celestial bodies (i know, i know)

"You ever heard of the sun, moon, and stars couple, Spock? Well, not couple, it's a triad, but couple sounds better than polycule in casual conversation, and when there's three things, you sort of get the gist."

Bones quirked a brow. "I'll take the moon, if you're shilling."

Jim laughed. "Didn't even have to, I see! But that was my thought, too. Comedy and tragedy masks, you and I, and Spock..."

He trailed off, breath shallowing and deepening both at once.

"You're the stars."

Though the statement was eyeroll-worthy, Bones didn't disagree.

"Well, what do you think of that, Spock?"

"I find this conventional assignment to be...inaccurate."

Spock's adorable, perfect impunity, combined with the upticking inflection that indicated semi-sarcastic confuddlement (was inaccurate even an accurate term? it might not be!), was more than enough to beg Jim's just-then-dormant curiosity.

"How's that, Spock? Not all planets have suns, or at the very least single suns? Suns are stars, and vice versa? And all the same, of course," he paused, threw a debonair glance to Bones, "could be said of the moons. There's endless room for debate, here!"

"No," Spock said, his acknowledgement a sign of his non-nonplussedness at Jim's interjection, "I refer to the characteristics of the sun itself, as a symbol. Of course, in the context presented, this is meant to be the Terran sun, or Sol. Children depict their sun as smiling, benevolent, the origin of 'sunny' in disposition, yet in actuality such a star is incredibly massive and foreboding. Radiant, volatile; the sun is terrifying."

Bones, privately, thought this a clear admission that Spock's childhood crayon drawings did not include a smiling sun. Even if it were, for all intents and purposes, a safe space to voice such a thought, he kept it to himself. Tender though the image was, the overall judgement, coming from, would appear less admiring than was probably polite.

Instead, he said, "You're saying that our Jim here, Captain Kirk, isn't radiant and volatile?"

Spock gave the absence of a smile that was itself a smile. "He is both of those things, and myriad more. But he is not, to me, nor in the larger context of," he gestured, "us, terrifying."

Reserved, Bones detected the answer to the natural next question: Bones was the terrifying one, except that he still, really, wasn't. Secretly, thirdmost, the brewing beast was Spock.

"Space is terrifying, Spock," Jim mused. "We're all...softer, more palatable versions of what might be called our original, primal impulses and forms. Simply by being socialized - by being those children who draw smiling suns - we tame down those razor-hot edges. And when we find something that scares us..."

One James T. Kirk, incensed? One S'chn T'gai Spock, impassioned? One Leonard Horatio McCoy, a brilliant southern combination of both? (For what is the moon, in this stitched fabric of kitschy symbolism, if not the planetoid version of a twinkling-impotent pop-cultured star?)

"I'd like to be terrifying, sometimes."

Spock nodded. "It is logical to have such an ability within one's capabilities, just as one should be able to appear non-threatening if one is indeed not a threat."

"Well...that's a different perspective." Jim's eyes twinkled with concentration, like classic solar flares. "I won't say it's wrong, but it's not quite what I mean. I said I'd like to be it, not just be able to be it."

"Won't be easy," Bones drawled. "You'll have to stop drawing yourself in crayon."