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Chapter Text

Nyota wakes up to the sight of a smiling Andorian.

“Good afternoon,” he says, his stethoscope swinging towards her where it hangs from his neck. He leans over her, antenna moving back and forth and his eyes flicking between hers and the tricorder in his hand.

She tries to get out a greeting but her throat sticks, dry and scratchy and she’s left trying to swallow, though her mouth is too gummed shut and parched to do so.

“You’re ok,” the Andorian says as he helps her sit up. He presses a cup of water into her hand, his touch leaving a coolness on her shoulder when he gives her a friendly pat. “Nasty case of the Elnathian flu, but I’m happy to say that you’re on the mend.”

His white coat and the chart he’s holding identify him as a doctor, and the display of her vitals and the scratchy sheets of her biobed tell her she’s in the hospital, but that still leaves her looking around, trying to place herself her with answers of why and how, and coming up with nothing other than the list of medication she’s on, typed out on a filmplast that hangs on the wall and is echoed in a neatly lined up tray of hypos that call up a dull ache in her neck. She touches her skin there, just below her ear and finds it tender.

“Your roommate called a medivac for you,” her doctor says before she can start to ask all the questions that have begun to tumble through her, coming out only in how her lips part and her eyes meet his. “We brought you over a few days ago, and you’ve been asleep ever since. Common, really, with the course of the illness.”

“Days?” she echoes, her voice rough.

“Sorry you missed the beginning of your break,” the Andorian says and taps his padd against the edge of her bed as his antenna dip. “You’re not the only cadet in here sleeping through the beginning of your vacation.”

Gaila comes in when he leaves and sits on the edge of Nyota’s bed, giving her a hug that Nyota struggles to return with how heavy her arms are.

“Good thing you always get your work done way too early, cause a lot of other cadets who got sick are going to have to make up their finals in January.” Gaila nods her head towards the door and their ostensible classmates also in the hospital, the motion making her curls bounce. Nyota swallows as the bed shifts slightly under Gaila’s weight and presses her hand to her stomach. “You went down like a rock. It was very dramatic, Ny. I had heard it was going around, but you got it particularly bad, though I guess all the humans in Xenoling did too, so it’s not like you were unlucky. The rest of us were spared due to, you know, superior genetics. Guess it’s a human thing, coming down with it.”

“But you’re ok.”

“Obviously,” Gaila says, waving her hands towards herself. “But I’m sorry about your trip home.”

“Oh,” Nyota says and covers her eyes with a hand that weighs too much.

“I called your folks. Your mom says hi.”

Nyota lays back against the pillows, letting her hand drop so she can better stare up at the ceiling, a thick, coursing disappointment rising through her that she squeezes her eyes shut against. She’ll see her parents some other time. February, maybe, since they have a long weekend then and she might be able to go home if she doesn’t have too much work, or maybe her parents will come out here and it will be like spending Christmas with them except not at all, since she should be in their kitchen right now enjoying a home cooked meal, not laying in a hospital bed with monitors beeping at her, her stomach turning over on itself.

“I’m sorry,” Gaila says again, her nose wrinkling. Her hand finds Nyota’s and Nyota tries to let the slight squeeze Gaila gives her make her feel better.

“I wonder who I got it from,” she says to the monitor spelling out her pulse, blood pressure, temperature, and other statistics she’s growing too tired to make sense of.

“A lot of people have it. And anyway,” Gaila says her eyes shining, “It was probably all the excitement that did you in. Compromised immune system, what with the anticipation.”

“All the…” Nyota starts and is drawing in a breath even as the realization forms, as the thought takes hold and grows, her chest going cold and her stomach freezing up. “No.”

“I let him know too,” Gaila says and squeezes Nyota’s hand again. “He says to feel better.”

She can feel her forehead bunch when she presses her fingertips to it, grimacing behind her palms. “No. No, no, no.”

“He understands. Logic, right? That you couldn’t make it since you were kind of passed out in an emergency room?” Gaila pats at her knee. “But I know you were looking forward to it.” Her sympathetic grimace slides into something else entirely, her tongue pressed to the corner of her mouth and her eyes shining as she gives Nyota a grin. “Dinner with the Commander and all.”

“No,” Nyota repeats, like saying it just once more could undo everything, could have her out of her hospital bed, could rewind time and give her chance to redo the last few days, to do it right this time, how it should have been and how she had imagined it, the hours she spent playing the entire evening out in her mind over and over since he had first suggested finding a night to share a meal together. “He must have- Did he think that- When I didn’t show up…”

“It’s ok,” Gaila says.

“But he would have-“ Been there. Waiting. She can’t say it, can only stare at Gaila and let the thoughts crash through her. No matter how much dread it wells up, how it makes her skin feel too hot and too tight, she can’t stop herself from trying to work through if he would have stayed there at the Academy gates where they had planned to meet, how long he would have waited for her to come, only to have her never arrive. Her stomach turns again, this time at the idea of what could have possibly gone through his mind as the minutes would have ticked by, as he would have finally decided she wasn’t coming. The fingers she presses into her forehead do nothing to keep at bay the thoughts of how long he might have stayed, if it would have been logical to leave right away, if he came up with explanations for her absence, if he had tried to call her only to have her not answer, if he had thought even for a few minutes or hours or a day until Gaila called him that Nyota would have chosen not to come with no word and no explanation, that she would have left him there alone waiting for her.

“I can see your blood pressure going up,” Gaila says, her head tilted at the monitor. “Huh. That’s kind of neat.”

“This,” Nyota says, her head falling back onto the pillow, “Is the worst winter break ever.”

…

The gifts she bought for her parents are tucked into her bag already. She pictures it where she had left it on the foot of her bed, waiting for the shuttle she never got on that next morning after the last evening she spent in her dorm, a day that passed half a week ago now. She be home wrapping the presents and listening to the chatter of her aunts and uncles and cousins, smelling the scent of her grandmother’s food that she can imagine clearly enough above the antiseptic and stale notes of air caught perpetually indoors that she’s sure her mouth would water if her stomach would stop churning long enough to approach anything like hunger.

The turning won’t cease though, and she’s not at home, and she’s not with her family, and she’s not back in her dorm in those moments before the room swam before her eyes, but is laying in her hospital bed, listening to beeping monitors and whirring machinery and watching the shadows stretch across the walls. Her padd lays in her lap and she picks it up only to put it down again, finding the energy only to run her finger over the edge. A look at the clock on the wall tells her it would be morning at home, time for coffee and a walk with her father and the dew drop shine of the morning’s moisture clinging to garden plants. She picks at the blanket beneath her hand, tries to remember the feel of the leaves of her father’s plum tree under her fingers, turns far enough to watch birds wheel by outside her window, playing in wind she can’t feel.

She pushes herself upright when there’s a knock on her door.

“Come in,” she calls, expecting her doctor, his smile and his hypos and the padd that he taps against his palm as he talks to her, telling her she’s doing great and no, that she can’t leave yet.

Instead it’s Commander Spock - no, just Spock, like he had asked - and she wets her lips quickly, her tongue passing over chapped and too dry skin. It’s a reflexive movement as if she is about to speak, though no words come, her mind slowing to a standstill at the sight of him hovering in the doorway, his eyes on her, deep and brown and making it hard to think about anything other than the sight of him there. She has a half written message to him that she’s been working on for too long, each word overthought a dozen times over and she no more knows what to say to him in writing than she does with him suddenly halfway in her room.

“I’m sorry,” she finally gets out, voicing the first thought that springs fully formed to her mind, hearing it spill out into the quiet of the room.

“How are you?” His hands are behind his back and he hasn’t moved from the door, lingering too still and unmoving in that way that he has of near complete motionless, the same way he would stand behind his lectern or sit at his desk, those hours she spent listening to him lecture last year, and the afternoons she spent in his office with him that always seemed to draw to a close too soon.

“Better,” she answers because she’s been awake now for two hours and that’s something at least. Markedly better than she was, for Gaila to have called for a medic and for her to have passed out midway through dressing. She’s spent hours laying in her hospital bed, remembering spreading out a selection of earrings on top of her dresser and trying to probe her mind for anything that came after that. She can’t find what she seems to keep looking for, no memory of Gaila coming into the room, no recollection of her arrival to the ER, just her doctor smiling at her when her eyes finally opened and the beeping bustle of the equipment of her hospital room that hasn’t ceased since she awoke.

Her hair is in knots when she drags her fingers through it and she stops when she decides she’s making it worse, smoothing her palms over it and trying to tuck it back behind her ears. She wants to run her knuckle under her eyes, wants a mirror, a change of clothes and a hairbrush and the time in the morning she always takes to get ready, wants to look at put together as he is, standing there in his neatly pressed uniform with his eyes still on her.

She clears her throat, still too dry no matter how many cups of water she goes through. “I’m really, really sorry about the other night.”

“It is no matter,” he says like when he had asked what is days ago now if she might join him for dinner, his eyes hadn’t met hers and slid quickly away with an agitation she had never seen in him before. For the successful completion of the semester he had said, quickly qualifying his suggestion, and her heart had pounded and her stomach had fluttered and it’s threatening to do the same now, her stomach turning over in a way that is all together different than the low lying nausea that hasn’t gone away since she woke up.

“Please,” she says and gestures to the chair next to her bed. The motion spurs him forward, his long legs taking the short distance from the door in a way that she’s still, two semesters of him later, trying to figure out exactly what makes him so graceful.

He sits on the edge of the chair, perched there with his back ramrod straight.

“How has your break been?” she asks and stills her hands in her lap as they threaten to twist together.

“Productive,” he answers quickly. “A number of students had questions regarding the comments on their final papers which I had an opportunity to address and I have also been able to complete much of the preparation for my classes next term.”

“I should have been there to help.” She was, all semester. Day after day in his office with him, sharing cups of tea and conversations that stretched on until she lost track of time, padds spread between them on his desk, the business of grading and lectures and office hours feeling at times secondary to everything else that passed between them.

She should have been at dinner with him too. She wonders where he would have suggested they go, if he had a place in mind or if he might have been as silent on the matter as he is now, his eyes on the wall past her. She can nearly see it, that evening that she missed, her wearing one of the many pairs of earrings she might have chosen, dressed in the skirt she had finally settled on, her chest probably still as tight and jumpy as it had been all of that day.

“That is not what I-“ His brow furrows and then his head shakes once, just as quick as his words. “It is logical that you rest.”

She picks at the blanket again, stares down at her hand and tries not to wonder how it might have gone between them if she hadn’t gotten sick. “There’s not much else to do.”

“I hope your recovery is expedient,” he says.

“Thank you,” she says and watches him rise, pull the hem of his jacket down and turn on his heel to leave the room, her heartbeat filling in for the noise in her ears where his voice had been.

Chapter Text

“Why does it do that?” Gaila asks, standing next to the window so she can hold the bowl up to the light. “Shake like that?”

“Gelatin.”

“What now?” she asks, already sticking her finger into it.

“Gelatin,” Nyota repeats. “It’s what makes jello… jello.”

“Is it made with - what is that tree bark leaf you all eat?”

“Kale.”

“Is it made with kale?” Gaila asks, pulls her finger out and tries to shake off the jello clinging to her skin. It splatters against against the window pane, catching the light that shines through it.

“No, that’d be- No, Gaila, it’s not.”

“But its green,” Gaila says. “And it must be good for you like that kale stuff is or why else would they serve it.”

“It’s not… It’s just dessert.”

Gaila pops her finger in her mouth and grimaces. “But it doesn’t taste good.”

“I know.”

“Then why do they give it to you with lunch and dinner?”

“Tradition.”

“Tradition?” Gaila echoes, trying to pick up a piece of it between her finger and thumb and frowning when it slips back down into the bowl.

“Hospitals always serve it.”

“That,” Gaila says and sets the bowl down too hard, shaking the tray that’s set next to Nyota’s bed. “Is illogical.”

Nyota straightens the spoon that jumped to the edge of the tray, pushing it back next to the knife and fork she hadn’t used, all of her silverware still clean since she had only half heartedly picked at her turkey sandwich. It’s limp and damp and she resents it for not being anything like the food she’d have if she were at home, half a world away from anything approaching mayonnaise and rubbery, too salty and too bland cheese.

“Spock came,” Nyota says and pushes the spoon another quarter of an inch, so that it’s lined up more perfectly.

Gaila looks up from where she’s leaned over the jello, her eyes easing out of their squint. “Did he.”

“He was only here for a minute.”

“What did he say?”

Nyota lifts her shoulder towards her ear in a shrug. “Not much.” She neatens the blanket laying over her thighs. “That it was all… ok. What happened.”

“He can’t be mad,” Gaila says like she could possibly know. “There’s no way he is.”

“No, I know,” she says because she does, has thought about it as her room grows dark at night, as the street lights of the city come on around her, glittering through her window. She’s laid out every moment she remembers of his visit, has examined them all one by one, turning each over in her mind. It’s left her with the certainty that whatever he is, he’s not upset with her. Or not upset, really. The very Vulcan equivalent of whatever that might be. Irrationally consternated. But, still. It’s too easy to remember that hot happiness that sat in her stomach after he had asked her to dinner, made all the worse now for the fact that she didn’t get to see that through, anything that might have been cut short and interrupted, left to only her imagination and the way her heart still picks up in the moments before she truly wakes, some vestige of delight left simmering inside of her in a way that she wishes would stop, would leave her to her scratchy sheets and hard pillow and not the dreams of all that could have happened.

She tugs at the blankets again, flexes her toes under them and watches how they move the fabric back and forth. “It’s just that…”

It’s just everything, all of it, the entirety of those hours that they spent in his office that held such promise, that left her thinking of that time and that room and him there with his eyes on her from across his desk and her absolute certainty that he was listening to and thinking about every word that she said. She hadn’t wanted that to stop no matter how the semester drew to a close and as simple as that is, she can’t get her mouth to make the words to say that to Gaila.

“It’s ok,” Gaila says anyway and settles herself on the edge of Nyota’s bed. “You have - see, you have gelatin. And no kale, which is a plus, trust me. That stuff is awful, no matter how good everyone thinks it is for you. And we’ll watch that horrible show you like and when you’re better, I’ll get you a Cardassian Sunrise. I’ll get you two. Three. Five. Ten, but I might need to borrow some credits.”

“Thanks,” Nyota says like any of that could possibly make a difference. Gaila’s grimace does though, at least a little, her face scrunching up before she reaches into her bag and pulls out a handful of data chips.

“I even brought the new episodes for you,” she says and fits one of the chips into the port on Nyota’s padd. “I’m not saying I like it since Terran sitcoms are a pale comparison to Orion ones, but I am saying I’ll sit here and watch it with you.”

“You love it,” Nyota says halfheartedly.

“This show is to shows what jello is to food,” Gaila declares and sits herself on the edge of the bed, messing up the blankets Nyota had perfectly straightened.

Halfway through the third episode Gaila downloaded, Nyota feels her turn towards her.

“Look,” Gaila says and taps her knuckles against Nyota’s knee though the blankets. “He came. He didn’t ignore all of it, leaving you two to avoid each other all of next semester and take completely logical pains to never run into each other. And he didn’t send you some completely awkward message like you and I both know he’s entirely capable of. ‘Cadet Uhura, I am writing to inform you that you totally didn’t show up, which was highly illo-‘“

“Stop,” Nyota says and pushes at Gaila’s arm and rolls her eyes. “Come on, that’s-“

“Funny?”

“Hardly.”

“Completely and utterly so amusing that you-“

She thinks at first, when Gaila stops talking and straightens, that her wide eyes are actually an apology, but Gaila’s looking past her towards the door, so Nyota figures it’s her doctor, except that doesn’t explain why Gaila presses her lips together and looks back at Nyota, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips.

“Well,” Gaila says. “Well, well, well.”

“I did not intend to intrude,” she hears and has just a moment to meet Gaila’s eyes, which are too bright and too happy and make Nyota’s stomach flip over too fast. She feels her pulse pick up in her entire body, her blood humming before she’s even fully turned towards the door, everything in her moving quick and light and leaving her watery in a way that has nothing to do with the fatigue of her recovery.

“Come in,” she says, tucks a strand of hair back, puts her palms on her thighs and rubs them back and forth across the blanket before she can get herself to stop, lacing her fingers instead.

Spock takes a step into the room and she scrapes her thumbnail over the knuckle of her index finger, lets her eyes flick back to Gaila again as his boots tap out another step against the linoleum.

Gaila stands and nods her chin towards the door. “I have to…” Her forehead wrinkles and her lips purse and it takes her too long to continue, too many moments ticking by in silence. “Go to the bathroom. Get a snack. Go for a walk. Something. Bye.”

Spock has to move aside to let her past, their boots a quick squeak on the floor and then Gaila’s gone and he’s there and Nyota tells herself to pull in a breath.

“That is quite a list,” Spock says into the quiet Gaila leaves behind, the door swooshing shut in her wake.

“She’s not getting food, I can tell you that,” Nyota says in a way that sounds too quick. She’s sure she doesn’t usual speak like that but can’t remember what’s normal, can’t possibly approach anything near to the ordinary with him standing there halfway to her bed, paused with his hands behind him, tall and dressed in his black uniform against the white of the room. She hears, despite herself, her words continue. “Everything they serve here is terrible.”

His eyes go to her tray and she lets herself watch him, lets herself give in to the way her pulse is beating too hard and how it’s impossible to keep her hands still and the fact that her mind is a buzzing, blank jumble that she has to press her lips closed against, in case anything she hasn’t sufficiently thought through and vetted slips out of her.

“I would have presumed the replicators would be of the same model as in the rest of Starfleet buildings.”

“I would have too,” she says and decides she would give anything - her lumpy pillow, her bowl of warming jello, her wilted sandwich - to be able to think of a question about morphology or a translation from Vulcan or a reading of his from the semester she was in his class, any single thing to talk to him about so that she doesn’t give into the urge to remark on the weather, that ever present bank of fog that sits over the city that would be entirely too easy to talk about.

“I brought this for you,” he says into the quiet that stretches between them.

He holds out a book to her and she takes it on reflex, the same as she would accept mugs of tea from him, stacks of padds, filmplasts marked with quiz answers and articles he wanted to discuss. It’s worn, the binding creased and the pages soft and faded and she’s suddenly entirely sure that she’s going to spill food onto it or her water glass that is more than out of arms’ reach. His head tips slightly and she feels unable to really grasp that she has an actual paper book resting in her hands when a moment ago Gaila was here and Spock wasn’t. “Though I see that you already have entertainment.”

“Oh, no,” she says quickly and is fumbling to both lay the book gently on her lap and to also to turn her padd off before he can see what it is. “It’s not - it’s really bad. It’s not, I was-“ She shakes her head, catches her hair up in both hands and pulls it forward over her shoulder. She holds on to it too tight and licks at her lips. “I wasn’t really watching it.”

“If I am interrupting-“

“-You’re not.”

His eyes trace over her face and there’s a too long moment that stretches out between seconds. When he takes another step towards her, she feels the breath caught in her chest unwind, ease, and release.

“It is long,” he says, gesturing towards the book in her lap before he tucks his hand behind his back again. “You had suggested you were under stimulated by your surroundings.”

She ducks her head forward in a quick nod. “The highlight of my day was watching my Orion roommate learn about jello,” she tells him and when his eyes search around the room, she reaches out and tips the bowl towards him, her other hand spread over the book. The cover is still warm from his touch on it, heat seeping now into her palm. Once, in an afternoon that had stretched into early evening, he had leaned over the back of her chair and tapped at her padd as he scrolled through an article he had sent her, finding a passage he wanted to tell her about. When he centered it on the screen, her hand had passed too close to his as she had moved to highlight the paragraph, not touching but near enough that she could feel the hot wash of his skin. That prickling warmth had spread immediately to her cheeks and it’s the same now, caused not only by the heavy weight of the book on her thighs and the fact that the brought it and the fact that he’s here, but also how his forehead knits as he studies the trembling green mass in the bowl, that expression he gets that never fails to make her smile.

“That is considered food?”

“Loosely.” She taps her fingers against the cover of the book. “I haven’t heard of this.”

“The protagonist visits Romulus,” he says and this time when he sits too straight on the edge of the chair, it’s without her prompting him to. “There is a subplot that revolves around their informal dialect.”

“Good thing I learned it, then.”

“The actual language is not included, a translation only.”

“No, I meant- Thanks. Thank you, for thinking of bringing this.”

He nods once. “Of course.”

She can hear herself swallow in the quiet of the room, the beeping that accompanies the hum of machinery the only other sound filling the silence that falls between them.

“You’ve read it, then,” she says and immediately wants to take it back because it’s too obvious and therefore likely illogical to state and entirely irrational to have said, but he’s already nodding again.

“I have.” She tries to imagine him reading a novel, tries to picture anything he would do outside of work. Beyond visiting a hospital. Visiting his former teaching assistant in a hospital. Who used to be his student. Who he invited to dinner. For the end of the semester working together, except here he is again, and she has a book that’s warm and solid on her lap.

The idea of his apartment comes up as a blank space in her mind, four walls that she can only fill in with enough detail to have them look the same as his office. She imagines a couch, except she can’t picture him on it with this book in his hands. Trying to place a table in the space is equally impossible, other than the memory of how he looked seated at one of the many tables in at the mess hall the few times she ran into him there.

“Has your health improved?” he asks and she blinks away the memory of the time she stood next to him when she found him over lunch and talked to him long enough that her bowl of soup had grown cold by the time she had finally eaten it.

“A little,” she says since she managed a few bites of food and since she’s been awake since morning, at that’s an accomplishment these days. Walking to the bathroom and back is uncomfortable and dizzying and the world beyond her window seems entirely too big and hard to manage, no matter how small the walls of her room have grown with the hours she’s spent staring at them.

“How do you find the care here?”

“Good,” she says, her finger ticking through the edge of the pages, the paper soft under her touch. “Everyone’s been very kind.”

“And your doctor?”

“Puri? He’s nice.”

“We work together,” he says and she’s about to point out that he doesn’t since Doctor Puri has never been around the Xenolinguistics Department, when he adds, “On the Enterprise.”

“Of course.” She can no more imagine him serving as Pike’s first officer in the hours he doesn’t spend in the department building than she can in his apartment. Those edges of him aren’t quite filled in, maybe have never started to be so. She wonders if they ever will be, tries to imagine the conversation they might have held over the dinner that never happened, if it ever would have strayed from the banal, from work and the Academy and Starfleet, if hints of everything that he is away from the office would have shone through. She looks down at the book in her lap, curls her fingers around it.

“What have you been up to?” she asks. “With the semester over?”

“I have two articles I am readying for publication.”

“That critique of Rosseau’s theorem?”

He nods, his chin dipping towards his chest and his eyes not leaving hers. “That is one. The other is a study on theoretical biophysics.”

She nods like he did, like she has any idea what that is. “Are you busy up on the ship?”

“The captain is with his family for the Terran holidays.”

“Good thing you have your papers,” she says, her thumb running over the book’s binding.

“It is indeed quite quiet on campus,” he says. “With the recess between semesters as well as so many personnel on medical leave.”

“I can imagine.”

“I had thought to next begin a review of Rosseau’s newest work.”

“A bit of light reading?” she asks, since she’s more than sure that the paper he’s talking about fills three padds.

“In a manner.”

“I’m glad you came by,” she says, squeezing the book tight. “Again.”

It’s only after the words have left her mouth and she’s listened to them that she realizes how concluding they sound when she really meant that she’s happy, thrilled, a little shaky at the idea that he’s here, but he’s already shifting forward in his seat like he’s about to stand.

“As I said, I did not mean to disrupt you.”

“No, not at all,” she says, shaking her head quickly enough that the room spins. “It’s… nice of you. To come here. I very much appreciate it.”

“I hope you find the book enjoyable.”

“I will,” she promises, sure that there’s no way that she won’t. She folds it open as he leaves, his footsteps still echoing in the room as she turns through the first pages. She stops when she reaches the beginning of the first chapter, holds the book open to that page and lets her eyes travel over the doorway he disappeared through. It’s a long time until she starts reading, and longer still until she puts the book down.

Chapter Text

Nyota has the end of her stylus in her mouth and is staring out the window when there’s a tap at her door.

“Hi,” she says quickly when she sees who it is, pushes herself upright and crosses her legs under the blanket. The crossword puzzle resting in her lap threatens to slide from it’s place on her thigh and she catches the filmplast before it can, trapping it and her stylus under her thumb.

She holds it there as Spock’s eyes move over her, caught as still as he is where he stands in the doorway. Her skin pricks with his gaze on her and she lets the idea of him coming back to visit her again, that fragile sketched out hope of a thought that he might, too tenuous and too bright to hold on to very hard, solidify into the fact that he’s there. She blinks just to check, and he’s still right where he was, half inside her room and half not and then he’s crossing the handful of steps to her bed. She pushes her hair back, pulls the blanket up higher and sets her filmplast on the bed next to her, her hands immediately too empty with out it.

“Hello,” he says, pausing next to her bed, a bag that’s held in his hand crinkling. He sits and sets it next to his feet, his hands finding his thighs.

“How has your day been?” she asks at a loss for anything else with him so suddenly in her room and so near to her. That first morning in his office was like this too, when she walked in to find him at his desk and was absolutely certain that it should be as easy to talk to him across the span of his desk as it would be with any other professor. She remembers the way her tongue tripped over every sentence she tried to get out, how she sat at her desk all morning and told herself to focus on the syllabus in front of her, the one he had handed her with long, slim fingers and his eyes on her, and to not look over at him, silent and still in his own chair.

“Acceptable,” he says, as motionless now as he was then.

“Good.”

“Yourself?”

“Same as always,” she says, gesturing to herself and her bed and her bank of monitors and her window.

He nods and for a moment they just look at each other.

She swallows, reaches for her cup of water when her mouth is still too dry. “Did you come to check on your book?”

There’s that curl to his mouth that’s not a smile, not really. It makes her heart pick up like it always has since that first time she looked up from her desk and caught him like that, a tiny twitch at his lips and his eyes warm in a way she would have never anticipated.

“Perhaps.”

“You,” she says, carefully setting her water back down. “Didn’t tell me the end of it was so sad.”

“You have completed it already?”

“And three of these,” she says, holding up her filmplast so that he can see it. It’s not a padd with an article on it and it’s not a stack of quizzes and it’s not a translation she has a question about, all of those left behind with the end of the semester, sequestered in his office she won’t return to as his student nor as his assistant, that time and place left in their past along with the ease of everything they used to talk about. She picks up her stylus again, rolls it back and forth between her fingers, and holds it poised over the blank, empty set of spaces that are waiting to be filled in. “What’s a seven letter answer for a star system with two gas giant planets?”

“The Eridani system?” he asks, leaning forward in his chair to better see. She shifts the crossword to her other leg so that it’s nearer to him, her hair catching on her shoulders as she shakes her head.

“The second letter is an I.”

“That parameter was unspecified in your original request for assistance,” he says, his brows knitting together slightly as he studies the filmplast.

She lets the smile that’s growing fully spread over her face. He’s there and she’s no longer alone in her room, and he’s talking and the only sound isn’t just the beep of machines, and he’s looking right at her and she’s not thinking about the hours ticking by, wondering if she could get them to speed up. Instead, she thinks she might like the afternoon to draw itself out, pause and hold and hang in this moment for a bit longer. “My apologies.”

“Mine as well,” he says. “I was unable to predict you would grow so attached to secondary characters.”

“Secondary characters?” she echoes. “No, I was talking about their dog.”

“Ah,” he says and his head tilts to the side and the sun coming through her window catches in his eyes, clear and brown for a moment it’s nearly hard to breathe. “I see.”

Its when he leans further forward in his chair that she pulls her attention away, her cheeks suddenly hot with the surety she was staring.

“I believe the Mintaka system would also be a possible answer,” he offers and she nods and tucks her hair back behind her ear and writes it in quickly, darting one more glance at him.

“What-“ She clears her throat and keeps her eyes on her filmplast. “What about a fourth century Tellarite emperor?”

“Zh'Enas”

“Doesn’t fit.”

“Sh'Chuni.”

“Not that either,” she says and then his hand is next to hers and he’s tipping the filmplast towards him and she’s thinking only of the scant space between their fingers and then, when he looks up, his face so near to hers.

He’s so close to her that the details of him come into sudden focus, the fan of his dark eyelashes when he blinks twice, quickly. The shape of his mouth, his lips not dry and chapped like hers are when her tongue darts over them. The faint trace of green on his cheekbones, his pale skin turning darker with it the longer she looks.

He sits back into his chair and she pulls in a sudden, sharp breath.

“I though perhaps you were hungry,” he says and his head is dipped down and he’s not looking at her but at the bag he brought, half bent over with his jacket pulling against the curve of his shoulder and the long line of his arm. “Considering the quality of food offered here.”

The salad he holds out is the one she always gets for herself, the one she brought to his office day after day as the weeks of the semester wore on and the complete silence of their early lunches were left behind, traded for conversations about class, readings, his work, her research, and onwards, winding and wending and seeming at times to never cease, a thread of thought picked up the next day and drawn through to him here now, a container in his hand from the deli near her dorm he never, not once, brought his own food from.

“Thank you,” she says and then repeats it again when he hands her a cup of tea, warm and steaming and smelling of afternoons in his office, the way the light would fall through the window, the sound of chairs scraped over tile and the shuffle of padds on desks.

“They offered these as well,” he says and hands her a bag of chips as he retrieving his own lunch, a salad the same as hers. “I was uncertain as to whether you would enjoy them.”

“It’s vacation,” she says by way of explanation and pulls the bag open eating two and then a third, and then tipping the bag up and shaking a handful into her palm, sure that she doesn’t remember the last time she was so hungry, nor having been so in the first place, the idea of food far from her mind when she was bent over her crossword.

They’re interrupted halfway through deciding which emperor it must have been by a soft knock on the door and the squeak of steps against the floor.

“No outside food in the hospital,” her doctor says. She quickly puts the bag of chips down and he immediately picks it up again with a wide smile at her, takes a handful and drops the bag back onto her tray. “Afternoon, Commander.”

“Doctor,” Spock says, carefully spearing a cucumber onto his fork.

Her doctor eats half of her chips as he scans her with his tricorder, his antenna flicking twice towards the monitors. “Dizzy?”

“Only when I stand up,” she answers.

“Nauseous?”

“I’m ok.”

“Good.”

“Does that mean I can leave?”

“You don’t want to spend Christmas with me?” She has to smile at the hand he clasps to his chest, the way his antenna turn towards her, and mostly at the grin he flashes towards Spock. He shakes his head, though, and drops his hand. “I am sorry, but no. You’re contagious to humans for a while yet.”

“That’s ok.” She picks at her blanket and tries for another smile. “A couple days, though?”

“A few,” he says.

She opens her salad when he’s gone again, sure that she can feel Spock’s eyes on her.

“I presume you had made plans for your holiday?” he asks as she picks at a tomato with her fork.

“I was going to go home.”

Out of the corner of her eye she watches him shift in his chair. “It is illogical to offer an apology, but I do understand the impetus.”

She huffs out a breath of air, what might have started as a laugh but doesn’t end up one, her chest tight at the thought of her entire family gathering, and the too bright lights of her room, her hard sheets and the hours that crawl by.

“Thank you,” she says and tries to put in the words how much she means it. She looks up after two bites of her salad to find him watching her, his fork poised above his lettuce. He scoops up a carrot and eats it quickly, his attention shifting from her to his salad and back up again. She tries for a smile and mostly fails, but says anyway, “I’m glad you’re here.”

“I would have reviewed Tellaranian history before arriving, had I known.”

“Next time,” she says and when he nods it gets a little easier to breathe.

He clears his throat, a sound she’s sure she’s never heard him make before.

“I am not occupied over the holiday,” he say as he gathers lettuce into a small, neat pile so that he can pierce it onto his fork. “If you would like company.” When she doesn’t answer right away, while her thoughts are spinning and wheeling and happiness is rising through her hot and thick and sweet, not exactly replacing the emptiness of what her break has become but sitting next to that hollow spot in her stomach, his hand rises from his thigh as though to forestall her from speaking. “I apologize, that was presumptuous to assume that-“

“-No,” she says between his words, before he can get another single one out. “That’s not what I- Yes. You should come. If you want to.”

He smooths his pant leg over his thigh. “I would.”

“That would be nice.” Really nice. Absolutely and utterly and incredibly wonderful in a way she hadn’t even known to hope for.

“I could bring lunch, again. If you would enjoy that.”

She’s smiling wide and hard. “Can you get it past the impressive security here?”

His mouth twitches. “I believe so.”

“Then I promise I’ll actually show up to eat it with you.” She ducks her head down. “Unless they change my room.”

“I will persevere,” he says and her stomach flips over on itself.

“You should-“ She clears her throat again, pulls her salad further into her lap and decides she can’t actually stop smiling, not even if she tries. “You should help me finish these.”

She points her fork towards the stack of crosswords Gaila brought over for her, complete with a few in different languages, another book for her to read, and plenty of comments about communication cadets who used their vacations to play word games. She’ll have to remember to ask Gaila for a change of clothes that isn’t her Academy sweats, and maybe some hair pins, and anything else she can think of wanting, now that Spock will be back here again, a visit she can be certain of this time, can plan for and wait for and let herself think about from now until then, the pictures she’ll spin out in her mind filling in for her drab, plain walls and the view out her window she’s grown too used to.

Afternoon shadows are stretching long over the tile floor by the time he leaves, the days shortened with the month of the year and time stretched out long with him there next to her, the stylus they trade back and forth between them constantly warm from his touch, and half of each of her crosswords filled out with his neat, exact print. She’s never seen his handwriting before, just typed notes in the margins of documents they trade back and forth. She spends too long studying it, the near perfect shape of the letters, the tiny imperfections she has to look close to find, deciding that with each one that she does, that she rather likes them.

“I’m sorry about the food,” she tells her doctor when he comes back that evening.

“I’m sorry it’s all gone,” he says, one antenna dipping towards her tray and her unfinished dinner. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m ok,” she says, sitting up slightly straighter and letting him run his tricorder over her. “A little tired.”

“Well, you had a big day,” he says to his tricorder as his fingers flick over it.

“Yeah,” she says and lays back as his tricorder beeps and he looks between the small screen on it and his padd.

“It’s nice you have friends that come by.”

“It is.”

“Or… friend and boyfriend?”

She looks up too quickly from where she’s begun working a fold of the blanket back and forth between her fingers. The room takes a moment to right itself and in that time, a smile has spread across her doctor’s face. It grows wider the longer it takes her to find something to say.

She clears her throat. “He said you two know each other.”

“We do, we do,” he says and turns his smile towards his padd, one antennae still on her. “Nice guy.”

“Yeah.”

“Smart.”

“He is,” she agrees, watching Puri pick up the first of the hypos a nurse laid out. She imagines him and Spock up at Spacedock together, walking the halls of the unfinished ship, talking about the parts of Spock’s job that have nothing to do with teaching, about what Puri does when he’s not treating flu patients. “He said you two don’t have much going on for the Enterprise over the holidays.”

“We don’t,” he confirms and presses the hypo to her neck, the quiet hiss loud from right next to her ear. “All of us are dirtside for the next week or so.” He goes through the second and the third hypo before smiling at her again. “‘Course, normally we have our XO complaining about the lack of productivity, but this year he’s been pretty quiet on that front.”

She keeps herself still, her head tipped to the side, letting the words wash through her and trying to not react with him raising another hypo to her neck. “He’s big on efficiency.”

“I know.”

“I-“ She licks at her too dry lips. “I worked with him all semester.”

Puri smiles at her again and she gets a gentle pat on her shoulder. “I know that too,” he says and then he’s telling her to have a good night and then he’s gone, leaving her alone to her room and her sore neck and her tumbling, spiraling thoughts as she begins to pick through what he said, what Spock said while he was here, their conversation and the length of his visit and the anticipation of his next one. She lays back, her eyes on the ceiling and gives herself over to it, realizing only much later that she’s been grinning up into the dark of her room the entire time.

Chapter Text

The presents that arrive early in the morning, borne in by a harried looking orderly, look exceptionally forlorn, stacked in their pile of bright bows and cheerful wrapping on the foot of her bed.

A comm call that leaves her with wet eyes, a hard ache in her throat, and the echo of her parents’ voices in her ears makes her want to toss her blanket over the packages and ignore them. She’ll open them next year and skip this Christmas entirely, chalk it up to a loss and avoid everything about it.

Or almost everything. She darts a glance at the clock on the wall, counts the hours until lunchtime and feels her stomach flip.

It’s when Gaila arrives halfway through the morning with a thermos of hot chocolate and a present that Nyota peels the paper back from and immediately replaces, that she stops casting looks at her comm, willing it to ring again even though it’s nighttime at home.

“Nice haul,” Gaila says sitting with her feet up on Nyota’s bed, tipping the chair back on two legs.

“This is entirely inappropriate to bring to a hospital,” Nyota says, though she’s smiling anyway.

“You’re welcome.”

“You’re taking that back to the room with you when you go,” Nyota says and places the package on the foot of her bed with the rest of them, then moves it to her bedside table, not sure that she can take the presents her parents sent seriously with Gaila’s gift so close to them.

“Say thank you,” Gaila instructs, her chair still tipped at a precarious angle.

“Thank you,” she says, poking the package slightly further away on the table.

“And say thank you for offering to take all of your presents back to the dorm for you.”

“Thank you for that too.”

“And say thanks for my help in opening them,” Gaila says, leaning forward so that the front legs of her chair hit the floor with a clunk, one finger snagging an edge of a ribbon and pulling it towards her.

Nyota lets her rip the paper off of half of the packages, Gaila’s delight with the ribbons and paper contagious, so that when Gaila finally tosses her one, Nyota pulls the bow off and tears at the corner of the wrapping.

“Your present is in my sock drawer,” Nyota says as she pulls out a holovid her father sent her. “But it’s not wrapped, I didn’t get a chance.”

“I’ll wrap it,” Gaila offers and starts gathering up the biggest pieces of wrapping paper. “We can open it together later.”

When Gaila’s torn off the last of the paper and dumped the final book Nyota’s mother sent onto the foot of the bed, Nyota gets up long enough to peer into the bag that Gaila brought, sorting through the change of clothes in there.

“Are you excited?” Gaila asks.

“I am,” she says, still sifting through the bag. “I get out of here tomorrow. I thought I’d be here until New Years.”

Nyota feels a hard poke on her arm. “Not what I meant.”

“I’m going to get in the shower,” she says, unfolding the sweater Gaila chose and considering it. Not what she would have picked out, but it’s fine. It has to be, she decides as she gives the clock another look.

“Are you planning to try to go home?”

“Um.” Nyota refolds the sweater and lays it over the edge of the bed. “No.”

“No?”

“It’s not… It’d only be for a few days and with the time change-“ She shrugs lightly. “I figured I’d stick around campus.”

“Really.”

“It just makes more sense.”

“I am not entirely sure it does,” Gaila declares, her finger in the bottom of her mug and then immediately in her mouth.

“I am.” Nyota puts her clothes on the bed and sorts through the rest of what’s in the bag. “Did you not bring eyeliner?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this. It’s cute.”

“Or mascara?”

“I decided it was illogical,” Gaila says and picks up Nyota’s mug to scoop the left over chocolate out of the bottom of it too.

As late morning stretches towards noon and her room falls into silence except for the beeping of monitors when Gaila leaves, Nyota turns towards the door with every set of footsteps that go past, every tap against the tile that sounds even and rhythmic. She used to do the same in Spock’s office, picking out how officers and students walked down the hallway. His steps were paced out differently than all the rest, measured in a way no one else’s ever were. Here, conversations louden and then fade, doctors and nurses call to each other, what sounds like a child runs up the hall, and person after person walks by her door but doesn’t turn into it, until he does.

“Good afternoon,” he says and then is beside her bed before she can do much more than push herself to sit up slightly straighter. She shifts on her blanket, the one that she pulled up to her pillow in her effort to actually make her bed and not be in it this time. It’s better like this, no sheets heavy on her lap and sitting on top of them makes her feel slightly more normal. “How are you?”

“I get to leave tomorrow,” she says, patting quickly at her knees and wanting to shift again with the excitement. “Best present ever.”

“Noted,” he says. His eyes follow the movement of her hands until she stills them, except the lack of motion just makes her want to rub her thumbs against her fingers or pick at her blanket or run her hands through her hair, except that she just brushed it and checked it in the mirror one time too many, thankful that Gaila had found other ways to spend her Christmas afternoon than offering a commentary on how Nyota had fussed with her ponytail.

He moves just before she reaches for it anyway, pulling a thin, flat, wrapped present out of the bag in his hand and holding it for a moment in front of him before extending it to her.

“You got me a present?” she asks as if the fact of it there in his hand, held out to her isn’t enough. It’s not, not quite, not really when she’s not entirely sure that she’s caught up to the fact that he’s here after a morning of waiting for afternoon to arrive, an evening of waiting for morning, a stretched out eternity of hours passing slower than should be possible as she sat in anticipation.

“It is nearly entirely self serving,” he says quickly. “And if you do not want-“

“I do,” she says without being sure how he was going to end that sentence. She takes it from him and turns it back and forth, examining the neat folds of the paper, the tape carefully placed to hold the ends closed. She touches one perfect crease, looks up at him. “You wrapped this?”

“It is perhaps fortunate that you have already received an unparalleled present today from your doctor as it does, so to speak, take the pressure off.”

She’s still staring at him. “So you did or didn’t pick out wrapping paper with reindeers?” she asks, dropping her gaze when her eyes catch his for a beat too long for neither of them to be speaking, watching how the light shines across the paper. “Was it between them and snowmen?”

“I would take the opportunity to state that gift wrapping in general is illogical.”

“Totally not,” she corrects and shakes the package lightly. Something in it rattles and his eyes follow her movements as she shakes it again, her head tipped like that will help her figure out what it is better. “It’s the best part.”

“Also noted.”

She peels the paper off without tearing it or dislodging the bright red bow, setting both next to her hip. She looks down at the box in her hand and then up at him, her tongue caught in her teeth and her smile too wide. He’s here and it’s entirely better than she imagined, a couple minutes into his visit and her chest is hot with delight, extra energy that she can’t completely contain coming out in how she taps her fingers on the box. “I should be honest about the fact that I have no idea how to play.”

“As it so happens, I would be willing to teach you.”

“Convenient.”

“Logical,” he says.

He hands her a sandwich with an apology that there were no other better options for lunch available due to the holiday, and as she unwraps it, he lays out the pawns and rooks and bishops and she tries to focus on his description of strategy and not just the sound of his voice.

“Got it,” she promises, sure that she’s forgotten half of what he said. “And listen, don’t think about going easy on me.”

“You twice corrected my slides,” he says and she lets out a soft laugh.

“I did, didn’t I,” she says, the memory of that day rising through her. That had been the first time she had gone to his office hours, right after that lecture, wanting to check that she was actually correct, wanting to smooth things over with him in case he had minded the two times her hand had shot into the air, wanting what she realizes now and didn’t quite know back then, to draw all of that out, how his eyes found hers, his attention on her as she questioned him and he answered, that singular focus, the same as he has now sitting so near to her.

“I can assure you, I will not offer undue leniency.”

She bites at her lower lip, her teeth scraping over it and her mouth pulling up in a smile. “Maybe you shouldn’t have used such an archaic grammatical structure for an example.”

“Perhaps I was not anticipating that among the ranks of Starfleet would be anyone with an interest in ancient Bajoran epic poetry.”

She points her half finished sandwich at him. “Never underestimate comm cadets.”

“I have learned not to,” he says so seriously that it makes her smile again, softer this time, what feels like her entire body warming straight through when he looks up from his lunch right into her eyes.

“I’m awake,” she protests three games and two yawns later, ducking her mouth into her shoulder like that will change the fact that this is longer that she’s sat upright in days.

“I believe it might be considered unfair to defeat you due to a handicap of exhaustion.”

“I can win in my sleep,” she says through a third yawn, ducking her mouth into her shoulder, and with a lot of false bravado as he captures her queen for the third time, leaving her unable to protect the king he has backed into the corner of the board.

He helps her put the pieces away and she tries not to watch how his hands hold them any more than she has while they played. She looks up from his fingers on a pawn when he asks, “Tomorrow, would you like a ride to your dorm?”

“I was planning to walk,” she answers too quickly, before she can think through how much she would enjoy that, how absolutely nice it sounds.

His head tips slightly, the pawn still caught between his thumb and forefinger.

“The entire way?”

“It’s only a few blocks,” she says because she can’t land upon a way to retract her statement and ask for a ride now that she’s turned it down.

“You are at Starfleet medical, not the Academy infirmary,” he says and she feels everything reorient. She turns to her window, the handful of buildings she can see, sure that they look no different than the ones near campus, and then the door the hallway and the sliver of floor and wall beyond it like it holds an answer. When it doesn’t, she turns back to him.

“Really?”

“I assumed you knew.” His eyes track over her face before a crease appears between his brows. He carefully puts the pawn down. “I apologize for not informing you of this.”

“No, it’s… You came all that way?”

“Your roommate has done so as well.”

“But…”

His eyes slide away from hers and in that moment, she wants to take his chin in her hand, press her palm to his cheek and turn his face back towards hers. The urge is so strong that her fingers tighten on the rook she just picked up, sure that she can imagine how warm his skin would be, how soft and smooth it looks. She’s had that thought before exactly once, a long afternoon in his office when the semester had grated on her and her head had swum with the work she needed to complete and the length of the day had dragged at her like it does now, exhaustion settling down deep. He had held a padd between them and she had been reading the passage he pointed to until she hadn’t been anymore, instead finding herself turned to him as he spoke and found him closer than she had anticipated, a shadow of stubble darkening his jaw and his cheek pale underneath it. She had her attention back on the padd again by the time he had noticed, so that when his head had moved towards her she had been studying the passage as if to memorize it and not the way his mouth moved around his words.

He’s speaking now and she stares at him until his voice resolves itself into something she can absorb beyond the downcast track of his eyes and how his hand reaches halfway between them before returning to his lap.

“I did not want the new semester to begin and to not see you,” he says and his fingers make tiny impressions in his pants, the skin around his nails turning white with the pressure. “And when-“

He doesn’t finish and doesn’t seem like he’s going to start speaking again, his words hanging there in the too still air, resonating loudly in the quiet of her room and sitting inside her, repeating over and over and warming her straight through each and every time she hears them again.

“I didn’t want that either,” she says just as quietly and his eyes meet hers and dance away in the next moment, light shifting over them and catching the clear, brown color, the shine in them that has nothing to do with the sun coming through the window and instead echoes everything that sits hot and heady in her chest. “And I would love a ride.”

“Very well,” he says. He said that same thing after she accepted his invitation for dinner, and had nodded then like he does now, just once, a quiet descending between them. The last time this moment stretched between them she had told him to enjoy the rest of his day and had walked back to her dorm with her mind buzzing and turning and speeding along so quickly that she had just stood inside the door of her room for too long. Now, she swallows and considers for too long of a time and thinks the entirety of the motion through in her head before mustering enough nerve to reach for the back of his hand. It’s warm and dry and she knows as she looks down at her fingers on his knuckles that he’s looking right at her.

Her heart in her throat, she waits to see if he’ll pull away. In the moment she spends deciding whether it was a mistake to reach for him to begin with, his hand turns over under hers, his fingers light on her palm.

“One more game?” she asks, sure that it’s not just her hand that’s warming from the contact but the rest of her as well, her cheeks humming with heat and her skin flushed hot.

He nods and gives her a gentle squeeze before he slips away from her touch. She moves away too, both palms spread on her thighs, one hand warm and tingling or maybe that’s her entire body that’s prickling like that, every inch of her alert after the touch of his skin to hers.

Her hands rest on her stomach as she tries to sleep that night, one pressed to the other. She imagines she can feel the warmth under her fingers, trapped between her palm and her own touch, a heat that she’s sure doesn’t dissipate with the time it takes fall asleep, all those hours she spends watching the dark, her lips pressed together tight and her heart beating fast. Once, she turns to look at the chess set resting on the table next to her and decides to imagine that it’s still warm as well, the touch of his fingers on it branded as surely as it is on her own skin.

Chapter Text

It takes longer than she feels like it should for all of the forms to be signed and a nurse to drop off the hypos she’s supposed to take home with her. She’s ready and packed and waiting perched on the edge of her bed long before Puri comes with the final padd, his signature scrawled along the bottom, and her attention firmly on the clock.

“Is that all?” she asks.

“Nearly,” he says, flicking through a number of screens on her monitor. “Are you feeling back to normal?”

“Yes,” she says no matter how tired she still is, exhaustion dragging at her late at night. She’s also restless and there’s too much energy in her after so many days in bed and she really thought she’d be released by now.

“Sorry about your vacation,” Puri says as he runs his tricorder over her one last time. “Probably not the best break you could have had.”

She kicks her feet at the floor. “It wasn’t that bad.”

“No?”

“Not entirely.”

Puri gives her a grin. “I’ll pretend that having me as a doctor is what you’re referring to. It’s the logical assumption.”

Spock is at the back of the waiting room, standing against the wall, and she weaves between chairs and groups of family and friends there to see other patients. She’s there to leave and despite how her legs feel heavier than they should after the short walk from the turbo lift, she doesn’t slow down on her way to him.

His eyes find hers when she’s halfway to him and she’s smiling by the time they’re close enough to speak.

“You appear to be much improved,” he says as she stops in front of him. Her bag, the one that Gaila brought with clothes and more books and that has her chess set tucked carefully into the bottom, bumps against her hip.

“I,” she says, tucking her hair back behind her ears with both hands and deciding that she can’t even begin to stop smiling, “Am feeling entirely better. Mostly.”

“Excellent,” he says and she’s pretty sure he’s smiling too.

The cool air outside the glass doors feels like a shock on her skin and the cars pulling in and out of the curb in front of the hospital are too loud, the noise of the city rising up around her louder and closer than the beep of the equipment in her room. Spock’s hand finds her arm just above her elbow, resting there warm and solid and then he’s leading her to a parking lot and she’s not thinking of the sunlight or the slight chill of the wind or the sights and smells that aren’t of a hospital room but of a city block, but how his thumb passes over the fabric of her jacket once and then again.

In his car, she stares around herself, at the new sights of everything that isn’t her hospital room, at this part of the city that she’s only been to a handful of times, at his pristine car and his hands on the controls and him there next to her, his eyes shifting between hers and the road as he pulls onto it.

He parks in the lot behind her dorm, the one she’s only walked through since she’s never driven here before. She wonders if this is where the medics arrived to, but there’s of course no sign of them, nothing outside of the sudden stillness of Spock’s car to ever tell her that night even happened beyond the way her eyelids feel too heavy for what little she’s done since waking.

She blinks that away and reaches for her door handle when he opens his own, wishing that she lived on the other side of campus, or that traffic had been worse, or that she could bring herself to suggest that they just keep sitting there in the quiet of his car, free of beeping machines and the bustle of the hospital.

“Thanks,” she says when he holds out her bag and shuts the trunk when she’s taken it, slung it over her shoulder and then run out of anything else to do except stand there on too shaky legs. He’s half an arm’s length away and his eyes are on hers and she decides that she very much doesn’t want to say goodbye to him here at the edge of the parking lot, with too short of a time spent with him today.

“There’s nobody around,” she says, gesturing towards her dorm. His attention turns to the building and she nearly regrets what she said at the thought that he’ll turn down her offer, but thinks of him leaving, getting in his car and driving away, and pushes herself to swallow the tightness that’s cropped up in her throat and say, “If you want to come up for a minute. Just to…”

She has to stop there because there’s no reason beyond another handful of moments with him and she really, really could have suggested getting a coffee or a late lunch or very nearly entirely anything else, her mind already ticking through more suitable options when he nods.

Gaila’s bed is the mess it always is, sheets and blankets kicked to the foot of it, her pillow left askew. She toes a rumpled uniform skirt over a pair of socks and tries to look around as quickly as she can for anything particularly embarrassing.

“Sorry, it’s… I haven’t been back for a while. Obviously.” She cups her hand around the back of her neck, lets her fingers dig into her skin and darts a glance up at him.

The corner of his mouth twitches. “Which is your side?”

She breathes out a quick laugh, drops her hand. “I’ll let you guess,” she says as she sets her bag onto the end of her still-made bed, next to the duffle she would have brought to her parents house, packed as it was when she was last here. She tugs the edge of it further closed when she realizes a bra strap is poking out, then picks the whole bag up and sets it on the floor further away from him.

He’s not looking though, his attention on her desk, everything that’s still sitting there from the end of the semester, including a filmplast holding notes she had made to herself as she had outlined one of the last papers she had completed. She chews at the inside of her lip as he reads through it, no matter that he’s seen her work in his class and as his assistant, his eyes on what she has on her desk in her room feeling far different than the polished assignments she turned into him. These are jotted down ideas, messy and half formed and she bites harder at her lip.

The first day of his class, he kept his hands resting on the sides of the lectern, lifting one only to tap the slides forward. He used the entire class period, all the students shifting in their chairs when they were sure that they’d be dismissed halfway through, equipped with a syllabus and a reading assignment and not subjected to an entire inaugural lecture on morphology. Now, his fingers press to the edge of her desk, the top of her Cardassian Orthography textbook that’s still sitting there, the stack of flash cards she had been reviewing for the test she had had before she had rushed back to shower and change and to meet him. She had tossed them there in her hurry and the pile is slightly askew still, sitting like that as the room spun before her eyes and Gaila found her and called the medics and she lay in her hospital bed. She reaches over to push them into a neater stack, realizes how close the motion has brought her to him, and thinks about how if she were to shift at all, her arm would brush up against his.

“Is this like how your dorm was?” she asks and sits on her bed, the space that it creates between them allowing her to think again.

“Similar,” he says. His head tips towards Gaila’s side. “I had that bed.”

“Are the faculty quarters quite the upgrade?”

“Indeed.” He picks up the first couple flash cards and turns one of them over, reading the back of it slowly. “If you would like, you should come over. Perhaps before the semester begins.”

“That would be wonderful,” she says, watching how his eyes leave the flashcard long enough to meet her own before he’s studying her desk again. He eventually puts the card down and takes in the handful of holos of her family she has framed, the padds she had left next to her bed, and then her dresser, neatly closed in contrast to Gaila’s which looks on the verge of having every drawer slide open, clothes sticking out of each one. His attention finds the earrings she had laid out and she watches him look at them one by one.

“I was trying to decide on a pair,” she says, her teeth scraping over her bottom lip. “The other night.”

“Would you like another opportunity to do so?”

“Yes,” she says without pausing, the word tumbling out of her with a smile and a leap in her stomach. She watches him turn from the desk to look at her and that jump expands into a tremulous, liquid shiver that takes up residence in her whole body when he comes to sit next to her.

There’s a careful distance between them, a handful of inches of red quilt that’s pulled taught where it dips under each of their weight. It’s not far enough to keep her thoughts from buzzing and it’s not close enough that she can quite muster herself to reach for him.

She watches the line of his throat work as he swallows. For all the hours she’s spent with him when he’s been nearly entirely still, he’s not motionless now, his hand smoothing down his thigh, his breath moving his chest and his lips parting and then closing again. She shouldn’t stare, she’s sure of that, but it doesn’t keep her from doing so. She’s certain that he knows that she’s looking, his eyes darting towards hers once and then twice and then settling there. The intensity with which he watches her back makes her sure that she should be able to feel energy arcing back and forth between them, a snap of something in the air that should be tangible with how it seems to take her over and slow everything down. She watches every individual part of his movement as he shifts, how his jacket moves across his arm, how his his hand turns from being palm down on his leg to rise towards her, how his weight moves to bring his body slightly closer.

His palm is on her cheek then and she’s spent months thinking about his hands, watching him type and write and hold his stylus and carry mugs and open doors and she’s thought too much about his touch on her skin and it in no way has left her ready for it, not the softness of his skin or how gentle he is or the warmth coming off of him, the reality that they’re alone and he’s touching her not caught up to the fact of it. His thumb rests just below her lips and she wants to freeze time here and now, wants to fast forward and lean into him and live out every single moment that is held in the promise of his eyes on hers, nearer now than they were, and nearer still until her own slip shut.

She nearly misses the first moment of his kiss, lost as she is to trying to grasp the fact that it’s truly happening, but the soft press of his lips to hers grounds her, begins to take up too much of her focus for her thoughts to be anywhere else but on how his nose brushes her cheek and his thumb runs over her chin, how his skin smells with him so close and how his lips press at hers, gently and so slow that she has time to memorize it.

When he pulls back, it’s only far enough for her to try for a breath, shaking and uneven, his nose against hers and his forehead so close she can feel the heat of him on her face.

“Acceptable?” he asks in a voice that’s less than a whisper and she nods carefully so as not to dislodge the hand still cupping her cheek, how he hasn’t moved away from her yet.

Their next kiss is just as slow. She gives into the urge to touch him, a hand curved around his elbow, the other finding his shoulder, the collar of his jacket, the hot skin of his neck that she lays her fingers against, feels a tendon lengthen as his head tips to the side to more firmly kiss her.

“And here I thought we weren’t bringing guys back to the room.”

She instinctively tightens her grip on him when he jerks away, keeps him there for just a moment, her head bowed forward and her eyes squeezed shut too hard.

“Hi,” she finally says, sitting back and finding Gaila there with one hip leaning against the wall and a too wide smile on her face.

“Hi,” Gaila says and gives them a happy wave.

Spock stands, presses two fingers too fleeting and quick to her knuckles and then he’s gone with a single, formal nod to Gaila, that she returns with another smile.

“Well,” Gaila says, flopping onto her own bed. “Happy holidays, indeed.”

“Great timing. Thank you for that.”

“You are very welcome.” Gaila turns on her side and props her head on her hand. “So. Good kisser or the best kisser?”

“We’re not discussing this.”

“I’ll discuss it, you just sit there and keep smiling like you are.”

The hand Nyota raises to cover her mouth does nothing to change the fact that Gaila’s right that it’s all she’s doing, and as she quickly finds out, it’s all that she’s capable of doing for some time, her mind stuck in those moments of Spock’s hand on her and his lips against hers as the afternoon wears on, Gaila continues to talk, and with each passing moment, the time until she’ll seem him again shortens.

Chapter Text

On New Years Eve, they try again.

Nyota goes downstairs long before she needs to and waits with her scarf bunched under her chin and her hands stuffed deep in her pockets, her cheeks growing colder with every passing moment. She lifts her face out of her scarf when she first sees Spock approach, watching him step into a pool of light cast on the path. She can’t help but smile at the sight of him there, walking towards her, and ducks back into her scarf, grinning against it.

“How was work?” she asks when he’s near enough to her and she decides she can’t wait for him to take those last few steps before speaking, the urge to begin talking to him too strong to hold it at bay any longer.

“Unfocused and inefficient,” he says though she can’t detect anything approaching irritation lacing his words. “Doctor Puri sends his regards.”

That makes her smile again, or maybe it’s how close Spock has come to stand, far nearer to her than she’s used to, all that time they were in his office together with a careful arms length between them. Now, she lets herself sway towards him, that compulsion nearly as strong as the one to start a conversation with him, the hours she spent waiting for evening to arrive thankfully behind her, and a night with him stretching out in front of them. She curls her toes in her boots, bounces back on her heels lightly and digs her hands deeper into her pockets. “I can’t say I’m sorry to miss him.”

The streetlight falls across his face, catching on the curve of his ear and the line of his jaw. She lets herself bite at the inside of her cheek and indulge in a moment of watching him, the blink of his long lashes and the small puff of white breath as he says, “Understood.”

The walk across campus is shorter than she might have expected, though as he opens the door to his building for her, she allows that it might seem so not due to the distance of the dorms to the faculty apartments, but how his elbow brushed twice against hers as they walked, each time nearly blanking her thoughts.

He lives on the sixth floor, which she never even knew to wonder about, not where exactly his apartment is or how the hallway by his door looks, or her first peek inside of it when he steps aside so she can enter first. She looks around herself as she unwinds her scarf, taking in the living room before her, the kitchen off to the side, and then the wash of heat at her back as he moves behind her, taking off his own jacket. He holds his hand out for hers and hangs it neatly next to his own, draping her scarf over top so that the ends are neatly aligned with each other at the same height off the floor. His hand looks big against her belongings, starkly pale and entirely odd as he arranges everything in a way she decides is rather endearing.

She steps out of her boots when she sees him do the same and despite being in hospital gowns, sweatpants, and old t-shirts for so long around him, she can’t help but flex her sock clad toes against his floor, sure that the newness of this is entirely unaffected by the fact of how long it’s been since she’s been in her neatly pressed uniform around him. She never thought to consider what color his socks are, though she’s hardly surprised that they’re black, or where he might leave his boots, which are placed neatly next to hers and a pair of running shoes, or what he might do with his comm and padd when he gets home, both of which he lays on a small table that also holds a potted plant, not one she thinks could possibly be Terran with how unfamiliar the shape of it is and the red dirt at its base.

He has his own uniform still on and his hand touches his stomach, his fingers brush at the hem of it, and he excuses himself with a nod towards a door that must lead to his bedroom. She tells herself not to stare at it when it closes behind him. Instead, she takes in his living room, his table already set for two, and a pot on the stove that when he reappears dressed in slacks and a sweater, he turns the heat on underneath.

He adjusts the temperature twice and then refolds a dishtowel that was already perfectly arranged on its hook.

“I do not have anything to offer you to drink beyond water or tea.” His eyes meet hers and when she’s sure they’re about to slide away again, she takes a step towards him. “I did not know if you would prefer champagne, for the holiday.”

“I can’t drink anyway,” she says quickly. “I’m still on a lot of hypos.”

“But you are feeling better,” he says.

“Nearly entirely so,” she says and takes another step towards him. “Though I do admit to sleeping most of the afternoon.” She gives him a smile and feels her heart pick up when his eyes drop to her mouth. “I didn’t want to fall asleep halfway through tonight.”

“Logical,” he declares and she smiles again.

It fades slightly as she rubs her hands together, takes a step towards her jacket and then quickly walks to it.

“Here,” she says, digging into her pocket. The motion causes her scarf to shift and she rights it, trying to return it to how perfectly it was placed as best she can. “I didn’t wrap it, so I hope you haven’t changed your mind about wrapping paper.”

He takes the book from her and examines it as she smooths her sweater over her stomach.

“It’s- You had mentioned once, a while ago, wanting to learn Bajoran.” She clears her throat. “I don’t know if you still do, but that’s one of their most popular histories and the language- it’s not hard to learn, I think you’d be able to pick it up quickly.”

He opens the cover, smooths it back with his palm and she reaches up and fingers her earring, the ones she had made Gaila help her choose.

“Thank you,” he says and she nods quickly.

“I hope you like it.”

“I am entirely certain that I will.”

Dinner is a stew of rich broth that she can’t help but immediately dig into. He watches her through her first bites until she wipes her mouth on her napkin and grins at him, taking in the sight of him across the table from her, their bowls of food steaming between them, and the way his eyes don’t leave her as she tries her dinner. She half wants to ask him to identify every vegetable in her bowl just to hear him speak Vulcan again like he has only a handful of times around her, but he has his spoon hovering above his food and she has to smile at him again.

“Delicious,” she declares and only then does he eat, careful and methodical as he did in her hospital room, at his desk in his office, though she’s sure as she watches him across the table that none of those meals compared to this one, even came close to touching this moment here in the warmth of his quarters and how he looks up at her between spoonfuls.

“So,” she says as she bites into something that resembles a bright green potato. “Any new years resolutions?”

“I had not considered any,” he says as he pulls his spoon through his dinner. “Yourself?”

“No more poorly timed illnesses,” she says lightly.

“That is a worthy goal.”

“Though,” she says and eats the other half of the vegetable. “I think it worked out ok.”

His eyebrow raises as he dips his spoon into his bowl. “I believe that it did.”

“I like your place,” she tells him when dinner is cleaned up and she has a mug of tea cupped between her hands, the steam curling up towards her as she makes a slow circle around his living room. He has a handful of pieces of art, a small sculpture on the table next to his couch that has strong, bold lines she’s sure must be Vulcan in origin, and a landscape painting of rusty mountains and dusty cliffs. Beneath the window rests another plant and next to it, the curved arc of a ka’athrya. She tightens her hold on her mug to keep from touching it and turns instead towards a hanging of Vulcan calligraphy, recognizing a phrase from a poem she had read once. She’s sure it was for a class, though now seeing the words hung on Spock’s wall it seems impossible that they could have been somewhere so sterile as in a classroom. The deep color of the canvas, the heat of his apartment, and the scent of her tea make the circles and lines of the undulating, winding script entirely more full of life than on a page of a textbook.

When she hears his soft steps cross the room towards her, she turns to him. She pulls her mug to her chest, dips her nose into the steam, and looks up at him when he’s half an arm’s length away, sure her cheeks aren’t only warm from the heat of her tea.

“We should consider leaving soon,” he says, his own mug held with his long fingers wrapped around it.

“We should,” she agrees. “We don’t want to be late.”

“Indeed,” he says and then his finger is warm under her chin and he’s leaning down and they’re kissing once softly, gently, her hands and mug pressed between their bodies when they sway close to each other. She’s ready for it this time, has been since she walked in the door, since she walked downstairs, since he left her room and she thought of nothing else for what seemed to be hours, days, a too long eternity of replaying a kiss that had lasted only half a moment.

Now, he cups the back of her arm as he pulls back for the space of a breath and then kisses her again and she leans up as far into him as she can, unbalanced except for his hold on her. His sweater is soft against the back of her hands, his chest beneath solid and hard, so firm she can feel the strength of him through the fabric. Warmth brands into her arm from his touch, sweeps over her face with him so close to her and she’s sure her skin doesn’t cool when they break apart, or when she tries to zip her jacket with clumsy fingers, or with his body next to hers in the turbo lift, only maybe when the night air hits her cheeks and the fact of being out in public restarts her thoughts. She burrows her chin back into her scarf, can’t stop herself from grinning into it, too wide and too hard and all together too happy to possibly contain it.

The city is crowded, people pouring out onto the streets, the sidewalks full of the press of everyone walking down towards the bay. She stays close behind him as they wind their way through the crowds, twice catching at the cuff of his jacket and finally slipping her hand into his when he reaches back for her. She doesn’t let go when they reach the water, buffeted by the surge of the crowd around them until she’s pressed close to him, their fingers linked together and the length of his body against her side warming her in the dark air of winter.

The wait is reduced to feeling like the span of only a few moments as his thumb rubs over the back of her hand and as she shifts to more firmly rest against his warmth. She’s not sure what she was expecting, but it’s not how gently he holds her hand or how he moves even closer to her, or how the Academy, only a few blocks behind them, feels worlds away, but then again she never expected any of this, never knew to truly hope for it, not beyond some half formed wish of a dream that she’s sure could never and had never and will never approach the actual reality of living out this moment, any sketched out idea of this burning too bright in her mind to ever really grasp.

The first firework arcs up against the sky. She doesn’t watch it, instead taking in the shine of reds and blues and greens and golds flaring bright over his face. The corner of his mouth curls when he notices her looking, his fingers curving into her jacket when she leans further into him.

“This,” she says, low enough only he can hear, her words shadowed by the murmur of the crowd and the crack of fireworks above them. “Is a wonderful way to begin a new year.”

His voice is a deep, rich rumble that rolls right through her, settles in deeper than the thunder of the fireworks. “Indeed it is.”