Work Text:
Vulcan is gone.
Vulcan is gone, and Jim has managed to get himself stranded on its grieving sister planet. That calm ice to vulcan’s raging desert, now half of a whole, shouts its pain mercilessly across its every wind, telling the tale of a nameless loss. The harsh cold of T’Khut sends sharp spikes and pinpricks of pain racing across every inch of his exposed human skin, but Jim feels the energy to flinch or to shiver bleed uselessly from him with every step he takes. He distantly remembers that this is a bad sign, but of course he keeps walking even as he feels himself dying, because he tries every damn day to chase the feeling of death from his bones anyway–looking it in the proverbial eye is easier, in a way.
His feet are getting wet, and he can’t stop thinking about vulcan swallowing itself whole. There are many moments in his life, most of them bad, that Jim never could forget, and never will–and a life of running and fear and too-quick thinking and motorcycles across potholed country roads have taught him to recognise them when he is in them. He knew, the moment he saw space swallow millions of years of history, too many lives to count, a home, an anchor in a universe that listens to no rules and bends for nothing, that he would never be able to forget it. A loss that he has not the luxury to feel, an untethering so jarring it makes him want to scratch his own skull bloody for a moment of peace.
And he’s never even been to vulcan. He had almost gone, once, but he was a stubborn, angry teenager back then, so of course he hadn’t followed his mom onto the shuttle bound for the now-dead planet.
(In a way, feeling the ice is a benevolence. Vulcan would have killed him with heat, and T’Khut will kill him with cold storms. But heat and cold aren’t really real, they are perception. Extremes, universal quirks, the absence and the end of a scale, a truth ancient and trapped in thermometers and numbers. The heat he never knew will kill him the same that the absence of it will.)
Except that there are fucking creatures on the ice-planet, and just as Jim thinks–after walking so many kilometres that he wouldn’t even dare to count them out because he’s pretty sure he should be quite fucking dead by now–that this is it, this is how Jim Kirk dies, eaten by a fucking space bear-lizard , Spock saves him. Hurrying toward him waving a light, Spock saves him ; from hypothermia and from being eaten, and he looks at Jim like he is a beloved puzzle, broken up into a thousand pieces that have lost their colour and their shape, with no hope of putting them back together the way they once were. A bad approximation, a half-forgotten joy to behold, a twisted turn of fate.
Jim knows that look, has seen it in his mother’s eyes countless times–he inherited more than his recklessness from his father, after all. The Kirk baby blues were an infamous and shapeless Iowan curse; a wild card, a distracted storm burning up cornfields because it was too busy staring up at the stars.
Jim bristles at the casual yet painful familiarity this vulcan (Spock) seems to feel towards him, feels words exit his mouth hasty and harsh in a conversation he will come to remember only barely, in fragments, but he still stays when he is approached; only barely, but still.
And then he falls. Headfirst and helpless into a tangle of pain and anger and confusion, a heart with old wounds barely grown shut. Scars a mess of tissue and flesh, pink and blue and green and violet, and no pain this man has ever felt is complete, seen through to its end.
There is a spaceship–no, there are many spaceships, their memory blurring to form a safe, confined space in a cruel universe, one of equations and silence and peace; the memory of so many quiet hours spent at desks and hunched over journals and pads, cramps from holding pens and typing on old-fashioned writing contraptions, trying to fight the habit of biting his own lip. But every good feeling in him shares its space with a loneliness and an unbelonging so great that he has illogically spent most of his life trying to find concise words for it. Everything in him is disjointed and misplaced. A cupboard meant for cups instead filled with forks, a refrigerator lying on the floor of the living room, a bed in the centre of the ceiling–all contained within him and familiar, yet undoubtedly wrong (if someone were to find his corpse and need to identify him by his bones and the imprints of organs long decayed, would they call him human? Vulcan? Abomination, amalgamation, marvel?). But still–
He knows he is loved (Amanda told him so all his life, and when he says it back to her at her deathbed she says that she knew all along).
He knows he is loved (brown eyes, soft smile, that freefall feeling of trust).
He knows he is loved (crew of the Enterprise, sands of vulcan, machinery and its cold parts making up a dizzying whole, mathematic formulas, the face of that cold, fascinating universe), and he knew that it is not the vulcan way. He sits and stands and runs in perfect balance, controlled and measured (logical ), and it should be enough, but he is always, always… falling.
There is a reality of loss and destruction (vulcans are pacifists) so harsh it steals the breath from his lungs (the air is warm and heavy with cold desert dust and he can’t breathe). Jim is here, (his eyes are a chocolate brown, those Kirk eyes of his , how could he forget), as he always is, and Spock is tethered to him because he is lost and confused and his spoons are where his plates should go (his heart is where a human’s liver and a vulcan’s digestive system would be).
Jim sees vulcan eat itself alive again but feels it this time (vulcans are telepaths, with low-level awareness of the universe and that underlying energy shared by all living things and especially by their own kind, vulcans are telepaths).
He feels how there is something and then nothing, feels it is his fault. It is his fault, he brought Nero here. He went against everything he had ever known, and he is just a man (barely a man), lost and uncompromising and put together wrong side up. A tragedy was born in his heart the day it was formed, and it has never let him go, no matter how he might try to shake his own particular void. He is alone, has been for a long time, and it claws at him (Kaiidth, he thinks, but it brings him no peace).
His planet is dead, and it is his fault, and Nero will come for earth (that home he only got to know late in life, the one he refused for so long) next.
Old, soft hands are torn from Jim’s head and tears shoot into his eyes and he can’t breathe. He feels torn apart, vulcan and human– his hands don’t feel quite right, his balance is off, and he is misplaced from his world, with no way to go back or repair what he has done and… Spock, apparently, has emotions. Jim’s heart is beating too quickly to seem entirely human, and it is the only thing that even remotely keeps him standing as his stomach heaves, over and over.
Spock, standing staring smugly at him during his academic hearing, had emotions. Spock, beaming down to vulcan and coming back covered in dead sand, had emotions. Spock, self-proclaimed master of fucking logic and everything rational and normal and justified, was a walking wound. Who would have thought?
He can taste the warmth of vulcan in his mouth even on the cold surface of the planet as they make their way to find Scotty, and breathes it out into the halls of the Enterprise when somehow Scotty and he find their way back to her. And he hasn’t been melded to Spock for hours at this point, but he still feels dizzy and wrong and lost, as though a hole formed at the bottom of him the moment he fell into Spock’s mind (it feels a little bit like hunger, like his heart will never be full again).
He has almost drowned, almost been eaten, almost froze to death, almost got stabbed and shot, almost crashed against the cracking foundations of vulcan, and altogether had too much of a hard day to not want to yell and scream and hit younger Spock when he sees him again. Even knowing what he knows now, still feeling the black hole inside his chest (except Spock wasn’t a black hole, he was an amalgamation; a terrible accumulation of things that were always too much and never not there, he wished something would come and take his emotions and his pride and his anger away), he can’t help wanting to fly into Spock’s arms, firsts and nails and teeth first.
But in the end, when it comes down to it… James T. Kirk knows better (barely, but still).
It would shock many, except for those who have seen him at his most honest (which is not many people, because Jim has known early on in his life that honesty is weakness, honesty is exposure, honesty is inviting destruction into your home for a cup of coffee). There is more to him than just anger. Anger is his wall the way indifference and composure is Spock’s–anger is safety, anger is a convenience that compassion and love and honestly don’t afford.
But Jim hasn’t come as far as he has in life by being reckless. Sure, it has saved his hide countless times, but… fuck it all, if there wasn’t also some logic involved. There are reasons, damnit, to be reckless. There are situations that warrant thoughtlessness, but they in itself are contradictory, because there is always thought behind letting go of thought.
Jim is angry and impulsive and burning bright and burning out, of course, but that’s not all he is–a fire and a flame are the same at their core.
So as he stands before Spock, goading him because he just can’t help himself (the man is after all the reason Jim can’t feel four of his ten toes at the moment), he stops. He has never lost a planet but he’s lost all his family to distance, and he has lost himself to stray dogs and stepfathers and guards with guns they weren’t afraid to use and a gnawing hunger in his stomach he isn’t sure ever left him, because he still feels it when he’s angry, no matter how much he has eaten; a twin flame to the emptiness that Spock has learned to let himself be consumed by.
And the only solution he comes up with–no, it’s not as simple and as complicated as that. He doesn’t think, he’s done with that now. He lets himself be pulled, lets compassion and memory and regret and the echo of Old Spock’s heart take over, and pulls Spock into a crushing hug, right there in the middle of the bridge (he hears shocked gasps and quiet whispers all around him, but it doesn’t matter; he closes his eyes because everything around him is too white, too much, not important at all).
Spock smells like spice and sand and a storm in the air, and he is solid under Jim’s touch. Still and tense and shivering with it, like there is a monster in his chest too afraid to come out. So Jim, who has never been accused of having even an ounce of self-preservation in his entire life, digs icy fingers into the back of Spock’s uniform and refuses to let go. Buries his face in Spock’s neck, feels silky hair slide along his temple and warm skin brush his own.
And he doesn’t know what exactly drives him, he so rarely does; except there is a hole in his heart and he left most of his anger lying useless and defeated on an icy cave floor on T’Khut, stripped from him by brown eyes and the fact that he knows Spock’s mom’s name (Amanda, Amanda is dead). He feels the tremor of a last great earthquake in Spock’s bones, and whispers to him like he whispered to his kids on Tarsus. Reaches, pulls, teases, and doesn't think about it for a second.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, softly, so only Spock can hear him. He still hasn’t moved, and Jim doesn’t even want to care about the looks he must be getting. “I don’t know exactly what you’re feeling right now, but whatever it is, it’s completely fucking logical, Spock. It's okay. Grief doesn’t come easy,” oh, doesn’t he know it, “Sometimes it’s just nothing at all, sometimes it’s anger or sadness or everything at the same time and you don’t know what to do with it, but you can’t ignore it, even if nothing is there.” The words slur in his mouth with their horrible truth, ripped from him like a bandaid from an old wound, and Jim tries not to think about the fact that Spock, a man who could probably kill him with his pinky finger, is rigid and frozen under his touch, with the only sign of life being a vicious little tremor running all the way through him (a cat ready to pounce, a live wire under his hands). Working on nothing but instinct, Jim just holds Spock tighter and feels his own hands tremble and slip away and regain their grip in turn.
“I know you loved your mom, and I know she loved you too,” he continues, quietly, gasping, rambling; he finally feels like he is finally standing on solid ground.
Spock gasps and shudders and there you are, Jim thinks, come on out, I don't know if I can help you at all but I think its all I've ever wanted, “I know you think you’re wrong, I know you think she didn’t know you loved her, but you’re wrong Spock. Do you know how I know?”
He doesn’t expect an answer, not really, but there is a near imperceptible shift of a head against his own, an ever-growing weight of a body leaning against his, and a hoarse whisper so animal it barely should have been a word at all.
“How?”
“I saw, Spock.” And fuck it all, fuck it all, seriously, vulcan is gone and he almost died and apparently nothing he says in the vicinity of this man doesn’t feel like confession, a holy place to rest his head. He still doesn’t remember much of what happened to him after he was shot down onto that ice block of a planet, but he feels like there are things he shouldn’t say, promises he made not to mention something or other, but an anger burns bright within him; a calm and vicious fury that doesn’t care for ripples in space-time and the safety of a timeline that never did him any favours for free. He breathes clearly with it, feels it settle him as much as it is able.
“I met another version of you, long story,” Spock shifts against him, shuffling but not moving away, “but he showed me that she loved you, and she always knew. He melded with me and showed me–”
Two strong hands push him away but still hold on, gripping Jim’s shoulders harshly, holding him steady, and he can’t help but relish the burn of that gentle prison, the warmth of Spock’s hands– “He performed a mind meld on you?” Spock’s voice is low, his eyes wide and vicious and sublime, and for a second there, Jim believes everything he has ever learned about the history and clans and cultural heritage and biology and emotional control of vulcans. Looking at Spock is like looking at a tiger in a zoo, only that the fence separating you from the tiger has suddenly come down, and you see the formerly caged animal stretching its jaw, setting itself upright on heavy, tired paws. Like riding a bike, Jim supposes irrationally–certain things you never forget. But he trusts Spock. He doesn’t know why, but his gut instinct has brought him this far. Something about them, when they are together, brings them into rhythm. Give and take, push and pull, kick and shove, but tandem nonetheless. Gravity, equal opposite reactions, magnetic pole and cardinal north. Falling into step with a terrifying ease not wholly originating from their military training.
Jim feels frozen, not from cold but from heat, and even the thought of looking away from Spock’s intent gaze hurts, just a little. Jim has chased wonder all his life, and here is Spock, who has just lost his planet and his mother and half his mind, but he gets angry and huffy and intense just because Spock Senior did the funky meld thing to Jim (maybe it’s easier to give into anger rather than grief, and oh, isn’t that familiar).
His breath is half gone from his lungs, but he says still, because he needs to (looking the tiger in the eye, knowing he won’t hurt you, getting sick off the power of it; vicious guardian angel, protected, safe), “Yes, because it was the best and fastest way to make me believe him. Meld with me if you want to see for yourself, ask your father about the rest, and don’t shut me out .” Jim is panting at this point, heaving and trembling in Spock's hold, and he reaches out to where he knows (feels) Spock’s heart rests, beats, slow and out of control–he feels the heat of Spock’s body under his hand when he places it at his side, feels the gasping intake of breath at the touch he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t felt it. He doesn’t know where he is getting the bravery, really, or the restlessness he feels right up until he touches Spock. The dragon-on-its-mountain-of-gold-feeling of talking to Spock like this, like he’s Jim’s (to comfort, to help, to talk to, to care for). The liberties that he shouldn’t be taking–there is something golden, there, he knows it. Feels it in the back of his mind, like hearing a song after only knowing the echo of it. Like something Other Spock hinted at but, with all his years and knowledge and wisdom, wasn’t brave enough to say (or was brave enough not to say). Something that makes his mind easier. Steady, even in the chaos all around them.
And Spock, breathing unevenly, just looks at him, the heat of a lost world haunting his eyes that now belongs to Jim, too, and he wants to talk Spock through everything that hurts him and hold him through the rest, learn when to let go and when to argue with Spock and kiss him about it afterwards and… it’s a good thing that life has taught Jim to compartmentalise, because otherwise that thought would have put him out of the fight for a good few hours. And then it doesn’t matter anyway because Spock brings his arms back around him, so tight that Jim curses himself for a moment for forgetting vulcan muscle density and strength before letting himself go limp. He lets himself be held up by nothing but Spock’s arms wound around him so tight he barely knows where they are anymore, only that he is wrapped up and safe and giving Spock something to hold onto other than his anger, and it might be the first and only injury of the day that he would later, with an insolent grin, call worth it. And he lets himself burn, then, for everything and everyone that had ever hurt Spock; for bigoted humans and even more bigoted vulcans (he’ll have to have a serious talk with Bones about his inappropriate language towards other species, that was for sure); and if he ever gets his hands on Sarek, Nero or the fucking VSA committee… well, that would be their fucking problem, wouldn’t it? He’d make it so, anyway, Jim decides right then and there.
The soft caress in the back of his mind is startling in its near-novelty, but not surprising. That feeling of water coming down, cold and boiling, to fill a bottomless hole that has suddenly grown a floor. And he feels the tremor in Spock finally subsiding, just a little, feels him go stiller in his arms, breath coming just that much slower and steadier.
“Spock,” a voice calls from somewhere next to them, but neither Spock nor Jim move at all (like holding your breath when building a house of cards, like slow careful brushes painting childhood calligraphy, like practiced hands connecting frayed wires). “Spock,” the voice says again, louder and clearer the second time around, and Jim blinks open his eyes to find half of the crew staring at them, the other half looking away or surreptitiously fiddling with instruments they definitely don’t need at the moment.
And when Spock moves from their embrace (like shattering a glass bubble, like being sucked into the vacuum of space, like closing a barely opened door), he trembles minutely (and oh God, has he been crying too?), doesn’t look towards the too-silent bustle of the bridge or at his father who has stepped up next to him, but just addresses Bones with a distant, ”Doctor, I am no longer fit for duty.” His voice wavers, but it marches on, “I hereby relinquish my command based on the fact that I have been emotionally compromised.” And because he is Spock, he adds, “Please note the time and date in the ship’s log.”
And because Jim sometimes knows when to let something go, when he has done enough (and perhaps even done something good?), he lets Sarek and Uhura (who shoots him a look he can’t read) lead Spock into the hall and away from the bridge. He’ll talk to him later; they’ll figure out where they stand and what in the absolute hell happened between us on the bridge, by the way, since we survived all this, I just thought I’d ask. But until then… he collapses in the Captain’s chair and orders the ship to warp.
He’s got some fucking revenge to exact, after all.
(The warp trail blazes a soft blue as stars disappear all around them, and he swears he can see T’Khut’s snow rage through vulcan’s bright desert all around him, those two cruel opposites finally intertwined forming something entirely gentle.)