Chapter 15

Finale: Desert

Disclaimer: I watch and tell without owning much at all.

She sleeps through the tremor.

Registering 4.4 on the old Richter Scale, it causes little damage on campus—one broken window on the second floor of the biological sciences building, a ruptured gas main in the cafeteria.

The ruptured gas main is the only reason Nyota learns about the quake at all. A large sign on the cafeteria door alerts the few students still left on campus before the winter break that a hot breakfast is unavailable. Nyota doesn't care. She normally just grabs yogurt or a bagel anyway.

This morning she adds a second cup of coffee to her usual meal. She shouldn't have stayed up so late, but Spock's gift of the Vulcan poetry book had been a Lorelei, pulling her onward, each page a revelation.

Not that she is prudish, but the Vulcan poetry seems to Nyota to be more intense than the human erotica she has read. It's a surprise—this intensity from people most assume are without any emotions at all.

What we think we know about Vulcans may be completely wrong, she thinks.

As she finishes her meager breakfast and walks to the language building, Nyota's resolve to speak about the book with Spock begins to falter. She can't think of any way to ask about his reason for such a provocative gift without asking the deeper, harder question that underpins it.

What do I mean to you?

Even thinking about it now makes her feel foolish, like someone with a silly schoolgirl crush.

Maybe the best plan would be to say nothing unless he brings it up first.

Have you read any of the book I gave you, he might say, and she will either lie and tell him no, or she will look away and admit that she has, and now that he mentions it, she has several questions to ask.

More likely, he will say nothing, his purpose in giving it to her simply the usual holiday gift exchange between professors and their aides.

To her dismay, Nyota feels a flutter of anxiety when she pushes open the language building door and starts up the stairs. She's never been anxious around Spock before—not even when he was at his most formidable as her professor.

The book has changed the equation between them, tipping the balance into unknown territory.

When she reaches the top of the third floor landing, she sees that the lights are on in his office. As she makes her way down the hall, she hears voices from inside.

"Good morning, Professor," Nyota says, surprised to see Professor Artura standing inside with Spock. Both men look up when she speaks, and for a moment Spock looks…grateful, or relieved.

"This series of aftershocks has been most disturbing," the Andorian says in his lisping accent. "But Commander Spock tells me that seismic prediction is unreliable."

"The variables are so great as to render any meaningful predictions moot," Spock says, and Nyota lets her backpack drift from her shoulder to the floor.

"This makes the second one in two months, doesn't it?" she says. "I slept right through it. I guess you can get used to anything."

"Most disturbing," Professor Artura says again, shuffling past Nyota out the door.

"Andorians are," Spock says, "unusually sensitive to geologic events. Their antennae have an electromagnetic sensor that keeps them spatially oriented—"

Normally Nyota finds Spock's scientific musings interesting, but today she has trouble focusing on his words. Instead, she tries to imagine hearing him read Vulcan poetry.

With a mental shake she settles herself behind the computer console where she checks and sorts Spock's mail. She keeps her back turned to his desk, willing herself not to fidget.

I am drawn to you against my will.

She should never have stayed up so late reading.

For almost an hour she manages to soothe herself with mundane work. By now she recognizes the names of Spock's frequent correspondents—most of them non-Terrans doing Federation grant research projects. Occasionally Spock gets personal mail in his box, mostly from Vulcan addresses, though also from a few on earth, and she sets those aside for him to read later.

Today he has an official Academy notice from the Dean's office. She wonders briefly if it concerns the recent loyalty oath; the idea makes her flush with anger.

"I need a break," she says suddenly, turning and standing. Spock is sorting through a stack of student PADDs on his desk—probably the last of the computer science exams—but he puts down the one in his hand and nods.

Together they make their way to the break room across the hall, and there at one of the small round tables are Professor Artura and his aide, a short freckled first year cadet named Dawson.

"Join us!" Professor Artura says. To her left, Nyota feels Spock pull back a fraction, and she steps forward.

"I just came to make some tea," she says, and Professor Artura stretches out his hand and points to the electric kettle.

"The water is already hot," he says. "Perhaps you can brew some more of that tea you made yesterday."

Nyota recognizes an invitation when she hears it, so she busies herself opening the tea canister and measuring out the leaves into the porcelain teapot on the counter. She fills it with water from the kettle and opens the overhead cabinet to retrieve some mugs.

"Use this one," Spock says, holding the mug she gave him after the party, and she looks up at him and smiles.

"You like it?"

"How unusual," Professor Artura says before Spock can answer. "Did you make it?"

At that, Nyota laughs.

"Oh, no, not me! A local potter made it—I found it over on Kober Street. It matches the Commander's…."

Professor Artura is watching her closely, his antennae pointed forward in an attitude of attentiveness.

"….firepot…."

Nyota stumbles to a halt, averting her gaze from Spock. In all things he is intensely private—and here she is speaking of his personal possessions with a freedom that may embarrass him.

To her relief Professor Artura asks for no clarification, and she pours a cup of tea for herself and one for Spock and finally looks up at him to hand him his mug.

I'm sorry, she tries to say, cutting her eyes briefly away.

"Are you going home for the holidays?" Cadet Dawson asks, and for a moment Nyota isn't certain that he is speaking to her. Professor Artura's aide is so quiet that Nyota has sometimes wondered if he is simply shy by nature or intimidated by Spock. If so, he isn't the only cadet who clams up around him.

Not that she ever has. Indeed, her first class with him involved too many arguments to recall—not arguments, really, but disagreements about procedural matters or grading rubrics. Most of the time Spock's point of view prevailed when they tangled, though she never felt bowled over, and she usually left feeling that he had at least heard her out, even if he refused to change a grade or a rule.

She suspects that part of the reason he hired her as his aide is because he values her willingness to challenge him. How many people in his life will actually confront him, call him to account?

Except that today she feels unequal to the task.

I ravish you in my dreams.

Why that line of poetry marked with a fingerprint?

And what makes her think it is connected in any way to her?

It could be about that Vulcan woman looking out of the picture cube with dark-eyed, sultry beauty.

"I need to go home some time," she says to Cadet Dawson. "But I have this huge project to finish—and my roommate will be here. The dorm is already so empty—I hate leaving her."

She takes a gulp of her tea and almost chokes. From the corner of her eye she sees Spock watching her closely.

"Spock," Professor Artura says, motioning with his hand, "your tea will get cold if you don't drink it quickly."

Nyota peers at her own half-empty cup and laughs. Maybe her jitters today are caffeine overload—

"Just hold your hand around your mug if it does," she says, aping a breeziness she doesn't feel.

Spock looks down at his mug and Nyota laughs again, realizing that she has confused him.

"I mean, you could heat up that mug just by touching it," she said. "You're hot enough."

"I assume," Spock says, raising an eyebrow, "you mean that my core temperature is higher than the temperature of the tea."

"I think the cadet is making a pun," Professor Artura says silkily. "Surely you know the double meaning of the word hot in human vernacular. And perhaps she is making a comparison, too—saying that she is a tea mug."

Cadet Dawson splutters.

For the first time that she can remember, Nyota feels genuine anger at the Andorian professor. She darts a glance at Spock and sees him flush.

"Or perhaps the cadet simply means what she says, that Vulcan physiology is not the same as human," Spock says, his voice with the smallest edge to it.

Professor Artura shakes his head and rises, and his assistant follows. As soon as they are out of the break room, Nyota places her hand flat on the table between them and says, "I'm sorry he misconstrued what I said. I didn't mean to embarrass you—"

And then, attempting to lighten the mood, she adds, "Although, you could have replied that I could cool a mug of tea with my human touch."

To illustrate, she wraps her hands around her mug and lifts it, grinning.

"But the professor compared you to the tea mug," Spock says, picking up his own mug and cupping it in his palm, "not me. We would have to change the metaphor."

And he runs his finger tenderly across the uneven surface of the mug before looking her in the face.

The sensuality of his finger stroke—the clear reference to her as the mug in his hand—is so startling that Nyota's face grows hot and she jumps up, knocking the table and splashing tea over the edge of her cup.

"Oh!" she says, grabbing a towel from the counter and wiping up her spill. "I'm just…clumsy today."

When she finishes and returns to the office, Spock is gathering up the student PADDs and closing down his computer.

"Are you finished?" she asks, surprised. Obviously he is—and is rushing to get away. His movements are so unlike him—so ungraceful—that she feels a flash of alarm. He is quitting the field, as distant and removed as he was yesterday, and with as little explanation.

"Let me help you," she says, leaning over the side of the desk and pulling several PADDs toward her into a pile. He pauses, holding up his hand to stop her.

"Your assistance is not necessary."

In the overhead light his hand is half in shadow, but Nyota's eye is drawn to his palm—a mottled green and gray blister across the heel of his hand.

"What happened!"

Instinctively she reaches for his wrist, circling it with her thumb and forefinger, tipping his palm up.

The blister is thick and angry looking. She senses his resistance to her touch—he is pulling back—and she grips his wrist tighter, feeling his pulse like a frightened hummingbird under her thumb.

"How did you do this?" Her own alarm makes her voice hoarse and strident. She adjusts her stance so that she is standing inches from him, her other hand reaching up to cradle his injured one.

His skin is fever hot. Nyota looks up at his face and sees a sheen of fine sweat across his brow.

"A burn," Spock says, tugging his hand against her grip.

"Stop!" Nyota says, and to her amazement, he does. "You haven't treated this, have you? It's all blistered, maybe infected. Let me get the med kit from the break room."

At last she releases him as she hurries to the cabinet where the med kit is stored. She remembers finding it once before—when Spock cut his hand on the broken picture cube.

"You know," she says as she re-enters his office, "we had to do this after the last earthquake. Remember?"

She sets the large rectangular med kit box on the desk and flips it open. Inside are various antibiotic and analgesic sprays, but Spock picks up a dermaplast instead.

"Give me that," Nyota says, and again she is amazed that he complies. She unwraps the dermaplast and reaches again for his hand.

"I'll try not to hurt you," she says, and as she does, she looks up and catches an odd expression crossing his face. For a moment she pauses—and in the stillness she thinks about what she has been missing the past two days, a sense of his presence—and more than that, an awareness of who she is through his vision.

"Don't," she says, letting the word do double duty. Don't move your hand. Don't hold yourself back like this.

If she insists, if she presses forward, she knows she will break something inside him—and with a start, she realizes that she isn't sure that she wants to.

Or that he wants her to.

I am drawn to you against my will.

She sets the dermaplast gingerly across the burn, sliding her fingers around the edges to help it adhere. Her hand slows and then stops, her palm resting on his.

Heat, and thirst—she is suddenly overwhelmed with a need for water and air. Looking up quickly from his hand to his face, she is distraught to see pain there—and then, without warning, she sees him close his eyes, his breath exhaling in a single rush.

Images of the desert flood her imagination—shimmers of heat hovering over red sand, and in the background, jagged mountains looking like bricks heaved into piles. Without needing to look she knows that at her feet are thick-trunked succulents and spiny brush-like plants leaning permanently into the wind, and further off, over the mountains, large birds catching a thermal updraft.

Va'khen—the birds are called va'khen—she has always known this—has watched them a hundred times in their flight over the western mountains near Shi'Kahr.

The imagery is so vivid, so fraught with longing and homesickness that she closes her eyes to see it better, and there in the purple twilight she hears a predator's growl. Detecting the faintest skitter across a rock, she leans down, watching a six-legged a'lazb rushing for cover.

The vastness, the richness of the desert as the sun sets, delights her, and she opens her eyes and looks up at Spock, his own eyes still pressed tightly shut.

"Your home!" she whispers, blinking back tears. "Thank you for sharing it with me."

Dimly she is aware that she is still grasping his hand.

"Please—" Spock says, opening his eyes and giving her such an unreadable look that she feels her heart in her throat. He holds his uninjured hand across his chest like a buckler.

Slowly, slowly she unfurls her fingers from his.

She isn't sure what to say. She has just violated everything she knows about approaching a touch telepath—ignoring his personal space with such flagrant disregard that she is abashed. Taking a step back, she hears herself breathing hard.

"Commander, I'm—"

But nothing she can say will bring the kind of absolution she needs. She is not sorry she touched him—is, in fact, glad that she did, that she felt him again—not just the warmth of his hand, but the impressions of his mind.

For she is certain that the images that flooded her were his—though the idea that they were not given freely makes her ashamed.

"Please," Spock says again, though even as she listens, she hears his voice take on a different quality than before—more determined, more defined. "Be safe as you travel home."

"I will," she says, flustered, suspecting that some truth has been refused admission to the conversation, that whatever he had been about to say has been silenced.

With that, he turns toward his desk and gathers up the other PADDs and notebooks, not looking back as she picks up her backpack and slips it over her shoulder.

Pausing in the doorway, Nyota waits a beat to see if he will say anything else, but Spock is busy packing his satchel and clearing his desk. She walks on down the hall, looking into the darkened break room before heading down the steps.

As she had yesterday, she measures her steps to her thoughts, walking slowing across the campus as she tries to sort out what happened just now. When did this relationship become so awkward, so hard to understand?

She thinks again about her first day working as Spock's aide—her resolve not to quit despite an inauspicious beginning. But soon enough they had fallen into a comfortable rhythm, working with students in the lab or discussing their different ongoing projects.

Walking down Kober Street to the ceramics shop—or the quick trip to the tea shop in Sausalito—times spent bantering good-naturedly, a pleasant diversion from work—why have those times become rare?

He's clearly uncomfortable with her. And yet—

She culls back through the images of his home—not just the visual impressions, but the emotional overtones they conjured up in her—in him—the sense of safety, of refuge—of a need to feel the comfort of the dry heat of the desert, and paradoxically, the sense of being parched, with an ache so intense that his thoughts are consumed with it.

With her.

And suddenly she knows this. As sure as she knows anything, she knows this.

He isn't upset with her. He's running away.

With a stumble she stops in her tracks, a student following close behind forced to veer off the paved pathway to avoid bumping into her.

"Sorry!" she says apologetically to the retreating student's back. For a minute she continues to stand immobile in the center of the path—and then with a lurch, she pivots around and heads back to the language building.

She takes the steps two at a time, but even before she reaches the third floor, she knows Spock is not there. She doesn't feel him there.

Sure enough, from the landing she sees that the office lights are off, the door closed.

Pelting back down the stairs, she comes to a decision.

The faculty apartment building where Spock lives is across campus—a five minute sprint that she makes in four. By the time she gets to the door, she is breathing heavily and she leans over, her hands on her knees, as she catches her breath.

When she can breathe without huffing, she reaches up and presses the call button for the intercom.

Nothing.

She hadn't considered that he might have gone anywhere else. His satchel was full of PADDs—and he had work to finish. It wouldn't be..logical…to go anywhere else. In spite of herself she grins at her deduction.

And then she hears footsteps behind the door and she watches the handle flip down.

"Commander—" she prepares to say, not sure what else she will tell him.

But when the outside door opens, a young woman buttoning a heavy green overcoat exits, and seeing Nyota standing there, holds the door obligingly. With a nod, Nyota slips through, walking the short distance to Spock's apartment door.

Through the glass inset she can see that a light is on inside.

The building door behind her slams shut suddenly and she jumps.

This is probably a very bad idea. Turn around right now and go back out.

But she is nailed to the floor, unable to move, paralyzed. She shuts her eyes and tries to feel again his desert longing.

Like someone in a dream, she raises her hand against her will and presses the chime, trusting that when he opens the door some words will come to her. She leans close to the door and says, "Commander Spock?"

Down the hall another door opens and an older man emerges, moving quickly past her and pushing open the outside door. Nyota follows him with her gaze, bracing herself as a gush of cool air rushes in. When she turns back to Spock's door, she angles her head to look more closely through the small pebbled glass inset. Light only, and nothing more distinct.

She presses the chime again.

Obviously her brilliant deduction about his hurrying home is incorrect. An errand, or a meal at one of the nearby diners—something has delayed him. So much for being able to feel where he is.

For a moment she considers waiting—but that presupposes that he will be home sometime soon. She has little to base that conclusion on.

Fishing her comm from her pocket, she considers giving him a call, but something gives her pause.

"Please"—she had heard him say. At the time she had thought he was asking her to remove her hand. Now she isn't sure.

She slips the comm back into her pocket and pulls out her paper memo pad. A comm call demands a reply. A note grants him more freedom, more time.

Where are you? she writes. I'm sorry if I upset you.

In two sentences she manages to be both petulant and maudlin. She tears the paper in half and tucks it into her pocket.

I am not leaving for several days, she rehearses, preparing to write. Call me if you need anything.

Better, but still impersonal.

I am not leaving for several days, she writes. Call me if you need—

For a moment she hesitates.

-me."

There. The right word. The word she means.

She folds the note in half and shoves it into the mail slot beside the door.

It's an overture if he wants it to be. Otherwise, simple information only.

Like a desert landscape with a muted palette and hidden life—available if he looks closely, if he risks the journey.

X X X X X X X

The trip home took forever.

An exaggeration, of course, the kind his mother liked to use to make her descriptions more colorful, more entertaining, less…factual.

The flitter ride took, Spock knew, 14.7 minutes.

Forever.

His father drove in stony silence; his mother's face was pinched in distress. From the back seat Spock caught glimpses of them in the rear-facing mirrors, though he tried to keep his gaze focused on the landscape whizzing by.

Not until they were back home—his father going immediately to his study and closing the door—had his mother followed him to his bedroom, propping her hand on the door frame, watching him as he sat on the side of his bed.

"So," Amanda said, her voice uncharacteristically tentative, "aren't you going to tell me anything?"

"You know everything there is to tell, Mother," Spock said. "I have decided on Starfleet instead."

"But," she began, "I thought—"

Spock glanced at his mother and she fell silent. What more was there to say? He had thought the same thing as well, that he would accept his appointment to the Vulcan Science Academy—his education, his academic achievements, validated at last.

As they were. The High Councilor had made that clear.

With two steps Amanda moved toward the bed and sat beside him, her arm trailing his, her fingers drifting over the top of his hand. A surge of sorrow engulfed him as she did—like a wave he could neither anticipate nor control.

For several minutes they sat that way, until Amanda stood up, sighing.

"I meant what I said," she said, pausing in the door. "Whatever you do, I am proud of you."

He slept poorly that night, waking frequently and listening for the telltale sounds that often followed some disagreement about him—his parents arguing quietly, intensely. But tonight he heard only the night sounds of insects and occasional calls of va'khen as they circled overhead, looking for unwary prey.

Close to morning he dozed off at last, sleeping through the sound of his father taking the flitter to town. Vaguely he was aware of his mother's movements—kitchen noises and the smell of Terran coffee wafting down the hall, and later he heard her turning on the shower.

He roused himself reluctantly and made his way to the kitchen, slicing some flatbread and pouring himself a cup of coffee. Balancing his breakfast in one hand, he went outside on the veranda, standing near the edge and watching the shadows race across the surface of the nearest hills as the sun rose.

A day ago this had been an ordinary view, nothing more than the scenery outside his house.

Now it was a place soon to be lost to him—a place he would visit from time to time, and come to in his imagination or his dreams, perhaps, but a place that was no longer home.

His coffee and bread finished, he set his cup on the ledge and pushed open the gate at the top of the stone steps leading to the garden. From the border he could see that the Terran pepper plants his mother had germinated from seeds several months ago were already waist high. A row of spindly Vulcan ones grew beside them in a scraggly line. How odd that the native plants were lagging so dramatically in development. Spock stepped over several small hills of tubers until he reached the pepper plants, leaning down and fingering their leaves.

The Vulcan plants were paper thin—their leaves only a few cells wide, the better to absorb the infrequent rainfall. On the other hand, the thin leaves also lost moisture faster than the Terran plants with their fat, almost greasy outer layering—

Spock reached out to pluck a leaf from a cayenne bush to examine when something stung him sharply on his wrist. Jerking back in alarm, he caught a glimpse of a k'karee, its blue-gray coloration helping it blend into the shadows under the pepper plants.

A juvenile, fortunately, only six to eight inches long, its snakelike body undulating from side to side until it was out of sight.

Immediately Spock turned toward the house and loped across the garden. An adult k'karee could inject enough neurotoxin to kill a full-size le-matya with a single bite. The few Vulcans who were bitten each year rarely died—unless, of course, they did not get the anti-venom in time.

Already his breathing was becoming labored, though from anxiety or because of the venom, Spock wasn't sure. He tried to slow his breathing and conserve his energy, but by the time he reached the stone steps, he was so lightheaded that he thought he might faint.

And then he did fall—the ground rushing up to meet him, his mouth filling with dirt and sand.

With a supreme effort he turned his head so that his nose was clear of the ground.

It was the last movement he would make for the next 20 hours.

He could feel his body, but he couldn't move it. Underneath his left rib a rock jabbed him with every breath. His ankle had twisted in the fall and throbbed, and his wrist was bent at an unnatural angle.

With the paralysis was a tingling, burning sensation in the nerve endings in his hands and feet. He tried to call out but could not move his mouth, could not even take a breath forceful enough to cough.

His mother had been in the shower when he walked down to the garden. Although he typically kept his thoughts and feelings tucked away from his parents, he focused on opening up to his mother, alerting her to his distress.

Nothing he had felt so far—not the shock of seeing the k'karee hanging for a sickening moment from his wrist, not the near-panic of feeling his knees buckle or his arms turn into useless heavy things—nothing frightened him as much as realizing that for the first time in his life he was really and truly mindblind.

His mother was not there. Nor his father, nor even the faint presence of T'Pring.

No one. With one stroke the k'karee had rendered him mute and deaf in every way possible.

He refused to panic. Logically, his mother would notice his absence soon and would find him here, humped over at the bottom of the steps. She would call the medics, the anti-venom would be administered in a timely fashion, and the paralysis would recede. A day or so to recover—and no lasting ill effects.

All he had to do was keep his wits about him, cultivating patience while waiting to be discovered.

His time sense was not affected by the neurotoxin, nor was his spatial orientation. He knew that his head was a meter from the rock wall that surrounded the veranda, that he was lying on a southwesterly axis, that 4.52 minutes had passed from the time he was bitten until now.

Hardly any time at all.

Forever.

His face was turned away from the sun but he could feel the heat on his ear and neck—and if he concentrated, on the upturned palms of his hands.

The rest of his torso was covered by his long-sleeved sleeping clothes—the loose pants and baggy shirt rucked up underneath him. Somewhere between the row of pepper plants and the veranda wall he had lost his sandals.

He tried again to reach his mother through their bond.

Silence.

The rock under his rib shortened his breath. The sun began to burn the tip of his ear.

Blinking became more difficult, though he still retained some control of his eyes. He was afraid to close them, afraid he would not be able to open them again.

Another 22 minutes went by, and still his mother did not come outside. Something skittered over the sole of his foot. The dirt in his mouth left a tang of iron.

He was a bundle of random impressions—a chaos of sensations without any control. He forced himself to calm down, to think about something besides the pain in his arm, the throb in his ankle.

Yesterday. He would think about yesterday. It had started out so propitiously. After an early morning run he had showered and dressed before either of his parents had risen. Too nervous to sit still, he had made himself tea and then had drunk it while pacing around in the study, running his fingers along the edges of his father's books, flicking the newsfeeds on and off, stretching out on the sofa and willing himself to settle down before his father noticed.

"I am hardly anxious."

Even as he told his mother this later while they waited in the anteroom at the Vulcan Science Academy, he had not expected her to believe it. The words were wishful thinking more than a statement of fact.

Where was his mother now?

Time flies when you are having fun, she often said, and though he reassured her that his own sense of the passage of time was steady, chronological, immutable, he understood the metaphor. Perhaps thinking about yesterday would not be the best way to pass time now.

Instead, he replayed his last chess match with his teacher, Truvik, watching the moves again in his mind's eye, and discovering, to his amazement, that the memories also called up the original emotional associations. When Truvik conceded defeat at last, Spock felt a flush of satisfaction that he recalled perfectly—indeed that he felt again, as if the match were just now concluding.

He had always known that he could recall mental images eidetically. How odd that he had not realized that his emotional life was equally available for review.

87 minutes since the k'karee bite.

An insect whizzed in front of his eyes, hovering for a moment before speeding away.

He recalled a particularly difficult piece of music he had learned for the ka'athyra, his mother's pleasure when he played it for her, his father's quiet approval humming through the bond.

"I have nothing left to teach you," the musician T'Cara had told him recently, and Spock had felt both pleased and sad at her words.

The sun moved higher in the sky and a shimmer of heat waffled the air. He was in real pain now, his focus so scattered that he could no longer submerge it. His thirst was another kind of pain, and for a moment he imagined the pleasure of biting down on his tongue, releasing a trickle of blood to wet his mouth. It remained a fantasy only.

He began to worry about his mother. By now she must have noticed his absence, must have seen that his bedroom door was open, that he was not inside. Could she have fallen in the shower, or become ill? Could she have left the house without him knowing? He wasn't sure of anything anymore.

The k'karee toxin was making his stomach sour—and for a moment he was afraid that he might vomit and choke himself, unable to clear to his throat. In growing desperation he tried to find his parents through the bond—but it was as if he was standing in an abandoned house, calling out to people who had moved away long ago.

Even during his kahs-wan he had not felt so alone. Or as helpless.

So this was what T'Pring's grandmother, bound to a motorized wheelchair, dealt with, and he hadn't understood until now. T'Zela managed to navigate her world with curiosity and good humor. Would he be able to accept such a situation with the same grace?

This speculation was neither logical nor…comforting.

"Spock!"

His mother's voice from the veranda—his heart beat faster in relief.

But instead of hearing her rushing down the stone steps to where he lay in the sand, Spock listened to the clink of his abandoned coffee mug being picked up from the ledge, the soft shuffle of his mother's footfalls, and the door to the house open and close with a muted bang.

She hadn't seen him.

In a flash he realized that he lay so close to the retaining wall that his mother would not have noticed him unless she had leaned over the railing of the veranda and looked straight down. More likely she had noticed his cup and called out, thinking he was in the garden.

His despair almost overwhelmed him.

By now the sun was close to being overhead. The pinna of his ear was so badly burned that he was sure it was covered with blisters. As the sunlight crept across his face, his eyes fluttered open and shut reflexively—until suddenly, without warning, his vision blacked out, as if someone had turned off the light.

"Mother!"

When he was 13 and drowning in the spillway, he had called out to his mother across the void—across the vastness of space as he sank to the bottom of the river in Seattle, calling to her as she planted desert flowers in the front yard of his home on Vulcan—and she had heard him.

Now he was a few dozen meters from where she sorted the breakfast dishes and drank a second cup of coffee—and he could not speak and she could not hear.

The irony was not lost on him.

The k'karee had bitten him four hours and six minutes ago.

If this were a chess game, what would he do now? He pictured Truvik sitting in his office at the school, musing over a chess game in play.

What you want, his teacher had told him, is mastery over your opponent. What you need is mastery over yourself.

What hubris to think that he had mastered anything about himself! The k'karee had given the lie to that notion.

Even yesterday, as he stood before the admissions committee at the Vulcan Science Academy, he had given in to his emotions in a way that Truvik would have found disturbing.

Not simply because he betrayed the ideal of Vulcan equanimity, but because he had tipped his hand and revealed his vulnerability.

Stonn had taken advantage of him for years for just that reason.

If you ignore the dangers from below, you will continue to lose.

He must have slipped into delirium for a little while as he lay sightless, his body leached of moisture from the heat, his mouth so parched that when he became aware again, his thirst was all-consuming, eclipsing the jab from the rock under his rib, worse than his sprained ankle or his wrist, wrenched and numb.

He thought of water, imagined dipping his head under the spigot in the kitchen, letting the cold water run over his chapped lips and swollen tongue. Or biting into a ripe kaasa, the juice running down his chin. Or dipping his spoon into a bowl of plomeek soup, laced with cumin as his mother made it, or even bland, the way T'Pring preferred.

He imagined T'Pring with a spoon at her lips and thought about the first time he had kissed her—one afternoon at T'Zela's house, when he was 14 and still hopeful that they might become friends. She had been skeptical when he told her what he wanted to try—had eyed him with what he realized later was mild distaste—but had agreed to humor him, standing stock still and letting him approach her. And as he had seen his parents do, he pressed his mouth to hers, feeling the firmness of her lips and her warm breath as she exhaled.

If she was disappointed, she did not show it. His own disappointment, however, stayed with him for some time—and not until recently had either of them shown any further interest in each other sexually.

She would be angry about yesterday, he knew.

If he could only have a drink of water, he could clear the dust from his throat and explain it to her. And she would have to listen, would have to understand.

At some point in the afternoon he heard his mother's flitter start up. Errands, or a meeting with the students she was tutoring at the local secondary school, two boys and a girl struggling with proficiency in Standard. Spock had met them once when he had borrowed the flitter and dropped her off at the school first.

"You should speak to them," his mother said. "They want to meet the famous chess champion."

But he had demurred, embarrassed by his mother's drawing attention to him this way.

"It won't take but a minute," Amanda had insisted. Realizing that continuing to resist would waste more time than a quick trip into the building, Spock had reluctantly agreed and walked his mother to the classroom where the three children sat waiting.

The boys were brothers, only two years apart in age—a rarity in Vulcan families. The girl could not have been older than 10, though she looked much smaller and younger.

Their eyes lit up when his mother entered the room—surprising Spock with their obvious display of affection for his mother.

"I told you I'd bring him one day," she said, waving her arm toward him. The children sat mutely, staring at him, and Amanda stood to the side, as if she were waiting for him to do something. After an awkward moment he told the children hello and then turned and walked back out. It wasn't what his mother had wanted from him—he was sure of that—but he was at a loss to know what she had wanted. He thought little more about it.

Until now, lying in the cooling air as the sun started to slip behind the distant mountains.

The noise of the flitter returned—and his mother's voice again, calling him as she walked through the house.

A second flitter soon after—his father coming home.

As the sun set completely, the temperature fell and Spock began to shake in the cold.

"Something is wrong," he heard his mother say when she opened the kitchen door briefly. "He didn't even take a bag—"

"He will contact you when he wants to," Sarek said.

The door shut again and the voices became too indistinct to make out.

When he had lain on the ground 14 hours and 10 minutes after the k'karee bite, he blinked his eyes rapidly at the fuzzy image that suddenly swam in front of him. For a fraction of a second he thought of the stories he and his friends had entertained themselves with as children, of sirshos'im, wraithlike soul eaters who wandered the desert, pretending to befriend travelers before stealing their katras.

He blinked again, and the fuzzy image resolved itself into T'Kuht, Vulcan's sister planet, at this time of the month a mere slender crescent of white. In a few minutes, his vision was clear enough that he could see stars as they emerged in the darkening sky.

With a start, Spock realized that his inner eyelid must have slid into place earlier, protecting his eyesight from the direct rays of the sun. Now that the sun had set—

Fascinating.

The night sounds began in earnest—the keening of va'khen on the hunt, the soughing of the wind as the thermal updrafts picked up. He remembered the night he and Sybok had slept out under the stars—until the le-matya had stalked them. The breathless run back across the wasteland in Sybok's arms—his father's silent fury later.

That night Spock had been certain that he was dying—that his katra would drift away, unmoored to anyone or anything. He began to wonder if he was playing out the same scenario now.

His thirst raged on.

Even as his parents turned off the house lights and retired for the night, Spock dreamed of water. He sniffed the air, hoping for dew. And then, almost 20 hours after the k'karee bit him, he moved his tongue from the top of his mouth and thrust it into the cold air between his teeth.

He had moved.

Elated, he twitched his cheek.

And waggled the fingers of one hand, and then the other.

In a few minutes he spit out the dirt still in his mouth and turned his head slowly to the other side.

With movement came renewed pain—though this pain was welcomed, a harbinger of good tidings.

Before he could walk he had to stand, and before he could stand he had to sit for a few minutes and focus on breathing. At last, however, he was able to place one foot on the bottom stone step, and then, with a shambling, forward motion, he climbed the steps to the veranda.

With a shaking hand he reached out and pushed open the door to the kitchen. There was the spigot he had fantasized about for hours.

Not bothering to wash the sand and dirt from his mouth, he turned the tap on and leaned into the stream of water, gulping it down, feeling the grit on his tongue and between his teeth. He drank and drank—and then promptly threw it all up in the sink, his stomach a hard, painful knot.

He leaned back into the water, letting it run into his mouth but being more careful to drink slowly, tipping his head back and letting the water run over his face, the chill of the water against his sunburned skin almost unbearable.

"What are you doing?"

His mother flipped on the kitchen lights and rushed to his side, and Spock closed his eyes and searched for her in his mind. She was there, her worry as bright as a fire, and her relief even brighter.

He was too tired to speak. Instead, opening his eyes he watched her hovering beside him, and he showed her the image of the k'karee in the garden, and himself sprawled across the ground.

He felt rather than heard his father moving rapidly to the study where he called the medics.

The next day he slept until deep in the morning. As he had known she would be, his mother was there when he awoke, ready to ply him with the first of many cups of tea he drank that day in a futile attempt to feel fully hydrated.

His father had already left by the time Spock rose, which was not surprising. After all, Sarek had work to do in town, and the medics had assured him that his son would recover—had marveled, in fact, at the function of Spock's human spleen.

That night when he returned home, Sarek said little at the evening meal and went to the study and shut his door afterward.

Over a final cup of tea, Amanda exchanged glances with Spock.

"You should speak to him," she said, but this time Spock could not make himself comply.

He went to bed soon after, his arms folded behind his head, careful not to dislodge the dermaplasts on his badly burned ear and the palms of his hands. The burns were nothing—a few more days and he could remove his bandages. He doubted he would even have any scarring.

His thirst, however, could not be slaked.

Or rather, the ghost of his thirst, like a mythical sirshos'im, sidling up to him and stealing his contentment.

Like his father's anger and disappointment, which threatened to travel with him no matter how far he ran.

X X X X X X X X

He is meditating when the tremor strikes.

One minute he is sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor, his lighted asenoi flickering before him, and the next he is reaching out instinctively to catch the firepot as it tumbles from its tripod.

As he stretches his hands forward, the hot, fragrant oil spills onto his palm and ignites the area rug where he sits. A human would have cursed; Spock almost does.

With his left hand he grabs the asenoi, lowering it to the floor gently. With his right hand he pounds the floor and smothers the flame. Oil is everywhere—soaking his pants leg, spreading in a puddle across floor, even splashing onto his ka'athyra that he had propped up beside him after a fruitless effort earlier to calm himself with music.

For several minutes he rushes to clean up the mess and change his clothes. Only later, when the wet towels are in the wash and the asenoi has been wiped off and righted on its tripod, does he examine the burn on his palm. Already the skin looks shiny and taut. A blister, certainly, across the entire heel of his hand.

Not the worst burn he's ever had, but bad enough. He makes a mental note to cover it with a dermaplast.

Before he can, however, his computer chimes in the other room and he walks down the hall to the living area.

A note from the Academy—an alert about the tremor. Minor damage reported, and no injuries. His eyes flick quickly over what proves to be an unnecessary email.

Another Academy email catches his eye, one he has read twice since receiving it yesterday—not something he normally does, not something he needs to do with an eidetic memory.

It is a notice that he may have to serve on an academic council when a disciplinary hearing convenes. One of the instructors in the engineering department has been charged with violating the rules against fraternization. Spock knows few details except that the charge involves a consensual sexual relationship between the professor and a student.

The attachment on the email is what Spock has read twice—the heavily cross-referenced handbook listing the regulations.

They haven't changed since he read them carefully on his own four months ago, the day after Nyota became his TA.

For 8.32 minutes he sits in front of the computer, staring at the screen without seeing anything, as blind as if his inner eyelid were protecting him from things too hard to view.

Since handing the poetry book to Nyota yesterday, Spock has neither eaten nor slept. Nor does he expect to be able to now. Instead, he decides to shower and go to the office, perhaps finishing up his grading and leaving before Nyota gets there.

For all his careful planning, however, Spock has not counted on Professor Artura's intrusion as soon as he unlocks his office. The Andorian is clearly distraught by the tremor in the night—distraught beyond what it merits, actually. But Spock forces himself to listen as the professor complains about the series of earthquakes that have shaken his composure.

When Nyota enters the building, Spock knows—he hears the front door shut in the distance and feels the air pressure shift slightly. Then her boots on the steps—she is climbing the three flights with less bounce than usual—an indication that she is tired?

"Good morning, Professor," Nyota says, and Spock is hopeful that the Andorian will take his cue to go back to his office to work. To Spock's disappointment, however, the professor continues to complain about the earthquake—a waste of energy, certainly, and Spock has to refrain from saying so.

Nyota, on the other hand, sounds…if not exactly sympathetic, at least tolerant.

"This makes the second one in two months, doesn't it?" she says. "I slept right through it. I guess you can get used to anything."

Finally Professor Artura leaves and Spock turns to the student PADDs splayed across his desk. To his relief, Nyota does not mention the party or the book of poetry. He knows that she is quite busy with a project in Admiral Spaulding's xenolinguistics class. Hopefully she has not had time to look closely at his gift.

From his vantage point at his desk, Spock is able to watch Nyota unobserved as she works for the next hour, her back turned to him as she focuses on the computer monitor he has set up for her on a small table. To his dismay his attention drifts frequently from the final exams he is grading to the slope of her shoulder, the curve of her neck.

"I need a break," she says suddenly, turning and standing. To refuse to join her might evoke her suspicion, so he nods and walks with her to the break room. Immediately he regrets it—Professor Artura and his aide are already there, sitting at a table and offering them tea.

For a moment he considers returning to his office instead. However, Nyota moves gracefully to the cabinet, opening a door and lifting out the tea canister he recently refilled with her favorite Kenyan tea. On a whim, he takes the mug she had given him yesterday from the storage drawer and says, "Use this one."

Her reaction is exactly as he had hoped. She gifts him with a smile.

"You like it?"

"How unusual," Professor Artura says before Spock can answer. "Did you make it?"

Laughing, Nyota says, "Oh, no, not me! A local potter made it—I found it over on Kober Street. It matches the Commander's….firepot…."

Her halting cadence, her quick look up at him—he recognizes that she is embarrassed. Is she concerned that Professor Artura will interpret her gift as being inappropriate, too personal?

He squirms, thinking about the poetry book.

"Are you going home for the holidays?" Professor Artura's aide asks Nyota.

"I need to go home some time," she says. "But I have this huge project to finish—and my roommate will be here. The dorm is already so empty—I hate leaving her."

Spock is baffled by his own reaction. He wants her to hurry and go home, to leave for the holidays so he can walk the campus without the fear of meeting her along the paved pathways, on the cafeteria steps, in his office.

On the other hand, he is overcome with a wave of loneliness at her words.

"Spock," Professor Artura says, motioning with his hand, "your tea will get cold if you don't drink it quickly."

"Just hold your hand around your mug if it does," Nyota says. "I mean, you could heat up that mug just by touching it. You're hot enough."

"I assume," Spock says, raising an eyebrow, "you mean that my core temperature is higher than the temperature of the tea."

"I think the cadet is making a pun," Professor Artura says. "Surely you know the double meaning of the word hot in human vernacular. And perhaps she is making a comparison, too—saying that she is a tea mug."

Even Professor Artura's quiet aide reacts, and Spock feels his face flush. If he says nothing, he will seem to assent. Yet knowing how to confront the professor's overly-familiar witticism is a challenge.

His mother would have replied with a witticism of her own. His father could simply stare someone into silence.

Spock decides to sound matter-of-fact—neither acknowledging the professor directly nor ignoring him.

"Or perhaps the cadet simply means what she says, that Vulcan physiology is not the same as human."

Professor Artura shakes his head and rises, and his assistant follows. As soon as they are out of the break room, Nyota places her hand flat on the table between them and says, "I'm sorry he misconstrued what I said. I didn't mean to embarrass you—"

Embarrassment would be illogical. He opens his mouth to tell her so but she speaks first.

"Although, you could have replied that I could cool a mug of tea with my human touch."

To his horror, he proves to be his mother's son, his own comeback slipping from his lips before he is aware.

"But the professor compared you to the tea mug," he says, picking up his mug and cupping it in his palm, "not me. We would have to change the metaphor."

He grips the mug, astonished at what he has said.

Jumping up, Nyota knocks the table and splashes tea over the edge of her cup.

"Oh!" she says, grabbing a towel from the counter and wiping up her spill. "I'm just…clumsy today."

This is what he has become, someone so tired, so unfocused, so distracted with longing that he disgusts the person he cares most about.

As she wipes up the table, he hurries to his office and begins packing up his things.

When Nyota follows him he angles his face away from her, and when she tries to help him gather up the student PADDs, he motions for her to stop.

Before he realizes what is happening, Nyota catches sight of his burned hand and grabs his wrist, twisting his palm upward and leaning over to see it better. She is so close that he can smell the scent of the lotion she uses when the weather is dry, can see a spring of her hair coiled at her temple. Feeling his chest constrict, he tries to pull back.

"How did you do this?" she says, moving closer.

The room becomes unbearably hot.

"A burn," Spock says, tugging his hand against her grip.

"Stop! You haven't treated this, have you? It's all blistered, maybe infected. Let me get the med kit from the break room."

At last she releases him as she hurries to the cabinet where the med kit is stored. If he leaves now—

But he is paralyzed, unable to move or speak. When she returns with the med-kit and opens it, he watches, mutely, picking up a dermaplast but handing it over when she asks for it.

"I'll try not to hurt you," she says, and without wanting to he searches for a double meaning in her words.

"Don't," she says when he tries to pull his hand away again.

She sets the dermaplast gingerly across the burn, sliding her fingers around the edges to help it adhere. Her hand slows and then stops, her palm resting on his.

If he were logical—if he were a rational, thinking person—he would step back and remove her hand. If he were able to move.

He is as paralyzed as he was the day of the k'karee bite—feverish and uncomfortably cold, his body betraying him, and his mind, too, sensing Nyota looking for him as the memories of the desert landscape of Vulcan come rushing back. Her face looms in his vision and he shuts his eyes in a vain attempt not to see her.

He is there again, in his parents' garden, face down in the red soil, his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth, aching with a thirst that is worse than any physical pain. The birds overhead, the wavering heat, the plants his mother has carefully cultivated at the border of the garden—he sees them again, and feels his desperation as keenly as he did that day—and because Nyota stands waiting, as silent as a mythical sirshos'im, and as persuasive, he allows her to see what he sees, and lets her feel the homesickness that sometimes threatens to break him apart.

"Your home!" he hears her whisper. "Thank you for sharing it with me."

"Please—" Spock says, letting the word do double duty. Please let me go. Please come to me.

Slowly, slowly, Nyota unfurls her fingers from his.

"Commander, I'm—"

He is abashed at his breach of decorum. Imposing a telepathic impression on someone this way—without her foreknowledge or consent….

"Please," Spock says again, casting about desperately for something to say that will grant him absolution. "Be safe as you travel home."

Even as he says it, he senses Nyota's confusion and hurt.

Turning toward his desk, he gathers up the other PADDs and notebooks, careful to avert his gaze as Nyota picks up her backpack and leaves.

Her boots on the steps again—and the subtle motion of air as the front door opens and shuts. Sure that she is gone, he breathes deeply, finally able to move.

Almost sprinting to his apartment, he examines the details he had let slip from his mind to hers—not just the images of the desert or the pain of his earlier ordeal—but the very real parallel of that memory to how he feels now.

How paralyzed he is.

How parched he is for her.

The urgency he feels to touch her when they are together, to seek out her company when he is lonely, to share his memories with her and learn her story—

She knows this about him now.

He has to get away.

Just inside his apartment door is the temperature control. He palms it as high as it will allow and then throws his satchel to the sofa, sitting on the adjoining chair and pulling up the work mail Nyota had flagged on his comm. If his parents are heading to Seattle tomorrow, he might be able to catch a shuttle and arrive about the same time—if he doesn't have to serve on the discipline committee.

His mind races as he decides to read the Academy mail first. The professor accused of sexual misconduct has chosen to resign rather than face a hearing—which frees Spock to leave town immediately. He barely pauses to consider how inappropriate his relief is.

Next he opens a note from his mother, scanning it quickly for their arrival time, but to his surprise he reads that his parents will not be coming to Seattle for the holidays after all. His father's medics have advised against it so soon after his surgery.

At this news, he sits for a minute, nonplussed.

He had counted on being surrounded by his family—of finding a refuge in their company, or at least a distraction. And a private word with Chris—that would have been helpful.

Seattle is still a possibility—his aunt Cecilia would be glad to have him—but he calls up the shuttle schedules for Vulcan instead.

He really should go home.

Nothing tonight, but he can catch a flight early tomorrow morning.

The intercom buzzes, startling him.

Holding the comm in his hand, he sits, immobile, unable to rise. The only people who ever ring his door chime are neighbors—lately more often than not one young blonde woman who has an unusual number of computer complaints that he is called on to repair.

But the intercom is for the building's outside door. He expects no one, knows no one who would visit.

Someone pressing the wrong apartment button? Undoubtedly.

And then he is startled again, this time so badly that his hand shakes, when his door chimes.

"Commander Spock?"

Holding his breath, he sees Nyota's shadow in the dimpled glass inset in the door.

The chime—again.

Opening the door and inviting her in would require him to be able to walk across the room; walking across the room could only happen if he could stand up from the chair.

He sits, frozen, silent.

I ravish you in my dreams.

She knows this about him now, too.

From where he sits he can see her shadow bob and weave—and then he hears the silky hiss of paper sliding into the mail slot.

He waits until the outside door slams, imagines her walking across campus, her arms pumping back and forth as she often does to ward off the chill, considers how long it takes her to greet her roommate and perhaps join her for dinner.

And only then, when he is certain that she is beyond his reach, does he stand up, wobbly legged, and walk the few steps to the mail slot, unlatching the bolt and slipping his hand inside, fingering the paper and carrying it with him to the sofa to read.

I am not leaving for several days. Call me if you need me.

If you need me.

The subordinate clause laid bare, free of any artifice, a hopeful, future tense in the phrase.

If he needs her.

Crumpling the paper in his uninjured hand, he walks to his bedroom and opens the closet, tugging his duffel from the floor. Enough clothes for a few days—shirts designed to wick away daytime perspiration, a tightly woven jacket for the cool desert nights, his hiking boots.

Seeing the heirloom ka'athyra on the bedside table, he picks it up by the headstock and lets the light play over the surface, looking for any remnants of asenoi oil or damage from the flame. After a moment he places the ka'athyra in his duffel, a sudden memory of finding his scanner there when Chris gave it back to him all those years ago.

Spock still isn't sure why his father sent the ka'athyra to him—intimations of mortality before the surgery, he supposes, or a quiet peace offering. Time to return it to the person who plays it best—if for no other reason than to keep it safe—not here, where the vagaries of moisture and fire and the unpredictable movements of the earth put it at risk.

If he can get back home, to the familiar comfortable heat, away from the wet tumultuous landscape of San Francisco—if he can lie awake in his childhood bed, reading The Odyssey or listening to his father playing music in another room…if he can meet with T'Pring and resolve the uncertainty he feels about her—perhaps then, after quiet evenings of drinking tea with his mother and watching the newsfeeds with his father, perhaps then he will feel safe.

What he thinks he knows about himself will finally be clear. He will be like a blind man whose vision is restored, or like a traveler in the desert, finding water under the sand, quenching his thirst at last.

A/N: More than one reviewer has warned me to expect pitchforks and hate mail, that no resolution will be satisfying—this is, after all, a story rife with UST from first to last.

But I hope that even if you heft your pitchfork, you will send a review.

"What We Think We Know" is the prequel to the resolution you might be looking for, a series of three stories that begin with "Slips of the Tongue" (picking up with the next morning when Spock boards the shuttle for Vulcan—told from both his and his mother's points of view) and then continuing with "The Visitor" (told by Nyota and Chris), and having the more…traditional…resolution to UST in "The Word You Mean" (from Nyota's and Spock's perspectives).

I wrote and posted my very first fanfiction almost a year ago, in January 2010, and I thought it would be my only one. Thank you to all the readers and reviewers who have tolerated my meandering around in my own little time line, willy nilly, eavesdropping on Spock and Nyota.

A special thanks to StarTrekFanWriter, whose excellent "Descartes' Error" was the reason I wrote my first story, and whose support since then has been invaluable.

As to what Spock and Nyota get up to next, I'm not sure—but I am sure the writing bug will bite again soon!