Chapter Text
When the first communication arrived, Nyota was already in bed after the latest long alpha shift in a line of long alpha shifts.
On days like this, it was all she could do to be grateful that no one had died – and on Mr. Spock’s home planet, of all places, someone really could have died. She’d hardly believed it when Dr. McCoy had beamed up with the captain unconscious. Even when after he explained that Captain Kirk was only in medically-induced state resembling death, her heart hadn't stopped pounding. Surely, those cuts and bruises across his chest weren't medically induced! And when Mr. Spock beamed aboard, he had been injured, too. Enough of the crew had seen the state they were in that rumors started to fly faster than anyone could rein them in. Only hours after they’d plotted a course away from Vulcan, the theories circulating around the ship ranged from blood sacrifice to a mystical Vulcan orgy and everything in between. Nyota put an immediate stop to whatever she overheard, even telling a group of yeomen that they should be ashamed of spreading those kinds of rumors on duty. She understood how little she knew about the mysteries of Vulcan customs, but she still couldn’t imagine their practices were so arcane that they demanded bloodshed among friends and brothers. Something must have gone terribly wrong.
When she finally found a private moment with Christine, they were eager to put the pieces together. How had a wedding ceremony turned into a physical fight? What did it have to do with Commander Spock’s condition? She wished that she could speak to Mr. Spock about it, but she didn't think it would be wise to bring up what was clearly an intimate subject. Christine naturally agreed with her on that point - they couldn't expect him to tell them anything simply because they wanted to know. Between the two of them, they could only come to one conclusion: it made no sense at all.
Nyota couldn’t help laughing to herself when she remembered the most extraordinary thing Christine had told her – that Mr. Spock had smiled at the captain, pearly whites and everything, when he’d seen that the apparent fatality had only been a trick.
Like someone had overheard her giggling and wanted in on the joke, that was when her comm unit chirped. She furrowed her brow, sitting up with displeasure. She saw on the viewscreen that someone was requesting a video comm. The request came from an unidentified comm signature… located on Vulcan? Who on Vulcan would be calling her in her personal quarters?
Suspicious, but curious, she ordered the lights to 20% and got up out of bed, pulling a robe on over her nightgown along the way.
“This is Lieutenant Uhura,” she said, slipping easily into the pleasant voice she used while on duty, “putting you through to video now.”
She accepted the video request and began adjusting the dials to accept the right signal frequencies to show the clearest image. When she saw the picture flicker to life on the screen, she looked up to see who it could be and gasped.
“T’Pring!”
“Greetings, Lieutenant Uhura,” said the woman. “I require thy assistance.”
And it was T’Pring. Nyota recognized her with certainty now that the image had reached clarity. No longer dressed up in the silver clothes of the ceremony, she nevertheless retained a stiff, formal quality. Her hair, pulled into two sleek braids, fell neatly in front of her shoulders on either side. She held her back and her neck very straight, upright, and her deep brown eyes were completely solemn.
Nyota realized she’d been staring. She shook her head, rattling herself out of her thoughts. “What can I do?” she asked.
“I am in need of a tutor,” T’Pring said. Before Nyota could ask for clarification, she went on. “I have spent the last six of your hours in contemplation. I have decided that I am no longer interested in the life which I would have on Vulcan, would I remain here. This change has come to me quite suddenly, and so I am unprepared. It is not my custom to be unprepared. Excuse me, I digress. I intend to leave Vulcan, but I am not educated in the dealings of other beings. I do not know the ways of outworlders. Thee are a most accomplished scholar of the ways of many kinds of outworlders. I would have thee teach me, that I might prepare for my journey and select an optimal destination.”
Nyota felt her brows draw together. “Well, I want to help you, but I’m not sure…”
“We may conduct lessons through this medium,” T’Pring said quickly. “I am aware that thee are not a tutor by profession and I assure thee that my expectations are appropriate. I have read thy work in Starfleet’s public xenolinguistics journal and I have found it to be exceptionally interesting. That is why I have chosen thee as my tutor. I would only gain from thy experience some part of what I lack in foreknowledge before I embark.”
The Enterprise hummed all around them.
“Please, Lieutenant.”
T’Pring’s eyes were shining.
Before she knew it, Nyota found herself agreeing to the proposal. She was always weak around women in need of help.
T’Pring had no demands as to the specific subject matter or the scope. She reiterated that all she wanted was to learn from Nyota’s experience, of which she had read very much. Flattered and bewildered in equal parts, Nyota promised to find an interesting example from one of the Enterprise’s encounters that had yet to be written about publicly. T’Pring informed her that she would be able to contact Nyota again at the same time the following evening, after Nyota’s shift was over, for their first lesson to commence. Nyota wanted to protest, but when she tried, she realized she couldn’t think of a reason not to begin right away. It just wasn’t how things were usually done, but… well, why not? If T’Pring really only wanted to hear what Nyota had learned on her mission so far, there was no reason she couldn’t think of something to share with her within a day. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then,” she said. “Good-bye, T’Pring.”
“Good night, Lieutenant.”
Just as abruptly as the comm had arrived, it had ended, and Nyota was left alone again in her quarters. Her eyes drifted from the video receiver to her bed, with its petal-pink satin cover pushed down invitingly and its plush, Plutonian-mineral-down-stuffed pillows still holding the vague imprint of her head and shoulders, reminding her that she was meant to belong there for the next eight hours.
She clicked her tongue and turned instead to her personal computer. Feeling a little silly, she opened up her own mission reports. T’Pring had asked for lessons from her own experience, but what would be useful to her? Nyota scanned the logs to remind herself of what she’d done in the past two years since joining the crew of the Enterprise. All the places they’d been, all the species they’d encountered… but where to start?
It was after three in the morning, ship’s time, before she let her tired body carry her to bed. She shut her eyes, her mind still buzzing about alien planets and strange, new languages and customs. When she finally fell asleep, she had dreams in Andorian.
---
The next night, Nyota waited for T’Pring’s comm with a mission report open on her computer, a notebook open on her lap, and a pen hooked onto the front of her uniform dress.
T’Pring contacted her at precisely the same time that she had the previous evening, down to the minute, according to time as it was measured on the Enterprise. She raised her right hand in a gesture Nyota recognized as a Vulcan salute. Nyota responded, and their meeting – she had to think of it as a meeting rather than a lesson, or else she felt absurd – commenced without any pretense of small talk or pleasantries.
Nyota shared one of the linguistic problems that had been on her mind lately, ever since she had begun a correspondence with officials from the Aquarian system. The system was so named because, unusually for a star system of its size, all of its planets were covered completely in deep freshwater oceans.
The Enterprise had been given orders to transport several Aquarian delegates from Aquaria Prime to a conference in Alpha Centauri. While Nyota acted as their interpreter, they complained to her about their troubles with the current communications technology. While they were able to breathe and walk outside of water with the use of water-filled helmets and filtration systems built into their suits, they told her that their languages were greatly compromised. Their speech was highly melodic and relied on the way vibrations traveled through their native oceans to convey information through a system of changing pitches and dynamics. In dry air, they were greatly restricted in the concepts they were able to express. While they were able to manually correct the output of their translators when necessary, their helmets prohibited them from communicating efficiently with each other while on alien worlds, and this, they said, put them at a disadvantage in negotiations with the Federation, most of the members of which were air-breathers.
She told T’Pring how she had remained in contact with the Aquarians after they left the Enterprise, and continued to work with them on programming that would enhance their technology and allow them to simulate the natural conditions of their planet. She described the basic principles of the technology and some of the problems they were facing at the current stage of development.
When Nyota asked if she had any questions, T’Pring looked thoughtful. She tilted her head slightly up and to the right, gazing at an invisible point in the air as she spoke. “Why is it expected that the Aquarians should adapt to the conditions of the worlds of others? Why not the reverse?”
Nyota took a deep breath. That, she thought, is a very good question. She said as much to T’Pring. “Unfortunately,” she concluded, “it happens more often than not that those in the minority will have to adapt to suit those in the majority, rather than being accommodated as they are.”
“It is the same on Vulcan,” said T’Pring.
Nyota waited for her to continue, but nothing else came. The conversation moved on.
---
It was during their fifth meeting that Nyota could no longer avoid the problem of whether or not to mention Commander Spock. T’Pring had begun asking her about her experiences with telepathic species, and it was a simple truth of work on the Enterprise that whenever telepathy was involved, whether out of necessity, for the good of the mission, or out of his own interest, Mr. Spock made himself available.
She would compromise, she decided. She would accurately describe his part in the story, but she simply wouldn’t mention him by name.
With that in mind, she began to describe an anecdote about the Andiluvian people, whom she had encountered right at the onset of the five-year mission, as soon as they had cleared charted space for the first time.
Since that first encounter, it had been theorized by xenobiologists from other planets that the Andiluvians, responding to some unknown threat or change in planetary conditions, had adapted by developing full intelligence while still in the egg, whereas some distant ancestor of theirs might have hatched, gone through a larval phase, and eventually metamorphosized into a now-unknown adult form of the species.
When the first Andiluvian cluster made contact with the Enterprise, none of those theories had been imagined yet. All they knew was that a certain crewman with heightened telepathic abilities (as Nyota referred to the commander) had experienced an attack of sudden, tremendous mental pain. When he recovered, he was aware that some form of message had been transmitted to him, but he didn’t have the ability to interpret its meaning.
Nyota had worked with this crewman to decipher the information he had received while the Enterprise remained forcibly locked in orbit around the Andiluvian planet, unable to escape a mysterious telekinetic pull. It was lucky that the crewman’s eidetic memory allowed them to translate the information into a visual format. After that, it took them three days to understand that the initial transmission had actually included a key that would help them to decode the rest of the material.
What they found, to Nyota’s excitement, was analogous to Earth’s own Voyager messages, phonographic records launched into space in the 20th century containing information about Earth and mankind. This was an alien species, like humanity, that had outgrown its planet and wanted to introduce itself to the rest of the universe. They wanted to meet, and given that the planet’s surface was entirely inhospitable to human life, the best option would be to allow a representative to beam aboard the Enterprise and to transfer them into a containment chamber along with some atmosphere sampled directly from the Andiluvian planet’s surface. With a transparent aluminum window dominating one wall and computer terminals both inside and outside the chamber, communication would hopefully be possible without the use of the species’ telepathy, which had proven disruptive to the mind of one of their crewmen already.
Starfleet approved their plan. Within a day, they had prepared the chamber and were ready to beam aboard the first representative of the Andiluvian people.
Nyota abandoned her notes and spoke from memory when she started describing the Andiluvian cluster to T’Pring. No one had known what to make of its physiology when it first arrived – not her, not Dr. McCoy, and certainly not the crewman with whom it had originally made contact.
It was like a collection of frog’s eggs, she told T’Pring, a mass of multi-celled organisms about the size of a human head but basically spherical and featureless. The organisms were connected by a thick layer clear jelly that held them together. She learned that they could communicate through the substance and, using electrical impulses similar to what controlled the muscles of a being like a human or a Vulcan, could move, communicate, and even separate from and connect with each other to form different configurations of individual organisms.
The wonderfully strange thing she discovered was that they didn’t seem to have individual identities. Instead, their sense of self was constantly in flux, dependent on how many and which other organisms they were connected with at the time. The more of them grouped together, the more intelligent and capable they were as a collective. Since Nyota had the experience with language to help them learn to communicate with humans and other members of the Federation, and the other crewman had the telepathic sensitivity to navigate their existing system of communication, the two of them built a device which would allow them to interface directly with the Andiluvian cluster – in effect, to join it, and to mutually share their knowledge.
Nyota confessed that, until that experience, she had been intimidated by that certain crewman. She felt that their working together to join with the Andiluvian cluster had also helped them to understand each other, although that hadn’t been the goal. Since then, she and that crewman had forged a more meaningful personal relationship, which she felt demonstrated another principle of interspecies communication: that cooperation could –
“It is Commander Spock,” interrupted T’Pring, “to whom thee refer.”
Nyota winced, hearing the suddenly sharp note of T'Pring's voice. She hadn't meant to say all that. She should have stuck to her notes, but she'd gotten carried away. “I’m not sure what exactly happened between you on Vulcan," she said apologetically. "I didn’t know if you would want to be reminded of him.”
“It is illogical to attempt to conceal his identity when there is no other whom it could be.”
“Of course, you’re right,” Nyota conceded. “He and I work together quite a lot, so unfortunately you may have to keep hearing about him.”
T’Pring regarded her severely. “I have no sentimental attachment to Commander Spock, and nor have I any ill will towards him. He simply represents a part of my life which has come to an end. Please refer to him as thee would any other individual, whenever it is appropriate.”
“I understand,” said Nyota. She felt herself soften in response to T’Pring’s stiffness and formality. She had never met a Vulcan other than Mr. Spock before. T’Pring made her realize that Mr. Spock did not exaggerate when he described the norms of Vulcan behavior.
A moment passed, and then T’Pring prompted her to continue, and so she did.
Once she had reached the end of the story, she and T’Pring spoke for a while about the differences between telepathic and verbal-linguistic communication. Nyota drew T’Pring’s attention to the trouble that the Andiluvians had with pronouns, once they were able to communicate using written language on a computer. They couldn’t understand why Federation Standard had only one pronoun for the first-person plural, and wanted instead to have we (two of us), we (three of us), we (four of us), and so on – but they had no interest at all in the word “I”.
When it was her turn to listen, Nyota noticed that T’Pring took care to speak about telepathy only in theory. She never referred to her own experience as a Vulcan. Nyota hoped, if they continued to have these meetings, that T’Pring might grow more comfortable sharing things about herself. It was easier to learn when one felt comfortable. That was a fact rooted in neurology, and Nyota thought must be just as true for Vulcans as it was for humans.
Just as they were saying goodbye, T’Pring unexpectedly spoke up again.
“Lieutenant,” she began, “have thee spoken of our communication with thy crew?”
Nyota shook her head. “No, I haven’t told anyone about it yet.” Not even Christine, she mused.
“I would request that thee do not speak of it with Commander Spock.”
“I won’t.”
“Though I bear him no ill will. It simply holds no relevance for him.”
“Of course, T’Pring,” she answered kindly. “I understand completely.”
“You do not,” snapped T’Pring.
Nyota noticed immediately that T’Pring had dropped out of her formal register and addressed her with the informal you. She raised her eyebrows at the view screen. “Then, I understand that I don’t understand. I apologize.”
“Unneeded,” said T’Pring curtly. “I will speak with thee tomorrow.”
Nyota waited, but T’Pring didn’t close the connection. Instead, she was staring intently at Nyota, a crease appearing between her brows. Her lips parted as if she wanted to speak.
“What is it?” Nyota asked.
T’Pring hesitated from speaking, puffing her cheeks out slightly like a frustrated child. Nyota found the expression so cute that she had to fight not to smile.
“Is there something else you wanted to talk about?” she asked again, trying to coax out whatever was bothering T’Pring.
“I would ask thee,” she began haltingly, “what are… frogzegs?”
Nyota frowned. “Frogzegs?”
“Thee have said that the Andiluvians resemble frogzegs. What are frogzegs?”
“Oh!” Nyota laughed brightly. “Frog’s eggs. The eggs of frogs, that is. Frogs are an Earth species - or, a group of species. I should have clarified.”
“Will thee direct me to more information on the subjects of frogs?”
“Of course I will,” Nyota replied. “Please ask me if I say anything that you don’t understand.”
“That is what I have done,” said T’Pring flatly. Her tone might have come across as hostile, but Nyota suspected that she was just embarrassed. She remembered how T’Pring had looked so lost on the night that she’d first asked Nyota for help. It must have taken a lot for her to admit to the gaps in her knowledge, especially given how highly knowledge was valued among Vulcans.
She hardly knew anything about what had happened on Vulcan, but she knew that for one reason or another, T'Pring was no longer part of a marriage that had been arranged in her childhood. Whatever the reasons were, it must have taken tremendous strength for her to set out on a different path than the one that had been laid out for her.
When they finally ended their comm, Nyota stayed there in front of the view screen for a long time, just thinking. She might not be able to discuss this with Mr. Spock, but it was more than past time for her to talk about it with Christine.
---
“So that’s why you’ve been looking so tired,” Christine said, tilting her head sympathetically.
“Excuse me?”
Christine shrugged and took a bite of her scrambled eggs. “It’s the truth. You’re the one who’s been staying up until morning, so don’t act surprised. I’m glad you told me, because I was about to recommend that you come in for testing.”
“It’s only been a few days!” Nyota frowned at Christine. Sure, she hadn’t told Christine about it right away, but the previous night had only been her fifth time speaking with T’Pring… or sixth, if she counted the first communication. And that was nearly a week, wasn’t it? Why hadn’t she brought it up before?
“A lot of disorders set in very quickly in outer space. You can’t be too careful.”
Nyota sighed. She knew the reason why she hadn’t spoken up about this yet. For the past five days, she had been sleeping in and rushing through breakfast, not taking time to talk to anyone. And then, she’d been heading to her quarters immediately after her shift and eating dinner in her room. It was no way to live and she knew it. She put her elbows up on the table so she could rest her chin on her hands. “I do feel exhausted,” she admitted.
“You could always ask her to slow down,” Christine suggested. “You could maybe talk every other day, or once a week…”
Nyota had barely opened her mouth to answer when Christine started to laugh. “What’s so funny?” Nyota demanded, starting to smile in bewilderment herself.
“Your face,” Christine replied. “You don’t want to slow down.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that!”
“I think you do. She’s very lovely, after all,” Christine said, reminding Nyota of the words she had spoken herself when T’Pring first appeared in the view screen on the bridge.
Nyota crossed her arms over her chest. “It isn’t like that, Christine. She’s… well, it’s nice to have somebody show an interest in my work who isn’t already involved. She listens, she asks questions, and she’s nice to talk to. I can admit that the circumstances are unusual, but if I don’t fixate on her history with Commander Spock, it’s no different than being pen-pals with someone who’s read about a few of our missions.”
“Pen-pals! Is that what they’re calling it now?”
“Stop.” Nyota dismissed Christine’s teasing with a wave of her hand. She could privately admit that of course she found T’Pring very lovely, but she wouldn’t have Christine reducing their connection to a question of attraction. T’Pring was bright and inquisitive, even enthusiastic in her own quiet way. They were engaged on an intellectual level. She finished her coffee and stood, offering to take Christine’s breakfast tray back to the dish return for her. They said good-bye, and she watched Christine walk out of the mess on her way to medical before she crossed the room herself.
After dropping off their dishes, she turned around with surprise to see Commander Spock standing there waiting for her with hands clasped behind his back. It was a pleasant surprise – she hadn’t seen much of Mr. Spock since they’d left Vulcan. He’d taken an almost unheard-of day off immediately afterwards, and since then he’d been utterly professional and focused on his duties. Or, at least, she assumed so. The truth was that she hadn’t spent any time in the rec room since then, either. She might as well have been confined to quarters for all the time she spent there preparing for her meetings with T’Pring.
“Good morning, Mr. Spock. How are you?”
“I am well,” he replied, bowing his head courteously. “I have a request, Lieutenant.”
“All right. Out with it, Commander, before I have to do something I’ll regret.”
He raised one eyebrow, like he always did when she tried to make fun with him. “I have composed a new melody for voice and ka’athyra,” he told her. She smiled, always appreciating when he used his own native Vulcan vocabulary with her. He didn’t have the time to take her through the whole language from top to bottom, but she appreciated everything she did learn from him – in this case, the word for what most humans called the Vulcan lyre.
“And you’d like me to be the voice.”
“I would also appreciate your assistance with the lyric.”
“I’d love to work on it with you,” she said, feeling her smile still pulling at her cheeks.
“Are you available this evening, Lieutenant?”
Her smile dropped. “Well – not this evening, but what about tomorrow, after alpha shift? We can work in my quarters.”
“As you wish.” Mr. Spock bowed his head again and retreated into the thick of the alpha shift crowd congregating in the mess hall for breakfast. Nyota waited to see where he would go, and with disappointment she watched him sink like a stone into a seat at a table by himself. She scanned the room and easily found Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy laughing together over their morning coffee. From what she and Christine had pieced together, the ceremony on Vulcan had been either resolved or aborted, the captain was all right, the commander was healthy again, and everything should have been back to normal. So, why wouldn’t Mr. Spock join them?
She felt that she had a responsibility to be a good friend to him. Something about what had taken place had disrupted the stability of his relationship with the captain, and he deserved to have stability. She would have to make sure to see more of him, even if it meant seeing less of T’Pring. She reasoned to herself that it would only have been a matter of time before she needed to spread out her meetings with T’Pring regardless. Christine was right. She was overtired, and before long it would start to affect her work.
---
T’Pring was quiet for a long time after Nyota told her they would need to postpone their next meeting. She looked straight ahead, her eyes hardly wavering at all. The air seemed to thicken as Nyota waited nervously for her reply.
When she finally spoke, Nyota slumped with relief. She had been concerned about how to tell T’Pring that she had to cancel in order to spend time with Commander Spock, but T’Pring didn’t even ask for Nyota’s reasoning. All she said was that she understood, and that they would proceed according to Nyota’s convenience from then on.
T’Pring did not quite apologize for her forwardness, but Nyota was nothing if not adept at reading subtext – even from Vulcans, who were notorious for saying only exactly what they meant… and about a hundred other things at the same time. Inferring how T’Pring felt from what she didn’t say, Nyota projected even more warmth than usual into their conversation. She wanted T’Pring to understand that she wasn’t pulling away out of a lack of interest. On the contrary, she was beginning to admit to herself that she had quite a lot of interest in T’Pring. It was silly to think about romance, with her being on the Enterprise, running around the galaxy with no say in where they went next, and T’Pring being grounded on Vulcan, trying to plan for the next phase in her own life.
But T’Pring was a beautiful woman who had called her, a stranger, in her time of need, and they’d talked for hours each night for days since then. So what if Christine would tease her about it? She was only human.
And she liked T’Pring, and she wanted T’Pring to know it.
She hoped that the message came across.
---
Seeing Commander Spock in her own quarters always gave Nyota a peculiar feeling at first. Whereas she had taken the time to wash her face and change into a more comfortable, casual dress after their shift, he arrived in full uniform with the ka’athyra tucked under his arm, looking exactly like the version of Spock who stood at the science console on the bridge. He remained stiff and professional even as he found his spot on her sofa, sitting down between the pink and yellow cushions thrown to either side. He didn’t look out of place, exactly, but he didn’t quite look like he belonged there, either. He was a plant in a garden that had grown a little taller than its neighbors, and now he stooped to compensate, so he wouldn’t stand out in the line. He didn’t blossom like the others, or unfurl his leaves in the sunlight. He stayed curled up like a hard bud, always shifting away from the light; keeping himself closed; protecting his heart.
But all of that changed when he started to play, just like Nyota knew it would.
He relaxed into the room, carving out a melody with the graceful passes of his fingers across the instrument’s strings. She watched him a little, but before long she closed her eyes, leaning back against her headboard and letting the sound of Spock’s playing envelop her completely.
She tapped one index finger on the knuckle of her opposite hand, gently beating out the supportive, meditative rhythm of the bassline as she heard it. Above that was a melody that conjured nothing so much as the image of moonlight. Vulcan, Nyota knew, had no moon. Wondering idly what Spock might imagine instead of a moon, she attempted to picture the Vulcan sky at night. She knew secondhand that the sky was most often red. She had seen fragments of light from that red sky through a window defining T’Pring’s face in their comms.
The melody skipped like a stone on the water.
Smiling to herself, she couldn’t help but follow her imagination when it led her to T’Pring. The slope of her shoulders was smooth and relaxed, with her long neck held gracefully erect and her head just slightly tipped forwards. Her hair, parted neatly and tucked away from her face, fell behind her like a curtain, as sleek as satin and as black as the night. Bathed in the rusty light of the Vulcan dusk, her catlike eyes became mirrors, capturing fiery sparks from the fading sun. Everything about her might have been deliberately composed. She might have been a painting, except for the gentle rise and fall that marked her measured breathing.
An insistent new melody emerged from below and overtook the quavering notes that died away above. The music no longer suited the peaceful image that Nyota had conjured. The heavy buzz of the lowest strings of the ka’athyra rumbled with a power that belied the small size of the instrument. This new movement of the composition seemed to take inspiration from old jazz and blues. Nyota could imagine herself keening high in grief above the accompaniment, sounding like Gorga Xi, that troubled chanteuse of the Zog-Lu System, then dipping low and moaning out her sorrows like the Earth singer Nina Simone.
As Spock continued to play, that darker melody tore through the song like the Minotaur racing through its labyrinth. Before long, every beat was like the crash of the Minotaur's head into a wall as it searched for an escape. The monster raced from wrong turn to wrong turn until he was too dizzy to continue. Exhausted, he collapsed and hit the cool stone floor. A breath of wind blew over his head like peace itself had come to comfort him. The first gentle melody returned, somehow softer and more assured all at once. It was as if the earliest phrases had gone through a trial and emerged, in the end, stronger than before.
A final arpeggio rang out through the air and drifted away. Nyota hummed and opened her eyes.
“It’s beautiful, Mr. Spock. What do you think the subject should be?"
Spock set down the ka’athyra and gazed thoughtfully at a point on the wall behind her. “The subject, Lieutenant, is love.”
“If we’re going to talk about love, Spock, you had better stop calling me Lieutenant. Now, who is it about?”
He leaned forward in his seat, holding his hands steepled in front of his face. “You recall our recent diversion to Vulcan,” he said.
She laughed in disbelief. “Yes, I recall. It was a week ago.”
“My… –” he paused and looked momentarily pained. “I have been thinking of T’Pring, the woman to whom I would have been joined.”
At the sound of T’Pring’s name, Nyota’s heart began to pound. She wondered what T’Pring was doing. It was the first day in a week that she and Nyota weren’t meeting at this time. She wondered if T’Pring might be thinking of her, like she was thinking of T’Pring.
And Spock was thinking of T’Pring, too, and Nyota knew that T’Pring must think about Spock sometimes, no matter what she said.
“Did you love her?” she asked him.
“I do not know. I do not understand the feeling as you do,” he confessed. “I did not desire her to be my wife. For many years, however, our minds were joined.”
“Parted from me and never parted,” said Nyota, remembering the words that T’Pring had spoken when she’d summoned Spock to Vulcan on the bridge.
Spock nodded. “I did not wish her to be my wife, and she did not wish it, either. It was logical that she chose to challenge our bond during the ceremony. However, now that she is parted from me, and will remain parted from me, I am… aware of the loss.”
That was news to her. Nyota had assumed that if one person were responsible for calling off the marriage, it would have been Spock. Cautiously, she pressed for more information. “Do you know why she didn't wish to be your wife?”
“It was explained to me,” he confirmed. “She preferred another.”
Another? Perhaps she wasn’t understanding correctly. T’Pring had told her she planned to leave Vulcan as soon as she could. The way she had explained it, it sounded as though she were entirely unattached. “Another life, you mean?”
“Another mate.”
What?
“But she –”
She stopped herself before she said too much. T’Pring’s words echoed in her head.
I would request that thee do not speak of it with Commander Spock.
It simply holds no relevance for him.
She wondered if T’Pring didn’t trust her to keep things to herself; if that was why she hadn’t mentioned this other person. This other "mate" who she preferred. Confused, Nyota reflected on the way T’Pring had first approached her. She hadn’t seemed like a woman who had just begun a relationship with a person for whom she had been willing to challenge her arrangement with Spock.
She realized that Spock was still waiting for her to finish her sentence.
“What I mean to say is,” she began again, “did she tell you why?”
He shook his head. “She told me the reasons that she did not desire me. Her reasons for preferring him, I assume, were not relevant.”
Oh, Spock. If she hadn’t known better, she would have reached out to hold him. As it was, they simply sat there, and she tried to project what comfort she could.
After a minute of thought, she had an idea.
“Spock. Is there any way that she could have challenged your marriage without having someone else to… be her mate?”
“No,” he said. “Not within the ancient laws to which our families are bound.”
“What about divorce? Is it possible to end a marriage after it’s formed?”
“It is not common. To be bonded is beneficial for the Vulcan mind.” He took a deep breath, and she watched as his chest rose and fell. “I have shared more with outworlders than is customary. Do not ask me to tell you more.”
“Of course, Mr. Spock. I only wondered…”
“It is natural to wonder about that which cannot be known,” he said. A change passed over his face. He looked to be so near to crying that she had the impression he wasn’t only talking about T’Pring anymore. “We are all of us bound by our nature, and those feelings of ours which cannot be controlled. And nor can they be understood. I will not say more,” he said, although he looked very much as if he wanted to.
---
Nyota turned it over and over in her head well into the night.
She stepped into the sonic shower, washed away the last twelve hours, and thought about it. She slipped into her nightgown, and she thought about it. She wrapped her hair in a silk scarf and tied a knot, and she thought about it. She turned out the light and curled up in bed, and she thought about it for so long that before she knew it the bedside clock read 01:30 and she still hadn’t fallen asleep.
The first time she tried to hail T’Pring’s comm unit, there was no response. Suddenly afraid that T’Pring was in trouble, she tried again twice before she realized, embarrassed and defeated, that she hadn’t even thought to check what time it was on Vulcan.
Either it was the middle of the night and T’Pring was asleep, or it was during the day and T’Pring wasn’t available simply because she was busy. What was it about T’Pring that made her feel so invested?
She sighed and turned out the lights and climbed back into bed. What a stupid question, she thought. She knew exactly what the answer was.
When Nyota had a feeling, for better or worse, she ended up following it. Her meetings with T’Pring had given her more than one feeling. That T’Pring had reached out to her at all made her feel important – competent and valued. So yes, she had agreed that first night because T’Pring had flattered her, but flattery alone couldn’t build a rapport like they had built.
Throughout their conversations, Nyota soon found that T’Pring was more than intelligent; she was hungry for new things to learn. The more they spoke, the more easily she admitted the gaps in her knowledge, but she grasped concepts that interested her with absolute ease. Whenever Nyota started to worry that she had gotten too far off-track on a tangent about phenomes or regional variations in grammar, T’Pring’s eyes, bright and attentive, assured her that she was still listening, and that she wanted to know more. She asked better questions than a few experts in xenolinguistics that Nyota could think of.
And she was charming, too. She was formal to a fault, but she never tried to hide her enthusiasm for their talks. The first thing she had done when they’d talked last night was ask if she could share her research on Earth frogs and their life cycle.
And Nyota said of course, and she’d taught Nyota the answers to questions about amphibians that she never would have thought to ask.
And now, Nyota worried, she could be trapped by the ancient law of Vulcan in a marriage with a man she didn’t love – all to escape a prearranged engagement with another man who spent his life on a starship. It wasn’t fair, she thought. It was as simple as that: unfair.
Her comm unit chirped.
She sat up straight and raced out of bed, leaving her covers trailing on the floor behind her. She accepted the comm at once, reaching out blindly to turn on the lamp behind her.
T’Pring appeared on the view screen, wrapped in a gray silk robe that she held closed in front with one hand while she adjusted her comm unit’s dials with the other. Pale light filtered in through a window to her right.
“T’Pring!” Nyota sighed with immediate relief, seeing T’Pring in front of her, looking a little tired but obviously in one piece.
“Lieutenant. I had not thought that we were to speak today.” There was no annoyance in her voice; only a question.
“I know,” said Nyota. “I’m sorry.”
“Unneeded,” T’Pring interjected at once.
“What time is it on Vulcan?”
“It is morning,” she said.
Nyota noticed that T’Pring’s hair was wet. Dark pools spread slowly across her shoulders as water from her hair seeped into her robe. “Your hair is wet,” she said.
“I was engaged in the act of bathing,” T’Pring told her. “When thee first attempted to contact me.”
Nyota nodded slowly.
“May I ask the reason for thy unplanned communication?” T’Pring asked.
“Oh.” She faltered. She took a deep breath and did her best to look T’Pring in the eye, as hard as it was to make eye contact through a video comm. “I just wanted to tell you that… you can talk to me. I mean, we don’t have to only talk about alien languages and first contacts. I don’t want to sound presumptuous, but I know that we humans sometimes just need someone to talk to. If that’s true for Vulcans, too… you can talk to me about anything at all, and I’ll answer you any time, as long as I’m not on the bridge.”
She watched T’Pring’s dark eyes - impossibly dark and deep, a rich brown like espresso in the morning light. “Thank you,” T’Pring said. “I would desire to speak with you now, but I must dress before it is time for asal-yem. That is our morning meal.” T’Pring looked up and to the right, as she often did when she was thinking. She began to speak, and then seemed to reconsider. “Good-bye,” she said softly. She raised her hand in the Vulcan salute.
Nyota did the same.
She lowered her hand and closed their connection, and she drifted to sleep a few minutes later with a smile on her face.
---
When she woke the next morning, the first thought in her head was that T’Pring had used the informal you in place of the formal Vulcan thee.