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It’s not easy being in love with someone who runs out of the room every time you walk in.
He supposed that McCoy would call this karma. After all, he had done his fair share of running out on her.
Christine used to look at him like he had personally fired up the Enterprise and shot it into orbit. Then she avoided him and dodged him around every corner. Now, now, she acted as though he had cut off her legs and demanded she run around the world.
It was probably a morbid fascination in the beginning: maybe for both of them. A little like the rebellious love stories from earth that Jim liked, and maybe they had each sought out in each other what they saw as polar opposites to their current life. Him, trapped in an engagement to a cruel, wholly Vulcan woman who saw him as a mutt attached to a prestigious title, and her, slaving away from blind loyalty to an engagement to her former teacher, now lost in space.
Human, bright, witty, bold, and clumsy.
Vulcan, forbidden, unassuming, never one to demand things of her.
Of course he had pushed her away. It had been for their own good. A man who could barely call her by her first name without having a breakdown wasn’t exactly a model partner for a woman…and she deserved better.
But lies are weak and brittle and don’t hold together for long.
First his life would need saving…then she would be gravely wounded, bleeding out bright red from her stomach into the glittery biobed, and he’d feel his heart stop, and he had a difficult time explaining to McCoy that he meant that literally. They reached something like a friendship with only awkward blips between. Her looks in his direction became less forlorn, and more sure of herself, more sure of her attraction to him and less ashamed of the love she held for him.
He’s still not sure what caused her to turn from angry at herself, to angry at nobody, and then to angry at him for the affection she held.
Just as he had started to turn his head around to look back at her, just as he had pulled his emotional state into something functional, she had started to run for the hills in the opposite direction.
“A woman can only give out a piece of her heart so many times before there’s nothing left, Spock,” she said, her tongue purposeful between her teeth as she reprimanded him the one time he had attempted to kiss her in years. Her hand burned cold against his chest and held him back. That constant, warm love he had always seen simmering in her eyes was dead and dusty now, and it scared him more than he had words for.
Now, Christine Chapel is getting married, and Spock might just be too little too late.
“It’s not a whirlwind romance, Spock!” McCoy spits. The doctor glares as his knuckles go white around the glass in his near-trembling hand. The wedding is in a day and McCoy may very well be more reluctant to remember that than Spock. “Whirlwind romances are happy.”
Chuck McAurthur. 45, five years older than Christine, with dark hair tied back into a ponytail, shoulders that stretch from one coast to another, and a thick accent Spock doesn’t know the origins of. A Grecian nose and Christine hanging on his arm. He holds three different degrees and teaches open-heart surgery at the Academy.
Spock had been introduced as ‘an old friend from the Enterprise’ which was a logical, sound label for what they had been. Meditation offered no answers as to why that title was so…unsatisfactory.
They met, so he heard, eight months ago. Dated for six. And now, engaged for two.
Now, it was one day until the wedding.
“She appears happy whenever I see her,” Spock monotones, his eyes on the unpleasant, stinging brandy in his untouched glass. Crickets and something described as ‘lightning bugs’ buzz and chirp behind his head in the chipped wood of McCoy’s house.
“You also thought that she was dating me when you got back. Face it, Spock, you’re a terrible judge of human expression.”
Spock’s face wrinkles just slightly at the memory. That had been a very-much mistaken assumption that the doctor would be loath to ever let him live down, unfortunately.
He looks at the doctor. “Do you truly believe she is unhappy?”
“I don’t ‘believe’ it, I know it.” His glass is empty, and his back cracks as he leans across the desk and looks at Spock like he wants to convince him that he can read his very soul. “Chris is like a sister to me. Spock, I know the words ‘rebound relationship’ mean nothing to you, so the subtle differences would also land flat. But the fact is that Christine still loves you, for some reason, and she-“
He interrupts his friend: “Then why is she marrying him?”
Glass smacks the ceramic of the porch table. “To push down feelings! To move on with her life! To fill the void! Spock, haven’t you ever done something because it was expected of you, or to shove down some feelings you had?!”
T’Pring. Kolinahr. Not hugging Jim and McCoy every time they nearly died. Not loving Christine sooner.
Years ago, he might have replied, “I am uncertain.” Or even end the conversation right there, stand up, wish the doctor a goodnight, before leave to drown his mother’s gift of excess emotion in meditation.
Now, he’s silent.
Wind whistles softly around them, like it is coaxing Spock out of his very comfortable, dusty shell that has taken years to even crack. His dark eyes remain fixated on the grass left uncovered by the doctor’s porch lights.
“What do you suggest, doctor?” His ancestor's hands squeeze his throat and leave deep marks in his voice. “I storm the venue tomorrow, and object, like in an unrealistic earth romance?”
Bones doesn't miss a beat. He nods. “Yeah. She’d love that.”
***
A gracious loser, is what Jim said, gratefully loosening his pink tie. The former captain said it with such grace himself that Uhura and Sulu standing next to him had to break out in smiles, as anyone did when near him. “And that’s the best thing a man can be,” he had added, before dragging Nyota onto the empty, half-torn down dance floor for some tipsy, clumsy dancing.
Being a gracious loser was not exactly illogical, but it was polite. One should accept defeat, but there isn't necessarily a reason to be gracious about it. But Spock imagines most Vulcans would prefer that to a loser who throws a tantrum or declares revenge.
Therefore, perhaps Chuck would have made a decent Vulcan in his own right.
Christine sips her second glass of champagne and looks at the stars through the window, her hand resting lightly in Spock’s, the both of them shielded from their friends in the turbo lift heading to the highest floor in the hotel.
“You did it all wrong, you know.”
“I am aware. We do not need to rehash-“
“You burst through both doors a half hour before the ceremony started. You mistook my sister for me until she turned around.” She’s smiling that fond, affectionate look that he had always been terrified to see when he was younger. He had run from that smile before. He loves it now.
“You are the same height, and both blonde. It is not-“
“You left without another word.” She is giggling now, and he likes it, likes the feel of her joy against his chest. “You sat outside in the back for another fifteen minutes, and tried again, this time with my mother.”
“Again, I-“
“Then, when the ceremony finally actually started, you still didn’t come in the right time, and you walked slowly up to me, whispered that you needed to talk to me,” her chest and shoulders tremble with laughter and her eyes are wet as she clings to him. He loves it.
“The doctor did not walk me through the specifics of how my role was to be conducted,” he offers as a way of explanation. The doors slide open, and Christine takes firmer hold of his hand, leading him down the hallway with the sound of deep, bubbling laughter.
Now, they’re both on the hill, and they’re only walking forward.