Chapter Text
Vulcan, 2238
Spock is climbing a mountain. It’s red, and impossibly high, its uppermost peak lost in swirls of clouds. You can see this mountain from Spock’s bedroom window if you lean against it and press your nose to the glass, and now Spock and I-Chaya have set out to climb it.
They say that there was snow here once, all down the mountainside, that the stone scraped it from the clouds and wore it all the year through. That was before the Rihannsu came and stole the sky away. But no matter--Spock and I-Chaya are climbing the mountain, and when they get to the top, perhaps they will find snow.
“Would you like that, I-Chaya?”
The carved wooden sehlat in Spock’s hand is not particularly forthcoming. But again, no matter.
“Indeed!” chirps I-Chaya, his voice high like a bird’s. “I would certainly be amenable to playing in the snow in the event that we discover some!” He leaps excitedly over the scree, his gait improbably light given the furry bulk of his body.
“Wait!” cries Spock, as he watches I-Chaya bound away beyond a line of man-sized boulders. “I-Chaya, you move too quickly!” I-Chaya’s massive head protrudes from behind a rock, and it seems as if he closes one eye quickly and opens it again. A wink, Spock’s mother calls it. A human gesture.
Across the cramped room, Spock’s mother looks up from her book and smiles at him. Spock catches her looking. He does not return the smile. His face feels hot, and he slips I-Chaya into his pocket and smooths the deep folds of red bed-linen flat again. He leans down to the foot of his bed and retrieves his PADD. Amanda’s smile fades.
“We’ll have dinner soon,” she says. “When your father gets home.”
“What will we eat?” Spock asks, trying not to sound hopeful.
She sighs. Then, “Mashya,” she says brightly, as if they have not consumed mashya in various preparations every evening for the past forty-two days. Spock feels angry. He attempts to suppress it, but he is unsuccessful. He is no longer such a child that her tone of voice, playing at excitement, has the power to cajole and distract him.
“I am tired of mashya,” he says.
His mother takes hold of the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. There are spots of color in her cheeks, livid pink. “Don’t you think I’m tired of it too?” she snaps.
Spock doesn’t answer her. He stares down at his hands. He thinks of his father, whose arrival is certainly imminent. They sit in silence for six minutes and twenty seconds before Spock’s mother sighs again, slumping slightly into her chair and letting her book fall to the floor. It, like all his mother’s books, is an antique, fashioned of flimsy, brittle paper. It came with her on the transport from Terra when she traveled to Vulcan to marry Spock’s father; she was allowed limited personal effects and brought only a single set of garments in order to accommodate her library. Spock’s father says he does not comprehend her illogical attachment to these physical objects. However, two months previous, he presented Spock’s mother with a bound volume of old Earth poetry to acknowledge the occasion of her birth. His actions are inconsistent. Spock does not understand them.
Now, his mother has dropped her book. She would never do such a thing were she not greatly compromised, and based on the available evidence, only Spock can be the cause. The realization causes a distinct sensation of heaviness in Spock’s solar plexus.
“Spock?”
Spock looks up. His mother holds out a hand, and he goes to her. She pulls him onto her lap as she did when he was very small and kisses the top of his head. Spock turns his face to her chest and lets out a breath against her cloak. “I am sorry,” he mumbles into the fabric.
Her arms tighten around him. “I am too,” she says. Spock tucks his head beneath her chin, and they sit in silence once more.
“What happened to the real I-Chaya?” Spock asks. It is a question he has been turning over in his mind for months now.
“You know what happened,” his mother says quietly. “He fell ill one night. There was nothing your father could do.”
“Why did you not wake me?”
“Spock--”
Spock sits up, pulling back from the comforting clasp of his mother’s arms and looking into her face. “Father killed I-Chaya with his phaser, did he not?”
Her left cheek twitches. “Spock! Your father would never--”
“Do not lie,” Spock says. His mother purses her lips, a little puff of air escaping them. He knows that he has won, to the extent such a macabre topic can yield a thing like victory. Her eyes leave his face, finding a dark corner of their grubby common room. His parents try, and Spock helps, but they are too many in too small a space. There is always some clod of red dirt, some crumb.
“We couldn’t spare the food,” his mother says, still looking at anything but him.
“You could have released him into the desert!” Spock cries, aghast that his parents overlooked so obvious a solution. “That is his native environment. He could have hunted, made a home up in the foothills.”
“Spock, I-Chaya’s home was here, with us. It had been since he was a cub. He was tame; he had never hunted a meal a day in his life. How long would he have survived? Even if he weren’t killed by a le-matya or some other wild animal, he’d have starved out there.”
Spock falls silent. His mother’s logic is sound, and Spock does not know whether that makes him feel better or worse. “Father was merciful,” he says finally.
His mother presses her mouth to Spock’s temple. He can feel her small smile. “Yes,” she says. “It was not easy for him. He loved I-Chaya just as--”
“He did not. Father is Vulcan,” he says, shaking his head decisively. “He does not love.”
A strange look passes over his mother’s face at that, but she schools her features nearly as deftly as his father does, and it is gone. “All right,” she says, in the same too-bright tone of voice she used to announce their dinner menu. She eases Spock down onto his feet. “Come,” she says. “Talae brought over a packet of spice mix. We’ll add it to the mashya; I don’t think it’ll be half bad.”
His father returns home covered in a fine coat of rust-colored dust and sits wearily at the table, his normally rigid posture slack with exhaustion. He coughs more red dust into his flannel. Spock watches his mother watch his father, her eyes full of worry. She says nothing as she slides a steaming cup of tea across the table.
“Thank you,” his father says, when he has recovered his voice.
The food is, in fact, only one-quarter bad, although Spock finds this rating system imprecise at best. Despite his earlier protests, he does not particularly care. The room is pleasantly warm, his mother occasionally blotting beads of sweat from her brow. When his belly is full he allows himself an indulgent moment to pretend it is full of something other than mashya, that they sit around the table in the old house in Shi’Kahr, that his father has returned from his office in the city and not from the rusty bowels of a dilithium mine.
His mother rises from the table, her chair scraping across the stone floor. She appears excited, and Spock finds her expression contagious in spite of himself. “What is it?” he asks.
“Just wait,” she says and disappears into the makeshift larder, a corner of the kitchen partitioned off by a bedsheet. She returns a moment later bearing a large plate and an even larger smile.
“Savas?”
Spock turns to face his father. It appears Spock is not the only one affected by his mother’s excitement. Sarek raises an eyebrow at him and turns back to Spock’s mother and her plate, laden with rotund salmon-colored globefruit. Spock’s mouth waters at the sight of it.
“Where did you get it?” he asks.
Spock’s mother raises an eyebrow of her own. “I have my ways,” she says. Most likely she procured it in trade at the market, where the Vulcans are left to scrap over pickings that the Rihannsu leave behind. With credits stretched thin and prices exorbitant for the most basic necessities, a thriving barter system has sprung up. In recent months, however, such luxuries as savas have been few and far between. They fall on the fruit; even Sarek tacitly condones the fervency with which Amanda peels it, breaks it apart to send a spray of juice and pith into the air above the table. She raises her fingers to her lips, laughing.
Later, Spock is sent to bed after an hour spent bent over his PADD working a set of equations. He lies awake puzzling over a particularly difficult one, the numbers and symbols hanging luminous in his mind’s eye. His parents sit at the table conversing in low tones, a glowlamp set between them like an overlarge firefly. Spock closes his eyes and tries not to listen to what they say. He fails, catching his name in the flow of conversation, and is given over to curiosity. He scoots to the edge of the bed, subtly attempting to take up a more advantageous position. The bed creaks, and his parents stop talking. He can almost feel his mother craning her neck to look, but he lies motionless and slows his breathing. After a moment, she starts to speak again.
“Anyway, I don’t like it,” she says.
“There is no guarantee it will come to pass,” Sarek says. “The House of Satok is exacting in their standards.”
“He’s not good enough, is that what you’re saying?”
“Amanda--”
“No, that is what you’re saying,” she says, her voice biting.
“I am saying nothing,” Sarek says. “I am merely alluding to potential obstacles.”
Spock’s mother sighs. “Who’s to say this is even a good idea?” she says. “Look around you, Sarek. Look at this world we live in. Maybe it’s not so--not so logical to bind yourself to another person in times like these.”
“Would you choose to face these days alone, my wife?” There’s a softness, a hesitation to his words now that Spock has never heard before. He wants desperately to open his eyes, to look at his father’s face and see if it matches his voice, but he knows his eyes will catch in the glowlight.
He hears their bodies shift, the brush of cloth against skin. Perhaps they are embracing.
“We will call on Satok, as requested,” Sarek says after some time. “There is no harm in their meeting. Should we find their minds compatible, that would be enough to silence any protest.” Spock is unsure, but he thinks he hears Sarek sigh. “They are of considerable means, Amanda,” he says. “Even by current standards.”
Spock’s mother stands, her chair rasping across the floor once more. “I’m not sure how long that will matter.” The lamp goes out, and although Spock does not quite comprehend her meaning, he cannot stop the chill that spreads across his prone body despite the closeness of the room.
***
In the days that follow, Spock does not dwell on his parents’ whispered conversation. He attends school, a less formal affair than it might once have been, conducted primarily via PADD rather than the learning pods Spock hears tell of at the Romulan school. Still, there is a sizeable collection of academic texts accessible through a makeshift digital library, and they take turns utilizing the energy allotment to ensure their devices’ batteries are sufficiently charged to allow for home study. One afternoon, Spock’s grade level is attempting a particularly challenging geometric proof when the sound of a massive explosion rips through the air. They cease their activity immediately and run outside, heedless of their instructor’s reproach. A massive beam of light issues from the base of a spidery black structure that has lately appeared on the horizon halfway to Shi’Kahr. Spock is predisposed against the structure, as it mars the view of the mountains from his window. The light appears to surge into the very earth, and Spock wonders if he is imagining the faint vibration that seems to crawl up into him from the soles of his feet, from the ground he stands on.
“What is it?” asks one of Spock’s classmates.
“It is a drill,” says T’Vess, their instructor. She is slim and dark-eyed and enjoys cataloguing desert insects in her free time, a fact she shared with Spock while dabbing at his split lip on the day he was sent home for fighting Stonn. Spock finds her eminently competent. He looks up at her face. It is pale, and her mouth is slightly pinched.
“A drill?” Spock says. “Why is it necessary to drill when we mine dilithium already?”
“The mines run dry,” she says, her tone strange. “The Rihannsu strive ever deeper.”
There are no further questions. The students stand in a loose semi-circle, watching the light stream into the desert until it becomes evident that no greater dramatics are forthcoming. As they return to the classroom, Spock approaches T’Vess and tugs lightly on the long hem of her tunic.
“What will happen when there’s nothing left?” Spock asks. He does not know why he asks the question, only that it is suddenly present in his mind and his belly churns as he waits for the answer. But T’Vess only shakes her head slowly. The tightness has not left her face.
“Resume your geometry,” she says to Spock. He complies. As the day wears on, he notices that her eyes do not stray long from the window.
Three days after that, Spock returns home from school to find both his parents waiting for him. It is unusual to find his father home this early in the afternoon, and Spock is immediately disquieted.
“What has happened?” he asks.
His parents share a glance, and Spock immediately remembers their earlier conversation.
“Are we going to T’Pring’s residence?” he asks.
His parents look at one another again. Spock’s mother appears to have a headache. She pinches the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. “This one’s all yours,” she says to Sarek, walking back inside the house.
Spock does not comprehend her human colloquialisms, but it appears his father does, for he steps closer to Spock and gestures at the low stone bench just to the right of the doorway.
They sit together. “Are you well, Father?” Spock asks.
“Spock, I must ask for your patience,” Sarek says gravely. “This is a matter of the utmost importance, and I trust you can be relied upon to hear me speak of it with a man’s ears, not a child’s.”
Spock nods, something like pride swelling in his chest. He stifles the bloom of emotion immediately. “Understood,” he says.
“In your studies, have you come upon the term kun-oot-la?”
Spock shakes his head.
Sarek exhales slowly. “The kun-oot-la,” he intones, “is a bonding ceremony. Less than a marriage, and more than a betrothal.” Spock has the impression that these are not his father’s words.
“Bonding?” Spock repeats. “Am I to bond with T’Pring?”
He swallows. The thought makes him feel uneasy. He remembers the day he fought Stonn--or, more accurately, the day Stonn’s blow to the face left Spock prostrate and disoriented for a duration of nine minutes before T’Vess found him. As he lay in the dirt, blood from his nose soaking into the sand beneath his face, he watched T’Pring’s boots as she shifted from foot to foot, perhaps weighing the merits of helping Spock up. In the end, she did not. Stonn called to her, and the boots exited Spock’s field of vision.
Sarek speaks again, returning Spock to the present moment. “Does this trouble you?”
“Will we be … will we be married? Like you and mother?”
“Perhaps later,” Sarek says.
“Perhaps?”
“There are other eventualities.” Sarek shifts minutely in his seat, and Spock is struck with the distinct impression that his father is expressing discomfort. It is most unusual.
“You did not know of the kun-oot-la,” he says. “What of pon farr?”
Spock’s face feels hot. He does not know much of pon farr. Earlier in the academic year, he overheard a pair of older children discussing it, although their description was so ludicrous it cannot possibly have been accurate. Pon farr seems a dangerous, tantalizing mystery to Spock, as do most things adults strive to keep from children.
“No, father,” he says. It seems the safer answer.
“Very well,” Sarek says. “It will perhaps be challenging to furnish you with an adequate explanation at this stage of your development, but I will attempt it nonetheless. Certain aspects of the description may be difficult for you to comprehend.”
“I will understand,” Spock says hotly.
Sarek glances sidelong at him, and Spock detects a hint of amusement in the planes of his father’s face. “No,” Sarek says. “I very much doubt you will.”
He is correct.
“What if I do not wish to bond with T’Pring, when the Time comes?” Spock asks carefully. It is the least uncomfortable question he can think to ask after Sarek’s explanation.
“It is likely that your wishes will be somewhat subsumed to the tumult of the plak tow,” Sarek says.
“After, then?”
“Following the onset of the plak tow, your initial bonding will be consummated via a second ceremony and physical union.”
Spock cannot prevent the rush of blood to his face at this. He hangs his head so that his father will not see but notes that, mercifully, Sarek is looking in the opposite direction.
“Afterwards,” Sarek continues, “it is unlikely that you will find T’Pring wanting, nor she you. Your minds will be joined, two halves of one whole.”
“Forever,” Spock says.
“Until death.”
Spock cannot see the difference.
“And if I do not do not join with T’Pring, when I have this fever,” Spock says. “I will die?” His voice sounds very small, even to himself.
“There are alternative measures for unbonded individuals,” Sarek says. “But the kun-oot-la renders them unnecessary. It is most logical.”
Spock understands that Sarek intends him to find reassurance in this appeal to logic. He attempts to do so, with limited success.
They travel to T’Pring’s home in the aircar. Spock tries to quell his excitement. They have not utilized the vee in months; their scant power allotment does not allow for it. Spock presses his hands to the rear passenger window and watches the landscape fly past in a red smear of mountains and desert. Their destination is the far side of Shi’Kahr, and as they slow to pass through the city, Spock watches the crowds of Rihannsu swarming the streets of his birthplace, his former home. He feels anger at the sight, although if he is honest with himself it is increasingly difficult for him to recall the time before the invasion. They look well-fed, careless and happy, and Spock cannot stop himself from staring at the overt displays of emotion he sees upon even so cursory an observation. A child, a girl about his age, is eating an apple. She leans close to her companion, throws back her head and laughs.
“Spock,” Amanda says, twisting in her seat to catch his eye. “Didn’t you bring something to work on?”
Reluctantly, Spock drops his gaze and picks up his PADD, resolving to work for the remainder of the journey.
Standing before T’Pring’s door, Amanda drops to her knees before him and straightens his robes, combs her fingers through his bangs. He attempts to move away from her, and she swats at his arm but leans in to kiss his cheek anyway. “You’ll be fine,” she says in an undertone, as if she isn’t speaking to him at all.
Then the door swings open, and T’Pring’s father stands before them. Somehow he seems more Vulcan than even Sarek, and Spock attempts to quash the almost immediate fluttering this engenders in the vicinity of his stomach. He looks down at Spock measuringly, then raises his hand in the ta’al.
“Greetings,” he says to Spock’s parents. Then, “Greetings, Spock cha’ Sarek.” He gestures down a narrow passageway. “Follow me.”
The House of Satok is as ancient as the mountains themselves, and fittingly its seat is carved into the very stone of the foothills outside Shi’Kahr. The passageway opens out into what must have once been a natural cavern but which now has been adapted to house T’Pring’s family. The room is large, and twin doors indicate a suite of rooms beyond it. Spock is struck with a sudden pang of envy, immediately followed by the flush of embarrassment. Across the room, T’Pring stands alongside her mother, and the two of them watch Spock as if they know his thoughts.
“T’Shara, T’Pring,” Sarek says, offering the ta’al. “I trust we find you in good health.”
T’Pring’s mother inclines her head politely. “And you as well,” she says. “Please, sit. Refresh yourselves.”
She nods at T’Pring, who leaves her side and walks purposefully to the open kitchen, returning with a heavily-laden platter. On it rests a basket of kap and a sweating pitcher surrounded by six metal tumblers. Spock barely restrains a gasp. He has not seen freshly-baked kap in over a year, and not only is there a golden-brown roll for each of them, but alongside the basket rests a shallow ceramic bowl. In its center sits a pale, creamy cube of butter. It is small, but nonetheless it is there.
Spock’s mother turns to look at him, and Spock folds his hands in his lap dutifully. He waits until T’Pring and her family have served themselves, then passes the basket to his mother and father. His mother declines her roll, and Spock does not miss the quizzical angle of his father’s head when he notices. But he does not trouble himself overly much, because at last he is closing eager fingers around the kap and breaking it in two to release a little cloud of steam. He sinks a knife into the butter, coming away with less than he wants, and spreads it across the warm roll. He eats in measured bites and, as the adults talk and pass around the pitcher of kvass, tries not to stare at the crusts T’Pring’s family leave on their plates.
After they’ve eaten, Satok straightens. “Perhaps we should attend to our stated business,” he says.
“Indeed,” Sarek says.
“T’Shara,” Satok says, nodding at his wife. She rises and goes into the kitchen, coming back a moment later with a pair of small glasses in her hands. They are the size of egg-cups. She hands one to Spock and the second to T’Pring. Spock is immediately assaulted with a cloying odor. His eyes feel dangerously close to watering.
“D’lechu juice?” Spock’s mother says suddenly. “What is this? They’re not bonding today!”
“Amanda,” says Sarek.
“Calm yourself,” Satok says. “We merely seek to ascertain their compatibility. They are unstudied in the necessary mental disciplines; the drink will aid in opening their minds.”
Spock’s mother shakes her head. It is barely perceptible, but her disapproval is evident. Across the low table, T’Pring and T’Shara sit expressionless as statues. Spock wishes his mother had not spoken.
Sarek nods at Satok. “Your logic is sound.”
“Very well,” says Satok. The plates and glasses are cleared away, and Satok indicates that Spock should come around the table and sit beside T’Pring on the low settee.
“T’Shara studied with the adepts, in the time before the invasion, he says. “She will oversee the joining of their minds.”
T’Shara gestures at their cups. “Drink.”
Spock looks at T’Pring. Her face is appropriately blank, but he thinks he can see the barest hint of trepidation in her eyes. He looks directly into them as he drinks the juice down.
He is unable to stop himself from spluttering; the drink is like fire in his throat. He notes that T’Pring does the same and feels a measure of relief that she is not unaffected. When he tries to recall the incident later, this will be the last thing he clearly remembers.
Almost immediately, Spock is overcome with a stifling warmth, as if the burning sensation of the liquor in his mouth has spread to every part of him. He lets his mouth fall open, as if doing so could release some of the heat that threatens to burn him up from the inside out. Across from him, he senses rather than sees T’Pring doing the same. He feels a hand on his face, so much steadier than he feels. He thinks he will slide from the settee and ignite on the floor, but it’s as if the hand has anchored him in space. He hears muttered words, and then the world explodes. He is looking upon himself, and with a start he realizes he is seeing himself through T’Pring’s eyes. He feels himself assessed and catalogued.
His eyes. They are a human’s eyes, are they not? So easily do they broadcast his emotions.
Spock blinks reflexively. From T’Pring’s vantage point, he attempts to discern what she means, but he cannot. His eyes appear just as hers do, wide and brown, pupils dilated. As he thinks this, there’s a painful scraping sensation in his head, a kind of mental scoff. Abruptly, he is cast out of T’Pring’s mind, slamming back into his own alone with nauseating force.
Spock reels, slipping off the settee onto his hands and knees and gagging. All at once, he feels strong hands grip him under the arms and haul him upright. Amanda cradles him against her like a baby, his limbs flopping uselessly as she strides from the room and then from the house altogether. She’s scarcely gotten them outside before she deposits Spock on the ground without ceremony. He rolls onto his hands and knees again and retches, emptying his stomach onto the red dirt. He gasps against the waves of nausea, aware that over the sounds of his vomiting his mother is muttering to herself, utilizing language she has expressly forbidden in their home.
“Fucking Vulcans and their goddamn ceremonial bullshit--sorry, Spock, I’m so sorry, but when I see the way they look at you I want to punch something.”
She does, slamming her fist into a soft drift of sand that has come to rest against the wall of the house. Spock drags the back of his hand across his mouth and sits back on his heels, watching Amanda with wide eyes. She glances over at the door and narrows her eyes.
“Do you want to go back in there?”
Spock shakes his head. “I do not.”
“That’s fine,” she says. “Go wait in the car.”
Spock crawls into his seat in the vee and slumps against the window. He closes his eyes. Presently, he hears footsteps and the slam of doors, feels the vee sink slightly as his parents climb inside. The door on his mother’s side slams, and when Spock opens his eyes he sees that his father has not yet touched the wheel, instead sitting for a moment in meditation.
Amanda turns to him in the back seat, eyes red-rimmed. She has something in her hands, wrapped in a handkerchief, and she offers it to him. He takes the little bundle, opens it carefully. It’s the last kap roll, and the inside is spread with butter.
They do not speak of the incident again. Spock is unsure what precisely unfolded, but he is certain now that he will not complete the kun-oot-la, that he will not be bonded to T’Pring. Although he cannot verbalize it, he knows with a sickening certainty that the cause lies with his mixed genetics.
When he sees T’Pring in the schoolyard, he feels a troubling mixture of anger, despair, and relief. None of these emotions befit a Vulcan, and he wonders if his agemates can see them written on his face as T’Pring claimed she could. Spock spends long minutes before the mirror in the lavatory, watching his own face as he deliberately provokes various emotional responses. Perhaps it is a symptom of his condition that he cannot see a single outward manifestation of any of them.
Prior to the disastrous visit to her family home, T’Pring treated Spock in a manner approaching utter indifference. Now, however, it seems that she and Spock do not exist on the same plane, that Spock cannot even disturb the air around her. He would not mind, except that somehow when her gaze passes through him he tends to think of dying. Stonn follows Spock halfway home one afternoon, until Spock finally tires of the shadow dogging his steps and breaks into a run. He does not enjoy being punched in the face, and an additional injury would cause his mother to worry.
Twelve days after this, T’Vess is conscripted to work in the mines, and the school is shut down altogether.
Spock continues his studies independently. His mother instructs him in Standard, High Vulcan, mathematics, and rhetoric. Spock conducts his own crude chemistry experiments, and tries not to think of what was possible in the makeshift laboratory at school. When his father returns home in the evenings, he lectures to Spock on Vulcan history. He pays particular attention to those facets regarding the Rihannsu, how they chose to spurn the teachings of Surak and left the planet behind many thousands of years ago.
We were as one, Spock thinks. Why did they leave? And why did they return?
2241
Something is happening.
It takes him far too long to realize what it is. It is morning, and Spock is roused from sleep by a creeping unease. He opens his eyes and listens, which is when he recognizes the source: a sound. Or, more precisely, the absence of sound. He kicks free of the blankets and rises, crossing to the window and looking out over the plain. While he has not forgotten the appearance of the first drill, three years on he would be hard pressed to recall Vulcan without them. Where one drill stood, there are now dozens. Their photon beams shoot unchecked from black slabs of metal, platforms manned only by Rihannsu. The beams flow into the earth relentlessly, stabbing puncture wounds into Vulcan’s red flesh, filling the air with their crush and buzz. But not today, Spock realizes. Today, they have fallen silent. He always expected to find relief in it, but he doesn’t.
As he steps away from the window, an object on the floor catches his eye. It is the tiny wooden sehlat he named after I-Chaya. It is now lodged in a crevice in the floor, covered over with debris. He kneels and plucks it from the stone, cradling it in his hand like an egg and blowing it free of dust.
His mother comes home soon afterwards.
“I was at Talae’s,” she says. “The mines are closing.”
Spock cannot stifle a gasp. He resolves to meditate for an additional ten minutes this evening to account for it. “How has she learned this?” he asks.
“She was in the city,” Spock’s mother says. “The Romulan market. Everyone was talking about it, apparently. Looks as if the well has finally run dry.”
“They did not mine for water,” Spock says, brow furrowed.
“I mean the dilithium’s gone,” his mother says. “Terran expression. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that your father won’t be slaving away underground any longer.”
Spock finds something troubling about her manner, but he cannot put a name to it. Sure enough, Spock’s father returns home early in the afternoon, his clothes stained red for the last time. His mother puts on an emotional display that causes Spock to avert his eyes, leaping at Sarek and kissing his cheek. She attempts the same with Spock, generous in her state of celebration, but he shrugs away. Even without the press of her mind when they touch, he can guess at her thoughts. She believes, as others do, that when the planet’s resources are exhausted the Rihannsu will leave them. Once, Spock might have believed the same, but if he is honest, he can no longer imagine Vulcan free from the shadow of her erstwhile cousin. He watches his mother prepare the midday meal, smiling like a child, and feels much older than his eleven years.
After lunch, he leaves the house and walks up the road. Talae waves to him as he passes her home, and he nods in return. Spock’s mother has become fast friends with her, while Spock and his father have been more reticent. They are Vulcan, Spock thinks, drawing himself up a little as he walks. He finds it odd that his mother should consider Talae and Nakar independently of their fellow colonizers. They may claim sympathy with Vulcan’s plight, but they are Rihannsu nonetheless.
“There are others,” Talae told Spock once. “Others like us, who seek peace with your people.”
They sat at the table eating balkra, the first fresh vegetables they had managed to procure in weeks. Spock remembers feeling a prick of irritation at Talae as she blithely refilled her bowl. After all, she was--she is-- free to take her pick of the markets in Shi’Kahr. Spock’s mother would say that credits are tight for all. Spock knows this to be true and is irritated anyway.
“If there are others, why do they not come? Why do they not speak for us?”
“Spock,” said his mother warningly. “Could you fetch me another cup of tea?”
Now, as he walks along the road, he thinks of walking all the way into Shi’Kahr, of finding the laughing girl of three years prior. He sees Romulan children occasionally; they come into the desert to forage for plants or to hunt game. They have never spoken to him, and Spock is forbidden to engage them. There are rumors of a Vulcan boy who spoke back to a one who threw a rock at him. He was taken by the authorities for questioning and did not return to his parents.
“There is no evidence that this story has any basis in fact,” Spock said, when he was restricted from walking in the desert shortly after word of it reached his parents’ ears.
“Regardless,” Sarek said, his tone brooking no argument.
When Spock returns to the house, his parents are seated at the table. There is a strange tension about the place, as if a storm has recently cleared. It lasts until after dinner, when Spock’s mother goes into the fresher and does not come out. Sarek walks outside and sits heavily on the stone bench, and after a moment’s hesitation Spock elects to join him.
Sarek stares off at the mountains. When he begins to speak, he does so without turning to look at Spock. “Kaiidth,” he says. “There is no logic in imagining otherwise. However, I find I am hard pressed to avoid comparisons between my own early life and yours.”
“Father--”
“Were it within my power to change our current circumstances, to enable you to exercise your full potential, I would do so,” he says.
Spock’s mouth falls open, but he quickly recovers and shuts it again. As his father says, there is no logic to yearning for an alternate reality. That Sarek should admit to it, in however small a measure, is utterly surprising to Spock. He does not know how to respond. He exhales slowly. In his peripheral vision, he sees his father turn to look at him.
“Do you share your mother’s belief that the Rihannsu will leave us?”
Spock hesitates. “No,” he says quietly. He realizes that this is the first time he has expressly stated it. Part of him instantly wishes he could recant.
Sarek nods. “I concur,” he says. “Though I have not--” He does not complete his statement, but Spock feels certain he was going to say that he has not shared this opinion with Spock’s mother. Spock wonders if his father knows more than just rumors. Failing to disclose facts in order to appeal to emotional security--that Sarek should do this is unfathomable to Spock. He thinks of a long-forgotten conversation with his mother. Father is Vulcan. He does not love. Spock had been so certain then. A child’s certainty, he thinks.
Is this what it means to love? To protect another from the truth, whether or not it changes the outcome? He wants to speak these thoughts aloud, ask his father to clarify, but he cannot make his mouth form the words. Spock and Sarek sit in silence for a long time, and when Sarek rises and walks into the house Spock does not call him back.
***
In the end, the Rihannsu do leave. Well, some of them do. But it isn’t in the way Spock’s mother imagined.
It’s midmorning, and Spock is dozing. He forces himself to sleep long hours these days; it’s preferable to being awake and hungry, although he chafes against such lassitude. He is roused entirely as Sarek strides into the room and addresses him.
“Rise and dress,” he says simply, his voice taut. “Pack your things.”
“What has happened?” Spock asks as he complies. He looks up at his father. Sarek’s expression is unreadable, and something about the set of his body makes Spock think he must be shielding more than usual. Sarek gives the slightest shake of his head, and in this moment Spock knows. Spock’s mother sits at the table, her hands clasping a mug of hot water. Spock wonders if she knows too.
They take him down the road, to Talae and Nakar’s. Spock has a bundle of clothing tucked under his arm, wrapped in his quilt. Along with the carved sehlat, it is one of the only possessions Spock is certain came with them from Shi’Kahr. He tells himself he was wise to bring it, that it may prove practical somehow. If, that night and many nights afterward, he lies with the soft cloth pressed to his face and breathes deep as if he could thus conjure the airy stone rooms where his life began, no one will be the wiser.
Spock’s mother sees Talae and both begin to cry. As always, he finds the sight of such blatant emotion strange on Talae’s face. They are our cousins, he thinks. How can we look so much alike and be so different? He looks away, to Nakar’s offered ta’al, his fingers spread awkwardly.
“Take Spock’s things inside,” says Nakar, and Talae complies, accepting the bundle of fabric from Spock and taking it into the house, wiping at her eyes as she goes. Nakar looks at Sarek. “You should go, if you mean to make for the spaceport. I’ll warn you, it won’t be easy. They’ve got their orders just like I’ve got mine, and they’ll not be so ready to defy them.”
“Thank you,” says Sarek simply. “We are in your debt.”
The look Nakar gives him says he doesn’t think he is likely to be repaid. Spock hopes his mother hasn’t seen.
“Amanda,” says Sarek.
Spock lets his hands fall to his sides. His palms are clammy. His mother approaches him almost hesitantly, as if afraid to disturb something. She clutches at the front of his robes, pulls him toward her, and Spock suddenly feels very small.
“I love you,” she says. Her eyes are shining, and she smells of wet wool. Spock’s throat feels tight, but his father is watching and his father is Vulcan and Spock is Vulcan and Spock will not cry. She grabs him to her, and he thinks suddenly of the day she carried him from T’Pring’s stone floor to vomit over the threshold. The memory trips some wire in him, and he lets fly a single peal of too-high laughter. His mother grips tighter. Spock can hear the hum of a vee in the distance, away down the road towards Shi’Kahr.
“I love you,” his mother says again. “Don’t forget.”
***
They lock him in his room.
It isn’t his room, of course, but Talae’s study. They have converted it into a makeshift bedroom for him, and Spock places his quilt carefully atop the narrow pallet on the floor. There’s a plate of food on the desk across from him, kap and plomeek stew and a creamy pat of butter he is certain is the largest he has ever seen. His stomach clenches and growls audibly, but Spock does not eat. He sits on the bed, legs crossed, and he waits. Eventually, he brings his knees up to tuck beneath his chin. And still he waits, though unsure exactly what it is he’s waiting for.
Night falls, and it begins gradually. At first, Spock believes he is merely experiencing a delayed emotional response to his parents’ departure. If the rumors are true, if the Romulans have tired of their tenure on Vulcan, then Spock estimates the likelihood of his parents returning at less than fifteen percent. The number makes him swallow, and tears prick at his eyes. He is alone in the room with no one to mark them, but he blinks them back anyway. And then he feels it, a plucking sensation in his head, a twinge like the snapping of a lyre string. It’s uncomfortable at first, then painful, and it is accompanied by a despair the likes of which Spock has never before experienced. All at once, he’s awash in it, vast swaths of abject sadness grey and drippy like watercolor across his mind. When the fear comes, it stabs red across this dreary field and it feels like lightning.
Spock scrabbles into the corner, some deeply animalistic part of him believing he can hide from it, claw dirt atop his curled form and remain buried until it passes. But as time goes on, Spock begins to forget that ending is a state it’s possible for anything to reach, let alone the storm in his head.
“Please,” he cries at the door. It’s not entirely flush with the wall, and he can see the play of light on the floor in the corridor. A shadow moves over it, and he knows someone’s there. “Please,” he says again. “Please let me out.” He needs to get out, he decides. He needs to run from the house and out into the road and keep going until he finds them, finds where they’re dying and joins them.
“They are leaving me,” he moans to Talae on the other side of the door. “They are all gone, all of them. Please, you have to let me go too! You can’t make me stay here alone!”
“Spock,” says Talae, her voice thick with tears. “You must listen. Your parents wanted more for you than that, they--”
“I do not believe you! Mother would not leave me--she would--”
Terror and sadness lance through his head. His words disintegrate into a pained howl against the grain of the door, and Spock is too agitated to trouble himself with things like embarrassment or shame at the gross emotional display. He screams himself hoarse, clawing at the door, and when his throat and hands are too sore to continue he slumps against it bonelessly. Eventually he drops into the sleep of the exhausted, and when he awakes he thinks it a mercy. Because although his parental bonds are broken, rent and sparking like cut livewires, Spock does not remember feeling it happen.
He lies in the dim, close room for a long time. His innate sense of time seems off-kilter. Talae comes and goes, wiping his brow with a cool, damp cloth and spooning broth into Spock’s mouth when he’ll let her. He hears voices, the muffled crump of faraway explosions. But he does not ask about them, and Talae does not offer. It’s difficult to sit up; equilibrium fails him and his head swims, dizzy with emptiness when he had never noticed it full before. So he stops trying to right himself, crawls over to the pallet and slides back down into unconsciousness.
The next time he wakes up, his stomach is growling again. He sits up slowly. The buzzing silence in his head remains, and a swirl of nausea threatens to dampen his hunger. He swallows down the sour taste in his mouth and gets shakily to his feet, leaning heavily on the wall to steady himself.
Talae’s head appears around the doorway. “Spock?” she says. “I thought I heard a noise.”
“Would it be possible--could I have something to eat?”
Talae smiles. Her features are broad, her body soft. She is nothing like Spock’s mother. But he allows her to fetch him a plate of vegetable stew and a roll, and to sit by him while he eats. She reaches out to him as if to smooth his bangs from his forehead, and he freezes, drawing in a breath like a startled animal. But then he relaxes, letting her comb her fingers through his dirty hair. Later, Spock will remember this as the moment he decided to live. Or, perhaps more accurately, the moment he decided not to die. If he closes his eyes, he can see his mother’s hands grabbing at his chest.
I love you. Don’t forget.
***