Archive of Our Own

The problem with colonies on unstable planets, which, if humans had any developed sense of logic, they would not have placed their colonies on in the first place, was almost always the unstable tidal conditions. These would, inevitably, cause strange weather patterns and fluctuating pockets of barometric pressure that could wreak havoc. Spock squinted up at the gray, alien sky, quickly becoming thick with angry lavender clouds. As the clouds gathered, the air pressure shot up until his ears rang and pain squeezed along the inside of his skull.

“Captain,” he said, pushing the pain aside. “Might I suggest we beam up?”

“Just give me one minute,” Kirk grunted, his voice muffled from the hulking generator engine he was under and from the buzzing metallic twang sound of his tools against the engine’s inner mechanisms. “This old thing has a lot of corrosion on it, Spock. I’m going as fast as I can.”

“You should not have sent the engineering team back to the Enterprise so hastily and continued the repair alone,” Spock said with a bite of something that could almost be annoyance in his voice. As soon as their tricorders had detected the stirrings of the storm gathering, Kirk had sent the rest of the away team back up to the ship.

“And you should have gone up with them,” Kirk replied, with the bite in his own voice holding much more teeth than Spock’s had. “Like I ordered you to.”

“Illogical,” Spock said flatly. “You are too weak to manually start the pump once you’ve repaired it. In fact, I am the only one on the ship strong enough to give adequate force to the crank mechanism.”

He looked from the still inert generator that powered the weather shielding domes that covered the buildings of the planet’s colonies and then glanced once more to the darkening sky. The temperature was dropping steadily, the cold seeping under Spock’s uniform, turning his skin to gooseflesh, and slipping beneath it into his bones. He shivered and resisted the urge to wrap his arms around himself.

“In seven minutes, the temperature will reach such that we shall both suffer ill effects to our bodies,” Spock reminded, as though conversationally. “I will need three of those minutes to operate the mechanism and we will need at least one minute to run to the nearest shelter.” Spock’s gaze flicked to the tiny mechanic’s cabin a short distance away from the generator. The mechanic who usually lived there had evacuated to the ship with the away team. “That leaves you with three minutes to finish your task.”

A snowflake, just as gently purple as the clouds, landed on Spock’s nose. He went cross-eyed for a moment looking at it and was glad that Kirk wasn’t able to have seen him do something so unpolished. The flake felt vaguely threatening in conjunction with the rising wind.

“Got it. Three minutes,” Kirk grunted and then cursed as something sizzled and sparked. Spock shuffled closer to Kirk, but the boots that lay exposed from under the engine kicked at him savagely, preventing his approach. “No, you don’t. You just stay over by the pump. I’m fine.”

Spock stepped back toward the mechanism he was going to have to grab as soon as Kirk repaired the fuel lines. He would have to be quick and use most of his strength to push the engine’s inner workings into ignition. He chose not to point out that the pump mechanism would be useless if Kirk was unable to get the fuel moving in the right direction. And if he was unable to do that, that would mean the destruction of all the colonies on the planet and the death of all of those who had been too stubborn or too slow to evacuate to the Enterprise.

Don’t think about Vulcan.

“Two minutes,” Spock said. He wasn’t sure if he was distracting himself or prodding Kirk.

“I know,” Kirk growled. “And when we get back to the ship, remind me how much I loved having your company here and, on a completely different note, to court martial you for disobeying that direct order to leave.”

“That is not-” Spock started but was cut off by a fizzle and a sudden loud hum in the hush between waves of the breeze being whipped back and forth by the growing storm.

“Now! Spock!” Kirk whooped, flinging himself across the scraggly ground and out from under the generator. Spock clutched the crank mechanism immediately and, straining against its corroded gears, began the arduous task of dragging it into motion.

The cold was utterly forgotten as he pushed his body, muscles straining, and he quickly became hot with the exertion. Alien snow began to fly steadily around him, melting on contact with his skin, and the pressure in his head seemed close to breaking his skull into nothing but splintered fragments. Kirk, a much slower runner than Spock, had already taken off toward the mechanic’s shelter, evidently more confident that Spock would be able to restart the shields around the building than that the Enterprise would be able to get a lock on him through the storm’s interference.

Spock moved steadily, methodically, almost ritually, and he counted the seconds he had left to him down in his head. Time was a constant thing he had always come to rely on. If there was nothing else, there would always be the steady rhythm of second marching into second into minute into hour.

It took every last marching second of three minutes for the fuel stream to ignite and the grid of weather domes to blare into sudden, electric, blooming life. The storm broke, the sky crying snow over the already stripped and barren land, before piling up around the farthest dome at the edge of the settlement. It cut a steady swarth toward where Spock stood.

Already breathless, Spock began to run toward the shimmering light of the small shield dome of the mechanic’s shelter. Kirk stood just within the interior of it, waving his arms and shouting something that Spock couldn’t hear over the sound of the wind chasing him.

His extremities were numb, the cold seeming to eat him from the inside out. He was slowing, he knew he was slowing, feeling heavier than even the extra weight of the snow on his shoulders could explain. His body was on fire, his movements steady but punishing. He had not pushed himself this hard since... Khan.

He looked again at Kirk screaming encouragements or threats or something else at him, and thought only that at least Kirk was on the right side of the barrier this time. At least Kirk was on the side that meant life.

It wasn’t until he passed through the energetic field of the weather shield and into a wave of temperate climate that Spock realized that he had been too quick to give in to such extremes of morbid melancholy. There had been a full 45 seconds after his arrival into the dome, before the storm hit the crackling shield. Death had not even been close to grabbing him. He took a moment to catch his breath and then strode purposefully into the doorway of the small, squat living quarters, Kirk laughing with relief as he fell into step behind him. He smacked Spock playfully on the shoulder, stinging the numb skin there with his human heat.

“You can really haul ass when you want to,” Kirk said affectionately. There was grease smeared over his cheek and his hands were black with it from the inside of the weather system’s generator. He left a handprint on Spock’s uniform and when he pushed the lock key of the shelter’s door, he left dark smudges on the buttons. But he was alive. They both were and so was this planet. That was what mattered.

“I think,” Kirk went on, as the door to the shelter slid open before them both, “that Scotty said anyone foolish enough to get caught down here in one of these weather patterns was gonna have to hunker down for a few days before the storm would clear enough for the transporter or a shuttle.” He paused around the creation of a sparkling grin. “Which sounds to me like an impromptu little shore leave we’ve gotten ourselves into here, Spock.”

The playfulness bled out of him slightly as they stepped through the door. The interior of the shelter was little more than one large room, split into a kitchen area, a corner devoted to a desk and two chairs, a very short hallway leading to nothing but a closet-sized bathroom, and the rest of the room was dominated by one bed.

“Hope you’re not all that attached to your Vulcan privacy,” Kirk said, but there was something in the jest that Spock couldn’t place, something that made it sound hollowed out. “Or maybe this is your punishment for not following my orders earlier. Just think, you could have been in your own quarters, nice and warm and private right now if you would have just listened to me.” Kirk stepped further into the one room cabin and Spock slid to follow him.

Another pulse of pain uncurled behind Spock’s temples as the barometric pressure of the storm changed again. He clamped down hard over that pain, pushing it out of his immediate awareness, controlling himself neatly.

While significantly warmer than the air outside of the protected dome, the interior of the mechanic’s shelter was set at a temperature a noticeable amount beneath that which Spock kept his own quarters at. His bones still felt coated in a sheen of cold but his skin had started to prickle with sweat as he glanced around the space curiously.

The pain thrummed again as he looked at the snow piling up outside the window, and it was harder to push back than the first wave had been. Spock found his heart beginning to pound a steady racing cadence in his side even as he held stubbornly to his control. He didn’t let the pain show in his expression.

“And if I was in my quarters now instead of here, you and all of the colonists still on the planet’s surface would be dead,” Spock sighed. He did not usually sweat and he found himself therefore unusually frustrated by the feeling of it creeping beneath his uniform. “In light of that, my privacy seems a small sacrifice.”

Kirk’s face broke into a slow grin before he stepped toward the sink in the kitchen area, running his soiled hands under the water.

“Glad to hear that,” Kirk said, still smiling. “Cause I think you can see every corner of this hut no matter where you’re standing in it so with the replicator and all, we might have everything we need to live for a few days here, but we will not be having much between us in the way of modesty.”

The words slid around in Spock’s mind but most of his attention was absorbed in watching Kirk scrub at his hands in the sink. There was a slippery slick film of soap over his fingers, grease darkened water dripping off of them. They shone in the light of the glow tubes that lined the shelter’s ceiling, and Spock’s heart pounded in a new rhythm at the sight of them.

More sweat puddled in Spock’s collarbone and he stalked to the other side of the cabin feeling simultaneously numb with cold and as though his nerves were slowly smoldering to life the line of signal fires along a siege wall.

The headache bit him again as he peered around the shelter, trying to focus on something that wasn’t Kirk’s dirty, dripping hands. He took in the bed that would, of course, fit two people comfortably on it; the bathroom that, while smaller than the one that he and the captain already shared quite comfortably onboard the Enterprise, was nonetheless big enough to fit two grown men together in the sonic shower stall; the desk that appeared sturdy enough to support the average body weight of an adult Vulcan if he were to be splayed upon it; and the kitchen counter that was at the level with Spock’s own waist, no worse on his back than bending at his science viewer, if he were to be bent over it.

Looking again at the kitchen meant looking again at Kirk, and Spock’s vision seemed to pulse as though something had changed in Kirk’s aura, the telepathic energy field emanating from his mind. Or, something in Spock’s perception of it changed. Kirk’s mental energy seemed to slowly fill the entire room, pressing up against Spock’s mind until it let the migraine he’d been holding off in.

Everything inside him began to ache with a sudden clarity of purpose that staggered him. His mind throbbed because Kirk’s mind was not inside it; his body throbbed because Kirk’s body was not inside it.

Fear grabbed him with an immediate fist. He swallowed, feeling as though the room was steadily getting hotter and hotter. Kirk continued to wash his hands and, oblivious to the turmoil roiling in his first officer’s gut, began to chatter pleasantly about what games the mechanic was sure to have stored away in this shelter that they could play to pass the time.

“Captain,” Spock interrupted through ground teeth. He knew what he was going to say next would be senseless. Illogical. He knew there was nowhere he could go. “I have to leave.”

He thought when the destruction of his planet and the subsequent death of his betrothed had failed to, like the same circumstance had enacted in many of his peers, trigger the onset of his --well, best to think of it clinically, scientifically, this he had always been taught even if such teachings had been said in hushed tones and with circumlocutory phrasings-- he had thought with the failure of his estrus cycle to begin at the dissolution of his bond that his disparate blood may have kept him from this most Vulcan of rites of passage.

Humans had no concept. No understanding. Nothing like it in their own reproductive cycles. His human blood should have protected him.

Kirk was a human. Kirk would not understand.

Truth be told, Spock was finding it hard to understand himself. The symptoms had come on so suddenly and between the headache, the feverish sweating, the foul smell of his own body, the simmering annoyance that he had never fully been able to shake, the fear, and the throbbing magnetic pull he felt toward Kirk, he was finding it difficult to thread his thoughts together with the lucidity he was used to.

“What?” Kirk said, chuckling. He flicked the water off, his hands shimmering in the light from the glow tubes. “What are you talking about, Spock? You want to go out there and freeze to death?” He looked at the window and the snow that had already climbed to the height of the sill. “If you could even dig through the snow to get anywhere to begin with.”

His laughter died in his throat when he turned and finally caught Spock’s eyes. Something in Spock’s expression, or the way his fists trembled by his sides, or the sweat prickling his face, or perhaps the erection just beginning to swell in Spock’s pants, made Kirk’s eyes widen into surprise and concern.

“Are you ok?” he asked, stepping gingerly toward Spock.

“I am not,” Spock admitted, stepping gingerly back.

When he offered nothing else, Kirk prompted, “ok? Well, what’s wrong?”

“Biology,” Spock said. He sighed with reluctance loudly vibrating in the sound. “I believe the unsteady tidal forces of this planet, of which this storm is a manifestation, has had an unanticipated effect on my biological processes.”

Kirk’s wide eyes squinted sharply.

“What’s that mean? Why does that mean that you have to leave?” he demanded. “Do you need the sickbay? There’s an emergency medkit in here.” He moved toward Spock again, clearly intending to unearth the medkit from where it was shoved in a nook near the door, but stopped when Spock scrambled away from him gracelessly. Kirk watched his quick movement with a furrowed brow. “Is this biological thing contagious or something?”

“It can be,” Spock said, again failing to elaborate.

Irritation flashed over Kirk’s features, clouding the crystalline blue of his eyes as he glared defiantly at Spock. Spock felt as though his skin was slowly being split open, and Kirk was the only balm for the wound it would reveal in the exposed gristle. He found his gaze tunneling onto Kirk’s own, and he became fixated on the way Kirk’s mind pulsed from behind his eyes, always so quick and calculating, even when he aped being vapid.

Spock had fallen for it once: this disguise of vapidness. He had assumed that Kirk’s eyes were as shallow as his charming, teasing grin and he had underestimated the competence of the brash young human. But he knew better now. He could see into the hidden shrewdness of Kirk’s gaze. And now, as fever began to cook his insides, Spock could see the tempting promise of that quick mind quickening even more behind the frowning eyes.

Too fast, Spock thought, the headache he’d been nursing growing until it burned his shields into tatters. He grimaced, unable to keep his emotions far enough outside of his awareness to keep his face neutral. Fear hit him again as the symptoms seemed to affect him faster than he’d ever heard of. A Vulcan was supposed to be aware of their approaching Time for months before the situation would become dire.

The sizzling magma his blood had become already, as it churned through him on the impetus of a heart that pounded louder than any other sound in his ears was distracting him from connecting his thoughts together. Its steady rap beat against the pain and the heat and the soggy walls of his dissolving shields, and suggested a much more acute case than he should be at, considering the fact that the symptoms had only begun minutes before.

His thoughts were coming fast. Too fast. Disjointed. Crowded with too many words and too many impressions.

Kirk’s slow human heartbeat; Spock swore he could hear its drumming, a bare echo of promise, within his own pulse. One of the light tubes had a slight sputter; a simmering rage began to blossom in Spock’s gut at the annoying light strobe effect it cast over that corner of the room. A smell was rising from his body; Spock wrinkled his nose at the primal scent of his own sweat.

“What does that mean?” Kirk demanded again, crossing his arms over his chest. He seemed like he was holding himself back from dragging the answers he wanted out of Spock physically. But seeing something in the way Spock held himself, stiff and shivering, softened Kirk’s expression. When he spoke again, his voice was gentler. “I want to help you. Let me help you.” He paused. “It’s pon farr, isn’t it?”

A strangled sound escaped Spock’s throat before he could stop it.

“You know?” Spock said, less levelly than he had intended.

Kirk grinned sheepishly, his arms relaxing again. Spock could not make himself look at anything but Kirk. He could practically taste Kirk’s thoughts on his tongue, so close was his mind to Spock’s own. It was distracting, though the way Spock’s skin was alight with tingling fires that itched and burned was, to be sure, a bit more so.

“The, uh, the other you,” Kirk explained, blushing slightly. “With the mind stuff. He showed me things I don’t think he’d intended to. So, yea, I know about pon farr.” Challenge steeled back over his features. “And is that what this is? This planet made you enter pon farr early?”

It was Spock’s turn to blush but he said nothing. The silence grew before them like a third presence in the room. Inside it, Spock’s thoughts crowded about his skull, absorbed entirely in contemplating Kirk. Spock was in pain, such terrible unrelenting agony, and he knew that touching, holding, having Kirk would end it. He was a wound gaping open, and Kirk would fill him once more, stitch the wound closed. Kirk would put out the fire inside him, douse him in the wet embrace of his mind.

“Yes,” Spock said finally.

Silence again closed around them after the whisper. It was Kirk who broke it this time.

“So,” he said into the choking quiet, “you need to fuck me or whatever?”

Spock stiffened, shock and desolation drilling together into his psyche. That Kirk could know what pon farr was, what it did, and could still act so blasé? It was practically unbelievable.

“It’s ok, Spock,” Kirk went on. He rolled his shoulders, stretching his arms above his head and the movement tugged his command gold tunic up slightly, revealing the smallest sliver of hot human skin beneath it. Spock’s interested cock dribbled excitedly into his pants. “I meant it when I said I want to help you.” He paused. “Whatever that entails.”

Everything felt wet and cold and hot, boiling, rolling, spasming just beneath Spock’s skin. From a distance, he tried to tether himself to the steady beat of his heart, so loud to him now, that brought a stable, predictable hum of heat with each pulse. He bit his lip and his teeth immediately sliced through the thin skin, the copper taste of his own blood blooming on his tongue.

He growled, like an animal!, around the negligible new flavor to the unyeilding pain inside him and the overwhelming pressure of his body squeezing him. He scrabbled, hopeless, fruitless, for his shields, for some sheen of civilization to hold over what was happening to him. It was so sudden-! So fast-! He hadn’t been able to prepare-! To shroud it in the proper ritual like a proper-!

A proper Vulcan would have gone through his Time just as all the other widowers had when the planet, and all the bonds She had nursed, had dissolved into dust, and would even now be attempting to, bile rising in his throat, repopulate the species. A proper Vulcan would not be doing this here with him.

Spock’s eyes darted again toward the door. The window had already been buried by the howling snow outside so the only light in the room came from the glow tubes, including the one that was annoyingly flickering briefly in intervals of every 46.4 seconds. They shone on Kirk’s hair and his skin and the shine made it evident that Kirk had started sweating as well.

His nose caught the remembered scent of Kirk’s aroused fear, the smell of him when Spock had held his throat in his hand, feeling his fluttering heart and fluttering mind under his fingers, holding him there as though spellbound, experiencing the feeling of touching this man with explosive passion breaking his shields for the first time and finding himself unable to resist the pull of it.

Even at that time, he’d felt himself already there. All over Kirk’s touch, sparkling at the corners of his mind with such a careless sense of cheeky entitlement, and it had been completely maddening. In his grief, he quickly became infuriated that Kirk thought he knew him, knew anything about him at all. To think he knew him enough to know that which is most intimate for a Vulcan, their emotions. That Kirk knew how Spock felt and that he could be so wrong in his words but smug in his mind, it had made him furious. Kirk spoke as though he thought Spock was unfeeling but the thoughts he received in their violent touch told Spock that Kirk believed the exact opposite and the confidence he had of seeing Spock drove him wild with angered fear of the exposure.

At the time, Spock had been ignorant but he knew now that Kirk had shared a mindmeld with his own counterpart from the other universe just before their confrontation.

Kirk had, therefore, known him then, gasping and clutching at the console, better even than Spock currently knew himself, and Spock had hated him for it. His every weakness made obvious under Kirk’s gaze. It was torture. It was...

It was always going to be here with him.

He’d made sure of that, hadn’t he? With his shining, calculating, teasing eyes. With the thick, expressive eyebrows above them and the full lips below them. With the soft swells at the top of his ears and the full shape of his ass in his uniform pants. With his mind... his mind... his mind calling out to Spock in every touch, so quick and daring, so mercurial and human. And he touched him so much.

Maddening.

“You did this,” Spock said from somewhere inside him he didn’t know had a voice. He was gaping open now and dripping. Desperation and anger, not logic and reason, were guiding him. He wasn’t even sure what he meant to accuse Kirk of. Kirk took a step back at the venom bleeding from Spock. “Made me... crave you. Made me name you ‘t’hy’la’ in my heart. Made me more dependent upon you than on any other being.” He gasped as though breaking through the surface of an icy lake. “And prevented my leaving before the arrival of this storm.”

“I ordered you back to the ship well before the storm was even half a dozen snowflakes,” Kirk whispered, low and dark. He shifted until his posture became daring. Spock sucked in a sharp breath. “Which just proves that I can’t make you do a damn thing that you don’t want to do.” He glared at Spock, though there was no real hostility there. “I didn’t make you do anything. You want me because I’m supremely wantable,” he smirked for a moment before sobering again, “and you fell in love with me all on your own. I think I did everything short of ordering you not to love me and you did it fucking anyway cause you are one stubborn son of a bitch.”

Spock choked back in surprise. Yet again, Kirk was making assumptions about Spock’s emotions. Yet again, he knew him better than Spock knew himself.

“Get mad at me if you have to,” Kirk went on. “Blame me. Yell at me if it’ll make you feel better. Be as illogical as possible. But that won’t stop the fever. You know it won’t.” He’d softened a bit as he spoke but as he continued his posture hardened once more into defiance. “Stop being stubborn for once in your life and tell me how you want to do this.” He pushed away from his place near the door and loped with a predator’s grace instead toward the bed. “Want me on all fours? My back? In your lap?”

Another wordless, animal growl tore from Spock’s throat on a wave of anger that moved through him. How could Kirk be the person to whom Spock was closest to and still not know anything about him? Was his ideas of pon farr really only gleaned from a memory of one public spectacle of fighting upon the hot desert sands? His counterpart had not shown Kirk any other ways it could be?

“Stop,” Spock demanded when Kirk seemed dependent on hearing some kind of coherent answer from him. “This is not a transaction. I will not have you trade your body for my life.” He took a deep breath but he had no dignity left to hold onto. “Pon farr is supposed to be a gift. A sharing of profound intimacy not possible during any other time. It shouldn’t... be like this.”

Spock shuddered as another flash of heat overtook him and he pulled his science blue overshirt up and over his head, tossing it across the room, thinking of nothing but desire for some kind of relief from the storm inside him.

“I think I’m destined to crash your nice, neat wedding plans no matter what universe we’re in,” Kirk replied, sitting down on the edge of the bed and taking his command gold shirt off, so they were both matched again in level of undress. “Think you’re just not meant for that life.”

“Don’t tease me,” Spock groaned. “It is torturous.”

Kirk looked at him and patted the bed beside him with one of his large, captivating, masculine hands. The gesture was inviting and apologetic. Spock delicately sat beside him, powerless to do anything else.

“Spock,” Kirk said gently. “It’s ok. It’s just me.”

“You do not know,” Spock replied brokenly. His hands were hard fists in his lap next to the hard, damp bundle of his desperate cock surging beneath his uniform. “I do not want you to see me like this.”

“Like what?” Kirk said, beginning to smile again. “Sweaty?” He huffed a chuckle that did nothing but frustrate Spock further. He was about to get to his feet and stomp off somewhere, anywhere, that would give him even one breath of air away from Kirk, when Kirk’s hand caressed him on his thigh, human heat searing him as it always did whenever Kirk touched him.

When Kirk spoke again it was with his own kind of fever coloring his voice. “Or is it that you don’t want me to see how turned on you are?” he asked.

“I...” Spock whimpered, sweating. Always, continuously sweating. He contemplated lying. Denying it. Denying that he didn’t want Kirk to see him so vulnerable, so in need of him. The last time his body had gaped open, missing the shape of Kirk, Kirk had been dead and thus he had never seen it.

“I think you want me to see how hard you are,” Kirk went on. “I think you want me to take you out of your pants and get a good look at you.”

“Yessss,” the pon farr hissed out of Spock. But his hand landed on Kirk’s, holding it in a vice to keep it from wandering up his inseam. It was more his own voice when he spoke again. “Jim, I can’t-”

“Do you want me to say it?” Kirk interrupted. His free hand went to Spock’s chin and dragged his gaze until it met Kirk’s own, pupils ragged and full. “That I want you too? Have wanted you ever since you wanted to throttle me and I wanted to beat your ass after the damn Maru hearing? That it was me who was on the other side of the glass from your tears, so the beauty of that gift from you was the last thing I saw?” He kissed Spock quick, still holding onto his chin, his lips stinging Spock’s with cold-heat. “I’m greedy. You said pon farr is a gift, so give it to me. Tell me how to help you lose control.”

“Jim,” Spock seemed unable to say anything more. When Kirk waited patiently, not fighting Spock’s grip on his wrist nor kissing him again, Spock’s face twisted with more senseless frustration.

“Well?” Kirk asked, smiling. “Are you going to put a baby in me or what?”

Something brittle in Spock snapped and he leapt against Kirk, throwing him to the bed and climbing on top of him.

“You don’t understand,” Spock hissed. “It’s not a baby. It’s a bond.” He curled his lip. “And I want you to put it in me.” He paused again, breathing hard over Kirk. Everything inside him was fire. “I am not strong enough to stop myself. I am not strong enough, not Vulcan enough, to keep from begging. Jim.” He straddled Kirk hard, gasping when his erection pressed against Kirk’s body. “Put it in me, Jim. Please.”

“Fuck,” Kirk said on a pant. His breath was hot and fast as his chest heaved beneath Spock. The thermal undershirt of his uniform clung to his sweat and outlined the curves of his muscles, Spock’s eyes mapping them out. Kirk writhed up until he was able to kiss Spock again, lingering this time. He pulled back for a breath. “You want to bond?”

“I need it,” Spock whined, dripping sweat onto Kirk, but neither bringing them further into contact nor pushing off. “I need your mind inside me. Jim. I’m in such pain, I am about to lose myself to the madness of it.” He clutched his eyes closed against a fresh wave of the pulsing agony he could no longer get away from. It continued to grow, swelling the bonding center in his head into more piercing shards of migraine, swelling his chenesi against his spine, swelling the already engorged lips of his sheath as it gushed lubricant to darken his pants, swelling his impossibly hard, wet cock, trapped as it was still in his briefs. “I need you inside me. I need you to fill me. Please.”

Kirk gazed up at him slack jawed for a moment and in desperation for some kind of relief, Spock slowly began to shift his erection against Kirk. He shivered, still too ashamed to look at Kirk but too far gone to stop rutting on him.

“You are making it very difficult to be clearheaded about this,” Kirk said, sucking on his teeth. He shook his head as if he could physically clear it. “Spock. I know you can survive pon farr without bonding. I know that our other selves did that. You never bonded your first Time in that universe and you lived. So, I just... I mean, I am all for fucking you or arm wrestling you or slicing at you with a lirpa or whatever it takes to ride this out but if... if your swollen telepathic glands weren’t going haywire, would you actually want to bond with me? You’re my best friend but you did try to kill me once and I made moves, you know, after the whole break up drama with Uhura, and you didn’t... you didn’t seem all that interested.”

“I have wanted to bond with you since I met you,” Spock growled. “And I have hated the emotional strength of that want since I first felt it stir within me.”

Whatever tenuous grasp Spock still had over himself snapped in earnest then, some subtle change in Kirk’s scent, some acquiescence in his mental aura, and the rapping at the side of Spock’s skull, the hammer pounding into his temple, finally broke. It shattered and whatever he was holding back could not be held back anymore. The fever was here. He was the fever. It was now, it was him.

There was no thought, just pulsing, swelling need. Spock began to claw at his clothes, ripping off his thermal undershirt as though he were crawling out of the furnace heat of his own skin. A keening, desperate noise ripped from his throat as Kirk sat up as well and calmly removed his own undershirt, exposing a bare chest flush with pink human blood.

“I've wanted to bond with you ever since I felt what it had been like for the other us,” Kirk said. He wiped a sheepish arm up over the sweat on his forehead. “I want that.” He smirked, appraisal in his gaze. “With you.”

“Jim,” Spock muttered. For a moment, he was unable to get his thoughts together enough to continue. His entire bloodstream was a mess of flame. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t speak. He ripped at his clothes again. Boots first, both clunking against the door after he threw them. Kirk’s hit the wall with a similar sound as he flung his own. Spock did not wait for the second boot to hit before he started to tear at his pants. “Jim,” he said again, biting into his bottom lip. He pawed at the straining shape of his cock under his briefs over the tatters he’d turned his pants into.

There was almost relief in the touch, until the desperate desire coursing through him redoubled.

“Please,” Spock begged, thrusting miserably into his hand. Kirk’s breath caught in his throat. “Put it in me. Please. Oh god. Jim.”

Somehow, in all of the heat and flame, he managed to get his briefs off and as soon as he had, he fell to his face on the mattress, pressing onto his knees to display himself wantonly. He still wore his socks and couldn't make himself care enough to peel them off.

There was no shame. There was only the fever. He keened, he whined, he begged to be filled, to be bred, to be used, over and over he begged as Kirk calmly pulled his own pants off and made soothing noises as Spock filled the room with the overwhelming smell of his arousal.

“Need it dripping out of me,” Spock sobbed as he heard Kirk toss his briefs and sit back on the bed. Spock was fingering himself, slimy as silk with his own lubricant, but he didn’t remember when he’d started to do so. “Need it hard and rough. Need it fast. Need you inside me. Need you to use me. Jim. Please. Need you to-”

“Spock,” Kirk cut in. “I need you to stop talking like that or this whole thing is going to be over much more quickly than either of us wants.”

He sat back on the bed beside the Vulcan, both of them naked and hard, his mind singing to Spock’s, calling it toward him. More pathetic sounds fell from Spock’s lips, but they could hardly be considered words. He buried his face in the blankets, their scent human but foreign, as he slammed his fingers into himself. The mass of his fra’als, engorged and dripping with thick fluid, splattered out of his sheath around his cock, and thrashed wildly.

His fra’als had never felt so fat with blood before. They hung heavy out of his body, dripping ropes of lubricant onto the bed as they writhed around each other and slicked his cock. When they brushed against the sensitive head, he cried out and an unsatisfying orgasm coiled weakly around his brain stem. His cock had been so wet and hard already, he hardly noticed the spasm and the ejaculate as his fra’als smeared it over themselves with their movement that had not become any less frantic with the release.

It was the midsummer rising in him. The height of the summer burn. A spearpoint of heat like a sand spire quaking phallically toward the sky in the scrubbed desert horizon, shimmering like the air around a flame. He could feel the three suns of his birth planet crackling inside his bones. The Watcher, the Sister Twin, pulled the tidal forces inside him. T’Khasi and T’Khut, the Wives who danced and spun together in the gravitational orbit of their bond, were now merely dust recycled and breathed into galactic eddies rather than a place to plant one’s feet, but they had him. Two hands, Goddess hands, cold as antimatter, ripping him in twain between them. They had him.

Dancing, spinning through his skull, the Goddesses teased him into a dionysian frenzy, writhing like cave paintings in firelight. Ritual, it seemed, was going to come to him regardless of circumstance.

He could feel the suns of Vulcan inside him. He could feel T’Khut and T’Khasi, so much dust and sand, inside him. He could feel Kirk’s eyes watching him, his mind coaxing crookedly out of the shadows at the edges of his awareness, inside him. He could feel the moon of this frontier planet holding sway over the waves of his blood, rushing moist, inside him.

There was no romance, no mythology, in the name of this planet. Just letters and numbers and classifications. No Goddesses who had spoken from the furnace of the planet’s molten core and told Her name to the people who lived here. But the storm was the planet’s breathing and he was locked inside it.

There was a web of pure thought undulating around him. The entire universe holding him, owning him, controlling him. He couldn’t stop it. It’d be like trying to stop a supernova with his bare hands.

He needed. He needed with an intensity that could hold three suns in orbit. One that could pin a mind, wings flapping, to a corkboard and hold it there.

He wanted to pin his own mind, let it writhe feebly on a crucifix of pleasure-pain, and present it to Kirk. Give him everything.

“Jim,” he muttered into the bed. T’Khut. Other half of my soul. Wife, sister, lover since time began. He didn’t know which words he wanted to say. His vision was hazy when he craned his head to look at Kirk. Kirk’s mind shone out of his skull in a glittering corona and it blinded him briefly. Spock whimpered without words.

“Spock,” Kirk replied, desire thrumming under his customary playfulness. He sat a safe distance away from Spock, waiting for some signal from the Vulcan before touching him. Kirk’s bare skin glistened with sweat under Spock’s scrutiny as his gaze roved over the shape of his thighs, his arms, his waist, his chest, his jutting cock, his wrist, his fingers. “You are a mess right now.” His voice lowered. “You’re filthy.”

“Yes,” Spock agreed. His fingers fell out of his stretched and moist hole and he moved, taking his body weight wholly onto his shoulders. He clutched his buttocks, pulling them apart to reveal himself shamelessly to Kirk. “I want you. Touch me. Fill me. Want your mind, your fingers, your tongue, your cock, your fist, your teeth, your seed.” He shuddered. “Please. Please. Oh, please.”

Kirk’s touch, the first one he bestowed on Spock since they’d been nude, was tender as his fingers drummed on Spock’s lower back, close to the painful knots that his chenesi had become. The touch of his mind was not, however, tender at all. His thoughts blazed with a madness similar to the one that had Spock in its grip. He needed with the same purity.

Kirk sucked in an eager breath as his hands explored Spock, soothing him with long strokes over his sides and his back and his buttocks. His fra’als strained, some of them around his hips, others surging over his perineum, trying to reach Kirk’s flesh and his mind inside it.

“I’m going to fuck you,” Kirk promised. His fingers brushed over Spock’s knuckles where he still held himself open. Affection fluttered in him. “You’ve been so good and patient for me.” He caressed the back of Spock’s hand gently. “So I’m going to fill you up just like you want. Gonna shoot you full of my kids.” He brushed the head of his cock against Spock’s skin, burning like a wet brand.

Spock began to cum again as soon as Kirk started to push inside him, squeezing and sucking him in, milking him at the slightest pressure. Again, the climax was little more than a momentary reprieve. There was no true satisfaction in it. But there was pleasure.

His body was in the throes of the most profound anguish that Spock had ever felt, but being split in two by Kirk’s heat alchemicalized quicksilver mercury injections of pleasure in the midst of it. Rapture and misery and not enough. Not enough. He would die and still, it would not be enough.

“More,” Spock snarled when Kirk gasped and paused.

More. More of you inside me. More of your cock. More of your mind.

“You’re so tight, Spock,” Kirk groaned. “Give me a second.”

“I need you,” Spock whined in response, the skin around his fingers white from how hard he was gripping it. Kirk slowly slid forward until Spock’s fra’als were able to reach the peculiar shape of Kirk’s human testicles. As soon as they touched, Kirk’s mind shocked Spock’s, drawing even closer into him. “Need you now. Please. Now. Oh, please. More. Harder. Now. Now. Now.”

Kirk began to thrust, driving into Spock, one arm braced on the strong expanse of Spock’s back. He pistoned into him, spearing his enflamed chenesi with his human cock and punishing his prostate just as eagerly. Kirk inadvertently pressed Spock’s face into the bed, making him pant and gasp, no longer able to get air enough to continue to plead.

The ensuing silence was broken with the damp slap of Spock’s fra’als over his dripping cock, his soaking perineum, the stretched rim of his hole, Kirk’s testicles as they smacked his ass, and over each other, clumsy and desperate to touch more and more of Kirk’s skin. Every pump of Kirk’s hips dislodged more length of Spock’s anxious fra’als from his gushing sheath, more than had ever been exposed before. “Pon farr” was an old phrase, a primeval word, a pre-Surak word. More powerfully ancient than even logic. And in that tongue, it meant simply “the fra’als.”

There were many telepathic centers on the Vulcan body, beyond those localized within parts of the brain. Most were clustered around the meldpoints in the skull, but many more were grouped around each fingertip. There were other places, mental erogenous zones, throughout the psionic system. But beyond even all of that, most of the telepathic centers in a Vulcan’s body resided in their fra’als. And pon farr’s swelling brought Spock’s mind streaming out of even more of his writhing organs.

He began to moan, so much of his telepathic system exposed now, as sensitive as clitoral nerves, sampling Kirk’s thoughts on the touch that grew between them. His mind was an explosion of sound and color and feeling. Emotions round and dewy and human. A depth to the pleasure he found there that was absolute, a hedonism so un-Vulcan, Spock began to cum once again just because of the sensation of it touching his mind.

While there may have been logic in Kirk’s actions before, now he, like Spock, had abandoned any hold it may have once had on him. He was, Spock bit back a whimper as Kirk didn’t pause for his chenesi to finish emptying through his spasming cock before he was pounding them mercilessly again, fucking him simply because it felt good and they both wanted him to. He had given himself over to pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Spock clamored for the ecstasy of it inside his own mind.

“God. Did you just cum again?” Kirk groaned brokenly. “You are sopping wet and your sushi sticks here are being awfully rowdy.” He shifted and smacked playfully at the fra’als that had reached around Spock now and were stroking damp tendrils over Kirk’s softly dusted thighs, slipping in the sweat there when he mentioned them.

The blow ricocheted through Spock’s body and somehow, impossibly, he felt himself tightening into another quick climax. His tortured chenesi seethed inside him at the treatment and Spock pumped, milking Kirk again in the process. Kirk’s motions sped up in response, every thought that Spock could read broadcasting an approaching climax.

Spock turned his head, so he could breathe, so he could speak.

“Yes, yes,” he panted. “Give it to me. More. Harder.”

Abruptly, and seemingly in contrary to Spock’s words, Kirk stopped moving and pulled out altogether. The action earned him an unconsciously disappointed sound from the Vulcan. It was strangled, however, when Kirk grabbed him, throwing him down onto his back, his legs falling open to let out the entire spread of Spock’s hormonally overzealous genitals.

His cock was covered in layers of viscous cum and continued to sway, despite the orgasms that had already squeezed through it, full of feverish blood and erect, from the thick, oozing walls of his sheath, stretched now nearly beyond bearing to let his fra’als free. The nest of fra’als all reached and clasped together, slippery with lubricant and cum, stumbling over each other in a clumsy ignorance to get toward Kirk’s skin.

“Don’t stop,” Spock begged almost immediately. He adapted to his new position quickly and pulled his legs up toward his chest, holding onto his thighs with his straining hands. His fra’als reached greedily around his hole, trying to draw Kirk back in. “By everything good in the universe do not stop.”

“I didn’t plan to,” Kirk snapped, but his voice was soft with laughter and the teasing playfulness of it only fed Spock’s arousal. “I just wanted to be able to see your face when I put a bond in your ass.”

He smirked as he kneeled behind Spock, dragging him down the bed by his ankles on a trail of Spock’s own fluid that was cooling on the bed, until he reached him again. He rubbed his cock through the slippery writhing of Spock’s fra’als and they both stiffened at the electric tingle of the connection. The mindtouch that pulsed between them flared, nearly destructive in the indulgence of the pleasure they felt at the mingling of their thoughts.

Spock’s hand smacked the side of Kirk’s face with a sweaty squelch and as Kirk guided his cock back into Spock’s waiting opening, Spock’s fingers crept toward Kirk’s shining qui’lari.

The new angle meant that Kirk did not put as much pressure on Spock’s chenesi but his fra’als had much easier access to human skin and Kirk’s mind was everywhere. His cock still expertly hit Spock’s prostate with every forward motion. He bent Spock practically in half with the exuberance of his vigorous movements. And within moments, Spock’s fingers collided with Kirk’s meldpoints so that eager telepathic energy surged out of him.

“My mind to your mind,” Spock groaned.

He had never heard the way-clearing words spoken so brokenly before. They were suggestive, desperate.

My mind to your mind. My mind against your mind. My mind moving, pumping, trembling inside your mind.

“Come on, Spock, I’m not gonna last,” Kirk said. “Hurry up and meld us. I already know how hot you are for it, you dirty little mindslut.”

A growl broke out of Spock as his free hand curled into a fist strong enough to make his nails create crescents of emerald blood in the palm of his hand, even through the bedsheets he held to. His eyes screwed shut

“My thoughts-” Spock moaned just as destroyed as before.

“-all up in my thoughts,” Kirk cut in, counterpointing his words by snapping his hips viciously, pushing deeper into Spock’s body. “Yes, we know, Spock. Just skull fuck me already, you freak. Marry me. God, I want it so bad. I want it so fucking bad.”

The link between them was already flaring to life before Spock fully opened the bridge of the merging and as soon as the meld roared into being, the pon farr was bleeding into Kirk utterly. It caught like wildfire between them. Just as contagious as Spock had warned that it would be.

In the middle of the destruction of it, the bond was immediate. Effortless. They both were so limp and rubbery with desire for it, the link between them already so strong, Spock’s fra’als touching so much of Kirk, that it merely burst into heightened awareness without direction from either of them. It burst into light like every color ever conceived inside the mind of God brought forth all at once. As though Spock was seeing for the first time. Seeing with thousands of eyes, all more alien than the last, all seeing and feeling and touching and tasting and everything he was experiencing was all just Kirk. It was Kirk and it was him and it was this huge thing that was the two of them together. Some new being with two bodies and one mind.

With no preamble, the pain and pressure in Spock’s head lessened, and the unending ache instead became a dazzling ecstasy he could not survive intact within. He dissolved into the bond, meeting Kirk within it and melting into him. They thought together. Moved together. Came together.

“Fuck,” Kirk keened aloud, spine snapping, emptying into Spock’s body and into his mind.

Fed by Kirk’s orgasm through the weaving together of the bond, the climax that washed over Spock finally brought with it the cooling relief he’d been yearning for. He arched his back, impaling himself further onto Kirk.

“In me, in me, get it all in me,” Spock heard himself crying over and over with a shameless desperation. He clutched around Kirk even as his body fought to go limp after the first satisfying orgasm he’d had since this whole thing began.

They both seemed to cum and cum and cum, their minds moving in tandem. One’s pleasure catching constantly on the other’s, spiraling together over and over. Distantly, beneath the never-ending rapture of it, of such total annihilation into Kirk, every thought, every feeling shared, Spock became aware that Kirk’s racing human mind and human body wouldn’t be able to handle much more of this overstimulating feedback loop.

He pulled back so that they both shivered into aftershocks, the meld falling off of them like water. The bond continued to swim open inside them both, a steady cord of simmering connection. That final, blissful fullness that the fever had been craving. Kirk’s heartbeat pounding in the back of Spock’s skull.

“Fuck,” Kirk grunted again. He breathed one last time before pulling out of Spock and sank down into the unescapable wet spot around him. “Spock, that was fucking nasty.”

“Yes,” Spock agreed distractedly, panting. Something that was still the pon farr agony, the itch of primal hormones, continued to churn in him. He desperately shoved his fingers into his abandoned hole, trying to catch the thick drops of Kirk’s cum and keep it from spilling out of him.

Kirk watched him from where he lay on the bed beside him, hair charmingly mussed, and he watched him through the bond. Kirk felt the instinctual drives that held Spock under their sway because Spock felt them and the bond curled between them so that Kirk could see them. He knew the unspoken things, the unshielded things, the uncontrolled desires.

“I stuffed you nice and full, huh?” Kirk asked with a filthy smile on his face. “And you’re so greedy for every single drop, aren’t you? Want to carry me around inside you, marked and claimed?”

Shivering at the words but powerless to do much else, Spock’s legs collapsed to the bed, the soaked sheets immediately sticking to his thighs. He continued to twitch halfheartedly as his fra’als and spent cock tried to retreat together back into his sheath, but the swollen nerves simply jostled each other painfully. While the bond, throbbing, alive, healthy, vibrant where the husk of his betrothal bond with T’Pring used to lurk, had taken off the immediacy of the drives of his Time, there was still a barbarity to him that spoke of the blood madness.

He sent images, disjointed and wild, of Kirk stuffing him even fuller, emptying himself into Spock repeatedly, through their link. His mouth, his ass, the tight space between his cock and the opening of his sheath, in his fra’als, the webbing between every one of his fingers, all over his face, Spock sent him images of everywhere that he wanted Kirk to mark him with his fiery, vital human spend.

“You have only but sampled my greed,” Spock said, the bond vibrating with promise. He glanced at the window, buried completely behind a dark blanket of snow, before looking heatedly back at Kirk. “I believe you told me that Mr. Scott said we would be trapped here for several days.” He spoke conversationally, as though there was no inuendo. But the bond was alight with it. “That should give us enough time to begin to assuage my hunger.”

A startled, exhausted arousal reached Spock from Kirk.

“Is this what all Vulcan weddings are like?” Kirk asked, chuckling. “You guys don’t do anything by halves, huh?” Gradually, he sobered and beckoned Spock onto the drier part of the bed with him, wrapping him in his arms. “How are you feeling though? You’re not going to keel over cause your balls got too swollen they cut into your spine, right?”

Spock raised an eyebrow.

“That is an exceedingly rare complication,” he said stiffly. “And thus, it is not likely that I shall be afflicted by it.” Kirk’s warm hand rubbed his back, massaging the sore places around his chenesi, the pain of which Kirk felt himself. Spock relaxed with a pleased sigh. “However, in answer to your other question, I am feeling... good.” He paused, taking stock of his body and the reclining and rallying of the wave of fever in him. Soon it would have him again, less strong the second time perhaps, but still stronger than he was, and he’d be a creature of need once more.

With each wave of the cycle, the pon farr would come back weaker and weaker, he knew, until he would be able to control it. Stuff it back in with all of his emotions, held secret and safe. Shared with no one. No one but Kirk. Kirk was there now. Would always be there.

A wave of euphoria burst from Spock. Everything in him was singing with Kirk’s mind, everything in communion, whole, full, complete.

“We’re technically married now, right?” Kirk asked.

“We are,” Spock replied. A stab of self-consciousness made him suspect that Kirk perhaps regretted it, that his motivation had not been his own want for the bond, but loyalty to and affection for Spock. But as soon as he felt it, he felt instead a gush of Kirk’s belief in the rightness of their new connection.

“Bones is going to be mad,” Kirk said. “He was supposed to be my best man.”

“It is indeed likely that the doctor will feel betrayed,” Spock agreed. “Yet, even so, I do not find myself regretting the fact that he was not here.”

“Yea, me neither,” Kirk said, smirking and clutching Spock closer against him. “Should we wash the sheets or are you going to get a second wave here soon?”

Spock thought for a moment. The way that Kirk’s gentle hands were working out the pain in his back had begun to shimmer again with a slow building heat and there was an itch, however faint, just at the barest corner of their link.

“I believe that just as soon as the sheets are clean, I shall merely wish to dirty them again,” Spock said. “I suggest instead that you replicate an electrolyte solution and spend this time replenishing your body’s strength.”

“None of what you said should be sexy and yet...” Kirk grumbled good-naturedly. His love and attraction poured into Spock and he laughed lightly. “You’re talking in full sentences again, I’m pleased to hear. Not so cockhungry you’re monosyllabic.”

“Yet,” Spock said.

“Yet,” Kirk agreed. “But soon you’re gonna want it again, won’t you?” He rubbed Spock’s back more pointedly against his hidden chenesi, and then dipped even lower to the top of his ass. “And do you know what I’m going to do when that happens?”

“I believe,” Spock said, the marriage bond between them flaring and sizzling, “that you are going to make me beg for it.”

“Yea,” Kirk chuckled sweetly. “I am.”