we have a flop

To be Vulcan is to believe that you are infallible. You believe, of course, on the most basic (not base, never base) of levels that logic itself is infallible. If your mortal, corporeal body and all its motive decisions are structured and conducted solely according to logic, you cannot but succeed.

Children are small. They limit their tasks. They do not fail. They do not learn to fail. Rather, they do not learn to fail on any sort of continuous cycle. They are only treated to the sensation in blinks and blips (and those not of perceptible, utilizable feedback), in the far-too-swift transition from childhood to adulthood, skipping directly past adolescence, with their kahs-wan.

Now, bad things do occasionally happen to Vulcans, to Vulcan. Certainly, they're never very happy about it. But it's never their fault. That's why they reserve themselves the logic of incense and censure. It is only the universe which has behaved capriciously, and afforded them wrongs.

It takes S'chn T'gai Spock a long, long time to accept that he is part and a part of the universe. It takes him longer still to accept the conduit by which he is linked.

If he follows logic, he cannot make a mistake.

But if he makes a mistake, then he can no longer follow logic. And as only a mistake would cause that schism, the inverse is true, which means that the converse is also true: since he can no longer follow logic, he must have made some mistake.

(The contrapositive. The contraband material, in his mind. And so, its presence is not positive, only a proof.)

He has made...the Jim Kirk mistake. And he has both paid and been paid, retched and been rewarded, dearly for it, in the bold and beautiful firestorm of 2286.

Spock, in 1986, disconnected from all that has ever made up who and what he was and is (which is to say, his hereditary strictures and scriptures alike; what is a Spock without his indubitable spine-snapping zero-scored self doubt?), has no choice but to restart. To go again. To recognize, in doubt, opportunity, and in nervousness, excitement.

Yes, excitement.

The positive, and not the negative. The anticipation, and not the apprehension.

He doesn't know what it is to fall. Perhaps he doesn't have to, in the specific studding sub-abstract of Jim, but above their binary stars, Jim represents a grand and terrifying inconsequential human all-importance wonderfully well.

"But Admiral, what if..."

The words trail off before the flat-lined question can curl itself out of them, catlike and tailbound.

Odds of failure formidable. Too harsh even to consider.

Admiral, not Jim.

Jim, staying staunch as he'd learned, was in freefall.

One damn minute, he thought, can't you let me collect myself before you throw me into the centrifuge again? For gods' sake, Spock.

But it was too late for that. It had been too late for that for some close on twenty years, all told.

So Jim - Admiral James T. Kirk, as Spock lived and breathed - leaned closer, shoulders squared, and clapped one hand hastily schooled of trembling on the shoulder of the not-quite-terry robe.

"Oh, but sweetheart, what if not?"