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A Post ST II and Beyond Story
PART I
From inside the chamber, it looked as though in death, Spock’s head rested gently on James Kirk’s shoulder.
But that . . . .
Was not so.
* * * *
Leonard McCoy stared in numbed, shocked silence. His head pounded from the neck pinch, and he could barely see for the tears in his eyes. Behind him, Scotty somehow found the strength to herd the engineering staff of green cadets from the area—they, too, shocked and hurt and struggling to cope with the knowledge that, on their first deep-space assignment, they had lost their captain. McCoy didn’t know how Scotty could even walk; he’d been injured by the concussion of the explosion when the main engines blew off-line, but both of them—physician and engineer—were running now on pure adrenaline and grief.
Before him was another grimmer story.
Admiral James Tiberius Kirk sat where he’d slumped moments after Spock had died. He had not moved a muscle. Couldn’t, McCoy supposed. Shaking his head, the doctor—caught down there with no medical equipment or he’d managed to lose it in the confusion—stumbled to one of the consoles and requested an orderly bring him another medikit. He had to do something for Jim. He had to. Even if it was just a sedative, at least, he could be of some comfort.
But looking back at the two men, he knew there was no comfort for this. Never going to any comfort, but time. And space maybe. He stooped down and nudged the burgundy softness of James Kirk’s sleeve.
“Jim.”
Nothing.
“Jim.”
No answer, not even a blink. Kirk stared out blindly breathing through a dry, open mouth, unaware of anyone around him now. He stared out at nothing. Like a man in battle who just had his legs blown off might stare.
“Jim,” McCoy insisted. “Come on, son. Let me know that you’re alive.”
He did. With a groan, Kirk turned his face, cheeks dark with stubble and shiny with sweat, into the transparent partition, put the flat of his hand up to it, and sobbed.
McCoy nearly died from the sorrow he felt. He glanced over his shoulder. Nearly everyone had cleared the area. Out of compassion and respect, no one even looked back down at the two fallen heroes sprawled on the floor. All witnesses to Spock’s death had pulled into themselves, and no one invaded James Kirk’s private ordeal—or wanted to.
Except him.
Shit! How long do I leave him like this? Till he dries up and blows away, or until I do?
Finally, McCoy could hear a noise behind him. Scotty had returned. He was red-faced and breathless, awash himself with grief at the sight of his friends—his bonnie laddies—devastated and dead. The chief engineer valiantly tried not to cry, but unstoppable hot tears streamed down his face.
“I canna believe it,” he moaned. “How did this happen?”
McCoy only shook his head in mutual incomprehension. He didn’t know either. One minute they’re in a battle for their lives against Khan and the Reliant, the next minute, the engines are off-line, Genesis is armed, and they can’t believe they’re watching Spock enter the radiated chamber—literally tricking them to get by. Then they’re both screaming, trying to get him to come out. But he doesn’t come out. With each passing second, McCoy had thought that maybe he could still save him. Spock, dammit come out now and maybe you won’t die! But with each minute, he knew it was impossible. No drugs could end the bleeding, no treatment restore burst cells. Clearly impossible. How Spock had kept himself going against the raging jets of radiation, like a blinding, hot geyser, shooting into his face, his nose and mouth, his eyes, McCoy found impossible to imagine. Only Vulcan strength of purpose was any match for that relentless, killing onslaught.
Where the hell is that medikit!
Feeling helpless, McCoy looked over his shoulder again, looking for anyone in a medical uniform. Two regular security guards, brawny and morose, remained stationed at each entrance to the room. Finally, he saw a burgundy form pushing past them. A young woman said something over her shoulder as she pulled out of the security guards grasp, her loose dark hair whipping her face as she pushed on by. Stumbling across the deck, she blinked, then headed straight for McCoy, when she saw him. Them.
You’re too young for this, McCoy wanted to say, but just took the kit and hypos out of her hand. He recognized her as one of the science trainees and glanced into her stunned dark eyes. I don’t even know your name.
Thankfully, she seemed to read his mind.
“Cadet Suchin Kamura reporting, sir. I’m from the science labs, but I’ve done a little paramedic work. Sickbay’s pretty messed up. I’ve come to help.”
Word had spread like wildfire throughout the ship that Captain Spock was dying or already dead. The small medical team—short-staffed as it was—was dazed, injured, or overwhelmed, but she had recognized McCoy’s belated demand for equipment, grabbed the field pack from an overtaxed ward nurse who shoved it her way, and raced down to Engineering.
McCoy nodded and turned to run the scanner over Kirk. He had two options: give the admiral a sedative to knock him out (at least he wouldn’t have to see that stare) or a stimulant to get him on his feet. The doctor felt Scotty’s presence behind him, but that didn’t help.
“I don’t know, Scotty,” he mumbled. “What do we do next?”
Scotty seemed as if he was about to collapse. “It doesna matter what we doo, Doctor! Can’t ya see that?” It was an admonition.
“I’d better get this one to sickbay, I guess.” McCoy glanced at the motionless, dark head beyond the partition, the sight he’d been consciously avoiding. “How do we get Spock—”
Scotty shook his head violently. “Sixty-five minutes to decontaminate the chamber. Not a minute sooner.” Scotty saw McCoy’s keen frustration. “I’m sorry.”
“All right.” McCoy looked again at Spock. “God, I wish we could get him out of there now. I can’t bear it—”
“Doctor,” Kamura said with some alarm, stooping quickly down to Kirk. She touched his arm. He looked so pale. “Admiral Kirk, are you all right—?” In a gush, bright blood splashed down upon his lips and chin, dripping red onto the white flap of his uniform.
At the sound of her voice, McCoy’s vision turned to the living man on the floor. Jeezus! He grabbed Kirk’s chin and tipped his head back to get a better look. Jim’s nose bled copiously—from stress, McCoy diagnosed. Working quickly, he set the hypospray to a small dose of coagulant and shot it into the side of Kirk’s neck. The doctor didn’t have one, but he fished around in the admiral’s pocket till he found a handkerchief and pressed it up against the alarming drips that came with every other heartbeat.
“Jim, sit up and lean forward into this.” To the woman, he ordered, “Get me a towel.”
A minute more went by, then two. The hemorrhaging slowed. McCoy sat back on his heels, watching his friend for worse signs of distress. For any signs at all.
When McCoy’s blue eyes wandered away towards Spock and teared up again, he missed the movement beside him. A word or vibration, something had signaled to James Kirk to come back to them. The admiral coughed from deep in his chest, then turned his head so that his cheek lay against the glass as his dull eyes cleared a little.
Kamura returned with a soft, wet cloth and gently began to wipe down the admiral’s bloody features. Looking up, his wide eyes focused for a moment on her face, awash with concern, and Leonard McCoy marveled at the calming affect her ministrations seemed to have—maybe as much on him as on James Kirk.
“Come on, Jim,” McCoy comforted. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“No.” His voice was hoarse, raspy, an eerie echo of Spock’s dying voice, as though his throat, as well as his nose, was nearly closed. “I can’t leave him.”
“He’s gone, Jim.” McCoy couldn’t say the word dead. “Let’s think about you.” As if Kirk were a downed animal, McCoy took his arm, trying to lead him to his feet. “My medical staff will bring Spock to Sickbay after the chamber is decontaminated.”
Now Kirk looked at him like he was crazy and pulled his arm away. “Nobody touches Spock but you and me.”
McCoy looked startled. “Jim, you can’t stay here.”
Kirk didn’t want to hear that. He turned and touched the glass with his fingertips. “He wouldn’t want anyone else.” His chin touched his chest and his eyes closed again. “Oh, god, I’ve killed him.”
“You did not kill Spock, Jim! That bastard Khan killed him!”
There was a sudden mix of raw despair and pure, coal-black grief as James Kirk lifted his face, then hatred and the need for revenge and retribution. His eyes opened and rolled, and every negative emotion swam across his features, colliding with each other in a mixture McCoy had never seen before.
McCoy made his medical decision. He couldn’t do anything for Spock, but he’d have to face that look of horror and sorrow and killing anger for the rest of his life if he didn’t listen to what this broken heart was telling him. He put the spray to Kirk’s throat and pumped a pretty good jolt of stimulant into it. Kirk’s hazel eyes blinked rapidly and then he took a deep, ragged breath.
I’d better give myself one of these too, the doctor thought. This ordeal is far from over. He glanced a Kamura who was still on the floor, poised to reach out to Kirk.
“Can I get you anything, Admiral?” she asked tentatively. She had never even been this close to an admiral before—to him, a bonafide legend—and now she was desperate touch him, to help him, to jump up and fetch whatever—no matter how difficult—he needed, or even thought he did.
Just then Scotty’s decontamination equipment kicked in: scrubbers, blowers, vacuums all rocked to life. Kirk’s eyes jumped, startled. He looked inside the chamber. He looked at Spock, at the oozing dark burns on his face and blistered hands. “Water,” he said.
Kamura rose from the floor, found a wall servo somewhere and returned with a glass of water. She touched his shoulder again, and at the prompt, he took the glass and drank it all down. McCoy leaned down to the young woman. “You can go now, Suchin,” he said. Cadet Kamura, he knew he should have said, yet her being here with them—now, down here—made her an intimate.
But James Kirk looked dismayed. “No, Bones. Let her stay. I think she wants to.” His eyes said: I want her to. She was one of Spock’s last cadets.
Neither McCoy nor Scotty could believe that James Kirk sat on the floor for the next hour. He moved somewhat, pulling his knees to his chest and burying his face in arms wrapped tightly around his knees. Sometimes they thought they saw him rock. Sixty minutes later the machinery slammed off and Engineering became quiet again, only the sound of the warp engines pulsing around them.
Like an automaton timer-controlled to implement its next coded function, James Kirk unfolded himself from the floor. McCoy was amazed that he could stand at all. He’s got to be totally numb, he thought.
“Let’s go,” Kirk ordered. He glanced at Scotty’s haggard expression knowing it reflected his own and drew his sleeve across his face.
“Aye,” Scotty sighed. “This way, Admiral.”
Scotty’s crew had secured the far entrance to the engine compartment with a set of triple interlocking decon-chambers, each unit there to eradicate whatever radiation was missed by the previous scrub. Kirk, McCoy and Kamura moved around to the far-end of the first unit.
“You’ll have to put on these protective suits, Admiral,” Scotty said slowly, his burr heavy with fatigue. He pointed to the blinding white suits, similar to what he had on, suspended from the servo arms. “You have to strip first.”
McCoy looked dismayed, but the admiral immediately started to unbuckle his belt and pull off his boots. When the act of disrobing became too complicated, he began to fumble with the openings of his uniform jacket.
“Help the admiral, Ms. Kamura,” McCoy ordered, resigned, as Scotty helped him with his suit.
She pulled his hands away, efficiently undid the fastening, and he let her. She helped him off with his jacket, his white uniform shirt and pants. She held up the one-piece white decon suit with attached boots and gloves, and he stepped inside of it. Then came the 360-degree bubble helmet that fit closely over his head. She closed the suit locks, snapped the fittings on the helmet, and checked out the pressure and air controls that registered on his chest.
Only yesterday, Suchin Kamura and her teammates completed Captain Spock’s emergency evac drills; she had procedures down cold. As she was trained, she tapped the side of the faceplate twice, and gave him the universal thumbs-up; then she traded Kirk with Scott and double-checked McCoy, repeating the routine.
McCoy nodded to Scotty, who furnished McCoy a portable anti-grav gurney that folded into a small floating pack. When the first chamber door opened, Kirk moved in, with McCoy behind him. That door snapped closed. A second lock opened, and they stepped through. Seconds later, that door also closed. McCoy was beginning to feel claustrophobic. “You okay, Jim?” he asked, projecting his own discomfort on the silent man ahead of him.
Kirk failed to answer but stepped instead into the final chamber the moment the doors slid apart. McCoy followed, running his medical tricorder over the length of the admiral’s body. When the last door slid open, Kirk was through it, into the engine room, into that room that less than two hours ago would have killed them both with silent, indiscriminate accuracy. McCoy saw Kirk waver, then move towards the figure at the far side of the room. He stood over Spock for a moment and then dropped to his knees, putting his arms around the body that fell forward against him. McCoy saw the admiral sway.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, James Kirk thought. Or maybe he muttered the words aloud, because McCoy’s head came up. But not the one. Of the two of them—brothers in arms—he was the one who was left. He had survived. He clutched at the body, holding it, attempting to comfort it, knowing that it was impossible now. He turned to McCoy.
“Help me lift him, Bones.”
McCoy slid the tricorder along the strap to his left side and brought the equipment he carried beside the body. But Kirk shook his head. “Just help me get him up. I’ll carry him out.”
“He’s too heavy, Jim,” McCoy responded. And you’re a wreck. Spock, though he had always looked thinner, had always weighed more. “In your condition, you won’t be able to hold on to him. Let me help you.”
Kirk’s eyes met his through the face plate. “Of course, I can carry him. Now help me lift.” In parallel, the two men, one on each side of Spock, locked arms under his shoulders and knees and slowly rose to their feet.
“See, Bones. He’s not so heavy.”
McCoy felt some amazement. It did seem as though Spock were somehow lighter, thinner, hardly a burden. An illusion, he thought. Like ordinary people lifting one-ton machines that have fallen on their loved ones to save their lives. McCoy transferred all the weight to Kirk, who hoisted the body once, and turned towards the exit. Arms hanging limp, Spock’s head fell against Kirk’s shoulder smearing it dark. McCoy could see blood on the faceplate of Kirk’s helmet and even on the arms of their suits, blood that had seeped through the dead man’s uniform. Blood and bodily fluids. If only the blood would be dry, McCoy thought wearily, but he knew in his heart that this kind of blood—blood shed by brothers—never dried. McCoy continued walking behind the admiral, as one by one they moved through the last of the decontamination locks. Once past them, Scotty removed both their helmets and gloves.
“Clear the corridor,” James Kirk ordered, though he need not have said it. Everyone on the ship was already in mourning, hiding somewhere, licking their wounds. In bitter silence, Leonard McCoy, Montgomery Scott, and Suchin Kamura walked behind the admiral as he carried his dead friend through their ship, all the way to Sickbay.
* * * *
James Kirk draped Spock’s body the length of an exam table, and no one in lab coats hovered or tried to interfere. Even McCoy hung back as Kirk smoothed down the uniform sleeves and fixed the white collar. He’d been in a couple of honor guards and he knew the exact precision necessary to fold a flag; he felt like he was doing that now. Dignity meant everything to Spock, and even here, he would be nothing less than dignified. When Spock’s body was in alignment, his hands folded over his stomach, his bangs straight, Kirk just stood beside the table. He wanted to leave but he couldn’t. Instinctively, his hand went to Spock’s shoulder, squeezing it gently.
“You are my beloved comrade,” he whispered to Spock. “Now I am lost . . . I am lost.” His fingers moved to Spock’s hair, felt the silkiness. Only when a strand came off in his hand, did he push himself away.
* * * *
Defused lights came on one-quarter power as he crossed the threshold. For the admiral, that was enough light for now. He was back in his uniform, and the low light kept him from seeing how soiled it was.
Half-expecting to hear the Vulcan’s deep, soothing voice saying his name, James Kirk stood in the middle of Spock’s personal quarters. Instead, he heard nothing but a slight ringing in his ears. He trudged over to the bunk, touched the Vulcan headrest, then turned as though surveying the room from Spock’s point of view. What was he looking for? A memento? A souvenir? Dammit, he could have anything he wanted from this room. He wasn’t looking for any one thing. He was looking for someone who would never return.
Like a sleep-walker, he went to the closet, opened it, touching each uniform one by one. Then he touched the black robe with the odd cuneiform writing on it; he’d always meant to ask Spock what the lettering meant. The Vulcan robe had reminded him of priestly vestments, tying Spock to an element of spirituality that the admiral himself certainly didn’t possess. Now he knew that robe was destined for another purpose. He clutched the sleeve, feeling the softness of it, the comfort. Just a few hours ago, Spock had been wearing it . . . . He realized that he’d never touched it before. The fabric was beautiful and elegant, soft and comforting like real wool or silk. No wonder Spock often wore it. Kirk took down the robe, brought it up to his face, inhaling. It smelled of incense, of antiquity, of a man undeniably at home in the present, yet also inclined to the teachings of the past.
James Kirk was so tired, he was swaying, but nothing mattered now but his duty to his friend.
Duty.
Where the hell does it end? What does it buy you but—
He groaned when he thought of the price Spock had paid. What was the use of putting this off? He went to Spock’s console and sat in Spock’s chair, the dark robe folded in his lap.
“Computer, voice tie-in. Admiral James T. Kirk override. Code double A, double Z.” He spoke one of the few Vulcan words that he knew “Pazheen’ablad.” Spock’s password. He knew it meant ‘hidden treasure.’ He smiled wistfully at the thought.
“Console override completed,” the computer conveyed.
“Computer, unlock personnel file assigned to Spock, Captain, Will and Last Words, for my eyes only, dated . . . .” He paused. He didn’t know the date of the last update. “Latest entry.”
In the old days, the computer would have said, “Working.” Now it immediately related in its objective quasi-feminine voice, “Spock, captain. Serial number: S-one-seven-nine dash two-seven-six-SP. File: Will and Last Words. Subfile: Will. Last entry stardate eight-zero-three-zero point three.”
A year ago.
“Computer, play back last entry.”
Spock’s uniformed image, proper, immaculate and reserved, popped onto the screen.
For the next ten minutes, Spock’s deep, mellifluous voice recited the exact details of his will. He spoke of a trust that he had set up with his Starfleet salary, hazard duty pay, and miscellaneous funds for his protégé, Saavik. He spoke of several scholarships for deserving students that he wanted anonymously implemented. To the admiral, he left everything on the ship to dispose of as he saw fit—even his body, "After Doctor McCoy is through with it, of course". To the good doctor, he left his science library and related research, and a personal message on another tape. And Sarek would deal with all family holdings on Vulcan. Except for one piece of property that he left to the admiral with only the words, “If you ever go to the southern quadrant of Shii’kan Canyon near Vulcan’s Forge, Jim, you will think of me, as it was a favorite place of my childhood. It is now yours.”
Kirk’s eyes filled with tears.
The screen went blank, and the computer continued, “File: Will and Last Words. Subfile: Last words. Last entry stardate eight-one-two-nine point six.”
Two weeks ago, Kirk realized. In preparation for this mission?
“Forgive me, Admiral,” Spock seemingly continued, though he was wearing the black robe that Jim now clutched in his hands, “if I have left you during a crisis. Know that it has never been my wish to abandon my duty to you.” He repeated the words, “ . . . to abandon you.” He raised his brow and softened his features. “Our friendship has been the one most satisfying aspect of my life. I do not want to depart this life without you knowing that.”
Calmly, he shifted in his seat.
“I do not know if there is an afterlife in the way you humans think of it. Actually, I think not. Yet, if I were human, it would be my fondest wish to meet with you again.” His dark, somber eyes closed briefly as though he were meditating. “As a Vulcan, I would wish to say to you, Do not grieve for me.” When he opened his eyes, he cocked his head, and Kirk saw the rare hint of the elfin. “But I know you well, and I know that you would not heed my words. I wish only that I could spare you what I know you must be feeling. Forgive that I cannot. If the situation were reverse, know only that, it would be I—as I watched this last tape of you—who could contend no better with grief.”
He dropped his head, from a moment’s self-deprecation perhaps; then it seemed as though the illogic of that gesture hit him, and with the greatest pride and greatest love, he raised his eyes to peer intently at the screen, as if straining to see past it—into the future, beyond the realm of death. His stern, lined face softened noticeably into a pleasant almost-smile. “Good-bye, Admiral. Jim, my dearest friend. My only t’hy’la. Remember me.”
Kirk shook his head with despair, as for the second time, the screen went blank. He groaned inwardly. Oh, Spock, can a man forget his right hand when he has lost it, forget what it is to see when all is dark now? All I do is remember you.
He had never in all his life felt such hurt.
“Computer off,” he whispered, fighting down a constriction that came so near to closing his throat. He was filled with grief for Spock, marooned inside his head and heart with his own desperation, buried in it. And all he could think of now was Khan. Khan’s face, Khan’s words, Khan’s rampant, uncontrollable emotion hurling at him through the bitter blackness of empty space, as though the man had stabbed him a hundred times in the heart. So many years of hatred built to this one devastating moment.
. . . I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you.
I shall leave you as you left me . . . marooned! For all eternity. Buried alive! . . .
Reeling, James Kirk clutched the robe to his chest and stumbled back out into the corridor. There he went to a wall comm unit: “Security, this is Kirk. Seal Captain Spock’s quarters until further notice.”
He wondered why he’d ordered that. No one onboard would violate Spock’s sanctuary. Ever. But he knew he’d done it just for himself—to keep himself from returning there before he was ready. Final duties with Spock’s effects would come later. But not today.
Stay out of there. Don’t try to find him there. He’s dead, and you . . . you’re buried alive.
He wandered down the corridor, just the few steps from his own quarters, but for a second or two, he found himself totally turned-around and lost. Slumping against the bulkhead, he felt disturbingly light-headed. When was the last time he’d eaten? Yesterday. But when was yesterday? He ran his hand down the back of his neck and then rubbed his eyes and the stubble along his cheeks and chin. He felt dirty, grimy in fact. He probably reeked of electrical conduit and two kinds of blood. He’d been up for over 30 hours. His mouth tasted like Denebian swamp water, and his lips were bone dry from breathing through his mouth. He needed to blow the blood clots out of his nose so that he could take a normal breath. At the minimum, he should shower, but he could barely contemplate the intricacies of undressing and working any mechanisms. He felt like he’d taken a physical beating, like he’d literally fought hand-to-hand with everything since their first encounter with Reliant: Genesis, Khan, Spock’s death. Yet he felt wired from lack of sleep and shock. Finally, he stumbled into his own quarters.
When he saw Leonard McCoy, he thought maybe he’d gotten that wrong too, but A Tale of Two Cities sat on the credenza, right where he’d left it. McCoy had been waiting for him. Poor Bones.
McCoy stood up. “Jim, I . . . .” He seemed to shiver. “I don’t know what to say. I feel like someone’s ripped my heart out.”
“I know, Bones.” Kirk sank down into his reading chair. “I know.”
McCoy looked down at his own empty hands and then remembered that he was a doctor and James Kirk was his patient, and not the other way around. “Jim, you’ve got to eat something and then get some sleep. I know you don’t want to, but you’ll collapse if you don’t. Let me put you to bed.”
Kirk only shook his head. “I just want to be alone.”
Don’t shut me out, McCoy almost groaned aloud. But he kept quiet, knowing that Kirk would never mean to do that.
Trying to massage some moisture back into them, Kirk rubbed his eyes as he slipped farther into the chair. “I just can’t be with anyone right now. You understand, don’t you.” Please, I miss him so much . . . I just can’t be with anyone else. Even you. He didn’t want McCoy to see how much he trembled as he remembered Spock’s taped words, spoken with such warmth, such gratitude—no, with incontrovertible depth.
. . . My dearest friend, my only t’hy’la . . . So beautiful when Spock said it. T’hy’la? My only friend? But that certainly wasn’t true. Spock had many friends aboard the Enterprise, people whom he cherished and who cherished him. So it didn’t mean just that . . . .
His fist pounded the chair. “Shit, Bones!”
For an instant, McCoy thought the swear word was aimed at him, but the doctor remained silent, only watching the look of concentration and question on Kirk’s face.
Admiral Kirk sat up straight, an almost angry gesture.
“Computer,” he said, addressing his personal system. “What is the meaning of the Vulcan word—” He suddenly realized that he had never said it aloud before. He looked straight at McCoy. Bones, I need for you to hear this, need to share this—this secret maybe? —with someone who understands how it was with us. His tone was soft but firm with courage. “T’hyl'a,” he stated with a clear voice.
The computer responded immediately, without an ounce of sentiment.
“The Vulcan word t’hy’la has three distinct meanings: friend, brother, and lover. Though a fourth meaning derived from a combination of the previous meanings occurs in both ancient Vulcan literature and more current personal records. The Standard equivalent translates to soulmate.”
Kirk slumped back in his chair. “My god, Bones.”
Something in the back of McCoy’s memory recognized the word. Hearing it made him ache with feelings, and those feelings, odd and sourceless, made him feel a little scared.
“Jim, why are you asking about that word?”
“Spock . . . .” He could barely say the name of his friend without weeping. “I just came from his quarters.” Now Kirk shook his head. "On his WLW tape, he called me that. I’d heard it before. He told me that it meant ‘best friend’, but he never told me the rest of the meanings.”
McCoy blinked suddenly. “You mean, the brother or lover parts?”
Kirk took a while to answer.
“Yes.”
Under normal circumstances, McCoy would have smiled; now he could only concentrate on what he wanted to say and then say it.
“Well, maybe to call you ‘brother’ to your face was too emotional for him. And the ‘lover’ label certainly didn’t apply.”
The doctor watched James Kirk’s expression fade away, as though he had gone numb, as though his mind were a parsec away. Then McCoy himself paused, putting three fingers to his temple, as if remembering something—an odd, foreign thought that could not possibly be his. His mind repeated: Avat S’James tze t’hy’la. He could have sworn the words were in Vulcan, but he didn’t know any Vulcan. Yet somehow, he translated James, who is my brother . . . who is . . . my lover? . . .
He gulped.
Kirk’s expression remained distant. Now McCoy’s spine lengthened. Don’t tell me I didn’t see something like that right under my nose? He felt heat in his face, but this was too important to be embarrassed about. He forced out the shocking words.
“Were you lovers?”
Admiral James T. Kirk didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. Time had stopped, paralyzing him. Neither time nor the Enterprise moving through it meant a thing but for this raw realization like an electrical current that had just jolted his nerves. Spock was speaking to him from beyond death. Telling him something very, very important. About who he was. About what they were to each other. Now he finally understood. Now that it was far too late. He swallowed away his great, grim surprise and answered the doctor’s question.
“No, Bones, we weren’t.”
McCoy’s eyes widened. He knew he’d actually been poised to hear something else. What was going on here? Why had that thought seemed—of his two best friends as beyond that common definition, as physical intimates—suddenly reasonable, obvious, even logical . . . if only for one crazy moment? Was he glad of Kirk’s answer or deeply disappointed?
“But we could have been,” Kirk finally whispered. He sat statue-still. “We could have been. That’s what he was trying to tell me.” His light brows knitted together as if they would never come apart. “I had no idea that it was even a possibility. I was so blind!”
McCoy took in air.
“Jim, I think you’re reading too much into this.” He wet his lips. “Spock used a Vulcan term of endearment to say good-bye to his best friend, that’s all.”
Kirk only shook his head, in bitter negation. “It means more. The computer said so.”
“All right,” McCoy said, “let’s say, you’re right, and we know damn well the computer is. It means that Vulcans are a lot more open-minded than we ever thought.” The doctor leaned forward a millimeter. “But Jim, you wouldn’t have agreed to that kind of . . . relationship.”
I suppose not, Kirk almost said.
But he didn’t say it.
How could Bones be so certain, when he wasn’t. Defiantly, as if moving from a dark, sheltered place into the reckless light, James Kirk’s hazel eyes met the penetrating blue ones head on.
“Only a fool wouldn’t want to.” Kirk’s face spoke of incredulity again. “If so, you just called me a fool, Bones. And maybe I am.”
For the first time, McCoy could see the honest argument playing itself out in Jim Kirk’s mind. He hadn’t meant to imply anything unsavory but had spoken an assumption concerning James Kirk’s sexuality based on years of blatant heterosexual behavior. Of course, sexuality was often more complex than most people wanted to admit—even a physician who’d seen every type of humanoid sexuality. He began to backpedal now.
“Spock always went where you led, Jim.”
“So if I didn’t go there, we didn’t go?” And a million logical reasons would have pushed the idea of sexual intimacy from his thoughts. Even if it had popped into his mind and maybe it had, he couldn’t have allowed it to remain. Duty. Careers. Vulcan reticence. Starfleet codes of behavior. A lifetime of sexual orientation. Labels.
“Why didn’t he tell me? Did you know about this?”
“I know now.”
Spock, you green-blooded devil. Full of surprises. Full of crap sometimes, too. Is this one of those times? Cause if you really meant it, you should have told him. He shouldn’t have had to find out like this. McCoy didn’t know how to diffuse the emotional issue, so he just spoke the truth to the admiral.
“It wasn’t his way to be bold. That’s your way.”
Kirk swallowed. “Did my boldness cause his death?”
“That’s like saying you think meeting him for the first time and shaking his hand caused his death.”
“I would have done anything for him, Bones. Given him whatever he needed. I did love him—it wasn’t passion, or it was and I didn’t recognize it—but it would have been so easy to step over the line. It had pretty much disintegrated anyway. The line . . . .” So many of them.
Dismissing what he was hearing, McCoy comforted, "You’ll think clearer about this after a few hours' sleep.” The doctor began to fuss with his medical kit. “I just came to check up on you and to report that I’m done with the autopsy. Spock’s body is in medical stasis.”
Kirk blinked hard. “What autopsy?”
“Routine. A procedure I’m required to perform on any crewmember killed on duty. You know that.” The doctor could see dismay slide across Kirk’s face, and he’d forgotten the gruesome old-fashioned image that particular word could still conjure up. “I know what Spock died of,” he continued. He cleared his throat at the memory. “Except for a couple small tissue samples, I used scans, a totally noninvasive technique.”
Kirk shuddered, accepting that. What he couldn’t accept was the sight in his mind of Spock trapped in the engine chamber. He ground his teeth. “How much did he suffer?”
McCoy stared at his boots, not wanting to speak of unspeakable agony.
“Who can say? Every major organ shut down before he died. He was blind, fighting paralysis and suffocation. Radiation cooks you.” When Kirk turned gray, McCoy stopped. “Sorry.”
“Remove the body from stasis,” Kirk ordered. “Burial in space will take place at 1800 hours.”
“You can’t do that without notifying his parents.”
Kirk’s eyes merely narrowed. “I can do anything I want. He belongs to me.”
“Jim!” McCoy snapped.
“You know how I feel about this.” Kirk’s eyes blazed. “Anyone who dies under my command—unless there are expressed instructions—is buried in space. We’re all here to be here, Bones. This was Spock’s home. Our home.”
“Because nobody ever gets home alive?”
“This is our home,” Kirk insisted, ignoring a real fear that McCoy’s words conveyed.
“Vulcan was Spock’s home,” McCoy implored from deep in his gut. “Take us . . . uh, him home.”
“No.” Kirk stood up and leaned his shoulder against the bulkhead, his back to McCoy. “Right where we are. Right here! He’ll lie where he fell.” He lifted his clenched fist and put his forehead to it. “Right here.”
“Jim, you’re making a big mistake.” Wait, he didn’t really know that and yet it seemed so imperative. Then he heard himself suggest something more reasonable. “Let’s take him home to his parents, to his people.” I’m so tired, but this is important . . . to me and to Spock, I just know it.
Kirk was sniffling now. “Bones, please, don’t fight me on this. He left it up to me. He didn’t mention Vulcan or Earth or anywhere else. I know he was a lot of things, but part of him was a soldier, like me. He died in battle. And all the space between us and that planet is the battleground. Tomorrow, the heat and friction of the Genesis planet are going to return him to ashes and atoms. It’s what I want, what he wanted.”
McCoy gave up, knowing he shouldn’t, but not knowing how to countermand Kirk’s wishes, or even why he wanted to so badly. Sighing deeply, he asked instead, “Is that . . . what you’d want, Jim?”
“Yes.” Kirk stared straight ahead, trying, like he sensed Spock had, to see into the future. “Someday, when I'm done, I hope I can be half as strong as he was, and can accomplish something good, save lives like he did. And wherever I am, wherever I drop, I hope whoever’s in charge leaves me there, no matter how remote or desolate. Because that’s where I should be. Where I’d want to be.” He tried to look at McCoy through his own gathering tears. “It’s only right for people like us.”
McCoy was sniffling too now. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing Jim Kirk, too, but somehow he knew that Jim was telling him all that so that he would remember it and write it down, so that someone else in the future could read it, or hear it, or something . . . . Oh, god, this was hard. He watched Jim sob once on his feet. When he couldn’t watch any longer, he tore his eyes away. T’hy’la—Spock’s word for this man whom he loved like a brother, too. The doctor tried to change the subject when he saw Kirk absently caressing the edge of the antique leather book.
“This is the book Spock gave you for your birthday?”
“It’s a good one, Bones . . . .” The voice trailed off again.
McCoy could see the paper bookmark half-way through. “You never finished.”
“I got interrupted.”
The admiral had been carrying it around the Academy, reading it in snatches, consuming big chunks of it at one sitting, savoring each chapter, avoiding putting it down until he’d boarded the Enterprise to begin inspections and had been forced to hand it off to Uhura. Upon reading the riveting first page, he’d been intrigued by the writing, nineteenth-century elegant yet modern and direct, and was soon caught up in the lives of Charles Darnay, Sydney Carton, and the good doctor Manette, all set against the turbulent times of the French Revolutions. It was the reign of Madame Guillotine, and as he turned the pages, he was repulsed and fascinating by her power, her threat, her relentless pursuit. He had grimly met the woman who knitted and counted heads but not yet read the words that would haunt readers for centuries. It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done. But he would.
This finely crafted, bound book was Spock’s birthday wish for him: Surely the best of times. He sighed. There has to be a message, Spock. This is a story of cosmic twins. Like us.
“I can’t believe he actually went out and bought this for me, Bones.”
McCoy chuckled softly. “Yeah, the owner of the antique store wasn’t too happy when Spock insisted on actually reading the whole thing while we were looking around. But he got over it when it only took a few minutes and Spock agreed to buy the book.” The doctor cleared his throat and lifted his chin at the memory. “Ahem. ‘There are several elements of this story that my friend will undoubtedly enjoy. Please, sir, be so kind as to . . . wrap it up'.”
Kirk had to smile. “You were with him?”
“Sure. Where do you think I found your half-glasses?”
“Oh, Bones, I wish I could have been there. . . .” He dropped his head. “I’m actually jealous.”
That was a very personal thing to say. Answered by another one.
“I know you loved him a lot, Jim.” McCoy nodded. “And I don’t know how I know this, but I know he loved you, too. You both just thought you’d have more time.”
“We were foolish, Bones.” I was foolish.
McCoy shook his head. “No, just human.”
The admiral picked up the book and held it for a moment to his chest before placing it carefully on the robe folded on the credenza like it was made, not of leather and paper, but of finest crystal. In his exhaustion, his feelings for Spock coalesced, clinging to the surface of his mind like obscure but distinct memories of lost loved ones are likely to do. How human not to take the time to understand the most important things when they are routine, how human to look back and wonder, bewildered by their loss.
“Bones, can I tell you something? The doctor nodded again to hear the admiral’s gentle voice, thick with yearning and tenderness. “We were at breakfast.” Kirk sighed wistfully. “Just yesterday, I think. And Spock was peeling an orange. I remember watching him, totally mesmerized, utterly comforted, and frankly fascinated. You know Spock. He peeled that orange with such care, such precision, as if, for one exact minute, that small orange was the absolute center of his universe. And when he looked at me without saying a word and offered me half, I was completely filled with wonder and pride over this single, simple act.” He swallowed hard. “I remember now, the quintessential feeling. It was pure and deep and intimate.” Maybe he could recapture it now. He took in air. “My god, I was in love with him, Bones, but I didn’t know it.” In despair, he shook his head, repeating softly, “I just never knew it.”
His head, filled with the essence of love and despair, fell to his chest. He couldn’t hold it up. Could barely stand. Fatigue, grief, and a truth that he had never understood before made him weak.
Finally unable to bear the intensity of these moments any longer, McCoy went over to the admiral and took his firmly by the arm. “Come on, Jim-boy. Doctor’s orders.”
He moved Kirk so that he sat on the edge of his bunk and began to unfasten his jacket for him. The admiral actually allowed him to help him off with his uniform coat, still speckled with his own blood from down in Engineering. Like he had allowed Suchin Kamura to help undress him before, McCoy remembered. Like he wasn’t attached to his body anymore. Shock’ll do that to you.
“Can you shower by yourself?” he asked softly, turning the near-limp man. He watched Kirk nod and trudge into the bathroom, and McCoy turned to the replicator and ordered the admiral some soup. Then he found a chair and sat by himself, listening for the occasional noise from the other room. The door remained open so that the sounds of falling clothes and boots and sonics and water mechanisms and then pockets of paralyzing silence assaulted the doctor who sat patiently remembering the friend who had saved his life at the cost of his own, remembering so many things about him.
When the silence turned too long, McCoy located a bathrobe in the closet, found James Kirk—stopped in mid-movement, slumped over the sink—and draped the garment around him. He turned him and, deciding the admiral needed sleep more than he needed food, moved him towards the bed.
Kirk trudged forward, went straight to Spock’s Vulcan robe and climbed into his bunk with it clutched to his chest. He lay on his back, his eyes wide, pooling, his mind filled with a million thoughts, his mouth able to vocalize only one of them.
“Guess I’m going to do something I haven’t done since I was a boy.”
So moved by his plight, McCoy actually touched his cheek, trying to sooth it. “What’s that, Jim?”
“I’m going to cry myself to sleep.”
McCoy almost wept himself but became the physician again as a way to shut out the pain. He was a doctor, and this was his duty. He pressed a hypo to the admiral’s throat. First something to hydrate him, then a sedative. Nothing too heavy. Just something to put him down for a few merciful hours.
“This’ll help.” I hope. He knew the dose would only last 4, 5 hours, and then Jim would be up . . . remembering.
With that, Kirk turned on his side, his face toward the bulkhead, his arms around the black robe. McCoy pulled the loose ends of the robe over Jim’s shoulders and hips—and felt the irrational need to crawl in beside him and cover his own face with that robe. He shook his head at the image. No, I don’t belong here. Dammit, not me.
One last thing.
“Jim?”
“Yes, Bones.”
One last thing.
“You know, if I could bring him back to you, I would.”
If only there was a way to bring Spock back. . . .
Kirk stifled a sob. “I know you would.” Then came a long, violent shudder. “Oh god, I wish you could. I’d do anything if I thought you could. Anything.”
Defeated, McCoy left Jim Kirk’s quarters on his way back to Sickbay. There, he knew, there’d be a line of people to see him: injured, depressed as hell, stressed out, anxious, grief-stricken, shocked, asking after the admiral, after Captain Spock. Scotty was sedated in a ward bed, but those on their feet would be the walking wounded: Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, especially Saavik, maybe even Carol and David Marcus—all carrying the guilt-ridden weight from relief at being alive on their shoulders. Just as he was.
Oh, Spock, you’ve really done it this time.
He paused in front of Spock’s quarters, drawn to it for some silent reason. Security had put up some ridiculous yellow lasers across the door that blinked “Sealed rooms. Do Not Enter.”
Yeah, sure those silly light streamers can’t keep me out, he thought. I’ll go to Sickbay, and then I’ll hide in here. He knew he was thinking bizarre thoughts. He had his own quarters, his own bunk. His own life, separate from theirs. But he did not feel separate. He felt combined, joined, merged . . . impossible. He touched his forehead.
Dammit to hell! Spock, I’ll remember you. I promise. But I’m me. I’m not you. I’m alive and that’s the way it is. My mind’s just playing tricks from grief. You’re gone. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. For all humans. For everyone! Dead is dead, boy. I’ve seen enough of it to know, and I examined you myself. Oh, Spock let me go. Have the decency to be dead. Let me go. . . .
But something told him that Spock, while decent and reserved in life, wouldn’t be in death. A shiver ran down his spine. Something was definitely wrong with him. He felt achy and queasy. He promised himself that he’d run a diagnostic on himself when the dust settled. Maybe a hot meal and a good night’s sleep was what he needed most. Yeah, surely that was it. Okay, so be it. Okay, whatever happens happens. As long as he could be there for Jim. That’s what Spock would want.
He reached out and touched the edge of Spock’s door. “Yes, I’ll remember you.” How could anyone forget you. You were a real piece of work. Now we find out that the stone man from Vulcan wanted to sleep with his captain maybe. Interesting psyche you had there, boy.
He moved on to the turbo lift. When it opened, Suchin Kamura was standing inside. She peered around his shoulder. “I know I’m only a trainee, but I wanted to see the admiral . . . to see if he’s all right.” She looked sad. “Is he?”
McCoy frowned in consideration. “I don’t know yet, Ms. Kamura.”
Now the haggard man before her caught her eye. “Are you, sir? All right?” Gently, she took his arm and brought him inside the turbo with her.
“Good question. I don’t know that either.”
“Sickbay,” she ordered. “I think you’re exhausted. I’ll see that the nurses put you to bed.” She put her arm around his shoulder.
McCoy wanted to smile but frankly didn’t have the energy. Whoa there. No little snippet of a girl is going to do any such thing. I’m the CMO here. Nobody’s going to put me in a bio-bed. Even the idea of a trained nurse helping him didn’t sit too well either. But suddenly he felt like he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. He could barely hold up his head. Well, maybe she was right. Okay, not sickbay but his own bed sounded pretty inviting.
“Turbo, halt,” he said. He looked down at her, all ship-shape in her trim, burgundy uniform. “Officers’ quarters.” The turbo reversed itself, and he saw her smile, happy in her new assignment. “You wouldn’t mind helping an old man like me?"
She tightened her arm around him. “I would be honored, Doctor.”
McCoy’s quarters were in the opposite direction from his friends’ so they didn’t have to walk past the jarring yellow light beams or the imposing closed door again. But McCoy paused to look over his shoulder. He was filled with an odd, startling, sorrowful knowledge that he would outlive James Kirk, too. He shook his head at the absurdity. His psi rating had always been low; this was just imagination brought on by the emotional wreck of what happened today.
No, that man will live forever. Oh, please, Jim, please live forever. My job can’t be the one who remembers you, too. Dammit put me to bed so that I can stop remembering.
In another minute, Suchin Kamura had eased him into the narrow bunk, and he let her. He wanted a drink, but he knew he needed a nap more. In no time he was asleep, snoring lightly. Tomorrow he would remember, if that was his job. Tomorrow.
PART II
Many Years Later
A shadowy edge tucked in a cranny of his most logical brain registered full-blown surprise at seeing the handsome features on the monitor screen. Jim! But his deep voice and reserved expression remained neutral as ever; after all, now he was a diplomat.
“I am pleased to see you, Captain Kirk,” he said calmly, nodding a greeting. “However, I did not expect to. Is something wrong?”
James Kirk was on Earth and Spock was on Rigel—and had been for several weeks. This unscheduled communication, while unusual and perhaps impulsive on the part of the sender, was nevertheless welcome to the receiver of the call.
“I just wanted you to know, Spock, that I’m not going to attend the ceremonies for the Enterprise-B.”
“May I ask why?” Spock knew that Captain Kirk had already personally accepted the invitation—if perhaps reluctantly. “You are expected. The guest of honor, I believe.”
“Some honor,” Kirk muttered cynically. “A media event covered by news people not there to praise but to bury Caesar.” He looked away from the screen at nothing. “I’m not connected with that ship. She isn’t mine and never was.” Now the captain shook his head, perhaps a little nervously. Then he got over it and his hazel eyes brightened. “Besides I’m going to be doing something really exciting. Orbital skydiving, and tomorrow’s the last optimal day for a tri-elliptical jump before there’s a global weather change. I don’t plan to miss the opportunity.”
Spock blinked once in a Vulcan show of horror.
“Orbital skydiving is a very dangerous sport.”
“Only if something untoward happens.” Kirk grinned winningly. “And it won’t.”
“That cannot be guaranteed. I would much prefer to know that you are safely aboard the Enterprise-B.”
Kirk shook his head in defiance. “I’m not going. I’ve made up my mind.”
“You will disappoint many people, Jim, but . . . it is, of course, your decision.”
The hazel eyes dropped demurely. “If you were going to be there with me, it’d be different.”
“I regret that I cannot be by your side, especially if it precludes your impulsive exploration of an overly dangerous so-called sport—one that has claimed 37 lives in the past five years—but negotiations here are not going well.” He folded his hands. “However, I understand that Misters Chekov and Scott, as well as Doctor McCoy, will attend.”
“Not Bones. He’s director of volunteers for the Earth Relief Organization, and there’s an outbreak of Correlian fever on one of the Vegan colonies. He’s on his way there now.” There was a moment of awkward silence. “So. I just wanted you to know—in case you caught any news vids without my smiling face. I didn’t want you to worry about me.”
“When we are not together, I am always concerned for you.”
Kirk’s lips curved slightly.
“Just as long as I know you’re not worried.” A thin, red stream of words blinked twice across the captain’s face. “Ah, gotta go. I could only wangle a five-minute window and time's about up.”
“Jim, I miss you.”
Now Kirk smiled broadly. “I love you too, Spock.” He winked at the screen. “Next time I see you, I promise we’ll have fun.”
Spock sighed with yearning at the mutual sentiment and the expression of it.
“I shall look forward to—”
The transmission ended abruptly.
. . . dear Jim, live long . . . .
The Federation comlink logo popped simultaneously on their screens, and each man was flooded with mixed emotions, as both sat light-years apart pondering the real reason for the captain’s call.
Exactly One Month Later
Even as the air taxi hovered and lifted away in a jet of dust, he was letting himself in through the courtyard wrought iron gate. In a few steps, he arrived at the carved front door. The house was unlocked and so he went in after a short, unanswered knock. Of course, nobody bolts anything around here. Damn smug, too-honest-to-need-security Vulcans would have no truck with locks.
He called out. No answer. Quietly, he moved inside, across the tiled foyer, through the large open living area, over exotic carpets, beyond the elegant staircase, past the large kitchen—all of which seemed cool and dark after coming in out of the brilliant, blinding sunlight. An old-fashioned clock or computer simulation chimed the hour.
When his eyes adjusted, he could see the rear courtyard beyond. Glass sliders opened automatically, and he found himself out on the rear patio, as the sculptured stone fountain, with its water-saving forcefield, splashed invitingly in the middle. He looked around. There was no one. Oh great, I’ve come all this way for nothing. Pushing through, he knew of one more place to look. He opened a low ornate gate and walked down into another area of the compound. Finally, he saw who he was looking for sitting on a stone bench under a mature zylah tree, staring at the ground. Bark and leaves the color of mint, the desert tree stood in full Spring bloom. The bench and the man’s black hair were littered with a fine sprinkle of yellow pollen and the tiniest leaves.
The visitor cleared his throat rather loudly.
Lifting his dark head, the man peered over his left shoulder. One elegant brow came up as it had a thousand times before, and the visitor felt relief to see something familiar in this unfamiliar landscape.
“Doctor McCoy, come in, please. I have been waiting to speak with you.”
Spock was sitting out in Amanda’s garden, alone. He had been contemplating the delicate new flowering, the hint of periwinkle and lavender that budded and poked up between the rocks that he’d assisted his mother in arranging so carefully as a serious, helpful child. His time sense told him that he had been thinking—to use the word meditating would be a lie—of those things for nearly three hours.
“I apologize for my distraction. I did not hear you arrive.” My mind was a million light years away. . . maybe farther. How could we have known it would come to this?
Remembering how empty and quiet the big rambling house seemed, Leonard McCoy demanded suddenly, “Where’s Sarek?” He scowled in disapproval. “Are you all alone here?”
Spock was unsure of the meaning of the doctor’s tone. “My father has been on a diplomatic mission on Cignus for nearly three weeks.”
“Doesn’t he know you shouldn’t be left alone?”
“Doctor, I am perfectly capable of caring for myself.”
“Nonsense. You’re hiding out here in your dead mother’s garden by yourself, your logical, over-educated Vulcan mind a million kilometers from anything. It’s hot as hell and you don’t care. You let me sneak up on you even though you say you were expecting me. You’re a wreck and you don’t even know it.”
“I am not—” Spock hesitated, as if the heat and time itself had slowed the blood pulsing in his veins. Perhaps I am . . . ‘a wreck.’ “I am fine,” he countered lamely.
“You’ve lost someone who was very dear to you, your closest friend.” McCoy swallowed at the inadequacy of those words. He knew that Jim and Spock had been lovers and a private couple for many years now. “Hell, so much more. Vulcan or human—it doesn’t take a medical degree to see that you’re depressed.”
Spock didn’t actually know whether Vulcans were capable of depression, but he would take the physician’s word for it. He understood that his emotions were beyond troubling.
McCoy eyed the seated man carefully. “Have you been eating? You look peaked.”
“Doctor, stop fussing. We are no longer in the Service, and you are not my doctor.”
“Mister Spock, I’m going to be your doctor till the day you die.” McCoy’s brow rose high with irony. “Again.”
A cool breeze whispered up for a moment, passing around them like a memory. At the respite, the doctor paused to peer at the simple desert garden with its flagstone paths and beds and odd, grey-green shrubs and low cacti and succulents. Kind of pretty in a dry, dustbowl kind of way. He took a deep breath. He’d better calm himself down or this was going to be one long, hot afternoon. After all, none of them were getting any younger, especially him.
Even wearing light-weight desert civies, Leonard McCoy felt over-heated, sweaty, and in no mood for small talk. He stuck his hands in his pockets and began to pace before the seated man. He knew he needed to sit down and compose himself, but his mind raced wildly; he had to speak before he burst from frustration.
“It’s official now. It’s taken them an entire goddamn month, but the Board of Inquiry into the energy ribbon phenomenon has finally completed its investigation. All they came up with was some flimsy story of a temporal/spatial fluctuation, moving across the galaxy, that ripped ships apart like paper and then kept on going.” He literally forced himself to continue. “They searched every rock and floating piece of space debris, Spock. They couldn’t find a trace—not a hair or a fiber from his uniform. Nothing. Verdict: missing in action and presumed dead.” He swallowed what seemed like a rock the size of El Capitan. “So, what’s there to talk about? There’s no ‘presumed’ about it. We let Jim go off and get himself killed.”
As he expected, the man he was talking to remained curiously, exasperatingly silent—neither agreeing nor disagreeing. In response to the silence, McCoy bright blue eyes blazed like one of Vulcan’s own overbearing suns, and what he blurted out came straight from his heart.
“I know Vulcans aren’t as prone to self-recrimination as humans, but I hate myself right now.”
Spock merely folded his hands.
“We both had more pressing concerns than the ship’s maiden voyage, Doctor—the epidemic on Vega IX required your immediate medical expertise, and the breakdown of diplomatic negotiations at the Rigel colonies required mine. Mister Scott and Mister Chekov are both technically astute. There is no evidence whatsoever that we could have done anything further to help Jim had we also been present. The decision to go below was his. Self-hatred is illogical.”
“One of us would have gone with him. At least he wouldn’t have died alone.”
A canted brow rose in sincere consideration.
“Gone with him to the lower decks? You are saying that two deaths are preferable to one? That is also illogical.”
“I’m saying Jim wouldn’t have been alone.” Human fists clenched at each side.
Even now, he can’t wait to call me illogical with that condescending tone of his. Doesn’t he have any feelings about what happened on the Enterprise. About what happened to Jim!
McCoy stared hard at the Vulcan, trying to dissect him with his eyes. It wasn’t hard to do. Spock looked tired and gaunt, the lines of his face etched far deeper than usual; instead of looking Vulcan calm, he looked human haggard.
It isn’t condescension at all. It’s grief.
“Don’t you want to talk about what happened to Jim, Spock?” he asked.
“Yes, but you said there was nothing to talk about.”
"Oh, don’t take me so damn literally. I didn’t come all this way to talk about the weather.” McCoy seemed peeved. “It happened like he said it would,” the doctor said, appearing to start again. “Don’t you remember what Jim told us in Yosemite—after he took that terrible fall? He said he knew he wouldn’t die because we were with him. That he always knew he’d die alone.”
As though it were yesterday, Spock remembered the helpless chill that had coursed down his spine upon first hearing those words uttered so matter-of-factly as they sat around the campfire. Of all the times he had been in the captain’s mind, he had never once sensed that inner insistence before, that conscious certainty of the future that Jim had communicated to them as clearly as if they were all melded.
“I fear that the Captain speaking both of and from his intuition in no way supports a fact of life or death ten point seven years later.”
“It happened exactly like he said it would, didn’t it, Spock?” McCoy didn’t wait for an answer. “And if nothing else, Jim was always intuitive.”
Among so many other things . . . courageous, intelligent, playful, gentle, giving, forgiving, supportive . . . and most loving.
“You are correct, Doctor. The captain had many fine attributes.”
McCoy couldn’t stop his tone from turning bitter again.
“Oh, what are we talking about? He’s gone.” The desolation of those words took his breath away, and his eyes grew watery with grief. Must be the damn glare. As he wiped his runny nose with the back of his hand, he looked at the Vulcan whose demeanor hadn’t changed. “No tears, Spock?” Blue eyes bore into brown one, studying them. “Ever?’
You can be one cold-hearted bastard sometimes, but not about this. You pretend that this latest final news about Jim doesn’t faze you, but it does. Well, let me tell you about Jim, about the Jim I remember. Let me see just how far you want to carry this stoicism of yours.
“There was only one other time, Spock, before the day we battled Khan—that I had ever seen Jim cry.”
The doctor uttered a low, bitter chuckle, remembering his own culpability. It had been a terrible accident and Jim had never held it against him, but it was still, after all was said and done, his fault. To his mind, he had been the catalyst, and it was still tough to speak of it.
“About a week after we’d returned from the past, from the Guardian planet, we were having a friendly after-shift drink and he just turned sour on me. He’d been holding it back for days, I guess. He just sat there, his face in his hands, weeping for Edith Keeler. I’ll never forget his voice or his words: ‘We never even made love, Bones. I wanted to so badly, but we never got the chance.’ He was absolutely broken-hearted.” The doctor touched one knuckle to his burning eye, willing back the moisture, unwilling to make a fool out of himself in this tearless emotion-barren place. “And then, so many years later, there was you. His second broken heart.”
Spock’s expression changed, barely.
I know how much he loved Ms. Keeler. I was there and saw the love between them grow and perish. As for my death, he whispered to me how unprepared he had been, how desolated, just before he kissed me for the very first time.
But McCoy’s mind moved forward in time.
“You know, I kind of thought I’d see you back on Earth, prowling through the wreck of the Enterprise-B.” The doctor continued, seeming to change the subject. “I thought for sure you would have arranged a place for yourself on the board of inquiry.”
“The board consisted of Starfleet’s top temporal and spatial physicists, structural engineers, starship architects, and forensic scientists, including Professor Soldark from the Vulcan Science Academy. They did not need me.”
“I would have thought you’d still want to see it. The ship.” The doctor hung his head at the memory. He had rushed back to Earth as soon as he could. “I saw it. Like some huge hand scooped out her guts. Eviscerated her.”
While he had not gone there, had avoided going there, Spock had apprised himself of the grim details of the disaster as soon as he could contact the appropriate people. Montgomery Scott had been most helpful, supplying schematics and a bootlegged copy of the bridge and corridor tapes. Once the Enterprise-B had limped home, instead of seeing Jim’s handsome smiling face on the evening vids, he had viewed countless replays of casualties, wreckage, and a Starfleet tragedy.
“Decks 13 through 15. Sections 20 through 28. I am well aware of the layout of the ship and the damage. I do not have to see it.”
“He never had a chance.” McCoy sighed, almost a shudder. “I wish we had a body. To see him lying dead would be a comfort. Make it real.”
“It is real.”
“You know what I mean. It’s hard to accept someone’s death when there’s no body. I expect him to show up any moment. Every day I half-hope . . . and pray . . . .”
“You humans fear death. Vulcans accept it as a natural course of life.”
McCoy shot him a skeptical look, full of ridicule.
“How can you say that to me of all people? You didn’t accept it. You actually came back from death. And Vulcan even has a system for preserving the minds of the dead.” McCoy scanned the horizon in the direction of Mount Seleya. “You all live forever in your Hall of Ancient Big Shot Thought, or you just have your parts put back together and, like the phoenix, rise again. A pinch of katra, a bit of fal-tor-pan, abracadabra, shazam! and you’re right as rain!” The doctor squinted again at the horizon or at just putting two and two together. “There’s nothing logical about how your culture deals with death, Spock, any more than how mine does. When push comes to shove, nobody wants to die. And that includes Vulcans.”
For once, Spock did not feel like arguing. Though he had no conscious recollection of his willingness to ‘accept’ or ‘reject’ his own death, he had not seen the illogic of his own previous statement until now. Vulcans may have excellent reasons for everything they do, but McCoy was right in that, for certain cultural elements, such as the preservation of katra, it was an apparent desire to “cheat death” that was the main source of those excellent reasons.
“I can assure you, Doctor, the fal-tor-pan ritual is as rare as—”
“As rare as Sarek’s son.” That wasn’t a compliment. “Look all the way here, cooped up in that shuttle, I couldn’t think of anything except how hard he took your death. I couldn’t do anything for him back then—and you know exactly why—but I wanted to so badly.”
“You were suffering from a case of unwanted Vulcan mysticism, I believe, Doctor.”
“I didn’t know it at the time. I just thought I was going insane all on my own.”
His carrying of Spock’s katra had been many years ago. On the Genesis planet, they had recovered someone who was no longer Spock, who on Vulcan barely recognized James Kirk, and it had been hard to watch Jim having to rebuild his life with Spock, as well as to watch Spock painstakingly rebuild his entire life. And even more, it had been hard to know some of the things in Spock’s mind and to pretend later that he didn’t know them.
“I remember,” McCoy continued, “the first time Jim and I discussed the meaning of the word t’hy’la. He found out quite by accident—I’m not sure exactly why you never bothered to mention it—that one of the meanings was ‘lover’. He was quite taken with it.” The doctor eyed Spock carefully, looking for any reaction. “After we rescued you, and your katra was out of my head and back into yours, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he’d pursue it. By then, he’d talked himself into actually believing that he was in love with you.” The doctor sent a cantankerous eye Spock’s way. “Hard to believe he’d give up beautiful women for the scrawny likes of you, but there’s no accounting for taste I guess.”
Spock didn’t see the wry smile play on the doctor’s lips, but he heard the words and felt the bite, not the affection.
“He was in love with me, Doctor. And I with him. But you know that. Do you have a point?”
“I always have a point, Mister Spock. And the point of this particular discussion is your relationship with James Kirk. He could be quite persuasive and persistent, I’ll bet. Of course, you succumbed.”
“Of course.”
Does one succumb to one’s own idea? One’s own dream?
Spock had promised himself that he would speak openly of it now. Jim was dead, and he could not betray a confidence or even the most personal memory by acknowledging that which was common knowledge—if only to the doctor and a select few other friends.
“But you, of all people, were well aware of our relationship.”
The captain always confided in you, while Spock realized that he himself had often been remote and distant to McCoy. I did not. Is that part of our problem? Has my Vulcan reticence, as you humans say, ‘come back to bite me’?
“On one hand,” McCoy continued, “he was very open about it, but he never went into detail. Not that I asked for details. I’m a doctor, I don’t have to.” McCoy sent his critical eye from the top of Spock’s head to his toes. Suddenly, there was nothing to criticize. There was only the truth of the situation. “He only talked about the good aspects, and I got the distinct feeling he was very happy.”
“That was always my intention.”
“Were you happy, too?”
“Indeed.”
Both men allowed the thought of those few years of happiness to ease the pain between them. If nothing else, they had both always striven for Jim kirk’s contentment and approval; now that he was gone, that common goal was gone as well.
“You two never bonded,” McCoy said quietly.
“Not in the restrictive Vulcan way. Between ourselves, yes.” Spock looked at the ground that was his homeworld and wondered if he would ever feel at home again. He had never insisted that Jim Kirk embrace the ancient customs 'shrouded in antiquity.’ At the time, he had considered their choice an acceptable option. “It would not have been right for Jim.”
McCoy turned his body so that he was facing Spock.
“He would have done anything for you.”
“Doctor, as you know, the bonding ritual is totally binding—legally, mentally, physically, psychically. It is much more than your human marriage. It is the literal melding of two individual minds and wills, a possession. I could not do that to him. I wanted him to always . . . have a choice.”
McCoy put it bluntly.
“To leave you.”
Spock sighed at the hurt he felt from just the speaking of those words. “If he so desired. That is, to love someone else.”
McCoy had wondered all the way to Vulcan how Spock reacted to losing a bondmate. But now, he realized that Spock had capitulated to Jim, perhaps all his life, and in that capitulation, no doubt spared his own life.
“So that’s why you didn’t die with him.”
“If we had been bonded by the laws and rituals of my people, I would have had the choice to be with him in Death. However, it was not so.” Spock’s unemotional face seemed as barren as the dirt at their feet. “He is lost to me. Utterly.”
“Because you never insisted on a bond, because you never insisted that he become Vulcan.”
“He loved that that was who I was, as I loved that he was human. I had no desire to make him Vulcan or to anchor him to an alien custom, no desire to reduce his humanity, the very thing that drew me to him. I had only the desire to experience it with him, and in that way make him mine. We were quite successful in that.”
Spock looked at the ground, at the dirt, the glare of the sunlight bleaching the color out of everything. This was his home. He had often found solace in Amanda’s garden when he was a boy. Now that Amanda was gone, and Jim too, he found solace here as a man. Beloved friend, mother, we were together so very briefly . . . .
It was becoming more difficult to speak.
McCoy turned, making himself ask what he’d come all this way to ask. Somewhere along the line, parts of Jim and Spock had merged; if not physically together because of career conflicts or personal responsibilities, their minds nevertheless were linked, aligned in tandem, consigned to one another like flowing waters, like swirling winds. As time went on, Leonard McCoy could do nothing but recognize that fact and marvel at it.
“Tell me, Spock, did you . . . could you feel him die?”
Spock remained seated and re-folded his hands, willing to answer the doctor, but it was hard to answer, to speak of that terrible moment—the moment when time stood still, buckled out from under him, knocked him to the ground.
“It was more like a blinking out,” he recalled. “Jim felt utter surprise. When the energy ribbon hit the ship—hit him—he was astounded. Then the link between us was abruptly cut.”
“That must have been awful.”
“I was as surprised as he was.” Spock swallowed. A flash of memory of the staircase steps at the Vulcan embassy on Rigel rushing up to meet his face . . . .
“I fell. I broke my arm.”
McCoy jumped, the physician’s concern overwhelming his feelings of discomfort. You poor, dumb son-of-a-bitch . . . It must have been like being punched in the gut. Visions of Jim on the bridge, unable to stay on his feet, stumbling backwards: Klingon bastards, you killed my son! flooded him. And McCoy felt forlorn to remember the nose bleeds and imagine the sudden stumbles, blatant physical manifestations of their terrible states of mind, of the horror of their personal losses.
“Spock, I’m so sorry.” Distracted, McCoy began to pace again. Spock could hear the crunch his desert boots made with each step. “This stinks! Jim could have lived for 20-30, hell, 50 more years.”
“It is not the length, Doctor, but the quality of life.” He also felt distracted, and he lapsed for a moment into his native tongue. “Avat-S’James-tze-t’hy’la . . . James Kirk was the finest life I have ever known.”
From a long, long time ago, the doctor felt an eerie immediate sense of déjà vu. Those few Vulcan words seemed both strange and familiar. Had he heard them when they’d first flown the Bounty on to Vulcan? Or were they from another time?
“Jim would say the same about you, you know. In fact, he did say it at your funeral.” Then the doctor began to shake his head, pulling himself away from the other man. The terrible grief that he had experience on Earth, returned once more.
“I don’t think I can go through this again,” McCoy muttered, hoping the wind would carry those words away. But he also knew that those exotic Vulcan ears had heard every word, and then he knew it wasn't the glare that kept his eyes cast down. He felt shame at what he was about to say, but he had to say it. “Seeing you. Without Jim. I just can’t anymore. He was what pulled us together, made it all work.”
McCoy cleared his throat. What was the use of fighting what he clearly felt. This was just as bad as seeing Jim without Spock so many years ago.
“I just wanted to come to Vulcan one last time, visit this dried up, old rock, and tell you face to face.”
God, this was harder than he could ever imagine. To cut himself off. But he had a life back on Earth, a daughter, two grandkids, things he wanted to do . . . consult maybe, open a free clinic, write his Starfleet memoirs—no, maybe a certain busted ex-admiral’s biography . . . and he wasn’t too old to settle down completely, maybe retire on a farm with a few animals and a woman who loved him. Besides, this was the end of an era for them, because without James Kirk or the Enterprise, as an honored diplomat Spock didn’t need him anymore, and he certainly didn’t need the Vulcan. Philosophical arguments and 25-year-old memories just weren’t enough to hold them together. And that was that.
“Spock, well . . . this is good-bye.”
The stunning hurt those words brought Spock was enormous. “I see.”
“Oh, don’t look at me like that.”
“I am to understand that I have lost . . . two friends.”
“Where Jim led, we followed. He’s not here, and you and I have no place to go. What the hell do we spend the rest of our lives talking about?” McCoy kicked a pebble and set it rolling. “Him?”
“So, you are saying that you no longer wish to see me nor to remember Jim.”
If his intention was to return the hurt, Spock clearly succeeded; now he could see it plainly on McCoy’s unhappy face.
“I didn’t say any such thing! I just meant—”
The shade from the tree had shifted and the sun beat down on them.
“Leonard, do not forsake me.” Words came hard. Spock clearly had not expected the doctor to come all this way only to abandon him. He actually bit his lip. “If we spend time together remembering Jim, then so be it. I believe that is as unavoidable as it would be beneficial. But I would also prefer to maintain our friendship through the same kinds of activities that we would have experienced had Jim lived.”
“Just pretend he’s still here?"
“No, that is impossible, but we must remain friends.”
McCoy felt exasperated. “You’re a Vulcan, I’m a human. What did we ever have in common but that ship?”
“I value you.” Spock stood up and his long fingers reached out to touch the doctor’s face. “You, too, are t’hy’la to me.”
Whoa!
Off-guard, McCoy pulled away, almost stumbling, his eyes very wide. That was the last thing he’d expected Spock to say. Hey, don’t go getting any funny ideas on me. Everybody knows that Jim Kirk was sexually precocious, but I have no intention of taking his place in your bed!
In an instant, the look in his blue eyes flashed all that.
Spock’s lips parted when he saw that completely irrational idea shoot across the doctor’s face, and his arm dropped to his side. He could only imagine what nonsense the doctor was thinking. For the first time in a long time, he actually wanted to laugh.
“I am not asking you to replace Jim. There or anywhere. I ask you to remain as you are. Remember, Doctor, that t’hy’la also means ‘close friend’.”
McCoy tried to backpedal away from the obvious faux pas, even if he had only thought it. Somehow this sneaky Vulcan had easily managed to read his ludicrous thoughts or probably just the crazy look on his face.
“Well, Mister Spock . . . uh, not that I wouldn’t be flattered, though I imagine you and I might have very different techniques.” Even he could see that these words, pulled straight from the top hat of his usual Southern charm, completely failed to appease.
“Doctor, you often display a tendency to speak first and think later.” Spock’s brow rose in obvious dismissal as he reseated himself. “Sometimes you can be what Jim would call a ‘clod’.”
McCoy whirled around and marched over to look down his nose at the ever-stoic Vulcan. “And sometimes you can be what Jim would call an insufferable tightass pr—”
Spock sighed deeply. It is traditional, but it is tiresome.
“Are we fighting, Doctor?”
“Of course not, Mister Spock. We never fight, we simply argue as though our lives depended on it.”
Chagrined, he could think of a dozen deprecating witticisms that the captain had used to describe diplomatic buffoons or desk-bound pencil pushers, but not one that he would ever call Spock. Jim was in love with Spock, his soulmate, and it showed every day. Jim glowed with the emotion, with the empathy, with the honor.
Shamed, McCoy paused, knowing he had reacted absurdly. Insultingly. He was close to Spock. Had been. You couldn’t have a man’s thoughts, his essence, in your head and not know him, not understand him better than this. Upon his death, Spock had left a personal tape for him acknowledging their closeness—if ever erratic and fraught with misunderstandings. Never sentimental, Spock had tried to elicit his fondness for the irascible Leonard McCoy, his personal physician and friend. As for McCoy, even during the first five-year mission, he had always been well aware of Spock’s growing closeness to Jim Kirk, their mutual attraction, and Spock wasn’t trying to deny it now. Not in so many words anyway.
“Sorry. I’m kind of short-tempered. Must be the heat.” McCoy wiped a sleeve across his brow; it came away wet. But it wasn’t the heat. They were fighting over Jim, over his affection, his respect. Just as they always had.
Almost immediately, as if he were in pain, he shook his head and began to rub the back of his neck. Why does he always piss me off? I thought I was over that. Shit, I need a drink!
As if reading his companion’s mind, Spock reached down and brought up a metal canteen from somewhere on the ground. “You are over-heated. Forgive my inhospitality. Drink this, please.”
McCoy didn’t know what he was drinking, but it tasted pretty good, and it was wet.
“Forgive me, Mister Spock,” the doctor answered between gulps. “I am truly sorry for my little outburst.” From the look on his face, he clearly was. “It’s an old habit wrought from a lot of years of feeling angry.” Until Jim Kirk’s death, Sybok’s ministrations had done a good job of diffusing that anger. But now? Where was Sybok when you needed him?
“Outwardly you are angry at me, Doctor, but you are really angry at Jim.”
Hell, I’m so mad at him I could just kill him!
“Aren’t you?” McCoy asked pointedly.
“No. That would be an illogical response to an unfortune circumstance. Surely Jim had no intention—”
“Dammitall! Why’d he have to go get himself killed?” McCoy’s frustration coated him like sweat. “Now he’s a real honest-to-goodness legend. They’ll name a ship after him, maybe a flashy new building at Starfleet Academy, but we’re stuck without him. Spitting in the wind. Especially you.” He shook his head hard. For the first time, he knew he was thinking as he should, of Spock, instead of himself. “Why didn’t he take over command, Spock? He had seniority. He had every right to sit in that chair. I saw the bridge tapes. I saw him take Harriman’s place. It shouldn’t even have been him going down below!”
Spock would not allow himself to entertain that thought. John Harriman had survived, and Jim had not.
Kaiidth. What is, is. Jim is gone. Not only to him, but to everyone who knew him.
“Captain Harriman sent me a very kind message, Doctor.” A portion of the note had read . . . he deferred to me, to my captaincy. It is a rare thing when great men are humble, and James Kirk’s humility cost him his life . . . .
McCoy could barely imagine how bad the captain of the Enterprise-B must be feeling: a damaged ship on her first run out of space dock, scores of lost civilians, and the blood of a legend on his hands.
“Yeah, me too,” McCoy confessed. “And to Scotty and Pavel. Okay, okay, so he’s not so bad.”
The doctor had received dozens of sympathy messages: from Ambassador Sarek and Federation Council Secretary T’Leatha; Admirals Nogura and Morrow; former crewmembers; Reilly, Kyle, Chapel-March, and Kamura-Soto; Jim’s former loves Carol Marcus, Areel Shaw, Janet Wallace; even Klingons in high places; Azetbur wrote that she had lost a “respected ally.” From nearly everyone James Kirk had ever known, or whose only wish was to claim to know him. He was missed by so many, mourned by more. Losing him was like losing your best friend.
It was losing your best friend.
“You wish to blame someone for Jim’s death,” Spock surmised, “but there is no one at fault. Not Captain Harriman for not being James Kirk and not us, for not being with him. It is regrettable. It is personally—”
. . . devastating . . .
A hundred memories of Jim flooded his mind in an instant, a hundred individual images of smiles and laughter and private times and touches, some surreptitious and some blatant and bold. And there were vivid memories of last days together, last glances, last words.
He felt the sudden urge to confess his own fears and misgivings to McCoy.
“I spoke to Jim the day before he . . . the day before the Enterprise-B ceremony.”
“I thought you were on Rigel.”
“He called unexpectedly, contacted me to specifically tell me that he would not attend the ceremony. He was quite adamant.”
McCoy frustration could be heard in his voice.
“Then why did he change his mind? If only intuition had warned him about how dangerous that little jaunt around the block was going to be!”
Spock frowned as he came to a sickening, logical conclusion. James Kirk’s instincts were nearly infallible. “Perhaps his intuition did warn him, Doctor. But about the jump.”
“What jump?’
“He told me he had decided to forego the send-off so that he could make one last attempt at a tri-elliptical atmospheric jump.” He watched McCoy’s incomprehension. “Orbital skydiving. I expressed my concern about its obvious dangers.”
McCoy suddenly understood where Spock was taking this.
“You mean that he canceled this jump of his and went to the Enterprise-B ceremony because he thought it would be safer?” McCoy sent his eyes to the orange sky and then covered them with his hands. “Dear Lord, no.” The doctor felt his blood pressure rise. He slumped down on the bench next to Spock. Dammit, no! “If he’d only stuck to his original plans!”
“If he had, Doctor, the crew of the Enterprise and the forty-seven civilians she rescued would all be dead. Jim was the right man to save them, perhaps the only man who could.”
“He was a great man. A hero in every sense of the word.”
Spock turned his face away.
“He sensed my trepidation over his skydiving and changed his plans.” Solemnly, his eyes fell closed. “Doctor, I fear that I have killed him.”
Déjà vu.
“You did not! That bastard energy ribbon killed him!”
Spock so needed to hear those words, and he felt grateful. To believe that he had killed Jim was a horror to him.
Suddenly, the pull of the mountains that swooped down and up from the valley a hundred kilometers from the garden drew Spock’s eyes far out to the desert horizon. Whenever he thought of Jim, his mind wanted to fly out, far away from his body, far from the minor spot where they stood, to the past, to that part of his life wherever Jim had been. He would ponder this phenomenon later when his mind was clearer.
Instead, he pulled his eyes back to McCoy, who sat beside him with his head in his hands. Something told him to try again to reach this man whom he still thought of as the closest friend he had left. But this was his father’s house on his father’s planet, and here, it was imperative that he keep control of his emotions. It was most difficult when McCoy wanted him to act human; he did not want to act that way. Even in the face of this despair, he would resist. But the difficulty was increasing in tight, measurable increments.
“Leonard, I understand that this has been very hard for you, but you were there for Jim when I died. Cannot you also be here for me?” Spock could feel his heart rate climb; he strained to steady it. “I cannot deny my feelings for him, my affection, my respect. I turn a corner and expect to see him, expect to hear his voice, or find messages on the compic from him . . . .”
He stopped abruptly.
I am nearly babbling . . . this cannot be.
An insect buzzed around their heads and then flew away.
“You’re damn right it’s been hard. First you, now him. Why am I always the one who’s got to pick up the pieces?”
McCoy knew he was being petty, but he had seen the love that Jim Kirk possessed for Spock every day on his face, and now he wanted to see that love for Jim from Spock. In fact, he demanded to see it.
“You remember that other time . . . that we thought Jim had died.” Tholia. “Your last words were ‘What would you have me say, Doctor?’ Well, I didn’t push you for an answer. But that was then. Things are very different now. So much has happened between us, and I’m not so willing to let him go so easily. I would have you say it now, Spock.” McCoy saw something fearful in Spock’s dark eyes. “I want to know about you two.”
“What he saw in me?” Spock responded with some irony.
“What he saw. Period.”
In the brightness, McCoy watched Spock squirm although the Vulcan did not move. He watched Spock retreat into himself, pull into his shell, hide behind his mask, his unblinking eyes, his chest that did not rise or fall, his austere silence. He watched Spock deny him, and he refused that denial.
“Say it, Spock. I want to hear you say it. Just once.”
McCoy had kept his tone neutral, yet his emotions were anything but. And his demands were adamant.
Spock’s eyes grew cold like black steel as he stood up, literally backing away as though from a fire. He turned. He had recognized the demand for payment for any kind of consideration in the focus of the doctor’s voice. He had spent his life denying that he felt anything for anyone and that had clearly been a lie and now he was going to pay for it and pay dearly. One of Jim’s epithets flew through his mind.
“As you wish, Doctor. I can say it, for nothing else matters now. Certainly not Vulcan pride. Nothing but the fact that he is dead, and I am alive.”
Even at McCoy’s sudden worried look, Spock didn’t stop. He knew he had to speak of it; maybe the words would make him feel better. Certainly, nothing imaginable could make him feel worse. He bravely faced the doctor, his friend, his enemy, his rival. No, no, his last brother. The one who would listen. Who wanted to listen.
“I loved James Kirk with my soul, Doctor. I shall never meet his like again, and I am forlorn with that knowledge. His death has made me feel insignificant and utterly abandoned. My logic has failed me and with it, my emotional control. I had hoped that you might help me grieve not for his death—because we all must eventually die—but for his loss. I miss him so. You are the only one who can truly understand what I have lost.”
I have lost everything . . .
The wind kicked up through the trees again and the tiny leaves fell like snow. Spock sat down again on the bench, but he slumped forward, his hands between his knees, a most unVulcan posture.
“I know Vulcan expects me to continue as though nothing significant has happened, but how can I?” He whispered the words into the air, staring out along the valley but not seeing it. “How can you expect that I live without the solace just his presence brought me? Without the stability that he used to calm the storms that were often my emotions? Without his body that taught me how to love and care for myself? Without his mind that accepted me and taught me my worth? Without his humor that knew when I was smiling? Without him?” Now Spock turned to look directly into the doctor’s startled blue eyes. “You tell me how.”
McCoy could hear the turnabout demand and feel the palpable outpouring of passion course out from the man beside him, and he felt bitter shame at himself for both forcing this intimacy and fearing it so much, and worse of all, for wanting to hurt a man who was so obviously hurting. What kind of physician was he? Only for the weak and not for the strong? Had his oath to do no harm meant nothing as the years went on? But he remembered Yosemite; there had been no anger there. He and Spock had felt especially close; in fact, ever since he’d carried Spock’s katra, there had been understanding between them. A truce. What happened to that truce?
He swallowed hard and reached out to touch Spock’s hand. Because he was grief-stricken and angry at Jim, or with God, or the Fates, or surely with himself for not being by Jim’s side on the Enterprise-B, he had been lashing out, fighting the reality of the captain’s death. But he had to stop fighting with Spock. It was wrong, just plain wrong. He had comforted James Kirk, and now he would comfort this man whom James Kirk had loved for decades. Who was also his dearest friend and had been for almost as long.
“You’ve got to live without Jim, Spock. Both of us have to. But you’re not alone.” Good-bye, Jim. “Let’s help each other.” If it were possible, McCoy’s eyes grew bluer. “I need to help you to grieve.”
“I have wished that you would want to help me. I was not sure. Our lives have not crossed of late.”
“You’re my friend. Of course, I want to help.”
It was true that McCoy had not seen his two friends for several months, his senior medical expertise pulling him in several different directions away from Earth. That was the way that Starfleet careers took individuals away from each other—from their families and even from their years-long homes on starships once the mission was over. Often it was a hard life to reconcile.
Then the doctor had this sudden irrational idea that if Spock came back, Jim could too. It passed quickly, and he didn’t allow it to become a hope. There was only one way they were going to get Jim Krik back now, and that was to remember him. To never let him fade from their minds, from their hearts, from the bond that was just as real between them. Between the two of them, they knew a lot about James Kirk and about each other.
He dropped his head, and his lips curved up at the incongruent thing he was about to say.
What can he do but turn you down? Okay, so he can break your neck first. Maybe you deserve it.
“Now that the inquiry’s over,” McCoy offered, “there’ll be a memorial service for Jim back in San Francisco. Afterwards, after we’ve said our formal good-byes, what do you say you and I go camping at Yosemite? Fresh air, birds, trees, sleeping under the stars. It’ll do us both good.” He didn’t mention either his famous beans recipe or singing around the campfire or his brand-new idea of skinny-dipping in an ice-cold creek. Instead, he looked up and out, through the garden to the open desert valley beyond. Sandstone mountains rose up like a rock cityscape in the far, far distance. He squinted to see the formation and thought of better times. The best of times. “Besides, your camping education isn’t quite complete, Mister Spock.”
“I have experienced the sing-along and roasting marshmellons,” Spock responded absently. “Mallows,” he corrected.
“Now it’s time for meatier stuff: blood brother rituals and ghost stories under a full moon.”
Spock’s brow rose.
McCoy looked a little embarrassed but didn’t let that stop him. Squatting down, he leaned close so that their bodies were very close. “Spock . . . uh, did you really mean what you said earlier . . . about me being t’hy’la to you?"
Hope you can tell by the sound of my voice that I’m apologizing? Jeezus, I’m sorry.
“I did,” Spock answered solemnly.
“Well, you know, if I really am, if we really are, well . . . then it’s absolutely imperative that—” His eyes narrowed at the growing idea that a little symbolism couldn’t hurt anything. He took Spock’s hand in his and positioned their fingers, acting it out. “You see, you take a pocketknife and cut an X on your thumbs, then you bind them together and your blood mingles, and that means you’re brothers by blood.” He cocked his head as he held their thumbs together. “It’s quite sacred.”
Spock looked skeptical making his hands a pair again.
“Self-mutilation is a sacred camping ritual," he stated warily.
McCoy didn’t answer the implied and literal question. “And I tell the best ghost stories in my family, which is a pretty impressive feat, because I come from a long line of champion storytellers.”
“I do not believe that I know any ghost stories.”
“That’s okay. I’ll tell ‘em, you just listen.” As Spock nodded in agreement to McCoy’s spoken arrangement, the doctor paused as the true reason for his suggested trip focused in his mind. “And later, after all the ritual, we can talk. Just you and me. About old times.”
“I believe I would enjoy engaging in that conversation.”
“I’ll make the arrangements. You just bring yourself along.”
“You will bring the bourbon?” Spock asked suddenly. Then without guilt, he added, “I wish to toast the captain.”
For the first time McCoy chuckled in amusement. “If you’ll drink with me, I’ll bring whatever you want. For Jim, I’ll make sure it’s the very best.”
Spock nodded and then felt the blood leave his face. At the doctor's utterance of the words, ‘the very best,’ a profound wave of grief flooded him. He looked at the ground, then up at the orange sky so that it filled his entire range of vision. And when his eyes filled with tears, he tried to let the sunlight and wind dry them as he had done so often as a child, but they spilled over and down his face.
McCoy saw and moved closer beside him. Awkwardly, then with real concern, he put his arm around Spock’s shoulder.
“Don’t cry, Spock,” he said gently. “I hate like the devil to see you cry.”
When Spock’s head came down on his shoulder, McCoy’s eyes were first pulled towards him, and then back up to the orange, cloudless sky—brilliant, indifferent, and oh, so totally magnificent. “Oh, go ahead and cry your eyes out. It does a man good sometimes. Take my word for it.”
"We had plans to return to Yosemite next summer,” Spock whispered, his voice hoarse and ragged. “Now he will never again see the beauty of that place.”
McCoy thought of Jim, and remembered the look of pure delight that would cross his winsome face whenever the Enterprise discovered a new planet, or they were privy to a rare stellar phenomenon. He was suddenly inspired. “Well, maybe Jim saw something . . . beautiful when he died.”
Spock raised his head at the thought and offered, “Possibly something mysterious, wondrous.”
“All right, sure.” McCoy smiled broadly. No doubt about it. “That sounds right. Knowing Jim, that’s exactly what happened.”
They did not speak after this but sat contemplating the death of James T. Kirk, imagining the moment, wondering if Jim had time to react, to understand, to appreciate what was happening to him. Of all the souls in the universe, they were certain that there had been time for this fine man to see beyond this life, beyond the great barrier, into immortality.
Sitting out in Amanda’s garden under the flowering zylah tree, Spock and Leonard McCoy, side by side, thought about this for some time, until each of Eradani’s suns descended behind them, and it was time to go inside.