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“Relationships... at least for humans, can be... quantum things.”
There are other quantum things. Not simply hypothetical cats, which must be one or the other.
Dead or alive.
Entanglements, for one.
He considers that, perhaps, they are many things, which makes it so difficult for them both to define it.
As much as he hates to give Angel credit, their words come to mind again.
“I'm saying... maybe you're neither.”
If he is not Vulcan or human, if he is something new, then why not this as well?
Putting things in boxes, as Angel put it, a necessary means of survival, perhaps, but it is not enough.
Not anymore.
Like a dead Schrödinger's cat. Trapped.
And these are thought experiments. While their feelings are real. They are real.
His mother's feelings are real. In his attempt to be so Vulcan, he had lost sight of her, and of part of himself.
He cannot continue to bury those feelings now. Wanting so desperately to be accepted that he shut out so many precious things-
Starfleet protocols.
Their hierarchy, although it exists for a purpose, is yet another box.
He closes his eyes as the understanding hits him.
He presented her with his box, and she presented him with hers.
Looking over at her next to him in his bed, in his room, the starlight falling on the curves of her face, he tells himself Christine needs rest.
He doesn't. He should not wake her simply because he was meditating and is feeling reflective.
“Spock,” she said, sounding sleepy-voiced, as though she had heard his thoughts. Impossible. “Are you staring?”
“Yes,” he confessed, as she turned onto her back in the darkened room.
“I wanted to apologize,” he said to her, looking away for a moment and then meeting her eyes again.
“About what?” she asks disbelievingly.
“For trying to put you in a box,” he told her. “Into my Starfleet regulations box.”
“Hmm,” she murmured, shifting all the way to face him now, and propping up her head on her elbow against the pillow, the beginnings of a smile forming on her sleepy face. “That's a really nice thought.”
“It is...unclear to me, how Starfleet defines relationships,” he goes on. “But I do not wish for you to-”
“Be Mister Spock's girlfriend?” she finished for him, watching his eyes widen slightly, as she stretched one arm.
“I do not think that we are anywhere close to-” he began rapidly.
“I mean, ever,” she told him. “Or, Mister Spock's fiancee, or Mister Spock's-”
“I see your point,” he replied to her, pulling the top sheet up close over his chest, looking up at the ceiling, his eyebrows drawing together in thought. “Not just a box, all boxes.”
“Something like that,” she told him, wrapping a hand around his arm and pulling herself closer to him, snuggling her face against the crook of his neck and shoulder as she breathed against him.
“I have so much to learn about you,” he admits, raising a hand and brushing his fingers along her hair, pushing a strand of it back and away so he can examine her very human ear.
“Ditto,” she told him, breathing out, letting herself start to fall into a state of rest again.
“Then I reject your...metaphor of Schrödinger's cat,” he told her. “And ask that you consider another instead.”
“Hmm?” she asked him.
“Quantum entanglement.”
“You're getting so science-y in the middle of the night,” she said with a hum of approval. “I'm not sure if I'm annoyed or kinda turned on?”
“I hope the latter,” he said, brushing his thumb against her cheek as she turned her face up to him, studying his expression and then stretched her neck up to give him a brief kiss.
“Tell me more,” she said against his lips, looking decidedly less sleepy.
“That we do not exist in a box, but in a state of being, together, constantly changing and at the same time, always connected, regardless of whether we are separated by vast distances, by time and space.”
“Spock.”
She said his name softly, with something deep wrapped up in the word. He doesn't think he has ever heard someone say his name like that before.
It is full of possibilities.
“And I wish to know you,” he said to her, leaning down to kiss her. “Every version of you.”
She smiled, and laughed against his lips, her eyes glistening in the soft light, as she kissed him longingly, far different from the previous ones that they had shared.
Even in the calm quiet of his meditative state, he feels something stirring inside him.
Tiny particles, perhaps, vibrating at the same frequency as hers.
No, that is just an idea, albeit a pleasant one.
He should not give into such thoughts.
Although, with each kiss, he thinks he may no longer have a say in the matter.