personality is the product of a clash between two opposing forces

[perform_admirably]

Three days of Hell on Earth - and somehow the hours of the morning after the world is calm again have moved Spock to more frustration than any of it. The insistence of his memory to forget between one day and the next that 'computer, lights on' does not function nearly as well without a computer. The insistence of the building's boiler to always run out of hot water during the very middle of his shower, despite an intentional variance of 0.15 hours every day since arriving in order to determine the best time to schedule it for the early morning. Running out of food and having no great desire to steal more knowing that he has no intentions - out of a lack of present ability - to replace what he takes.

Most would be happy to be alive. Spock finds it easier to be annoyed in very small ways, rather than elated in large ones. Easier to let what concerns him be flat, normal, sterile. To be neither angry about what's happened nor relieved for what can continue.

Flat, normal, sterile boredom draws him down the stairwell and into Jim Kirk's building at no later than eight in the morning, knocking sharply at the door with his knuckles. He waits. The other man is in there, and when Spock knocks, he expects an answer, with the same stubbornness of a child. So he waits.

"Captain," he says, only once.

His sling, a write-off after the anomaly, no longer supports the cast on his nearly-healed arm. In his hand, he grips a box, found incidentally at an antiques shop nearly a week ago during a search for a piercing saw. A wooden tangram puzzle.

It doesn't occur to him that Jim Kirk might not be in any mood for a puzzle.

Comments

[perform_admirably]

Kirk's last words deflate Spock as quickly and efficiently as a needle, drawing him so abruptly into cruel self-awareness that his own cup falls out of his grip. Seamlessly snatched back out of the air after half a second's drop, but enough that the water slips over the side to wet Spock's scraped and scabbed knuckles.

Knowing that Jim Kirk has been inside Ambassador Spock's head should have no bearing on anything - He is being entirely selfish, entirely self-absorbed. Entirely human. And to catch himself thinking this way, acting this way ... he feels robbed of privacy and embarrassed, this is why he had come to make Kirk explain. Spock feels his own privacy has been stepped over, but Spock is Vulcan. He can scarcely imagine what Jim Kirk, in turn, must think and feel about the situation that they've been entered into.

No more of this.

"No, I shame myself," Spock murmurs. "I would apologize, Captain, but one cannot apologize for something so fundamental. I am simply at a loss as to how to comprehend that person, who is myself, but a myself which does not agree with my self-conceptions. A decorous mean between respect and intimacy. Gravity and playfulness. That is not who I determined myself to be. That is not who I desire to be. I cannot comprehend becoming that person. Yet he is 'here' and so I find myself placing myself under his shadow as I have been ever under the shadow of different expectation."

[to_boldly]

"Spock." Jim had started forward for the first splash from the cup, but he stills, attentive, almost deferential for the torrent of what follows from Spock's mouth.

"Spock," he says again, quiet when the other man falls silent. "Look, I can't imagine what it's like to be you, the rigid culture you grew up in, and god knows you have every good reason in the world to want to uphold that." To be those expectations, when so few Vulcans are left to try. "But you don't have to be any of it. Not your dad or your elders, and least of all that other Spock. I've been running in the face of expectation my whole life, believe me when I say, you're going to be happier picking your own destiny. Whether it's what you started out wanting, or where your older self ended up. But Spock."

Jim shrugs. "He wasn't a bad guy, either. There's nothing wrong with either of you."

[perform_admirably]

Spock breathes. A moment ago, under the sudden, flaring, visceral anger of the man across from him, he'd been small, fearful, proud. Now that Kirk's anger has drained, for whatever reason, Spock is once again silently awed and respectful of Jim Kirk. He would never have said so aloud, scarcely really could even form ideas about why it was that Jim moved him. But there was a sweet innocence to an otherwise rough man, who was human, who not only could be happy or angry, but could be not only happy or angry - who was, in his very nature, being able to be both broken and whole at the same time.

It clicks. It clicks because it is the very same thing about the Ambassador - who was one and the same and yet unique, who shared the same origin, who shared the same door, who shared a mother - that Spock found himself silently respectful of.

Spock leans his weight backward against the counter-top at his hips, losing the parade-stiff shoulders. Just the two of them, behind a door, the rest of the world without. Spock blinks again, searching across the room for Jim's blue eyes. "Picking my own destiny ... I hear this often lately. But I don't understand ... I cannot, will not, abandon the philosophy, no matter what I might gain, individually. The philosophy exists for a reason. It is beneficial." It is logical.

"He was very ... human."

[to_boldly]

"Well," says Jim, marshaling a small smile. "I hear his best friend was a bad influence. C'mon." Stepping forward, he collects the cup from Spock's hands, fills it with fresh water and puts it into the microwave.

"You don't have to abandon anything," he says over the machine's hum. "You're young, right? Especially for a Vulcan. You have your whole life to decide who you want to be, and I'm not going to hold some other version of you against you. We don't pick our family, but we pick our friends, don't we?"

The microwave dings, and Jim pulls out the cup, plops a tea bag into its depths. "And a captain picks his crew. Don't get me wrong - I'm intrigued by what the other Spock told me, but you're the one I terrorized into joining my crew. So if you think I want something distinctly Vulcan from you, I don't. Hell, I don't even know what that means, half the time. I want...a First Officer with balls enough to write an unbeatable test. Who'd fly a ship into the heart of the Narada on the chance that it could save a planet."

[perform_admirably]

Though he traces Jim back and forth across the room with dark eyes beneath heavy lids, quietude returns to Spock, who stands silent until Jim is finished, running the tips of his fingers across the curve of his bottom lip. Many thoughts, or perhaps none at all, the expression gives no clues in return for the little, warm smile.

"What it means? Something Vulcan. To compose ourselves is our duty, and to win, not battles but order and tranquility. To serve appropriately in the place which we are best able to serve, which is where our gifts and qualities find the most fertile soil to grow responsibly. I require something Vulcan of myself, Captain."

Setting the scanner finally down on the counter beside himself, he holds out his arm to accept Kirk's cup from him again, lifts his head up from where it's been slouched forward. Meeting Kirk's eye again, oddly galvanized. "What you require is a First Officer ... who no longer believes in a no-win scenario." Or, perhaps, only that he should not be afraid of one.

Spock quiets again, as if suddenly looking at the man apart from him as a man, not so apart from him after all. "How bad is your pain?"

[to_boldly]

"It's fine, Spock," says Jim, settling the cup of tea in front of him. "Trust me, I've had worse wounds than from a poor man's sword happy Minotaur."

He seats himself at the little table with which his apartment had been furnished. "Look. Be what you need to be, Spock. It's probably the crazy human in me, but I trust you. Whatever the right choice is, I think you'll make it. So."

Jim steeples his fingers around his own cup. "You want to talk about the meld? Maybe without acting like I peed in your early morning protein flakes this time?"

[perform_admirably]

"Colorful, as usual." Spock takes his own cup in one hand and holds it up to his face, letting the humid steam clear into his sinuses as he peers at the other man across the lip. A man who calls him friend. His friend.

Though he is not sure just yet that he would be able to speak the word. He could keep attempting. Indefinitely.

"Talk about it?" Delicate brows raise slightly. There is a light that comes to his face, however small and tremulous, a sort of defiance he's worn only rarely. This time he wears it not against the world, but for his friend. For Jim Kirk. "Language is one more layer of symbolism in a system of communication which is essentially fallible. It is error-prone. If I said that you could always show me, it might be the logical decision."

[to_boldly]

"That's kind of what he said," says Jim, leaning back with an expression that isn't quite wary, so much as it is...not as open. As much as he'd opened himself to the meld at the time, he hadn't chosen it. It had merely happened, and through the necessity he could feel bleeding through all points of the bond, Jim had let it.

"I guess it's...a way for your people to share an experience," Jim ventures. "Not a recollection of it, but the actual experience."

[perform_admirably]

'That's kind of what he said' ought to be surprising to Spock, after what he's admitted about feeling under the shadow of his own strange older iteration. Perhaps it's the inherent truth of it that leaves him ... positively unsurprised to hear Jim say as much.

Immediately, Spock cuts in with a very plain, "It would make me a liar if I were to say that a part of me didn't want to share that experience with you. In a way, I consider it as belonging to me as well. Which is not a very charitable way of thinking." He holds up a quick hand. "It does not. And there are times when, foolishly, it does not occur to me that you know so little, that I have allowed you to know so little, I ... "

Pausing, lengthy, Spock tilts the cup to his lips. He finds his words. "Did not intend to make you uncomfortable, but I wish to make it obvious. I am trying to get to know you, Jim. And over time, I would like for you to get to know more of me ... as well."

The look that Spock levies on him this time desires to make it just as obvious - Jim Kirk has found himself in the position of a privileged person. That this conversation is meant for him alone, would not be occurring outside this small apartment. That he wants more than a superior officer out of this person and has determined not to be ashamed of what is more than simply a weak-minded, sentimental whim.

[to_boldly]

"You'll get to know me, Spock," says Jim with a sip from his cup. "It's kind of inevitable, I am, as you and others have said." He smiles. "Colorful. I assume that's a nice way of saying flexibly raised. But look."

Leaning back in his chair, Jim spreads his hands. "I want to know whatever about you you want me to know. I think you're interesting. Fascinating, as you might say, and I don't get you even half the time." Jim shrugs, artless and wincing immediately after for his bruises. "I just think you might make me better."

[perform_admirably]

"Your attitude is seldom parochial, this is very true." Kirk earns a particular half-twitch of an eyebrow which is quickly becoming devoted to the fondly dry commentary that the man inspires. Spock is half caught-up in his own concerns even as he slips the joke in. Sentimentality was a basking in ideals that in reality one did not take seriously enough to make the slightest sacrifice to or ever translate into action.

He had done both. For Nyota. For Jim. And for his mother, he had hunted Nero down behind this man he speaks with now as a friend. If he must have feelings at all ... he has damned well earned these ones.

"All that I want you to know for the moment is that you are not required to 'get' me to keep me. I, for one, appreciate that you have no use for starry-eyed sycophantic group-think. It provides me very excellent job security."

[to_boldly]

"No," Jim agrees with a chuckle, no he would not accuse Spock of group think, propensity towards mindmelding aside. And as much as he'd like to set the other man's mind at ease on that point, when it comes to sharing the experience in that way, Jim will steadfastly refuse. Emotional transference is one thing - reliving the destruction of one's home planet through their eyes, feeling that old heart break as surely as if it'd been lodged in his own side - Jim's not doing that again. And what's more, he's not inflicting it on Spock, either. Once is surely enough to experience that kind of devastation.

Jim shifts, taking another drink from his cup as he tries to think of something else. "How's the arm?"

[perform_admirably]

The chuckle pleases Spock, expression warming half a degree again to something more at-ease. There is not much that separates this face from the face of a moment ago. There rarely is, though Kirk seems to be able to scrape meaning enough from Spock's stares to hold a lengthy conversation.

He doesn't know what it is that Kirk lived through on Delta-Vega. Only that Kirk's roundabout answer is no. And the subject is ultimately ... inessential. With that between them, Spock drops the topic most permanently. Wheedling is simply not who Spock is. Fruitless, desperate is not who Spock is.

"Healing," he says, sedate. "I believe I will find the doctor and request that he remove the cast after the end of this next week." Which will no doubt cause an argument, but Spock uses his words very precisely, and request to Spock is a little more imperative than it might be to others. He wants the cast off already, regardless of McCoy's medical opinion.

"Speaking of injuries." He raises his cup slightly to Jim. "You shared an aphorism of your mother's with me. My own mother used to say something along the lines of, 'one could get clean in a teacup if one had to.'" A polite reminder that Jim still needs his morning hygiene. "I also came here to discuss some new ideas that I have concerning the greater situation. And to ask you ... if you would be amenable to participating in a game with me."

[to_boldly]

Jim's face is thoroughly buried in one hand by the time Spock stops speaking. "Okay," he says, pushing back his chair. "I am going to take a quick shower before your nose and my feelings start fighting over who's the more offended. You stay here. Drink your tea."

Without waiting for argument, Jim departs back through his bedroom door, shedding his shirt as he goes. He hardly waits at all for the water to get hot, eager to find out what this game might be, and, he realizes, standing under the spray, to hear Spock's new ideas. Rinsing the soap away, he makes a half-assed attempt at his hair before giving up, steps out of the shower and redresses with as much haste as his aching body will allow.

"Tip," says Jim when he reenters the kitchen, picking up the conversation as though whole minutes haven't passed. "Don't make this suggestion to Bones in a room with anything throwable. He has startling accuracy for a man who's never taken a marksmanship course."

[perform_admirably]

Spock gives a small shrug as Jim stands to leave, doing what he's told. "I had planned to stay here and to drink my tea," he follows after Jim.

And he does. So that when the man comes back out, Spock has an empty cup, a bored expression, a partially-dismantled Keurig, and a pair of hands steepled thoughtfully on Jim Kirk's small kitchen table. He does not look up at the sound of Kirk's voice, having heard the sounds of the shower turning off and busy shuffling from across the apartment.

"Point of fact: The Human benchmark median reaction time is 215 milliseconds. The Vulcan benchmark median reaction time is 120 milliseconds. Make inferences."

Spock for: Bones wishes.

[to_boldly]

Between Spock's commentary and the dismembered coffeemaker Jim was most certainly not done using, he swiftly resolves to be there when Bones loses it and hypos the Vulcan unconscious.

"Unless you plan on making that thing more efficient," he says, pointing at the Keurig, "I'm going to need you to put that back together. I need at least four cups before noon, and caffeine withdrawal is an ugly process." He smiles sweetly. "Make inferences."

[perform_admirably]

"There is still half a carafe of coffee left. There's no need to become distressed." The brow twitches again. But Spock makes his inferences from that saccharine expression on the other man's full lips. The sort of inferences that suggest an apology, even if he might not otherwise. "I was concerned that it might not have a filter. I'll put it back together - sit down, have more if you supposedly need it."


There is a pause just short enough to seem unforgiving. "My present belief is that we may be trapped in some form of generated warp bubble, by means, technological or otherwise, vastly different in theory and practice than our own, and of deeply concerning lack of ethic. Nevertheless, you may want to approach your equations from such a hypothetical standpoint and see what yields."

[to_boldly]

"A warp bubble travelling not only through spacetime, but through all possible versions of spacetime," says Jim, morbidly impressed at the scale of that, should it prove true.

It's enough to distract him from his insufficiently caffeinated headache, at least until Jim spies the pot Spock has so helpfully pointed out. He pours another cup and returns to the table. "You know the amount of energy it takes to power a single warp drive. How rare the dilithium crystals are that make regulating that much electromagnetic radiation possible." Jim's expression darkens as his thoughts move from science to conjecture. "What the hell could be powerful enough to sustain a warp bubble for this long, with enough...finesse to bring select people into it at will?"

Gingerly, Jim tests the stretch of his arm against the bruises pulling tight across his shoulders. "What could layer another nightmarish reality on top of the first one so seamlessly, then poof it away again just as fast?"

[perform_admirably]

"We both understand the relation between matter and energy, Captain. An object at once traveling through infinite time and space would require infinite energy." It was, of course, one of the major restrictions of the top reaches of faster-than-light travel. On this scale, conjecture is all that they have. Rather than suggest an answer to Jim's question, Spock stays pointedly silent. The answer, of course, is nothing, but as they are observably here in reality, the answer is not nothing.

"Would you give me your arm? You will need it to play. If something isn't done, you won't stop complaining, and complaining is not a very efficient way to enjoy recreation." And although Spock is the one to make the request, he reaches his good arm slightly forward, hesitant, practically nervous. On Vulcan, it might be a business-like matter of course, part of their medicine, what Spock intends to do. This is not Vulcan - it is Jim's kitchen.

[to_boldly]

"You don't know I'll complain," mutters Jim, even though he certainly will. And though he trusts Spock, he's seen the levels of pain Spock deems acceptable, which makes him wary of what lengths the man will go to in the name of medicine.

"You even think the words 'my mind to your mind' and I'm punching you in the face," he says, lips quirked as he extends his arm.

[perform_admirably]

"Honestly." The look that he slides Jim is bone-dry but just as patient. He takes the extended arm awkwardly in his own which still wears the bulky cast, turning it over to examine first the lines of blue veins on the softer, thinner skin on the inside, and then the shape of Jim's rough elbow. The skin smells clean now, at the very least - sweet and oily soap, whatever kind it is that Jim's using. Not relevant, really, is it.

"People on your planet have been doing this for at least four thousand years, your surprise is appreciated but entirely unnecessary. No need to squirm. The principle is counter-irritation and it is not 'new' and very effective. If we keep your mind busy with something else, the discomfort is no longer prioritized." Even as he says it, his eyes now narrow, and he stops avoiding an actual touch to run the fingers of his free hands over the other man's wrist, down the inside of his arm, to the elbow, and back to the inside again with a professional touch that straddles a line between acupuncture and phlebotomy. Spock's brow darts: he's found what he's looking for with inhuman sensitivity, a cluster of nerves. Which he gives a sharp pinch.

And then he gives a very, very tiny gasp of surprise. "I suppose it's my planet as well."

[to_boldly]

Jim's skin tingles before Spock ever touches it, some form of anticipation running up Jim's spine and along his nerves. For a moment, he almost wants to take his arm back, but then he identifies the urge as shyness of all things, and promptly crushes it.

His mouth is just open to speak and distract himself when he feels another sensation coming on, one Jim can't as readily identify. Soap. Not in his nose, but almost, the smell rising from his own skin too faint to take notice of, yet his awareness of it grows all the same. Dimly, Jim is aware that Spock is speaking, but he can't concentrate, chasing that odd thread of secondary awareness towards its source, heart picking up speed as he begins to think that it isn't his awareness at all, that it's actually -

Spock pinches, and Jim jolts upright in his chair, tingles that are most certainly centered in his own skin spiraling out from the pinch like a strike to his funny bone. "Fuck," he gasps quietly. "This is better?"

[perform_admirably]

There is a reason that Vulcans are as adept as they are at finding and controlling body responses, not simply knowledge, not simply sensitivity, but of course, as Spock has kindly omitted, a very shallow sense of what the other person is experiencing. Feeling where the nerves are, not finding where the nerves are.

It should, however, be entirely one-sided. Yet Spock feels an oddness somewhere in the middle of his chest. Jim's heart-beat, because, of course, Spock's heart is not there. He ignores the lapse brutally, almost a little too brutally, and presses the flat of the side of his palm against Jim's inner elbow before bending his forearm upward, to test flexion. Then he takes his hands away completely, business-like, and leans back stiffly in his chair.

Of course he does not regret having done what he can for the discomfort Jim is in. The problem with regret was that it was highly illogical. Because, of course, at one time whatever it was that one was regretting had been exactly what they'd wanted to do.

Spock blinks, ignoring the hairs standing on end on one of his own arms. "Normatively. Yes. This is better. Give it a moment. I brought a tangram puzzle set. It is a dissection puzzle popular on Earth. The objective is to form a specific shape given an outline, using all seven pieces, which may not overlap. You'll find it's quite simple, but oddly rewarding. A good exercise for relaxation after the events of the past three days. I presumed you would not be leaving your domicile today, and so ... "

Spock has come to keep him company. Strangely hard to admit.

[to_boldly]

Spock releases him as if burned, yet Jim can't find it in him to be offended, too distracted by the sparks in his arm. They're already already neutralizing in favor of a numbness that he can already feel extending upwards, dulling the ache in his upper body to a degree that's very nearly blissful given what came before.

"Huh," Jim grunts, flexing his hand. "So you came to cure my bruises and my boredom." He smiles over the table. "Thanks, Spock. Probably be good to get out of my head for a while." Out of his head, and out of the endless, frustrated loop of trying to figure out what had happened in the last few days, and whose face Jim had to phaser off to prevent it ever happening again.

[perform_admirably]

There is no way that the other man hasn't noticed what Spock has, and that he has chosen not to comment is curiously relieving, whether or not it's intentional on Jim's part, or simply an incidental of the conversation. Spock is still grateful - he had intended a mind-probe, and not anything approaching such an open experience. Now that things are drifting somewhere more mundane, toward the game Spock towed over, he leans back against the chair a little less stiffly.

His eyes flutter to the ceiling for a moment before he leans forward again, crossing his arms across his chest and folding one leg over the other at the knees. "Thank you, Captain. In a manner of speaking, yes. As your First Officer, is it not my responsibility to see to the management of day-to-day activities, such as maintenance and logistics? As there is no ship to take responsibility for, these definitions become rather more narrowed. Your maintenance." Spock uses the blink again, the one that signifies the end of something and the beginning of something else where facial expression is absent.

"I normally play with a rather strict timer. However, I would not want to discourage you, should you be unfamiliar with the game's form. If you find it disagreeable, my scanner is sitting on your counter-top, should you decide you would do something more immediately productive."