propositional logic

"The definition includes friend, brother, and lover. Words in Federation Standard that, taken separately and in various combinations, connote optionality or - and/or - alternation. Communicated in Vulkhansu, there is no choice but to be - rather, to perform the duties of, in a sense - all three at once. Constantly."

The rest of the pronouncement hangs, tritely, in the air: if one is indeed another's t'hy'la. It hangs more limply and less significantly than Spock's own literal admission, however. When he, or any Vulcan, mentions "no choice" in a matter, he means it literally, in that one does not decide, one simply does. It's not about pressure, or even the effortless lack of it. Spock introduced pressure, perhaps tactically in error, when he sought to clarify the state of being.

He thinks it's a performance. Jim understands that sex is a performance, of course he does. As much as everything is a performance, as much as life requires choice and conscion in all things that have any worldly weight. For the personal, a little elision is allowed.

Aha. Indeed.

For the personal, a little elision is allowed.

"And you're sure about that, Spock?"

"I do not make statements of which I am not sure. Of whose certitude I am not confident."

"You're speaking in half-sentences, Spock. You're nervous. I know what that means."

The camera of the situation, arranged toward performance in both Jim and Spock's minds, pulls itself back just then - for them, metaphorically, including also a dimension of rending dilation, in time. For us, not so.

Jim is straddling Spock's crotch, knees bent and feet tucked somewhere almost below Spock's thighs, and it's taken him almost the whole of the encounter to reconcile the sight of Spock's chest, hairy and elegant, with the fact of Spock's face above it; the crucial conversation aside, he's wanted to just stare, and stare, and stare, and only now are the rectangular shapes beginning to connect together into a single cohesive whole that will at some point cease to feel meritorious of his entire entirely smitten focus.

Spock's chest is, of course, only visible because Jim had used the bottle-opener of logic to say that even if Spock's heart is down at his side, if anyone should care to listen (and Jim certainly would, but he'd conveniently avoided actually enacting his own pretense up to this point save by the relatively disconnected device of his palm), his own heart is situated somewhere beneath his pectoral muscles, scars and all, so if they're so paired to each other, they should be even, shouldn't they? And Spock hadn't exactly been reluctant to acquiesce.

He hadn't been reluctant when Jim had reverently reached down to cup at the swells of his chest, only flinching at the initial speed of the action. His chin had dug into the crown of Jim's head with all fervor, and his nose had explored the shell of Jim's ears with truly ardorous abandon.

Neither of them possess penetrative genitalia, and while Jim has admitted to himself that he finds the prospect of using toys fun (at the very least, non-repellent, which is the type of response he hopes he might be able to expect from Spock, someday), it's not for today. It's not for now. There are only ideas, concepts, now. Feelings, perhaps. The feeling of "we are engaging in coitus" versus the feeling of "we are clothed, or perhaps unclothed, and doing nothing of the sort" is, Jim thinks he might come to understand, a wide dichotomy. For all Spock insists that the Vulcanian interpretation of their own term is markedly, definitionally fluid, it's the human who has the more instinctive lay of it, in practice.

It's at least slightly disconcerting that Spock, while so clearly disregarding societal expectations in that he has made to bond himself to a human man (and has made to make himself a man when originally he was not conceived as one, to boot), is submitting himself so totally to this brink-edge division between what is safe for him and what is not. Maybe the concern is of a tipping point that exists between what is allotted for him and what is not.

It feels natural to invite Spock into his quarters, to lay him down in his bed. He's never so much as blinked towards the other alternative; palpable, is the carefully-considered barrier before the chamber of the Vulcan and his interiority. This, of all compromises, Jim is scared but absolutely willing to accept. To need privacy from one's own privacy...all the same, he would still like to give Spock a kiss on the bridge, every now and then.

He gestures at the crotch atop which he sits. "Is there a word you like to use for your...this?" The audible ellipsis had been directly intentional, because Jim had no intention of volunteering a word that might bring with it various associated discomforts, but worse still was the possibility of othering, dismissing, Spock's body. Of anything of him.

(As if anyone with eyes and ears and a soul could ever do that.)

"In what context?"

In the context of I'm sitting on your genitals, or at least I think I am, and I love you and I want to kiss you...?

"In the context of asking you if I can kiss you down there."

Juvenile, yes, is the invocation of "down there", but since it wasn't his opener, Jim figures he can get away with using it.

Spock, perhaps oblivious or perhaps not, hesitates.

Tracing Spock's cheekbone with one finger (and cursing himself mentally for forgetting to use two, or disguise his stupidity by the use of knucklebacks), Jim offers, "You don't even have to take your pants off. I just want to. Or I can not." But I can't not want to.

A little elision is allowed. Maybe even a lot. Jim would give the world, even though he feels so much more like Jim than Kirk right now, and so not in any position to be giving anything that anybody wants.

Spock places his hand on Jim's left breast and stills his breathing to match the pace of the beat there, then moves into half time.

"You know me...all too well. Jim."

The repartee is mirthless. Were Spock's hand not clutching over it, Jim is sure his heart would crack in two (in a beautiful sort of way, to be sure, but broken nonetheless, and he does not love Spock to love a broken thing; Spock is the most whole entity in all he has ever known).

"Spock..."

Spock responds to the tender, low address by lidding his eyes still more and pulling his knees up against Jim's back. Jim comes to understand all at once that he is so satisfied at this particular impasse that if he could simply stop them in time and revisit this moment again and again, he would, observing and indulging in something new and different each time. Without any shedding of pants.

Jim is the only thing standing in his way before that goal, that euphoria, that serendipity of situation, but Jim does that by representing an other, not by representing Jim Kirk himself or even the captain that looms behind and above him when not around and through him.

"You are already conscious of that which I fear: that you are intrinsically so unorthodox a choice for someone of my status in Vulcan society that any further deviation may prove...socially fatal."

Reverence paints Spock's own voice at the surety of his conclusion and at Jim's inherent understanding.

"That's quite dramatic, for you, Spock," Jim says in rhythmic reply, knowing that as drama queens go Spock is far and away the most captivating.

Spock nods, swallows. "It is quite dramatic, indeed, that I should need such reassurances as you are attempting to provide."

"But you'd like me to go on attempting, is that it?"

"I could not let you do so without making an attempt of my own to be communicative."

"I'll keep on leaving out the nasty bits, then," Jim concludes with a soft smile. He leans down to kiss Spock's cheek, tapping two fingers to his side with the hand that doesn't move up to grasp the sallow shoulder.

And now, for his findings.

"I'm not saying you have to. I'm almost saying the opposite of that, I think. But what I am saying is that your secret - and your...secret - is safe with me. If t'hy'la is really what you want us to be-" no choice, no choice, no choice "-if t'hy'la is really what we are, then I'd encourage you to try it. But if we're not, then you don't have to." Jim raises a cautionary hand, a let-me-finish to both himself and his audience. "I'm not trying to trap you, or swindle you into it, by using logic. I'm just trying to speak your language the best way I can figure."

With his hand wrapped lightly around Jim's wrist, Spock contemplates this. Jim allows his eyes recess by drifting his own up to the slightly mussed hairline, the perfect flushing ears, the double-faceted coloring of the cheeks. It's plainly implicit in the selection of words proposed to make an equivalent that there's no room in the definition for something so detatched as "admirer" or "adorer"; logic and action are the counterparts of emotion and feeling, in some sense. He could sit and stare, drinking in and breathing out, forever, but for the small caveat that he'd like to be allotted other angles, other settings, as well. Just to see Spock is an ordinate blessing he feels woefully unequal to.

It's a performance. Or it's not. There can be no elision of Spock's total ethereal quality.

At last and at length, Spock speaks. "Am I to understand, then, Jim, that your implication is the final, disjunctive proposition: whether we are or we are not, in fact, t'hy'la, there is no stipulation for copulation?"

Jim grins, lazier than he's ever felt in his life. He stows with all haste his childish, semantic disappointment at the idea that anything about their union could be considered disjunctive, and not conjunctive (Spock and Jim, Jim and Spock, all at once, constantly, constantly, constantly, forever).

Oh, baby, now you're speaking my language, is what he could say, to please his twitchy semantics even more. But the very glimmer of t'hy'la fascinates him, wholly captures his mind. He can do naught but be as he has proposed, as he knows he will only continue to grow to be.

(The sentence is, also, nowhere near cutting by halves.)

"So poetic, my love." He slides off and moves up to press his nose into Spock's cheek. Spock sighs a cadence that says without saying that Jim has given the world by taking it, by lifting it away. Yes. That's what Jim can do. "That's exactly what I meant to imply."