December 11 in the Kirk/Spock Advent Calendar 2006
Abomination
by Acidqueen; Rated R with warnings: possibly depressing, implied character death
Thanks to Hypatia for the beta! All remaining errors are mine!
Click here for Acidqueen's art for this story
FB: a.q @ gmx.de
Archive: My own website, ASCEM, all others ask, please.
Summary: Of which one does not speak.
The first thing I see is the room; small, barren, and only a few slits in the wall where the light from outside falls through. I lie on the floor, crouched, and it is hard on my skin. My hands barely follow my orders, almost too shaky to wipe my gummed-up eyelids. There is green under the nails; there is more green on the floor. In fact, there is green everywhere. I touch my groin; I do not know why, but I need to, and it is green too. My hands rub over open flesh, the upper skin abraded. But I cannot stop myself. I rub harder and harder, and it is a perverse need that pushes me to hurt myself like this, stroke myself to completion until my seed washes the blood from my fingers.
The next time I open my eyes, the room is dark; it has to be night, but I do not know if it is the same day or another. There is no green now, only black on an almost black floor. That is how my mind feels, too, darkness all around and in me. I am on Vulcan, I know; the air is like on no other planet, so dry that it burns like sand in my hurting lungs. I long for water, but there is none. It takes me a long time to approach the door, but I sink down to the floor before I even reach its threshold, unable to proceed or to shout for help. There, I remain until the morning.
They clean me and heal my body; they feed me with water and desert fruits. But they do not speak to me, as if I were a stranger to their language. There is an invisible border zone around me as if I had a contagious illness. Their long coats sweep around me like shadows, their cowls deep in their faces. I wonder why I still live, when obviously I have gone through my time alone, but I am too tired to ask. They will tell me in due time, and due time would be when they decide.
So finally I know. It was T'Pau herself that came to my room. I fell to my knees and offered my thoughts, which were all questions. She barely touched my face, her fingers not connecting to my melding spots. I must have sinned indeed, if my mind was so detestable. I dared to look up and ask, and her words were sharp like in the Arena, cutting through my soul with their unbearable truth. I have killed my captain and my friend, broken his neck with the Ahn-Woon in the madness.
I wish they had killed me too, instead of bringing me here to Gol.
I walk along the garden with its sand-colored flowers and their stinging nettles. I touch them, one by one, until my right hand is covered with blisters, the fingers stiff and malformed. But I feel no pain. When they offered me the choice between going back to Earth for facing my trial or remaining in Gol as my self-chosen prison, it was an easy choice. Only here could I learn to forget what has been, stop thinking about the man that was dearest to me and has died by my own hand. Pain is a thing of the mind, and in Gol I would learn to wipe it clean as the sand wipes the Forge to get reborn in stone.
My left hand touches another nettle, its fire never reaching my frozen soul.
It is the 15th of Tasmeen; it is twenty years since I killed my friend. I have buried myself with him, and it was right this way, but for the first time in a long time I wonder what might have remained from the world outside, from my past. Are my parents still alive? How did McCoy live through the loss of his best friend? I imagine his face in front of me in the moment where he must have spoken those words--"he's dead"--and his eyes would have been cold, deep-blue, despising that which had become of me. I should have sent him a final message, apologize in a human way for my unforgivable action. But as it was, I have never spoken to anyone about it, and nobody has spoken about it to me. I have sworn eternal silence from the day I learned the truth, and so it would remain in my own private darkness forever.
My hand caresses the nettles, but they are soft in the spring and do not hurt my skin. A young scholar walks next to me, to help me lest my aging legs weaken and I fall. He is young and chatty, unable to keep the silence. He tells me the story of a half-blood, of his rise and sudden vanishing: a parable to demonstrate that nothing good could come out of this dilution of Vulcan blood. I listen to it as if it were the life of a stranger, and it is, because I have another name, life and mind by now. There is nothing left of the Spock who walked on alien worlds and felt the heat of novae on his skin.
And so I almost miss the words, the unbelievable ones--Kirk had survived the fight!
I turn. I tumble into the young man's arms and plead for information, my tongue unwilling to form the words after more than fifty years of adopted dumbness. It is from him that I learn that I did not killed Jim, that he had survived and lived for many years, but never returned to the stars after that day on Vulcan. I shake the scholar off and walk back to the house, my weakness forgotten as feelings that I had long suppressed burst out like molten lava. I storm to T'Pau's door to find her in bed, her servants next to her. She looks like parchment, but I do not care for her state and ask for the truth. They pull me away from her, and for the first time in decades I hear the words of my youth again: "bad blood".
I fight them until the floor is green.
I am now where I once started: the room small, empty, with only a few slits where the sunlight falls through. My hands abraded from where I tried to break through the door, and my voice gone after hours of pleading. The only thing that differs from the past is the note in my lap that I received an hour ago, handwritten and signed by T'Pau. Sharply painted signs declare that, after the fight with Kirk, I had fought and raped Stonn right there on the earth of my ancestors. A shame that our House could not live with; never in a thousand years had a man taken another man on the sands of the Koon-ut-kalifee. So it had finally proven that the half-breed was an abomination that had to be purged from the face of Vulcan.
I sit in silence and darkness, and it feels as if it has been like this forever. My heart is a desert; it has been like this forever, too. What Jim had given me had been the spring of a summer that could not be, the blossom of what would have to be crushed under the reality of my existence. I will do now what I should have done long ago, proving my Vulcan heritage and my human weaknesses alike when I will my heart to stop.
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