five people spock loved and one person he fell in love with | spock/kirk | 3, 937 words
title: five people spock loved and one person he fell in love with.
author: tasheila
pairing: spock/kirk, spock/lots of people
rating: pg-13
words: 3, 937 words
summary: a promt from st_xi_kink round two:
Five People Spock Loved and One Person He Fell In Love With.
Spock/Kirk preferred, but if some other pairing inspires you, go ahead. I would love it if you had his parents and/or possibly T'Pring in there.
notes: i don't remember ever writing two fics in such quick succession but i guess kirk and spock are just so inspiring to me. also, it is my first long fic, ever. i wanted to stick to one person per page but it obviously didn't work, lol.
1. His Mother
There was a time in the life of Spock where he didn’t care about being half-Vulcan.
He is five years old, in the days before schooling, before the outside world dictates that he is less than what he is worth, before he learns that emotion is a weakness and because humans felt it, they are weak too.
He is a five-year old boy whose world revolves around his mother.
Spock’s earliest memories are of sitting in her lap, listening to her voice as she tells him all about the planet she had come from, Earth, where the leaves are abundant and the air is cool. He has images of soaring rivers in his head, of bustling cities with a cacophony of noise, and people who look like his mother.
He looks at her and categorizes their differences: chubby hands tracing her downward-shaped brows and his own sharply angled ones, and then her softly rounded ears, a stark difference to his sharp ones (she loved squeezing them and he could never understand why). He asks her once, why they looked so different, and with a wise gleam in her eye, she answers him: “It matters not, my Spock, because my love for you makes up for our differences.”
He grins at her, and says, “Then I hope we are more different than ever so you can love me more!” Mother and son giggling, both go to sleep on her big, white bed as they wait for the Ambassador to return. Spock likes sleeping in her bed when his father isn’t there: he is her protector, ready to slay the dragon she tells him about in his bedtime stories, lest the dragon decides to jump out of the book and take her away from him.
Sometimes, Sarek arrives, after a trip cut short and joins them on the bed. Spock notices the lack of affection between his parents but puts it to a secret love language that five-year olds are not privy to. Besides, Sarek allows him to stay in between them, so he can’t possibly be all that bad, right?
Life continues on like this, idyllically. Spock never questions the fact that he has no other friends, because he is perfectly content to be with his mother. He never questions why they never leave the vicinity of his home, and when they do, for a rare outside foray, he does not notice that all Vulcans steer clear of them. He puts it down to jealousy: they don’t have a human mother who holds his hand and spits on hers to smooth his hair, one who cooks him strange foods like “French-fries”, one who laughs freely as if she is discovering the world for the first time.
Spock is an eight year old when he begins his schooling. He doesn’t really want to, but his father explains that he needs it, that knowledge is a beautiful thing, and it will take him to far away places. He doesn’t want to go to far away places, because that would mean leaving his mother, but then he realizes that far away places could mean Earth, and maybe someday he’ll take her there and she can show him the leaves and the rivers and the noisy cities (and protect him from the cold).
On the night before school, his mother is twitchy, fidgeting as she puts him to sleep. He begs to be allowed to sleep in her room like they did before but a soft, pained smile crosses her features, and Spock decides he never wants to see her smile like that, so he secretly vows he’ll stop it from happening again.
He once read about mind-melds in one of his father’s tomes, so he asks “Mama, can I meld my mind with yours so I can know what you feel?”
She laughs, kissing his forehead. “It doesn’t work like that, Spock. A mind-meld is for your beloved, not your mother.”
“But, you’re my beloved!” he protests, sitting up. “Please, Mama, please? I can tell you’re worried, and I don’t want you to be!
“Spock,” she whispers softly. “You’re eight. You can’t meld with anyone, much less me. And I can’t do it, either. I’m human, remember.”
“Humans are better than Vulcans,” he says surely. “When I grow up, I’m going to marry a human, just like Papa did and we’ll live next to you.”
There it is, that soft, pained, smile. “Oh, my Spock,” she says, before she leans down and smoothes her nose all over the contours of his face. It’s her version of a mind-meld.
To Spock, it is the greatest feeling ever, and he holds her close to him, promising that he will score the highest marks in the history of the school so she will be proud of him. She smiles, a real smile, and kisses his forehead and tells him she already is.
Three weeks later he gets into a fight at school because a classmate insults his mother, and his father tells him he married her because “it was logical.” In an attempt to be more Vulcan, he starts hiding his love. She never says a word about it, starts keeping her hands to herself, her endearments become quiet. Their silences are always fraught with a tenuous love they no longer mention.
Twenty years later, she falls off a crumbling cliff-side and Vulcan is destroyed. He never gets to tell her how much the first eight years of his life meant to him, how sometimes, despite living in Earth he despairs because he wants her there, how he has never mind-melded with anyone, because in his head, she is still his beloved.
How sorry he is that the soft, painful smile on her face stayed permanently, because he put it there.
2. Stonn
It is Spock’s first day of school and the first and only friend he makes is a boy called Stonn.
He supposes he should be lucky; the minute any child catches site of him they all look away, some more sneeringly than others. He doesn’t know why this is, and he reverts back to the old safeguard: everyone wants a human mother, and he’s the only child lucky enough to have one.
So he spends the first break of his lesson alone. By the second break, he is joined by a boy around his age who introduces himself as Stonn. Stonn slightly looks like him, a bit more imposing, and his ears look sharper. But he seems nice enough, so Spock doesn’t complain.
“Why don’t the other kids like you?” asks Stonn boldly.
Spock stares at him. This is the first Vulcan child to have spoken to him. He doesn’t expect them to be so…direct.
“They’re jealous,” he answers back. “Because I have a human mother.”
Suddenly, Stonn’s eyes grow wide with curiosity. “What’s that like,” he asks. “To have a human mother?”
So Spock tells him. Tells him about his mother who adores him, who makes him misshapen sweaters just because she wants to, who tells him about Earth, who makes him strange foods like “spaghetti”, who loves him with everything she has.
Stonn finds this exciting. A human mother seems so different to what he has at home, all sharp angles, and cold spaces, parents that don’t touch, and loaded silences. The fact that he has no idea that Spock’s half-human self makes him a taboo should imply that his parents don’t talk at all.
They spend all their time together after that. Spock likes Stonn, and he starts to wonder if his assumptions about the Vulcan world are just that: assumptions made up by the over-imaginative mind of a lonely child. Certainly, Stonn is nothing like the other children who still either refuse to look at him or goad him by making remarks laced with an implicitness that Spock knows he must ignore, lest he let his rage get the better of him. Stonn even likes to defend him from the bullies, and both friends take pride at besting all the others in their year in the first Science exam (Spock first, Stonn second).
By the second week, Stonn’s father is gently told that his son is running about with The Ambassador’s Son. The teachers start separating them, and soon they are strangers.
The next day, Spock gets into a brawl after his mother is insulted. Standing silently among the bullies is his first and only friend.
3. T’Pring
Spock is fifteen years old when his father brings the idea of marriage into the equation.
He has gotten over the delusion of marrying a human and living next to his mother. His formative schooling years had seen to that. He supposes this next step is the logical path to becoming more Vulcan, so he allows his father to make the match.
That night, while Sarek is away, Spock can hear his mother crying softly in her big white bed and it takes all of his willpower to make sure he doesn’t go and hold her like he used to as a little boy.
Three days later, he is introduced to T’Pring. T’Pring looks like a colder version of his mother, dark and beautiful and he can’t help but feel that behind that smile, there is a cruel streak waiting to get out. If Spock’s problems have to do with controlling his love, with T’Pring, it is controlling her hate.
With T’Pring, there will be no visits to Earth, no possibility of raising his children the way his mother raised him. But Spock compartmentalizes; after all, the way his mother raised him led to his naïveté about the Vulcan world at large, and some very wretched experiences as a schoolboy.
He touches T’Pring’s hand, hoping his kiss will convey enough passion, and as he takes her in, he senses her cruelty, her absolute determination to have the best, and for herself, only. She seems disappointed to have ended up with a Vulcan/Human hybrid. She is passionate, yes, but so much so that the idea of her frightens Spock.
After that touch, they are separated. He will never see her again, until he reaches his full maturity, but before that happens, Vulcan is destroyed. A few weeks later, the full list of the dead or missing comes out, and the name T’Pring stands out in stark contrast to all the rest.
Spock is surprised by the twinge of feeling in his chest.
4. Nyota Uhura
Spock is 27 years old and in the third year of his tenure at Starfleet when a plucky, determined Cadet takes the Kobayashi Maru test and fails it.
It doesn’t surprise him that she fails, of course, because he built it that way, and he knows that the cadets don’t take it seriously anymore, just as a rite of passage within Starfleet. What impresses him about this girl is her fresh, innovative ways in trying to beat it: she tries to use diplomacy, yelling in 8 different languages, two of which even he hasn’t heard of.
The end result is a spectacular failure, her death count almost surpassing that of Cadet James T. Kirk who took it a week ago (he tried calling the enemy captain over for a fistfight). As Spock looks at her over the viewing window, he notices her resolute glare and the way her head never drops, the way her voice never wavers as she plows through language after language in the hopes that someone is listening.
He finds that he is.
Next week, he speaks to her personally and convinces her to take a class with him. Science isn’t even her specialty; it’s communications, she tells him, and she lacks the prerequisites to even understand what the hell he’s actually teaching (she doesn’t say that but he kind of knows she implies it). He finds himself offering her unofficial tutoring, a first for him.
She gives him a funny smile at that, and says, “But you don’t even know my name,” before she covers her mouth and looks away.
“Uhura,” he replies, “right?”
“You can call me Nyota,” she says, before what looks to him like a blush appears on her cheeks. “I don’t even tell guys that on first dates!”
It is, at that moment when he realizes he’d really rather not have her go out on dates with anyone else other than him.
Soon the tutoring sessions turn into heavy kissing and meeting bodies. He still manages to teach her though, sometimes when he is running kisses up and down her neck he tells her about the phyla of animals found on Romulus, and then as his legs wraps around hers it’s physics that is the main subject.
What happens is she scores the highest on all of his exams, better than his most experienced students, and this is all without the appearance of favoritism, which leads him to making the closest expression he can to a smile. She is, without a doubt, perfect.
Except he knows that she isn’t the one who will be his mate, his beloved, his t’hy’la, and he knows this because he doesn’t talk about Vulcan with her. She asks him once, how his childhood was like, and he looks away for a few minutes in silence, before she wisely decides to change the subject and talk about the last summer, which she spent trekking around Asia and teaching schoolchildren new languages.
How, he surmises in his head later that night, as she lays sleeping on his shoulder, will you ever mate with someone when you cannot even tell them about your deepest childhood hurts, which haunts you ever so often, the idea that you will never measure up to your early promises?
He never asks her for a mind-meld. The closest he came to it was the few minutes after Vulcan is destroyed. In the turbo-lifts, she holds him so closely, so softly and if he closes his eyes he can imagine that he is back on Vulcan, a five year old, his mother holding him tightly.
And yet, the fact that he has to close his eyes and imagine this again reminds him why they cannot be anything more than this fleeting, momentary love. Somewhere, his t’hy’la is waiting, and when they meet; it will be a relief to share the burden of his feelings, to share his heart with someone who will never break it.
He thinks that this is what his father might have felt when he first met his mother.
5. His Father
Spock goes through many intermittent moments of his life when he fears his own father.
When he is five, he really has nothing to fear because he is under the protection of his mother, who won’t let a fly land on him. And Sarek seems to genuinely enjoy him, lets him sleep in between them because he knows how much it makes him happy.
But at eight, he goes to school, and it all changes. There is a break in Spock’s heart after his father tells him he married his mother because “it was logical to do so,” and he realizes his whole life has been a lie. There is no love for him to look forward to in the future, and as a Vulcan this is par for the course and must not be focused on. But as a human, he cannot stop that deep rush of disappointment that fills him up.
This is when he starts holding back from his mother.
At fifteen, the idea of a permanent mate scares him so much, but because it is Vulcan and expected, he allows it. Watching his father’s hard, stony face (a complete opposite from his mother’s) during the match, he supposes that this is the first time his father is proud of having a half-human child: one capable of being an eligible match to a girl from a good family, despite being a hybrid.
At 20, he is top of his year at school; the smartest, the most capable out of Vulcan’s most gifted, and as such only five of his peers make it into the Vulcan Science Academy. He is expected to accept this honor, and supposes that he doesn’t blame anyone for thinking he would: after all, this is the Vulcan thing to do.
But he rejects it. For the first time, an expression he can’t recognize flashes across his father’s face. It could be disappointment, but he’d know that look…so, is it pride that Spock had rejected the Establishment in favor of defending his mother?
But his father stare returns to normal after that, in impassive incredulity, at his son’s gall to reject the Academy. The result of this is father and son does not speak to each other for eight years.
When they resume communication, it is because their home planet has been destroyed. Amanda is dead. They are now members of a limited species, and nothing will ever be the same again.
There is an unexplained pain for him, as he strangles Kirk on the bridge. Almost as if his entire body, his brain, his heart is protesting at the action as he let his fury take over.
Later, as he stews over the moment, his father tells him he married his mother because he did love her, and only then does begin to understand him.
The wounds of his childhood are closed, and ultimately, they are healed. He can love now, freely, wholeheartedly, and he can throw himself at this base emotion he spent so long denying.
He can love, just as his mother had loved him, and his father. He can love, the way he knows his mother always wanted to.
What he had taken away when Spock was an eight year old is now his again, twenty years later, free to do with what ever he wants. This now, he realizes is the greatest gift his father has ever given him.
The one he fell in love with
Spock does not know how old he is, or what moment triggered it, when he falls in love with Captain James Tiberius Kirk.
When he thinks about it, as he always does, maybe there was a series of moments that brought him to his current state of feeling.
His first two encounters with Jim are the first two failed Kobayashi Maru tests, and at the time, he doesn’t think there is anything special about the boy. He hears snippets from his peers about the man, and from Nyota’s own irritated grumblings and thinks: he seems a failure, and it is a shame that he will never be half the man his father was.
And then Nero happens. Their worlds change and soon Jim is Captain and he is the First Officer, and the Enterprise is theirs.
He thinks it might have happened just after the Enterprise landed. They are instantly separated, and brought into official questioning by Admirals who are curious to know what actually happened in space. In one of the smaller function rooms before the third hearing, Jim suddenly rests his head on Spock’s shoulder, almost as if it is the most familiar thing to him (he later finds that it actually is), and remarks at how tired he feels.
Without knowing why, Spock reaches out and melds his mind with him. Jim doesn’t stop him. This absolute, unknowable sense of trust between them can’t be broken anymore and Spock isn’t sure he wants to. The things they see, and what they know passes between them and suddenly, this feels right, and Spock knows he will never love anyone as much as he loves Jim Kirk in this moment.
When he hesitantly severs the connection, Jim is quiet, and Spock presses a kiss on his forehead because it seems right. Jim looks up, whispers “thank you,” and suddenly he is gone to him, into the assembly hall for his hearing.
That night he holds Nyota in his arms and tells her what they have can no longer continue, for he would be hurting more than two people now, if it were to do so. She hugs him, tells him she understands, and not for the first time, Spock is filled with an extraordinary sense of wonder for everyone who has loved him, and how they have pushed him into this moment of absolute surety.
He thinks of it this way: of the five people he has loved in the past, they were all, in some surprising way, connected to each other: he loved his mother and was ashamed at those difficult feelings he had for T’Pring, he loved Stonn who began to hate him because of his mother, he loved Nyota, and a hybrid loving a human would earn him more hate from T’Pring and Stonn, and through it all his father, a silent, constant present in his life.
But Jim, Jim is separate from all of them, perhaps only connected to Nyota, but even that is a superficial connection at best. What he will have is now new, and unknown. There are no textbooks and guides on how he will love his t’hy’la, it is something that Spock will jump blindly into, and for once, the thought does not scare him.
He goes to Jim that night, and they kiss for the first time. It is soft and sweet and Spock is filled with a sense of wonder that he knows will be permanent. With Jim, there will new discoveries for the rest of their lives together, and it will be where he is most content.
Their bodies meet, and their souls yearn for each other, and there is an unspoken promise between them that they will never break. This is forever, my t’hy’la.
In the end, he holds Jim in his arms, as Jim begs for their minds to meet once more. Regretfully, Spock must turn him down (and he will hate doing this to him, even when they are Captain and First officer on their ship) but instead he asks that they simply speak.
Spock tells him about his childhood, of all the things he could never tell Nyota, about Vulcan, about Stonn, T’Pring, and his beloved mother who had promised him the world and he in return had promised that he would love her forever, in the way she loved him. He talks about his disappointment at reneging that promise, and then the hurt his father’s words had cost, and how it led him to believe that he would never love, but oh, how he is so very wrong right now.
And Jim tells him everything too, about Iowa, and an absent mother who had learned that looking away was a coping mechanism, about stepfathers who crossed so many boundaries, and the bruises of his childhood. Spock holds him tighter then, and promises that no one will ever hurt him again, and Jim looks at him so trustingly that Spock realizes now is the time: if he had broken his promise to his mother about keeping that soft, pained smile away from her face, he can do the same for Jim, and this time, he will keep it.
Jim begs him again, but what Spock does is smooth his nose over the contours of his face, learning everything, committing it to memory. It isn’t the mind-meld. But it’s just as significant to him, because his mother did it for him, and now he will love Jim in the way of humans, like his mother, with the force of a million, brilliant suns.
And it will be amazing.
author: tasheila
pairing: spock/kirk, spock/lots of people
rating: pg-13
words: 3, 937 words
summary: a promt from st_xi_kink round two:
Five People Spock Loved and One Person He Fell In Love With.
Spock/Kirk preferred, but if some other pairing inspires you, go ahead. I would love it if you had his parents and/or possibly T'Pring in there.
notes: i don't remember ever writing two fics in such quick succession but i guess kirk and spock are just so inspiring to me. also, it is my first long fic, ever. i wanted to stick to one person per page but it obviously didn't work, lol.
1. His Mother
There was a time in the life of Spock where he didn’t care about being half-Vulcan.
He is five years old, in the days before schooling, before the outside world dictates that he is less than what he is worth, before he learns that emotion is a weakness and because humans felt it, they are weak too.
He is a five-year old boy whose world revolves around his mother.
Spock’s earliest memories are of sitting in her lap, listening to her voice as she tells him all about the planet she had come from, Earth, where the leaves are abundant and the air is cool. He has images of soaring rivers in his head, of bustling cities with a cacophony of noise, and people who look like his mother.
He looks at her and categorizes their differences: chubby hands tracing her downward-shaped brows and his own sharply angled ones, and then her softly rounded ears, a stark difference to his sharp ones (she loved squeezing them and he could never understand why). He asks her once, why they looked so different, and with a wise gleam in her eye, she answers him: “It matters not, my Spock, because my love for you makes up for our differences.”
He grins at her, and says, “Then I hope we are more different than ever so you can love me more!” Mother and son giggling, both go to sleep on her big, white bed as they wait for the Ambassador to return. Spock likes sleeping in her bed when his father isn’t there: he is her protector, ready to slay the dragon she tells him about in his bedtime stories, lest the dragon decides to jump out of the book and take her away from him.
Sometimes, Sarek arrives, after a trip cut short and joins them on the bed. Spock notices the lack of affection between his parents but puts it to a secret love language that five-year olds are not privy to. Besides, Sarek allows him to stay in between them, so he can’t possibly be all that bad, right?
Life continues on like this, idyllically. Spock never questions the fact that he has no other friends, because he is perfectly content to be with his mother. He never questions why they never leave the vicinity of his home, and when they do, for a rare outside foray, he does not notice that all Vulcans steer clear of them. He puts it down to jealousy: they don’t have a human mother who holds his hand and spits on hers to smooth his hair, one who cooks him strange foods like “French-fries”, one who laughs freely as if she is discovering the world for the first time.
Spock is an eight year old when he begins his schooling. He doesn’t really want to, but his father explains that he needs it, that knowledge is a beautiful thing, and it will take him to far away places. He doesn’t want to go to far away places, because that would mean leaving his mother, but then he realizes that far away places could mean Earth, and maybe someday he’ll take her there and she can show him the leaves and the rivers and the noisy cities (and protect him from the cold).
On the night before school, his mother is twitchy, fidgeting as she puts him to sleep. He begs to be allowed to sleep in her room like they did before but a soft, pained smile crosses her features, and Spock decides he never wants to see her smile like that, so he secretly vows he’ll stop it from happening again.
He once read about mind-melds in one of his father’s tomes, so he asks “Mama, can I meld my mind with yours so I can know what you feel?”
She laughs, kissing his forehead. “It doesn’t work like that, Spock. A mind-meld is for your beloved, not your mother.”
“But, you’re my beloved!” he protests, sitting up. “Please, Mama, please? I can tell you’re worried, and I don’t want you to be!
“Spock,” she whispers softly. “You’re eight. You can’t meld with anyone, much less me. And I can’t do it, either. I’m human, remember.”
“Humans are better than Vulcans,” he says surely. “When I grow up, I’m going to marry a human, just like Papa did and we’ll live next to you.”
There it is, that soft, pained, smile. “Oh, my Spock,” she says, before she leans down and smoothes her nose all over the contours of his face. It’s her version of a mind-meld.
To Spock, it is the greatest feeling ever, and he holds her close to him, promising that he will score the highest marks in the history of the school so she will be proud of him. She smiles, a real smile, and kisses his forehead and tells him she already is.
Three weeks later he gets into a fight at school because a classmate insults his mother, and his father tells him he married her because “it was logical.” In an attempt to be more Vulcan, he starts hiding his love. She never says a word about it, starts keeping her hands to herself, her endearments become quiet. Their silences are always fraught with a tenuous love they no longer mention.
Twenty years later, she falls off a crumbling cliff-side and Vulcan is destroyed. He never gets to tell her how much the first eight years of his life meant to him, how sometimes, despite living in Earth he despairs because he wants her there, how he has never mind-melded with anyone, because in his head, she is still his beloved.
How sorry he is that the soft, painful smile on her face stayed permanently, because he put it there.
2. Stonn
It is Spock’s first day of school and the first and only friend he makes is a boy called Stonn.
He supposes he should be lucky; the minute any child catches site of him they all look away, some more sneeringly than others. He doesn’t know why this is, and he reverts back to the old safeguard: everyone wants a human mother, and he’s the only child lucky enough to have one.
So he spends the first break of his lesson alone. By the second break, he is joined by a boy around his age who introduces himself as Stonn. Stonn slightly looks like him, a bit more imposing, and his ears look sharper. But he seems nice enough, so Spock doesn’t complain.
“Why don’t the other kids like you?” asks Stonn boldly.
Spock stares at him. This is the first Vulcan child to have spoken to him. He doesn’t expect them to be so…direct.
“They’re jealous,” he answers back. “Because I have a human mother.”
Suddenly, Stonn’s eyes grow wide with curiosity. “What’s that like,” he asks. “To have a human mother?”
So Spock tells him. Tells him about his mother who adores him, who makes him misshapen sweaters just because she wants to, who tells him about Earth, who makes him strange foods like “spaghetti”, who loves him with everything she has.
Stonn finds this exciting. A human mother seems so different to what he has at home, all sharp angles, and cold spaces, parents that don’t touch, and loaded silences. The fact that he has no idea that Spock’s half-human self makes him a taboo should imply that his parents don’t talk at all.
They spend all their time together after that. Spock likes Stonn, and he starts to wonder if his assumptions about the Vulcan world are just that: assumptions made up by the over-imaginative mind of a lonely child. Certainly, Stonn is nothing like the other children who still either refuse to look at him or goad him by making remarks laced with an implicitness that Spock knows he must ignore, lest he let his rage get the better of him. Stonn even likes to defend him from the bullies, and both friends take pride at besting all the others in their year in the first Science exam (Spock first, Stonn second).
By the second week, Stonn’s father is gently told that his son is running about with The Ambassador’s Son. The teachers start separating them, and soon they are strangers.
The next day, Spock gets into a brawl after his mother is insulted. Standing silently among the bullies is his first and only friend.
3. T’Pring
Spock is fifteen years old when his father brings the idea of marriage into the equation.
He has gotten over the delusion of marrying a human and living next to his mother. His formative schooling years had seen to that. He supposes this next step is the logical path to becoming more Vulcan, so he allows his father to make the match.
That night, while Sarek is away, Spock can hear his mother crying softly in her big white bed and it takes all of his willpower to make sure he doesn’t go and hold her like he used to as a little boy.
Three days later, he is introduced to T’Pring. T’Pring looks like a colder version of his mother, dark and beautiful and he can’t help but feel that behind that smile, there is a cruel streak waiting to get out. If Spock’s problems have to do with controlling his love, with T’Pring, it is controlling her hate.
With T’Pring, there will be no visits to Earth, no possibility of raising his children the way his mother raised him. But Spock compartmentalizes; after all, the way his mother raised him led to his naïveté about the Vulcan world at large, and some very wretched experiences as a schoolboy.
He touches T’Pring’s hand, hoping his kiss will convey enough passion, and as he takes her in, he senses her cruelty, her absolute determination to have the best, and for herself, only. She seems disappointed to have ended up with a Vulcan/Human hybrid. She is passionate, yes, but so much so that the idea of her frightens Spock.
After that touch, they are separated. He will never see her again, until he reaches his full maturity, but before that happens, Vulcan is destroyed. A few weeks later, the full list of the dead or missing comes out, and the name T’Pring stands out in stark contrast to all the rest.
Spock is surprised by the twinge of feeling in his chest.
4. Nyota Uhura
Spock is 27 years old and in the third year of his tenure at Starfleet when a plucky, determined Cadet takes the Kobayashi Maru test and fails it.
It doesn’t surprise him that she fails, of course, because he built it that way, and he knows that the cadets don’t take it seriously anymore, just as a rite of passage within Starfleet. What impresses him about this girl is her fresh, innovative ways in trying to beat it: she tries to use diplomacy, yelling in 8 different languages, two of which even he hasn’t heard of.
The end result is a spectacular failure, her death count almost surpassing that of Cadet James T. Kirk who took it a week ago (he tried calling the enemy captain over for a fistfight). As Spock looks at her over the viewing window, he notices her resolute glare and the way her head never drops, the way her voice never wavers as she plows through language after language in the hopes that someone is listening.
He finds that he is.
Next week, he speaks to her personally and convinces her to take a class with him. Science isn’t even her specialty; it’s communications, she tells him, and she lacks the prerequisites to even understand what the hell he’s actually teaching (she doesn’t say that but he kind of knows she implies it). He finds himself offering her unofficial tutoring, a first for him.
She gives him a funny smile at that, and says, “But you don’t even know my name,” before she covers her mouth and looks away.
“Uhura,” he replies, “right?”
“You can call me Nyota,” she says, before what looks to him like a blush appears on her cheeks. “I don’t even tell guys that on first dates!”
It is, at that moment when he realizes he’d really rather not have her go out on dates with anyone else other than him.
Soon the tutoring sessions turn into heavy kissing and meeting bodies. He still manages to teach her though, sometimes when he is running kisses up and down her neck he tells her about the phyla of animals found on Romulus, and then as his legs wraps around hers it’s physics that is the main subject.
What happens is she scores the highest on all of his exams, better than his most experienced students, and this is all without the appearance of favoritism, which leads him to making the closest expression he can to a smile. She is, without a doubt, perfect.
Except he knows that she isn’t the one who will be his mate, his beloved, his t’hy’la, and he knows this because he doesn’t talk about Vulcan with her. She asks him once, how his childhood was like, and he looks away for a few minutes in silence, before she wisely decides to change the subject and talk about the last summer, which she spent trekking around Asia and teaching schoolchildren new languages.
How, he surmises in his head later that night, as she lays sleeping on his shoulder, will you ever mate with someone when you cannot even tell them about your deepest childhood hurts, which haunts you ever so often, the idea that you will never measure up to your early promises?
He never asks her for a mind-meld. The closest he came to it was the few minutes after Vulcan is destroyed. In the turbo-lifts, she holds him so closely, so softly and if he closes his eyes he can imagine that he is back on Vulcan, a five year old, his mother holding him tightly.
And yet, the fact that he has to close his eyes and imagine this again reminds him why they cannot be anything more than this fleeting, momentary love. Somewhere, his t’hy’la is waiting, and when they meet; it will be a relief to share the burden of his feelings, to share his heart with someone who will never break it.
He thinks that this is what his father might have felt when he first met his mother.
5. His Father
Spock goes through many intermittent moments of his life when he fears his own father.
When he is five, he really has nothing to fear because he is under the protection of his mother, who won’t let a fly land on him. And Sarek seems to genuinely enjoy him, lets him sleep in between them because he knows how much it makes him happy.
But at eight, he goes to school, and it all changes. There is a break in Spock’s heart after his father tells him he married his mother because “it was logical to do so,” and he realizes his whole life has been a lie. There is no love for him to look forward to in the future, and as a Vulcan this is par for the course and must not be focused on. But as a human, he cannot stop that deep rush of disappointment that fills him up.
This is when he starts holding back from his mother.
At fifteen, the idea of a permanent mate scares him so much, but because it is Vulcan and expected, he allows it. Watching his father’s hard, stony face (a complete opposite from his mother’s) during the match, he supposes that this is the first time his father is proud of having a half-human child: one capable of being an eligible match to a girl from a good family, despite being a hybrid.
At 20, he is top of his year at school; the smartest, the most capable out of Vulcan’s most gifted, and as such only five of his peers make it into the Vulcan Science Academy. He is expected to accept this honor, and supposes that he doesn’t blame anyone for thinking he would: after all, this is the Vulcan thing to do.
But he rejects it. For the first time, an expression he can’t recognize flashes across his father’s face. It could be disappointment, but he’d know that look…so, is it pride that Spock had rejected the Establishment in favor of defending his mother?
But his father stare returns to normal after that, in impassive incredulity, at his son’s gall to reject the Academy. The result of this is father and son does not speak to each other for eight years.
When they resume communication, it is because their home planet has been destroyed. Amanda is dead. They are now members of a limited species, and nothing will ever be the same again.
There is an unexplained pain for him, as he strangles Kirk on the bridge. Almost as if his entire body, his brain, his heart is protesting at the action as he let his fury take over.
Later, as he stews over the moment, his father tells him he married his mother because he did love her, and only then does begin to understand him.
The wounds of his childhood are closed, and ultimately, they are healed. He can love now, freely, wholeheartedly, and he can throw himself at this base emotion he spent so long denying.
He can love, just as his mother had loved him, and his father. He can love, the way he knows his mother always wanted to.
What he had taken away when Spock was an eight year old is now his again, twenty years later, free to do with what ever he wants. This now, he realizes is the greatest gift his father has ever given him.
The one he fell in love with
Spock does not know how old he is, or what moment triggered it, when he falls in love with Captain James Tiberius Kirk.
When he thinks about it, as he always does, maybe there was a series of moments that brought him to his current state of feeling.
His first two encounters with Jim are the first two failed Kobayashi Maru tests, and at the time, he doesn’t think there is anything special about the boy. He hears snippets from his peers about the man, and from Nyota’s own irritated grumblings and thinks: he seems a failure, and it is a shame that he will never be half the man his father was.
And then Nero happens. Their worlds change and soon Jim is Captain and he is the First Officer, and the Enterprise is theirs.
He thinks it might have happened just after the Enterprise landed. They are instantly separated, and brought into official questioning by Admirals who are curious to know what actually happened in space. In one of the smaller function rooms before the third hearing, Jim suddenly rests his head on Spock’s shoulder, almost as if it is the most familiar thing to him (he later finds that it actually is), and remarks at how tired he feels.
Without knowing why, Spock reaches out and melds his mind with him. Jim doesn’t stop him. This absolute, unknowable sense of trust between them can’t be broken anymore and Spock isn’t sure he wants to. The things they see, and what they know passes between them and suddenly, this feels right, and Spock knows he will never love anyone as much as he loves Jim Kirk in this moment.
When he hesitantly severs the connection, Jim is quiet, and Spock presses a kiss on his forehead because it seems right. Jim looks up, whispers “thank you,” and suddenly he is gone to him, into the assembly hall for his hearing.
That night he holds Nyota in his arms and tells her what they have can no longer continue, for he would be hurting more than two people now, if it were to do so. She hugs him, tells him she understands, and not for the first time, Spock is filled with an extraordinary sense of wonder for everyone who has loved him, and how they have pushed him into this moment of absolute surety.
He thinks of it this way: of the five people he has loved in the past, they were all, in some surprising way, connected to each other: he loved his mother and was ashamed at those difficult feelings he had for T’Pring, he loved Stonn who began to hate him because of his mother, he loved Nyota, and a hybrid loving a human would earn him more hate from T’Pring and Stonn, and through it all his father, a silent, constant present in his life.
But Jim, Jim is separate from all of them, perhaps only connected to Nyota, but even that is a superficial connection at best. What he will have is now new, and unknown. There are no textbooks and guides on how he will love his t’hy’la, it is something that Spock will jump blindly into, and for once, the thought does not scare him.
He goes to Jim that night, and they kiss for the first time. It is soft and sweet and Spock is filled with a sense of wonder that he knows will be permanent. With Jim, there will new discoveries for the rest of their lives together, and it will be where he is most content.
Their bodies meet, and their souls yearn for each other, and there is an unspoken promise between them that they will never break. This is forever, my t’hy’la.
In the end, he holds Jim in his arms, as Jim begs for their minds to meet once more. Regretfully, Spock must turn him down (and he will hate doing this to him, even when they are Captain and First officer on their ship) but instead he asks that they simply speak.
Spock tells him about his childhood, of all the things he could never tell Nyota, about Vulcan, about Stonn, T’Pring, and his beloved mother who had promised him the world and he in return had promised that he would love her forever, in the way she loved him. He talks about his disappointment at reneging that promise, and then the hurt his father’s words had cost, and how it led him to believe that he would never love, but oh, how he is so very wrong right now.
And Jim tells him everything too, about Iowa, and an absent mother who had learned that looking away was a coping mechanism, about stepfathers who crossed so many boundaries, and the bruises of his childhood. Spock holds him tighter then, and promises that no one will ever hurt him again, and Jim looks at him so trustingly that Spock realizes now is the time: if he had broken his promise to his mother about keeping that soft, pained smile away from her face, he can do the same for Jim, and this time, he will keep it.
Jim begs him again, but what Spock does is smooth his nose over the contours of his face, learning everything, committing it to memory. It isn’t the mind-meld. But it’s just as significant to him, because his mother did it for him, and now he will love Jim in the way of humans, like his mother, with the force of a million, brilliant suns.
And it will be amazing.