Fic archive: Star Trek TOS - "I Leave This At Your Ear" 1/1
23/05/00
Star Trek
Rating: NC-17
Kirk/Spock

Summary: After Sam Kirk's death, Spock tracks Jim down on Earth. Takes place shortly after the episode Operation -- Annihilate!

Copyright disclaimer: The Easter bunny didn't bring them to me, so I was forced to go hunting rabbits. Ugliness ensued. (Seriously: All things Trek belong to Paramount/Viacom, and all that's mine is this story, on which I'm making no money and which you really shouldn't steal.)

Sex disclaimer: Yes Virginia, there is sex in this story. It's m/m, it's explicit, and if you're under 18, you aren't supposed to read this. If you otherwise can't deal, get a reality check. If you'd just rather be elsewhere, take a random bookmark and I hope I'll see you again someday.

Notes:
This takes place in the same universe as my other K/S stories, about a year after At My Most Beautiful.

It's been pointed out to me that some of the cultural details in this story don't match canon. To which I can only say that these stories do tend that way. I rely as much on my conceptions of how the world will look in three or four hundred years as I do on show precedent.

This is the "first-time" story for this series. Odd that I should leave it so long.
Many thanks to Mary Ellen Curtin for Spock advice and help with other details.
Title snitched from W.S. Graham.




I Leave This at Your Ear
by Jane St Clair



Spock climbed out onto the roof of the coffin hotel and waited.

He was cold, but on Earth he was always cold. Even in high summer he sometimes shivered, and this was only a very warm spring. Still, he had dressed in both a sweater and the service coat from his father's years as Ambassador on that planet, and he was comfortable enough in the circulating air that he wouldn't need to go in for some time. His mother had given the coat to him years ago, and at the time he'd only stared at her in confusion. Her human-cold hands clutching his for a second and then pressing the garment into his grasp. His father must have owned the coat when his parents had met, but he couldn't grasp whatever significance that his mother had intended in giving it to him at that juncture. He suspected that his father didn't know she'd done it. But he was grateful for it tonight: the heavy felt and satin covered his hips and blocked the worst of the chill.

Cross-legged on the roof, staring across the low cityscape at ground transports streaking past in the remaining light. Motors made of ceramic and light generated only the tiniest of sounds, but he was evolved to listen in a thin atmosphere, and when he was still he could sense not only the sound waves but also the sub-aural vibrations of engines and impact.

The coffin hotel was strung together of prefabricated cubicles, one and a half metres square by two metres long, that were padded on the floors for sleep and intended for nothing more elaborate than the rest of those not concerned with luxury. It was half a century old, most likely, but solidly constructed, and as it needed little outward beauty to fulfill its purpose, the complex might stand for a full century yet.

Fully dark now, and if he relaxed into meditation, the running lights on transports would extend into the streaks of slow-capture photography. Des Moines rose behind him with the delicacy of a city formed of glass and information.

It had taken him twenty-seven hours to request and confirm leave from Starfleet Command, and by then Jim Kirk had already left. His captain had been granted automatic bereavement leave upon the completion of their mission, that he might bury his dead brother and sister-in-law and grieve for them suitably. The core emotion of loss was beyond Spock's experience, but for days as the Enterprise travelled to Earth he'd been aware of Jim Kirk at the centre of the bridge as a thinly-shielded mass of bleeding pain. He'd been silent in his command chain, spoken only when spoken to, bitten his nails. Bloody-red arcs where he'd cut them down too far.

There was no public funeral. Jim Kirk took his nephew Peter and the pair of bodies and beamed down to his family home, where the dead were presumably interred, the child consoled, and the ceremonies of passing carried out. Spock had not intruded, but he had taken his communicator and his reading and settled himself within driving distance. And waited.

Kirk hadn't asked him for anything, but he never did. Their friendship had formed out of Spock's tolerant silences and Jim's teasing, the mutual delicacy of their chess matches, and the fragments of loneliness that Jim radiated at odd moments. On the last run, McCoy had hovered and offered comfort that wasn't accepted, and once rebuffed he'd come to Spock to offer up his guilt for Spock's near-mutilation. That guilt had been harder to grasp than Jim's rock-hard fragility, but he'd offered the same response: unjudging silence that gradually swallowed human agony. McCoy had sat with him most of that evening, often talking, always drinking, and by the time he went to bed he hadn't radiated anything but drunken exhaustion. Only after that, Jim had drifted over and knelt in front of Spock a moment, stared up at him. Shuttered hazel eyes staring into his, and for half a moment a cool touch on his knee. Flash of

//pain loss loneliness Samisgone dead dead deaddeaddead whatamIgoingtodo whycan'tIswallowthishurt//

before the hand retracted, and then Jim was physically gone and psychically shuttered, and the next morning he'd taken the child and left.

Spock had oriented himself to face the Kirk farm when he sat down, used his tricorder to fine-tune his posture. After an hour's silence, he realised he was psychically reaching for his friend, but the distance was too huge for him to sense anything. All he received was random impressions of human life and the streaking thoughts and vibrations of travel. It was fully dark. Lights spread for half a mile and then thinned as Des Moines gave way to agricultural Iowa and the strangely feral vegetation that almost swallowed it up.

He climbed down.





He hadn't been prepared for this emptiness. Vulcan's emptiness was one of desert and dry air and meditative stillness. What struck him while he hovered at the edge of the yard was the absence of the clutter that seemed to characterize human life. There were earth beds that might be cultivated in summer months, but they were empty now. The grass between him and the house was wild but close-clipped. He couldn't make out a vehicle.

He had extinguished his high beams a hundred metres from yard's entrance and coasted in with only small running lights and the luminosity of the control panel. Now he stood beside his rented groundcar and listened. A human fear of the dark might have led an observer to mistake him for the fabled risen dead. Black clothes, black hair, white, white skin stripped almost colourless by the olive blood underneath it. Something about the nocturnal luminesces on this planet made him almost glow in the dark. Only his stillness refused to suggest a threat. He'd never offered violence to a living thing except in the defence of others, and the willful harm humans sometimes did one another was mind-boggling to him.

He gathered himself finally and padded across the unmarked yard. The grass outside the manicured area was tall, and already thickly green. In the growing season, this place must be enormously lush.

The steps were soft boards, treated with protector once but long since softened in the humidity. They gave a little under his feet when he pushed off them into the screened porch. There were no lights on in the house, though one window was open, and for a moment he demanded of himself what logic had led him to a visit that would rouse those better left to sleep and heal.

When he brushed his mind out, though, he could feel Jim Kirk sitting awake in the darkened kitchen. Instead of withdrawing once he'd established the presence, though, he stayed open, drifting to see if Jim would sense him. His consciousness absorbed everything that drifted through its openness, laying in sense-memories of the place. Trees just beginning to flex in the growing warmth. Wood of the house and its slightly chipped paint. The boy was upstairs, dreaming. Not the nightmares of the traumatized, just shards of the day cycling through his unconscious. Jim Kirk psychically bleeding two and a half metres from where Spock stood.

"Is someone there?" Raw voice. Jim didn't sound like he actually believed anyone was, but the human-animal fear of the dark was present even in a trained Starfleet officer.

//yes can you hear me//

"Who's there?" More harshly. Soft feet padded across the interior floor, and he could hear fingers brush at a light panel before Jim apparently decided against further illumination. Then fumbling with a lock and the interior door opened, leaving only the screen between them.

Jim walked like he hurt. He was shirtless, and Spock's skin momentarily crawled at the idea of nakedness in the chill before he reminded himself that for humans this would be a warm night. "Who's there?"

"Captain." He moved a little out of the shadow so that Jim could see his profile at least.

"Spock. Is something wrong?" Tiredly. He wondered how long it had been since the man had slept decently.

"Almost certainly. However, there is no crisis you need to attend to at present." He stayed where he was, watching the man behind the screen. After a moment, Kirk retrieved something from the kitchen and stepped outside. His bathrobe. He wrapped it around his shoulders but didn't put it on properly, and he was still barefoot.

Silence between them while a small wind shifted the tree branches against one another.

"Spock, why are you here?" Kirk said finally.

"Would you prefer the philosophical answer or the simple one?"

A snort. "I don't think I can resist. The philosophic one."

"Suffering increases entropy and speeds the heat death of the universe."

"Surak. I know that one. I think I'm going to need the simple version, though."

Pause. "I wish to ease your unhappiness, if I am able. Because you are my friend." Reflecting into the silence his irritation with the limits of the Standard language.

Bitterly, Jim said, "McCoy called three times yesterday. I wouldn't talk to him. What makes you think I'll talk to you?"

"Because I will not require you to speak at all."

A longer silence this time. Spock left his presence open so that even Jim's human-psi mind could sense it if he so chose. Finally, "Did you drive here?"

"I did."

"Fine. Wait while I get my shoes."





Spock reflected that the first hard rain in that country must be something people dreamed of. Even now, what colours he could see were made more vivid by the humidity. Water shimmering in the air around him. When Kirk came out, shod and shirted but still naked-seeming, Spock had offered him the keys, but he had declined, settled rather into the passenger's seat and stayed there. He didn't speak until the lights of a fuelling station appeared, and then he only asked Spock to pull in.

Spock waited in the driver's seat while Kirk went in. When the man came out again, he had a cup of coffee cradled against his chest like a wounded animal. Spock noticed how the other humans in the parking lot didn't look at him. Avoidance, he supposed. The superstitious need not to see grief lest it attach itself to them. But he couldn't have looked away if he'd tried. The man in his running lights was perfectly golden, graceful even in his suffering. Aesthetically pleasing, but also . . . kyat, manifestly existent, far too there to ever be ignored.

He kept driving, awaited an expression of Kirk's wishes. Only once he tried to withdraw back behind his psychic shields, but the other man reached out for him immediately. A hand on his wrist, but he recognized it as the physical representation of what Jim could not yet accomplish mentally. And he had conceded, stayed open, encompassing them both.

Finally, he gave up on a response from his companion and simply pulled over. There was light on the eastern horizon; he could feel it touching the back of his neck. If he had had a greater knowledge of the terrain, he would have chosen somewhere near deep water, but he knew of none. There were only miles of ploughed fields and pasture. The wind coming over them was surprisingly sharp. He leaned into it for a long moment after he got up. Turned only after that to spot Kirk making his way to sit under one of the few trees.

When Spock joined him, Kirk said, "If you mention Sam, even once, I'm going to walk away and leave you."

"Illogical, Jim. You are fifty-two kilometres from home"

"You think I won't?"

"I believe you would. If only because I know you to be impossibly stubborn. But I understand your request, and I will not."

"Thanks."

He sat. Beside him, Jim squirmed occasionally as if he were uncomfortably living in his own skin. Quietly, "You know, I can't sleep? Peter goes to sleep and has nightmares, but I can't sleep at all. I just feel tired and numb and raw. I hadn't seen Sam in years; I don't know why this hurts so much." Pause. "This doesn't even mean anything to you, does it? Emotion is just . . ." Another pause. "You shouldn't have to put up with this. I'm upset and you're letting me take it out on you."

"I believe I gave you permission to do so."

"Gave me . . ." Kirk twisted to stare at him. "Oh god, you're joking aren't you."

"Jim." Reproachful. And he was teasing, though he would deny it. Because Jim was at his most vibrant when he was provoked.

"You are, and I'll never be able to prove it. Who'd believe me? I'll tell Bones, and he'll say, Yes, Jim, and then he'll pump me full of drugs and ship me to the funny farm and I'll spend the rest of my life making bead-pictures and playing Bingo." Kirk hissed in frustration and thumped his back against the tree.

"It would be a waste of a fine officer," Spock said.

"Don't do that." Pause. "Besides, what do you care? You think I'm crazy anyway."

"If I thought you were unbalanced, I would have dispatched a psychiatric team instead of a science officer."

"So I'm stubborn and emotional and illogical, but not crazy. Fantastic. Why do you put up with me?"

"Because you are my friend."

"You always stumble over that word when you say it. It's not dirty, you know. There doesn't even have to be emotion implicit in it, if you don't want."

Spock sighed, sorted his thoughts. The Federation Standard language was a marvel of precision and variety; each idea it expressed was carefully distinct. As a scientist, he delighted in it. Vulcan, for all its dispassion, had developed its scientific vocabulary during a cultural renaissance, and its terms were often composites of meaning and description that occasionally failed to provide clarity. In other things, though . . . it was his first language, and its semantics still laid the patterns for his thoughts.

Jim's hand rested beside Spock's knee, close enough that it was easy to pick up. Kirk didn't seem to notice, even when Spock began tracing the creases in his palm. Spock considered letting go, but nothing would be gained at this point by reserve. If he answered honestly, there would be little left for him to hide, in any case. He made the next stroke with two fingers, running along the back of the big hand, over the fingers and into the palm, around the wrist and back to meet the matching fingers on Kirk's hand. Delicacy of a kiss.

"In Vulcan," Spock said, "the word for friend is t'hy'la. It also means beloved. I have been unable to find any single word in Standard that carries both those meanings."

A long silence while the sun rose. Jim was still close beside his shoulder, a cool, underclothed presence. The hand still rested in his; their hands rested together on his thigh. He wondered whether Jim even recognized the significance of the touch Spock had offered. Human eroticism as he had studied it did not focus significantly on touch in non-erogenous zones; the man might have taken the gesture for simple comfort.

Kirk said, "Did you just say you love me?"

"Would you prefer the simple answer or the philosophical one?"

"Simple. I'm exhausted."

"Yes." And he could feel the man's delight expand into his open consciousness, honest and brilliant gold. A moment later, Jim had shifted his body over so that they were in almost full contact, and Jim's head was against his shoulder.

"Thank you." In his head //thank you thank you thankyouthankyouthankyou//. "We should go back. Are you alright to drive?"

Spock nodded. He could feel Jim's exhaustion bleeding, more immediate than pain. He had to help the man stand up, had to assist him to the car and settle him in the laid-back passenger's seat. Kirk was shivering, whether from cold or exhaustion Spock didn't know, but he stripped off his father's coat and wrapped it around the compact golden body, using one sleeve as a pillow for the sagging head.

And drove, watching the road with both eyes, stretching out a hand only occasionally to brush darkening hair off that forehead.





When he came back it was nightfall. Warmer tonight, darker. The cloud layer was close to the ground, insulating and raising the humidity even more. He lowered his shields again, but at first he could find no one. The boy was missing; his presence even in sleep had been aching, agonized without any layer of reason bandaging the wound. When he reached deeper, though, he could feel the muted gold that was Jim Kirk, drowsing but not asleep.

When Spock had taken the man home and put him to bed, it had been only an hour past dawn. Spock had gone back to his hotel afterward and slept as well, rolled into the semi-fetal ball that preserved his body heat in cold climates. He rested through two sleep cycles, long enough to pass through REM sleep several times, but there was little of his dreams that he could remember, only fragments of home and flashes of a too-human desire. By the time he surfaced, he was achingly hard, and it took long meditative minutes to bring his body under some semblance of control.

The physical reaction notwithstanding, he was surprised by his calm. At some point in the last twelve hours he'd reached a perfect, still place in which his motivations and his actions matched one another. If he was waiting on the porch now, it was only to gain a sense of the night, and of Jim's still-ragged aura just beyond the door.

"I know you're a pacifist, but if you keep lurking out there like a thief in the night, I'm going to get worried." Softly humourous. Jim had opened the door and leaned against its frame, one hand pressed to the screen's delicate wires.

"Good evening, Jim. I did not expect to find you alone."

"Mom took Peter to Stockholm. There's a counselling program there that's ready to take him." He straightened and opened the door, kept it propped open so that Spock had to brush that other body with his in order to step inside. "Thanks."

"For what?"

"For coming tonight. For coming last night. I got to sleep this morning for the first time in days." He half-reached for Spock, then apparently thought better of it and padded away. "It's good to have company."

If he hadn't been so mentally open, he wouldn't have been able to feel Jim reaching for him. The man was as low-psi as most humans, but he fought against that limitation as he did all others. As though by sheer will he could press beyond the limits of his mind.

Spock was in the kitchen, close behind the other man, when he saw Jim sway. Exhaustion, most likely, compounded by grief. He was not as strong as he pretended. Spock extended an arm and caught the barely rounded shoulders, let the weight rest against him. Across the touch,

//oh god why can I still feel him want just to be still want to stop hurting want my brother back curse you Sam why did you have to leave me//

flared, and Spock staggered for a moment before his training stepped in to buffer the emotional shockwave.

He found that he'd drawn the man close to him, wrapped his wool-clad arms around naked shoulders and stilled himself. How could Jim stand to be shirtless in this cold air? A singular sensation, though, cool human skin against the fabric of his clothes, Jim's face tearless against his shoulder.

He hadn't experienced this stillness in too many years. The interior life of an old house, the air currents swirling outside, the soft sounds of Jim's breath and heartbeat settled at the back of his mind, so that Spock was first aware of the silence surrounding them both. He could carry Jim upstairs, put him to bed, make him rest, but Jim would never forgive that affront to his dignity. Instead, he let Jim lead him. The other man had pulled back until only their fingers were still laced. Spock wondered if he should mention that to him this touch was more intimate than a kiss.

He followed Kirk up the stairs, stepped after him into the naked bedroom where he'd settled his friend the night before. He'd sat on that bed and listened to and felt the man fall asleep. Watched the expanding light through the sheet glass windows, studied faults in the glass created over the course of century or more in which it had flowed slowly downward.

Though it seemed inhumane to him tonight, the windows were both cracked open. When he bent over Kirk as the other man laid back on the bed, he could feel the cross-draft ruffle his hair. To Jim it probably felt good, but Spock was going to be cold if he left things as they were. For half a minute, he stood over the other man in the darkness, invisibly burying himself in the necessary warmth of his coat, then brushed a kiss across the human-cool forehead. Stood, walked to the windows, and closed them both.

He was aware suddenly of the blueness of the dark. Jim was prone, lying on his back, and his chest moved deliberately with each inhalation. Now, finally, he could take his coat off, lay it over the chair and toe off his shoes. Come to the bed and lie within arm's reach of this man. Kirk didn't turn towards him.

Long silence.

"When you first go into the desert," Spock said finally, "you discover that you need words your language does not supply."

Jim turned now to look at him, then twisted his hips and rolled onto his belly. Hiding or simply seeking comfort Spock couldn't tell.

"I'm sorry, it's not somewhere I've ever been." The words slightly muffled by the pillow against his cheek.

"Illogical to apologize. The desert will still be there when you arrive." He had wanted to say 'planet.' He was speaking already in terms of inevitability, but he was so sure that this man would eventually come to Vulcan. "You have never visited my homeworld."

"No."

"It is a planet of deserts, strung together by wells and sheltering only two oceans. I grew up without the presence of water. The air was very dry, a humidity of less than five percent on most days. We lived on the very edge of Shi'Kahr, where the desert extending to Gol begins." Jim had settled his face against the pillow. Both his arms wrapped almost protectively around it. Spock extended a hand and rested it on one bared shoulder blade. "When I was ten years old, I climbed one of the watchtowers at midday so I could feel the winds. They were cool, higher up, and smelled different." He stroked down slowly, keeping his hand just to the left of Kirk's spine.

"The towers date from before we were spacefaring. They were outposts. The city has grown immensely since. The towers are mud brick structures in the midst of low-density housing. At that distance from the city's core, dwellings are not arranged in any set pattern; rather, they are seated at aesthetic intervals." He circled, running first the heel of his palm, then the pads of his fingers over the pale skin. Rolled his hand over and began scratching gently. "There is no logical impasse in this. Space is not at a premium, and an orderly people do not require entirely regularized infrastructures."

He scratched Kirk's back and shoulders gently. His nails were trimmed short enough to prevent damage, and he knew that the sensation would soothe as thoroughly as a deep muscle rub without inflicting stress on the man's already-tired body.

"I climbed the tower in the early morning. So high up, the smells of cultivated plants and of domestic water vanish. The winds from the desert are marked by its peculiar scent. It fascinated me. I stayed there for hours, trying to identify its source." Tracing the muscle-lines of Jim's back. He sat up so that he could reach better. He could feel the bright-sharp sensation that Jim radiated back at him. "My father came looking for me in the early evening. I was not able to read him, then, but I do not think he was entirely displeased, though I had missed an entire day of lessons and left no notice of my whereabouts.

"Much later, I understood that the desert is a living element of my planet, and that what I was smelling was the desert's essence. No smell at all, simply a fragment of dry taste."

He couldn't make it clearer than that. Standard couldn't approach the concepts, and even Vulcan had no particular words for them. Odd that words to express emotions should be preserved while those needed to express sensory input shout not exist. That it would be easier to sing love across a lover's skin than to express the taste of that one's skin where his spine hollowed as he lay very still under a touch. He could meditate on this body for hours, reciting for himself the variations of gold in hair and skin and eyes, repeating the image of this sudden, uncharacteristic stillness.

Jim snaked a hand back and caught Spock's, pulled it forward to his lips. Kissed the fingers' pads, the blunt tips, the creases that marked his joints. Then cradled the captured hand in front of him and began the caress of a Vulcan kiss, and if Spock hadn't been sure whether the man had recognized the significance of the gesture the day before, there was no doubt that he did now. Breath-touch of skin and psychic questing, Jim's low-psi only a faint echo that Spock had to strain to hear.

//you're so beautiful didn't expect that why are you so kind to me?//

//. . .// He didn't have words for his reasons yet. He was only mute and aching with physical desire.

The same fingers that had kissed across his palm quested up his arm until they had enough of a grip to pull him down beside Jim's body. He stayed very still, watching, one hand still on that naked back. The eyes staring back at him were suddenly very much in the game. Vivid energy that snapped through Jim's body and into his own, brilliant delight at a worthy challenge.

He was going to remember this for the rest of his life. His stillness on the bed, clothed beside the half-naked human form, shattering hazel staring him down, and then he was kissed, tentatively, one hand curled up and behind his head and the other laying just under his cheek.

Coffee and human tears. Bright non-taste that was Jim Kirk underneath it.

He leaned forward, into that mouth, into the bare shoulder, stroked the strangely cool palate with the tip of his tongue. Rolled so that Jim was on his back and under Spock, attentive and flaring gold. If he would never have the opportunity to repeat this moment, he could at least extend it, stilling Kirk with a hand and drawing the kiss out gently. He was so close, so open, that Spock could hear echoes of the man's thoughts, bright torrent of sensation and emotion and a warm, expanding thing that he recognized as desire.

Jim's hands had risen to his shoulders, and they were pushing him back. In that moment, he was confused, but when he surrendered to the push, Jim followed him up, stayed kissing him, still pushing deeper and fighting to control both their breaths.

There were fingers at his waist, drawing his shirt up, and he was able to slip out of it gracefully enough. The trousers went less elegantly, and for an instant he was horribly cold, until the other body wrapped around him. Skin to skin after that, his heart under the curve of Jim Kirk's arm and Jim's a moth flutter under the cage of his ribs. He was hard, but perhaps he had never fully controlled the wave of desire he had woken on. Jim under him, fighting him, kissing him and twisting under him, rising to kiss the lids of his eyes.

"Oh god you were blind. I thought I'd lost you. I couldn't have taken that, not both of you so fast." Jim hadn't even been on the list of Spock's considerations when he'd been willing to trade his eyesight for the life of a planet, but shock ran through him now. Human waves of grief spiralling out from the golden body under his.

"I know." As much comfort as he could offer in those words. He had to cradle the man and calm him for long minutes. It gave him time to explore. Straight thighs, the hollow and flesh-rise of a hip, nerve-endings in the nipples that hardened under his touch. By the time Spock had a knee cradled in the crook of his elbow, Jim was very calm, only trembling a little from the sensation and radiating nothing more intense than his desire.

Then he could relax and rest his head on the man's belly. An instant or two there, breathing through the stiff hair that ran down to his groin, then he followed the line to Jim's erection and took it carefully into his mouth.

"Jesus." Long exhalation, some culturally remembered deity. Spock's attention was elsewhere, collecting the bright-sharp taste of precum and mapping the most sensitive places on the curved skin. Ran his tongue up the shaft and paused just under the head, then changed his angle and relaxed so Jim could thrust into his throat. "Yes, oh god, oh please don't stop."

//would never leave you in such a state//

"Thank you. Yesss . . ."

He had to be careful of his teeth, but it wasn't so difficult, and the right combination of touches brought his partner over, moaning and spurting down his throat. Stayed there, stroking Jim's belly and thighs until the penis in his mouth had softened, then stroked it apologetically with his lips and tongue before letting go. Crawled up close as soon as he could after that, because he was cold without the other man's body against him, and still desperately hard.

Jim Kirk was spread out on the bedspread like a thing come apart, but he reached blindly for Spock as soon as he was close. Cradled Vulcan hips between his thighs, kissed him softly.

Jim's hand pressed his, cold glass or synthetic container cupped in the palm. Spock found the cap's release by touch, let the lubricant pour over his fingertips. Stroked behind the other man's scrotum, down to the tiny hole, rubbed it gently. Pushed gently, then harder, for the first penetration. Tight. He had to move carefully; he could so easily damage the trust he had been offered. He stretched the muscle gently, kissed his way from sternum to navel as he waited for Jim to relax. Jim's mind already beating frantically against his as he rose from post-coital languor into a second arousal.

//yesss Spock please yes feels so good need you need you don't you dare leave me//

//shhh I know steady t'hy'la do you want this//

//!//

He almost laughed at that, restrained himself only because he could imagine his lover's shock at the sound. Instead, he curled both arms around the other man and rolled them until Jim's body was spooned in his, both of them facing the window. Amazing, that he could contain this beauty with just a touch. That he could bend and kiss Jim over his shoulder, their mouths just barely reaching. That their bodies should fit together like this, long planes matching each other. A leg held in the crook of his arm and he thrust in, harder than care would have dictated, but Jim only arched back against him, brilliant and ecstatic in the dark.

Later, he remembered the stillness of those minutes, a lovemaking accomplished by small shifts of weight and light touches rather than rhythmic coupling. The way Jim's hair brushed against his shoulder when the man arched back. He remembered curling his hips forward to sink as deeply as possible into Jim's body. Stroking him from shoulder to hip, then sliding the same hand over the thin skin where belly and thigh met. Breathy laughter that caught at the end. His fingers combed through the stiff hair, stroked down behind Jim's cock to trace each testicle in its sac. Behind that to where they were joined, where his touch made both of them gasp and arch.

Stroking Jim finally to orgasm, letting him shake in a still embrace, then rocking harder into him, two thrusts, three, and coming wordlessly, his face pressed tightly into Jim's hair. Bright

//pleasure joy brilliantlight Jim//

//yes love you//

Afterward, he remembered the stillness in the room. Even Jim's breath was almost perfectly silent. Both of them curled like that on the bed, gradually chilling until Spock reached blindly and found a blanket to wrap around them. Bare legs still tangled and exposed to the room. Jim Kirk against his chest, human as a caged moth. One hand stretched behind him to caress Spock's face and then reach around under the hairline to trace the contours of his skull.





Cold woke him. The room had chilled overnight, and he was sleeping alone. He reached psychically first, then with his eyes, for his captain. Not far, but dressed again. The same jeans, and Spock's coat wrapped around his bare shoulders, sitting backwards on a chair and staring out the window at the rising light. When he noticed Spock looking for him, Kirk nodded and extended an arm, but let it drop when the other man didn't immediately accept.

"Jim."

"I'm OK. I just thought I'd feel better, for some reason."

It was still there, of course. Raw edges of grief spilling out from an unshielded mind. He'd eased that only a little, and only through deep physical distraction. The floor under his feet was cold, but he resisted the instinctive urge to dress, or even wrap himself against the chill. He crossed the room and rolled to his knees in front of the other man. Reached up and traced a brow. Jim caught the finger and kissed it, then stroked it with two matching ones, but he didn't smile.

Grief as an emotion was not quite beyond Spock, but it had taken him a long time to grasp the human experience of raw absence that was its source. He was thinking of the taste of the desert and the long, flat run to Gol in spite of the brilliant humidity of the Terran day.

"Jim, will you trust me?"

"You know I do, Spock. Why? What is it?" Sudden spike of curiosity in both presence and voice.

He stood and offered a hand to his new lover. Stood very still while Jim rose, then drew the man to him so that they stood back to front before of the window, Jim in denim against Spock's bare skin. He could see the tiny prismatic effects of the window glass as they struck that skin.

It wasn't something he even had to reach for. He needed the long seconds more to be sure he actually wanted to share this. He stretched out psychically, then, as he wrapped an arm around the body in front of him and pressed fingertips to Jim's face.

//can you feel me//

//yes Spockwhat//

// . . . // Opened himself to the distant hugeness that was one of his language's most primitive words, and let the awareness of its being bleed over to Jim.

//oh god what//

//a'Tha// Immanence, existence of something unspeakably ancient that was yet not what humans would call God.

He stilled himself, opened again. Reached for the swelling human energy that he could always feel on Earth and that he had gradually understood as the lingering low-psychic presence of the dead.

// . . . //

"Sam . . ."

He had no words for this at all, but he could feel Kirk's joy expanding. And he could remember the first time he'd touched it. How he'd lost a friend in his Academy days and then been able to reach out and still feel them in the sunlight. Even then, he hadn't been as young as the man he was holding, and even when he had been that young, he'd never allowed himself that kind of ecstatic wonder.

He eased them back slowly, opened his eyes to brilliant light touching Kirk's face and his by proxy.

"Oh god, Spock. Thank you."

Kirk's skin against his was cool, but not uncomfortable in the sun's focussed warmth. The raw edges of Jim's grief were easing, slowly, but Spock was surprised at the extent to which they had bled over to his own mind. He was past being careful, running entirely on trust and the collection of thoughts that was as close to the human idea of love as he dared approach. So beautiful, this man he was holding. The human fragments of him screamed to be afraid. He was already too close. It would be so easy for this man to take him completely apart.