’ slurs, you know exactly what he means, you just choose to be deliberately difficult. And yes, Bones has a point. Illogical when delivered by a Vulcan is a loaded word.”
The captain’s logic is less inaccurate than Spock would like.
“Now both of you mean a great deal to me, but I’ve a duty of care to everyone else on this ship too. I cannot command the Enterprise with the two of you squabbling like six-year-olds in the backseat of the car. I’m leaving the two of you in here to sort it out between yourselves. If you can’t someone will have to transfer off the ship.”
And with that Captain Kirk stalks out the ready room. The door seems to slide closed behind him with exaggerated care. Spock stands in the centre of the room in icy silence. He is a model officer. He does not get reprimanded by his superiors. He certainly does not get called a six-year-old and threatened with a transfer.
He stares blankly down at the floor, carefully bringing his heart rate back down. It seems to have spiked without his noticing, a regrettable lapse of control. He has no doubt that at any minute the doctor will burst forth with yet another tirade, a turbulent outpouring of the preposterous nonsense that passes for thinking in his disordered brain. And that will make it clear that the only logical choice for the officer to remain is Spock.
He waits in an ever-lengthening silence.
Finally he looks across the room to see McCoy sunk in a chair, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. There is a disconcerting series of fine shudders across the human’s shoulders. The captain is correct. Spock has studied the many ways in which humans communicate and that study included body language. This looks regrettably like that most wasteful, most inexplicable form of human emotional outpouring, the outbreak of tears.
He has reduced students to tears in his years as an instructor but has found that a calm explanation of why the production of excess fluid by their lachrymal glands makes no difference to the logical flaws that have led to their failing grade leads to them drying up and departing most promptly.
That had not been a course of action available to him when Nyota had finally succumbed to tears during the long trip limping back to Earth after the destruction of the Narada. He suspects that his inability to give the reaction she seemed to desire had been the major reason why their relationship had fizzled out on their return to Earth and not been renewed when, at the last minute, he took up his posting on the Enterprise.
He continues to regard the doctor, who continues to ignore him. It is unusual and unsettling. Despite the belief that humans have in their ability to act in unpredictable and surprising ways, in Spock’s experience they all operate within limited modes of behavior and he can foresee their words and actions with a high level of accuracy. Yet today both Captain Kirk and Dr McCoy have ventured outside their normal behavioral habitats, the captain with the ultimatum in place of his usual long-suffering tolerance of their disagreements, the doctor with his complete silence in the face of this ultimatum.
Spock feels oddly at a loss in the face of this variable happenstance. Clearly something needs to be done but he is not clear as to what. He needs more information. Perhaps it is time that he too tries something out of the ordinary. He eyes the bare skin that lies exposed above the neckline of the doctor’s blue shirt, below the short-cut brown hair. The idea is distasteful but attempting to communicate verbally with McCoy has never brought any elucidation.
Never one to second-guess himself once a course of action has been decided upon, he crosses the room swiftly and lays a hand on the bare skin of the doctor’s neck. He expects to encounter a muddy chaos of thought, a polluted river in flood, full of debris catching in awkward places, creating eddies and whirlpools of confusion and flawed reasoning.
The doctor’s mind is indeed turbulent but it is rather awash with strong currents of translucent thought, clashing one up against another in bright sprays of surf. Right now the strongest current is a churning stream of rust-brown and dark yellow. I’ll have to resign. I can’t force Jim to choose. It’s not fair on him. And Spock matters more. They can always find another doctor. Jim needs Spock’s calm and caution to temper his own rashness. Jim’ll be alright. He won’t be abandoned. After all, they’re supposed to have that famous fucking friendship.
The thought stream floods with a deep mottled purple, aubergine and perse, as dark and ugly as a bruise. Dammit! Why isn’t my friendship enough for him? Why does he like the damned Vulcan anyway? The purple is streaked through with swirls of roughly textured umber: Jesus Leonard, still a jealous asshole, grow up, why don’t you?
That purple swirl is jealousy? Spock has felt something very similar, every time Captain Kirk sits joking with the CMO, wasting time, chatting inanely, failing to focus on the needs and responsibilities of his command. Spock has always considered that feeling to be justified frustration at resources being misdirected.
He will need to meditate on this.
The purple current is deflected by a sudden wash of deep saffron yellow. You can’t leave him. He’s been left too often. No one stays for him. You promised. The current is full of fragments of images of Jim and Leonard together: Jim saying his mother had been away a lot while not quite meeting Leonard’s eye, Jim blaming work for staying at the Academy on a holiday while Leonard wonders, Jim looking up with a crooked smile of relief as Leonard finds him in the corner of some dirty bar. And through all of it a word is spinning dizzily, pus-filled sickly white-yellow tinged at the edge with an angry red line of infection: Tarsus.
Spock concludes with some consternation that McCoy knows the captain far better than he has realized and appears to be necessary to Kirk’s peace of mind in a way that he has not appreciated. His oversight in this matter is disconcerting, even dismaying.
A new current of rust and umber floods over the last one. This is my fault, why can’t I just zip my lip, why can’t I just ignore his smug crap, why can’t I think for two seconds before vomiting out my frustration? Images of Spock: hands clasped, an eyebrow coolly raised, a finely etched sneer; words spoken in his monotone voice: illogical, irrational, fallacious, flawed. It is distressing to see himself this way, to see how cold and how forbidding he appears to McCoy. In life he is more slender than the doctor and yet in this incarnation he is a presence as tall and broad and unbreachable as a dam wall and the doctor sees himself as a tiny figure banging bleeding fists futilely against this barren edifice.
And then spiking up through the tempestuous waters comes a sudden awareness of Spock’s hand on his neck, an astonished cognizance of the Vulcan’s higher body temperature, a visceral reaction of heat>home>happiness tinged in shades of sunny yellow. With it comes a bifurcating thought stream, one heading off into clear blues of scientific analysis, of the fascinations of comparative biology and Spock is yet again surprised to realize that this man is a keen and insightful scientist. The other stream is a violet barb of surprise: what the fuck is the Vulcan doing?
Spock realizes that he no longer knows how he should answer that question.
Leonard’s mind hangs for a moment in the violet and blue mix, before it is all washed away by a translucent wave of peach-pink warmth. “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice oddly loud in the silent room. “I’ll resign. Jim needs you. The Enterprise needs you.” And for the first time Spock really understands how emotion can be a conduit to courageous action just as effectively as rational analysis.
“No,” he hears himself reply. “He has need of both of us. It behooves us to find another solution.”
“Us?” McCoy thoughts light with disbelieving laugher, an odd sensation of light-refracting bubbles rising through the intermingling streams of thought. Then there is a strange tremor through his mind, like an aftershock from an earthquake and he raises a hand and places it on top of Spock’s on his neck. Spock speculates that the tremor is the sensation of McCoy’s mind doing something impulsively without thinking it through first. And then all organized lines of thought are lost as he feels that broad cool hand cover his own.
Human men apparently notice breasts or legs. Vulcans notice hands. Despite his impatience with the doctor Spock has noticed how big the man’s hands are, how long his fingers are and how dexterous they are in manipulating his instruments. He has noticed the cleanly trimmed fingernails and he has noticed the way the doctor fiddles with a hypo or a stylus when he is attempting to think, rolling the instrument distractingly through nimble fingers.
He is aware of the mechanics of his physiological response to the touch of hand on hand: rapid pulse, elevated breathing rate, vasocongestion of the skin of the face and neck. He is also aware of warm sparkles of arousal, glittering flickers of silver and gold centred in his hand, now caught between two layers of smooth human skin. No one has touched him like this since Nyota walked away from him nearly nine months earlier. It takes him a moment to process what McCoy is saying.
“So you’re trying to read my thoughts are you? Giving up on trying to talk to me? Can’t say I blame you. I’m not exactly in control of all the crap that tumbles out of my mouth.”
This is exactly the sort of nonsensical statement that Spock would normally react to with his driest logic, but he is distracted by the feelings that accompany the words. There is a resigned acceptance from McCoy that he will never be quite good enough, that he is damaged in ways he himself only partly understands. The thoughts are underlain by flickering images of a blonde woman with hands on her hips yelling soundlessly, a frail man in a hospital bed begging soundlessly, a shuttle on fire with figures in the flames screaming soundlessly, trapped behind an unbreakable wall of glass that the doctor cannot reach through.
The rusty brown thoughts are edged with a shimmering halo of ruby, a tired humor as he puts up with himself and plods on through life as best he can. After all, what else is there to do?
“It can’t be pleasant for you. My mind must be more of a mess than my gramma’s attic and that’s saying something.” An image floats up of a vast space disappearing in murky distance, stale air thick with dust tickling up the nose of the small boy hovering at the door, cardboard boxes with sagging corners randomly stacked, teetering piles of magazines and newspapers ready to collapse the slightest push. The boy hesitates, torn between curiosity and fear, until a skitter of rat’s claws sends him abruptly back into the safety of the house.
McCoy is rubbing his hand gently over Spock’s in a mute apology for the disorganization of his mind. The shimmers of silver-gold arousal sparking up Spock’s arm are interfering with his speech capabilities. It takes him an unacceptable passage of several uncalculated moments to reply.
“Your mind is far superior to your grandmother’s attic. I find this experience enlightening. I have misunderstood you in important ways. My data is badly flawed.”
Admitting to flaws? He sounds upset. Why? Fragments of words float in McCoy’s mind. They are not wrapped in contempt as Spock would once have hypothesized, but rather bob on a sea of wine-red concern.
McCoy twists in his seat so that he can look up into Spock’s face, still keeping his hand over the Vulcan’s. “I wish I could do it - read your thoughts. I damn well don’t understand you and I know Jim thinks highly of you and he may be a risk-addicted self-absorbed brat but he’s also turning into a damn fine captain and he wants you at his side and I’m fucking it up and I don’t understand you. I don’t know how to.” His sea of concern has turned the color of blood and his frustration is popping up through it like gas bubbles in a methane swamp.
“The mental communication is beneficial, it is undeniable. A mind meld would achieve your objective.” Spock is prepared for the surge of revulsion in McCoy’s mind, a vermillion spike rapidly streaked with the violet of surprise and then subsumed in a rising murky fog that seems to have more to do with fear than with disgust.
He is not prepared for it to be accompanied by a brilliant blue spike of scientific fascination: feel another mind, an alien consciousness, catalogue the differences, sense the similarities... an extraordinary opportunity. He is even less prepared for the aquamarine spike of unadulterated curiosity. To finally know what lies behind that damned blank exterior. Then all the colors are subsumed in one overwhelming peach-pink thought: if this is what it takes to keep us at Jim’s side… Dammit man, do it!
McCoy stands abruptly, still holding Spock’s hand as if it is a life preserver in a wild sea. “Fine. Let’s go. Quick, before I lose my nerve.”
Spock is too surprised by the doctor’s agreement to do anything other than lift his hands to McCoy’s temples, taken aback by the loss of color and warmth that came from momentarily losing his touch on the other man. He places the tips of his fingers at the key points, placing pressure on the nerves and blood vessels that will facilitate the link.
“My mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts.”
He holds his own mind tightly in check in an attempt not to overwhelm the doctor. He watches with curiosity as McCoy immediately begins formulating the experience into images that he understands from his own experience. Jesus fuck, okay, breath. In an ocean. Just like swimming far out at sea. Keep your sense of self. Know where the shore line is. Images float by of a young McCoy, all gangly limbs and huge eyes, a set of overlapping reflections of what must have been the same place visited many times over the years, being taught to swim in the ocean by an older man. I’m a strong swimmer. I can do this.
McCoy is thinking of himself as treading water as he cautiously looks around, tries to make sense of the experience. Spock attempts to order the thoughts that will make this encounter the most productive given their immediate dilemma of communication and cooperation in the light of their captain’s requirements.
However he is still a little shaken by his arousal in response to the touch of this man who is now right inside his mind. He never melded with Nyota. She was far too respectful of Vulcan custom to ever suggest it. He has melded with Jim on two occasions to pass essential information on some of their many fraught away missions but it has always been quick and tightly targeted, with time of the essence.
Wait! What?! I was turning you on? Of course. His thoughts are now visible to McCoy just as the doctor’s had been to him minutes earlier. Arousal comes in glittering sparkles that are immediately eye-catching. And then it becomes that experience where the effort not to think of something means you can think of nothing else. McCoy’s sea-green curiosity propels him into the middle of the memory of that touch, hand to hand.
Oh for god’s sake man, call me Leonard. I’m shacked up in your mind and all. How intimate can one get? Spock has no answer to offer, still caught in his shimmering memories. Your hands are that sensitive? Really? The scientific blue of analysis is mingling with the aquamarine green of pure curiosity and the mix is so similar to the contents of Spock’s mind much of the time that he feels oddly at home.
That is until Leonard raises his hands and put them over Spock’s, which remain in place on the meld points. Now this he has never done before. Arousal surges through him, a brilliant phosphorescence that runs across his entire mind, glowing trails running down through his limbs and out across his thoughts. Unlike the touch telepathy where one simply watches a mind, with a meld one feels it. And what he feels, Leonard feels. Oh my lord… that’s extraordinary!
Rather than removing his hands, as might seem logical, Leonard begins to rub them gently across Spock’s, trailing his finger tips down the back of the Vulcan’s fingers, feeling with fascination what happens in Spock’s mind, in both their minds. The glittering trails shift and swirl, glowing with a blue-green light that seems to suggest that for Spock at least his scientific curiosity is not that different from lust.
So sensitive! Leonard is captivated. How can you get any work done if your hands react like this? Spock is shivering now, physically and mentally. Inanimate objects don’t provoke this reaction. Only sentient beings.
Huh! As sensitive as my lips, I guess. And there is that odd tremor again, Leonard acting before he’s thought it through and the man’s mouth is pressed against his, moist lips moving curiously over his own, the tip of a tongue tracing the seam. Mouth to mouth kissing is not common among Vulcans. Spock indulged with Nyota, who enjoyed it. He watched her enjoyment through touch but without the mind meld he did not feel it. He spent the time in a scientific cataloging of her mouth: the ridges of the hard palate, the yielding fall of the soft palate, the slick enamel, the softer gingiva, the papillae on top of the tongue, the lingual frenum beneath it.
But this time the kiss comes with a direct line to Leonard’s arousal. His lust rises in a golden wave that flows like honey. This time Spock is caught in the imprecision of wet and slick and hot, of sucking and licking, small sharp bites and soothing strokes. Leonard’s hands remain tightly over his, their fingers now intertwined and the surging golden honey is lit from within by the glowing phosphorescence.
Emotionless, my ass!
I have never claimed to be without emotion, doctor. However, I am not affected by it.
Oh, pull the other one. Wait, I’ve got an idea. Make me moan!
?
Make me moan! Leonard supplies a helpful image of himself alone and naked on the bed in his cabin, legs spread, one broad hand tweaking a nipple, the other squeezing his turgid cock, head tossed back, moaning softly.
Spock sucks hard on the doctor’s tongue while imagining running his tongue up the underside of that leaking cock.
Oh, fuck yeah!
Spock feels a surge of satisfaction at the shimmering golden result.
See! See! That’s smugness, you smug bastard. I’ve told you time and again that you’re smug!
That is not smugness, Leonard. That is satisfaction at a job well done, a perfectly logical reaction.
Crap! See the light rose bit in the middle? That’s satisfaction! And where it goes all dark around the edges, like the ring at the periphery of an iris? That’s smugness! Emotion leaks into all your so-called logic.
Spock is rather taken aback by this insight. Yet another thing he will have to mediate on.
Oh god, don’t take me seriously. Leonard presses up against him so they are touching from chest to thigh, with mouths still meshed together. I hurt you when I rant, don’t I? I’m an idiot. I manage to both be convinced that you’re denying your emotions, which drives me up the wall, and that you’ve no emotions at all, and so can’t be hurt by my drivel. Very human, holding contradictory ideas!
He can feel Leonard bracing for one of his acerbic retorts, an awkward hardening and darkening beneath their fluid mutual pleasure. He realizes that he too hurts the doctor in ways that have not occurred to him. Your mind is both more beautiful and far more organized than I ever realized, he offers. You have indeed given me much to meditate upon.
There is a warm tumble of sunny yellow happiness, aerated by tiny rainbow-tinged bubbles of delight.
You and me both, Spock. You and me both.
Behind them a door slides open.
“What the fuck! Guys, what the hell are you doing?! This is not what I meant by settling your differences.”
Two virtually identical orange spikes of annoyance at James T. Kirk stab through their minds.
Leonard begins a reluctant withdrawal, body first, then lips, then hands. Spock feels bereft at the loss as he moves to end the meld.
More? Later?
My cabin, after shift?
God, yes!
Not a probably mythical supreme being, Leonard. Just your superior officer.
“You smug pointy-eared bastard. You knew exactly what I meant!”
“Doctor McCoy, I can assure you that my parents were united in matrimony well in advance of my conception and with your imprecision of communication it is seldom possible to ascertain what you mean.”
The thumping noise turns out to be Jim banging his head against the ready room wall.
It is as it always has been - as it always will be.
Except that Leonard’s mouth is twitching at the corners and the skin at the edges of Spock’s eyes is subtly crinkled.
Leonard slaps Jim on the shoulder as he walks to the door of the ready room.
“Man up, Jim! Nobody said being captain was going to be easy.”
Jim stares after him before turning back to his XO. “Spock? What the fuck? You were kissing him?!”
Spock looks at him, his hands clasped precisely behind his back, his face serenely blank.
“It appears that the doctor has a tendency to, as your humans would say, shoot off at the mouth, before he has engaged his brain. It is therefore an effective management strategy when he is in my presence for extended periods to keep his mouth otherwise occupied. Captain, it is perfectly logical.”
- THE END -
Author's note: The idea that for Spock lust and scientific curiosity are much the same thing comes from someone's fic, probably a TOS Kirk/Spock fic but I can't recall which one. If anyone recognizes the idea, please leave a note so that I can acknowledge it properly.