Chapter Text
1: The Complication is this: Nurse Chapel today is not Nurse Chapel yesterday
Sickbay, not long after the away mission to Psi 2000
She’d seemed so bewildered. But earnest, desperately earnest. “You couldn’t hurt me,” Nurse Chapel had said. “I’m in love with you. I know how you feel.”
Of course that was untrue, for she clearly believed he felt nothing for her, thought nothing of her. But at this very moment, Spock’s feelings, usually tucked neatly away, burst open into a horror-filled maw inside him. Seeing her like this, clinging, desperate, full of that inexplicable, empty version of love—what other feeling could it engender besides horror?
He’d been in love with her once. They’d been in love once. He’d seen it in the wry, conspiratorial grins she gave him. The way she bumped his shoulder when they walked side by side, the warmth in the way she’d teased him. The way he could feel she wanted him. He knew she remembered that. But they could not have that relationship anymore, not after what he’d done.
Did she remember that day? When his brother had come back, trying to win him over to his dangerous, chaotic side?
“You can’t deny your emotions, brother. Repress all you want, but you cannot deny them. So choose.”
The swirling time vortex had pulled at Spock, as if it had hooks in the skin under his fingernails and the insides of his eyelids. It longed to devour him. But he was not the nearest to it. Instead, there was his betrothed, T’Pring, bound and tied to the railings, and across from her, but below the balcony, just as near to the gulping, pulsing vortex that Sybok had made of the warp core, was his friend, Christine.
Choose .
As always, T’Pring, even bound and mussed, her hair falling down across her cheek, was firm and certain. Her chin was straight, jaw rock hard, as she glared daggers at Sybok, knowing him for a mentally confused patient, for someone whose words meant nothing, because he was illogical, and it was her duty to save him from that.
For her, logic was everything, duty, responsibility. If the vortex took her, if she died here, she would die with her logic intact.
But Christine—Christine was looking at him. Not imploring, she was not a girl desperate to be saved—he had always admired her boyish effervescence. And even now, forced into the role of the damsel, she stared at him with pure confidence in her set jaw and lined brow. She knew he would solve this, that he would show his great wit and skill and save everyone, defeat Sybok, win the day once more.
She didn’t know that he had no idea how to stop this. She didn’t know that after the loss of Pike, he had lost confidence in himself. He had been struggling to find meaning and purpose. His duty to logic had not been enough to support him in a cruel and illogical universe. Would emotion offer him anything more?
But seen by her eyes, he’d felt a small burgeoning of hope. What she offered could perhaps be enough. Perhaps there was no logic or justice or true fellowship in the world, but there could be love.
She trusted him.
He had to be worthy of her trust.
A fallen spar, a reflected phaser bolt, and Sybok was screaming in rage at being taken out at the ankle. Spock raced toward the time vortex, even as it grew and swelled. Christine was at the bottom of the broken ladder, he ripped off her bonds with his ferocious Vulcan strength, and was about to clasp her to him, to race away with her to safety—because he’d chosen her; more, he’d chosen love over logic, hope over duty. He wanted to be a hero to her, even if he could only be a tragic one—but her eyes had lit up, the warmth in them, the delight, because he’d saved her, just like she knew he would. “Give me a boost,” she said. “I can get to her. I have my vibrascapel for the bonds.”
He didn’t know what she meant, but she swung up him like he was a ladder, and he caught her foot, and launched her up onto the higher balcony where T’Pring was bound.
“Don’t be a fool,” he heard T’Pring say. “Can’t you hear it? It’s going to arc soon.”
“Don’t talk. I’ve got you,” Christine said, and she was cutting with the vibrascalpel, and the time vortex was warping, and then the bonds attaching T'Pring to the railing were undone. Behind them the time vortex blorped and its strange blue bands reached out.
“Go!” T’Pring cursed at her. With still bound hands she shoved Christine back toward the edge of the railing, where she would fall, but fall to safety. “He chose to save you, not me. Go!”
But Christine caught her hands. “ No . He just needed my help.”
Then the warp caught them and with a rippling, pixellated smear, they were both gone.
Spock stared into the empty space, the warp core a melted heap, the time vortex gone. He had thought he had chosen Christine, because he wanted to hope that there was something good, something worth loving in the world. But his eyes fell on Sybok and he realized that he had made the same mistake as his pathetic brother. He had chosen emotion over logic, foolish, blind emotion. Not even love, but simply pride. He wanted to be regarded by eyes that thought he was a hero. Then Christine had stolen the hero’s turn from him, rightly, because for her it wasn’t a performance put on like a mating dance, it was simply what any officer of the Enterprise did, what was right to do, the duty and logic of the moment.
He’d lost them both.
He thought she must not remember that day, this Christine with her worried expression and soulless touch. She should not touch his hands like that—he was Vulcan—but even skin to skin her mind was a vague cloud, tangled with anxiety and diffidence. She loved him like a magnet loved its opposite pole. She needed him. But he no longer felt that she liked him. But then, he no longer offered her anything to like.
That day had changed everything.
She’d looked so proud of him for his clever moves, disabling Sybok. She’d been so full of love for him, but the kind of quiet, undemanding love she was so good at. She had never asked for him to betray his fiancée. She would never. He had done that on his own. He would have mourned T’Pring, but not missed her, let Christine comfort him, and then moved on to her. He had been so selfish that he could have forgiven himself for that, for choosing to abandon his fiancée because he preferred the other woman in danger. He had let his emotions sway him into cruelty and unkindness. He should have found a way to save them both, or sacrificed his desires for duty.
He should have found a way to save everyone.
“I see things, how honest you are," Christine begged, swarming him with touch, like some monstrous python. "I know how you feel. You hide it, but you do have feelings. How we must hurt you, torture you.”
Oh, she did. She tortured him every day. Because he had gotten them back, but they had been broken along the way. What they had fished out of that time vortex was not what they’d hoped to catch. Something was missing in each woman. There was a sense of lost time; the memories that should have been recent and immediate felt long ago. They had strange confusions. And their emotional responses were incorrect.
He’d realized the severity of the situation when T’Pring had frowned at him with a cutting expressiveness that reminded him of their youth—before she had grown so composed and withdrawn. “Spock?” she asked, like she didn’t quite recognize him. “Why am I— Where am I? On the Enterprise? Shouldn’t I be—” and then she frowned again like she couldn’t quite remember. Her eyes flashed, she stared up at him, a simmering rage coming to a full roiling boil. Her relentlessly, frustratingly calm face contorting with rage was like an image from a nightmare. “What did you do ?”
McCoy had had to sedate her.
But Christine’s alteration had been even more uncanny. He had been so desperate to get her back, to finally save her. Yes, choosing emotion had been wrong, but he had bent the laws of physics to find them again, to fix his error. He had thus spared himself the consequences of his mistake . . . only, he hadn’t. He imagined reuniting with his Christine, her thanking him for saving her from an eternity of suffering. He would admit his error in thinking that saving just her would be heroic enough and ask for forgiveness. She would confess that she had long been waiting for him to choose her over T’Pring—his duty. He would let his hands settle around her waist, draw her near—
But that hadn’t occurred.
He turned to her, and she’d looked at him with those pretty blue eyes, a puzzled, distant expression in them, as if she remembered feeling something for him, but the immediacy of her overwhelming feelings were gone. Something else in them was missing too. He didn’t know what it was, except at that moment she seemed to notice it also, and the flash of fear across her face shook him to the core. She looked around at the Enterprise like it was unfamiliar, like she was remembering it, but from a long distance away. And then she looked back at him. An ache filled in her expression, like she’d found those feelings she’d had for him again, like she was clinging to them to fill that empty space, and she looked at him like he was a hero and could make everything better.
The emptiness inside her made his skin crawl. He recoiled from her—from what he had made her.
He hadn’t saved anyone.
“I love you,” she said, clasping his hands, as if feeling her mind, the desperate ragged force of that love that was holding her shell of a self together, would be anything more than horrific to him. “I don’t know why, but I love you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, because he was so sorry. He had made so many mistakes. But you could only move forward, he knew now, you could not fix the past. And so he drew his hands away, and let her go.
You couldn’t love someone you’d hurt like this. Christine had become a Frankenstein’s monster, a husk, a guilty shadow. She was the damage he’d done to her, his own failure. The cocky, confident scientist was gone. She was frightened by the gaps in her own mind, the mistakes she made while performing treatments. The one thing she’d had perfect faith in—her own mind—had without warning betrayed her.
Only it hadn’t. He had damaged it.
It seemed her other friends had also turned away from her. Her grief and bouts of fear and uncertainty confused them, made them feel they did not know her. And as for him, well, he could no longer treat her as a friend, because he could not bear to be near her when she was abject, clinging, and empty. So he treated her with a cold, alien formality. The girl who had challenged him and smiled at him and treated him like a true companion, she was dead.
So he wept, when she once again dared to tell him she loved him. Because he had loved her once, and it had destroyed her.
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