DISCLAIMER: The Star Trek characters are the property of Paramount Studios, Inc and Viacom. The story contents are the creation and property of Djinn and are copyright (c) 2009 by Djinn. This story is Rated R.

Quantum Lust

by Djinn

He's old enough to be her grandfather. Christine thinks he likes that. As he moves over her and into her and arranges her like she's his little cadet doll, she thinks he's getting a sexual charge out of the oddness of their arrangement.

She knows she's getting a sexual charge out of it. And a nasty feeling of having something over Uhura every time she walks by her and the real Spock, the young Spock, the Spock she isn't screwing over and over and over.

"Christine." His voice rasps like a file, like nails on the chalkboards in the museums of how things were. His hands are rough, too. Too many years on Romulus—he's told her his life story, shared it in images through the meld that enhances the sex.

Uhura never mentioned the meld. Christine realizes she and Uhura aren't the friends she once thought. Not if Christine can do this—not that being with this Spock is wrong, it's the not telling that's wrong.

She's enjoying the secret, enjoying the passion in stolen moments, in darkened corners, in rooms far off the Academy grounds. Never dives, though. Spock likes his rooms properly gentrified. He's nobility of some sort, after all. He's explained it to her, but she doesn't listen all that well.

She doesn't care all that much. He won't be hers, and she doesn't want to be his. This is what is. This sex. This touching. This lust that burns her from the inside out.

He's moving her again, pulling her up to sit on him, easing her down to take him in. His face is scrunched in a grimace of bliss, and he murmurs her name over and over as she moves. Sometimes it sounds like Vulcan, the words he says.

He should be speaking Vulcan to a Vulcan. He should be perpetuating his race, not spending his seed with her, on her, in her. She thinks he's always been a rebel, even if she never sees that side of the Spock of her time, only sees it in this wise and wizened version.

She's seen this older Spock with Sarek. The two don't get along; she can tell that even from the distance she keeps. And old Spock and young Spock don't get on, either. But then her Spock tells the younger what to do and then can't see how wrong a path that might be for them both.

"Am I alive?" she asks as her Spock lies back in post-climax quiet, his lips turned up ever so slightly. "The me you knew from that other reality?"

"No. You are dead."

"How do I die?"

"Not you. Her. She died helping in an emergency operation. A shot to the head. Painless, they told me." He clutches her and she leans down and studies the panic in his eyes. "Not you. You have a different path. Everything is different now."

"What planet? Help me avoid it just in case?"

He shakes his head and she knows why. This is forbidden. This is wrong. This is— "Gamma Ceti IV."

A place she's never heard of. She burns it into her memory now. Gamma Ceti IV. The place she might die. "When?"

He shakes his head, runs his hands up and down her body, lingering on her hips, on her breasts. He pulls her down for a frantic kiss, his tongue dominating her, his hands making her cry out almost in pain. Then: "You were forty five."

It is a gift or a curse, but either way she knows now. But he's right. All is different. Else, how would she be here, on top of him, riding him to completion. This older, non-real Spock who loves her.

He loves her. She doesn't love him.

Does she?

"I am to marry," he says into the silence.

It isn't unexpected.

What is unexpected is how much it hurts.

"Will you be able to hide this once you are bonded?" She meets his eyes and shows him she can be practical in the midst of pain.

"Most Vulcans would not. I...I have had more practice hiding things."

"Good." It's the wrong answer. She should enjoy what's left and then go. She shouldn't want this, to be his secret, his lust on the side.

But she does want it.

She takes his hands, pulls them over his head, and kisses him hard. "We don't exist," she says when he allows her up for air. "We aren't real."

"We are not real." But his body, joining with her even as she holds him prisoner, is more than real. "We do not exist." But he wrenches himself free from her grasp and rolls so he's on top, so he covers her, owns her, makes her and them and this more real than anything.

She can barely breathe when he's done with her. She chills under the light sheen of sweat, and he wraps her in his arms and the covers, and kisses the damp off her forehead.

"Did you have her this way?" She's asked before. He's never answered.

"I was too late." He meets her eyes, and there's profound regret in his. "I waited too long."

"You aren't waiting now." At the end of his life, here he is, taking what he wants finally with a version of her who's barely lived.

"No, I am not waiting now." He leans back into the pillows and draws her with him. "I can arrange for you to be where I am."

"I know."

"Do you want this?"

She does. She doesn't. She can't think when he touches her. She can't think when they're apart.

So she stays silent.

"It is a wise answer, my Christine."

She isn't sure it is. She thinks it's a cowardly one.

Until he touches her again. Until he opens his mind to her. Until he murmurs that he loves her.

Then, it's the ultimate bravery to still not answer.

FIN