Work Text:
It is an acknowledged truth within the Continuum that in each universe exists a S’chn T’gai Spock for every James T. Kirk. Even when the Continuum feels playful -and cruel enough- to separate them, the other always finds his way. In one instance, though, the Continuum witnessed the dramatic birth of only one Kirk and no Spock.
It was terrible to watch as Kirk had no one to challenge him, no one to match his mind, no one to understand him, no one to break and fix him. Indeed a pitiful sight. “Are we going to let this tragedy unfold for much longer? I can’t bear to see him like that. He’s so… so...”
“Boring?”
“Thanks, Trelane. We need to do something. Docile Kirks are the ones I hate the most, but this one is on a whole other level...”
“I had so much fun when I played with one before they took me back in the Continuum,” Trelane says dreamily, a pout on his lips though as he still hasn’t forgiven his parents for interrupting his game.
“Oh, right, I remember that!” The other chuckles before coming to a realization, “Wait! Isn’t his Spock stuck in another reality now?!”
Trelane’s eyes sparkle with mischief, and he nods frantically. He grabs a sphere and knocks with his fingertip on it. An old, wrinkled Vulcan meditating appears on the surface of the object. Another tap and a younger one comes into view, seemingly arguing with a blue-eyed Captain Kirk. “These two are taking so long to get together…” he sighs and dramatically rolls his eyes.
“You’re forbidden to interfere with them again. Last time you did that, Kirk died.”
Trelane huffs and retorts with a shrug, “McCoy revived him. Besides, no one said I couldn't interfere with the extra one…” Before anyone can stop him, Trelane is back to the old Vulcan’s image, and with a snap of his fingers, he sends the one they call the Ambassador into the universe the two Continuum members were looking at in the first place.
“There!” Trelane proudly announces, “A Kirk-less Spock for our Spock-less Kirk. A good deed I have done. They should reward me for this, don’t you think?”
“Shush, now watch, I’m curious what’s going to happen!”
*****
Spock feels the shift in his mind as all the broken Vulcan links start to heal suddenly during his meditation session.
He makes his way toward the part of his mental landscape, where his connection with his home planet resides. What he finds is not the barren land it had become when he had witnessed the destruction of his counterpart’s home planet, but instead, the bustling recreation of Shikhar. It is not complicated to assess the situation. He has accumulated enough experience with alternate universes to have a good idea of what is going on without having to run experiments. Not that he will trust his “instincts” only, but a lifetime with two Jims is enough to allow himself to make a few guesses before fact-checking.
When he resurfaces, his quarters look the same on the surface, but a candle 1.5 centimeters too much to the right and a missing stain on the carpet floor are the first hints that Spock adds to his list of evidence that he is not where he was at the beginning of his meditation.
After 2.29 days and seven different tests and calculations made, Spock can scientifically assure himself that he had been transported to a new universe. He concludes it is not a natural phenomenon as no ion-storm has seemed to occur, no ribbon effect was detected, nor even red-matter traces were to account for.
He also decides that complaining would be illogical.
No matter who or what placed him here, they gave him a good position at the head of the Vulcan Science Institute and almost accommodated him perfectly. If anything, he is only missing one element, one person precisely, but it would be greediness at this point. While Spock is more in tune with his feelings after spending years with his own Jim, this sentiment of greed is something he rejects immediately.
It is easy to settle in his new life, and days -months even- pass by swiftly.
“Director Spock, the U.S.S. Alexander has entered the atmosphere and is ready to beam its Chief Scientist to your office,” Skessik, Spock’s assistant signals to his communicator. Starfleet and the V.S.I. have decided to collaborate on a project designed to improve the Academy’s simulations. Spock himself, considering his extensive knowledge in computer science, has volunteered to partner with Starfleet’s envoy.
Spock acknowledges Skessik’s message and exchanges briefly with the Captain.
His visitor should have been Lieutenant Mrisil, but the Captain informs him that the Caitian died during their last mission, and his Chief Officer has now volunteered to take her place.
Spock offers his condolences before giving the signal to beam the crew member down.
He knows very little about the person he will have to work with: a Terran fondly referred to by the Captain as the ship’s Hephaestion. A curious analogy that Spock does not have time to dwell on.
The familiar sounds of beaming particles tingle his hearing sense, and soon enough, the usual blue of the Science Department’s shirt fills his vision. The fabric has changed, it appears thicker, lines more defined and shoulders squared. The silver Starfleet delta on the man’s chest looks more polished and brighter than what he used to wear. Each Universe and period of time has its version of the uniform, but it still floods Spock with feelings of longing every time.
“If there’s any true logic to the universe… we’ll end up on that bridge again someday.”
It is illogical to do so but he misses the bridge and the ship. Her Captain even more.
The man clears his throat, trying to get Spock’s attention. “Mister Spock?” he asks, and it is enough for the Vulcan to be pulled out of his reverie. That voice will always resonate within him.
“James T. Kirk,” Spock exhales the name with wonder in his tone, and he is hit by another memory, another moment of surprise he had in an ice cave on Delta Vega.
“In the flesh!”
He is the exact copy of the one he had met on that freezing moon—same light brown hair, albeit greying on the sides, same cerulean blue eyes despite hidden behind glasses, same raspy voice. Spock does not believe in fate. He believes in science, but he must admit that if Jim being here is not a way to give him a third chance, then he would definitely have preferred continuing to suffer in silence in his last universe.
“Why are you here?”
Jim looks confused, head slightly tilted to the side as he appears to study the old Vulcan before a cocky smile graces his lips. “Vulcan minds are hard to challenge, and while your simulations are thorough, one: they’re just completely out of date and two: they would surely benefit a mind lacking your logic.”
Only Jim would make such a statement and defy the core of the Vulcan way. Spock allows himself to smile inwardly. If anyone can provoke his students, it is the one named Kirk.
“But you do not lack logic, Mister Kirk. You simply let your emotions guide you.”
“They brought me here, so I wouldn’t count that as a bad thing.”
“I guess we will see about that,” Spock answers before calling for his assistant, “Skessik will show you to your accommodation for the duration of your stay and will provide you with your schedule. Welcome to the Vulcan Science Institute, Mister Kirk. I believe your stay will be most interesting.”
“It is already,” Kirk answers, still smiling, although shyly as Spock’s assistant escorts him out.
*****
Spock always knew Kirk was intelligent. He was in his original universe and even greater in what had been dubbed the Kelvin one, so it is not a true surprise to find him in a blue uniform this time, but to think of him as a Chief Science Officer rather than a Captain is… unsettling, for the Vulcan.
“Do I have something on my face?” Jim asks after a few days of their co-operation. No matter the universe, the young man has always been very observant so it is logical he realizes how much Spock is looking at him. Though, judging by the pink hue on his cheeks he does not dislike it.
“You remind me of someone I once knew,” Spock’s tone is fond and even faintly amused.
He cannot help the display of emotions whenever he speaks about the Jims he encountered and cared for, even less in the presence of another Kirk.
Jim’s expression seems to fall a bit before he wonders with as much nonchalance he can muster, “Someone important to you?”
He is not subtle in the least but Spock does not mind. Life taught him playfulness, something that his Kelvin counterpart failed to understand but he is young and his Kirk will undoubtedly help with that.
“An understatement,” Spock decides on and is rewarded with the spark in Jim’s eyes that tells him he had set his mind on a new challenge.
“Family?”
“You could say that.”
“You’re not like other Vulcans,” Jim smiles and Spock allows himself to pull the corner of his lips upward enough for a smile of his own. One that changes Jim’s expression into a smirk.
“And you are different from what I would have expected as well.”
“Really?! How so?” Jim asks, gleeful. The program he just coded into the computer needs a bit of time to run so he sits back and relaxes, bringing up his legs and feet on the old Vulcan’s desk.
Spock does not care at all and leans against the desk himself with his arms crossed against his chest. For a second, the memory of a similar moment on the bridge where his Jim and he were blatantly flirting floods his mind, but he comes back to the present easily enough with the very same question that started this whole conversation in the first place. “How come you do not captain your own ship? You are young and resourceful after all.”
“I don’t know, I don’t think I’m ready or will ever be... Don’t get me wrong I would love to. It had been my dream ever since I was young but every great Captain that I've met or worked with has an equally amazing First Officer and I don’t feel like I have found mine…”
Spock breathes in sharply and he grabs the locket he got from his Jim years ago. The words Jim recorded are still painfully carved in his mind.
“You once said being a starship captain was my first, best destiny… if that’s true, then yours is to be by my side.”
“Besides, I would need a ship!”
The sound of Jim’s chuckle lets him breathe again and the ache brought by another set of memories recedes a little. “You have an interesting nickname for someone that does not have a ship in his heart,” he whispers.
“You heard about the Hephaestion thing hm?” Jim asks, scratching the back of his head self-consciously. “I do love the Alexander, it’s a beautiful ship, small, fierce, and undefeated but despite what everyone assumes, it’s not my one true love...”
As far as Spock knows, the USS Enterprise is not a registered ship in the Federation fleet so it is no wonder that this Jim is in no particular hurry to move along the Starfleet ranks.
****
“Whoever forged a universe for this Kirk without a Spock nor the Enterprise must have hated him badly.”
Trelane looks everywhere but to his companion who grunts in annoyance.
“Seriously, Trelane?!”
“I was mad okay? I was sent back to the Continuum during my encounter with him so yeah I blamed him and yeah I may have made him a universe where his dreams would be forever out of reach but I’m doing the right thing now aren’t I?”
“I guess,” the other grants him but returns his attention soon enough to the sphere.
*****
“So I may have stumbled upon some Vulcan facts last night?”
“Some confidential Vulcan data, you mean?” Spock corrects, barely lifting his head from the padd he is looking at. All Jims are just the same, they are too curious to let authority dictate anything, let alone prevent them from getting the information they are looking for.
“See, if you absolutely wanted it to be confidential you would've gotten better security on it. It barely took me an hour to crack that code,” he says with that proud inflection in his tone.
“Should I hire you to further the security around the V.S.I. archives then?”
“Maybe?”
Jim falls to silence and paces around Spock’s desk. It amuses the Vulcan once more. He knows Jim wants to ask something but he does not know how to approach the subject, meaning it must be something he is not sure he is comfortable with.
“What troubles you, Jim?” Spock finally asks when Jim stops to frantically clean his glasses with his science blue shirt for the third time already.
“I just-” he stops himself, puts his glasses back on, and starts pacing again, “I just have a hard time picturing a civilization like yours doing the thing that I read last night.” He stops in his tracks and looks at the Vulcan with that assessing stare his counterparts always sport when they are trying to assess a situation. He is looking at Spock and yet he is not. As the human would say, you can almost picture the cogwheels turning as he does his hardest to put into pictures a theory he stumbled upon.
“Ah,” Spocks raises an eyebrow, the same as if he would raise the corner of his lips to smile. “You read about biological data and the Vulcan mating customs, I presume.”
The hue that splashes Jim’s cheeks tells Spock everything that he needs to know, and soon it is the human’s ears that turn crimson as well.
“There is nothing to be flustered about C-” Once again the wrong rank almost slips past Spock’s lips but he stops himself before Jim can catch what he was about to say, “It is only the ‘birds and the bees’ as humans would say.”
Spock remembers vividly the first time he had that conversation albeit within a very different context. At that moment he could not fully understand the embarrassment that his Jim was going through but his choice of words -awkward to say the least- was evident.
In front of him, the young Lieutenant Commander chuckles and relaxes, standing at ease with his hands behind his back.
“Pon Farr doesn’t sound like your regular birds and bees,” he smiles.
“It is of a rather intense nature. I will agree with you on that.”
“Seems like it yeah,” Jim snorts.
“You know you found something that is highly guarded and that my people do wish to keep a secret,” Spock tries to admonish but fails as he knows Jim would never reveal any of this. He is curious but he is not ill-intentioned.
“I would never!” Jim shouts, a scandalized look on his face as if Spock just insulted him by suggesting he would spill the Vulcan’s best-guarded secret.
“I believe you,” Spock says, something warm in the chocolate shade of his eyes.
They fall silent again and Spock continues to review the new learning sims they came up with for the Institute. The students will be challenged way beyond what Spock expected for this project. In fact, he speculates that their improvement will rise 6.9% more than what he calculated back when he thought he would have another person to work with.
“That person I remind you of, it’s your mate right?” There is something in Jim’s tone that Spock cannot quite decipher. He thinks it is pessimism if only judging by the lack of spark in the cerulean blue eyes.
Pon Farr is a primal expression of feelings and needs the Vulcans can only unleash every seven years. During this time, the iron fist that guards their emotions opens like Pandora’s box and sweeps their sanity until the flesh is satiated. For Spock, the longing he feels ever since Jim disappeared, is by and large, as consuming as the Plak Tow, the blood fever Vulcans undergo during their Pon Farr.
More often than not he yearns for fingers gently slipping in his calloused and wrinkled hand.
Jim always joked about being able to sneakily kiss Spock even on the Bridge although everyone knew that you simply do not touch Vulcan’s hands lightly.
“What makes you think so?” Spock finally asks, elbows resting on his desk, hands crossed as he rests his chin on them and carefully looks at this Jim that is so similar and yet slightly different than the ones he knew.
“You said that ‘important’ was an understatement when I asked you about them and that they were family but not quite. I can do 2+2 you know?”
“You are the Chief Science Officer of the USS Alexander, I would hope for you that simple mathematics is within your set of abilities indeed.”
“You know what I mean.”
Now there is frustration in Jim’s tone but Spock cannot seem to stop teasing the poor man.
“Why do you not get to the point then? If you want me to see what you mean, of course.”
That side of Jim is relatively new to Spock. Jim is cunning for sure but he does not usually beat around the bush. Here he is not smoothingly trying to get information. He is just genuinely unable to find a way to hear what he wants.
“My point is that I think you look at me with such intensity sometimes that I feel like there is something you’re not telling me,” Jim finally says, frowning as he stares at Spock. “It feels like you know me and I feel like I know you too but something is missing and I- I cannot put my finger on what it is but you know. I know you do. You do right?”
He looks distressed by the time he stops talking and Spock grows uneasy. The last time a Jim displayed such behavior was when he ‘accidentally’ bonded with the Kelvin Kirk on Delta Vega. A move he always regretted. It was the act of a Vulcan fragilized by the destruction of his peers suddenly seeking reassurance and comfort from the one that harbored his mate’s younger traits.
“I need to meditate,” Spock announces, and as if on queue, Skessik enters the office, guiding a now irritated Jim outside to show him how the pods display the learning sims. “We will talk later, Lieutenant Commander,” Spock all but whispers as the door closes on Jim.
*****
Inside Spock’s mind is a part he never visits. Not after Jim, his Jim disappeared 103 years ago. Not after he felt their link tear and snap 25 years ago. Not after he realized that the other Kirk and he were bonded.
It is the only instance in Spock’s life where he never confirmed a speculation with a fact.
It would have been easy though. To go and check if there was another golden thread in the cornfield. Behind the barn where in the real-life Riverside farm Jim had asked Spock to marry him.
It is getting impossible to deny that place a visit now, especially the more he is encountering new Kirks with whom he seems more in-tune than he should certainly be.
His hands are shaking and it results in 42.38 minutes needed for him to finally relax enough and enter his meditative state.
He walks and walks, passing between Mounts Seleya and Kholinar, towards the Mountains of Gol, and when he reaches the Voroth sea after 2.7 hours, the landscape starts to transform. Desert shapes into endless wheat and cornfields and far beyond on the horizon he can almost make out the shape of the unfinished Enterprise in the Riverside shipyard.
From then on it is easy to see his objective and it leaves him speechless.
Once he reaches the barn he concludes that his eyes are not deceiving him and instead of a decaying thread resting untouched on the ground like he thought he would find, there is the stem of a cord made of countless strings. An unknown number of golden links that he knows, tie him with other beings. As his hand hovers over the reachable threads, the warmth and love he gets from them are unmistakably Jim’s.
The cord is large enough that it contains millions of bonds and all of them stem from here reaching Jims in what Spock figures are other Universes.
*****
“What did you do, Trelane?!”
“Nothing! For once nothing, I swear!” Trelane is quick to answer.
“Have you seen that thing? I know they’re T’hy’la but to have every single Kirk from every Universe to be fated to this specific Spock?!”
“It’s not just this Spock…” Trelane mumbles.
“I’m- What?! What have you done?”
“Hey, stop accusing me!”
Trelane’s friend sends him a look and crosses his arms in front of his chest as he waits for him to elaborate. “Alright, I’ll bite. Tell me then?”
“You know that no matter the Universe, Kirk’s and Spock’s mind always try to reach for the other when they’re separated right?”
“Yes…”
Trelane waits a bit until his friend’s face lights up with understanding.
“Wait don’t tell me…”
“Exactly! When his Kirk disappeared, he glimpsed at several Universes but being a human and with his untrained mind he reached in every direction and you know how no Spock can resist the call of a Kirk.” The other nodded. “It provoked a domino effect and each Spock's and Kirk’s minds did the same unknowingly. Which is a feat considering how Spock is acute to his mindscape. Anyway, Kirk spent what… more than 70 years there before dying… That’s plenty of time for these bonds to develop. I’ve seen it myself in other Universes’ Spocks. It’s true, they are connected. All of them.”
“That’s why you didn’t care about sending this Spock here?”
“I wasn’t sure since this is the only Universe where Kirk had no Spock but I guess the moment I sent the Ambassador here, their minds reached for each other?”
“Wow… That’s…”
“Cliché?”
“I would have gone for romantic but that works as well.”
*****
“Bullshit,” Jim whispers, his voice strained as if he had been punched in the sternum.
Unsurprisingly, Jim reacts that way as Spock explains to him that they are linked.
Because Jim has a rather rational mind, even more so in this Universe where he is a scientist.
So Spock does the only thing he knows will convince him but makes sure his consent is obvious and not after reciting a handful of warnings.
The meld leaves Jim in awe and he is full of questions and theories. Spock thinks it is that exact moment that he falls for this Jim. The scientific wonder in the baby blue eyes makes the Vulcan’s blood sing.
It’s been 103 years since he last let himself feel loving emotions towards a Jim and he knows this one can return them. Not like the Kelvin one who has his own Spock to love and care for.
“Why did you show me this only now that I’m about to board the Alexander? I have so many questions, so many… feelings,” Jim asks, pain clear in his raspy voice.
“Jim, you must know that I cannot bear to hide things from you.”
“But I need to leave! How can I do that knowing it will hurt you?”
“I have been living in pain for the past century Jim,” Spock answers almost fondly. It is so James to care so much about him.
Jim’s communicator’s distinct chirping sound startles him and he answers it hastily. The ship is in orbit and he will be beamed up any minute now.
“I will come back.”
Jim’s eyes are resolute so Spock does not say anything to that and they look into each other’s eyes before the man dissolves in a blur of golden and silver sparks from the teleporting effect.
*****
“Trelane, are you interfering with my Spirk’s spheres again?”
“Dad!” Trelane all but whines as he’s caught red-handed, his friend vanishing immediately.
“Stop it already and go to your mom, she’s doing that annoying thing again.”
“What thing?”
“Existing.”
Trelane stomps his feet and sighs dramatically. “But I wanted to know if Kirk will come back!”
“Stop arguing and go or I will remove your powers again.”
Trelane shivers and snaps his fingers to leave. Q looks at the sphere and smiles.
“These two,” he says, rolling his eyes before covering everything once again with a fabric dark as space, sparkling with dots that resemble starlights.
*****
“Mister Spock? There is a transmission for you,” Skessik says over the com. He sounds skeptical, as usual when it concerns personal matters regarding his superior. “The starship Enterprise is requesting permission to land.”
“Permission granted,” Spock answers and for the first time in more than a century, he smiles.