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Jim had always been good at reading rooms. He could step onto a bridge and feel a shift in the air before anyone said a thing. With Spock, the tells were smaller: a breath that came too even, a glance that hovered just to the left of Jim’s shoulder, fingers held a shade too rigid behind his back. He’d learned Spock’s quiet like a map, and, by the end of the five-year mission, he could travel it with his eyes closed.
Spock had always been good at closing doors. He did it politely. He did it gently. He never slammed them. He would seal off one thought, then another, until Jim felt like he was talking to someone standing behind frosted glass.
The last months of the mission stretched thin. The crew moved with the comfort of veterans, but the future kept tapping on the window. Promotions. Transfers. New ships. New wars maybe. The Enterprise carried them home in a long curve through space that felt like the end of a song, the note you hold when you don’t want to hear silence.
They had decided to keep the relationship private. It wasn’t a secret so much as a boundary. Shared rooms when they could manage it. Shared food. Hands finding each other under the table in an empty conference room, thumb to knuckle, touch to touch. Jim joked more than usual to balance the gravity he saw in Spock’s eyes. Spock responded with that little tilt of his head that meant he understood the joke and the fear behind it and that he would not invite either any further inside.
Nights were the hardest. Jim slept light, then reached for a body that wasn’t there, then found Spock sitting upright on the edge of the bed, spine like a line on a chart. Spock would say he didn’t want to wake him. Jim would slide closer and touch the hollow of Spock’s throat with one finger. Spock would close his eyes. He would let his shoulders drop a fraction. He would lean, not far, but enough to tell Jim that the wall had a hinge.
They argued in quiet voices in those nights. Jim’s hands moved while he talked. He kept reaching toward Spock’s face, stopping short, then resting against Spock’s shoulder instead. Spock kept his hands folded in his lap, knuckles pale, nails tidy. He answered every question with a calm tone that made Jim want to throw something and then hug him in the same second.
“I need you to tell me what you need,” Jim said one night, thumb pressing into the cords of Spock’s neck with a pressure that meant please. His voice came out steady. His eyes didn’t.
“I require time,” Spock said. His gaze stayed fixed on the wall. “I require correctness.”
“Correctness?” Jim let out a breath that felt like it had teeth. “We’re not a math proof.”
Spock’s jaw worked. His mouth softened. He touched Jim’s wrist, very lightly, like he was navigating a fragile edge. “I am Vulcan.”
“You are Spock,” Jim said, and shifted closer. He touched the corner of Spock’s mouth with the back of two fingers and felt the smallest shiver. “And you are mine. Don’t give me the planet when I’m asking about you.”
Spock swallowed. His eyelashes flickered. He leaned forward until his forehead brushed Jim’s. Their noses lined up. Jim could feel the heat of him, the way Spock’s breathing tried to flatten into a steady rhythm and failed. Spock’s voice dropped. “The existence of feeling within me introduces a variable into my function that may render me unreliable.”
“That’s not what I see,” Jim said. “I see the man who saved a science team by walking into a storm nobody else could endure. I see the man who pulled me back from places I don’t even want to name. You make me better. I need you to tell me I make you better too.”
Spock closed his eyes and said nothing. The silence hung there, nearly physical. Jim cupped Spock’s cheek and waited, thumb warm against the line of his jaw. He kissed him slow, and Spock kissed back with a caught breath and a hand that came up to Jim’s waist and stayed there, hesitant and firm at the same time.
Conversations kept circling back to the same orbit. Spock spoke about logic and duty until the words felt like a railing he gripped to keep from falling. Jim tried honesty like a knife to cut through it: I love you. I’m scared. I’m not good at this either. I want to do right by you. Tell me how. Spock nodded, then measured every reply like a captain counting rations.
The mission’s last briefing wrapped in a room that suddenly seemed too small for all the lives they had lived in it. Starfleet had offered Jim an admiralty. The offer had been on the table for months. He’d kept it there like a drink he didn’t want to finish. He told no one he had already typed a draft acceptance and deleted it twice. He told no one that his finger trembled over the send button whenever he and Spock had one of those long, quiet arguments about the future.
McCoy saw everything the way a doctor sees a fever coming before the cough. He cornered Jim after a routine medical check with a look that said he wasn’t here to hold anyone’s hand.
“You look like you’re sleeping on a floor,” McCoy said, flipping through a PADD without reading it. “And our favorite Vulcan looks like he’s trying to be a rock.”
“Rocks are stable,” Jim said, and smiled in a way that made McCoy’s eyebrows twitch.
“That depends on the erosion,” McCoy shot back. He pushed the PADD into Jim’s chest and said, softer, “Stop trying to be the hero in your own head. Talk to him like a person. Or I swear I will lock you both in a storage closet until someone cries.”
Jim put the PADD down on the biobed and rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “He wants to be perfect.”
“He already is,” McCoy said, then rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell him I said that. He’ll run diagnostics on his cheekbones.”
They laughed. It didn’t help much.
The last fight started with something small. Jim forgot what. A word with the wrong angle. A question about after that sounded like a demand. They were in Jim’s quarters. The lights were low and gold. Spock stood with his hands behind his back. Jim leaned against the table, fingers tapping the edge.
“I have made a decision,” Spock said. The phrasing landed like a stamp on a document.
Jim went still. He tried to shift his body into neutral the way Spock did, feet planted, shoulders square. The muscles in his jaw moved anyway. “Tell me.”
“I will travel to Gol,” Spock said. His voice stayed soft, not cold. The softness hurt more. “I will undergo training to eliminate all remaining emotion.”
Jim’s fingers curled. The table edge dug into his palm. “You’re leaving me.”
Spock’s eyes flicked, just once, to Jim’s hand, to the white line of pressure across his knuckles. “My decision pertains to myself.”
“It pertains to me,” Jim said, and pushed away from the table. He closed the space between them. He did it slowly, watching Spock’s shoulders, the set of his mouth, the fine tremor in his breath that practically begged him to keep his hands careful. He reached up and rested his palm against Spock’s cheek. Spock didn’t pull back. Jim felt the heat in him. He felt a hope that made his throat tight. “You think you’re doing the right thing. You think you fix me by removing you. That’s not logic. That’s fear.”
Spock’s eyelids lowered. His voice thinned. “You speak of a cultural and biological imperative. I am not a complete being while subject to forces I neither control nor fully understand.”
“You are not a weapon, and your heart is not a malfunction,” Jim said. He touched Spock’s hairline with his fingertips. He smoothed back a stray piece of hair that dared to be out of place. “I will spend the rest of my life not being enough for you if I let you do this.”
Spock’s breath hitched. His hand rose and closed around Jim’s wrist with a precision that tried not to be a plea. The grip softened. “I experience thought patterns that interfere with duty. I… experience longing during critical operations. I watched you nearly die on three occasions within the last thirty days and felt a loss of control that could have cost lives.”
“You saved them,” Jim said. “You saved me. You held me together in that corridor when I couldn’t breathe. You steadied my hands. You made me stronger, not weaker.”
Spock held his gaze. His mouth opened, then closed. The words he chose next cut clean. “I cannot be who you need while I am divided.”
Jim stepped back like he’d been pushed. He pressed his thumb into the corner of his eye in a visible, childish movement he failed to hide. “Say the other part.”
Spock’s brow creased. “I do not understand.”
“Say that you love me,” Jim said. His voice went quiet in a way he couldn’t control. He stared right at Spock, chin up, shoulders up, a pose he used when he knew a hit was coming. “Then tell me you’re leaving anyway.”
Spock’s lips parted. A pulse moved in his throat. He lifted a hand and set it flat against Jim’s chest, fingers spread. The texture of Jim’s shirt caught at his skin. “I do,” he said, very softly. “I do.”
Jim felt the hand. He felt the warmth seeping through cloth and skin to a place he didn’t have words for. He nodded. He took a breath that didn’t land right and came out ragged. “Then you’re making the worst call of your life.”
Spock’s gaze wavered. He took his hand away. “I depart at 0200.”
The number fell like a lid on a box. Jim smiled with too many teeth. “Course is set then.”
Spock’s shoulders pulled back, a reflex, a uniform straightening that wasn’t needed. He looked like a man bracing for gravity to suddenly double. “I will inform the captain.”
“You just did,” Jim said.
Spock’s eyes flickered. Jim reached out again, quick, and caught his sleeve. The fabric bunched under his fingers. He tugged. He pressed his forehead gently to Spock’s. Their noses touched. He breathed him in like he was trying to memorize heat and scent and the sound of a breath at close range. “One more kiss,” Jim whispered, so close the words brushed Spock’s mouth.
Spock kissed him. It wasn’t tidy. It wasn’t Vulcan. His hands came up and framed Jim’s face, long fingers pressing into Jim’s jaw like he wanted to hold his skull steady. Jim gripped Spock’s waist, pulled him in, felt muscle under the neat lines. The kiss spoke in a language they never used in public. It shuddered through both of them. It slowed. It ended with soft, open little touches that said please, said no, said yes, said remember.
Spock stepped away first. He didn’t look at the door. He looked at Jim. He put two fingers against Jim’s wrist for half a second, then dropped his hand. “Good night, Jim.”
“Good night, Spock.”
He left. The door closed without a sound.
Jim stood for a long time without moving. His chest hurt. His hands didn’t know where to go. He dragged one over his mouth and then over the back of his neck, squeezing the muscles there until he had a physical sensation that could compete with the one inside. He sat on the edge of the bed where Spock always sat. He stared at the wall that Spock always stared at. He tried to breathe in a normal way and failed.
Sleep didn’t come. Morning arrived anyway. Jim walked to the transporter room with his face set into something like command. He told himself he wasn’t going to watch Spock leave. He watched anyway. He stood behind a crowd of junior officers who didn’t know where to put their eyes and a chief engineer who pretended to be too busy to stand still.
Spock stepped onto the pad with a small bag and that expression he wore when he was building a bridge between two cliffs in his head. He looked around once, eyes moving with control, cataloging, appreciating, letting go. His gaze found Jim, who had not planned for that. Jim’s mouth twitched. He lifted his chin a little, like a toast without a glass. Spock gave the tiniest nod. Then light took him, and he was gone.
McCoy found Jim later on the observation deck he always pretended wasn’t his favorite. Jim leaned with his palms flat on the railing, fingers spread, knuckles white. McCoy stopped a foot away, crossed his arms, and looked like a man trying to decide between yelling and hugging.
“You let him go,” McCoy said.
“I didn’t own him,” Jim said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears, sanded down at the edges.
“You should’ve fought,” McCoy snapped.
“I did.” Jim turned his head. His eyes looked wrong on his face. They looked like eyes from another story. “You were right. He’s trying to be a rock.”
“You’re trying to be a statue.” McCoy planted a palm on Jim’s shoulder and squeezed hard. “Say something real.”
“I’m broken,” Jim said, staring out into the clean, glittering distance. “Is that real enough for you?”
McCoy’s mouth pressed into a line. His hand shifted from Jim’s shoulder to the back of his neck. He rubbed in slow, firm circles like he was working on a knot he’d seen a hundred times. “It is.”
“I took the admiralty,” Jim said. He didn’t look at McCoy when he said it. “Or I will. I’m going to type the message and send it. I’m not a captain without this ship. I’m not… myself. But if he’s not here, I don’t know how to be who I was. New job, new uniform, new problems. Maybe I can bury it there.”
“Bury it?” McCoy’s voice went sharp. “That’s your big plan? You’re going to drown yourself in memos until you forget your own name?”
“You got a better one?” Jim asked, not angry, just tired.
“Yeah,” McCoy said. “Therapy and honesty. With yourself first. With Spock if he ever stops playing monk.” He blew out a breath, then looked away for a long moment. “I can’t watch you do this to yourself.”
Jim turned to him. “You’re not leaving.”
“I am,” McCoy said, and his eyes said it was the first time he’d let the words out. “I signed up for a volunteer rotation. Refugee world. No resources. No glory. They need doctors, and they don’t need me to stand around and watch my two idiot friends light their lives on fire and roast marshmallows over the ashes.”
“I’m not—”
“Don’t,” McCoy warned. He touched Jim’s cheek with a rough thumb, a father move he’d never admit to. “I’m not doing this to punish you. I’m doing it so I make it out of this with a piece of myself. Maybe I’ll come back when you two get your heads on straight.”
Jim swallowed hard. His jaw tightened and relaxed. He nodded. “Send me a message when you land.”
“I will.” McCoy’s mouth twitched. “And tell Commodore Paperwork that I said he’s making a mistake.”
“I’m not a commodore,” Jim muttered. “Yet.”
“You will be our Lord of Forms by next Tuesday,” McCoy said, then pulled him in. The hug was quick and fierce. He patted Jim’s back twice like a punctuation mark, stepped back, and looked him in the eye. “Don’t fall apart where nobody can see you.”
Jim stood in the doorway of his quarters that night and stared at the empty bed. He stripped the sheets and remade it like he was building something new out of the remains. He put his palm flat on the pillow where Spock liked to rest his head and held it there until the heat from his hand fooled him into thinking there was warmth underneath. He slept badly. He woke up and typed the acceptance letter and didn’t delete it this time.
The promotion ceremony felt like someone else’s party. Jim smiled and shook hands and nodded at speeches. Stars glinted on uniforms and in the eyes of people who admired him. He looked handsome in the new cut, every seam perfect. He stood straight with that clean, proud posture that made people who didn’t know him think he wasn’t afraid of anything. His eyes landed once, in a quiet moment, on an empty seat at the back, and he needed to blink several times before he could get his face right again.
The Enterprise didn’t understand. Ships never did. He walked the corridors with a hand brushing the bulkhead and told himself that touch could be a goodbye and a promise, and not a wound. Crew filed past him with hugs and handshakes and little jokes to bridge the gap. He hugged back. He clapped shoulders. He kissed Uhura’s cheek when she let him. He shook Scotty’s hand and then pulled him into a hug anyway because there are rules and then there are rules.
He saved the bridge for last. He stood behind the captain’s chair and touched the top of it with two fingers. He let his memories run a reel he didn’t try to stop: Spock at the science station with his head tipped toward a screen, the flick of his eyes over data and then back to Jim like a tether; the first time Spock had sat in the chair and looked at him for confirmation of a call he already knew was right; the way Spock’s hand had sometimes rested on the railing near Jim’s right shoulder, close enough that the hairs on Jim’s arm would lift from the charge of it.
He left the ship without looking back because he knew if he did, he would not leave.
Starfleet Headquarters swallowed him whole. He wore the uniform like armor and learned door codes and signed orders. He took meetings with people who used words like strategy and legacy, and he performed the part he’d been cast in with a skill that made him want to laugh and punch a wall and run for a star all at once. He kept a small framed photo on his desk. It was from shore leave somewhere warm. Spock stood next to him in a loose shirt, the collar open. Jim’s hand was in Spock’s hair, messing it up while McCoy pretended to scowl behind the camera. Spock’s mouth carried the suggestion of a smile. Jim’s eyes were narrow with mischief. You could see the pride in both their spines.
Nights stretched out. Headquarters went quiet. Jim stayed late under soft office light and read reports that had nothing to do with asteroids trying to kill him. He thought about going home and then didn’t. He stared at the photo. He touched the glass with the tip of his finger and felt nothing back.
McCoy’s messages came through erratic network paths from the world where he had landed. The first one was a selfie taken outside a tent with a field hospital sign. He looked sunburned and furious and absurdly alive.
“Still breathing,” McCoy said in the recording. “Tell your desk I said hi. Tell Spock that if he achieves spiritual perfection, I’ll knit him a sweater.”
Jim smiled and played the message again. He sent a reply with a quick clip of his hand giving a salute and the photo on his desk visible in the background. He said, “Proud of you,” and meant it.
Spock didn’t send messages. Vulcan was Vulcan. Gol was something else entirely. Jim looked up the ridge where the monastery sat in one late-night search, watched images of a path burned white by sun, a geometry of buildings that asked for silence, and turned the screen face down like a guilty boy.
There were days when he hated Spock for leaving. There were days when he hated himself for those days. He took elevators up and down without thinking and found his thumb pressing to the inside of his wrist where Spock’s fingers had rested in the transporter room. He found himself straightening his shoulders the way Spock did when he was about to say something that mattered. He found himself moving his hand to calm the air in front of him when a meeting heated, the same way he’d seen Spock cool a bridge without a single raised voice. He missed him in small ways that added up to something too large to carry. He carried it anyway.
A letter from McCoy cracked something open. It didn’t look like much. A list of patients who would live now. A note about water filters that finally worked. Then, at the end, one line that sounded tossed-off and wasn’t.
“I’m mad at both of you,” McCoy wrote, “and I love both of you, and I’m not interested in either of you pretending you’re fine.”
Jim closed the message and let his head drop into his hands. He pressed his fingers to his eyes until little bursts of color popped behind his lids. He sat like that for a long time, breathing slow because that was all he could manage.
He walked home. He took off the uniform jacket and threw it on a chair and then picked it up again and hung it with painful care. He showered long and stood with his palms pressed to the tile, forehead resting against the wall. He toweled off and pulled on a T-shirt that had known better days. He lay on the couch. He stared at the ceiling. He called Spock.
The call didn’t go through. Of course it didn’t. Gol didn’t take calls. He knew that. He tried anyway. He tried three nights in a row, always late, always after a day that felt wide and empty. On the fourth night, he wrote a message he couldn’t send.
“Spock,” he typed, and stopped. He backspaced the name. He typed again. “You once told me that you considered the balance between choice and duty the foundation of everything you respected. You didn’t say it like that, but that’s what you meant. I’m trying to do the same. I am trying to choose you while respecting you. I don’t know how to hold both at once. If you come back, I will be better. If you don’t, I won’t break. I will love you in whatever way you allow.”
He saved the message as a draft and went to bed and slept for four hours without waking.
A month turned into two. Headquarters started to feel like a place he could navigate without drowning. He filled in gaps. He visited ships. He sat in briefings with captains who looked at him like an older brother and with captains who looked at him like a cautionary tale. He stood in a shuttle bay after one inspection and saw, with absolutely no warning, Spock across the room.
It wasn’t him. It was a young science officer with dark hair and a precise posture and eyes that didn’t look like Spock’s at all. Jim felt his stomach drop and laughed at himself under his breath. He walked to the shuttle and almost tripped over the memory of Spock stepping forward with that particular way of moving that didn’t waste a single line of motion. He got in, sat down, and closed his eyes until the pilot asked if he was alright. He said yes, because that was easier than telling the truth.
A message arrived on a quiet morning when rain tapped the windows of his office and the city smelled clean. It wasn’t from Spock. It was from someone in Vulcan Administration with a name like a piece of sculpture. The message was brief, formal, and the most important thing Jim had read in months.
“Spock of Vulcan has entered seclusion at Gol and has requested that no personal communications be forwarded. He has left instructions for the handling of professional inquiries should they arise. We acknowledge any personal connection you may claim, and we request that you do not attempt to make contact. He asks that you respect his path.”
Jim read the lines twice. He put the PADD down. He flexed his hands and watched his own fingers with a detached little shock, like they belonged to someone else.
He replied with a single sentence. “Please confirm that he is safe.”
They wrote back one word. “Confirmed.”
That night he went home and took the photo off his desk. He didn’t hide it. He placed it on the table by his bed. He placed it carefully, lining up its edges with the wood, the way Spock would. He turned off the light and lay in the dark and said the truth out loud because there wasn’t anyone there to hear it and because he needed to hear it himself.
“I forgive you,” he said. His voice sounded strange, too loud in the room, too soft for anything outside it. He waited. His throat worked. “I forgive you for leaving. I forgive me for not stopping you.”
He slept better.
Work became the rhythm he could hold. He wrote to McCoy once a week, updates that managed to be honest without spreading his insides on the table. He said he missed him. He asked for photos. McCoy sent pictures of hands and faces and small victories with bandages and smiles. Sometimes he sent a barbed joke that made Jim snort water out his nose. Sometimes he sent a quiet line that made Jim sit down wherever he was.
Months later, on a day built of meetings, Jim stepped into a conference room and realized he had no idea what the last admiral had said in the last twenty minutes. He smiled, apologized, and asked them to run the numbers again. He put his hands on the back of a chair and felt, suddenly, the full weirdness of being a man in a nice suit pretending to be a machine that transformed pain into policy.
He took a leave day without asking permission. He booked a shuttle to a world with desert in its bones. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going.
The sky over Vulcan looked like it had been poured, hard and clean. Heat lifted in lines off the ground. Jim walked the path toward the ridge without rushing. He knew he wouldn’t be allowed inside. He didn’t want inside. He wanted proximity. He wanted distance and closeness laid next to each other until they made sense, which they never would.
A pilgrim, calm and expressionless, paused near him and looked at his shoes with a faint crease of disapproval. Jim smiled. He stepped aside. He kept climbing. The monastery sat like a decision at the top of the world. He stopped where the path narrowed and felt every heartbeat like a knock on his ribs.
A figure stood near the gate. Robes. Hands tucked inside sleeves. Head bowed in a way that suggested thought rather than prayer. Not Spock. Jim knew from the stance, from the length of the forearms, from the angle of the neck. He wondered if he had hoped for a miracle. He looked at his hands and found them steady.
The robed figure turned. It was an elder. The eyes were old and sharp. The mouth softened when it saw Jim. The elder lifted a hand in a small greeting.
“You are out of place,” the elder said, voice dry as stone warmed in sun.
“I know,” Jim said. He touched his sternum with two fingers, a habit he’d picked up to calm himself before stepping onto stages he didn’t want. “I came to stand at the edge.”
“That is a practice,” the elder said. The gaze flicked to the ridge and back. “You will not be allowed further.”
“I don’t want further,” Jim said. “I want to stand here and tell him something he won’t hear.”
The elder tipped their head. “Then tell yourself.”
Jim nodded. He took a step closer to the gate and stopped. He drew a breath in. He breathed out. He spoke, to the stone and the heat and the invisible line that connected him to someone wearing similar robes somewhere within.
“I love you,” he said. “I am curing myself of needing you in a way that hurts us both. I am learning to need you in a way that does not. I don’t know how long it will take. I will be here when you are ready. If you never are, I will live. If you are, I will meet you where you are and not where I want you to be.”
The words surprised him in their gentleness. He had expected rage. He had expected a performance. He got truth instead. He stood there a long minute and let the desert hear him.
The elder watched without comment, then lifted a hand in farewell and returned to the gate. Jim turned away. He walked back down the path with a careful pace. He flexed his fingers. He touched his jaw. He rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger and didn’t hide it when a tear knocked loose and slid down. He smiled at himself for not pretending.
Back at Headquarters, the world did not shift on its axis. His inbox waited. His chair waited. The photo waited on his nightstand like a small, steady star. He picked it up sometimes and said, “Later,” to two men who weren’t there, one in the desert and one in a crowded clinic far from home.
He didn’t wait passive. He visited ships. He pushed for better training for crews so fewer captains came home with eyes like his. He argued for medicine budgets with a ferocity that made McCoy leave him a voice message calling him Admiral Hellfire and promising to name a clinic after him if he kept it up. He laughed and saved the message and played it on mornings when he needed a friend’s voice to aim him.
Seasons turned. News traveled. He heard, eventually, a whisper that the students at Gol were not all staying forever. He heard, once, that a human admiral had been seen near the ridge with his head bowed and his spine straight. He let rumors be rumors. He did his job. He went home. He slept.
A simple envelope showed up one day, thin and plain, with a stamp and everything, routed through a dozen official hands until it found him. His name written with the neat handwriting of a person who measured pen pressure like they measured anything else. He held it for a while without opening it. He ran his thumb over the edge until the paper softened, then he slid a finger under the flap and pulled out a single card.
“Jim,” it said, and nothing else, on the front.
He turned it over. The message fit in the space of one breath.
“Training continues. Clarity increases. I find no total absence of feeling within the intention of perfection, only a method of seeing without noise. I will return when I can be what I choose to be without harming what I hold. I request that you remain yourself. —S.”
Jim stood very still. His chest rose. It fell. His fingers pressed to the ink the way a man checks a pulse. He sat down. He read it again, then again, each time for a different word. He smiled. He cried a little. He laughed at himself for both. He placed the card in the frame, behind the photo, so the message sat against Spock’s shoulder if you held the picture up to the light.
He called McCoy. The connection crackled. McCoy’s face appeared, tired and bright.
“You look like someone handed you oxygen,” McCoy said, squinting at the screen. “Spit it out.”
“He wrote,” Jim said, and touched the frame with a knuckle. “He’s coming back. Not now. Not soon. Just… he’s coming back.”
McCoy’s mouth twisted into something softer than a grin. “Took the man a monastery to say he misses you. Figures.”
“I’m going to be ready,” Jim said, and heard the solidity in his own voice with relief. “I’m going to be good.”
“You’re already good,” McCoy said. He lifted a cup in a toast. “To idiots doing their best.”
Jim lifted an invisible glass and clinked it against the screen. He looked at the photo again and touched Spock’s hair in it with the tip of one finger, a careful, private little apology and promise.