just the essentials

and i will keep ping-ponging between fandoms as long as the ships are good and the philosophy is flowing. thank you Zara they changed my life

"Spock." Jim gestured matter-of-fact-ly with two fingers. "I want to talk to you."

This was not unusual. The captain of the Enterprise held his first officer in close confidence and high regard, and no one least of all that first officer himself would think anything amiss or remiss if his conference was requested.

Admittedly, the lack of titular address made the request slightly unusual, but given that Spock did not possess a colloquially tradeable family name, it was...all the same. Not worth quibbling about, as Jim might say.

They had been passing each other (and how much of a coincidence had that really been, do you think?) in one of the ship's corridors, and moved into a nearby empty rec room for their regular chat.

"You know I...flirt with you, don't you, Spock?"

Spock blinked and flicked his eyes to one side, letting his lips and brows both drift up.

"From what I can tell, there are many different definitions of human flirting. Some exhibits are more like mating rituals, while others are more." He stopped his train of thought and fully frowned.

Jim seemed to have been anticipating this, and he did not frown. "Natural, Spock?" he prodded. "Just an everyday part of life?"

"That would be an accurate description, Captain," Spock agreed. Feeling slightly off balance, he instinctively reached for the title. Jim smiled, warm and with crinkling eyes; he perceived, Spock realized, the use of his title between the two of them as that very natural flirting.

He would and did think the same of his name. There was no avoiding it. It was...integral.

"Did you call me to you to flirt with me, Captain?" This time, he indulged in the title purely to highlight the juxtaposition of duty with pleasure. Of course, Jim smiled again. Of course, Spock welcomed it.

"Not exactly - at least, not in as natural a way as I believe I've been doing. I called you to me because...well, because I like having you near me. Very much so."

Spock inclined his head to acknowledge. The simplicity and straightforwardness of their conversation thus far, he found, pleased him greatly.

"I was thinking about what usually comes after flirting."

Spock straightened back up.

Jim was watching him with a keen solicitude in his eyes - he didn't look lost, nor distraught, merely concerned, and Spock wasn't sure quite how to respond. He didn't welcome the thought of continuing the chain of premises, because a chain of premises has a conclusion. He was afraid, and he was melancholy, of the end.

But that was not what Jim was suggesting. Not an end, rather. More of a beginning.

"I thought I might kiss you- sorry, I should say I thought we might kiss. If you'd like to try that."

Now he looked hopeful, and indeed at least a little lost. For the few moments his eyes searched, Spock found that Jim looked quite foreign. Once the captain's gaze returned to his Vulcan anchor's, he appeared to be at home.

"The prospect is...not unpleasant."

Jim nodded, ducking his head, and worked his fingers against the base of his palm. It wasn't that he hadn't considered what would happen at this juncture; to the contrary, absolutely. It was just that...well, nothing could have prepared him.

Spock watched, and watched, and watched. The human standing before him was undoubtedly one of his favorite sights in all the universe to observe, from any angle and in any state (but, preferably, a healthy and happy one), so if the kiss never happened and all he did was watch, that would also be not unpleasant.

Jim always loved his litotes. But Jim seemed to be distracted, just then.

"There is no need to be ashamed, Jim. I, too, have little experience with those of more or less the same gender as myself."

He could only assume, after all, that Jim's hesitance was marked by the only categorical difference between this and any of his numerous other romantic encounters with those individuals encountered on their missions, both human and not. For one example of a concrete aspect that resulted from this difference but was not the core basis for the categorization itself, Jim was usually taller than his partners. Not so in the present moment.

(Partners. It had quite a pleasing sound - because it was logical, of course. It was what they had always been and would always be, unless death or bureaucracy somehow came in their inevitable certitude to force the two apart.)

Jim laughed, almost decadently carefree. "That's not what I'm worried about, believe me. I've been with a man before, I know how to...kiss a man. But I've...never kissed a Spock before."

Spock's brow furrowed. It was immensely illogical to speak of singular, anonymous examples of collections which by their very nature contained only one member. "I fail to see how your experience with men, as you have stated, would not be sufficient."

"Spock...you're special." Jim wrung his hands, spread them from side to side. Spock adored him. "You could be a woman and I'd still be so..."

Just as he had posited, and then again firmly diagnosed. To posit would be far too close to...a guess. Or would it? "Hesitant?" Or, as he had also said, ashamed.

(He'd even shocked himself by failing to get trapped in the state of insisting that Jim's aversion was to Spock himself, because of aspects which belonged only to Spock himself, namely...his self.)

"Not hesitant at all," Jim tamped down the egregious suggestion not hesitantly at all. "Nervous, or anxious, would be the word - and I know that usually includes some hesitation, but I don't want you to think for even a second that there's any part of me that is," he grimaced, "hesitant to kiss you. Nothing could be farther from the truth."

"Further, Jim," Spock corrected gently. "As you are speaking of metaphorical distance."

Jim took the requisite pause at this; while he never found himself grammatically floundering, it wasn't as if he would protest to Spock's implicit judgement that he mangled such quasi-homonyms from time to time. He was no scientist, was much closer to a grammarian given his self-profession as a history buff, yet these verbal imprecisions escaped at times nonetheless.

More than that, though: for Vulcans, space - physically, if also metaphorically - was of the utmost, and they did not concern themselves with time, except to say that what had been, had been, and they didn't very much like to think of it because it didn't allow them to hold themselves as upright, as a cultural collective, as they currently did.

No, his statement had semantically regarded physical distance on a very distinct purpose.

"Couldn't be farther, either. Because here I am, at your side."

"You are standing directly in front of me," said Spock, obliquely.

You are curled up in a state of perpetual rest within my heart, thought Spock, feeling quite keenly its mighty hummingbird's beat.

So Jim carefully took hold of Spock's right bicep and tricep (Spock found an undignified, unbalanced dichotomy in the practice of referring to the combined muscle groups as the upper arm, since no one ever referred to the lower arm), shifting his hand neither any lower nor any higher (as Spock shifted his hands, locked behind his back, exactly none at all), and then he leaned up, and there was the kiss.

It was the first time, but it felt like the last time too - rather, like the continuum of all time and times condensed into one singular, supermassively expansive point.

That would be the simultaneously poetic and reductive description, anyway, a sort of compromise between Jim and Spock's individual views on the matter.

For Spock: he found it difficult, in some sense, to keep his eyes closed, as he found he wanted quite desperately to see what Jim looked like when performing such an action as he had so apparently anticipated, while in another sense he found himself far too overwhelmed to do anything but weakly flutter his eyelashes and yield his mouth to a certain pliance necessitated by the joint action.

Jim's hand had cupped slightly tighter around his arm at first, but now lay wholly still. His cheeks were round and rosy.

It was security, which made no sense at all; they were physically vulnerable to attack from any who wished to take advantage of their preoccupation. And yet Spock felt unfathomably safe, and like he had always been this safe and was merely experiencing it afresh once again.

For Jim: he knew it was only a kiss, and he knew furthermore that with both of Spock's hands held behind his back he had no chance at all of giving Spock even half as much pleasure as he himself would receive from this impossibly precious donation of affection, rendered from mouth to mouth.

Spock's mouth wasn't even moving; he seemed not averse to but neither enthusiastic towards the prospect of actively reciprocating. He had made exactly one low noise which Jim yet found inordinately reassuring - of what, he didn't know. He didn't know! There wasn't anything to know.

But the logic of it - what even was so wholesomely heartwrenching about the exchange of oral fluids via the conduits of lips, the most enervated location on the human body, for humans themselves? - bore no strength or weight in face of the much more potent feeling, which was that Jim loved Spock and could not ever imagine being able to tell him so, to tell him precisely or even roughly how much, so he would settle for...

Stars.

They let some minutes pass.

They didn't ask each other, was that good for you? Because of course it was. It always had been. It always would be.

It was a natural action. It was a nova. It was an orbit. It was waking up in the morning. It was going to sleep at night.

It was exploration, and it was already discovered. It was extreme contentment, but what it was not was complacence.

"Should we do that again, later?" And Jim still would have asked it if they'd been married a quarter century; just because he wanted to? Just because he needed to.

Spock had no immediate response. Jim could tell that he was trying to work out the logic of it, or failing that the observable absence thereof.

"I'd like to take good care of you, Mr. Spock," he offered as if irrelevant. "The best," came out as if involuntary.

The best of Jim's own abilities, or the best of anyone who could otherwise occupy the role, or the best possible care transferrable in the universe? The captain would do well to not speak in such vagaries. His human inefficiency was exemplary in its own most efficient performance.

"And to me, well...that would include giving you a kiss, every now and then. Just to make sure you knew I cared."

Now Spock turned, sharp blinks punctuating his rotation. Even in surprise, he was impossibly elegant. Like a dream, which seemed verily now to resemble real life. "Did you think that that fact would ever come into question?"

"I thought it might," Jim said, shrugging (it was, of course, in his own peculiarly characteristic way where hands and mandibles splayed forth almost in rhythm; embarrassment comported with tenderness laid over self-deprecation as coquettishly genuine eyelashes over eyes).

"It's not uncommon for Terran spouses to get worried about things like that." And, much worse than just innocently worried. "I'd hate for you to have any reason to feel the same way."

It was impractical, but not illogical, for it was Jim - he could and did catastrophize when it was his own participation that was being concerned. That his first and most immediate assumption should be that Spock would come to emotional dissatisfaction if he were not to be kissed at regular intervals, after having being kissed once, or twice or three or four times, was, frankly ridiculous.

But Jim was not wrong or to be blamed for making such an assumption. Spock's hypothesis (different from a guess, you see, because a hypothesis can be experimentally, scientifically tested, without endangering those who have formulated it) was that it would not be straightforward to convince Jim of the contrary. He was a human, you see. But Spock's hemisphere that so aligned found itself quite game to try nonetheless.

"I never have had it," replied Spock. "If it is not too bold, too arrogant, to presume," and those were quite human emotions and actions, "I can categorically state, based on my knowledge of your personal nature, that I never will. Even if you tried to give it to me, Jim, I doubt very much that I would take it."

Jim grinned. "If I tried to give you a kiss, Spock?" He knew, of course, that his facetiousness regarding the perceived ambiguity would net him the raise of a slanted brow, and no more. It was what he wanted. It was what he wanted. And...everything and more.

"If you tried to give me a reason, Captain." He realized that he had never answered the original question. "I would be...amenable to your attempts-" (and blatantly successful, they would all be, so it was not quite correct to refer to them as attempts) "-to kiss me."

"Oh, well that's different! See, you've got to be precise with these things, Mr. Spock." The captain grew smug; he was unbearably handsome. "It doesn't suit you to be considering all these trivialities, now does it?"

But a kiss was a triviality. Wasn't it?

They proceeded at their usual gait down the corridor, both sets of hands locked professionally behind both professional waists, blue and gold and black and gray and side by side by side by side.

He would, indeed, not think of trivialities, such as the societal responsibility of shame he had incurred upon himself upon becoming (or perhaps simply being, feeling) universally drawn to a human, or the tinge of his lips slightly cooler in hue from the pressure so recently applied.

(What of their hands, which at the present moment did not dangle close to each other, flirting by proximity, when at all other times they so easily did?)

He would, instead, think of such pressing matters as the relative ratios of their individual gaits that had mutually equalized with each other or the place in between Jim's eyebrows that was so strangely devoid of any actual brow presence.

One could kiss such a spot with remarkable ease and without sensory objection. What was the evolutionary cause or reason?

No, no. None of those things. Spock would think of what he would order for lunch, and who he would sit with - for...evolutionarily social reasons and causes.

And the kiss(es) that would come later, after that.

Because he had time, he would think of trivialities. And the trivialities, in their own handsomely unforgettable turn, would quite willingly, lovingly, afford all the time in the world (his world) back to him.