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]

"That's what I said." Spock, fitting of black plastic and new metal already in one hand, gives him a momentarily confused look, before pointing with the piece of the coffee pot to the stack of yellowing paper found at the bottom of the frame that the seven pieces were sitting in.

"Unless you're planning on playing with extrasensory projection, there are templates on those, about two hundred of them, to be matched exactly. It should take an experienced, skillful player about twenty seconds to complete an unfamiliar puzzle. I typically give myself eight. The game won't take long; that's why I brought the scanner."

Because, apparently, Spock plans on spending the entire day in this apartment. He has not considered the possible consequences of this. The only Human other than Kirk that he's spent a great deal of time with, recreational time, was Nyota Uhura. And that relationship had moved quite beyond dissection puzzles.

[to_boldly]

Digging out the paper, Jim studies it, eyes passing swiftly over each design. Truth be told, for a man who grew up putting engines back together, frequently using parts whose origins were not vehicular, it seems like a bit of a cakewalk.

Selecting one of the harder ones just to be an ass, Jim sets himself to assembling the shape, forming it in his mind in less than three seconds, with his hands in less than ten. "Does this come in three dimensions?" he wonders, even as a secondary part of his brain considers the rest of what Spock has said.

Truth be told, Jim is dying to get back to his scanner, ready to reprogram it with all the ferocity he possesses to find some clue regarding their imprisonment in this world, but...he also wants to beat Spock's game. "Which one did you do fastest?"

[perform_admirably]

The first look that Jim receives is - however brief - legitimately impressed by the performance. Spock expects Kirk to be good, but not quite so close to as good as he is. Which is, he realizes immediately, a terribly patronizing opinion to have. He discards it for the next time - he'll make a better selection. Jim Kirk is making good on his threat, the logical conclusion of what Spock is watching.

There is still a lingering of surprise in his voice when he says, "I'm aware that it is your right to ask questions to which you already know the answer. If only you exercised it less often. No, this does not come in three dimensions in this exact iteration. Not in the apparent century. I simply picked it up when I was searching for something else. I don't remember which was the fastest. It was a game that I played as a very young child. You're aware already, of course. My mother was a schoolteacher from Earth."

And, as if in admitting this he's somehow tired himself out from conversation, he goes quietly back to the remaining bits of the coffee machine.

"Bringing it was whim. I should have known better."

[to_boldly]

"I do one puzzle right and you should have known better?" asks Jim, frowning at him over the completed puzzle. "Wait, you brought me a game you played as a kid, and now you're unhappy with - "

Jim stops abruptly, confused, and irritated with himself for being so. "Is the reason you guys share thoughts because you're so damn hard to read, otherwise?"

[perform_admirably]

There is a quick flutter of blinks. Spock finishes with the coffee machine, replaces it on the counter, picking up the scanner on his way there. Which, stony-faced, he holds out toward Jim.

"I should have kept my conversation to professional subjects." He should have known better. Why hadn't Spock known better? Why is Jim so bothered? "It would have been the fruitful and natural choice. You are my Captain. My apologies. At present, I think it becomes disgracefully obvious that my thinking is disordered and my motives for coming here, unclear. If this frustrates you, I could leave."

But he doesn't want to.

Which is ... fascinating.

[to_boldly]

"You told me why you came here," Jim replies, and maybe it's his own loneliness, the lack of control over their situation that he tries beating back every day only to fail again and again, maybe it's the fact that the man in front of him is one of only two he actually knows, and he only came here to, to...Jim's mouth bitterly shapes the word. "To manage me. I don't care if the conversation strays to the non-professional, okay? I'd...fucking welcome it, there's - " Jim sighs. "There's more to life than our work, isn't there?"

[perform_admirably]

"I was processing internal and external stressors by concealing my true motivations for my actions through the elaboration of reassuring and self-serving but ultimately incorrect explanations. I was ... rationalizing. This was subconscious and I was not immediately aware of it." Still holding the scanner out between the two of them like a shield in place of the suit of cold armor, Spock's face grows grim, strangely green.

He coughs, thick, like there's something caught in his throat. "I came here because I felt lonely."

[to_boldly]

As usual, there's as much to decipher in what Spock's not saying as what he is, and it's only Jim's particularly determined brand of stubbornness that carries him through to the other side.

"Spock," his says, voice gentling somewhat, "Come sit down. I get this kind of conversation makes you uncomfortable, but I kind of think I have that effect on you in general, so I'm just going to go with it." And yet, as soon as he's begun, Jim pauses. Aboard ship things had been different - they'd had so many duties to distract them, by the time they came together each day as Captain and First Officer, it had felt necessary. Natural. Jim doesn't want to force things, but he'd be lying if he said he didn't miss that, nor miss the friendship he could swear they'd been slowly evolving towards.

"Do you always secondguess you're this much?" he asks. "Or is it just this place? Our...unique situation here."

[perform_admirably]

When Jim says sit, Spock sits, dropping a sturdy Vulcan frame into the chair with a scrape and staring across the table at the other man as he speaks, stiff-shouldered. Yes, this kind of conversation makes Spock uncomfortable. He would rather be beaten with a large stick.

"You make me uncomfortable because I don't understand my preference for you outside of my responsibilities." Aboard ship, things had been different. After working, if Spock hadn't picked up an extra back-half or front-half of an under-staffed shift, he spent his time with the group in the rec room. When he ate, he took his meals with the group. When he desired intimacy, Nyota found him. That he found himself still searching for that was strange, and that he found himself seeking out James T. Kirk when he was searching was uncomfortable. Because it didn't make sense.

"But I don't normally suffer from post-decisional regret, no. Therefore I must assume that it is a result of some unique combination of factors. I agree with what you're suggesting, but have no solution to offer you. I offer my apologies." It's beginning to sound very much like the conversation on the beach. Circular. Spock has no desire to be involved in circular anything.

The obvious answer is to turn it into a spiral. "Just because I don't understand doesn't mean that it isn't true."

[to_boldly]

Jim's not sure he's ever felt guilty before for another person enjoying his company, but given Spock's phrasing, he almost wonders if he should.

"I don't think it's as complicated as you're trying to make it, Spock," he says. "I know you've spent time with other people, other humans, even, outside of your responsibilities. Why do I have to be different?"

[perform_admirably]

"Jim," Spock says. He can count the number of times that he's used the man's given name on the fingers of both hands, still. Setting what's in his hands down on the table, he leans forward from the tightness of before. He doesn't become warmer or even more attentive, but different. "That's what I just said. Why are you different? It's clearly not as complicated as I'm trying to make it. If you're asking me for an answer, I will try to give you one. You may not be satisfied with it. I have decided ... within the last forty-seven seconds, that I am."

Because the alternatives make less sense than acceptance.

"You say ... I make you better. He says ... we need each other. Why are you different? Because you are you. Because I am I. Because I have not shared with those other people the experiences that I have shared with you. The question that I am amiss in not bothering to ask myself until now is ... "

The marker of a question ought to be curiosity, but there is a thread of confident acceptance, instead, in Spock's voice. The entire conversation within Spock's mind between whatever selves he may be keeping in there very well may have been as easily summed up as, 'No.' Spock's final cumulative reply, it seems, is 'Yes.' It's not complicated at all. Perhaps the depth of caring could be calibrated by the number of different selves that were actively involved in a given relationship.

"Why is a man who calls himself a scientist behaving as if 'different' is 'bad?'"

[to_boldly]

"I don't know, Spock," says Jim honestly. If there's anything he's learned in this conversation, commitment to logic or no, Jim can no more predict the things that Spock will say and do than Spock can for him.

"People don't like change in general." He hesitates for only a moment, for if there's anything that Jim can be counted on being, it's direct. "I don't think you like the way I do things. And in those six months we served together that you don't remember, I think you liked that the way I do things works even less. I'm just guessing, but as a scientist, maybe you don't like that you just don't get me. Me, I just...I find it fun. Challenging. Not getting you."

[perform_admirably]

I don't think you like the way I do things. Spock blinks in surprise. "'I don't like you' - there is no need to insult me. I neither like nor dislike the way that you do things, however, your modus operandi is a fickle and unstable subject, on which it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment. There can be no doubt that I would take issue with it at points. In my observation, you seem to get things to work but do not always understand how they work. We could call it practical experience but I think I prefer to refrain."

He doesn't like the way that Kirk does things. It's change. He isn't going to admit it. And yet, Kirk is exactly the thing that made Spock turn his head on the Science Academy so many years ago. In comparison to a vessel on an exploratory mission, to Starfleet, to Spock the Science Academy had seemed limpid. In comparison to James T. Kirk, leaping without looking, the Vulcan way of doing things seemed endlessly efficient, but in the end ... strangely disapppointing, as if Spock had, until meeting this man, behaved like some traveler cautious of that very disappointment, content with brief glimpses out into the world.

He hesitates in turn, forced to concentrate for a moment on swallowing any frustration at being handed himself so plainly before they made themselves apparent. "However. Jim. Despite any of this, after what has happened, I can no longer go out into the universe with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment. It's been over half of a Solar year for you. For myself, slightly less than a month's time since the destruction of my entire planet, the death of the majority of my family, the loss of things important to me to such a degree that you could barely comprehend. The war-time murder of hundreds of civilian Romulans on a vessel that I willingly destroyed. Arrival in this place. I ... hated Nero. I hate whatever has brought us here. Hate is not something that is particularly easy to come back from. Please be patient. Be patient as I grasp for equilibrium. That is what all of this is about, after all. Very selfish of me."

[to_boldly]

"I'll give you everything I've got, Spock." Jim's throat is tight, the lump lodged in the center of it painful. He doesn't want to be taken, and yet he is, swept up in the memory of that hatred, feeling it as if it were his own, though the source of his experience is, of course, a different Spock, and one with more than a hundred year's time to balance his own emotions. If that elder Spock had experienced the death of Vulcan so deeply, Jim can't imagine how it must feel for the young Spock sitting across from the table now.

Jim finds he doesn't want to meet his eyes, afraid of the agony he'll see reflected there, however well concealed. But he looks anyway. Having once manipulated these very hurts to prove Spock emotionally compromised, Jim deserves every guilty stab against his own conscience. "I hate him, too," he says, quiet. Nero had taken all chance of Jim ever knowing his father, had sent his mother running to the furthest corners of the galaxy to get away from the child that so resembled him; Jim had thought that'd be enough, but Nero had proven such thoughts hopelessly naive. "If I could tell you how to stop, I would, but I don't know myself."

[perform_admirably]

Meeting blue eyes in the moment that they draw back across the table, he sees Jim. Not for the first time, but just as clearly as any other time Spock has managed to cut through everything extraneous and stopped complicating things out of some fear of slipping off the edge of some cliff.

He'd woken up after the horrors of the last three days, whether he had wanted to admit it or not, feeling so lost, so cut off, so alone. Only he wasn't. And Spock had forgotten that Jim Kirk must have been going through the same thing that he was. Whether or not he liked the other man, Kirk, it seemed, made the emptiness in his mind bearable. No excuses - that's why he's still sitting in this chair.

"If you do not know, don't try." Those blue eyes seem so like mirrors at times, through which Spock can see a reflection of what's desperate to be human in himself. They still make him uncomfortable - Kirk's unexpected wisdom. "It's your right as a human being. You can hate, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact. As can I. As I embarrassingly have been. You deserve the same considerations that I've demanded for myself." Spock pauses, hesitates, and offers, "Do you want to work on modifying the scanners?"

[to_boldly]

"Yeah," says Jim after a long breath. "Now more than ever seems like a good time to learn everything we can about this place." He picks up the half-disassembled scanner that he'd arrived with, turning it over in his hands.

"Spock. The capacity for hatred might be an expected trait for humans, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable. Hatred is what turns a man into a creature like Nero. So as soon as I can find it in myself to forgive the man, I mean to."

[perform_admirably]

Both of these things get another dart of mobile brows, but it's some time before Spock speaks. He wants to comment wryly on what the other man says at first, to avoid saying anything at all too somber, personal, about the second. But even Spock's culture held an unsentimental, emotional respect for the truth of death. There had never been another Nero, there would never be another Nero. Whatever he was, however much Spock still desires to hate him, his loss was the universe's loss.

"May we both find peace. May he find peace in death that he could not in life. Peace, peace, and perfect peace." For the three of them.

After the words, he gives a shrug, staring at the equipment in Kirk's able hands before lifting his empty cup. After all of those words between the two of them, he's content to sit quietly in that chair across from Kirk's and watch him work, at least until it's time for Kirk's lunch. "May I have more of this? You aren't using it."

[to_boldly]

Jim wears a faint smile for the words that sound like a prayer, feeling, if not peaceful afterward, than more assured of its possibility. In the days that followed their return, Pike had told him it was the loss of Nero's family that made him go mad. It hits closer to him than Kirk would care to admit outloud. "Peace," he murmurs, reminding himself yet again before he nods.

"Tea hound, huh? Knock yourself out. And take the box if you want it."