Original Title: Soulmate to Singularity
Notes: The final part of the Progression Series. Sequel to 'In Fever Dreams.' It's been a wonderful ride, people, and I hope to write more Star Trek 2009 in the future. But for this series, this is the end.
Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek 2009, and I make no profit from this work.
And this was it.
Jim knew it. Spock knew it. And everyone else would know it, he presumed.
Their shuttle was adrift in space after a Klingon ambush. They had only survived because the Bird of Prey was so badly damaged that a well-placed volley of phaser fire had destroyed a major engine and forced the Klingons to leave or risk destruction. But their shuttle was badly damaged - the life support systems had failed, the communications array was down, and there was nobody who could arrive to aid them fast enough.
Finally, Jim had found his no-win scenario. The one he couldn't cheat his way out of it, the one that would end the world as he knew it. And the one that, really, he didn't mind so much. The frustration and anger he'd felt at the test all those years (oh, eons) ago...it was gone, not even a whisper in his dying veins.
This was the end, and Jim Kirk found that, really, it wasn't as bad as he'd thought.
"So this is it," Jim whispered.
It was cold. Very, very cold. Vaguely, Jim wondered whether the cold would kill them first, or the lack of oxygen. They were buried under every blanket in the place, and wrapped around each other like the gloved hands of lovers at New Year. But from the sluggish responses Spock was now giving, and the fact that Jim, too, was feeling his own shivering taper off, he supposed that it would be the cold.
"At least we're here together," Jim whispered. "We go out together or we stay in together, right?"
He felt Spock smile against his skin.
"I'm glad you're with me," Jim said softly, pressing his nose into the shining dark hair. "I always thought I'd be afraid, but I'm not. Because you're here."
Their hands curled together, warm and secure, the bond fluttering between them gently like a strange kind of heartbeat, keeping their hands welded tighter than the cold could have managed. Jim's hands were beginning to line now, with age, but he wouldn't get any older.
"At least," Spock murmured, his breath warm on Jim's neck, "I will not have to face the possibility of a hundred or more years without you, beloved."
"Together," Jim echoed.
They had survived Nero, survived their first five-year mission, survived a spate of Neutral Zone patrols, and survived until this last year of their second five-year mission. They had stuck together despite whispers of promotions (Spock) or unsuitability (Kirk); despite rumours of their relationship (both) and accusations of emotional compromise (both).
And now, they would stick together for the final test.
"Do Vulcans believe in an afterlife, Spock?" Jim whispered.
"Not as such," Spock murmured, his voice slurring slightly. "The Vulcan soul can survive the body, but only when passed to another. We have no Heaven, as the humans do."
"Not all humans," Jim murmured.
Spock hummed an agreement, nosing closer until his lips pressed the slowing pulse point in Jim's neck.
"I love you," Jim whispered.
"And I you."
"I'm sorry for everything I ever said that hurt you. For ever meaning to. For not seeing sooner how precious you were to me. For all the times you got hurt and I was to blame, or the times I could have done something but didn't."
"But I'm not sorry for this," Jim breathed. "It sounds bad, but I'm not. I want you with me, always, and if there's something else...then I want you there, with me. I'm selfish enough for that."
Spock was silent for a long moment, before saying, "I believe, Jim, that I am, too, that selfish."
Jim laughed breathlessly, and kissed his hair.
"Meld with me," he whispered. "I want...to make sure that we go together. Properly together. All...all wrapped up and connected."
The bond hummed appreciatively, before opening like a flower and swallowing them whole, wrapping them in each other's minds like an origami puzzle.
There was not the small room that was Jim's first trip into Spock's mind - the small, frightening room that he had hated. Nor was it the Vulcan desert, but a shining stone courtyard. The stone was a brilliant pale grey, gleaming in the sun, and the breeze that rustled through was warm and caressing. Roses - Terran roses, of a thousand colours - waved in the breeze.
"This was my home on Vulcan," Spock said, and there they were, in the middle of the stone rose garden. Jim crossed the small gap between them and embraced him, hard, pressing them together like two pieces of a puzzle.
"You never showed me this."
"I do not visit it much myself. The memory is often...lonely."
"But I'm here now," Jim murmured, looking into that stern face with all the love he could manage. Which, when it came to this man, was a hell of a lot of love. So much that Jim wondered how he carried it all, how he contained it, how it didn't spill out of him and into the world like so much tipped paint. But then, to a telepath, perhaps that was exactly what it did. What it was doing now. "You can't be alone when I am here."
"Indeed," Spock breathed: a low, soothing sound that purred along Jim's bones.
"It's a beautiful place to end with," Jim said - even now, reluctant to use the word 'die.'
"The Ancient Vulcans had a belief," Spock murmured, "that when bondmates died together, they became truly one. They achieved 'the final unity.' The word later evolved into the Vulcan word for 'singularity.'"
Jim smiled - that special, brilliant smile that only Spock had ever seen, and tightened his arms around his bondmate as if something threatened to tear them apart.
"I said I'd never let go of you years ago," Jim whispered. "And I meant it then, and I mean it now, and I'll always mean it. Afterlife or not, whether there's more or this is it, I am never letting go of you."
"Nor I you," Spock murmured, and they met in a kiss.
And neither felt much, when their physical bodies released and relaxed into the final sleep. They would be found, in the end, with smiles on their bodies and stilled veins, never to be revived. When the fabric of Spock's robe felt heavy under Jim's hand, and he inhaled with a sudden rush of strange, euphoric vertigo, like the dizzying heights of a faint, he simply kept on inhaling, breathing in and in and never out, expanding as something into nothing, or as nothing into something, and outwards and outwards until he was not Jim Kirk, and would never be again, and had no sentience to know it.
And mixed together, there was Spock and Jim, and they became not Spock or Jim, but something else, expanding forever into a shattering world, spinning around each other like the DNA double-helix: touching at every point, and breathing the spaces inbetween.