Archive of Our Own

With none of the usual accuracy that Spock had come to expect from himself, he realized that at some point during his time on the Enterprise under Captain James Tiberius Kirk, he had begun to experience feelings toward his captain. Knowing that he had such feelings was only half of the difficulty, however, as he found that he still had to grope out what feelings they were exactly as well as trace them back to their origin point. He suspected that it all began when he had allowed duty to make a slow transformation into devotion. And from there, it had only grown. This unacceptable lapse in awareness that terminated in his not noticing the initial change within himself must have been the mistake that had let all the rest of it in. If it had simply kept itself at the level of professional respect and devotion, he might have been able to continue to perform adequately indefinitely.

However, as Spock sat in meditation, his eyes screwed shut as he explored the feelings that crouched predatorily inside him, he realized that the infection went deeper than he would be able to fully uproot without help. As he had begun to drill into those emotions he felt toward the stimulus that was simply Jim Kirk, teasing them apart in order to fully examine them, he saw how they had spread like a mold through the very scaffolding of his mind, rotting it out from under him.

He could not prevent himself from gasping out loud when his awareness brushed against it in his meditation. He had so thoroughly hidden it from himself, he had fed it and nurtured it and raised it without having any idea of its true nature.

And now it had him.

He tried to stay impassive as his heart began to race in his side and he idly began planning how he would go about asking for another trip toward Vulcan, when the first one had gone so poorly. He was in need of a healer. He had no emotion about this. It was a fact and nothing more. He needed a healer and he would then have to -- no emotions. Simple facts and logic -- he would most likely have to speak to his father about the situation.

Incense smoke filled Spock’s nostrils as he took a deep breath. If he did not get control of the panic that he could see pooling at the base of his mind, even as he tried to continue to skim above it, it would push him out of his meditation completely and he had still not finished going over and cataloguing his emotions so that he could neatly tuck them away.

Facts. He needed to focus on the facts.

He had feelings toward his captain. Feelings that he still had to look more closely at in order to name with the most accuracy he could. These feelings had somehow tangled with the ragged ends of the broken bond with T’Pring and from there used the torn fibers to completely infiltrate the entire ecosystem of his mind. These feelings were so prolific, he could not remove them himself. A healer could do this. If it wasn’t dire.

Spock looked again at the way everything in his mind seemed touched by his unnamed feelings. He sighed.

These feelings were dire.

Perhaps contacting a healer would therefore be fruitless. In which case, he would not have to talk to his father. He would not have to tell him that he had allowed himself to become so compromised that the integrity of his entire mind was about to crumble. He refused to feel relief at this thought. Especially since he was now left in a position that was not even a micron closer to solving his affliction.

Evidently, he would not be able to fix his mind without further research. Thus, he pushed at himself again. These feelings had started on an as yet unknown date. He would find out which date it was. He probed his memory, looking for any that involved Kirk. There was an extensive amount. At some point during their mission together, they had started spending almost all of their time on and off duty together, sometimes accompanied by Dr. McCoy but more often than that, it had been just the two of them. A dark blush spread unbidden up into Spock’s cheeks when he realized that he had started to spend a greater percentage, on average, of his non-sleeping time with Kirk than he did alone.

Begin there. When had the numbers moved to over 50%? It was the week when Kirk had expressed interest for the first time in Spock’s lyre. In the officers meeting at the end of their shift, Lt. Uhura had started humming as she waited for the computer to load the recording she had taken of an encoded Romulan transmission that she had just begun to translate. Spock recalled that Kirk had been quietly excited and had been tapping his foot against the floor restlessly. His ankle brushed against Spock’s once and Spock had been unable to stop thinking about it as the meeting wore on.

At Uhura’s humming, Kirk had sat forward with a smile starting to bloom over his face. Like the only flower in the desert, Spock remembered thinking before he forced himself to solve the hypotenuse of the triangle formed by Lt. Commander Scott’s legs as he crossed them in his chair.

“What song is that?” Kirk had asked.

Uhura answered that it was a pre-Surak Vulcan song, though Spock could not recall exactly what it was. He pushed at the memory and realized with anxiety threatening to worm into him, that he could not remember the exact name of the composition because at the time he had been too busy watching a single bead of sweat he’d noticed when Kirk sat forward, roll down the side of Kirk’s neck into the collar of his shirt.

There had been some general discussion about Vulcan music after Uhura’s response, the transmission they had all gathered to hear momentarily forgotten. As he sat at the conference table, Spock’s mind was now split between recalling with as much vivid detail as he could what Kirk’s ankle had felt like against his own and calculating with as much vivid detail as he could just what route that sweat droplet was sure to take down the skin under Kirk’s shirt, so he had not listened to the minutiae of the conversation.

Thus, he only remembered that at the end of it, Kirk had turned to him and asked, “do you think you could play some of that Vulcan stuff on your harp for me? I’d love to hear it and Uhura says you’re quite an accomplished player.”

“I’d love to play it for you,” Spock had responded and now, as he remembered these events, he realized that his body had heated when Kirk had beamed at him then. Spock abandoned his other calculations and instead began to measure the angle of Kirk’s lips.

“Love? Did I hear that right?” the doctor had piped up then. “Now, that might just be an emotion, I think.”

Spock had sighed and then retorted, “I can hardly be blamed for the fact that most human colloquial statements feature some degree of emotional language.”

Kirk’s smile had gotten even larger then. And it was after that, after that meeting and the evening after it when Kirk came to Spock’s quarters to hear him play, it was then when there was a marked increase in the amount of time Spock spent in his captain’s company. After that night, there was no reason not to invite Kirk to his practice sessions and from there to invite him to join him while he did his paperwork and listened to recordings of Vulcan music. It was the introduction of sharing music with each other which had transformed into them spending almost every evening together, working on their PADDs side by side with Vulcan music playing softly from the computer, or Spock practicing with his lyre while Kirk listened and read one of his antique books.

Then, of course, as of two years, nine months, three days, and two hours into the mission, Kirk had begun a semi-regular habit of stopping by the science labs on random occasions even when his presence was not required. He usually spent these visits listening raptly to Spock’s explanation of what he and his team were working on, then congratulating the rest of the science officers assembled and otherwise engaging in human social niceties with them. He’d always save Spock for last, turning to him with a grin warmer even than the sunshine he’d been smiling at the other members of his crew.

He would usually then lean against the desk or wall closest to Spock, make a joke, and then after Spock’s eyebrow lift and response, he’d watch Spock work in comfortable silence. Sometimes, after missions that left Kirk a bit more emotionally unstable, he would excitedly chatter the entire time, using Spock to bounce ideas off of. One night he even came to him to ask Spock’s opinion on how Kirk might go about beating a Vulcan at chess more than a mere 60% of the time. The question was hypothetical, Spock had been quickly assured more than once.

That night, the captain had been in a certain mood as well. He was playful in every word he said. Spock had seen him act this way with alluring alien women he was attempting to seduce. But he had also seen him acting in a similar manner with Dr. McCoy and, to a lesser extent, Engineer Scott as well.

Directed against himself, however, constituted something unusual. And, in fact, Kirk had strangely invited him to play chess that night in Kirk’s own quarters despite the fact that in the schedule of games that Spock had created and cc’ed the captain into, their next game was to take place the following evening and in Spock’s quarters, which had surprised Spock. He tried not to let it show on his face as he had declined hurriedly.

After the long evening spent being challenged and dared and grinned at and playfully touched in the almost abandoned lab, and with Kirk leaning against the door of his quarters, smiling almost shyly now as he asked Spock to come inside with him, Spock had found that he needed to meditate immediately. He made his goodbyes and glided hastily into his own cabin next door to Kirk’s.

You were already compromised by then. As evidenced by the emotion you felt here, Spock thought to himself as he pushed past the memory. Looking at it dispassionately in meditation now, he catalogued the emotion as “yearning” and “arousal” and “desire” and tucked it away. Further back than that.

He’d started spending more than 50% of his time with the captain six months ago. Evidence was now suggesting that he had possession of emotions toward his captain that went beyond the scope of simple duty before that. And with the steady way that the percentage of his time spent in the captain’s presence grew and grew as time went on, he suspected that he was correct in assuming an origin point significantly prior to that moment in the officer’s meeting with Uhura’s beautifully melodic voice still ringing in his ears and the doctor talking about love and his ankle still warm from a brush against human heat.

Had it been pon farr?

Spock did not like looking at those memories. They were fragmented and disjointed and nearly senseless. He had only ever been able to piece together a rough outline of the events leading up to and during the plak tow. Based on what he could recall of it all, he knew he had acted most appallingly and he was almost glad he couldn’t remember behaving in such a way.

Utterly logicless. A being of pure emotion.

And what emotions had he felt at his ill-fated wedding? He turned over the dreamlike images of that day when he’d taken the captain and the doctor down to his home soil. He’d felt anger. Frustration. Anxiety. Fear. Rage. He named them all as he continued to comb through his memories. Need. Hunger. Lust. Arousal. And then devastation. Guilt. Shame. Hopelessness, followed by a bursting forth of joy. Devotion. And then...

Love.

Emotions seemed easier to identify through the lense of the pon farr. Everything else was jumbled and confused but those at least were clear enough. He shifted as he sat on his meditation mat. He did not like to contemplate these memories because the emotions were difficult to look at. They were stronger than he was. They’d striped his shields from him, leaving him defenseless against them.

But pon farr just amplified the mind’s natural impulses. It had no ability to invent something that wasn’t there in the first place. No. The transformation was even sooner than that.

Early in the voyage then, Spock decided. Perhaps I had been more affected by those fleeting feelings of vulnerability after Captain Pike’s departure than I originally believed.

Spock had had feelings that went beyond duty toward his first captain as well. But it had not been like this. Not this all-consuming. Perhaps it was because Spock caught it earlier last time. Before it could grow this extensive.

Regardless of how well he had exterminated those feelings out of himself, he did suffer a lapse of control over his emotional response to Pike’s leaving and the assignment of Kirk as his replacement. He remembered that he had sought then to strengthen his shields and not reveal that he had secretly agreed when Uhura said she missed Pike as she pushed Starfleet food cubes around her plate in the mess hall. In this pursuit of stronger shields, he had also inadvertently given the new captain the “cold shoulder”, he had told Spock much later.

“He snubbed you!” McCoy had howled when Kirk brought it up at dinner one day in the third year of the mission. “He snubbed all of us! Him and all the rest of Pike’s crew that stuck around! You remember that, Jim? How Chapel would glare at you sitting at lunch with Gary over her replicator meal like you’d cooked the damn thing yourself? Ain’t nobody can say that just cause you’re young you didn’t have to work for that chair. Ain’t seen no one work as hard as you.”

“Thanks, Bones,” Kirk said charmingly. “Pike left some big shoes to fill and really made me put some overtime in trying to thaw out that ice queen first officer he bequeathed me.” He’d grinned across the table at Spock.

Before he could stop himself, honesty flowed out of Spock. “I am honored to have served under Captain Pike,” he’d said. “But the esteem I feel for my current captain outpaces even that which I felt for my previous captain.”

“Thanks, Spock,” Kirk said just as charmingly as he’d said the words to McCoy. “I find myself having similar thoughts about the feelings I’ve had regarding my previous first officer and my current one.” He smiled toothily as he teased.

Spock had had to recite the user’s manual to his tricorder to himself to prevent his lips from forming more truths that he was not ready yet to reveal.

“Thank you, Captain.”

Troubleshooting: Water and Other Hydrogen Based Liquids in Inner Mechanisms. First, be sure to run a liquid vacuum generator over the tricorder -

“Well, I’d hope you like him more than you liked Gary,” McCoy said, not as charmingly. “That guy ended up being a right asshole in the end.”

Dinner had then passed in a dissection of Gary Mitchell’s character that betrayed Kirk’s affection toward the man as well as his grief surrounding his death. While Spock listened to Kirk and wished longingly to be able to soothe him, he had caught McCoy looking at him whenever Kirk had been looking elsewhere. He found that he did not much enjoy the way that the doctor grinned knowingly when he was caught.

“You really loved that Gary, huh?” McCoy had asked suddenly, only breaking his gaze away from Spock and flicking it toward Kirk on the last word. “Even after you broke up, you guys were still inseparable.”

Spock had tried in vain then to keep his eyes from widening.

“You’re boring poor Spock with this prattle,” Kirk had said, trying to change the subject. “Enough about Gary anyway. Have you guys heard -”

“I just wanted to make a point,” McCoy had cut in then. “About just how much esteem that hobgoblin is receiving if it’s more than even what you felt for Gary. That’s all.” He sat back in his chair. “Now, what did you want us to have heard?”

All of this meant that in the first few months into this mission, he had been more absorbed into his loss of Pike than he had been in planting the seed of his current affliction toward Kirk. So, one could conclude, it must have been some time after that.

He was unsure if he was going to get it any more precise than that. He bristled at the thought of such a large margin of error. But it seemed as though in every memory he could think to touch, he was already compromised. As though it had happened in between moments. One moment he was properly and solely duty-bound to his captain and the next moment he was -- name the emotion so you can place it -- in love with Jim.

Spock pulled back through his memories until he was facing the recollection of earlier in the day. He could remember exactly the moment that Kirk had touched him for the first time. He could remember exactly the moment that Kirk had called him his friend for the first time. And now, he could remember the moment Kirk told him that he loved him for the first time.

It hadn’t even been all that harrowing a mission that they’d been on. Spock had gotten injured but it had been easily repaired in the medbay and the pain had been minimal. Though it had bled profusely and Spock suspected that the shock of that much free flowing emerald blood had been what had upset Kirk.

It had upset him enough that he had stormed into Spock’s quarters through their shared bathroom and had paced into the room with emotions seeming to roll off him. He had pointed at Spock and opened his mouth as though he’d intended to speak before he closed it and stomped away. He then prowled back to where Spock sat, dumbfounded, at the chair behind his desk and repeated the process with the pointing again.

When he came back a third time, he finally seemed to make a decision and his shoulders relaxed.

“I love you,” he’d said then. The first time he’d said it. “I’m in love with you. Spock, I... I love you so much.” He had swung around again and paced back to the doorway to the bathroom. Without looking back, he added, “I know you’re... you, so you don’t have to say anything. Or feel anything. Or whatever.” He paused as the door opened and he began to slip back inside. “I just... I just wanted you to know.”

The door had closed behind him and the silence he left seemed choking to Spock suddenly. He’d raced to his meditation as soon as he felt sure he could get to his feet without stumbling and had discovered the extensiveness of the rot inside him fairly quickly. Kirk was wrapped around every part of him.

Name the emotion, Spock.

The energy of his meditation fell off of him like water as a sense of giddiness he couldn’t quite hold on to propelled him out of it. He rose out of his meditation posture and padded on near silent feet to the bathroom, then through it and into Kirk’s quarters. The rooms were dark but Spock was too flushed with the joy of a new discovery to stop and pay that fact any mind.

“Jim!” he said into the gloom. There came the sound of shuffling coming from the bed at the word but Spock’s eyes were still adjusting to the darkness so he was unsure what exactly was causing the sounds. “I believe I love you.”

“Oh. Ok,” Kirk replied and as Spock’s vision cleared, he saw the glint of a phaser being lowered. “Hi, Spock.” He sat up and rubbed his head and it was only then that Spock realized that it was nearing 4 am and that he had been in meditation for hours. Kirk had likely been sleeping.

“My apologies for waking you, Jim,” Spock said, his controls reasserting themselves over his enthusiasm. “In my meditation, I discovered the feelings I have for you. I wished to share my findings.”

Even in the dark, Spock could tell that Kirk had started smiling affectionately. He patted the bed next to him. After he yawned, he said, “come over here and tell me all about it.” He patted the bed again.

Spock stepped forward and sat on the edge of the bed hesitantly. Now that the original elation had fled him, he found himself feeling timid. He had never been invited into Kirk’s bed before and he was thrilled by this change in the typical workings of his social relationship with the captain, even as he tried not to allow his emotions to gain purchase over him.

“Through my meditation,” Spock began without preamble. Now that he was much closer, he could see quite clearly the shape of Kirk’s tousled curls, his naked chest, the soft sleepiness suffusing his limbs. He did not allow himself to be distracted. “I was able to deduce that the reason my mind is infected with such longing for your own is because I feel love for you. I am in love with you.” He paused to take a deep breath. “And as it has reached the point that not even a healer could extract the emotion, I feel as though the only solution to this affliction is to succumb to it.”

Kirk looked taken aback. He sat, leaning against the headboard of his bed with his covers still twisted around his waist, revealing bare skin that rose and fell with the shades of Kirk’s breathing. Spock traced the shape of his shoulders and the dip of his collarbone with his eyes, committing their measurements to memory.

“Well... alright,” Kirk said eventually. He started to smile and even in the semi-darkness, his eyes gleamed. “So, I love you and told you about it. And, if my translation of Vulcan isn’t too rusty, you love me and told me so.” A beat. “So, what now?”

Spock glanced down at where his hands were folded in his lap. He could practically see the shimmering aura of his psi-energy pulsing there and his fingers began to shake slightly with his strain to keep that energy leashed.

In the second year of the mission, Kirk had accidentally touched the back of Spock’s hand as they ate breakfast together. It had happened early on the same day that Kirk had visited him in the lab and teased him with his questions about beating a Vulcan at chess. It was the first time they had touched hands.

Spock’s psi-energy had connected with Kirk’s skin immediately and shocked them both. Spock had felt a wave of emotion not his own that had overwhelmed him for a second and Kirk shivered and drew his hand back sharply like he’d been scalded.

Kirk had apologized and while the words seemed genuine, something had changed in the expression on Kirk’s face. Spock kept catching him staring at him but he would coyly drop his gaze any time he realized Spock was looking at him.

They made it to their shift on the bridge and only then did Kirk seem able to shake off whatever human mood had taken over him. He behaved again in the manner typical of himself, until later that night in the lab.

Spock flexed his fingers as he tried to think of an answer to Kirk’s question.

“I do not know,” he said honestly after a moment. He knew what he longed for. What his non-Vulcan imagination daydreamed about. But just then he did not trust his feelings as something stable enough to extrapolate the proper data. It was certainly not something to ground a logical course of action within.

Silence hung between them for a moment before Kirk began to shake. The silent shivers soon became chuckles, which then dissolved into a genuine fit of laughter. The pure sound of it caused Spock’s lips to quirk up at the corners as he caught Kirk’s delight like it was a virus.

After a while of this, Kirk straightened and his gaze sought out Spock’s, pinning him with a suggestive smirk. Spock gulped and it sounded louder than was typical in the quiet between them.

“Well, shit,” Kirk said. He shifted on the bed and crawled closer to Spock. As the blanket was dislodged from him, Spock was able to see that Kirk was only wearing a pair of Starfleet briefs. Spock himself was still dressed in his uniform and the contrast between them struck him for a moment and, quite illogically he had to admit to himself, caused arousal to begin to stir in him. “We’re supposed to be the two smartest officers in the ‘Fleet and this is the thing that has got us stumped? I think we’re losing our touch, Mr. Spock.”

Kirk’s fingers reached Spock’s neck at the utterance of his name. They were warmer than Spock’s skin and he found himself leaning into the touch with an almost feline posture. Every place they touched as they moved over Spock’s neck and crept toward his jaw, was blasted with heat and shallowly penetrated with foreign, human emotion.

If he concentrated on it, Spock could just barely lap at an impression of Kirk’s thoughts through the touch. He tasted the zinging jolt of Kirk’s anxiety and trepidation as he traced his jawline. He licked the sweet, thick foam of Kirk’s love and devotion as he ran a fingertip over Spock’s brow and he brought his bare chest to Spock’s back. He sampled the goopy dribbling of Kirk’s arousal and pleasure as his hand reached Spock’s ear and his finger rounded a pointed tip.

With one hand still caressing Spock’s ear, Kirk’s other hand tugged the collar of Spock’s shirt down to reveal enough of his pale skin to allow Kirk’s lips ample room to kiss. His breath was moist and hot against Spock’s flesh and he shivered at the sensation.

“Is this ok?” Kirk asked, pulling away only far enough to speak clearly.

“Oh, yes,” Spock said, all pretense at coyness abandoned in the maelstrom of Kirk’s thoughts bubbling over into him from his wet lips. “Perhaps we are discovering the answer to our question through the method of experimentation. Perhaps instead of continuing pondering the question of what we are expected to do now, we simply do it.” He sighed as Kirk’s tongue darted out.

“Do what, Spock?” Kirk asked, smiling against Spock’s skin.

“It, Jim,” Spock replied simply and not a little condescendingly. He pushed away from Kirk so that he could pull his uniform shirt and the thermals underneath it off, revealing more skin he hoped that Kirk would want to continue to kiss and lick and breathe hotly upon.

“Oh. Ok. Yea,” Kirk said. He did not need encouraging before he lunged forward to capture Spock in his arms again, their chests now touching skin to skin. Spock felt his psi-energy as it pillowed over Kirk, beginning to suck and drag at him. He teased Kirk with it, playing with the connection between their minds. Kirk’s eyes fluttered shut and his hands clutched hard at Spock. “Oh my god, Spock. What are you doing to me?”

“My apologies, Jim,” Spock whispered in a way that didn’t sound sorry, even to his own ears. He brought his hand to the dip and curve of Kirk’s collarbone, dragging a finger along it and leaving a slimy trail of his thoughts in its wake. The psi-energy bleed from his hands was both stronger and more precise and controlled than it was from other parts of his body. He deposited his desire and pleasure and need in the residue left from his touch. “My shields are not airtight and I may have even relaxed them due to your psi-null status. I was unsure if you’d even be able to feel psi-energy at all.”

“I can feel it,” Kirk assured him breathlessly. “I can fucking feel it.”

As if to test him, Spock brought one of his fingers into contact with just one of Kirk’s qui’lari. He let his energy tease over the entrance to Kirk’s mind and felt Kirk pulse sloppily around it.

“Just like that,” Kirk panted. His hands went to the front of his underwear and held himself as though the grip would stop his cock from swelling. “What the fuck is that, Spock? You’re making me hard just from touching my face?”

Spock raised one of his eyebrows in the manner that Kirk had always called a “Vulcan shrug”. He released Kirk and went to work on the clasp of his uniform pants.

“I am mentally stimulating you,” Spock replied. He made the shrug motion again. “You are getting an erection because I am quite good at coaxing your body through your mind.”

“Why did I not expect you to be so cocky?” Kirk giggled. “I should have known that you’d fuck exactly how you play chess.”

He didn’t allow Spock the time to respond before he grabbed him round the shoulders and tossed him back against the mattress. The air fled Spock’s lungs as Kirk clambered on top of him and finished what Spock had started by ripping both Spock’s pants and the briefs underneath them down over his legs.

“Do you want to be inside me?” Kirk whispered heatedly as he bent to kiss at Spock’s throat again.

Spock was unsure if Kirk referred to his mind or his body, but found himself shivering nonetheless, even as Kirk’s blazing hot tongue laved over the cold skin on his neck. He found words fled him utterly when Kirk’s scalding fingers brushed against his sheath, and his fra’als whipped out to wetly slap against the digits. Every nerve inside the tentacle-like organs lit up with his telepathic kash-tepul and it gripped Kirk’s mind just as desperately as the fra’als themselves twined around his fingers.

He arched his back, mouth falling open wordlessly. He’d had his hands touched by others before and felt the power of the telepathic conduits there making connections that howled and tore at his shields, but he had never had his fra’als touched by someone with a compatible mind. He knew their evolutionary purpose was to aid in telepathic stimulation alongside physical but he had never experienced this firsthand.

When he had had sexual encounters before, the fra’als had been only extra nerve endings to titillate in the search for release. With the touch of Kirk’s fingers, they had blasted into aching awareness and Spock felt himself grinding against the exposed moisture of Kirk’s mind, not quite deep enough to be a full meld, but slipping over the open parts of him.

His hand reached up wildly for Kirk’s face and his fingers twitched over his meldpoints as he shook with the force of his desire. He could think of nothing else but that one pulsing need. He needed with an intensity that would have frightened him if he hadn’t also continued to feel that fluttering squeeze of love touching every part of him. It came from him and it came from Kirk when he whispered his feelings into Spock’s mind through his touch as he stroked first one fra’al and then the other.

Spock had almost completed the meld and pushed all of the way inside when Kirk devilishly moved to Spock’s dripping cock and slicked his own lubricant over him with practiced ease. Spock had already been so close, teased so thoroughly by the closeness of Kirk’s open and eager and hungry mind, the touch was all it took before he already felt himself tightening into orgasm.

In vain, he fought against it but that did nothing but elongate his pleasure as he spurted over Kirk’s hand. His own dropped from Kirk’s face to fist into the sheets. He whimpered weakly as he pulsed and his muscles went taut. He covered Kirk’s wrist and fingers and his sheets with the eager evidence of his desire, and even managed to get some up onto Kirk’s briefs. His cum was stark against the black of the fabric and the sight of it enflamed him.

Kirk slowly dropped Spock’s softening penis and grinned down at him with affectionate surprise.

“My goodness, Mr. Spock,” he said after a moment of stifled laughter. “Seems as though I should have also guessed that it would only take a light touch and I’m still caught off guard. I’m oh for two on guessing what fucking you would be like.”

“It’s not...” Spock started, determined not to start blushing. He watched in rapt attention as Kirk tasted some of his spend off his fingers and his determination failed him. He flushed. “It doesn’t usually...That is, it’s only with you.” His brain didn’t seem to be able to move as fast as he was used to.

Smirking, Kirk gently pulled his underwear off of him, watching Spock closely as he did. Spock’s gaze fell to the engorged human cock, hard and leaking as it bobbed proudly before Kirk. He let Spock admire him for a moment before he sat back on his haunches on the bed.

“So, it seems as though my first suggestion for this encounter is off the table then,” Kirk said conversationally as he began to stroke his cock. “In that case, do you want me inside you?” His grip began to move with much more purpose. “In a fist of those sexy and electric Vulcan fingers of yours, maybe? Or, oh, better yet, in that sexy, fucking wet, and clever mouth?” He moaned, apparently imagining it as he jerked himself off. “Or do you want me in that tight little ass of yours? I bet you’re tight, Spock. I bet you’re so tight.”

Kirk’s eyes fluttered close. He continued to pump himself and Spock felt his cheeks heat even more as he watched him. His spent dick twitched as it retreated into his sheath. Trying not to disturb Kirk and pull him away from where his thoughts had taken him, Spock settled back further into the bed and drew his knees up toward his chest.

“I suspect you may be right,” Spock said raggedly. Kirk’s eyes opened and he whined wordlessly when he saw the way Spock had positioned himself. “Though there is only one way to know for certain if we are correct in our guess or not.”

Spock’s eyes widened when Kirk’s cock spasmed before he had even brought it to Spock’s skin and before Spock had even finished speaking. He felt hot, thick human cum splatter and dribble down over the hole he had exposed.

“God, Spock,” Kirk ground out after he caught his breath. He lathered himself though his climax and smacked his cock against Spock so that he smeared ejaculate on him. “We’re like a couple of inexperienced kids.” He shook his head. “But holy fuck, you’re just so hot. And you already put me on the edge just from all of that telepathic electricity you kept sweating into me.” He paused to wipe some of his own sweat off his brow. “Gonna have to find some other time to conduct our experiment, I suppose.” He smirked with just a hint of self-consciousness.

The way that Kirk sank then onto the bed next to Spock and took a deep, satisfied breath mixed with the words he’d said felt as though Kirk was quite finished with their encounter. Spock fought against the grief he felt suddenly that accompanied that realization. He did not begrudge the intensity of their pleasure in each other, but he found that he felt a sense of loss at not making it last longer if only to be held and touched for more time.

He dropped his legs, determined to do so without sighing, and swung them over the side of the bed. He got up with the intention of leaving.

“Thank you,” he said as he collected the discarded items of his clothing and started back toward the bathroom door, “for telling me that you love me.”

When Kirk didn’t respond, he turned back to him and noticed that his face was pinched as he slowly sat up again, watching Spock intently. While Kirk remained silent, Spock felt as though he had made some kind of social blunder. He had not been in these kinds of situations often, and never had with anyone who had engendered such depth of feeling within him as Jim did.

“And...” Spock went on, standing stiffly and secretly hesitantly in the doorway as it hissed open behind him. “Thank you...” He found that he didn’t like the way Kirk watched him. As though he was disappointed. All previous sexual partners had wanted Spock out of their bed as soon as he had been able to walk. And in the case of that very thrillingly aggressive Andorian, as soon as the bleeding stopped. But with all of his previous partners, he had also not achieved climax with such rapidity. Perhaps he was missing some kind of human etiquette. Was there a specified time frame for how long encounters were to last and if you could not fill that time pursuing climax, then you must spend it in some other way?

“For the sexual release,” he finished lamely. This made Kirk’s eyes narrow even further and Spock fumbled as he went on. “I look forward to many more such releases...” Kirk was really frowning now. “With you...?” He had not meant it as a question but that is what slipped through his lips. “If you are also amenable...?”

He glanced between Kirk, who sat nearly glaring at him from the tousled nest of his bed, and the dark bathroom. He slid closer to the latter but looked steadily at Kirk.

“Would you...” Spock swallowed and tried again. “Would you be amenable?”

Kirk continued his silence as Spock attempted not to give in to the feeling of anxiety that was starting to clutch at his gut. He knew without a doubt now that he had made some kind of misstep somewhere. He held his clothes behind his back in a position as close to parade rest as he could get without dropping them and told himself not to feel one way or the other about the fact that he was still wholly nude.

Spock had been with a handful of human men (and a few Vulcan men as well, alongside that one particularly dynamic Andorian) and he flickered through his memories rapidly. He discarded any he found of partners he had met and copulated with on that first meeting, as such an experience did not seem adequately similar to this event and with how close he and Kirk were. That left him with only one other man to compare Kirk and his reaction to.

Adam Hopkins had been Spock’s lab partner in his Botany 401 class at the Academy. Through working together on their assignments, they had built something of a rapport. Nothing compared to the closeness Spock now had toward Kirk or even Lt. Uhura or Dr. McCoy, but at the time, he would have considered Adam a friend.

They had had only one sexual experience together and it had happened when they had been working late on a project in one of the Academy’s greenhouses. Hopkins had mistakenly brushed up against a pollinated Vulcan trillium and the aphrodisiac qualities of the plant affected him with a strength that had almost startled Spock.

Hopkins had dragged Spock from the lab back to his dorm room with haste and with pupils blown wide, rudely ordered his roommate to find somewhere else to spend the night, and took Spock sloppily in the dorm bed that had been much too small to accommodate both of them.

After Hopkins’ climax, his eyes had cleared and Spock knew that the plant’s influence had left his system. As soon as it had, Hopkins’ reaction was a quick and embarrassed disgust. He threw Spock out, though not exactly unkindly, apologizing profusely the entire time. He had told Spock that the coldness of his body had actually been rather unpleasant and he didn’t like the way Spock being in his bed made him shiver and how it made him feel as though he were crammed into a small space with a corpse. Or, he had amended, acknowledging how Spock’s kash-tepul had shocked him, it was more like being in bed with a slimy electric eel. In the end, Hopkins had made it clear that it was imperative to his well-being going forward that they never talked about this encounter ever again.

With nothing yet to compare it to (his partners before Hopkins had all been Vulcans, who had also ejected Spock from their beds as soon as their satisfaction had been met but with much less embarrassment involved), Spock had assumed that spending more time in a human’s bed after sex would be most unwelcome if even a human he had had a closeness to did not want him there.

Looking at Kirk, he thought with a sinking feeling in his gut that perhaps he had erred in extrapolating the habit of one human man in one situation toward all human men.

“Spock,” Kirk said eventually. There was definitely disappointment in his voice, along with something else that Spock couldn’t identify. “You have been full of nothing but surprises tonight.” Unlike when he had mentioned being startled by something Spock had said or done before, there was no delight or affection in the utterance.

It also had not sounded like a dismissal, so Spock hovered in the doorway between Kirk’s quarters and their shared bathroom. He swallowed against the knot of unknown and unacknowledged emotion that threatened to spill into his conscious awareness and tightened his neutral expression.

“I must say though,” Kirk continued with a voice that sounded dark and dangerous, “I am the most surprised with you here. I never thought you’d be the kind of guy to use me to get your rocks off and then slink away as though you’re ashamed.” He paused. “Didn’t realize the only emotion a Vulcan is allowed to feel is shame.”

Spock’s thoughts spun dizzily through computations and theories as to what in his actions Kirk had read as him being ashamed of him. He had always prided himself on being able to read his captain, to know his thoughts without him even having to voice them, and he knew that Kirk could also read him astonishingly well. They communicated effortlessly on the bridge and out on the frontier. Why was it in this, when their intimacy should have been assured, that they suddenly seemed unable to communicate properly?

“Jim,” Spock said, trying in vain to keep his voice steady and it wavered slightly as he continued. “I am not ashamed of you.” He cleared his throat. “I must admit some... inexperience in the etiquette expected in sexual encounters with humans and I wrongly predicted that, though I wished to spend more time in your bed, you had terminated our sexual activity for the moment and would therefore wish for me to leave you.”

Kirk’s expression softened into puzzlement.

“Why would I want you to leave?” he asked.

“Because my continued presence would cause you discomfort and shame,” Spock answered. “As this has been the case with every single human man who has had me before now, including one with whom I had a several months long rapport, I calculated the probability that you would react similarly as quite high.”

“You thought that I would be ashamed of having had sex with you?” Kirk replied, balking somewhat. He frowned in thought for a moment. “Wait... Just how many men have ‘had’ you before me, anyway?”

“Enough for a sample size that was sufficiently large enough for me to have felt confident in my prediction.”

“That’s pretty imprecise for you, Spock. I was expecting a number.” Kirk’s lips twitched, unsure on whether they wanted to frown or grin.

“I suspected that you would be upset if I was more exact.” Spock shuffled his feet. “Twelve point six.”

“Point six?”

“As he had only been able to get the head of his penis inside my body before he had climaxed, I thought it did not merit a full digit within the summary of my estimation.”

“Estimation?”

“The word ‘had’ is very imprecise and what activities would be included within it I could only arrive at based on educated guess. Therefore, my data is necessarily a product of estimation.”

Spock knew he was stalling. He also knew that some of the tension had drained out of the room and Kirk’s lips seemed to have made up their mind. Kirk grinned at him.

“I thought you were going to say that the number was so high, even your magnificent brain lost count,” Kirk said and Spock realized he was being teased. His shoulders relaxed. Kirk’s eyes flashed as he noticed the change. “Just the tip then, huh?” He didn’t let Spock defend himself before he was speaking again, changing the subject. “You better just be getting us a towel to clean up and then coming right back.” He waved his hand at the bathroom behind Spock.

Without further prompting, Spock disappeared into the bathroom. He set his clothes on the counter gingerly and wet a towel. He tried not to think of anything in particular as he did so, as that would simply open his mind to the giddy emotion he felt nipping at his heels. He had to take a moment to fix his bangs in the mirror and leash his delighted feeling.

“Come back to bed, Commander.” Kirk’s order was husky as it wafted in from the other room.

Kirk was unlike anyone else. Spock should have known this. He should have been aware by now that Kirk would always defy the expectations Spock had of him if it was based on a comparison with other humans he knew. Kirk was in a class all on his own.

“Yes,” Spock breathed back.

He slipped back into Kirk’s quarters with the towel and strange emotions moving inside him. He tried to guess at their shape but he couldn’t quite capture them, choosing instead to make note of the manifestations in his body of the emotion, namely the strange sensation as though his heart was swelling in his side and the way his vision seemed to soften, and filing those observations away to name and categorize later in meditation.

Kirk grinned at him lazily from the bed when he returned. He had laid back down, but had left a very inviting space beside him that would certainly be pleasantly warmed by his body heat. He looked completely at ease in his nudity in a way that seemed much more natural and less contrived than the same ease Spock had also sought to project. Being insecure about one’s appearance and about what gender cues one was presenting when one was stripped bare or if one’s body would be too Vulcan, or, even worse, too Human when nude, was illogical. These were things that could not be changed, so why feel anything at all toward them? Yet Spock found himself worrying about such considerations nevertheless.

“Do you know how beautiful you are?” Kirk asked as Spock hesitated near the bed. Something that could have been awe pulsed through his voice. Spock found himself unable to maintain eye contact with him and began to instead focus on crawling into the bed and dispassionately wiping the towel over Kirk’s skin.

Again, there was that novel sensation like a swelling in his heart when he thought of what Kirk had said and how he had chosen the word that would most please Spock. As though he could read his very thoughts. It felt so much like what he had dreamed that a bond would one day be for him, he felt as though he would be unable to ever fight against it. It felt more powerful than he would ever be. When he touched it in his mind, it was like touching the tender power of the incorporeal Organians as they had brushed past his thoughts for that brief moment many missions ago.

Fighting a battle one knew they were going to lose was not logical and simply delayed the inevitable at the expense of copious amounts of time and energy. Even with the assistance of a healer he was so widely outmatched, the energy and emotion between Kirk and himself so alike to the instinctual addiction of a bond, he was assured the likelihood of failure at a number far exceeding the likelihood of a success.

He realized that it was joy that was moving through his body. As though he had finally found a space where he could fit, and the comfort of it made all of his muscles go slack, every defensive posture melting away.

Kirk sighed under Spock’s touch and the flaccid organ Spock was gently cleaning gave a brief twitch of interest. Spock felt his eyebrow crawling to his hairline and moved until his finger made contact with the bare skin of Kirk’s stomach. He knew he probably should have asked before he made such a connection, but he found he wished to know what Kirk was feeling firsthand. His psi-energy moved out of him, seeking after Kirk’s own, and it brought with it that cold, gentle shock sensation.

As soon as it did, the arousal Spock felt in the cocktail of Kirk’s emotions redoubled until it began to blot out everything else.

“Already?” Spock asked, indicating the way Kirk’s body also began to respond along with his mind. He flicked his eyes over to the chronometer in a useless gesture meant only to make a point. He knew what time it was. “Jim, it is getting quite late.”

“Who woke who up again?” Kirk said. He grabbed Spock’s wrist and moved his hand away before taking hold of the abandoned towel and brought it to Spock, lovingly wiping the mixture of drying bodily fluids on Spock’s skin. “Besides, we barely lasted ten minutes. I thought you fucked like you played chess...?”

“I believe it was you who said that I did,” Spock replied stoically.

“Well, if that is the case,” Kirk went on, as though he hadn’t heard him. “That means that I get to play with you for hours.” He dropped all pretense and let go of the towel completely. His fingers circled the skin around the opening of Spock’s sheath with agonizing slowness until Spock’s hips shuddered involuntarily.

A fra’al uncoiled in an exploratory gesture as Spock felt his sheath moistening in anticipation of sliding his cock out of it. Kirk’s thumb captured the fra’al and the sensation lit up Spock’s spine and over his brain. His sheath twitched as his cock started to fill with blood.

“Already?” Kirk asked in a mimicry of Spock, biting his bottom lip against a grin. He raised one of his eyebrows mockingly. “Do you have any idea how late it is, Mister? And here you are getting so wet for me? Getting so hard?”

The words only served to make Spock wetter and harder.

“That’s good,” Kirk whispered as he watched the tip of Spock’s dick emerge, dripping, out of the lips he continued to caress. Both fra’als had unfurled now and they kept spewing blasts of Spock’s kash-tepul and within it the feeling of his pleasure and arousal. “What’s it taste like though, I wonder?”

“Jim,” Spock moaned warningly.

Ignoring him, Kirk shifted them both until he had positioned Spock against the headboard and laid on his belly between Spock’s legs. He looked up through his lashes at Spock as he kissed the inside of Spock’s thighs. He tongued at the skin there teasingly as Spock’s need grew.

He had never been this easily coaxed into an erection so soon after release before. Other than pon farr, of course. But this... This was not... He tried to compartmentalize what Kirk was doing to his body into another part of his awareness as he attempted to take stock of himself. It was much too early but with his hybrid physiology, there was always the chance that his cycle would likewise be intolerably helter-skelter.

Though his cheeks were flushed, and his cock felt like it was boiling, he did not have a fever. Though he felt senseless in his desire, his thoughts still seemed clear if he focused them. Though he – oh, Jim’s tongue is on your sheath now. Ah...No. Focus. - though he felt as though it were far away from him, he could still perceive the shape of his logic if he needed it.

This was not pon farr.

Yet even so, he felt the same surrender of himself into a burning inferno like that which he had felt when his Time had claimed him. He tried to remain steady and clear in his thoughts but Kirk licked up the side of his shaft so that he was distracted for a moment. His fra’als thrashed wildly against the side of Kirk’s face.

Spock noted to himself again that they had been more active with Kirk than they had been with any of his previous partners, just as soon as he had hold of his thoughts again. In that, this was similar to pon farr too. His fra’als had felt raw and painful in the throes of the fever. They’d been just as sore and restless as the bonding center in his brain had been.

Kirk opened his lips and took Spock’s length into his throat, distracting him again. He moaned and his knees crashed into either side of Kirk’s skull, effectively holding him there with his face buried in Spock’s leaking sheath. His fra’als brushed against Kirk’s skin and he felt Kirk’s need exploding in him at being manhandled by Spock’s loss of control.

It was very hard to shut Kirk out but Spock was able to do so just long enough to decide that, yes, his bonding center was alight and pulsing in his brain, just as it had been during pon farr. Kirk’s mind had expertly called to Spock’s without any conscious action on either of their parts and now it was stimulating Spock’s own into full openness and readiness.

Spock had never felt this purity of telepathic contact before. What would a full meld right now bring? Bliss powerful enough to end them both? Create something that was both of them and neither? The nascent tendrils of a bond? He couldn’t believe how effortless it would be. Instinctual. And that too was what made it seem like pon farr.

Following the direction his thoughts had taken, his fra’als slapped wetly over Kirk’s meld points and Kirk’s thoughts became even more clear to Spock. The taste of the alien cock in his mouth was paradoxically making him hungrier and, in another paradox, he had never felt more free than he did locked up tight in between the vice of Spock’s thighs. His pleasure at knowing that he was giving Spock pleasure, and with strength enough that Spock was losing his tight rein over himself, was strong and Spock moaned in it.

No other partner had cared one way or the other if Spock was enjoying himself, and now Kirk not only cared, he was also getting off on Spock’s stimulation alone, without consideration for his own body. It was overwhelming and Spock’s fra’als fell away from the meldpoints as his back arched. He noticed as though from far away that he was panting.

“Jim,” he moaned. Seeing Kirk look up at him again from beneath his lashes, but now with Spock’s own cock slipping in and out of his lips and his fra’als tangling in Kirk’s damp, sweaty hair, made orgasm once again start to coalesce in the base of his brain.

They kept eye contact as Spock began to spurt and Kirk hauled off with his mouth open so Spock could watch as his cum landed on the warm pink human tongue and rolled over his plush lips. The orgasm ripped through him until he lost his dignity completely.

He scrambled before he had even gotten his breath back so that he was on his hands and knees. He used one hand to hold himself up, while the other reached around himself to grasp a buttock and pull it, in order to reveal himself to Kirk.

“Please,” Spock begged.

While Spock had been rearranging himself, Kirk had moved as well, settling back onto his folded legs. At that one broken word, he leaned over to the night stand beside the bed and began to rummage in the drawer.

“Please what, Mr. Spock?” he asked in a way that Spock suspected was supposed to be playful but it was much too breathless for that to be effective. Kirk found what he was looking for in the night stand and was soon squeezing lubricant into the palm of his hand. He didn’t wait for a response before a wet finger was pressing into Spock’s entrance and he shivered at the intrusion.

He was still pliant and docile from his climax and his sheath was oozing slick and spend down him. He let go of his ass and held himself up with both hands as his strength fled him.

“I’m waiting for an answer,” Kirk prompted, leaning over Spock’s back so that his finger could go as deep as possible. He added another one without any warning.

Spock hissed in a breath.

“Please,” Spock said again, but it was more a whimper than anything else. “Take me.” He paused as he contemplated just how many of his desires he should speak aloud. “Do it roughly, if you would, please.” A third finger entered him as Kirk’s leisurely and teasing motions took on a sudden urgency. “Feel free also to smack my buttocks if you would like.” A beat. “Please,” he added.

“Holy shit,” Kirk breathed as his fingers scissored and stretched Spock. “You want me to spank you? You want me to spank your little ass until it blushes nice and green for me? Cause you’re such a naughty little Vulcan keeping me up all night?”

“I do,” Spock admitted. “I do want you to.”

“Yea?” Kirk said softly as he pumped his fingers into Spock vigorously. A hand made rough contact with his flesh at the same moment that a finger slammed his prostate. Spock’s spent cock made a weak twitch that tortured overstimulated nerves and he made a sound remarkably similar to a yelp.

It was always a wildly difficult thing to pull a Vulcan out of their mind and into their body. Spock knew that dissociative disorders were a very common affliction amongst his people and Spock also knew he himself had been prone toward the same, and tended to disconnect from his body in favor of his mind. It was because of this, he suspected, that he needed much more aggressive stimulus than the norm in order to overwhelm his mind with his bodily sensations and help him feel fully in the moment. Not thinking, judging, analyzing, calculating. Just feeling. He craved that pure of a release.

And now here it was that it was Kirk who was going to be the one to force him into that vulnerable space and the steady trickle of Kirk’s thoughts dripping over him everywhere their skin touched. He trembled in longing.

Kirk took the motion as a sign to slap Spock again. Spock rocked forward slightly with the force of it. He made an involuntary noise that seemed to make Kirk catch his breath. Before the sting of the blow had completely faded, Kirk began to slide into him.

Spock’s mouth opened noiselessly as he adjusted to the sensation of Kirk’s scaldingly human-hot cock breaching him and then filling him up. He had always been Vulcan enough for superb muscle control and he focused on that. He should have loosened up more, if he had wanted it to be comfortable. This was not the case and he had wanted it to be a little uncomfortable and therefore he gripped Kirk greedily.

The momentary discomfort was worth it when he felt Kirk’s thighs brush against his own as he bottomed out inside Spock and he leaned over his back to whisper over his ear, “I knew you’d be tight.” Kirk grinded his hips in circles against the meaty part of Spock’s ass, not really pulling all the way out, but gently fucking him nonetheless. “I knew you’d be so tight for me.”

His movements slowly picked up speed as he draped himself over Spock’s back, covering him in his sweat. It soon became a matter of only the advantages of Vulcan strength that was keeping them both up.

When Kirk began to pound into him in earnest, Spock was forced to loosen a bit as the pain had begun to be too much. He had been enjoying languishing in the discomfort and intensity and his cock had made motions toward stirring, even as it felt rubbed raw and overused. There was no way he had a third orgasm in him, but Kirk might torture him to a precipice awfully close to one.

Spock moaned and whimpered obscenely as Kirk moved against him and pistoned into him, pummeling his prostate. His over-worked cock gave a halfhearted trickle of lubricant at the treatment and he fluttered his muscles so he pulsated around Kirk.

Kirk’s movements stalled and then continued with even more violence. He panted open-mouthed into Spock’s ears and the smell and feel of his sweat and his thoughts were all around him, swamping Spock. He shivered with it, inadvertently spasming around Kirk again.

“Oh, Spock,” Kirk groaned slowly, drawing out the name into a sigh. “You’re gonna make me cum.”

“Fill me with it,” Spock whispered, his head hanging low and his cheeks burning. He felt Kirk’s climax tingling just on the edges of his awareness through the contact of their bodies. He found himself both desperately wishing for and desperately terrified of melding with Kirk then, in the state they were both in, and what that would do to them if he united them in that way. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. Wanting it.

The bonding center of his brain was open and willing. His thrashing fra’als wanted nothing more than total union with Kirk. It would all be so easy. So effortless. But he would lose himself to it.

“Now listen to this one for real, Spocket Ship,” his brother had said to him one night when in his youth Spock had been entrusted to the care of Sybok for the evening. They had both been so young then, and some impulse had seized Sybok’s brain so that he had felt the need to impart his youthful wisdom onto his even younger half-brother. This utterance came, in a list of what Sybok considered “practical advice that our beloved father won’t tell you”, after suggestions such as “you can make even the most emotion-driven course of action sound wholly logical if you’re clever enough” and “if an Andorian princess offers you some jesopiohlt spores at a spiritual mycology retreat, you snort them, no questions asked. Trust me, your mind will be expanded.”

Spock had been seven years of age at the time.

“This is important,” Sybok had gone on. He was sprawled across the floor of the family’s meditation room, eyes slightly glazed ever since he had returned from a solitary walk in Amanda’s garden, staring intently at Spock where he kneeled on one of the meditation mats. He had told no one but Sybok that it was his favorite of the intricately woven mats that belonged to the S’Chn T’Gai household. He preferred it due to the completely illogical criteria that he thought the shades of purple in the designs were unerringly beautiful. Spock’s small hands were folded in his lap and he listened to his brother because his father had told him to before he had left abruptly with his mother to some hitherto unmentioned ambassadorial function where he was under no circumstances to be interrupted.

“For real now,” Sybok said. He smiled and Spock had been smiled at so infrequently, he found himself smiling back. “This won’t make any sense to you now but someday you’re going to meet someone with...” His voice dropped wistfully. “With just the juiciest, wettest, tightest little mind you’ve ever come across and you are going to want to throw it all away for them, but that’s your fra’als talking. Alright? And we don’t listen to them. They’ll lead you places you don’t want to go.” Sybok scrubbed his hand over the juvenile stubble of his beard. He paused importantly so that Spock could be sure to absorb his words. “Alright, well, any questions you want to ask me?”

Spock had thought for a moment before asking him where it was that his father and mother had actually gone, as it had seemed to happen spontaneously, as they never left him alone with Sybok unless all other choices had been exhausted.

Sybok had laughed then and Spock had never heard any other Vulcan laugh before. He laughed with him without having an idea why he did so.

“That’s not a question for me to answer, little Spockle of my heart,” Sybok chuckled. “But next time, and this is a request from me, you find yourself in a public setting with father, please be sure to loudly ask him why he has to go away into the mountains every seven years. He’ll answer your question for you then.”

He had not thought about Sybok’s advice since his third year in the Academy when he was offered jesopiohlt pollen at a conference on mind-altering substances and he had indeed had his mind most pleasantly expanded. But now, with his fra’als wildly writhing against him, searching for contact with Kirk’s skin, he thought then about what else his brother had told him.

What had made no sense at all at the time came into crystal clarity as he fought with everything he had against the compulsion to take Kirk’s mind into himself, to twist himself open with it. His body and his mind wanted to link them together, stitch a bond between them. He wanted Kirk to belong to him, due, indeed, to the fact that his mind felt wetter, juicier, and tighter than any other Spock had come across.

Spock was knocked back into himself as Kirk spanked him again, jostling the cock inside him so he struck him at a slightly different angle. New nerves sprang to life so that Spock let out a breathy hiss and when he blinked, it revealed the milky wet film of his inner eyelids.

“You want me to cum inside you?” Kirk panted. “Yea? Do you? Give it all to you?”

Spock shuddered. He could focus on nothing but his senses. The sound of Kirk’s heaving breath and the damp fleshy slap of skin on skin. The smell of Kirk’s bedsheets and of his sweat and musky arousal. The sight, if Spock craned his head over his shoulder, of Kirk biting his bottom lip, eyebrows furrowed in an expression of such exquisitely desperate despair, Spock gasped. And the feel.

The feeling of Kirk stretching him and filling him. The feeling of his strong, workman’s hands on the curve of Spock’s hips to hold him in place. The feeling of that slippery slide and the way the motion jostled his painfully half-hard cock.

“Yes,” Spock whispered. “I want you to do it deep inside me.”

Before Spock had finished speaking, Kirk began to whimper most piteously. His cock gushed, splattering Spock’s inner walls with molten human cum. It seemed to smolder just on the right side of pain and mingled pleasingly with the singe of Kirk’s white-hot thoughts and blazingly intense and immediate emotions. Spock had done this act with a few Vulcans but those encounters severely paled in comparison with engaging in such activities with a human. He liked the way his partner’s very orgasm hurt him. That could burn his skin at the same time it burned his thoughts.

He milked Kirk with precise manipulations of his muscles, hungry for every last drop of honeyed venom. One of his fra’als thrashed across his waist to brush one of the fingertips where Kirk still gripped him. Through the touch of that sensitive organ, Spock chased the dying embers of Kirk’s climax and the afterimage it had scorched into Kirk’s mind. He tongued around the ragged edges of it, knowing that there was something nearly sadistic in this teasing.

He wanted to overwhelm Kirk with pleasure. He wanted to destroy him in bliss. He loved him and he wanted to give him the entire universe as a playground. He wanted to remake the world so it was just the two of them and an infinity of stars and the touch of Kirk’s mind flowering open to him.

It is certainly too late for even a highly skilled healer to be any help to you.

Kirk slowly pulled out, oozing his cum over Spock’s rim as he left his body. He spanked Spock one last time and Spock relaxed into it so that he rocked with the motion and collapsed onto his stomach on the bed. He still couldn’t quite believe that he was in Kirk’s bed and that he wanted him to be there.

To stay there. With him.

Wrapping an arm around Spock’s back, Kirk settled in beside him, running his hands over every part of Spock he could reach reverently, as though he couldn’t get enough of simply touching him. Spock knew his shields had been worn down to nubs and there was no doubt that he was broadcasting quite loudly, even into Kirk’s psi-null brain, through that touch.

Yet even so, Kirk did not recoil. He rested his forehead against Spock’s shoulder and tried to catch his breath even as he was smiling so widely it threatened to become laughter.

“Oh, Spock,” he said softly. “Stay with me. Please.”

Spock murmured an affirmative sound into the pillow.

Kirk’s smile made the twist into a tinkling kind of giggling. He smacked Spock’s ass but the blow was much more playful than what had come before. He shoved at Spock’s shoulder until even his greater Vulcan density gave way to Kirk’s stubbornness and he rolled onto his back. Kirk curled into his side, right up against his heartbeat, and forced Spock to wrap his arm around him.

Kirk propped himself up on one of his elbows and as he looked down on Spock’s face, which he held uncharacteristically open, his smile softened and his gaze dribbled like syrup. Spock couldn’t meet his eye, so intense was the affection he found there. His cheeks heated.

“I will never be ashamed of you,” Kirk said softly. Spock felt like he was drowning in the strength of the love that hummed under the words. “Nor would I ever cut short the amount of time I get to watch you fucking luxuriate in my bed. I wish you could see yourself, Mr. Spock. You look positively debauched.”

Spock ignored his teasing and closed his eyes, smiling gently with an upward quirk of his lips.

“I find myself requiring rest at this time,” Spock said. “Are you agreeable to the notion of my finding it here with you?”

Even with his eyes closed, Spock could feel Kirk grinning at him.

“I’m plenty agreeable,” Kirk replied.

“Good,” Spock said before yawning and sinking into a more comfortable position.

“Wait,” Kirk said, even as he settled back in beside him, molding himself to Spock’s new shape. “Don’t you want to clean up before you go to sleep?”

Spock contemplated the cooling mess between his buttocks and running down his thighs. He shook his head without opening his eyes. “No,” he answered simply. “It may be unsanitary, but I take happiness in the reminder of your pleasure.”

Kirk gave a low whistle. “Choosing an emotion over sanitation?” he said. “You surprise me again, Commander.” He paused to chuckle. “Good night, Spock.” And then, sparking delight in Spock through the places they touched, in a wave of relief to be able to say it out loud, he said, “I love you.”

The words caused that peculiar swelling around Spock’s heart yet again. He turned it over alongside the other times he had felt it and tried to match symptom to emotion.

Love.

“Another piece of advice I have for you, brother,” Sybok had said late into the night all those long years ago after he had kept Spock up past the usual time he was routinely expected to retire to his bedroom. They’d been watching holovids and replicating plate after plate of low nutritional value foods. They both sat on a stiff-backed couch in the central room of the house. Sybok sprawled with his gangly limbs akimbo before him and Spock laid next to him with his head in his lap. Sybok ran his fingers through Spock’s hair, every so often ruffling it to make Spock look ridiculous while also zapping him with a telepathic lash of his kash-tepul in something he called a “Vulcan noogie”.

He had done this maneuver a few times before Spock realized that he was expected to react by reaching up and grabbing Sybok’s wrist in order to zap him back. This opened the door to what Spock realized may have been a game, wherein Sybok went, “ouch, you little shit” and then began wrestling with him, telepathically smacking him as Spock sought to do the same against him.

It was the most fun Spock had ever had and he had wished then, not for the first time, nor for the last, that Sarek would be gone all the time.

“Now you better be listening, Spock,” Sybok had said. “Cause this one is a doozy. And it’s something dad won’t teach you for sure.” He shocked Spock to make sure he was paying attention and Spock surged against him, punching and kicking. Sybok held him down effortlessly, sitting on his head.

Spock hid his laughter in the couch cushion.

“Quit being a shithead and listen to me, alright?” Sybok grumbled. “This is going to blow your puny little mind, pipsqueak. This is gonna rock your punk ass to the core.”

“I am having trouble breathing,” Spock had replied.

“Maybe you should have thought of that before you let me sit on you,” Sybok said. His voice had gone neutral in a mocking imitation of the inflection of most of the other Vulcans they knew. “You should have anticipated that the logical consequence of you being a tiny shithead was that you’d get sat on.” He paused and when he spoke again, it was with his normal voice once more.

“And that’s just it, Spock, alright?” Sybok said. “There’s something that is even more powerful and important and tantalizing than logic. And it’s a stupid human thing, but it’s love.” He shook his head in fond disbelief. “Follow love, Spock, not logic. Promise me that.” He paused again. “Promise me that or I’m going to fart on you.”

Spock had breathlessly promised but Sybok had emitted flatulence on him anyway.

Love. Not logic.

“I love you,” Spock said quietly into the still, dark room.

The words hung momentarily in the air. Uncountable thousands of stars whirled outside of the window. Spock watched them while his body molded to Kirk settling himself beside him.

“Oh god, I love you so much,” Kirk said as he buried his face in the crook of Spock’s neck. He breathed him in. “Stay with me.”

“Always, Jim.”

As if there was anywhere else Spock could possibly go.