Chapter Text
Jim didn’t remember the incident with the aphrodisiac pollen on Delta Draconis V very well.
He remembered pain; burning, desperate need. The flowers around them seeming to swell and spin like kaleidoscopes. He remembered grabbing helplessly at Spock, knowing in the distant back of his mind that Spock was not affected, that he didn’t want this.
Then he remembered cool fingers closing around his cock. Leaning against the rough bark of the tree as Spock’s deep brown eyes filled his vision, as his hand trailed sparks of pleasure and further need.
Spock had patiently worked him to completion five, six times, until his mind finally stopped spinning, until he was capable of thought again.
Jim had looked dizzily at Spock, realizing, now that he could think again, that Spock was still fully dressed. That he was calm and in possession of himself, that he did not seem to be aroused at all.
“Captain,” said Spock. “Captain, are you in possession of your faculties again?”
Jim looked down at himself. He was entirely naked. Tatters of his clothes lay where he had torn them off, all over the clearing. There was cum splattered down his thigh and some on his belly. If any had been on Spock at any point, it wasn’t now.
“I think so,” he croaked. “Spock—”
“I apologize for the liberty,” Spock said evenly. “It was the best option I could think of under the circumstances.”
Then Spock had wrapped him in a silver emergency blanket and led him out of the forest back to the beamup point. Bones was already waiting in the transporter room, having presumably been briefed, and Spock slipped away to take command of the bridge.
“Do you want to talk about it?” asked Bones once they had arrived in sickbay. Jim’s mind still felt like it was ten steps behind, bobbing slowly after him like a balloon, perhaps somewhere down the corridor.
“Not especially,” said Jim.
“Don’t blame Spock,” said Bones, as the tricorder made its warbling noise, dopplering past his ear. “If he hadn’t…reacted the way he had, I’m not sure what would have happened. It doesn’t seem like the kind that would have worn off on its own. I don’t know if he knew that, but in retrospect it seems like the only option. I don’t think he was trying to take advantage of the situation at all.”
“He wasn’t,” said Jim, watching a light on the sickbay ceiling rotate and turn purple. “He kept all his clothes on.”
“Good,” said Bones. “I might have trusted as much. Sometimes that Vulcan coldness is good for something, eh?”
Bones did not understand at all. Jim hadn’t wanted Spock to clinically jerk him off. Wasn’t sex pollen the famous solver of relationship problems in all the Starfleet gossip? Getting people together who had pined for years? This had been Spock’s chance to finally get what he wanted, if he had wanted it. But he hadn’t.
“He doesn’t love me,” Jim said, voice wobbling.
Bones peered into his eyes. “You are still incredibly high.”
“I know.”
“Is the, uh, urge gone?”
The urge for sex, yes. The urge to be loved, no. He wanted Spock to curl around him like the sepals around a bud, kiss the back of his neck, whisper sweet nothings. But that wasn’t something Spock could clinically measure out like he did with the other thing.
“Yeah.” Jim was shivering miserably. He wanted to cry, or maybe crawl into a hole.
“I’m going to give you something for sleep, then,” said Bones. “And monitor you overnight.” A distant hiss.
Jim flopped forward, planting his face in Bones’s shoulder, and let Bones hold him, rubbing his back, until he fell asleep.
For days after, Jim thought about asking Spock about it, and chickened out every time. Spock seemed entirely normal. The whole incident was omitted from Spock’s log. Jim had gotten a dose of “mind altering phytotoxin” and was “escorted to the beamup point and surrendered to the care of the CMO.” That was it.
Maybe it hadn’t happened at all. Maybe it had been a complicated hallucination, and Spock had simply been somewhere nearby while Jim hallucinated himself to orgasm half a dozen times. But in that case Jim thought he would have hallucinated more than that. Spock fucking him, or him fucking Spock. Touching Spock’s lean and beautiful body.
But what about the eyes, Spock’s forehead against his, never breaking eye contact all the while? He didn’t think he’d have hallucinated that either.
Spock acted as he always did, Jim thought. Perhaps a few lingering, curious looks. Checking if Jim was all right. He didn’t open a conversation on the topic, so neither did Jim.
Their relationship was an unusual one, unlike human friendship. Spock said it was called t’hy’la, a word untranslatable into Standard, which was the closest it was possible for two Vulcans to be. Beyond the connection between husband and wife, he had said. And Jim believed it. Their minds were beginning to weave together a little, such that Jim always knew where Spock was, whether he was all right.
But Spock had never proposed anything sexual between them, so neither had Jim. Rumor had it Vulcans didn’t have sex at all. He knew that wasn’t true—after all, there was pon farr—but outside that, who knew? Spock’s mother wasn’t telling.
Anyway, despite his weepy come-down from the pollen, he knew Spock did love him in his way. Their relationship was so much bigger than sex. Jim's libido was a very small thing compared to the depth of the trust they had in one another.
Jim turned the idea of bringing it up over and over in his mind before deciding not to. Lending a hand to a battle brother, in a life-or-death situation, was not the same as being sexually attracted to him. It was just going to have to be something they both chose to forget.
Spock had never had any interest in sex.
For a Vulcan, it was not unusual. Not universal, but certainly common enough that outsiders knew to expect it. Plenty of Vulcans engaged in sexual contact during pon farr only, and the rest of the time were content with the ozh’esta and the occasional meld.
Leila, during his brief attempt to experience “human dating,” had considered it a problem. She had called him frigid and accused him of not loving her. Spock found that perplexing. Of course he did not love her. They had only been together for two weeks, and it took a great deal longer to build up the intellectual intimacy for anything he would call love.
He told her that he found her both intelligent and congenial. She had ended the relationship.
Years later, she had infected him with pollen that made him suggestible, assuming that this would release his pent-up sexual desire. It did not happen, but neither of them had been capable at the time of being upset about it. She had ground her vulva against his closed sheath until she reached completion, which at the time he had not minded. He had enjoyed it, in the same sense as he had enjoyed everything at the time: too chemically happy not to.
For a while, he had assumed that that was what happiness was, that humans felt that way when they smiled. In that case, Spock had never been happy before in his life. But, in talking to the other victims, he found they had not felt that way before either, except those who had experience with mind-altering drugs. It made him feel better about having been freed from their effects. He was not a miserable person who had experienced joy exactly once in his life. He was a normal person who had been nonconsensually drugged.
And if the memory of his single sexual experience turned from pleasant to disturbing once the pollen had left his system, that did not mean the pollen had done him any good. For without the pollen, he would not have had to experience it at all. Why should he enjoy such things? Only because Leila had wanted him to? He had not wanted to. And he had already had more than enough, in his life, of people ready to love him if only he were different. He would rather be as he was, even if it meant being alone.
His next sexual experience was overwhelming desire and repeated masturbation during his pon farr, culminating in violence. It was so unpleasant that he was relieved it had not needed to go any further and would not happen again for seven more years. Just as with the pollen, it seemed a foreign kind of madness, inexplicable in retrospect. Why had he wanted T’Pring? Why had he wanted to hurt Jim? Neither were thoughts that fit in any way with his core self.
But now he had a third to list, and this one was quite different.
He had been entirely in control of himself, his mind completely his own, and the choice entirely his. But, despite his attempts to shield, he had felt Jim’s pleasure pummeling against his mind with every touch. It had been—extremely enjoyable, in a way he had not expected.
Of course, the choice had not been Jim’s, and so the only respectful thing he could think of to do was not to speak of it again. The captain had chosen not to file a formal complaint, and that was the best it was reasonable to expect.
But at odd times, when it was not at all pertinent—when he turned in his chair to look at Kirk in the center seat; when Jim brushed his hand over his mouth while he studied the chess board; when they crouched together in a blind, watching uncontacted sentients to guess at their technology level—he would think about it. About how Jim’s face had looked, mouth open and eyebrows drawing together. About the way his erection had jumped in Spock’s fingers. The trembling of his thighs, such that he would have slid to the ground if Spock had not supported him.
He wanted to do it again, and he had not the slightest notion how to propose such a thing. It was not the way humans engaged in sex.