Disclaimer: Star Trek in all its convolutions belongs to Paramount/Viacom. This story is mine. It's a fine balance, and I keep it from tumbling down by involving neither lawyers nor money. And that's as it should be.

Sex disclaimer: I wish there was sex in this. I really, really do. And I'm really, really sorry that there isn't any. So. Anyone who can't deal with m/m affection on this level needs therapy and readjustment badly, 'cause there isn't anything much here that I'd stop my grandma from reading.

Words in Vulcan and Romulan, and certain key concepts, are borrowed from Diane Duane's novels The Romulan Way and Spock's World.

Title respectfully stolen from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. 

Feed the author, who lives for attention, at janestclair15@hotmail.com
 
 

He sleeps for hours in a warm, dark place. Sometimes he dreams -- of wars in the vacuum of space, of his days here on ch'Rihan, the planet that the humans call Romulus, of an older time when he was a soldier and a lover and a much younger man. He dreams of his death and resurrection and the time in between when he was part of the mind of a friend. Not infrequently, he dreams of Jim Kirk.

What he remembers best at this late date are the hands. The fingers were always shorter than his own, but amazingly animate. They were always moving. He dreams of long nights in which those pale golden hands stroked his body, tracing cool patterns between his ribs, along his thighs. He dreams of waking to find human digits tangled so tightly with his own that he could not tell where his hands left off and the other's began. They were lovers time out of mind. He still remembers.

There was the time between as well. Jim was gone but Spock still dreamed of him at night as a happy man in a beautiful place. No fear, no suffering. Though every file listed the admiral as dead, it was more to Spock that Kirk was too far away to touch, but close enough to see. In his waking hours, he knows that this was the time Jim spent in the Nexus. He knows it was a gradual weaning period from the passion they shared in life.

While he lingers on the edge of sleep, the ghost whispers about the room. He kisses it, mentally. In this time before dawn it is restless. Soon they will be leaving.

Spock

yes beloved?

now?

soon

A pause.

now?

you always were impatient, beloved

I'm sorry

this is unlikely And a sound of telepathic laughter.

He can't remember anymore when the ghost found him. A Vulcan could never have done it. The Vulcan katra is too concrete to travel the maddening distances between worlds. Unclaimed, it only dissolves into the oblivion of space. But the human soul is less defined. No one has ever said, "The soul can do this," or "The soul cannot do that." No one ever claimed that a human soul could not travel across the galaxy to find its bondmate after death. He should not have been surprised.

Even so, it took almost a year. Word had reached him though unnamed channels that Admiral Kirk had emerged from some other plane of existence, only to die saving a planet of millions. Vaguely, he had felt the dying. But the bond, madly enough, was still there. He should have supposed it would be. Jim had told him once that during the time of Spock's own death, the bond had still existed, solidly and silent.

And then he woke one morning and he was not alone. Jim's lips brushed his in greeting, frail as a ghost and radiant with joy.

found you! Like a child who has won a game of hide and seek.

yes, t'hy'la, you found me

I have a million things to tell you

He has not mentioned this to anyone. As it is, people tend to think he is a little mad. On this alien world at the centre of the Romulan Empire, he teaches cthia, the reality-truth of which logic is the beginning. His own truth is simple. Ambassador Spock in his hundred and sixty-eighth year resides on ch'Rihan, teaches cthia to those who would know it, and lives every day with the ghost of Admiral James Kirk, his lover, wrapped around him in an embrace as close as any they shared in life.

The pool in the floor of his room is a natural one, but hands shaped it into a regular shape a thousand years ago. The water in it is so cold it hurts. The brief splash of it across his body wakes him completely, so that for a moment he is surprised to still feel Jim's presence. Then his thoughts settle again and he washes himself more completely, letting the cold help lift both dirt and sleep from him. He stands, after, and centres himself: a grey-haired half-Vulcan, shirtless in the stone chill of an alien planet, standing barefoot and still wet.

His travelling clothes and cloak are folded next to the pallet that serves as his bed. The transport, a converted farm vehicle that would not have been out of place on Soviet Earth, is expected in some twenty minutes. He needs to move on to ch'Havran, Remus. The next cell is waiting there. He's loved Romulus, the feel of it, Vulcan hardness with a very human fire added, and there are days when he is reluctant to change anything about it. In another life, it might have been his homeworld. In this one, it is the only place that still fits the man he has become.

He shoulders his pack and waits for Jim to follow him, glittering hazel in and out of crevices in the rocks.
 

 
 
 
 

jane
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