Discover Top Posts Tagged with #*paradise

Just Shy of Paradise

Spock was puzzled. No one on the Omricon Ceti III colony should be alive. If the landing party had planned to spend more than a couple of hours on the surface, they might have donned protective gear themselves, but it wouldn’t take long to gather enough readings and make the necessary observations for a full report. Their plans for a quick, safe visit had been upended, however, when the colony’s leader had emerged with a handful of his people, all of them quite whole and—as Doctor McCoy was discovering—in perfect health. The whole situation defied logic, and Spock wanted to know why.

He also hadn’t expected the appearance of Leila Kalomi. The way she looked at him made him want to take a step back, though a table had already separated them. It was an irrational reaction, of course. When they’d been acquainted on Earth six years ago, Spock had known Leila was attracted to him. He suspected many people had known, in fact, since humans tended towards gossip. Apart from an occasional longing look or accidental touch, however, Leila never acted on her feelings, for which Spock was grateful. He respected her as a fellow scientist and wasn’t surprised she’d been chosen for a mission like this one...

But how had she managed to survive here? How had any of them survived?

And something was different about her now. She had lost all the quiet reserve she’d once showed in his presence, but that wasn’t what struck him. It was a totally unscientific observation, based on nothing beyond mere instinct, and the Vulcan half of his mind railed against it as baseless and emotional. Yet he couldn’t deny being unnerved by the expression in Leila’s blue eyes. It had seemed both self-assured and almost...predatory. The blatant hunger in her gaze stood in stark contrast to the resolute professionalism displayed by Christine Chapel. She was also in love with Spock, as he was all too aware, but she never let her emotions interfere with her duties as the Enterprise’s head nurse. She certainly never stared at him as if he was a delectable dish that she was about to devour.

Despite his misgivings, Spock found himself one-on-one with Leila as he tried to work out the mystery of this colony’s continued existence. Her company was proving useless to him apart from making him vaguely uneasy. The woman refused to give him a direct answer. Though a botanist by training, she offered him nothing besides platitudes.

Finally, tired of wandering behind her and waiting in vain for any piece of meaningful information, Spock stopped walking. They’d come up alongside what looked to be an entire meadow of pale pink flowers atop long, thick stalks that somewhat resembled Earth lilies. He paid no attention to them, turning instead to face Leila.

“I fail to understand why you cannot explain this plainly,” he said.

“The properties of it aren’t important,” she told him in the same evasive, rather dreamy voice. “Just that it gives us life and peace...” Her lips curled up. “Love.”

“Leila.” Spock raised one of his slanted brows. “You’re a scientist. You know that what you’ve described to me is not possible.”

She kept smiling and reached for his arm. “Come. Look.” She was leading him to the edge of the little meadow, which swayed a little in the gentle breeze. “I was one of the first of us to find them, you know. The spores.”

“Spores?” he echoed.

As he glanced from the flowers to Leila again, one of the them forcefully expelled a white pollen-like substance. It covered half of Spock’s face and the front of his uniform—and then all he could feel was pain. Blinding, white-hot agony that made him clutch his temples and drop, gasping, to his knees. He tried to reach for his tried-and-true Vulcan methods of diminishing the sensation. Pain is in the mind—the mind can be— Except his neat, orderly, logical mind was…changing. He found that he couldn’t control it after all. And that was the source of the pain: it was mental anguish rather than physical.

“No,” he groaned. He was crouching on the ground now, desperate. Even as he grasped at a lifetime’s worth of carefully cultivated mental discipline, it all slipped away from him as though it had never been. “No, I can’t…please…”

“It shouldn’t hurt...it didn’t hurt any of us…” Leila’s voice faltered.

Spock choked out: “I am not like you!”

As soon as the words left his mouth, the pain ebbed—then disappeared. He lifted his head. What had he just said? I am not like you. But wasn’t he? A thousand thoughts and sensations flew through his brain at once as he knelt there, trying to make sense of them, trying to catch his breath.

Then Leila knelt beside him, touched his face, stroked it. The caress of her soft hand was comforting. He blinked. She was saying something about belonging.

“You don’t need to hide your true self anymore, you know. We understand,” she murmured.

Spock met her calm blue gaze. He felt the truth of her words as much as he comprehended it. It felt as gentle and reassuring as her cool palm against his cheek. Lifting his hand, he grasped hers tightly. A warm, pleasant sensation began to wash over him. She was quite beautiful. How could he ever have thought of her as predatory when her eyes were so tender?

“I...I love you.” They seemed like the right words for this feeling, and he tried them out without stopping to really think about them.

Leila smiled. They leaned into one another for a kiss they both wanted—Leila because she’d been dreaming of it for years, Spock because she was lovely and she wanted him and most of all because he could. When he thought of it later, his momentary pain and that kiss seemed to go on forever, the memories of each experience tangled inseparably together, at once unbearable and blissful and utterly indisguishable.

• • •

Jim had confronted him twice. Almost the entire crew of the Enterprise had beamed down by now, eager to join the colony’s ranks, but the spores had evidently not affected its captain. Spock wasn’t worried, though he wondered, albeit with only the faintest trace of his earlier burning curiosity, whether Jim had some kind of biological immunity to the spores’ effects. He hoped not. He understood that his friend couldn’t live down here beneath the berthold rays without the protection the spores provided. Nor could he survive aboard the Enterprise alone. Neither thought was a pleasant one.

“He’ll come around,” Spock said to himself.

He had changed from his obsolete Starfleet uniform into the colony’s olive-green coveralls. They were less practical but more comfortable, and they served as a visual representation of his newfound belonging. That was a novelty. Growing up on Vulcan, Spock had had to work harder than his peers to fit in, to prove himself in spite of his human blood. Later, he’d always been an outlier in Starfleet regardless of his accomplishments. His own colleagues often considered him alien, suspicious. He’d never let it bother him.

Not here, though. Not in paradise. Here, he truly belonged.

Descending the steps of Elias Sandoval’s house, Spock found Leila waiting for him. He caught her outstretched hand and squeezed it. Hand-in-hand and smiling, they wandered off in the direction of the small grove where they’d watched clouds together earlier. He noticed many members of the Enterprise crew milling about, conspicuous in their brightly-colored uniforms. A few of them waved at the couple and called Spock’s name.

“I only wish I had my lyre,” he told Leila with a wistful smile.

“The captain’s coming back. You could ask him to bring it. I’d like to hear you play.”

“An excellent suggestion. In the meantime, I suppose I can sing for you even without accompaniment.”

Spock did sing—or rather, he could—but he’d never serenaded a woman before. The way Leila blushed and lowered her eyes told him that she found the idea highly romantic. Fascinating.

He and Leila settled onto the grass, his arm slung around her shoulders, she leaning into his chest. He began to hum an old Earth song he’d occasionally heard his mother sing as a child. The words came back to him a little later than the tune: “Remember me to one who lives there...”

The afternoon, while still bright and pleasant, had turned a bit cool. Spock usually found the bridge of the Enterprise too chilly for his liking, and he thought that this breeze had a definite bite to it.

“She once was a true love of mine…”

He could imagine things he would much rather do with Leila than this, things that generated a great deal more body heat. With those more physical, amorous activities in mind, he pulled her closer and indulged his desire for another kiss, bringing the song to an abrupt end.

It never occurred to him to worry about who might see. To remember that there was now another woman somewhere nearby, a woman he respected and who loved him just as much as Leila Kalomi.

#hope his is okay and I am ofc happy to tweak! ♥♥♥ just let me know #didn't want to go any farther & put words in your/christine's mouth #I paraphrased that whole scene from the episode so it seemed a little more organic heh #nuschapel #*paradise

I just finished Karneval and realized that Nai is probably the only albino anime boy who didn’t die

#also i'm in garenai hell #*paradise #halp #shut up shin #not snk related