Work Text:
The away team has only been surface-side for an hour before McCoy’s communicator buzzes: the transporter tech has just received a distress signal from Lieutenant Sulu, and it’s his job, as always, to bring the stand-by med crew to deal with the injured when they beam back. And by injured, he thinks irritably, of course he means Jim, who doesn’t seem to have learned from his history books that it’s an officer’s job to stand back and let other people get shot.
The team is just materializing on the transporter pads when McCoy bursts into the room. Instinctively he turns first to Kirk, and he sees that he is right, once again, in expecting trouble. Kirk’s face is several shades paler than usual, his forehead is beaded with sweat, and as the floor goes solid beneath his feet he drops to his hands and knees, gagging and retching. When McCoy sweeps him with the tricorder, he finds that Kirk’s temperature is elevated and his heart is racing so fast it’s a minor miracle he’s still conscious, not that that will last long, by the look of him.
A small exhalation of pain catches McCoy’s attention, and when he turns he sees Spock, still standing but swaying on his feet and looking almost as wretched as the captain. And then it’s damn lucky that McCoy is used to working with a Vulcan, because the slight slump of his shoulders is just enough of a clue for McCoy to get an arm wrapped around Spock’s waist before his eyes roll back and he goes limp in the doctor’s arms.
While the medical team is loading the two of them onto the stretchers to be taken back to Sickbay, McCoy corners Sulu, who is fluttering around anxiously like he wants to help.
“What happened to them?” he demands. “Were you attacked?”
“It was some kind of plant,” Sulu answers. “When we arrived on the planet, the commander and the captain took point so they could scout ahead for our contact from the settlement. The rest of us were following about a hundred yards back taking readings with the tricorders. About half a mile from our original landing site I heard the captain shouting. When I reached them he and the commander were covered in what looked like plant pollen. He insisted the plant had sprayed them on purpose. They started having a toxic reaction a few minutes later, that’s when I sent the distress signal.”
McCoy sighs heavily. “At least tell me you brought me a sample of the damned flower, Lieutenant.”
Sulu, eyes wide and frightened, obediently fumbles in his pocket and hands the doctor a slightly wilted, slightly crushed red flower. He doesn’t recognize it at first glance, but that doesn’t mean much. The botanical unit is optional for Starfleet doctors, and as his ex-wife was fond of complaining, he’s never gotten the grasp of anything more complicated than red roses.
“They’re going to be okay, aren’t they?” Sulu asks, a note of uncertainty in his voice that even McCoy can pick up on.
“Of course they are, Lieutenant,” he says. “You know Lady Luck has a soft spot for the captain a mile wide. We just need to identify the toxin in that flower you gave me and they’ll be good as new. Now get moving, I want you and the rest of the away team in the Sickbay so I can make sure you aren’t going to keel over on me too.”
McCoy first realizes this isn’t going to be the usual Jim Kirk Medical Special in the corridor outside the transporter room. They’ve already left with Spock’s stretcher, but he’s sticking with Kirk, who is still semi-conscious even if he doesn’t seem aware of the commotion surrounding him and might be able to tell them a little more about what the plant did to him and Spock. That’s the theory at least. But when McCoy leans over him to check his pulse again (unnecessary, but it’s reassuring to do it the old-fashioned way even if it isn’t as accurate as the tricorder), Kirk’s eyes fly open and he sits up with a gasp.
“Where am I?” he asks, and then, looking around himself and apparently drawing his own conclusions, “Why am I on a stretcher? Bones, what are you doing here?”
McCoy puts a hand on Kirk’s shoulder, trying to ease him back on the stretcher again, but Kirk fights him, jaw set and stubborn. “You and Spock had a run-in with a flower on that plague-ridden cesspool of a planet. Sulu had you beamed back when you started reacting to something toxic in its pollen – that boy has more sense than you do, not that it’s hard. Damnit Jim, would you lie back down until we can get you to Sickbay?”
“I feel fine,” Jim says, pouting at him. “Maybe the pollen wore off.”
“I don’t care how you feel. Your heart was beating so fast you could have had a heart attack, and I want to know why before you have a relapse and die in your Captain’s chair.”
That seems to shock a little sense into Kirk; he insists on staying sitting up, but he stops trying to get off the stretcher, and he doesn’t fight McCoy the rest of the way to Sickbay, although he looks like he’s barely holding himself back when McCoy tells him how many tests he needs to run.
When he walks into Sickbay, one of the nurses pounces on him immediately.
“Doctor, Commander Spock regained consciousness a few minutes after we left the transporter room. All his vitals are within acceptable standards and he says he is no longer experiencing symptoms. He’s insisting that we can release him now.”
And then they bring Kirk in to transfer to the bed nearest his first officer, and several medical sensors start blaring alarms. He goes straight to Kirk’s side. The captain is doubled over on the stretcher, arms wrapped around his ribs like he’s trying to hold himself together, face screwed up in pain.
“Where does it hurt, Jim?” McCoy asks.
Kirk hisses sharply at the sound of McCoy’s voice. “Head – oh fuck – my head. Stomach. My – god- everywhere, Bones, this really fucking hurts.” There are tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, and his knuckles are white and bloodless where he’s clutching the edge of the stretcher. McCoy doesn’t know the last time he’s seen Kirk show pain – he whines, he plays up cuts and bruises for sympathy, but real pain he tries to hide under bluster and bravado. If that’s failing him…well, it isn’t good.
Kirk’s usual bed is on the other side of the room, but the sensors are already calibrated for him, unlike those on the bed next to Spock, and right now McCoy wants to be absolutely sure he knows what’s happening to the captain. But halfway there, the creases of pain in Kirk’s forehead start to ease, and he loses his death grip on the railing. By the time McCoy has helped lift him onto the bed, Kirk’s breathing normally again, and the alarms around Spock have turned themselves off again.
“Well that was weird,” Kirk says, and McCoy can’t help but agree. “Man, I can’t remember the last time I felt like all my bones were being splintered while I bounced around in zero-grav, that was fun.”
McCoy rolls his eyes. “I’m glad you enjoyed it, Jim. But some of us have to figure out while your symptoms keep coming and going like this, so we can actually fix whatever the hell is wrong with you. “
He picks up his tricorder again and scans Kirk. As the nurse had said of Spock, his vitals are all perfectly normal, and there is no sign that of the sickness that had struck him only moments before. It is, frankly, baffling, and McCoy has seen more than a few things on this ship the Mayo Clinic wouldn’t believe.
“Doctor, I believe that I have a theory.” Spock’s voice has a lingering trace of hoarseness which McCoy suspects is from attempting to stifle his cries of pain, but it is as calm and emotionless as ever. “The sudden onset of pain when the captain was brought into Sickbay, coupled with the cessation when he was moved to a greater distance, would suggest that our symptoms are linked in some way to our proximity to each other.”
McCoy shakes his head. “Don’t be ridiculous, Spock – this is a starship, not a pulp novel.”
“On the contrary, Doctor. While not something we have encountered before, this type of phenomenon is not atypical for the Enterprise, and I can conceive of several means by which the pollen we inhaled would be able to detect our proximity and release a toxin – ”
“Guys, guys!” Kirk is on his feet before the fight, a familiar one, can really get going. “I think we all know there’s only way to know for sure that this is caused by how close together we are.”
Ten feet from Spock’s bed, Kirk collapses, curling into a ball on the cold floor with his hands balled into fists and covering his face. McCoy swears under his breath as he picks him up and carries him back to his bed, where Kirk grins at him, albeit a bit shakily.
“Spock?” he asks.
“My symptoms returned at the same moment yours did, Captain.”
“Well, there’s your answer, Bones.”
Two hours later, that’s the only answer he has. He’s done every scan and blood test he knows how to do, and a few that are purely theoretical, and while he thinks he’s isolated an unfamiliar protein present in the blood of both the men, he can’t figure out what it is, or how it’s making them so sick – no chemical agents, no toxins, just that little protein showing up on his viewscreen. It’s enough to drive a doctor mad. And Kirk isn’t helping; while Spock is content to sit on his bed and let McCoy run tests on him, Kirk is put out that he isn’t being let back to the bridge to run his ship, and is making up for it by being extra-exasperating, even for him. McCoy is giving serious thought to strangling him.
Which is when Sulu comes in, running so fast he slams headlong into the doctor and knocks them both to the floor.
“This better be important, Lieutenant,” McCoy says, brushing dust off his pants.
“I found the flower, Doctor!” Sulu exclaims. “It took me some digging, because it isn’t in Starfleet’s general catalog for dangerous plant life. But the botany lab has a private library left by a few of the scientists we’ve worked with. And Dr. Rupesh’s journal had a sketch of a flower that looked like the one I brought back, sir.”
“And did his journal happen to have any information on this plant we could actually use to treat the captain and Mr. Spock?”
“Well,” Sulu paused, suddenly blushing hotly and dropping his eyes. “He said it’s used as…um…birth control, sir.”
“Birth control?” McCoy asked flatly.
“According to Dr. Rupesh, the inhabitants of the native village he had contact with had some pretty strict social taboos concerning sex. They believed the pollen of the flower would only work on people who were in love, so the elders would give it to young couples to stop them from having sex before they got married, sir.” Sulu handed him his PADD. “I’ve got his research journal pulled up on here, sir. He didn’t run a lot of tests on the plant, though. I think he thought it was just superstition.”
McCoy waves a hand at the two officers, lying in beds a room apart. “Does this look like superstition to you, Lieutenant? No, don’t answer that. Thank you for the journal, it might help me figure out how this damned thing works.”
“What do you mean it only works on people in love?” Kirk interrupts, pushing himself back up on the bed.
“That’s what it says in Dr. Rupesh’s journal, Captain.” Sulu looks like he would rather be anywhere else, including outside the ship without a suit. “People exposed to the pollen suffer from intense pain whenever they get too close to the person they are, uh, interested in. Sir. But it’s probably just a folktale!”
“The lieutenant is correct, Captain,” Spock says. “It is more likely that the pollen works through compatible biochemistry, or even mere proximity to the afflicted, than such an ill-defined social construct as love. You need not fear that this bears any implications on your feelings toward me.”
“Right,” Kirk says, laughing. “Wouldn’t want to give the crew the wrong impression, would we, Mr. Spock? You know how much of a gossip mill this place is. Next thing you know they’ll think you’re pining away for me while I cry myself to sleep, wishing you returned my love.”
“I would, indeed, not wish to give the crew that impression, Captain.” Spock says, and that seems to be the end of it.
Bones keeps them both in the sickbay overnight, just so he can keep an eye on them he says, but when morning comes and neither of them have shown any more symptoms, Kirk convinces him that there’s no purpose served in keeping them any longer. They’re both fine, as long as they stay far enough apart, and Bones will get a lot more done if Kirk isn’t hanging over his shoulder asking questions every five minutes. Not to mention that Kirk is just itching to get back in his chair where he belongs; he never did like sickbay, but he likes it even less now that every second there he spends thinking about the responsibilities he isn’t living up to. He suspects Spock feels the same, if the relieved cast of his shoulders when Bones dismisses them is any clue, although for a Vulcan the difference is only a degree or two off level. He’s gotten good at reading his First Officer, even from across the room.
Unfortunately, getting back on the bridge is easier said than done. While Bones was sleeping, he’d convinced Spock of the necessity of testing the strength of the repellent force between them, and now Kirk can say with confidence that fifteen feet is as close as they can get. At fifteen the dizziness and the nausea starts, a low, bone-deep buzz of misery that sets his teeth on edge. At ten feet the pain hits, as abruptly as a hammer to the knees and just as agonizing. He couldn’t bring himself to try to get closer.
Fifteen feet isn’t that far, really, but it’s too far to have a conversation without raised voices, and it’s more than the distance between the captain’s station and the science station on the bridge. Even if it weren’t, he knows, it would be too much of a risk to have them on the bridge at the same time. One jarring blow sending the crew sprawling at the wrong moment and he’d be incapacitated just when he was needed most.
So they have to change the bridge shifts around so that he and Spock are never on together, which means the rest of the bridge crew has to be moved around to accommodate the fact that the main shift is lacking a senior officer, which means a lot of bruised feelings and bitter grumbling from crewmembers used to working as a team. They mostly try to do it out of Kirk’s earshot, but he still sees the wounded looks Chekov sends him when he finds out that he and Sulu will only be on the bridge together twice a week.
And it’s not just the bridge that poses a problem. They have to schedule when they leave and arrive for their shifts, to make sure they don’t pass each other in the hall. And when they are going to train in the gym. And when they are going to eat meals. And where they go in their free hours, because if some wet-behind-the-ears ensign sees the captain and the first officer keel over in the hallway and panics, there’s going to be trouble.
Kirk’s life hasn’t been this regimented since he was a cadet, and even then he managed to sneak off campus every evening to hit the bars in San Francisco. It grates against his nerves, makes him feel stifled and trapped, hating the feeling that someone is telling him what to do, even if the someone in this case is his own common sense. And he can’t even sneak off, because while he doesn’t much care if he does something stupid to himself, hell if he’s going to put Spock through the kind of pain he felt in the sickbay when they got too near each other, just because he’s finding it hard to sit still and do as he’s told.
It takes about a week of being settled into his new, over-scheduled, Vulcan-free life to realize that he misses Spock.
Apparently some time between Spock trying to kill him and getting covered in evil birth control pollen – and however many times he thinks about that it doesn’t get any less gross – he and Spock have become friends. Which, okay, he mostly knew already, because it’s not like they don’t spend all of their working time and a good chunk of their free time together, what with the eating together and the standing evening chess match and the sarcastic Vulcan sense of humor Kirk is coming to deeply appreciate because no one could feed him such perfect straight lines if they couldn’t guess the innuendo-laden jokes he was going to make.
But Kirk’s had friends before, and he’s never missed them all that much when they went away. That was what friends did – they stuck around for awhile and laughed at your jokes and let you buy them beer, and then they left and you found new, more entertaining friends to replace them with. One appreciative audience is much the same as another, and Kirk’s never bothered to get all that attached. Except to Bones, but then Bones, who rubs his back when he pukes and yells at him when gets STDs from one night stands and looks really grim and disapproving when he lets the bad guys shoot him, is different.
And so, it seems, is Spock.
It’s worst on the bridge, where he is accustomed to having Spock always at his right hand. He no longer has anyone to direct dry asides and lascivious remarks towards; Uhura has no patience for that sort of thing when she’s working, Sulu mostly ignores him, and watching Chekov turn pink, while amusing, doesn’t hold the same competitive appeal as studying Spock’s face for the betraying flick of a brow that means he’s scored another point in the game of getting Spock to react to him. The skinny, spectacled young officer who has replaced Spock at the science station is adept enough, but she has none of Spock’s insight, and after three days Kirk can make her burst into tears just by glaring at her. He’s never made Spock cry, and he’s pretty sure he couldn’t, even if Vulcans did have tear ducts.
He muddles through ten days without Spock, but he’s off-kilter and he knows it shows. He’s twitchy, snappy, he nearly bites Chekov’s head off when the kid has the nerve to correct his flight plans in front of everyone on the bridge, and he thinks Sulu is going to challenge him to a duel right then and there. The unshakeable certainty he used to have in his decisions is gone; he knows he’s making the right choices, he feels it, but without Spock there to challenge his logic and call him an impulsive Neanderthal he finds threads of doubt creeping in.
At least a dozen times a day he turns instinctively to ask Spock a question, and finds the words have left his mouth before it has registered in his head that there is no one there. The rest of the crew has started giving him odd looks, like they don’t quite trust his mind, and he’s heard a few of the more naïve ensigns talking to each other, asking why McCoy let him out of Sickbay when he obviously still belongs there.
He’s in his quarters when he finally snaps. He can’t sleep – he’s a restless sleeper at the best of times, and the last ten days he’s been a positive insomniac – he has too much nervous energy to read, and the stack of requisition forms on his desk don’t bear thinking about. What he really wants to do is play a decent game of chess, but Spock’s the only one he can get to play with him: McCoy doesn’t have the patience, Uhura prefers Double Cranko, and everyone else on the ship gets too nervous if they think they might beat the captain. Spock is the best chess opponent he’s ever had, but that doesn’t matter now, when they can’t get close enough to sit across a table and play.
So he’s pacing his quarters, hating his life and hating that damned planet and that double-damned plant that started this whole mess and wishing he had something he could throw at the wall that Starfleet wouldn’t make him pay for, when he realizes that he still has his communicator clipped to his belt.
“Commander Spock, this is Captain Kirk, do you read?”
The Federation scientists have never quite managed to eliminate the faint crackle coloring the voices transmitted over the communicators; Kirk suspects them of leaving it on purpose, to make it sound more authentic. Regardless, the voice that replies is still unmistakably Spock’s, and Kirk feels a shiver of relief go down his spine.
“This is Spock, Captain. Are you in need of my assistance?”
Kirk settles into his desk chair, and he can feel the tension he’s been carrying for days draining out of his shoulders and back. “Nah, Spock, I just wanted to check up on you. See how you’re handling the bridge without my esteemed presence to provide inspiration and guidance.” He hopes Spock can hear the friendly smirk in his voice.
“I have in fact held the bridge in your absence before, Captain. But your concern is acknowledged and appreciated.”
“I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time, Spock,” he says, as it belatedly occurs to him that though the night shift is generally quieter than the main shift, Spock has never been one to sit idly by when he might be able to find a pile of work to do.
“On the contrary, Captain, the diagnostics I am running will not require my attention for another 68 minutes.” There is a momentary pause, the briefest of hesitations that Kirk wouldn’t have caught if he weren’t straining to hear it. “I must admit I am glad to have the opportunity to converse with you. I had grown somewhat accustomed to your companionship, and its lack was noticeable in the last week. And I have been unable to find another chess partner of comparable skill.”
Kirk laughs, for the first time in days. “I knew it, Mr. Spock! You’re only keeping me around because I’m the only one on this ship who can beat you at chess. Well, that and my charm and good looks, I presume.”
Spock lets the joke slip by without comment, and from there the conversation turns practical; he trusts Spock to know what is happening on the ship, to be prepared for their next mission, but that trust doesn’t take the place of sitting down and arguing it out with him until they can reach an agreement, or at least until Spock has given up on changing his mind. He is surprised, a little, by how easy it to slip back into the banter and the gentle teasing he is used to, winding Spock up even as he’s asking him about the results on the experiments Engineering is doing to improve the efficiency of the weapons system. But at the end of the hour, when Kirk reluctantly ends the conversation so Spock can give his full attention to the bridge, he feels more himself than he has in days.
After that he starts buzzing Spock a half dozen times a day – from the mess, from his room, even from the bridge if it’s a slow shift – never for as long a conversation as that first day, just long enough to ask him a question about a crewmember, or tell him about the sector they would be through that day, or pass on a joke Kirk knew would baffle him. It isn’t the same as having Spock at his side as he should be, but it’s better than nothing, and he gets through another whole week that way.
When McCoy comes to his room on Saturday evening, Kirk is on his third glass of brandy and just starting to slur his words.
“Jesus Christ, Jim,” McCoy swears when he walks in and sees the bottle on the table, but Kirk ignores him and pours them both another glass with a broad and sloppy grin, and McCoy doesn’t complain about that.
“I hope you remember that you have a bridge inspection to do in the morning,” McCoy says, sipping slowly from his glass. It’s good liquor, Kirk knows, the best a captain’s salary can buy, which is pretty damn good, but if McCoy doesn’t want to enjoy it that’s his problem.
“Screw the inspection, Bones,” Kirk says. The brandy burns his throat a bit as he tips his glass back, but it leaves behind a warm numbness he rather likes. “Spock’s the only one who will care if I show up hungover. One of the benefits of being the captain of this fine vessel.” He hiccups slightly on the last word, and his own voice sounds so strange to his ears he starts laughing. When he looks up again McCoy is glowering at him with his arms folded over his chest.
“I know you’re not this much of a damn fool,” McCoy growls. “So will you please tell me this isn’t your way of begging for attention from that green-blooded bastard?”
McCoy is wrong, wrong, wronger than a cadet doing his first navigational charts, and Kirk needs to make him see that. “Don’t want attention,” he mutters. “Just miss him is all. I touch him all the time, did you know that? I didn’t know that. But I do.”
It’s true. Kirk hadn’t realized it until this week, but when they are around each other he touches Spock all the time. He bumps his shoulder, pats his back, slings a companionable arm around him. When he leans over Spock’s shoulder to study his console he brushes his ears and the back of his neck with his fingertips, when they play chess their hands touch every move. He is always touching Spock and he’s never even noticed, and now he misses it, desperately.
“I just want things to go back to normal,” Kirk says. He pours himself another glass. “You’re supposed to fix things, Bones. Tell me you’re going to fix this.”
McCoy takes the glass out of his hands and puts it back on the table. “Why don’t you just ask me to walk on water next time? It would probably be easier than synthesizing an antidote for an unknown toxin based on luck and guesswork.” He sighs, and Kirk knows McCoy is older than he is, but he doesn’t usually look it. “I’m getting close, though. A few more days, maybe. We’ll figure it out, Jim.”
McCoy stands and Kirk follows, lets himself be led back into his bedroom and his bed by McCoy’s reassuringly heavy hand on his shoulder, and falls asleep before his head hits his pillow. When he wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t remember most of the night before, but he does remember McCoy telling him he’d only have to last a few more days, and that was the important thing, anyway.
Two days later, Kirk is kidnapped.
When he hears the alarm, Spock is meditating in his quarters, the flame of his lamp flickering dimly on his face as he concentrates on controlling his breathing. In truth, he is almost relieved to hear it. Yes, it jolts him out of his light trance, but the sense of centered calm he strives for has never felt further off.
Most often when he meditates he visualizes a pool of water, round and glassy as a mirror, such as could once be found by the canny in the deserts of Vulcan. It has served him well, clearing his mind and sharpening his control under the most trying of circumstances, but for the last several weeks when he has reached for it, he has felt as if the still waters were whipped by the fierce desert winds.
This is, perhaps, why he has felt the need to meditate more often lately. Ever since the incident with the plant that precipitated his separation from the captain, he has found his mind uncharacteristically unsettled, and his daily meditation has gone from a comforting evening ritual to a virtual necessity.
His first thought, when he hears the alarm blaring from his communicator, is that McCoy has finally found an antidote for them.
When he presses the button to accept incoming transmission, it is McCoy’s voice issuing from the communicator, but it is thin and sharp enough that Spock can tell this is no good news.
“Mr. Spock, get your Vulcan butt down to the transporter room, now,” McCoy barks, and ends communication before Spock has the opportunity to question him as to the nature of the emergency. Which, he knows from experience, can only mean one thing: something has happened to Kirk.
He doesn’t run to the transporter room. But part of him, a small, shameful, human part, wants to, badly.
When he volunteered himself to serve as First Officer under James Kirk, he did not anticipate this sort of dependence. There had initially been a sort of grudging respect, along with the desire to mitigate the disaster he expected Kirk to leave in his wake. And after speaking to his older self, he was willing to believe that respect might one day bloom into friendship, as much as he doubted his own description of a partnership as unshakable and lasting as the stars. Not with Kirk, a man so crass that he once proposed sexual relations with members of four species, comprising six distinct genders between them, all at once. But a friendship of sorts, all the same.
Spock will be the first to admit that Kirk caught him unexpected. He did his initial service under the command of Captain Pike, and while the man was a great many things, from brave to self-sacrificing to conscientious of his crew, what he had been most of all was competent. He had had charge of a ship for longer than Spock had been in Starfleet, and while he gladly accepted advice, he had little need of it. The first several months of their mission, Spock often felt that Kirk was a small child who needed his hand held.
He calculates the meters between his room and the transporter room, recalculates it in kilometers, in millimeters, in feet, in miles, in parsecs, in Planck lengths, factors in the speed of a warp drive starship against the walking speed of an adult Vulcan male. No matter how he measures it, this distance is far too great.
It was not that Kirk wasn’t brilliant, because even Spock had to concede that he was. And not that he wasn’t brave, because only a fool would argue that. And not that he didn’t command respect, because Spock knew most of the crew would cheerfully follow him into hell, trusting him to best the devil and lead them out again. But the captain was…inexperienced. There was no better word for it. His knowledge of command had until then been merely academic, and a Federation Starship set a very steep learning curve for such a young captain. The minutiae of day-to-day command, the matters of logistics and bureaucracy and psychology that made up a captain’s life on those many days he wasn’t single-handedly saving the known universe, were more of a challenge to Kirk than he might have guessed.
Coming around a corner Spock collides with a young science officer with his nose pressed against the screen of his PADD. He offers him a hand up, and a nod of apology, feeling the press of lost time even in sparing those few seconds, and ignores the wide-eyed stare against his back as he walks briskly away.
Even after those first few months, as Kirk found his footing on the bridge and began to give his orders with confidence, Spock was surprised to find that they remained close. He was no longer required to spend his evenings in the captain’s quarters going over acquisition forms and performance reviews with him; instead, they met in the common room to play chess together and watch Earth movies that Kirk insisted were the quintessence of human culture and that seemed to Spock to mostly consist of explosions, with occasional interludes for coitus. On the bridge itself they developed a flawless professional partnership in which Kirk said unendurably stupid things, Spock attempted to convince him of the illogic of his arguments, Kirk did what he wanted regardless, and Spock saved him, usually after Kirk had already saved the rest of the ship and its crew.
One of the night shift security officers tries to stop him with a question, but Spock rebuffs him with uncharacteristic brusqueness – inexcusably unprofessional in most circumstances, and he will have to chastise himself later, but there are more important matters to be dealt with now.
What he and Kirk have is, by most standard definitions, a friendship, and a much deeper one than Spock was prepared for. He has never cared for a human this much, unless one counts his mother, and he tends not to. Even on Vulcan, mothers are an exception. And even at its closest and dearest his relationship with Nyota always had some degree of distance, a mutual unspoken agreement never to push too far, and he thinks that is why he and Nyota are better friends now than they were lovers. But he and Kirk have never had that distance, or maybe it is that Kirk is incapable of it, of closing him out from anything once he’d let him in at all. Spock doesn’t know; all he knows is that he would rather play chess and argue logical fallacies and risk his life with Kirk than he would…anything, really, and that is a very strange feeling indeed.
It has made this forced isolation a trial. There is a quality to his thoughts that is - he is not certain if this is what humans would call loneliness. He is not alone: far from it, in fact, as he spends the majority of his day in contact with any number of people he would consider friends, including Nyota. But none of them are Kirk, and when he thinks of evenings staring in companionable silence at a chessboard, no words needed for the understanding that passes between them, it is with a pang in his stomach he can only characterize as loss.
McCoy’s face is grim when he walks into the transporter room.
“Doctor,” he says, as calmly as ever despite the over-fast beating of his heart. “Am I correct in assuming I have been summoned because Captain Kirk has gotten himself into some trouble?”
“If by trouble you mean that Jim went and got himself kidnapped, then yes, he’s gotten himself into trouble,” McCoy spits. Spock has always been privately bemused by how angry the doctor allows himself to get over what he calls ‘Jim’s Goddamned Danger Fetish’, an anger he suspects covers the fondness he feels for the younger man.
“I was under the impression this planet was uninhabited aside from the Federation outpost,” Spock says. “Their surveys have never revealed any signs of intelligent life. You are certain he was abducted?”
“He was abducted, all right. The away team saw the whole thing.” McCoy drags Lt. Riley away from the curve of the wall where he has been hiding, trying to avoid notice. “Tell the good commander what you saw, Lieutenant.”
“I didn’t see anything until they were right on top of us, sir,” Riley stammers, clearly uncomfortable with the scrutiny. “One second the captain was telling us that we only had another few minutes’ hike before we got to the base, and then we were surrounded by guys. They shot Ensign Kovacs in the chest, but they only hit me in the arm. I made like I’d been hit worse, though, so they wouldn’t finish me off.”
He draws a shaky breath, rubbing his arm. Spock can see where the fabric of his shirt is torn and blood-stained, although the lack of a wound suggests McCoy has gotten to him already. “Before I got hit, I heard someone shouting. ‘Don’t shoot the one in yellow!’ The captain took out three of them, but one of them hit him with the butt of his gun. They tied him up and dragged him off…they left me and Kovacs, they must have thought I was dead too. But when they were walking away I heard one of them ask his friend how much money this was going to make them, and he just laughed and said the Empire would make them all rich.”
“Why did you allow the captain to be captured?” Spock demands.
“There were at least ten of them, and they had us outgunned. They killed Kovacs! I thought if I tried to fight they’d shoot me too, and then nobody would know what happened to the captain. I – I just -”
McCoy puts an arm around the young man’s shoulder, glaring at Spock over the top of his head. “Hey now, you did the right thing, kid, you followed all the protocol. Jim’s going to be proud of you when he gets back. Don’t worry about that.”
McCoy sends the ensign back to his quarters for a medically ordered rest and a course of Scotty’s moonshine, not that any of them officially know about the engineer’s underground trade, and by the time he finishes Spock has a theory.
“Romulan bounty hunters,” he tells McCoy when the doctor returns.
“Hit it in one, Mr. Spock,” McCoy says. “The Lieutenant described them down to their pointy little ears. And Jim hasn’t exactly made any friends back in the Empire, they probably think they can sell him back for a pretty good sum.”
“It is highly unlikely any officer of the Romulan Fleet would pay their price,” Spock says. “The abduction of a Federation officer by the Empire would be seen as an act of extreme aggression on their part. As tenuous as the treaty already is, this would be tantamount to a declaration of war.”
“I don’t think the bounty hunters much care, and they’re the ones who have him,” McCoy answers.
“Then we shall have to claim him back,” Spock says.
“Aye, man, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Scotty says. Spock blinks, startled; though he had seen the other man in the corner when he walked in, hunched over the engineering console with Ensign Chekov, his presence had not registered.
Scotty waves him over to the console, which displays a holographic map of the rocky forest that covers the surface of the planet below them.
“There’s been no sign of the Captain’s signal,” Scotty says. “Those Romulan buggers likely smashed his communicator so he couldn’t call us in on the sly. But they aren’t as smart as they think.”
He gestures at the map, where a small red dot is glowing smugly in the upper right corner. “The lad over there picked this up a few minutes ago. It’s a transmission on the same frequency the Romulan fleet uses. Not as powerful, of course, but well enough to flag down a passing ship.”
Chekov beams proudly. “We cannot decipher their codes yet, but we do not have to! All we need to know is the place where they keep the Keptin. And that is right there on the map.”
“So what’s the catch?” McCoy asks, closing his eyes wearily. “Jim’s not sitting in my sickbay right now getting his hard head looked over, so I’m guessing there’s some reason you can’t just beam him up and let the rest of us get on with our lives.”
“Ah, no,” Scotty admits. “There is a wee little problem.”
He seems reluctant to add more, but Chekov has no such reservations. “Romulans have force field. Transporter beam cannot get through.”
“Surely there’s something you can – ” McCoy starts, but Scotty shakes his head.
“I had my hands on a Romulan shielding device last shore leave, Doctor. Fellow wouldn’t sell to anyone who had a Federation look to him, but I got my chance to check it over while his back was turned. That thing – the power coils were unstable and I wouldn’t put money on the housing material, but the concept was years ahead of anything we’ve got. I’m afraid the only way we’ll get through that force field is beaming down there and walking through it.”
The silence stretches out as the men contemplate this statement – all except for Spock, who is reaching a decision. From the moment McCoy told him of the captain’s fate he knew would be necessary, and Scotty’s elaborations have only confirmed it. There is only one logical course of action.
“Doctor,” he says. “Would you inform Lieutenant Uhura that she is in command of the bridge until my return?”
“And where the hell do you think you’re going, Mr. Spock?” McCoy demands.
“I am going to rescue our captain,” he says, as if it should be obvious. But McCoy just clenches his jaw and glares at him as if he thinks he’s mad.
“You – you – is Jim contagious?” he asks, sounding strangled. “Of all the idiotic things I’ve heard – and you’d better bet I’ve heard a few – that has to be the most ill-considered, brainless, I’ll-just-order-the-body-bags-now thing anyone has said to me since I snuck Jim onto this blasted ship.”
This is not going as well as Spock might have hoped, and not for the first time he longs for a Vulcan crew, who would have seen the rightness of his statement without his having to argue the point. Of course, if he were serving a Vulcan captain he wouldn’t have been in this position in the first place, so it doesn’t matter.
“I must ask you to calm yourself,” Spock says. “I have already considered alternative means of securing the captain’s safety. But this is the most logical.”
“Logical? On what planet is it logical for you to go down there by yourself?”
“On every planet, Doctor.” His arms are stiff at his sides, his face schooled into stony stillness, but behind it he feels the wasting time like a stinging pain. “The Romulans will anticipate a retaliatory force, and take precautionary measures. The odds of ambushing them successfully are far greater for a single individual.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to go,” McCoy says, refusing to be swayed. “For Christ’s sake, what do you think we have a security force for?”
Spock shakes his head. “In a physical altercation, a Romulan would easily overwhelm a human opponent. By my calculations, I am the only member of the Enterprise’s crew who has both the physical strength to defend myself if I am captured and the technological knowledge to disable their force field.”
He pauses. “As the first officer, it is my duty to protect the captain, if I am able to do so.”
Spock memorized the Starfleet Manual in the weeks he was preparing to leave Vulcan for the Academy, and he still recalls it perfectly. He knows that duty is not listed anywhere within its pages. But that is immaterial; he still knows it to be true.
“Do I need to remind you that you can’t touch the captain?” McCoy asks. “Or had you forgotten your little affliction?”
“I had not.”
“Then what are you planning to do about it, Mr. Spock?” he asks.
“A disciplined mind is not a captive to physical sensation, Doctor. I have endured greater pain. And I need only do so long enough to disable the force field, and then Mr. Scott will be able to beam us both onto the Enterprise without harm.” He takes a deep breath, or a deeper breath than usual. “In the captain’s absence I am the acting captain of the Enterprise. You will not stop me from doing this.”
Spock wants to believe that he has made McCoy see the logic of his argument, and that is why the man finally concedes; in truth he is probably just as aware as Spock is that he’ll never give in, and that every second he stands there fighting a losing battle is one more second the bounty hunters could be preparing to drag Kirk off to another planet where they’ll never be able to find him before he gets sold to be some admiral’s leashed pet. In any case, he grits his teeth like it pains him, but gives a curt nod of his head.
After they have notified Lieutenant Uhura of his plan, after he has armed his phaser, after Scotty and Chekov have checked and double-checked the beaming coordinates, he stands on the transporter pad ready to be beamed down, when McCoy steps forward and seizes him, dragging him off to the side of the room.
“Doctor McCoy –” he protests, but the doctor only tightens his grip on Spock’s arm.
“I’ll be waiting here for you,” McCoy says fiercely. “You bring him back, you hear me?”
“I will,” Spock says, and steps back onto the platform. McCoy’s face is the last thing he sees before the world dissolves around him.
On Scotty and Chekov’s calculations, Spock rematerializes three miles from where they have placed the Romulans’ camp, far enough that their sensors would not pick up the energy of the transporter beam. The forest where he finds himself is thickly wooded with evergreens, letting only a trickle of the watery autumn sunlight through, and beneath their branches the air is chill. There is no path; Spock is left to find his own way through the forest with the coordinates and compass programmed into his tricorder. But the ground is level and easy to traverse, hard-packed dirt covered in a layer of pine needles that dampen the sound of his footsteps. It takes little thought to move silently through the trees, correcting his path as he walks. He cannot bring himself to think of what his captors might be doing to Kirk as he awaited his rescue, and it is illogical to dwell on it when he is unable to do anything to prevent it. So, as he walks, he thinks about chess.
Spock learned to play chess from his mother. It was not a common pastime on Vulcan, which had its own games of logic and strategy, but Amanda brought a collapsible board with her from Earth as a way to pass the time. When she reached Vulcan and found that her husband was too busy to play and no one else knew how, she put the board away and forgot about it. But when Spock was five he came down with Oronian measles, and to distract him from the fever and the itching Amanda dug the board out from its dusty cupboard and taught him how to play.
He stills remembers the first time that he beat her. He was ten, and at the time it had seemed an impressive accomplishment, although he knows now that she possessed far more enthusiasm than skill.
Kirk reminded him of her that way.
The Academy had a chess club, which Spock only joined because his mother worried about his social life. He would have preferred to use his spare time to expand his studies, but the first time he told her he had gone to a meeting, her voice lost that concerned note it had every time she asked if he was making any friends. Most of his fellow cadets were amateurs by his standards, but there was a Rigelian who held his own most of the time and a young woman from Orion who could beat him handily, grinning as she tossed her long red hair back over her shoulder and called checkmate. Several of his favorite moves are ones he learned from her.
In the trees over his head, a bird gives a long, keening cry, and Spock jerks to a standstill, barely daring to breath until he is sure he has not been given away. It is not illogical to think the Romulans might have a perimeter watch in wait for someone attempting just this. But as the echoing birdsong fade away, the forest is as still as it was, and he permits himself the barest sigh of relief.
On the Enterprise, Kirk had taken over worrying about Spock’s social life from his mother, which was why more evenings that not he found himself in the officer’s lounge. Even if it wasn’t by choice, Spock couldn’t honestly say he objected, though. The Enterprise’s lounge was spacious and well-lit, with recessions along the walls for small groups to sit and talk or play board games, and there was some satisfaction to be found in filling out paperwork or reading research papers on his PADD in the companionship of his crewmates, rather than the solitude of his quarters.
The first time he played chess against the captain, it actually started as a game against Lieutenant Sulu, who had mentioned off-hand during an unusually dull shift that he had been looking for a chess partner. It was, Spock knows now, a rather transparent attempt by the Lieutenant to spend more of his off-hours with Ensign Chekov, but at the time Spock saw nothing wrong in volunteering himself.
Halfway through their first game, Kirk had broken off from the group of young women from medical who were listening politely to a highly edited account of his latest exploits to drag a chair up to their table, sitting with the legs tilted back and his arms folded across his chest as he studied the board.
“I play winner,” he declared, flashing a broad grin. It was far enough in the game to be obvious to all three of them that it was going to be Spock, although Sulu had demonstrated the grasp of a few exceptionally complex moves.
“With my apologies, Captain,” Spock said. “I do not believe this game to be suited to your particular talents.”
Kirk beat him in 27 moves. While Kirk was beaming smugly at the entire lounge and patting his shoulder consolingly, Spock replayed the game in his head, and couldn’t believe any of the captain’s moves were actually successful – they were nothing like the carefully-planned classical plays he memorized from the chess guides as a boy. They were impulsive and chaotic, and on their own at least half of them should have lost the game for him.
That Spock beat him the next four games in a row did not take the sting off that initial defeat.
The Romulans’ force field is not visible to human eyes, or to Vulcans’, and Spock does not realize he is nearly on top of it until he feels the faint hot buzz of energy against his bare skin as he passes through it. His tricorder doesn’t show life signs any where within its range: from the energy output, Scotty had calculated the field’s diameter as approximately 2 kilometers, and logic would suggest that the Romulans have made their camp at the center. Still, from here on Spock knows he must proceed with even greater caution.
Caution never worked on Kirk; he had a bad habit of getting around Spock’s defenses and forcing him up against the wall. More often than not, it didn’t work, at least in chess – Spock kept the tally in his head, and it stood at 115 wins, 24 losses. But it was a better record than anyone held against him since Gaila was assigned to another starship. And though he was loathe to concede that his interest was anything but academic, it nevertheless brought the faint quirk of a smile to his lips to watch the outrageous moves Kirk devised in his attempts to defeat him.
In the long days after he and Kirk were separated by biology, it was the chess games he thought about most often.
It wasn’t a fixation. Or an obsession. His father would have sternly disapproved if he thought his only son was putting such emotional importance in a pastime, an intellectual exercise used to encourage social bonds with the man his life depended on more days than not.
It was just that he had become accustomed to spending his evenings sitting across a table from Kirk, watching the expression that flickered across the man’s face like firelight and listening to stories that he knew to be gross exaggeration peppered with dramatic license, punctuated by soft exhalations of victory or frustration, depending on whether his latest gambit had succeeded. He…enjoyed it, even. Enjoyed the risks Kirk encouraged him in, enjoyed how transgressive he felt as he took action with only the barest of forethought. Enjoyed the way Kirk smiled at him when he did.
When he played the ship’s computers at chess, there was no risk, no transgression, every move planned a dozen squares ahead and played out diagram-perfect, and for the first time in his life it bored Spock to metaphorical tears.
He started the first game the day after McCoy let them both out of Sickbay, as a way to take his mind off of their predicament and its lack of a solution. He’d played the computer many times before; when he was young, of course, and his mother was too busy to play with him, but also on dull shuttle trips and during quarantine and the week it had snowed too hard to leave the dorm, after the second day when he’d finished all his coursework for the month. The computers were an ideal partner, programmed with a nearly infinite number of moves and capable of responding to any of his.
He gave up on the game after half an hour. It wasn’t challenging. It wasn’t satisfying. It wasn’t Kirk.
The first week he mostly ignored it, and it wasn’t hard, with as many changes in personnel and procedure as he had to implement to work around their condition. Between the paperwork, which had to be filled out in triplicate, and the crew, who did not seem to understand the meaning of final, he barely had time to sleep, let alone start chess games he never finished.
But the second week the Enterprise had settled back into an uncomfortable routine, and Spock found himself with long afternoons stretching before him in which he had no duties to perform. And when he exhausted the possibilities of meditation, and exercise, and the libraries, he found himself thinking, once again, of chess.
At the end of the second week Spock hacked into the Enterprise’s computer and started rewriting the chess program.
Spock hears the guard before he sees him, the crackle of dry leaves under heavy boots and the harsh scrape of plastic against bark giving him away, and when he comes around the tree closest to him, it is already too late. Spock slips behind him and applies pressure to his neck before he has the chance to react; the guard’s eyes go wide, then close, and he tumbles wordlessly to the ground.
When Spock rolls him face-up, he sees the pointed ears and ridged brows of a Romulan. Doctor McCoy had been right.
He doesn’t waste time on the guard, tying his hands behind his back and covering him over with a layer of leaves and dirt. He’ll be missed soon enough, when he fails to report back to camp or cross paths with the other guards. The best Spock can do is delay his discovery by a few minutes, buy himself a little more time to find the captain and get them both back to the Enterprise.
The gun he takes with him, slinging the strap absent-mindedly over his shoulder and across his chest.
The Romulan camp spreads out over the clearing like a fungus, an ugly growth of ragged tents, rusted equipment, and twining wire. From the ridge above it, Spock could see the entire camp, including a humming metal box that must be the field generator. And Kirk, chained and staked at the far end of the camp, kneeling in the dirt with his head down like a dog.
Closer, Spock can’t see anything but trees, but he can hear the noise of the camp, loud and foreign in the still woods – the static discharge of weapons fired at nothing in particular, the clatter of cooking dishes, the low mutter of conversation in the staccato syllables of Romulan. As he comes up on the back of the camp, he can hear another voice, this one raspy and furious as it shouts insults in Standard about the Romulans’ mothers and their sexual habits, and Spock feels his heart beat faster at it.
It was logical for the bounty hunters to keep their captive alive. Spock knows this. But Spock had been readying himself to see Kirk’s corpse, and even looking down on him, he didn’t quite trust the evidence of his eyes. But he trusts this.
The small explosive charge he planted on the ridge goes off with a concussive blast, exactly on time.
It’s not large enough to do any damage, although it does leave his ears ringing and send a shower of fist-sized stones tumbling down onto the camp. More importantly, it sends the Romulans scurrying. They’ve been waiting for an attack from the Enterprise, from the supply station, from anyone who might care that they have a captive Federation officer, and the smoke has barely begun to clear before they’ve grabbed their weapons and run into the woods to head off the attackers that aren’t there at all.
It’s all the distraction Spock needs. He watches from a tree, higher than their line of sight and shielded by the branches. He allows several minutes after the camp has emptied, long enough for any stragglers or forgetful mercenaries who’ve left their weapons behind in the confusion, and then he climbs down and makes his way in.
He knows the moment Kirk hears him as he creeps through the undergrowth that surrounds the clearing. His head jerks up, and then snaps back – he forgot the chain, clearly, and he’s already at the end of its length. It pulls him back, swearing, into the mud. But he staggers to his knees, and then to his feet, peering desperately into the trees for whoever is approaching him.
This close Spock can see the tears in his uniform, and the blood dripping down his face from the deep gash in his forehead. The gun he stole from the guard is a cold and heavy weight on his back.
Kirk’s eyes go wide when Spock steps out of the trees. He opens his mouth to speak, probably to shout, but Spock shakes his head, pressing a finger to his lips in an entreaty to cautious silence, and Kirk nods and sags against his chain, at the end of his strength. He at least has the sense to not try to get closer to Spock, biting his lip and watching as Spock skirts around him at a distance, far enough to keep them both safe.
The field generator sits to one side of the camp, crouched in front of the largest tent like an over-sized metal spider, and Spock can feel the energy it gives off buzzing in his bones. It is an ugly, sullen sound, nothing like the graceful pitch of the Enterprise’s machines, and it fits the generator, which looks like it was cobbled together out of spare and rusted parts. It’s hard to believe that this, even if it is bastardized and ill-worn, was able to out-smart their engineers, and Spock’s fingers itch to take it apart and study it so it will not happen again.
But this is not the time. All he needs to know is how to turn it off, and that is obvious enough, the control panel on the side marked out with broad red lines and labeled in angular script. His written Romulan is not as good as it could be, not as good as Nyota’s, but even a child could recognize the rigid symbols spelling out on and off. One press of a button and the Enterprise will be able to lock onto both of them.
The hand closes around his neck like a vise. He doesn’t even see it coming.
He feels his feet leave the ground, feels the pressure as the hand tightens, cutting off his airway even as he kicks and claws at the arm holding him. And then he feels the starburst pain of something hard impacting his skull, and everything goes black.
When Spock wakes up, he is lying facedown in the dirt, hands tied behind his back. He keeps his eyes screwed shut and his breathing low and even, hoping to keep from alerting his captors to his consciousness, but it is too late. A broad hand grips his hair and hauls him upright. Fetid breath washes over him, making his stomach curl, as the guard studies his face.
“He’s awake,” the guard says to someone standing behind him. He looses his grip abruptly, and Spock cannot prevent himself from falling back into the mud; he barely rolls his shoulders enough to take the impact there, instead of his face. From above him, he hears the sound of cruel laughter.
Spock is braced for a blow, but he still flinches at the boot toe digging into his side, bruising his ribs and forcing him onto his back. He tries to sit up, to lessen his vulnerability at least a little, but the boot slams into his chest, knocking his breath from him as he slams back against the ground.
He can’t see the Romulan pinning him down clearly, just a vague impression of pointed ears and black leather and guns, but from the way he stands, even with one foot on Spock’s chest, he has to be the leader.
“What have we got here?” he asks, loud and taunting. “Could it be the captain’s pet half-breed?”
It’s an epithet that’s never quite lost its sting, but Spock doesn’t respond. He can feel a slight give in the rope, and his attention is better spent figuring out how much pressure will be needed to loosen it.
“Did the Enterprise send you to save your master, or did you sneak off on your own, like a good pet?” The other bounty hunters laugh, raucous and a little forced.
The boot pressing down on him makes it hard to draw breath, but Spock finds enough to answer. “I was sent, as First Officer of the Starship Enterprise, to inform you that if you do not release Captain Kirk immediately, we will be forced to take retaliatory action against you. The bridge is waiting on my signal,” he gasps.
That at least gets a pause out of them, as the ragged group of bounty hunters contemplate facing off against all that a Constitution-class federation ship could muster. But finally the lead Romulan snorts loudly.
“You’re lying,” he snarls. “If they could attack us, they would have, instead of sending you in here like a sneak-spy. No one’s going to come and save you, Vulcan scum.” He spits, dramatically, and Spock can feel it land on his cheek, warm and sticky.
The Romulan clucks his tongue, sneering down at him. “What are we going to do with you, Vulcan?” He waves a hand at the cluster of Romulans surrounding them. “My men think we should kill you. But I think we should have a little fun with you first.”
He hauls Spock up by the collar of his shirt, leans in close enough that Spock can see the ridges of his forehead and the flecks of gold in his brown eyes. “I could break every bone in your body. I could peel your skin off in strips, slit your belly open and spill your innards in the mud, leave you to suffocate in your own blood, and it wouldn’t be more than a blood traitor like you deserves.” The smile that twists his lips reminds Spock of a le-matya with its prey. “But I’m not going to.”
Spock isn't really expecting the blow. Apparently he's failed to make the correct response required to maintain the flow of speech, and this - a deep ache under the skin, throbbing - is the appropriate punishment for inattention. The blood from his split lip trickles down his chin and tastes coppery-foul in his mouth, but he doesn’t dare spit.
"Nuhir! Bring the Captain over.”
"Sir, should we really unchain him?" The guard looks slightly nervous. If tales of their exploits have reached the Romulan empire, as indeed they must have for Kirk to be a desirable property, Spock feels illogically pleased to discover that the reports have been complimentary.
"What can they do?"
From the corner of his eye, Spock watches the guard tie Kirk’s hands and ankles, then unlock the chain from the thick leather collar clasped around his neck. With the muzzle of his gun at the small of Kirk’s back, he urges him to his feet, shouting in Romulan and cuffing the back of his head when Kirk staggers and stumbles over the rock-strewn ground.
The guard doesn’t order Kirk to kneel before his leader; he just kicks his feet from under him, and Kirk falls to his knees. For a moment his eyes meet Spock’s, and he can see the plan in them, see the gears turning as he glances at his captors and back at the trees, but Spock shakes his head – he’ll be dead before he takes a dozen steps, they both will, and as First Officer it’s his duty to make sure at least one of them walks away from this.
The Romulan tosses Spock to two of his guards to hold, and turns to Kirk, eyeing him with a speculative gleam.
“Bring me a brand from the fire,” he says to one of his men finally. He tips Kirk’s face up with a finger under his chin, and seems to like what he sees, judging by the smile that spreads across his face.
“Your captain is such a strong-willed man,” he says to Spock, still smiling. “So full of life. He’ll make quite the diverting toy for some senator. With a little…training, of course.”
The guard returns with a long branch from the cooking fire, end charred into charcoal and still burning sullenly red. Taking it from him, the Romulan toys with it idly, passing it from one hand to the other and twining it in his fingers. He looks at Spock, and he strokes the branch as he speaks.
“Do you know what I’m going to do with you, Vulcan?” he asks. “I’m not going to hurt you. I won’t lay a finger on you. All you have to do is stand there and listen as I break your good captain’s spirit. And when I order one of my men to slit your throat, you’ll die with his screams in your ears, knowing that there was nothing you could do to save him.”
He seizes Kirk’s wrist and pulls his arm straight, twisting it to expose the pale skin, and with his other hand presses the end of the brand against it, holding it down as the flesh sizzles. Kirk’s screams are high-pitched and manic, and they hit Spock like a blow.
Vulcans do not show anger.
Spock is not all Vulcan.
He can’t get his hands free, but he doesn’t need them, not when he drives his elbow into the stomach of one guard and slams the back of his head up and into the nose of the other. They both crumple to the ground, groaning in pain, and with his shoulders free Spock has enough slack to get his hands in front of him, even as his joints scream in protest.
They both have guns, which Spock can’t fire with his hands tied. He can pick one up awkwardly and hold it, though, and after a split-second’s consideration of its heft, he swings it like a club. The crack it makes as it collides with the skull of the Romulan leader echoes through the clearing, and he folds like a jackknife to lie unmoving in the dirt. And he has Spock’s phaser, which only needs one hand to fire, and Spock has it trained on the rest of the Romulans before they have even fully understood that their leader is fallen.
They fire back, and one of them even strikes him, an energy blast searing the skin off his shoulder. But Spock doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even feel it, still hearing Kirk’s screams and seeing the agony rent across his face, and his aim is better than theirs.
In a matter of seconds Spock is standing in the middle of a ring of collapsed and unconscious Romulans, breath rasping harsh as sandpaper in his throat, sweat streaming in his eyes, fingers so tight around the phaser his knuckles are turning white.
“Spock,” Kirk croaks in the sudden silence. “What are you doing here?”
He doesn’t reply: he scarcely hears the words, coming at the same moment as the pain that he’s pushed from his mind refuses to be ignored any longer. His shoulder, yes, the bone-deep throb of scorched skin and muscle radiating agony down into his arm and up into his chest. But worse than that, much worse, is the pain of the toxin in his blood, the contaminant he allowed himself to forget about. He’s too close to Kirk, he’s been too close since the Romulan leader first called for him, and he can feel it now in the way his stomach churns, his heart pounds, his bones seem to want to worm out from under his skin.
He can’t think, he can barely breathe. All he can see through the haze of white-hot pain and the remnants of anger are Kirk and the generator.
Spock takes a step, then another, forcing himself to move against the protest of screaming muscles, until at last his fingertips meet the warm metal of the generator. Words swim into dim focus, and he seizes on the only one he recognizes, thinking desperately off, off, off, and brings his palm down on it.
The emergency signal on his wrist comm is too small for his fingers to find. In the end he just wraps his hand around the whole thing and squeezes, setting off every alarm built into it and then some. That has to be good enough.
“Spock, Spock –” Kirk’s voice is tight and edged with his own pain, and Spock does the last thing he has any strength for – staggers a few steps toward him and just falls, one arm out to shield Kirk, draw him close and keep him safe.
The last thing he feels, before everything goes black, is the rise and fall of Kirk’s chest up against his own.
No one ever accused Leonard McCoy of being pretty. But when Kirk wakes up to his face only a few inches away from his own, it’s just about the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
“Bones!” he exclaims, or tries to – his voice comes out as a frog-like whisper.
“No shouting,” McCoy says. “I’d tell you not to talk at all if I thought I had a chance of being listened to. We patched you up with the dermal regenerator, but the tissue’s still fragile. You need to go easy on it, and on that thick head of yours, you numbskull.”
“Not a numbskull!” Kirk protests, but he can’t stop the grin. He’s woken up in sickbay with McCoy standing watch enough times to take the lectures and complaining for the thinly veiled concern that they are.
His head is still vaguely throbbing, and there’s a clean ache just below his elbow he doesn’t want to think about, but that isn’t important.
Kirk doesn’t remember a lot after that melodramatic freak in all the leather grabbed his arm and got way too intimate with the hot poker, too lost in the pain and the swearing to keep much track of what was going on. But he remembers Spock, and the scary, too-distant look in his eyes, and the weight of an arm wrapped around his chest, holding on for dear life.
“Where’s Spock?” he asks, softly.
McCoy jerks his chin at the bed next to him. He hadn’t even thought to look. But there’s Spock, sitting up with his knees covered by a thin sickbay blanket, reading something on his PADD and looking wan but still all in one piece.
“That idiot woke up hours before you did, Jim,” McCoy says. “And he’ll be out of here in the morning. Hell, it’s not like a little almost-dying ever hurt anyone.”
There are some things not adding up here, and the biggest one is that he and Spock are five feet from each other and he doesn’t feel like he wants to die, or like he wants to claw his skin off, or like he wants to throw up. And it’s only been two weeks, but he’s gotten kind of used to that.
“What – how –” Kirk flaps a hand in a gesture trying somehow to capture the whole situation of him and Spock and the sickbay beds that McCoy keeps really too close together and much sense none of it is makes.
When he speaks, Spock’s voice is almost as rough as his own, even though it’s as cool as ever. “While we were incapacitated, Doctor McCoy was finally able to synthesize an antitoxin and administer it to us. We are, in your terms, cured.”
There is a slight flicker of a smile across his face, Kirk would bet money on it.
“I want to do a few more tests on you two, make sure there aren’t any lasting effects. But Spock’s right, Jim. You’re cured.”
"Well, hot shit." Kirk says eventually. "Finally." It's not nearly as much as he wants to say, but he's tired, and really, he's not sure what else there is to say.
Except that he's glad to be back with Spock, and no one needs to hear that.
“Well I’m glad you’re happy. But some of us still have real jobs to do now that the crisis is over. Like giving all the junior officers their latest vaccines,” McCoy replies. He crosses his arms over his chest, glaring down at them both in his most doctorly manner. “I expect you to rest while I’m gone, do you hear me? No sneaking out, no playing pranks on the nurses, no hacking the beds to show porn, or so help me I’ll shove enough hypos in your ass to make you look like a pin cushion.”
“What,” Kirk jokes. “No lectures about how I psychically attract crazy Romulan bastards to kidnap me for the slave market and try to torture me? What about the one about how I’m going to give you a heart attack before you turn forty? This is not the Bones I know and love.”
“Oh, you’re going to hear it,” Bones says. “I’ve got a few words to say to say to both of you. When I’m assured that you’re in good enough health for me to kill you again. But for now, bed. Rest.”
And that seems to be that, because McCoy turns his back on them and walks away, radiating righteous irritation.
The sickbay is never entirely quiet. There is the low , almost subconscious hum of electronic equipment, and the faint beeps of monitors, and the chatter of the nurses as they take temperatures and make beds and drink coffee. But between him and Spock, the silence feels overwhelming.
“You didn’t have to come after me like that,” Kirk says at last. “I mean, by yourself and all. They weren’t going to hurt me too bad, not if they wanted to make any money off me. But they would have killed you. You didn’t have to.”
“I did. You are my captain.” He exhales slowly, like the words hurt him, like they’re an admission of guilt. “You are my friend. It was…necessary.”
“But not very logical.”
“No. Not logical.” This time he doesn’t have any doubt about the smile, small as it is. “You are a bad influence on me.”
“But you love me anyway, right, Spock?” the question slips out before he can stop himself.
Spock closes his eyes, tips his head back against the stiff white sickbay pillow. There is a slight green flush coloring his cheeks. "For a given definition of love, yes, Captain, I believe I do."
And that’s it, that is it, he’s been missing Spock for two weeks, more than he was willing to admit, he was drowning in it, and now Spock is finally here, only a few feet between them, and it’s too damn far. Kirk stands, only wobbling a little as the room spins around him and sinks into place. The cold tile on his bare feet makes him shiver. But he scoops up his blanket and pillow in his arms and in two steps he’s dumping them on Spock’s head and climbing into the bed next to him.
“Captain?” Spock asks, black eyes wide, and Kirk pokes him in the stomach. It’s easy to reach.
“We just almost died,” he says. “You saved me from psycho bounty hunters. You can call me Jim.”
“Jim,” he says, and Kirk doesn’t miss the twist of tone that could almost be sarcasm, if this weren’t Spock. “May I ask what you are doing?”
Kirk looks at him curiously. "Uh, snuggling. Duh."
“Snuggling.”
It could be an argument. But Kirk’s just squirmed his way into the most comfortable spot, face pressed against the curve of Spock’s throat, one leg thrown over Spock’s hip, an arm across his shoulders, and he’s warm and sleepy and feeling more comfortable in his own skin than he has in the last two weeks, and it’s not worth fighting over.
“Yes, snuggling. I missed you. Shut up and deal.”
Spock doesn’t say anything. But Kirk can feel the rigid line of his spine relaxing just a little, settling into his touch, and he falls asleep to the feeling of someone gently stroking his hair.