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James Tiberius Kirk, Starfleet’s youngest and most famous Captain, was emphatically not a quiet man. If there was anything Spock had learned about him in the year he’d served as the man’s First Officer, it was that Jim was always making noise. If not giving orders, he was making jokes or teasing one of the bridge crew. If he was not speaking, he was drumming his fingers or tapping his foot. Even when he slept, Spock had been unsurprised to discover, Jim snored and mumbled to himself.
Once, Spock had found it singularly irritating. It interfered with his focus. Even in the ambient noise of the bridge, he’d found it impossible to ignore.
Looking down now at Jim’s comatose body on the hospital biobed, his captain’s profound silence left a knot in Spock’s stomach he could not seem to remove. He missed the noise. He missed the jokes that he did not understand, the entirely unnecessary teasing. He missed the sound of Jim’s voice: its low timbre, the way it expressed so much that his own carefully regulated tones lacked. He even missed the snoring, unable to sleep more than fitfully without that steady noise in his ear.
Most of all, Spock felt Jim’s absence in the dark void in his mind where his captain’s had once been. That had been the hardest to get used to, once they made their bond. Jim could no more shield than he could become Vulcan; it simply wasn’t in his nature to hold anything back. And now that Spock had acclimated to the push and pull of Jim’s mind against his own, its absence left him shaken and off-balance. He had not realized before how much he had come to rely on it.
Jim, he thought, was never meant to be so still. So quiet. There was little of him in the still form lying on the bed.
Spock found he was reluctant to leave Jim’s side. Without his presence in the mind meld, the Vulcan could not seem to convince his frustratingly volatile emotions that Jim was recovering. And Spock found the incessant whirring and beeping of the monitors somewhat reassuring, if woefully inadequate.
Doctor McCoy, though he and Spock very rarely saw eye to eye, was astonishingly understanding. He fended off any and all comers, including those who outranked him by several orders of magnitude, with the same belligerence that had likely gotten Jim aboard the Enterprise on the day of Vulcan’s destruction. None were allowed to enter.
But McCoy never once even tried to make Spock leave. He skirted the Vulcan easily, as though he were one of the machines keeping Jim alive. He even took it upon himself to shove food into Spock’s hands a couple of times a day, and though the gesture was inevitably accompanied by the doctor’s customary grumbling and cursing, Spock could feel no real ire behind it. For the most part, he left Spock alone.
--
The day that Jim awoke, McCoy could no longer justify keeping visitors at bay, particularly when Jim insisted he allow it. Spock was too distracted to keep an accurate count, but he would not have been surprised if the entire surviving crew of the Enterprise came in and out of the room that day.
Out of courtesy, Spock removed himself to the most unobtrusive corner of the room. He spoke little, letting Jim be the focus as he deserved to be. Instead, Spock occupied himself enjoying the sound of Jim’s (albeit hoarse) voice. It didn’t matter what his Captain was saying, only that he was speaking. And every so often, Jim’s eyes would slip past whichever visitor he was teasing at the time, and Spock would feel a rush of affection through the renewed bond between them.
Nyota was the last to visit. Spock welcomed the hug she initiated, but he still spoke very little. A lump had formed in his throat, making it difficult to speak, and Spock had to focus most of his energy on keeping his emotions from seeping through their bond. He hadn’t had to shield in several weeks. It was more difficult than he remembered.
Once Nyota had departed, Doctor McCoy spent another half an hour fussing around Jim’s bed, checking the IV and the readouts on his tricorder multiple times over before he finally left them alone.
Spock did not speak. Jim sighed and shifted in the bed. “What I wouldn’t give for a cheeseburger,” he muttered, tweaking the myriad tubes leading from his body to the machines that beeped and whirred all around him.
Finally, Jim gave up and fell still. He looked at Spock. “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”
Jim’s smile soon faded. Apparently, his deliberate use of one of his many illogical colloquialisms had not had the desired effect. He held out a hand.
The hand shook. Jim must be more fatigued than he was letting on, if such a small exertion was so difficult. Spock knew he would not give in easily, so he took the simpler route and grasped Jim’s hand.
Jim tugged him closer to the bed. His face, ever an open book even by human standards, was creased with concern. “Spock.”
Spock shook his head sharply. “I will not burden you with—“
“Damn straight you will, or I’ll kick your Vulcan ass from here to next week.”
Spock raised an eyebrow. “Temporal impossibilities aside, you are in no condition to do so.”
“Well, I’ll damn sure try.”
Spock met Jim’s eyes with his own. An old human proverb said that eyes were the windows to the soul. Poetic. Spock had never understood it before meeting James Kirk.
For an instant, Spock did not see the bright, concerned eyes that looked up at him now. Instead, he saw a flash of the clouded, glazed stare he’d seen through the glass of the core containment door. Vulcan eidetic memory was ruthless; the vision, and the rush of pain and grief that it brought, felt much like a kick in the stomach.
Before Spock even registered that Jim had released his hand, two hands cupped his face, pulling him down to the bed. Jim’s lips were chapped, the kiss clumsy with the odd angle and fatigue. Spock was quite sure he had never tasted anything sweeter.
“I. Am not. Dead,” Jim murmured, breathing the words into Spock’s mouth as though it might lend them credence.
Spock discovered his fingers carding themselves through Jim’s hair. “I watched you die.” The words, when they finally tore their way past the lump in his throat, were rough and desperate. “And I could do nothing.”
“You can’t – oh, fuck it.” Jim dragged Spock’s hands to his face, splaying the Vulcan’s fingers out roughly. After a second, Spock corrected his placement, touching his fingers gently to Jim’s psi-points.
Jim’s thoughts slammed into him with the force of a punch. You saved my life. Wonder, gratitude, and a love so unfathomably deep Spock could drown in it.
“Khan took out an entire Klingon platoon,” Jim said aloud, hands holding Spock’s firmly in place. “But you beat him. You and Uhura. And you brought him back alive, so Bones could whip up his miracle cure. I was dead, and you brought me back. You did the impossible, Spock.”
It took a moment before Spock could speak. “It is what you would have done.”
Spock discovered then that, of all Jim’s noises, it was his laugh that he’d missed the most.