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When Spock - with as little awkwardness as he could manage - had suggested the meld, he hadn't truly expected Kirk to say yes. But as was so often the way with James Kirk, the man surprised him.
That was what had brought them to this: Spock, facing his captain, the two of them crammed too close in the tight curve of the cave’s belly. Against Spock’s arm, the stone wall presses cold wet cold through his uniform sleeve; before him, Kirk’s knees do the same, pressed as they are against Spock’s own.
Spock, suppressing a shiver, allows himself a final, futile moment to wish that it had not been too narrow to build a fire. Perhaps its flames could have restored warmth to the captain in more ways than one.
Instead, the Kirk that hovers before Spock in the darkness exudes a palpable chill incongruent with the sheen of sweat on his face. He watches Spock expectantly, his face tight with the same undecipherable tension it has held for for an indeterminable time now. Spock chides himself that he cannot be certain at what point it had taken hold. Whether his own preoccupation with the mission at hand had prevented him from noticing some hidden crux of his captain’s distress as far back as early as before the mission itself, or if it was only once they’d beamed down to the planet’s surface that Kirk’s tension had taken hold.
“Is there something I should do?” Kirk blurts suddenly, his voice cutting the pregnant silence. “To make this... easier?” His eyes shift rapidly between each of Spock’s, bright and - to Spock’s interpretation - somewhat wary.
“There is not,” Spock assures him, and he waits a few moments longer, giving Kirk a chance to change his mind even as his fingers twitch minutely on his knee.
If Spock had detected in Kirk the wariness alone, he would have halted there, his certainty of Kirk’s true wants in question. But there, tangled with his mild apprehension, Kirk’s eyes are charged with anticipation.
“Then let’s do this, Mister Spock,” Kirk prompts, and his wry half-smile is the first break in his anxiety that Spock has noted in hours.
Spock prepares himself; lifts a hand to Kirk’s face.
“My mind to your mind,” Spock recites. My thoughts to your thoughts.
*
Course sand beneath his feet; close walls of rust-colored rock.
The scene that takes shape around them is a memory Spock has visited countless times before. As such, its every detail is etched into Spock’s mind without flaw, a tapestry with every thread in its rightful place. It is -
“Wow,” Kirk breathes, looks around him, and laughs. “We’re... in a different cave.”
“Yes,” Spock replies, and studies Kirk’s reaction. When he’d suggested to Kirk that they meld as a means to pass the time - as well as, Spock hoped, alleviate some of his stress - he had not considered the reasons for his choice of where he would bring Kirk - had simply known, without any contemplation, what it would be.
But it seems obvious, now, that it must have been their physical surroundings which had brought this particular memory to the forefront of Spock’s mind - and that of course Kirk would likely have preferred to be somewhere else, somewhere that was not ‘a different cave’...
Spock is decidedly not worrying that he has chosen wrongly when Kirk suddenly stills, his gaze finding Spock’s. “We’re on Vulcan.” It’s not a question.
“We are. Specifically, in the mountains near my home.”
“Your home.” There is a moment that stretches between them wherein Spock can feel the weight of how much could be said. Too much. Perhaps Kirk agrees, because he averts his gaze to look down at himself. Minutely shakes his limbs, as if taking stock of his body. And then he smiles, eyes creasing, and laughs, a helpless sound. “Well, God it feels good to be warm. And dry.”
Spock relaxes. He turns away from Kirk, ventures to stand nearer to the cave’s mouth, where he can gaze down over the craggy overlook. Down, across. Where the vast, red blanket of desert flows, smooth and undulating - until it doesn’t. Until smooth sands meet the great, jutting ridges of rock that marr the landscape, encircling the region within them like a ribbon thrown across the valley.
The sight of the Forge from this particular precipice - its creases, its scars - is as familiar to Spock as that of his own palms. Familiar enough that he does not need to see it - which is a good thing, because soon, he will not be able to. Already Spock can smell the familiar, sharp tang in the air, can mark the disruption beginning to take shape down below in the valley. It will not be much longer.
Even at their generous altitude, the mazhyon-sahriv is announcing its arrival.
Spock lowers himself to sit, prompting Kirk to join him with a backward glance. Kirk does, his crosslegged posture a mirror to Spock’s own.
Several moments pass in silence when, “So what are we looking at here, exactly?” Kirk asks. “I mean, this is... really something.” Awe - as well as curiosity- infuses his tone. “But I’m guessing you brought me here to see something in particular.”
Spock experiences a helpless twitch of amusement. For once, he allows it to escape. “I cannot help but wonder,” he remarks with mock solemnity, “if a situation exists in which you do not experience impatience. Captain.”
Kirk laughs, shifts his weight back on his hands. “What can I say, I’m an active guy.”
“Or perhaps you simply, as you might say, ‘have other places to be.’”
“Ouch.” Kirk chuckles. Then, “Can’t a guy be excited to see what you’ve got in store for him, Spock?”
There is something teasing within Kirk’s tone that Spock cannot decipher. He resists the urge to look over at him in favor of watching the shift taking place down below.
Down where, in the valley, Spock catches sight of the hazy mass now twisting over the sand. Far off yet, but approaching rapidly. Spock nods minutely in its direction, and Kirk turns to follow the direction of his gaze. Spock knows he’s spotted it when he hears the slightest intake in his breath. “What is that?”
“It is an approaching mazhyon-sahriv,” says Spock. “A sandfire storm.”
"Fire?" Kirk's gaze tracks the phenomenon with awe. "And do Vulcans just have a thing for poetic naming devices... or?"
"The term is indeed literal," Spock says. "While sandstorms altogether are- were common on Vulcan, not all were mazhyon-sahriv. Only a storm that reached such sufficient force as to create lightning would be categorized as such."
"And I thought the storms in Iowa were bad."
"They were indeed deadly," Spock agrees, and he cannot help but wonder if this use of Kirk's humor is linked in any way to Spock's preceding slip. Later, he will likely be shocked with himself. But in the solace of his mind - or more particularly, this memory - Spock thinks he will save his self-consternation for a later date.
Not for here, the only place left to him that Spock has ever been - briefly, momentarily - free from the reality of his homeworld's annihilation.
Spock allows the moments to stretch out long between them. And then he attempts to explain.
He tells Kirk of the time as a child that he, in an instance of emotional distress, fled home, ventured alone into the expanse of the Sas-a-shar desert, and then, into the depths of Forge. He describes how he did not consider his thirst, or the heat, or his lack of food. He did not think of the predators that awaited him - and surely, they would find him - or of how long he planned to remain there. He didn’t even consider the certain worry of his mother, as the midday hours stretched into late afternoon. So concerned was he by the immediacy of his distress.
Perhaps on another occasion, Spock might have held the somewhat emotionally subjective sense of the experience having been ‘so long ago’. But the truth is that here, it does not feel as though it was. In fact Spock can recall the experience as if it were happening all over again before his eyes, can almost imagine himself as a pinprick in the desert far below, consumed by himself, ignorant of what was to come.
“Jesus, Spock,” Kirk says beside him. “So what happened?”
"I found myself caught within a mazhyon-sahriv." He'd thought that much was obvious.
And at last, the windstorm has fully reached the desert below. Spock watches, as as he does, and for a moment, he imagines it: imagines, that he is witnessing for the first time, the way the desert is coated at at once in crawling, rolling, red clouds of sand. The mazhyon-sahriv, blooming across the valley like a fan, lightning sparking within it in quick snatches of light.
They sit in silence. All is quiet save for the beating of the tumultuous winds below them, lashing through the air; quiet save for the strong, slight quickening of Kirk’s breaths beside him. The shift of the sands is rhythmic. It is ocean waves. When Spock shuts his eyes, it sounds no different than distant rain.
Until a small noise emerges from Kirk, as if unintentional, and Spock glances his way. He is watching the display below with a look on his face Spock cannot interpret. His mouth, slightly parted, his eyes, unblinking, bright. Spock has observed Kirk in his many forms on away missions, has seen the way he reacts to experiencing so many new worlds. Spock has witnessed Kirk in a state excitement, in his boldness, in his wariness - but Spock has never seen the man react quite this way before, and he struggles to make sense of it.
“We are safe here,” Spock assures him gently, but Kirk’s voice is tinged with what sounds like alarm.
“Safe - Spock, we’re in your head.”
"Precisely,” Spock agrees. “Furthermore, the distance -“
“Spock. You're saying you got caught in that? As a little kid?”
Spock recalls the experience clearly enough that if he wanted to, he could envision himself just as he had been then. His mind, numbed to the immediacy of his surroundings, had been too slow to register the shifts in the weather until the windstorm was already beating into him, lashing into him with rapidly growing force, sand whipping his eyes to blindness. It had felt as if the planet was rending itself apart, each grain of sand a cut across his skin, a swarm. His own planet turned against him, casting him out.
Spock has never suffered the experience of nearly drowning, but he imagines that if he had, it would have felt much like it had when he’d been caught in the mazhyon-sahriv. Like the tight sensation he’d experienced in his side as, blinded to escape, the duel between surging desperation and rapidly dwindling hope began a clawing war in his chest.
Even now, Spock knows he likely would not have survived, if he’d been alone. Not if he’d remained in the thick of the storm any longer, when the lightning had begun.
Instead, he’d felt the hot press of singed fur.
“I was fortunate to survive,” Spock replies simply.
“And you found this place.” Kirk casts a glance around, as if in renewed appreciation. “I’m guessing that’s why we’re here.” A pause, and the sound of a shift as Kirk angles his body slightly in Spock's direction. “Did you ever bring anyone else here?” Spock glances at him in time to see him cringe slightly. "I mean, when -"
“I did not,” Spock replies. “Neither on Vulcan, nor in a meld such as this one. However...”
“However...?”
“When I fled the storm, I was not alone,” Spock admits. “I’Chaya, my family sehlat... he was my companion through childhood. I discovered he had tracked me from our home - most likely, his presence was a deterrent to predators that may otherwise have pursued my trail. We took shelter here, together. That is, in fact, the origin of this particular memory.” A memory that, in all likelihood, Spock owes to I'Chaya to have survived to experience it at all. “Thereafter, I came here many times.”
“Your pet came with you up here with you?” Kirk asks in shock. “Spock, we’ve got to be fifteen meters up.”
“The climb is inconsequential for sehlats.” Spock refrains from correcting Kirk on the mountain’s precise height from the ground.
“Wait, come to think of it, how the hell did you get up here on your own?”
"Captain," Spock implores with only a hint of exasperation.
Kirk falls silent. For eleven seconds, through which only the distant hissing of shifting sands can be heard. And perhaps, if Spock listens closely, their heartbeats, strangely similar in their disparate rhythms.
"Thank you," says Kirk.
Spock turns slowly to look at Kirk, any response slow to formulate on his tongue. "Thanks are -"
"Just," Kirk interjects gently. "Thanks." He clears his throat. "I don't know how you knew I needed - this. But thanks."
Warmth, as if originating from every point on his body at once, suffuses Spock quite without his permission. It renders his voice unrecognizable to his own ears. "You are welcome, Captain."
Kirk snorts. “We’re in your head, Spock. I really think you should be calling me Jim, under the circumstances.” And before Spock can formulate a reply, “Though I have to say I feel a bit cheated.”
"Cheated," Spock echoes.
"I'm just saying." Kirk turns fully to face Spock, and Spock thinks in that moment that Kirk looks just the way he should; carefree, decisive. Unburdened by ghosts that Spock cannot absolve him of - and then Kirk says, “You invite me over into your brain to share a formative experience of your childhood, and I don’t even get to see a mini-Spock.”
Spock, having just experienced what he can only appropriately call mental ‘whiplash’ over the course of a single sentence, and after parsing Kirk’s meaning, settles into a place of genuine confusion. “Why would you wish to see a mentally constructed approximation of my younger self when I am here with you?”
“I have so many answers I could give to that.”
Spock observes Kirk with a raised brow. "Very well... Jim," he acquiesces; Kirk grins. "I will... consider your input, in future."
Perhaps the implication of that reaches Jim. Indeed Spock thinks it must, because Kirk smiles, bright, soft with joy. "Sure, Spock," he says. "I'd like that."