guttural thoughts, visceral noises

The rockfall had struck directly at his side from above; the biological disadvantage of not keeping the heart, crucial organ, central to all, shielded in some sense by the bow of chin and the brace of arms...it was woefully apparent.

Stones on this planet were not possessing of the proper cleavage to allow for pointed facets, but the surface was jagged, and it did much more than simply graze Spock's uniform. The material, an appropriately impassive blue, shredded with the sound of every stitch in the knit taking force, not one of them taking the brunt first.

It was all at once, and then the material was stained green, and Spock found that it was a very wet experience, breathing. The air had, previously, been rather arid. This, of course, did not help with his hemorrhaging.

He found himself face up, eyes to the sky, in clear view of the disturbed den of indigenous creatures, higher up, approximately from where the assailing rock had originated. There was no more confusion; there were no more stones. So he should simply pick himself up.

Dull. Quite dull, was the pinching sensation of a likewisedly jagged stone underneath his back, on the right side. Duller still was his left leg, with his right leg soon to follow. Weak, but the stone was not weak. Deficiency of iron. Nominally unaffected areas sacrificing themselves for the good of the overall organism.

The expression arrayed over his face, by some force not controlled, must have been suitably detached from peacefulness, because Dr. McCoy didn't waste time shaking Spock's shoulders or calling his name. They'd already been delayed in reaching the beam-up point before the avalanche had started. Now, it was only a matter of apprising the transporter room.

Spock was vaguely aware of McCoy doing his best to keep his voice controlled as he urged the captain to calm down and stay out of it, the man's bleeding out and having you here to agitate him won't help matters - and that's putting aside what you'd do to my own efficiency!

Curiously, the doctor's voice gained a quality of haleness once the communicator had finally been snapped shut; there was no carryover tension when one hand joined the other in pressing firmly at the wound.

Spock saw the blood. He could not but see it. Yet he questioned why it should bleed, and bleed, and bleed.

Only a scratch. A broad one, moreover almost to a gouge, but a scratch nonetheless. An accident.

Aggravating. Perhaps logical, but he did not deign to think about it.

Instead, he turned his attention to Dr. McCoy, who was juggling medical tape and gauze between his two hands. Of the gauze in particular, there was none to waste, because he'd only brought what spare portion fit into the space at the bottom of a tricorder pouch.

"You do not seem particularly concerned, Doctor," Spock hazarded, thinking his judgement accurate considering the lost faculty of his lower extremities - his upper, as well, considering how sluggish they appeared to be in responding to his wish to move them, to assist in some way.

The doctor had not administered a hypospray. Caution and stillness seemed assumed. He knew Spock would not flail about, nor lash out at him.

"Nothing to be concerned about," McCoy replied at last. He was gauging the right moment to switch from tourniquet held by palm and fabric, with all urgency, to gauze that simply sat there and absorbed, absorbed, absorbed. "You're just bleeding. A flesh wound, as they say."

Spock noted this. Ruminated on it.

"And you do not wish to chastise me for the arrangement of my internal organs, such that a concentration of blood vessels is located at my side, accessible from my back, when such natural events occur?"

"Why, Spock? Would it make you happy?"

Spock ran his tongue over the inner ring of his top teeth, tasting the tight, angry heat of blood. It was possible that this was a psychosomatic reaction to the knowledge that he was bleeding elsewhere, and could see the blood; in this moment, he didn't care to discern.

McCoy probably would. In this moment. In any other.

"Do you ordinarily antagonize me with the intent to elicit such an emotional reaction?"

McCoy almost laughed. But only almost.

"I'd have to be a real idiot. You'd have to think me one. No, Spock. That's not why."

The switch was made just then.

"Why, then, Doctor?"

He expected it to be immaterial, throwaway conversation, suited to the strange time of the air. And maybe it was, after all. But only maybe.

"Because it's easier to tell someone you hate them than tell them you love them."

His cavernous humanity elided any of what might have attempted to be objective truth attached to the homely statement - so radical, it was, that it would almost have been empirically frightening had Spock not the good sense not to take the good doctor at his word.

Had he not. In fact, he hadn't.

"When you don't actually hate them, that is. I know your relationship with your father isn't too strong, and I know whatever insults I can dish out to you, you've suffered far worse burns to your pride from Vulcans who have a logical bone to put over on you. So I'm pretty damn sure you know what it's like to be totally angry, so angry you can't even think about a person edgewise, because they've royally pissed you off so much."

Spock gritted his teeth and reascertained the separation of his heart's pounding from constriction of the lungs within his chest. The purpose of their closeness, in humans, was to facilitate the confusion and conflation of sensations. In this moment he believed that wholly.

The doctor's impart continued like a tinny, black and white monologue. Spock felt many centuries old, and yet not as if that would be the reason for his imminent death. If it even was imminent.

He realized it was the lack of intention towards control that was different, that was significant. He had not bothered to consider being Vulcan since this odd conversation had begun. Besides physically, of course.

"In those moments, you find you can't hate the person enough. Can't crumple up the paper they've given you violently enough, can't slam the door finally enough, can't show inward or outward that you're a righteous mess of fury in any way that feels...adequate. So you bottle it up. Vulcans, and humans. We both do it."

That Lieutenant Commander Leonard McCoy, Chief Medical Officer of the USS Enterprise, should bottle up his emotions? It was simultaneously incomprehensible and wildly apparent to Spock. The two of them, and the captain also incidentally integrated, could not be arranged into nor onto any convenient axes, any triangulation that would denote this property here, that property there, and the definite absence of one or the other or both here and there and everywhere else.

No disquietude was necessary. The man - a fellow officer, if nothing else - was simply correct. Spock remained as silent as he had been.

McCoy clearly noticed this, because he was pausing intermittently to make a steady contact with Spock's eyes; avoidance was not a possiblity. They were here. They were simply here. It was correct. It was a fact. Many a time had Spock wished for the ability to instantaneously extricate himself from McCoy's presence, while never had he been mournful when the other left the room, or he his company, but this situation neither produced nor merited either of those reactions.

Indeed. Bones continued.

"Now imagine it's the other way around. You love someone. You can't appreciate their presence in your life fiercely enough. Oftentimes when you get that angry, it sort of comes to you slow - too slow, anyway, and the other person's already left and taken their superior feeling with 'em. Parents have a particular way about it, I find."

Sarek did not, had not, done this. He valued comprehension and the settled weight of his words far too much. Spock nearly always settled with his own anger while Sarek was still watching him, only to deal with its markedly rougher reconciliation later, out of sight.

Spock understood Sarek. Patently so. But it was the understanding of logic, and not the understanding of emotion.

Spock might also grant himself that he understood McCoy's logic, in general. Not until such a moment as this had he ever, did he ever - would he ever - begin to put a manageable parse on McCoy's perpetual state of emotion. One could never do so without submitting one's own emotion to the mix. He had learned this in the only way possible, when one is broaching the subject as an adult, in workplace situations.

Workplace situations in Starfleet accounted for injuries acquired while on the job. Such accidents were not fortuitous. They were not...

"So I'm standing here telling you all this by a fatal sort of accident. That I thought I should hate you, and didn't care too much about it, but now I've found that I love you beyond all expression or comprehension. It's too hard to come out with. So I'm swallowing it up."

So saying, Bones swallowed. It was clearly, nigh-audibly painful for him, but there was an edge of catharsis, razor-thin and wormhole-deep, that Spock could just barely glean.

Because he, too, computed apathy as a singularity point, axis of all feeling, between absolute disrespect and absolute loyalty. It wasn't new information. They both could quite certainly tell that the concept of apathy had abandoned itself on the transporter pad some years ago, lost beneath the bending of knees and the crooking of wrists.

"I'm not trying to justify myself, or anything," McCoy said, cracking the silence as spiders' unintenable ice (frozen, dew, water making itself known where it shouldn't be as if there is ever any other place for water but everywhere all around us). This rejoinder was clearly a prompt, and Spock chewed on it with his own swallow. Gone was the coppery taste. No blessing to yen before his gratitude than that of the doctor's presence, in itself.

"In other words, you believe there is an alternate interpretation to your statements than that you conceive vitriol to be, as humans would call it, an acceptable love language?"

"I'm saying I'm emotionally constipated, Spock," Bones drawled; Spock was not sure he quite comprehended his mind's idiosyncrasy for crafting the interpretation of sound with or without the nickname. It was not one he ever used, but for a being who attempted rejection of feeling as all it had to go on day in and day out, it was a relief to be able to render out the logic in grasping certain epithets as an aid toward tonal indication and identification.

(All that to say, Spock knew what a drawl was and he knew the idea of Bones drawling was quite different than the idea of McCoy drawling. McCoy drawled in group settings, at diplomats; Bones drawled at his good and dear friends. Or perhaps the blood loss was making its impact known at just the most convenient moment.)

And so, with that revelation compacted, the drawl rounded itself out: "And so are you."

"Will I live, Doctor?"

"Sure you will, Spock. It's never gonna be me that kills you."

Never? It was a throwaway promise, simply because it was not being made of the moment itself.

"I'll act like I want to wring your neck, though, because it's just that difficult keeping you alive."

"But you are equal to the task?"

"But I'm exactly, illogically equivalent."