Like $76 million's worth of people, I have just witnessed the unexpected wonder that is Star Trek 2009. Thus, I am compelled to submit this for a couple I could not have fathomed 2 days ago.

Xenization

Space, for all its beauty, is but a cold vacuum. And for others, he is the universe's mirror; an exquisite view turning frigid in the depths.

But not here.

As his home scatters and drifts through the infinite nothing, she grips tight his shrinking tether of emotion. Reason, forced to govern as an invited tyrant, faces rebellion in this room. He fights it as he did the slaughter of his people; valiant but failing. She denies him the distance to hide in the safety of logic until, in desperation, she is handed his shards to piece together.

And now he is learning…

How to touch her without fearing rebuke. How to mark her without shame. How to express with a silent tongue. The words are few and ultimately unnecessary. One need not hear what is sculpted in the eyes. That he does not trust himself to speak summons her skills in translating movement; a quirk of brow and lip, the pace of hands.

Such perfection buried under doubt.

The watching humanity assigns the outcast many labels, a source of pain for which he constantly digs new graves. Her linguistic prowess settles on xenization; he travels as a stranger in his own skin. But between these walls, he is being taught all that has won her to him. The physical acts become mental lessons, the self-constructed ice chipping away by a finger tracing words on his arm while lips against his neck taste his pulse.

He is alive in this room.

While the galaxy passes sentence on his reserve, it is no harsher than his own self-judgment. Hence she lives in a vicious rush to reconnect, to remind him of a worth more precious than logic, more rewarding than knowledge. He has proven as capable a student as once a teacher, but the edges of progress swiftly tatter in space's chill.

She sees him fray.

Sequestered in her room, they repeatedly rebuild; mortar clings to kisses, bricks solidify with contact. A new mirror forms, whereby one reflects the other. And when she says forever in a sigh, his reclaimed soul believes.