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Chapter Text

Your name is S'chn T'gai Spock. Spock. Your mother is human, and your father is Vulcan, and you sit uncomfortably between the two in both genetics and a physical sense, watching as a council of doctors debates viciously over who gets to examine you first. 

You are five years old and you want nothing more than to leave, but Vulcans do not want anything so you say nothing. Beside you, your siblings engage in a quiet argument over which of the instruments they are going to use on you first. Your mother’s hand in yours becomes sweaty. Your father does not touch you. He never touches you.

Sometimes, you wonder what this means. 

When the doctors do come in, it turns out Michael was right. They will use the needles first. You offer your arm to the first in line, and watch as your mother’s brilliant aura dissolves into hardened edges and sharp lines. For her sake, you pretend to understand why it has to hurt.

When you are nine, they have exhausted all means of testing. Your body is full of tiny scars that will never quite heal right, but that is the price of life, as you have come to know it. Your unique biology is something unfamiliar to your kind. It must be studied. Examined. So that if you are hurt they will know what to do. 

The fact that only hurt seems to come from them is irrelevant . 

For all the favor your genetics have won you with the doctors and scientists, it does not carry over to your classmates, who stare at you more often than not. You do not make easy companionship. Your home is too abnormal, and your life even more so. Your classmates see fit to point this out in bright stark detail as often as they possibly can.

Their words frame the vast difference between yourself and your classmates. You find yourself picking fights and breaking skin with your too-dull teeth, and having to hide your bloody knuckles from your family when you are home. You do not do a very good job of it. No one says anything either way. 

Your mother’s aura fluctuates whenever you come in injured. Sometimes, she even goes to help, fidgeting her hands in her lap, but a look from your father stills her every time.

Sometimes, when this happens, Michael will come and help you. Other times -most times- she bows to the same look your mother does. Doctoring yourself is something you learn at a very young age. Watching your mother’s weakening aura is another.

You yourself do not have an aura. It requires emotions to have one, and as such, Vulcans do not have the bright colors framing their bodies like humans do. Your mother and sister (and sometimes your brother, though you ignore what this might mean), however, have auras as bright as the setting sun. 

Your mother’s is sparkling silver and your sister’s is a warm, rust red and you, with your tampered genetics and scarred skin, pale in comparison to both. 

You are Vulcan, however, so this does not bother you.

When you are fourteen, your sister leaves and the colors in your life dim to the soft flutters of your mother’s cool gray as she flits through the halls of your home. And when you are seventeen, they dull further, as your mother’s light wanes with the lack of expressed emotion. 

You take to reading to her on days when it is especially dull, Tolkien and Faulkner and Dickens, wading through the illogical notions in the hope that once bright aura will return. And sometimes it does, flickering into something akin to what she once had, but it never lasts. Eventually, you stop trying. 

At this point, you learn to ignore all mention of your heritage, and when you are eighteen, it becomes no matter anyway. You leave Vulcan without approval or support. In some way, you know your mother is proud of you for that, even before she says it. Your father, unsurprisingly, says nothing. For you and him it has always been this way. You do not think this will ever change. 

When you are nineteen, you attend an academy primary attended by humans, and the shock is so much, that you spend most of the day struggling not to be sick. Humans all have their own specific auras, waxing and waning and curling into each other, until you are unable to distinguish where one person begins and another ends. It’s a kaleidoscope of colors, far too bright for you to even comprehend, and the sheer mass of it makes your head pound. Still, you have not made it this far to be buried under simple color. 

You are Vulcan and above pain. So you adapt. You learn to wear tinted glasses and never look humans head on. You learn to ignore sneers and skeptic looks and emotions full of a vibrancy that echoes their auras. 

You learn that no one else can see the auras and that’s alright too. 

You are just as different here as you were at home. At this point, the pattern is so clear that the recurrence does not surprise you. So you work and you strive and you eventually succeed, graduating the academy with honors that no one applauds and a ceremony that no one will attend. 

Instead, your mother sends a card that she has painstakingly signed your father’s name across. The pale remains of her aura cling to it like a shroud. You breathe in the last of that whispy gray and hide it in the bottom dresser of your drawer to never look at again. 

You eat that dinner and many others after it alone.

When you return to the academy the next year, you are a professor. 

Even that changes nothing. There is a cycle, discomforting as it is, and you have learned throughout your life to always follow the cycle. You spend the next years doing the same. Silent dinner after silent dinner, empty bed after empty bed, disapproving class after disapproving class. There are, of course, the differing projects and the endless assistants but even that grows monotonous. It is, like all things you have learned your existence to be, entirely dull. That is, until it all changes. 

Because then -then you meet them and everything else seems to fall into place.

Chapter Text

You see the blonde first. 

That is, as evidence suggests, how he likes it. After all, no other human that you have known has ever shown like this before. Not in all your time on earth have you seen an aura like this, and for one to walk into your class unannounced brings back the same nausea you felt when you first arrived on this planet. 

(Or at least that is what you tell yourself when you spend the next two lectures attempting not to be drawn into the sparks and colors only you can see. It is… unnerving how difficult this is.)

Even after acquainting yourself to it, his is still the brightest aura you have ever seen. It is sparkling and crystalline gold, billowing up and about, impossible to ignore. It creeps along crevices and anchors itself in corners and shimmers so bright and full that you almost find yourself staring. And just when you think that you are done being surprised by it, the blonde comes in late one morning and drags in yet another new dataset for you to analyze. 

The gold -whose name you have avoided learning in a class this large- is just as bright as usual, but this does nothing to dull the aura of the disgruntled man he just pulled in. The stranger's aura glows just as fully, if not quite as brightly, just crisp and clear and blue as a Vulcan lake. It reminds you so starkly of your home planet that you find yourself quieted just by looking at it. 

Of all the humans you have encountered, these two remind you most distinctly of your mother. You cannot bring yourself to look away. Similarly, you cannot bring yourself to make contact, stuck in the limbo between what could be and what so starkly is. So you go on as if their very gaze is not your very undoing. 

In the end, the lecture goes as planned, but your heart, beating in your side, is faster by a near four beats per minute. Your attempts to calm it do nothing of the sort. All the while, the blonde and his friend sit staring at you from the third row in as if they know something. As if they know everything . 

The next three lectures run similarly thus. And by the end of each, your heart throbs as rapid as it’s ever been.

(If you were not Vulcan this would terrify you. Being what you are, that is, being just that ... this does something similar that you refuse to name.)

Unlike you, they seem to have no problem with the way events are advancing, at least this is the impression you receive when they approach you after the fourth lecture. The gold, at least, seems to be similarly entranced with you, but that seems to be his nature with everyone just out of his reach. By now, you’ve seen how he’s edged his way into the lives of all of his classmates as if he knows no meaning of subtlety. His gold clings to them all, a spark or two there, clustered in some places, a bright streak against even the distant the studious linguist in front of him. Now he stands in front of you, curious gold dancing along his eyes and edging into your space. 

In opposition, his partner - who else could he be, to have an aura that flows so fluidly with the gold’s- seems to keep to himself. While just as loud as the gold, this blue is more reserved, irritable but kind in his own way. This combination has endeared him just as fondly to his classmates as the gold has, sparking less but streaking more firmly against those whose auras were previously waning before the blue’s intervention.

When you see the flash of a medic’s cross on his uniform, it does nothing to surprise you. Healing seems to be as much the man’s prerogative as the grumbling, and it seems all the man does is grumble. The man is grumbling now, staring you down with weary eyes as his partner tugs him forward to introduce themselves. 

When they look at you, you don’t glance away from their auras even as the light threatens to overtake you. You breathe it in like you would the home you will never return to, and something in your chest (side?) slots into place. 

You do not know what it is. You may never know. It is alright. You learn other information to supplement it instead. You learn the entrancing gold is Jim and the sparkling blue is McCoy and before them, you are colorless and dull and so, so alone but you introduce yourself as Spock anyway. 

They hold your name in their mouths like it’s something precious, a reverence you have never known. Even McCoy seems absent of his usual weariness, as Jim gives his hand a quick, reassuring squeeze and then reaches out to tug on your sleeve. 

“Let’s go somewhere private and talk, alright?” He says, as if his very presence isn’t something you will follow until the day you die. “We’d like to know your opinion on something we find very important.”

There’s something final in the statement, but the finality is something you welcome, even more so when McCoy takes up position on your other side, clasping your arm in a mirror of Jim’s. 

In that moment, something changes. Between them, you remain, and for a second their auras mix and you -dull and colorless and isolated you - are a brilliant green.

Later, you will mark this as the start. Later, when you know these two better than you will ever know yourself, when Jim becomes Captain and McCoy becomes Doctor, with no loss of fondness for either, when they forge you a family that will never deny you on the basis of the marks on your skin or the blood pumping underneath, when the word Enterprise is just as synonymous with venture as home . Later, when the love you feel for them begins to match the love you feel for yourself.  

But that is later. 

For now, you close your eyes and revel in this, in being seen. When you open them, they are both still there. In each of their auras, a pale streak of green remains. 

You take a breath and follow them to later.