Fic: Two Summers, Interlude
At the center of the Milky Way Galaxy lies a dark heart. It is called Sagittarius A*. Astronomers believe that this heart is a supermassive black hole, 6.7 billion kilometers in diameter containing the equivalent of 2.5 million Terran suns.
Optical and infrared images of this region reveal hundreds, thousands of stars orbiting around the dark heart of the galaxy-the red-orange of the cooler stars, the piercing blue of the hotter. Some of these stars orbit Sagittarius A* at 5000 km/s, or 0.00167c. The black hole itself cannot be seen in the photos.
Radio images show gas, streaming in columns, follow an inevitable path into the circle of the black hole. In these images, everything is tinted red. Sagittarius A* is a glowing red organ that pulses with the red gas-blood matter coursing into through the thick-thin columns. Columns resemble veins surrounded by clouds of blood from burst vessels. The black hole itself looks eerily like a human heart, and one could divide it into a left and right ventricle by the shades of red.
Most of the stars around Sagittarius A* are old. Going out further into the galactic core, star formation is relatively rare. This region is mostly populated with red main sequence stars. X-rays reveal the presence of stellar corpses in the form of more black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs.
Mixed in the fray are massive stars, relatively young and evolved Wolf-Rayet stars blown about in stellar winds, short-lived OB stars surrounded by Strömgren spheres of ionized hydrogen. Scientists still debate the way in which these stars could have formed, because the environment around the galactic heart is severe. There’s a large magnetic field, strong tidal forces, weird distributions of gas and dust. All of these factors in turn restrict the rate of cloud collapse and the composition of the star. Conditions are far from ideal.
That doesn’t change the fact that these stars exist.
Stars are born and they die. They begin as clouds of matter, space dust collecting and conglomerating because of the simple and complicated fact that objects with mass have gravity. Molecular cores form inside these nebulae, then as its density increases it collapses into a protostar. The protostar exerts more gravitational force on its surroundings and itself, accumulating matter and pulling everything tighter and tighter and it begins to heat up. It heats up, emits energy through radiation, pressure builds in the center, the density keeps increasing, the temperature just keeps climbing until.
Until fusion.
The star reaches maturity.
The life of a star depends on its mass. For the most part. Other minor factors like metallicity can come into play, but mass is key. Depending on the mass, stars lead very different lives. Star death is determined by mass too.
Death is thought to take one of three forms. And it is interesting to note that stars can resurrect, if they manage to inject themselves with matter from another star.
For low mass stars, death comes when the core is depleted of helium. During the main part of their lifetime, low mass stars fuse hydrogen to produce helium. When the supply of hydrogen begins to run out the star fuses helium, producing carbon and sometimes oxygen. After the helium is consumed, the star is effectively inert.
It’s not that there is nothing left to burn, but that the fire isn’t hot enough. Beyond helium, low mass stars lack the temperatures necessary to keep fusion going in their core. What remains of the star is a white dwarf surrounded by a planetary nebula-shells of gases from the layers of the original star that burn around the dead core.
For high mass stars, death comes in two main forms: a neutron star or, more famously, a black hole. The cause of death is somewhat different from their low mass counterparts since the core of high mass stars are hot enough to continue fusion. In the lifetime of these stars, the core will burn through hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, neon, magnesium, silicon, sulfur. The fusion of silicon and sulfur produce iron and nickel.
Not all forms of fusion release energy. In particular, the fusion of iron and nickel require energy to be consumed in the reaction. However, stars radiate energy away into space. There is no mechanism by which they redirect energy produced back into the center of the core. As a result, iron and nickel accumulate in the core, and death begins.
Then, one of two things happens. Either gravity rips through the electron degeneracy pressure that had been keeping the atoms in the core apart from each other, or nuclear fusion is so intense that the mass of the core totally surpasses the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses. In the first case, protons and electrons combine to neutrons and neutrinos, giving rise to a neutron star. The second case is a black hole.
All of this-birth, life, and death-because objects with mass have gravity.
At the center of a star is a burning core.
At the center of the galaxy lies a dark heart.
[ In sleep, Jim dreams that Spock is alive. He dreams of the night after they were bonded on Vulcan II, remembering the cool wind of the desert whispering into their room, finding the image of diaphanous curtains blowing in and out with the cadence of the breeze strangely clichéd and indescribably intimate. He was still getting used to the bond, slightly disoriented by the presence of Spock touching certain points in his mind.
They did not have sex that night. It would’ve been too weird and alien, what with Jim still trying to adjust to the ghostly feeling of having a second heartbeat in his chest, a second awareness in the spaces of his brain. And in retrospect, it would’ve been unfair to Spock, who was already holding back from inundating Jim with the full strength of the bond.
Instead, Spock took Jim through a low-key meditative exercise. They sat before each other on the floor.
“Close your eyes. Concentrate on your heart beating, t’hy’la.”
Jim’s heart skips a beat hearing that word.
He feels a spark of Spock’s laughter diffuse through his mind and he opens his eyes. Spock isn’t smiling, but he is. And it feels so good.
“Close your eyes, Jim,” amusement tinges his voice. “Feel the beat of your heart.”
It’s harder than it seems like it should be. His brows furrow as he tries to concentrate, but nothing. Annoyance and frustration mount when suddenly, he feels Spock’s warm hand on his. Jim keeps his eyes closed as Spock guides his hand until it rests over his heart. It takes a little while, but soon, Jim can feel the faint beat of his heart.
He finds himself becoming aware of other things, like the rhythm of his breathing. It evens out, his whole body seems to relax with each breath. Spock keeps his hand over Jim’s hand over his heart.
Then he realizes that Spock’s breathing exactly matches his. With that awareness, he suddenly finds himself wondering if Spock can control his breathing through the bond.
“It is not a matter of control, but as you felt, awareness. Once we become more familiar with each other’s biorhythms, we will be able to learn how to direct them.”
Jim can think of a thousand ways that might be useful.
“Indeed.”
At least half of those thousand ways are related to sex.
Spock’s hand tightens over his and for a moment, Jim literally feels Spock stop breathing. Aching and desire tease at the edges of his awareness, his heartbeat seems to speed up a little. Then, with a shuddering inhale and a long exhale, he feels Spock reign everything back in. For the first time, he understands exactly how much strength underlies his Vulcan’s self control.
Jim opens his eyes.
“You’ve wanted this for a long time.”
Spock lets go of his hand and looks at Jim, desire still dark in his eyes.
“Yes. However, you must build your own awareness first, so that you are not overwhelmed by the presence of another in your mind. There have been cases among Vulcans where one bondmate dominated over the other. Like physical strength, some minds are stronger than others and as with physical violence, it is possible to abuse that power.”
To anyone else, it would sound like Spock’s afraid of his own strength. Jim knows this isn’t true. They both saw exactly how well matched they were for each other in terms of raw power when the bond was forming, and Jim felt Spock exult in that fact. It’s not a matter of strength, but a matter of training. Just because Jim has a lot of potential doesn’t mean he can’t be laid to waste by a few telepathic sweeps of his system.
Spock wants-needs-to take the time to teach Jim so that he won’t accidentally blow out part of Jim’s mind while he’s, for example, coming. It’s a possibility, if Spock’s moans in bed are anything to go by.
“T’hy’la,” Spock’s voice is strained. “You are projecting.”
“Oh. Sorry,” Jim touches his index and middle finger to Spock’s wrist. “Guess that’s another thing we’ll have to cover.”
Jim tries to project calm and quiet through the touch. He finds himself centering on his heart, imagining the steady and humanly lopsided beat pumping the lifeblood of his body.
Gradually, overlaid in the awareness of his own heart and breath, is an awareness of Spock’s heart and breath. The beat is much faster than his own and it alarms him. That disappears as he becomes aware of how right this heartbeat is for Spock, how the rapidity perfectly fits the needs of a body and blood so different from his own. He finds himself fascinated with these sounds, his slow heart like a fundamental tone, Spock’s heart and breath like overtones that enrich the timbre of their bodies.
He feels he can almost touch Spock’s heart itself, that he could hold it in his hands and marvel at the dark green pulse. Jim moves his hand from Spock’s wrist to his ribs, finding the approximate location of his lover’s heart. The awareness grows stronger and the way that their hearts complement each other makes Jim smile. He feels Spock relax a little and with that relaxation comes Spock’s deep satisfaction, his uniquely Vulcan knowledge that this is a bond, and his barely contained anticipation to see how much farther they can go. Because this is also only a beginning.
Jim loses his sense of time. Or rather, he counts time by the beats of their heart, by the breaths of their lungs, by the soft sound of curtains blowing in and out like the sail of an old Earth ship.
He anchors himself, they anchor each other, in the rhythms of their bodies.
In dreams, Jim’s heart is not beating alone. But it is just a dream, and he will wake up to excruciating silence and the loss of a man who was not only a lover, but written into the very beat of his body. Spock was his counterpoint, his overtone, the person that made everything richer and extra.
Grief is not a matter of finding another partner to sing the same duet. It’s a matter of rewriting the music entirely-rewriting and being rewritten-to accommodate the loss of that unique voice.
When he wakes, Jim presses his hand to his chest. He feels like his heart is broken and bleeding, sobbing quietly despite the first summer that has passed. But it’s still beating, pounding out music and half expecting that despite death, its other half will answer the call. ]
For thousands of years, humans have thought their world the center of the universe.
First, it was at the dawn of civilization. Zhōngguó-the Middle Kingdom. All roads lead to Rome. The land between two rivers. Concurrent with that are traditions in human myths-the land of the gods above and the underworld of the dead below. Humans, the living, go about their business between Tian-Heaven-Vyahrtis-Asgard and Erebus-Naraka-Hell-Duat.
Then it was the solar system. Humans saw the night sky and saw the stars move across it, while they remained stationary. They saw the sun travel from east to west while the firm rock of Earth never moved. They saw the inconstant moon change its face regularly. The heavenly bodies must revolve around the Earth, all must be geocentric because that was the only way anything made sense.
Then it was the universe. If the earth could not be the center of the solar system, it must be the center of the universe. By this time, humankind had thought of itself as the center of all things for so long that the idea of being in the periphery was unacceptable. It was inconceivable that humans, in all their intelligence and technology and dominion over their great and wondrous planet, should not be masters of the space beyond. It was a gift, it was destiny, it was the right and necessary order of things, and on and on.
Over the years, humans have found that their solar system is halfway between the core and the edge of the galaxy, that the form of matter with which their galaxy is composed actually makes up less than five percent of the universe, that the universe itself is unimaginably large and their sun unimaginably common.
Yet they persist in believing that they are the center of the universe.
And perhaps it can’t be helped, given their limitations, given the restrictions placed on their brain. Humans have a terrible habit of anthropomorphizing everything they see, drawing comparisons to their experiences to make things more understandable and relatable. At the center of their science and all their knowledge, one finds that man is still the measure of all things.
Thus, they speak of stars in terms of birth, life, and death when in fact, stars are not “living” in the human sense at all. The black hole at the center of their galaxy is not a dark heart, the gases that flow into it are not a form of stellar lifeblood. The harsh conditions in which stars are formed imply certain scientific facts about the course of a star’s existence, but the word “harsh” is loaded with human meaning. It evokes ideas of a struggle, of a difficult human experience.
Stars do not struggle any more than they are born, live, and die. Matter is matter, energy is energy, gravity is gravity, time is time.
Matter is transformed to energy, energy is radiated away, everything in the universe changes between different states of existence, but that is different from life and death.
Yet humankind is consumed with this question of life and death, searching for it in the outer reaches of space, looking in the center for answers.
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
At the center of the universe lies a vastness unknown to humans-that is how it has always been.
At the center of the limited H. sapiens universe is their own reflection, the image of a hand reaching to grasp something that may not even be there. That may not even exist.
For thousands of years, humans have mistaken their center of the universe for the center of the universe.
For thousands of years, humans have assumed that a center exists. They yearn to find it with each passing age, and they hope that it is meaningful.
[ So what?
So the fuck what?
Forget meaning and that shit, forget the metaphysical musings and that crap.
At the center of every living thing’s existence, there are facts. There is the fact that they are living, there is the fact that they will die. There are other facts too, like the fact that some feel, some think, some see, some hear. Some put roots in the ground, some fly in the air, some walk on four legs, some swim in the sea. Some breathe through circuits. That’s the fact of the diversity of life.
But for all living things, absolutely unavoidable is the fact of death. Death that ends all things. Death that’s kind of a paradox, because even as one life is ended, the rest continues on. Everything keeps moving forward irrevocably to-whatever it’s moving towards.
So what if humans want to compare the evolution of star to the biological life cycle? It does little to nothing for their understanding of stars, but it does something for their understanding of themselves. Humans draw parallels to the things around them to see more clearly their own condition, the simultaneous comedy and tragedy of their approximate universe.
Want to know what’s at the center of the universe?
At the center of the universe is balance.
Balance between the thousand dichotomies that characterize the universe, balance between the binaries of existence and non-existence. Between the black and white of life and death are colors. Not shades of grey.
Yeah, even grief. Even that grey eternity is made of mauves, dusty blues, matte yellows. The colors of dawn, right before the sun rises.
Spock once told Jim that he marveled at life because it could produce beings that created their own meaning. They made it, proclaimed it, searched for it, sometimes found it despite-or in spite of-the vast emptiness of the universe. A few years later, Jim told Spock he marveled at life because it gave him love. It gave him Spock.
Spock is dead. He’s learning to live with that, even though he hates that he has to. Spock is the love of his life. He remembers Spock in his ship, in the steady beat of his heart, in the lives of his crew. He hates it, he wants the real live person, but he’s learning to live with it.
So yeah, he looks to the dark heart of the galaxy and finds meaning there. Yeah, he thinks about the stars and marvels at the fact that they live, they die, they give light, they are extinguished. It does nothing for his understanding of astrophysics, but Jim doesn’t need that. He already knows that matter is matter, energy is energy, gravity is gravity, and time is time.
What he is learning is that life is not simply life, and death is not merely death.
And grief, measured in summers, is a matter of balance.
At the center of Jim’s universe is a beating heart. Surrounding him are Bones Nyota Sulu Chekov Chris Scotty, each with their burning cores and steady determination to live, remember, grieve, and laugh. Spock’s death ripped a hole in their center, leaving behind a large magnetic field, strong tidal forces, weird distributions of gas and dust. Conditions are far from ideal.
That doesn’t change the fact that they-Jim, his crew-exist.
More than that, the center exists. And even if, in the grand 93 billion light-year spread of the universe, 400 billion stars of the Milky Way Galaxy, 14 billion years since the Big Bang scheme of things that center has no meaning, James T. Kirk laughs and he makes it meaningful. His crew make it meaningful.
Because so the fuck what. Spock is dead, Jim is alive and one day he will die but until that day, he loves Spock and he will make his own meaning shift to shift, day to day, summer to summer. Because he is James Tiberius Kirk and he is the man Spock fucking chose to be t’hy’la.
At the center of Jim’s grief, he can see himself more clearly. He can see the reflection of his hand reaching out to Spock, he is reminded of the vision of Spock reaching out for his mother. But also in that reflection is the image of his crew. He can see the ties that bind them, the ways they rely on each other, the stories they carry inside themselves.
Is this what Spock found in the days after Vulcan was destroyed? Is this what he saw reflected in his alternate self? Is that ultimately why he took-there’s no other way to say it-a leap of faith and gave Jim a second chance?
Jim will never know. But he is certain of this: Spock must have found his center or created it in the early years of serving on the ship.
And in doing so, in exposing himself and allowing life to transform grief into love and laughter, he became the center of Jim. Possibly the center of the Enterprise itself.
Spock is dead. In that reflection is an image of all they lost.
Time passes.
His heart continues beating.
Jim begins his second summer. ]
At the center of the Milky Way Galaxy lies Sagittarius A*.
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?