Release

Kirk tests the suitability of the mask by covering Spock's nose and mouth without warning. Spock takes an exploratory breath and finds it impossible. He nods, adding his silent approval to Kirk's.

Kirk pushes Spock back roughly against the bed. He falls into the coarse Starfleet-issue sheets willingly, without resistance.

Within a chamber carved from cool rock, he hides from the desert heat. The winds outside do not disturb his vigil, crouched as he is on his bed of stone. Within this tomb, will he finally find peace?

Kirk, nude, shining, and powerful, like a Classical statue of an athlete, climbs on top of Spock's chest. With a knee to the bed on each side of Spock he pins the Vulcan to the bed, sitting atop him like a wolf on a mountain peak. He is ready to bay to the moon.

Spock watches him with helpless, love-struck eyes. He is motionless. Kirk's body holds down his body; Kirk's hands hold down his hands. Kirk's gaze keeps him silent.

Kirk rocks his body subtly against Spock's. The undulation, the contact, and indeed, the entire situation all mix and mingle to send a pounding arousal to Spock's groin. No part of Kirk's body is even touching Spock's penis, but it reaches out towards him blindly as it fills with blood.

Kirk masturbates himself against Spock's upper chest. Spock flails his head forward, yearning to taste, but Kirk is just barely out of reach. Spock squeezes his thighs together, trying to give himself some measure of relief. It half works.

His shaggy head leans defeated against a stone wall, his knees pulled close to his chest in a nervous embrace. The candle in the crook in the wall burns low and flickers as a finger of wind comes through the window and tickles it with memory.

Kirk's swollen dick rubs against Spock's chest, almost abrading the Vulcan's skin with the force of the repetition. Spock's lungs heave in response, his breathing already constrained by the mass of the man who has mounted him. Spock wants, needs to be touched.

And Kirk knows.

He reaches behind himself with one hand and lets it hover just beyond Spock's penis, tantalizingly close. With the other hand, he stifles Spock's nose and mouth, just as they did before in practice.

Only now, it is real. No other reality exists. In one move, Kirk has captured Spock's breath in his one hand and his lust in the other. He proceeds to free him from both. The hand on Spock's dick moves with fierce tightness and untiring skill. The hand across Spock's face is utterly motionless.

Spock holds his breath and pumps his hips into Jim's hand. White lights flicker behind his eyes, blurring Jim's face into a halo of golden clouds. He can hear the blood rushing through his body in all directions. Jim pulls harder and faster. The hand on Spock's face does not move.

One tear betrays him and flees the prison of his eye, only to die upon the stone on which it falls. He edges further into the corner of his own prison before he is wiped away and destroyed like the tear.

Spock knows he needs breath but he needs Jim so much more, needs Jim's touch more than air, needs Jim running through his bloodstream more than oxygen. Jim flows through his blood and throbs in his groin like a heartbeat. Jim's touch is unforgiving. With his hands he pulls pleasure and life from his Vulcan prisoner. Semen explodes into Jim's fingers, coating them with Spock's gift of submission.

The exertion wipes all sense from Spock's mind, robbing him of the last bit of oxygen his straining body has saved. His tingling body blacks out to the feeling of Jim's hand accepting his seed, Jim's heavy genitalia on his chest, and Jim's fingers killing him with their constancy.

When Jim removes his hand, Spock does not move again.

He presses his head against the granite wall, wishing to disappear inside it. The pain he feels does not approach the pain deep in his chest. He had never before imagined a pain stronger than that from rejection, yet it lies here shackling him. What good is a tomb if even death provides no release?

Jim is shocked at his own actions. He gives himself up honorably; Spock would never know him to do otherwise. Starfleet determines an official court martial to be undesirable for several reasons: it would embarrass Starfleet to the Federation, the killing occurred during civil and not military activity, and Earth is all too eager to wash its hands of the entire embarrassing scandal.

So, Jim is given to the Vulcans to criminally prosecute.

They are not amused. On Earth, Jim is Starfleet's golden hero, the youngest captain ever to command a starship, a prize specimen of the local species. The Vulcans are not impressed by any of this. Kirk is emotional by their standards, which are predictably strict, and the entire nature of his crime fills their prudish natures with detached horror and disgusted bafflement.

Not to mention that he is a stranger who has killed one of their own. No matter how much Vulcan failed to protect Spock when he lived among them, now that an outsider has caused him harm they rise up like angered wasps. They will destroy Jim with their sting.

Vulcan has never been any kind of refuge for him, yet he seeks one there now. He questioned his logic, again and again, but could concoct no alternative. Without Starfleet, Vulcan was all he knew, and he has fled to its cruel succor. He had emerged from Vulcan once; perhaps this time he will leave it properly coated in stone as he had neglected to do in his youth. The Earthers have legends about those who emerge from tombs--as soulless zombies.

Jim is given one meal of bread and milk each day in the Vulcan prison, served early in the morning before the sun rose high enough to scorch his cell. He eats only to take his mind from his guilt; the food brings him no fulfillment. The Vulcans leave him there for weeks, his strength withering, and with no desire for hope.

They drag him into court one morning, dressed in a simple shift of an emasculating beige, after yet another sleepless night. The Vulcan officials take turns haranguing him:

"You have destroyed Spock!"

"You caused him to feel!"

"You won his trust!"

"This act goes beyond murder. You have taken more than his life; you have taken his soul!"

And it is true, for Spock's spectre hangs 'round his shoulders. Invisible and mute, it remains, unable to leave Jim, equally unable to communicate with him.

Jim halfheartedly attempts to reason in his defense. He tells the Vulcans about erotic asphyxiation, that certain individuals were neurologically programmed to respond to suffocation with an involuntary erection. He knows it was physiologically illogical, but reminds them that Spock had not been fully Vulcan. Spock had consented to the act and had even orchestrated it quite actively beforehand; perhaps that was what the Vulcans found so startling about the whole affair.

But the Vulcans know how much Spock had needed him, and how such emotional submission was 'in bad taste'. Jim will pay just as much for Spock's feelings as for Spock's death.

He wonders if escape was even possible, if he had fled this distance and into this fortress of stone and logic and still writhed under the knife of such cutting pain and longing. He yearns for love to simply slice his life away, to take away his choice, because it is the fact that he had a choice--and a responsibility to Logic--that leaves him paralyzed with guilt and shame.

With dizzying swiftness the Vulcans condemn Jim to be executed, out in the desert where he'd nearly died once for Spock before. Tal'shaya is so rare that even many Vulcans do not know its meaning, but the practice was still taught, preserved from the old days. It would be painless, but Jim will cease to exist. Jim's light will go out.

He kneels in the sand, his chest heaving, thinking only of Spock.

The Vulcan executioner stands above him.

Wind brushes again through the window high in the wall and unceremoniously snuffs out the candle. A wave of torment traverses his body, and he falls against the wall sobbing. Hyperventilating. He cannot bear for the light to go out, even within the twisted cage of his imagination. Jim's light. Every light is Jim. Every light will always be Jim. His ghost would plead with the executioner in his elaborate, sick fantasy for the pardon of the man who had destroyed him. Because he is light.

T'Quen hears the noise from Spock's chamber as she passes through the hallway, and pauses to listen to him weep. He is a special problem to the priestesses of Gol; never before have they encountered an adept nursing a broken heart for an outworlder. Does this outworlder know what anguish is experienced here on his behalf? She has seen Admiral Kirk's images just this morning on the interplanetary newsvids, and from the cool sanctuary of her stony home she calmly wonders if the outworlder longs for his runaway lover with just as great a pain.

She quickly hurries on, because meditation is a very private thing whose sanctity is not to be disturbed--but as she walks, she mourns he who cannot learn that his comfort and his destiny does not lie within these walls.