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A long time ago I was reading a bunch of fandom conversations, and one of the things that I came across regarding Star Trek: Rebooted was a lot of raw hatred for the relationship between Spock and Uhura. Hatred that seemed both completely detached from the actualities of the TOS canon and dissociated from the process in the movie. (And, for that matter, about the particular breakthroughs, culturally, for black women as active participants in both stories and relationships that were in TOS canon and the new movie. Which is stuff I didn't have conscious in my head before I was reading the backlash to the backlash, in which WOC posted, effectively, "Not only did a black woman get to have a relationship... she got Spock.")
So I wound up writing this - including a rewatch or two of the movie and a fair amount of TOS research - because the ranting irritated me. Which also struck me as hilarious, because I haven't written fanfic since high school (and the fanfic I wrote was all NG, and actually pretty insubstantial).
Anyway. Here it is.
The Price of Logic
"And since my usual farewell would be ... remarkably self-serving, I will simply say, 'Good luck.'"
The particularly fascinating thing about Humans was their exuberance.
It had taken a little time to come up with an appropriate word; too many others suggested that there was something wrong with their freedom or a deep failing in the control cultivated by Vulcans, and Spock found neither course acceptable.
Yes, exuberance.
It was also the particularly dangerous thing about them. It made them unpredictable, illogical, whimsical, at times perverse. He had studied the histories, knew how brief the times were between their wars, and knew that that brevity was as much due to their capricious capacity for change as anything else.
Vulcan's wars had lasted far longer, and the spans between them were greater because it took that long for the survivors to rebuild.
It was part of their appeal. It was not logic that made their company interesting, nor did he have the excuse of an Ambassadorship to pursue it, but the kaleidoscopic madness of their ... exuberance.
He wondered, often, if his fascination with them was his mother's inescapable legacy, if he was the lone Vulcan so intrigued by a species his elders had once called too volatile to leave their star system unsupervised. It was not logical to be fatalistic, but Humanness was always his weakness, his vulnerability. Logic suggested the pursuit of kolinahr to remove both the weakness and the distress it caused.
Logic suggested. Logic suggested, but that Human attachment disrupted his logic with a single, persistent question: would embracing kolinahr mean abandoning all traces, all ties, all bonds with his mother? Could he abandon her on an alien world with people who would not allow themselves to love her precious Human exuberance?
She said she would be proud of him whatever he chose, said it, and yet what was pride but another Human thing, that Human thing that had driven such an irrevocable wedge between Spock and his father when he rejected the Vulcan Science Academy, another point of weakness that undermined logic? She would not believe that he had rejected her. He was not sure if he could believe it.
Logic among humans was difficult.
It was her exuberance that so intrigued him. Some Vulcans might suggest that the lack of diligence in Human emotional control would lead to a crippling of their intellect, but he could find no evidence of it in Nyota. Indeed, she reminded him of Amanda, with her capacity for understanding the nuances of languages. And, indeed, she could use logic, quite well, when it suited her, when she argued herself off the Farragut and onto the flagship, for it was only logical that the most skilled linguist should be on the Enterprise.
Only logical.
It was only logical, too, that he wished to separate herself from her temptation, from the draw of the uninhibited affections the Human woman offered. He had no logical excuse to pursue her, to accept her obvious interest, to allow it; and yet he could not bring himself to send her away, beyond the coldly logical assignments to the ships: her interest was well known for its obviousness, after all, and it was logical to not encourage the rumors. It was logical to not offend T'Pring and her family, who might already have perfectly logical concerns about her betrothed being a half-breed, abandoning the ways of Vulcan to experiment with this Federation of Planets.
It was only logic, but that logic was so much an obvious mask for his weakness that when she argued, he had no response. The emotions undermined even the clarity of logic, and Humanness kept him adrift.
Logic defeated him, and he acquiesced. The bulwark would have to be built with protocol, with procedure, because logic was insufficient.
The thing he always hated to admit was that logic had always been insufficient. It was illogical to deny it, knowing how much the striving for logic had meant, how much he had labored upon it.
He would forever know that he was weak because of his mother. Not, as his peers suspected, because of his half-breed status, because he was less a Vulcan due to his parentage. He was no less Vulcan than they, for he had striven to achieve the best a Vulcan could accomplish.
No. He was weak because he loved her, even though he would - could - never say it. No insult, no wound, no assault could perturb him, all through childhood. Even the declaration that his father was a traitor had merely made him twitch, but when they called his mother ... that name .... He had proven greater mastery of Vulcan martial arts upon the body of the larger boy, at least, and would, in the privacy of his own mind, admit to satisfaction, even now.
Likewise, when the Minister referred to his Human mother as a disadvantage, after she forgave him even his temptation to kolinahr, his repudiation of everything she was, all her exuberant vivaciousness, all the logic of his conception as furtherance of his father's diplomatic studies, he was weak. Weak enough to hate them for dismissing her, and to walk away.
There was no logic to walking away from a near-flawless record and the honor of the Science Academy. He could not bring himself to apply that knowledge to his decision, though some time later it had occurred to him that perhaps there was insufficient logic underlying their contempt for her. Or perhaps it was logic, but logic is only as good as the premises that have been applied to it. He did not know whether it was his or theirs that bore the flaw.
Logic was particularly insufficient to address the problem of the insufferable cadet, Kirk. Not only had he somehow insinuated himself onto the Enterprise despite the disciplinary hearing over his reprogramming of the Kobayashi Maru simulation, he was appallingly correct in his analysis of the potential for threat when they arrived at Vulcan. Spock did not want to spare the time to speculate how the Human had acquired the information required to make the judgement, nor admit to curiosity about it. The intuitive leaps required were, he reflected as the alarm klaxons wailed to call the crew to battle stations, profoundly Human, part and parcel of that unfortunate exuberance.
The ship dropped out of warp into a minefield of tangled metal wreckage, the shards and fragments of the ships which had managed to enter warp without mishap. Thousands of student lives had passed through his care, his simulations, and had ended in the moments between departure and arrival. Thousands of student lives. Even the gift of fear could not have helped them.
But even with that horrible realisation, he felt a sharp pang of relief: Nyota is on the Enterprise. I did not ...
He cut off the thought before he could finish it, traitorous and emotional as it was. The enemy ship hailed them, taunting him in particular, giving him other things to think about. The captain was at least ridding him of the troublesome cadet for the duration by assigning him to the away team miss--
"Captain, please, I apologise. The complexity of human pranks escapes me."
"It's not a prank, Spock. And I'm not the captain, you are."
He could only acknowledge the irrationality and incomprehensibility of having that impossible cadet jumped up into the command structure, for it was so outside of logic that he could not begin to muster an argument against it in the required time.
"Be careful with the ship, Spock, she's brand new."
Humanity betrayed him in the pit of his stomach, but he stilled it, stilled the emotion before it could crack his face, allowing himself only an eyebrow of response. His captain was going into the grasp of the enemy, and the ship was in his care. There was nothing he could do but watch, watch the away team attack the enemy equipment that was threatening Vulcan, watch the young ensign's exuberant excitement at conceiving and executing their rescue, and continue watching until the latest horror manifested.
There was no logic to it. There was no reason. It was beyond comprehension. "They're creating a black hole in the center of the planet."
"Yes."
"How long does the planet have?"
"... minutes."
He did not know if it was logic or emotion that drove him to the transporter room, to go to the sacred place and rescue the High Council. Perhaps it was both, both things; it was logic that settled him in a smooth, balanced crouch so that the quaking of the dying planet could not throw him off his feet, but it was emotion that quickened his steps. Logic drove evacution; logic spoke to the rescue of what could be brought out from the crystalline center of his people, even if every katra was inevitably lost; emotion, perhaps it was, that insisted on finding his parents. Fortunately, for once logic and emotion had the same goals, and he had time to second-guess neither as he brought the elders out from the shelter of the transporter-blocking rock and onto the quaking, unstable cliffs.
It was emotion, though, that he was left with, as the ground gave way beneath Amanda's feet and left him reaching for nothing. The rage was the rage of generations-long wars, the memory of an old hatred between Vulcan and Romulan, beyond the mere political differences that it might once have been, the shared blood of generations that had blasted each other to the stone age again and again. He settled his mind into mantras, breath control, the recitation of figures, and watched the dissolving husk of the planet fading away into nothing, his home disappearing and leaving him not even a stone to lay at her grave. "I am now a member of an endangered species."
But Nyota pursued him, cornered him with Humanness when he had withdrawn to be with his weakness, pressed her warmth against his cheek and tempted him with the exuberance of human grief. "I'm sorry," she repeated, over and over again, "I'm so sorry." Frailty led him to lean on her for a moment, overcome with so much Humanity that sought to overwhelm his control.
"What do you need?" she asked, she pleaded. "Tell me."
He swallowed everything Human, everything vulnerable. "I need everyone to continue performing admirably," he said, with as much control as a Vulcan could muster, a Vulcan who was more driven to be Vulcan than any other in order to overcome what the Science Academy had referred to as his disadvantage.
"Okay," she said, and he saw her gather logic, gather will, throwing all of that Human exuberance into being as Vulcan as she saw he had need to be, and she kissed him again and let him go.
"Out of the chair." The insubordinate Human fancied himself captain, and insisted upon attacking a superior enemy. Logic and responsibility dictated a return to gather the fleet and report, even as emotion drove otherwise. Emotion must be denied, controlled, placed in proper channels.
"Marrying your mother was logical." The words surfaced from memory even as he applied the nerve pinch to the unruly cadet and ordered him thrown off the ship. Logical, logical, logical, logic left him the only one bereft, the only one so alone. "Get him off this ship."
But again, as the pod was ejected, he wondered if logic removed Kirk so thoroughly, or if, perhaps, emotion had made him an acceptable target, if not a legitimate one. It was too late to revisit the decision, in any case; he put thoughts of the cadet from his mind, the better to pursue the rational and reasonable course.
Even technical impossibilities served insufficient to rid him of that insufferable cadet! Somehow the Human had transported onto a vessel moving at warp speed, and while his apprehension had been quite simple, his presence remained an annoyance. It was irksome to even admit to being annoyed.
If anything, now the Human was more arrogant and insubordinate than before, taunting his grief, mocking his control, treating him like another one of the barroom brawlers that this Kirk had put through disciplinary measures before he joined the Academy - oh yes, he had looked up the Human's record. It was interesting to observe his gadfly technique, though he had no chance of piercing the protections afforded by logic.
"Step away from me, Mr. Kirk."
The Human did not understand the frailty of his species. Even without applying the knowledge of pressure points, their constitution was simply not robust enough for hand-to-hand combat with a Vulcan. Surely he knew this.
"What is it like not to feel anger? Or heartbreak? Or the need to stop at nothing to avenge the death of the woman that gave birth to you?"
"Back away from me." The roils of world-spanning rage threatened to betray Humanness again. He would not permit that to happen.
The cadet's face twisted into a sneer. "It must not even compute for you," he said, and then the last words he spoke, that he would ever speak: "You never loved her!"
Spock's hand was smashing across the Human's face, and then his grip crushing the fragile windpipe almost before the words escaped him, all the rage he could not direct at the Romulan, all the pain, all the grief, spiralling inwards and out again to choke the life out of this insolent child, this arrogant upstart who was so incapable of understanding his own limits that he had rewritten the test so that he could not lose, this piece of Human waste who was not worthy to even think Amanda's name.
"Spock!"
His father's voice snapped the fugue of emotion, dragging him back from the brink of murder, left him shaking. Shame washed in to replace the thwarted urge to destruction, and he remembered Sarek telling him, long ago, the last time he had been provoked to violence in such a fashion, that emotion ran deeper and stronger in the Vulcan heart even than in the Human one. He remembered that then, as now, it had been a sneering voice mocking his mother that had broken his control. Humanity, always Humanity, would be his end.
He heard his own voice declaring himself unfit for duty and ordering McCoy to note it properly in the records, and he left, feeling himself tempted to stagger, because he could no longer hold back the grief. He forestalled Nyota's inevitable pursuit with a look; he would not let her share his shame.
"Speak your mind, Spock."
He had not expected to encounter his father, to be pursued. They had not spoken to each other for some time, not since he had walked out to join Starfleet, and he had, after all, just brought shame to the wrecked remainder of his people with his inability to keep his emotions still. "That would be unwise," he said.
"What is necessary is never unwise."
It was as much a command as any order from Starfleet, even phrased as mildly and neutrally as that. "I am as conflicted as I once was as a child."
"You will always be a child of two worlds. I am grateful for this. And for you."
That was an admission, an implication, and it gave Spock the liberty to chase a wild impulse, to reveal his failure. The sense of loss was overwhelming, all-encompassing, but perhaps, perhaps he could expose it. "I feel anger for the one who took mother's life," he said, after the silence he needed to pretend to be a Vulcan rather than a Human in deceptive guise. "An anger I cannot control."
And yet, his father's voice, so often stern and condemning, was kind. "I believe that she would say, 'Do not try to.'"
Spock dared to look up, to look at his father's face, stunned at this moment of revelation.
"You asked me once why I married your mother."
Spock was silent, waiting to hear what would come; the softness of Sarek's face seemed almost to betray emotion, to suggest affection, to fall short, even as Spock fell short, of the ideal of crystalline logical clarity.
"I married her because I loved her."
The moment could have extended forever, because Sarek, Sarek who was the most Vulcan of Vulcans, the most perfect embodiment of everything that Spock had always wanted to be, Sarek had admitted to being motivated by an emotion.
To be motivated by love.
The anger did not grow less, not at all, but it became more clear, more focused; it was permissible to feel grief, to feel rage, to allow these emotions to exist. A good Vulcan, a respectable Vulcan, a wise and honorable Vulcan, above all Sarek, loved Amanda.
It shocked him to the depths of his being.
In the quiet of that moment, Spock gathered his love and grief for his mother and placed them in the center of his emotional being, where logic dictated that they belonged. Armed with that security, he returned to the bridge with his serenity restored. The sea of emotion would serve him rather than drowning him; he could not afford the luxury of pure logic, not now. Perhaps kolinahr would come later, when there was time to pursue such peace.
Now there were Romulans.
"Mr. Chekov is correct."
He was even sufficiently restored to balance that the Human's slap on his shoulder merely shifted his position slightly to one side rather than provoked any meaningful response. Fortunate.
And before he could face the Romulans, he had to face Nyota. She clung to him in the transporter room, and he let her.
He more than let her.
"I will be back."
"You better be!" she said, and with a gentleness and insistence that he recognised as precious Human exuberance, "I'll be monitoring your frequency."
The emotions flowed up, and he let them, let them wash through him as he murmured, "Thank you, Nyota." Perhaps this was how Sarek had felt. Perhaps. It was permissible to feel it, in any case, to consider the possibilities of discarding his reserve, taking up the wild abandon of Humanity for a little while.
She kissed him, and he allowed himself to enjoy it without concerning himself with whether it was properly Vulcan. Even so, he was aware of Kirk's attention upon them, and he allowed himself amusement when she left. The cadet fancied himself irresistable to women, and her refusal to return his interest had not escaped Spock's awareness.
"So her first name's Nyota?"
"I have no comment on the matter," said Spock, in the serenity of victory.
The gleaming ship buried in the depths of the Romulan vessel was an ample demonstration of interference from a future timeline. Its brightly illuminated interior had a clean, Vulcan sensibility, quite a soothing change from the utter illogic and chaos of the mining ship's design.
"I foresee a complication. The design of this ship is far more advanced than I had anticipated."
The ship's voice was soothing, serene. "Voice print and face recognition enabled. Welcome back, Ambassador Spock."
"That's weird," mumbled Kirk as he brushed past, making it entirely clear that he, at least, had some knowledge of the ownership and origin of the futuristic vessel.
"Computer, what is your manufacturing origin?"
"Stardate 2387. Commissioned by the Vulcan Science Academy."
Without responding to the computer further, he followed the Human into the cockpit of the vessel. "It appears that you have been keeping important information from me."
"You'll be able to fly this thing, right?" The Human was hurried, and appeared disinclined to elaborate upon his knowledge.
Dryly, he replied, "Something tells me that I already have."
Kirk said "Good luck," and turned to go, only to pause as Spock said, almost unthinkingly, "Jim."
The Human looked at him, brought up short by the intimacy of names.
He had run the probabilities in what a Human might call a back of the envelope calculation, with almost embarassing lack of precision. Almost; the Human would not care, and there was nobody else to observe. "The statistical likelihood that our plan will succeed is less than four point three percent."
"It'll work." This was the sort of arrogant confidence that had hacked the computer simulation, defying the logic of probabilities.
"In the event that I am unsuccessful, tell Lieutenant Uhura--" Spock was actually not entirely sure what he wanted Nyota to know, whether he wanted to confess to emotions through the vehicle of this particular Human, comrade though he might be now.
"Spock. It'll work." Kirk ran back up the passage and was gone.
He settled into the chair to muse upon the complexities of relationships with Humans, and it started to rotate to direct his attention forward. Diverted from more emotional contemplations by the behaviour of what was, by all evidence, his ship, he returned his attention to its functions. "Fascinating."
"Hail them now." Kirk's voice was cold in the aftermath of Chekov's report on the enemy ship's condition. "This is captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. Your ship is compromised, too close to the singularity to survive without assistance, which we are willing to provide."
"Captain, what are you doing?" The question escaped, though Spock kept his voice low.
"Showing compassion. It may be the only way to earn peace with Romulus." There was a smug undertone to his concluding, "It's logic, Spock, I thought you'd like that."
Spock recalled Sarek's voice. "I believe that she would say, 'Do not try to.'" His attention turned to the enemy ship, the genocidal Romulans doomed to madness, lost to hope. The tangle of rage and loss would be a long time passing, a long time healing and smoothing away into imperturbable peace. It was oddly generous of the Human to attempt to frame the question in Vulcan terms, as if matters of cool practicality and logic could overcome the heritage generations of pain and the turmoil that rested in the Vulcan heart. "No, not really," he admitted, offering the intimacy in exchange for the Human's teasing kindness. "Not this time."
"And since my usual farewell would be ... remarkably self-serving, I will simply say, 'Good luck.'"
Spock watched his elder self walk away, and let his hand drift back down to his side. The wear and age upon his familiar face was both as disconcerting and reassuring as the parting advice. Stay in Starfleet. Allow emotion to share in guidance of your life.
He wondered, and it would not be for the last time, how his elder self had come to such a conclusion, how long he had wrestled the fine line between logic and emotion. Had he reconciled with their father? Had they shared a moment of vulnerability, of admission of that dark secret of unlogical decision?
Had his elder self resisted Nyota's charms, let her graduate, let her ship out, as she passed into becoming a colleague, someone he had once known, someone lost in time, in distant battle, in the shorter Human lifespan? He must surely remember resisting her and her exuberant Humanity, and know that he, younger Spock, knew her now, that this was the age at which he had resolutely said 'no' without words.
Until now, when Sarek had given him permission - as a Vulcan - to love. Permission only wrested out of the deepest grief and deepest anger, which surely his elder self had not been forced to suffer. And he knew, just as surely without daring the emotional impulse to ask, that Nyota had been a part of what his elder self had lost while trying to become the perfect Vulcan.
"Good luck," his counterpart said, leaving him to contemplate uncharted possibilities.
Spock considered that he had never played the harp for her. He had heard rumors that she sang. It seemed likely that she might enjoy the prospects of a duet.
He would not pay the price of logic a second time.
So I wound up writing this - including a rewatch or two of the movie and a fair amount of TOS research - because the ranting irritated me. Which also struck me as hilarious, because I haven't written fanfic since high school (and the fanfic I wrote was all NG, and actually pretty insubstantial).
Anyway. Here it is.
The Price of Logic
"And since my usual farewell would be ... remarkably self-serving, I will simply say, 'Good luck.'"
The particularly fascinating thing about Humans was their exuberance.
It had taken a little time to come up with an appropriate word; too many others suggested that there was something wrong with their freedom or a deep failing in the control cultivated by Vulcans, and Spock found neither course acceptable.
Yes, exuberance.
It was also the particularly dangerous thing about them. It made them unpredictable, illogical, whimsical, at times perverse. He had studied the histories, knew how brief the times were between their wars, and knew that that brevity was as much due to their capricious capacity for change as anything else.
Vulcan's wars had lasted far longer, and the spans between them were greater because it took that long for the survivors to rebuild.
It was part of their appeal. It was not logic that made their company interesting, nor did he have the excuse of an Ambassadorship to pursue it, but the kaleidoscopic madness of their ... exuberance.
He wondered, often, if his fascination with them was his mother's inescapable legacy, if he was the lone Vulcan so intrigued by a species his elders had once called too volatile to leave their star system unsupervised. It was not logical to be fatalistic, but Humanness was always his weakness, his vulnerability. Logic suggested the pursuit of kolinahr to remove both the weakness and the distress it caused.
Logic suggested. Logic suggested, but that Human attachment disrupted his logic with a single, persistent question: would embracing kolinahr mean abandoning all traces, all ties, all bonds with his mother? Could he abandon her on an alien world with people who would not allow themselves to love her precious Human exuberance?
She said she would be proud of him whatever he chose, said it, and yet what was pride but another Human thing, that Human thing that had driven such an irrevocable wedge between Spock and his father when he rejected the Vulcan Science Academy, another point of weakness that undermined logic? She would not believe that he had rejected her. He was not sure if he could believe it.
Logic among humans was difficult.
It was her exuberance that so intrigued him. Some Vulcans might suggest that the lack of diligence in Human emotional control would lead to a crippling of their intellect, but he could find no evidence of it in Nyota. Indeed, she reminded him of Amanda, with her capacity for understanding the nuances of languages. And, indeed, she could use logic, quite well, when it suited her, when she argued herself off the Farragut and onto the flagship, for it was only logical that the most skilled linguist should be on the Enterprise.
Only logical.
It was only logical, too, that he wished to separate herself from her temptation, from the draw of the uninhibited affections the Human woman offered. He had no logical excuse to pursue her, to accept her obvious interest, to allow it; and yet he could not bring himself to send her away, beyond the coldly logical assignments to the ships: her interest was well known for its obviousness, after all, and it was logical to not encourage the rumors. It was logical to not offend T'Pring and her family, who might already have perfectly logical concerns about her betrothed being a half-breed, abandoning the ways of Vulcan to experiment with this Federation of Planets.
It was only logic, but that logic was so much an obvious mask for his weakness that when she argued, he had no response. The emotions undermined even the clarity of logic, and Humanness kept him adrift.
Logic defeated him, and he acquiesced. The bulwark would have to be built with protocol, with procedure, because logic was insufficient.
The thing he always hated to admit was that logic had always been insufficient. It was illogical to deny it, knowing how much the striving for logic had meant, how much he had labored upon it.
He would forever know that he was weak because of his mother. Not, as his peers suspected, because of his half-breed status, because he was less a Vulcan due to his parentage. He was no less Vulcan than they, for he had striven to achieve the best a Vulcan could accomplish.
No. He was weak because he loved her, even though he would - could - never say it. No insult, no wound, no assault could perturb him, all through childhood. Even the declaration that his father was a traitor had merely made him twitch, but when they called his mother ... that name .... He had proven greater mastery of Vulcan martial arts upon the body of the larger boy, at least, and would, in the privacy of his own mind, admit to satisfaction, even now.
Likewise, when the Minister referred to his Human mother as a disadvantage, after she forgave him even his temptation to kolinahr, his repudiation of everything she was, all her exuberant vivaciousness, all the logic of his conception as furtherance of his father's diplomatic studies, he was weak. Weak enough to hate them for dismissing her, and to walk away.
There was no logic to walking away from a near-flawless record and the honor of the Science Academy. He could not bring himself to apply that knowledge to his decision, though some time later it had occurred to him that perhaps there was insufficient logic underlying their contempt for her. Or perhaps it was logic, but logic is only as good as the premises that have been applied to it. He did not know whether it was his or theirs that bore the flaw.
Logic was particularly insufficient to address the problem of the insufferable cadet, Kirk. Not only had he somehow insinuated himself onto the Enterprise despite the disciplinary hearing over his reprogramming of the Kobayashi Maru simulation, he was appallingly correct in his analysis of the potential for threat when they arrived at Vulcan. Spock did not want to spare the time to speculate how the Human had acquired the information required to make the judgement, nor admit to curiosity about it. The intuitive leaps required were, he reflected as the alarm klaxons wailed to call the crew to battle stations, profoundly Human, part and parcel of that unfortunate exuberance.
The ship dropped out of warp into a minefield of tangled metal wreckage, the shards and fragments of the ships which had managed to enter warp without mishap. Thousands of student lives had passed through his care, his simulations, and had ended in the moments between departure and arrival. Thousands of student lives. Even the gift of fear could not have helped them.
But even with that horrible realisation, he felt a sharp pang of relief: Nyota is on the Enterprise. I did not ...
He cut off the thought before he could finish it, traitorous and emotional as it was. The enemy ship hailed them, taunting him in particular, giving him other things to think about. The captain was at least ridding him of the troublesome cadet for the duration by assigning him to the away team miss--
"Captain, please, I apologise. The complexity of human pranks escapes me."
"It's not a prank, Spock. And I'm not the captain, you are."
He could only acknowledge the irrationality and incomprehensibility of having that impossible cadet jumped up into the command structure, for it was so outside of logic that he could not begin to muster an argument against it in the required time.
"Be careful with the ship, Spock, she's brand new."
Humanity betrayed him in the pit of his stomach, but he stilled it, stilled the emotion before it could crack his face, allowing himself only an eyebrow of response. His captain was going into the grasp of the enemy, and the ship was in his care. There was nothing he could do but watch, watch the away team attack the enemy equipment that was threatening Vulcan, watch the young ensign's exuberant excitement at conceiving and executing their rescue, and continue watching until the latest horror manifested.
There was no logic to it. There was no reason. It was beyond comprehension. "They're creating a black hole in the center of the planet."
"Yes."
"How long does the planet have?"
"... minutes."
He did not know if it was logic or emotion that drove him to the transporter room, to go to the sacred place and rescue the High Council. Perhaps it was both, both things; it was logic that settled him in a smooth, balanced crouch so that the quaking of the dying planet could not throw him off his feet, but it was emotion that quickened his steps. Logic drove evacution; logic spoke to the rescue of what could be brought out from the crystalline center of his people, even if every katra was inevitably lost; emotion, perhaps it was, that insisted on finding his parents. Fortunately, for once logic and emotion had the same goals, and he had time to second-guess neither as he brought the elders out from the shelter of the transporter-blocking rock and onto the quaking, unstable cliffs.
It was emotion, though, that he was left with, as the ground gave way beneath Amanda's feet and left him reaching for nothing. The rage was the rage of generations-long wars, the memory of an old hatred between Vulcan and Romulan, beyond the mere political differences that it might once have been, the shared blood of generations that had blasted each other to the stone age again and again. He settled his mind into mantras, breath control, the recitation of figures, and watched the dissolving husk of the planet fading away into nothing, his home disappearing and leaving him not even a stone to lay at her grave. "I am now a member of an endangered species."
But Nyota pursued him, cornered him with Humanness when he had withdrawn to be with his weakness, pressed her warmth against his cheek and tempted him with the exuberance of human grief. "I'm sorry," she repeated, over and over again, "I'm so sorry." Frailty led him to lean on her for a moment, overcome with so much Humanity that sought to overwhelm his control.
"What do you need?" she asked, she pleaded. "Tell me."
He swallowed everything Human, everything vulnerable. "I need everyone to continue performing admirably," he said, with as much control as a Vulcan could muster, a Vulcan who was more driven to be Vulcan than any other in order to overcome what the Science Academy had referred to as his disadvantage.
"Okay," she said, and he saw her gather logic, gather will, throwing all of that Human exuberance into being as Vulcan as she saw he had need to be, and she kissed him again and let him go.
"Out of the chair." The insubordinate Human fancied himself captain, and insisted upon attacking a superior enemy. Logic and responsibility dictated a return to gather the fleet and report, even as emotion drove otherwise. Emotion must be denied, controlled, placed in proper channels.
"Marrying your mother was logical." The words surfaced from memory even as he applied the nerve pinch to the unruly cadet and ordered him thrown off the ship. Logical, logical, logical, logic left him the only one bereft, the only one so alone. "Get him off this ship."
But again, as the pod was ejected, he wondered if logic removed Kirk so thoroughly, or if, perhaps, emotion had made him an acceptable target, if not a legitimate one. It was too late to revisit the decision, in any case; he put thoughts of the cadet from his mind, the better to pursue the rational and reasonable course.
Even technical impossibilities served insufficient to rid him of that insufferable cadet! Somehow the Human had transported onto a vessel moving at warp speed, and while his apprehension had been quite simple, his presence remained an annoyance. It was irksome to even admit to being annoyed.
If anything, now the Human was more arrogant and insubordinate than before, taunting his grief, mocking his control, treating him like another one of the barroom brawlers that this Kirk had put through disciplinary measures before he joined the Academy - oh yes, he had looked up the Human's record. It was interesting to observe his gadfly technique, though he had no chance of piercing the protections afforded by logic.
"Step away from me, Mr. Kirk."
The Human did not understand the frailty of his species. Even without applying the knowledge of pressure points, their constitution was simply not robust enough for hand-to-hand combat with a Vulcan. Surely he knew this.
"What is it like not to feel anger? Or heartbreak? Or the need to stop at nothing to avenge the death of the woman that gave birth to you?"
"Back away from me." The roils of world-spanning rage threatened to betray Humanness again. He would not permit that to happen.
The cadet's face twisted into a sneer. "It must not even compute for you," he said, and then the last words he spoke, that he would ever speak: "You never loved her!"
Spock's hand was smashing across the Human's face, and then his grip crushing the fragile windpipe almost before the words escaped him, all the rage he could not direct at the Romulan, all the pain, all the grief, spiralling inwards and out again to choke the life out of this insolent child, this arrogant upstart who was so incapable of understanding his own limits that he had rewritten the test so that he could not lose, this piece of Human waste who was not worthy to even think Amanda's name.
"Spock!"
His father's voice snapped the fugue of emotion, dragging him back from the brink of murder, left him shaking. Shame washed in to replace the thwarted urge to destruction, and he remembered Sarek telling him, long ago, the last time he had been provoked to violence in such a fashion, that emotion ran deeper and stronger in the Vulcan heart even than in the Human one. He remembered that then, as now, it had been a sneering voice mocking his mother that had broken his control. Humanity, always Humanity, would be his end.
He heard his own voice declaring himself unfit for duty and ordering McCoy to note it properly in the records, and he left, feeling himself tempted to stagger, because he could no longer hold back the grief. He forestalled Nyota's inevitable pursuit with a look; he would not let her share his shame.
"Speak your mind, Spock."
He had not expected to encounter his father, to be pursued. They had not spoken to each other for some time, not since he had walked out to join Starfleet, and he had, after all, just brought shame to the wrecked remainder of his people with his inability to keep his emotions still. "That would be unwise," he said.
"What is necessary is never unwise."
It was as much a command as any order from Starfleet, even phrased as mildly and neutrally as that. "I am as conflicted as I once was as a child."
"You will always be a child of two worlds. I am grateful for this. And for you."
That was an admission, an implication, and it gave Spock the liberty to chase a wild impulse, to reveal his failure. The sense of loss was overwhelming, all-encompassing, but perhaps, perhaps he could expose it. "I feel anger for the one who took mother's life," he said, after the silence he needed to pretend to be a Vulcan rather than a Human in deceptive guise. "An anger I cannot control."
And yet, his father's voice, so often stern and condemning, was kind. "I believe that she would say, 'Do not try to.'"
Spock dared to look up, to look at his father's face, stunned at this moment of revelation.
"You asked me once why I married your mother."
Spock was silent, waiting to hear what would come; the softness of Sarek's face seemed almost to betray emotion, to suggest affection, to fall short, even as Spock fell short, of the ideal of crystalline logical clarity.
"I married her because I loved her."
The moment could have extended forever, because Sarek, Sarek who was the most Vulcan of Vulcans, the most perfect embodiment of everything that Spock had always wanted to be, Sarek had admitted to being motivated by an emotion.
To be motivated by love.
The anger did not grow less, not at all, but it became more clear, more focused; it was permissible to feel grief, to feel rage, to allow these emotions to exist. A good Vulcan, a respectable Vulcan, a wise and honorable Vulcan, above all Sarek, loved Amanda.
It shocked him to the depths of his being.
In the quiet of that moment, Spock gathered his love and grief for his mother and placed them in the center of his emotional being, where logic dictated that they belonged. Armed with that security, he returned to the bridge with his serenity restored. The sea of emotion would serve him rather than drowning him; he could not afford the luxury of pure logic, not now. Perhaps kolinahr would come later, when there was time to pursue such peace.
Now there were Romulans.
"Mr. Chekov is correct."
He was even sufficiently restored to balance that the Human's slap on his shoulder merely shifted his position slightly to one side rather than provoked any meaningful response. Fortunate.
And before he could face the Romulans, he had to face Nyota. She clung to him in the transporter room, and he let her.
He more than let her.
"I will be back."
"You better be!" she said, and with a gentleness and insistence that he recognised as precious Human exuberance, "I'll be monitoring your frequency."
The emotions flowed up, and he let them, let them wash through him as he murmured, "Thank you, Nyota." Perhaps this was how Sarek had felt. Perhaps. It was permissible to feel it, in any case, to consider the possibilities of discarding his reserve, taking up the wild abandon of Humanity for a little while.
She kissed him, and he allowed himself to enjoy it without concerning himself with whether it was properly Vulcan. Even so, he was aware of Kirk's attention upon them, and he allowed himself amusement when she left. The cadet fancied himself irresistable to women, and her refusal to return his interest had not escaped Spock's awareness.
"So her first name's Nyota?"
"I have no comment on the matter," said Spock, in the serenity of victory.
The gleaming ship buried in the depths of the Romulan vessel was an ample demonstration of interference from a future timeline. Its brightly illuminated interior had a clean, Vulcan sensibility, quite a soothing change from the utter illogic and chaos of the mining ship's design.
"I foresee a complication. The design of this ship is far more advanced than I had anticipated."
The ship's voice was soothing, serene. "Voice print and face recognition enabled. Welcome back, Ambassador Spock."
"That's weird," mumbled Kirk as he brushed past, making it entirely clear that he, at least, had some knowledge of the ownership and origin of the futuristic vessel.
"Computer, what is your manufacturing origin?"
"Stardate 2387. Commissioned by the Vulcan Science Academy."
Without responding to the computer further, he followed the Human into the cockpit of the vessel. "It appears that you have been keeping important information from me."
"You'll be able to fly this thing, right?" The Human was hurried, and appeared disinclined to elaborate upon his knowledge.
Dryly, he replied, "Something tells me that I already have."
Kirk said "Good luck," and turned to go, only to pause as Spock said, almost unthinkingly, "Jim."
The Human looked at him, brought up short by the intimacy of names.
He had run the probabilities in what a Human might call a back of the envelope calculation, with almost embarassing lack of precision. Almost; the Human would not care, and there was nobody else to observe. "The statistical likelihood that our plan will succeed is less than four point three percent."
"It'll work." This was the sort of arrogant confidence that had hacked the computer simulation, defying the logic of probabilities.
"In the event that I am unsuccessful, tell Lieutenant Uhura--" Spock was actually not entirely sure what he wanted Nyota to know, whether he wanted to confess to emotions through the vehicle of this particular Human, comrade though he might be now.
"Spock. It'll work." Kirk ran back up the passage and was gone.
He settled into the chair to muse upon the complexities of relationships with Humans, and it started to rotate to direct his attention forward. Diverted from more emotional contemplations by the behaviour of what was, by all evidence, his ship, he returned his attention to its functions. "Fascinating."
"Hail them now." Kirk's voice was cold in the aftermath of Chekov's report on the enemy ship's condition. "This is captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. Your ship is compromised, too close to the singularity to survive without assistance, which we are willing to provide."
"Captain, what are you doing?" The question escaped, though Spock kept his voice low.
"Showing compassion. It may be the only way to earn peace with Romulus." There was a smug undertone to his concluding, "It's logic, Spock, I thought you'd like that."
Spock recalled Sarek's voice. "I believe that she would say, 'Do not try to.'" His attention turned to the enemy ship, the genocidal Romulans doomed to madness, lost to hope. The tangle of rage and loss would be a long time passing, a long time healing and smoothing away into imperturbable peace. It was oddly generous of the Human to attempt to frame the question in Vulcan terms, as if matters of cool practicality and logic could overcome the heritage generations of pain and the turmoil that rested in the Vulcan heart. "No, not really," he admitted, offering the intimacy in exchange for the Human's teasing kindness. "Not this time."
"And since my usual farewell would be ... remarkably self-serving, I will simply say, 'Good luck.'"
Spock watched his elder self walk away, and let his hand drift back down to his side. The wear and age upon his familiar face was both as disconcerting and reassuring as the parting advice. Stay in Starfleet. Allow emotion to share in guidance of your life.
He wondered, and it would not be for the last time, how his elder self had come to such a conclusion, how long he had wrestled the fine line between logic and emotion. Had he reconciled with their father? Had they shared a moment of vulnerability, of admission of that dark secret of unlogical decision?
Had his elder self resisted Nyota's charms, let her graduate, let her ship out, as she passed into becoming a colleague, someone he had once known, someone lost in time, in distant battle, in the shorter Human lifespan? He must surely remember resisting her and her exuberant Humanity, and know that he, younger Spock, knew her now, that this was the age at which he had resolutely said 'no' without words.
Until now, when Sarek had given him permission - as a Vulcan - to love. Permission only wrested out of the deepest grief and deepest anger, which surely his elder self had not been forced to suffer. And he knew, just as surely without daring the emotional impulse to ask, that Nyota had been a part of what his elder self had lost while trying to become the perfect Vulcan.
"Good luck," his counterpart said, leaving him to contemplate uncharted possibilities.
Spock considered that he had never played the harp for her. He had heard rumors that she sang. It seemed likely that she might enjoy the prospects of a duet.
He would not pay the price of logic a second time.
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