aren't you dead? (a fondness for antiques)

Spock had gazed quiveringly at his captain - admiral, so admirable - when he'd said it, so pricklingly presciently, out of those same dark eyes, just irises and corneas and rods and cones but all bound together nearly one half-century ago like a book treated most delicately, and Spock did so very rarely rub at the sockets of his so beautifully sunken eyes.

In the simulated death-record books of the Kobayashi Maru, yes, Spock had died, and Kirk pretended so laughingly that it was a lark, that it didn't pang at him - Spock, die? but Spock was perfect, sacrifice for Spock was a thing of nobility and gorgeous intelligence because Spock would not die, never, alone - but, then again...he held Dickens under his arm, so precious because Spock had given him to him, and Spock was not made to sit up on a shelf, which was why he had joined Starfleet in the first place.

(Dickens was serialized. Every bit of Spock is so much, all at once, and Kirk cannot fathom his gladness at having access to, most constantly, the entire extended volume.)

Kirk did not love Spock because Spock was special; Spock was special because Kirk loved him.

Maybe.

Maybe that's true.

And maybe it isn't. Maybe it's a disservice. Maybe it's both and neither, necessary and sufficient contrapositive conditions, and some people hated Spock because Spock was special, so we can see how much good that did, and not everyone loved Dickens, but how could anyone refuse the triumphant solemnity, so grand, so grand, of being recalled to life?

Kirk's hair grew curly, lost its singular slick shine, and Spock's, too, acquired something of texture. They became rounder. Creakier. Ever more touched, and touched, and touched.

As Dickens' parochial children might not have loved their dilapidated possessions, and we won't love to imitate Havisham's cling to her wedding dress, but that uniform, scorched in radiation air-fire, is no more waste product than Spock's Kolinahr robe.

Spock, older. Kirk, less agile. Spock, wiser. Kirk, less foolish...perhaps.

Even without saying anything explicit, commonplaced, public, there was something unmistakable that blossommed there, as thumbprints and dogears upon pages.

And Kirk grew only more endeared, enamoured, and overjoyed.

Underscored further: if there is one thing of all the many that James Tiberius Kirk can count himself principally, ungovernably glad about, it is that Spock is aging at pace with him, and he is not shooting a rocket round the moon to scorch impassively in the quiet queen's face; James Tiberius Kirk never thought that he'd get to grow old with anybody, and he is most certainly not happy that Spock took his temporary death first, but he is overjoyed to tenderly stroke each line in the deep, hale-sallow visage of Spock, unmistakably Spock, forever Spock, forget the family name because here lies - here STANDS - Mr. Spock, forever loyal to his golden captain, and that's the best kind of everlasting love, when you can't use anything but a climbed-inside nickname for your best-loved, most one-in-a-billion antiques.

Aren't you dead, Spock?

and aren't you like a spine-worn book, read alive, and constantly reliving and dying, again and again and again and again