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1.
Spock discovered his oddity quite by accident. Young vulcans were encouraged to touch others, it was part of a desensitizing theory that if, when young and nearly empty, touch-telepaths were to come into contact with one another they would not only get used to the separate, alien emotions of others, but become less curious of them. At first, Spock was odd because none of the other children could read him at all. After touching practice, inevitably T’Pring would be in tears, S’Parva would pout, and Stonn, the child most in control of his emotional outbreaks, would glare at Spock like he wished terrible things to occur upon his person.
Spock stared at himself in one of his mother’s mirrors for a long time. Too-large dark eyes gazed across his four-year-old form.
The next day, touching practice went much better, T’Pring held out her hand to Spock, with only the tiniest of sniffles, and when he clasped it in his own he thought only one thing, feel what ought to be there. And she did. If Spock really felt whatever it was she perceived he did he did not know, but her relief came to him like a minty rush, and he almost-smiled when she purred in delight.
2.
His condition worsened however as he moved from infancy to childhood. Touching others by accident was not an option, for if he did not remember to make them feel what ought to be there, they wouldn’t, and for days he would be ostracized anew. However, the other children seemed intent on making him join in their logic games and learning activities.
“I prefer to be left alone. Solitude is more agreeable a learning environment for me,” he said sternly to T’Pring.
“We are to be married when we are grown, Spock. It is in our best interests to learn each other as soon as possible, is it not?”
Before Spock could catch himself, he blurted, “You are going to marry Stonn.”
T’Pring jerked one eyebrow skyward, “I am not. I am to wed you, thus our parents have already decided.”
Spock nodded once, for this was true, but it was also true that T’Pring would one day marry Stonn. Spock did not know how he knew this, or even explain what logic such a conclusion might be extrapolated from, but it was truth. He pressed his lips together and nodded again, and to his satisfaction T’Pring left him for the day, intent on completing her self-studies with the others in the group she’d initially been trying to convince him to join.
3.
It wasn’t until Spock entered the Starfleet academy and took the required psychology course that he began to recognize his own condition as a pathological liar. It wasn’t something he’d thought of himself, but as he read the definition he found it aptly described his consistent refusal to acknowledge the quirk of his own telepathy, now much stronger than it had been in his infancy or even childhood. Vulcans did not have names for what he was or what he could do, but perhaps humans did, and so Spock, a young cadet, the only Vulcan cadet of his year, set himself searching through the massive database of Starfleet, looking for the answer to a question he’d never allowed himself to ask.
Beginning with telepathy and touch telepaths, Spock combed through the resulting information, going only so far as to figure out how helpful the link or data file would be before setting it aside or deleting it from the list. Very few were investigated immediately.
It took him almost a week to be satisfied that he’d exhausted his available sources, most of which were cringingly weak with lack of documentable source material, or even based around pure speculation. It was also the first time he’d realized that clearing his data records might be more immediately necessary than he’d first assumed.
At the end of his nuclear physics lecture, Professor Ziggarossi called him down for a word. Spock came willingly, hands clasped customarily behind his back, the picture of attention. “Yes, Professor?”
“I was wondering if you’d checked out that book we were talking about last week, A Nucleus on the Grand Scale and saw something interesting on your library data records. Spock, are you interested in meta physics? I could recommend a good class…”
“No thank you, sir. It is pure curiosity on the physicality of my race as it might be seen though the lens of another. I have finished with this line of thinking.” Spock was lying again, he noticed.
Professor Ziggarossi’s eyebrows furrowed in the human way, and he pulled a small, red paper-and-imitation-leather book-book from his satchel. “Well, if you say so, but I thought of this book of my wife’s after seeing your reading list, and thought you might like a look-see. Take it. It’s not so big, won’t take you much time, I’m sure.”
Spock took it on instinct, thanked him, and left for his advanced fourth-dimensional mathematics course on the floor above. In the lift he looked at the book’s cover, and its title winked at him in aged gold-foil.
The Psychic World: Interviews with Psychics from across the Globe and from the Stars.
4.
Professor Ziggarossi’s book had been an interesting read, indeed, and upon returning it Spock had given an involuntary flinch at the dark-haired man’s inquisitive eyes. After that, Spock’s relationship with the professor was tensely professional, the atmosphere of gentle academicism dead. Life continued on for the half-vulcan, who dedicated himself even more thoroughly to his physical training and classes. He made top scores in his classes, and was a class apart in training exercises not due just a little to his Vulcan strength.
He had his quirks under control, for the most part. An odd breaking glass, bent spoons, nothing happened that he could not explain away easily enough.
Except for the betazoid.
She often stared at him with something kin to terror in her pitch colored eyes, and Spock wondered if perhaps the same problem he used to have with the other Vulcan children had returned. Feel what you ought to, he tried to demand of her mentally, one day when he’d caught her gazing at him once again. Her expression did not change even one iota, and Spock left it, the roll of his stomach setting him off of his salad and driving him away from the commons earlier than his want.
He could hear her friends questioning her as he left, shrill, feminine voices asking what the trouble was, and what had happened.
The door shut behind him.
Halfway through his second-year first semester, Spock curled up on his bed and skipped all four of his afternoon courses. He’d seen the betazoid girl for the first time in nearly three earth months. She had been standing under a light on the academy’s performance building’s stage when she’d caught eyes with Spock. Instantly her look of terror had torn her away from the drama troupe’s practice, and with her fellow drama cadets rushing up the aisles towards Spock, intent on finding her displeasure and dispatching it…Spock squeezed his eyes shut.
The light wrenched free from its bolt with a scream of metal.
The betazoid girl was dead.
5.
Spock could not rid himself of the deadly strangeness that was his power, only hope that allowing certain aspects of it use would render other pieces atrophied. He had no idea if it would work, or even if it could, but he trained his empathy to the upmost that he could bear, and put up Vulcan shields as high and thick as he could make, not to keep things out, as they’d been intended, but with the thin hope of keeping something much worse in.
One day, like any other day, Spock, now fully grown, woke to the horrible knowledge that his mother would be dead before he fell asleep again, and that T’Pring would no longer marry Stonn, for there would be no T’Pring for Stonn to marry.
In the privacy of his instructor’s quarters, Spock allowed himself thirty minutes to shake and shiver in his bed, because there would be no time for it later. Later, he would be one of an endangered species that would never again reach the same glory it had fallen from, and later, he would meet James Tiberius Kirk.
Nyota tried to ask him what was wrong, he could see the question in her eyes even before the thought flicked across his mind, alien as they born from others ever were, barely any louder than the chattering from minds beyond the room. “You have the Kobayashi Maru simulation this morning, do you not?” he said.
She smiled brightly, white teeth flashing, knowing that he’d sneaked a glance at her planner, though for what she didn’t guess. Liarliarliar! Spock thought to himself. He’d plucked the information from her brain as he’d practiced on her so often.
How long would they be together now that Kirk would be in the picture? Spock could only feel weary for the not knowing.
+1.
Apparently, two years.
Spock and Nyota separated amicably, still as close as ever, though Spock had yet again lied to give her a reason she would accept. He’d told her he’d been conflicted most his life; first with T’Pring and his inability to find attractiveness in she who was to have been his wife, and continued with Nyota, with whom all logic told him attraction should have resulted. He gently steered her with vague commentaries peppered through the past six months that allowed her to determine a specific series of steering questions of her own, eventually coming to the conclusion that he was homosexual ‘together’.
She was as supportive as anyone could be; especially given the amount of time she’d essentially wasted on him during her prime. Spock was thoroughly grateful, though it never showed on his face, only echoed quietly through his whispered, and for once completely honest, “thank you.”
He’d done it a week previous, holding on any longer wasn’t an option. It would be soon. Spock didn’t know what. A strange, uneasy knowledge.
“Ready to go, Spock?” asked Jim, entering the transporter room with a wave to the transport tech.
“Yes, Captain.”
“Sulu?”
“You got it, Captain.”
“Lorenzo?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Peiwitz?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Beam us down, then, Brown!”
“Aye, Captain.”
Spock, Jim, their pilot, and two red-shirted security officers faded out in swirls of false-light to meet the planet natives, and hopefully to make a mining treaty.
The planet was hot, like Vulcan had been, and Spock was comfortable, even after many years in the chill of the human comfort zone, but it was lucky that the main settlement wasn’t too far away from the transport point, otherwise the other crew members would be at greater than fifty percent chance of contracting heat-related illness such as heat stroke or dehydration, neither of which would endear the sufferer to the CMO, or any of his increasingly difficult staff.
The village was simple, but not for lack of knowledge or technology, the planet itself had been a hub of trade since before its first extra-terrestrial visitors, and had only become more so since the visitations became common, if not often. The small metal buildings were etched with decoration, and blessedly cool for the tired, overheated humans. Spock walked the canteen around the group without complaint, allowing the away team to take as they wished, so long as they did not choke.
An alien woman, whose species was known for its pale yellow skin and chocolate brown almond eyes, entered the room they’d been escorted to, “The One will be here soon to speak with you.”
Bells went off in Spock’s guts. He scanned her mind quickly and quietly. Nothing was off…
He watched her exit with the grace given to a species that had to coordinate three knee joints.
Stoically, Spock passed the canteen to Kirk, who grinned, “Thanks, Spock. Nice place, don’t you think.”
“It is irrelevant, Captain. Please keep your mind on the mission.”
Kirk playfully spat some of the water onto Spock’s shirtsleeve, “Geez, stressed, Spock? Relax, it’s an easy enough mission. Just talking!” Spock had taken note earlier than Kirk was not to press the issue of mining rights for the federation, it did not make him breathe any easier.
“Yes. I have…” he tilted his head minutely, “…a bad feeling, Jim.”
The Captain sat up abruptly, inhumanly blue eyes wide, “Did you just call me Jim?!”
And then the door opened to admit the One, the leader of the people, the Many. “Hello, esteemed Captain Kirk! I am One Redtree! It is a pleasure to meet you, my friend!”
Kirk shifted seamlessly from surprise to indulgently schmoozing, “Hello, One Redtree! It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance as well!”
“What brings the federation to our humble planet?” He already knew the reason.
“Courtesy call…mostly,” Jim answered. This man was lying.
“Mostly?” He was worried, planning something?
“Well, the higher-ups were hoping to get some of the oar in your mountain side. It isn’t something your people put much interest in,” Definitely planning something. By the tightness in the One’s chest, and the stuttering of his tubular heart, it wasn’t something he liked.
“It is true that the oar in the mountains isn’t of much use to the Many…” Darkness lurked in his mind.
“Then an agreement can be made?” The plan appeared in Spock’s mind, plucked out of the Darkness lurking in One Redtree’s.
“Hmmm…mayhaps we’d be allowed to move this congregation to my personal home to discuss it further?”
“No,” said Spock, cutting off his captain, and stepping between the blonde and the foreign leader.
The One startled, “Excuse me, Commander, I was speaking with your captain.”
“And now you are speaking with me. Who is Yellowbark?”
The One’s almond eyes widened, “Excuse me?!”
“Who is Yellowbark, and why is he paying you to capture our captain?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about, and I should hope to know what you are accusing me of!”
“Spock…?”
“Do not interfere, Jim, this man’s intentions are not kind towards you.”
“He hasn’t—!”
BE QUIET!
Silence. Every eye in the room gaped.
Spock realized belatedly that the command had not been spoken aloud. He heaved a breath, and turned back to One Redtree and his slowly cracking facad.
I know what you were planning. Do not deny it.
“I wasn’t planning anything!”
You were. Tell them.
“I wasn’t!”
TELL.
The One shrieked, collapsing, “He has my wife!” Spock nodded, “He has my wife! She’s my life! I don’t know why Yellowbark wants your captain! But that’s what he wants for her return!”
Spock stepped aside, and Jim moved forward once again, who passed Spock with the thought We're going to talk about this, later, brushing by. Spock was sure that they would, too. But there had been no other way. As Jim spoke with the One, getting as much of the true story out of the distraught leader as he could, Spock indulged himself in the foresight. Without knowledge of the true situation, Jim would have fought valiantly against his so-called captor. Yellowbark wouldn't have contained Jim, of course, would have never gotten the Romulan bounty on their captain's brilliantly haloed head, but in the escape Jim would have died. Just a random, stray shot would put him off balance on a small boulder...Jim would fall. It was not a deadly fall for distance, but for the second rock that would essentially crush his t'hy'la's poor head.
Well, nothing for it then.
No more lying. This promised to be a very entertaining conversation.