Fic: Two Summers, 1-8
He regrets burying Spock on Vulcan II.
No, that’s not true. That’s where Spock belongs, where Spock would’ve wanted to be buried. They never talked about it, but Jim knows.
He regrets that he can’t visit Spock’s grave.
He doesn’t know where this impulse comes from, but it seems to be something ancient and intimately human. There are days when the only thing he wants to do is redirect his ship to Vulcan II, beam down to that arid hot burning planet, walk its sands to where Spock rests. He imagines himself kneeling before rock and stone like a supplicant, whispering and screaming into the desert wind. He imagines the wind carrying his words to Spock’s katra, or the wind bringing him secret memories of his lover, or the wind wiping away his tears, replacing them with kisses from Spock. It’s not logical, but he wants to believe that the wind can convey messages to the dead, that the dead linger in some unknown unseeable world of their own, and it is the air that Jim breathes it is the breeze that touches his face that can travel between those two realms.
There is a wind in space. Jim likes to think of light as its own kind of wind, racing through the void in every direction. He wonders if Spock is in that light, if he is laughing because he’s with the stars now.
These are old Earth beliefs, wives tales, crockpot stories used in a time when people didn’t have the marvels of science and technology to explain to them the way things really work. Yet despite the fact that they’re absolutely ridiculous and untrue, they’ve survived. Those tales of an afterlife and this unfounded belief in a human soul a Vulcan katra have lived on, even though there’s never been anything to solidly back it up. People cling to them in secret.
Jim used to laugh at the legend and myths humans would come up with. They have some weird stuff. Now, he remembers them, wondering. Hoping. He reminds himself there is no evidence, that scientists have tried a million different ways and it’s inconclusive at best, contradictory at worst. But something in him has to believe that Spock is still out there. It fucking hurts too much to think otherwise.
He always assumed the funerals he held as a starship captain would be a remembrance, if not a celebration, of the deceased’s life. It’d be one of those “put the keg on my coffin” affairs that dwelt on all of life’s good parts and didn’t allow sorrow a place in the room. Who the fuck cares about what happens afterwards? So-and-so lived a good life, and that’s all we can ask for.
It’s different somehow, on a starship. Because so-and-so did live a good life, but that life was cut short. Death came suddenly, randomly, swiftly, slowly, deliberately. They all knew the dangers and risks signing up with Starfleet, serving under James T. Kirk. That knowledge doesn’t ease anything, doesn’t take away the sting of unfairness and the gnawing questions.
They’ve done the “keg on the coffin” thing. Some people explicitly request it in their files. Jim thought that’s how he’d like to go. But it’s different. The perspective between being the one to go and the one left behind are completely different.
And somewhere in there, holding all those funeral services for the crewmembers that died, he realizes that there is nothing shameful in sadness. He thought that mourning was useless because it does nothing for the dead. But it is necessary for the living. Joy that a life ended, that a friend passed, is only possible if you believe that they’ve gone onto a better place, that they are in Elysium, that they are somehow at rest or returned to the source of all things or rejoined the cycle of life. The idea of simple nonexistence is brutal. It might be supported by all scientific investigation, it might be easy to accept when death is abstract and the people dying are not your friends. Otherwise, something inside recoils at the thought.
Jim wonders what Spock would have to say to that. Would he go into how humans are hardwired, talk about their evolutionary history, bring up articles on anthropology and discuss the different ways that alien cultures deal with death? Would he start talking about funerary rituals and prepare a report for Jim to read just because he can, and Jim asked? He misses the intense intellectual curiosity of Spock and the way the Vulcan thoroughly researched everything.
That’s why he wants to go to Spock’s grave. To ask him these questions and get answers he knows are true. He wants to ask Spock if he’s there, if he’s happy, if he’s waiting for Jim. If the wind carries his spirit across the desert sands, if they will be joined on the other side.
He wants answers to questions that no one has been able to unravel. He wants to know that despite the fact that he is mortal and one day his heart will stop, that their love will outlast death and the slow decay of time. And he wants Spock to tell him.
This is what Jim imagines, kneeling in red sands before his lover’s grave, his eyes turned to the sky searching for a sign, a confirmation.
But they are lightyears away from Vulcan II and not likely to go near that planet anytime soon.
Jim sits in his captain’s chair, imagining a soft breeze touching his body like Spock’s quiet breath against the nape of his neck.
In his mind, he hears Spock whisper yes.
It’s all he can do not to reach out into the still air of the bridge, desperately trying to catch the wind.