Sorry for the long wait! I thank all those who reviewed/favorited/alerted! Real life can be overwhelming at times, and writers block likes to hurt me, but I've done the impossible. A T pon farr. Wow. Patting myself on the back here, feel free to join me! jk lols. That would be a little strange...

Enjoy!

"I can probably fix this," says Bones as he scrambles back around his desk and begins the auto-open sequence on the drawers.

"Probably is not so helpful now," Jim says and takes a step back, his legs biting into the sharp desk as a pale fist slams into the glass again. His assumption had been right; it didn't hold a second time. Evergreen blood spills from Spock's fist and splatters the remaining shards of glass and the door, and the Vulcan doesn't even let out a hiss of pain, not even in his primal state.

That hand reaches through the door, and Jim has to look away as a sharp remnant of the reinforced window drags a long cut into his first officer's forearm, the green blood spilling and swirling down the door.

"Bones," Jim says with increasing urgency and jumps around the desk, grabbing the pointless paper weight there. "Hurry it up now," Jim hefts the paper weight in his hands while watching the fingers grasping for the over-ride switch. Jim was weighing the success rate of fighting a Vulcan in the throes of heat, lacking all logic and exercising all that strength. With a paper weight. The odds were surprisingly good.

Well, until the door slid open, revealing a heaving Spock. His lips were torn in a snarl, and his eyes blazed with a need that resembled blood lust more than sexual desire. The worst was the blood. It was all over his clothes, dyeing his blue science shirt turquoise and his white skin dark green. The blood dripped from his mouth and it was smeared across chin and Jim was almost sick for all the pain he felt for Spock.

His stomach heaved and he doubled over, resisting the need to vomit.

Okay, maybe he was actually sick.

"I found i- oh god Jim, don't throw up in my office!" Jim shot Bones a glare just as Spock vaulted smoothly across the desk, knocking papers into a white cloud around him. Jim scrambled back again, and Spock didn't even notice as Bones practically threw himself out of the way and behind the Vulcan.

He began advancing towards Jim, still bleeding profusely from the cut on his arm, hands curled into claws. His eyes were so narrowed the only color in them was black. Jim slammed into the wall, and Spock was still coming. Then, a voice so dark and primal it was barely more than a growl rolled across the shrinking space between them.

"Mine," It said, and Jim knew Spock was gone.

Then, a hiss and Spock's eyes rolled up in his head. He crumpled to the floor in a bloody heap, Bones standing behind him, empty hypo-spray in one hand.

"What? He's not the only one who can knock someone out like that." Jim rolled his eyes and sunk down the wall, feeling on the verge of going unconscious himself.

"Bones," Jim groaned, trying to put his hand to his head but he couldn't seem to find it. Suddenly his chief medical officer was at his side, talking to him, yelling at him, shaking his arm but he could barely feel it. The whole room was spinning and he turned his head to the side and vomited on the floor. There were two Bones, then four, then two again, and he was talking into his communicator, probably shouting, but it was just a refracted echo that made no sense. Black tentacles were clawing at his vision, and they wrapped around his eyes and he was nothing.

O0o0O

"Murng," Jim said, and he felt like his mouth was stuffed with cotton. However, his head was clearer than it had been in days, and when he opened his eyes, there was only one of everything for the first time in a while. Actually, everything was a lot clearer than it had been even before the incident on Hadron XIII.

"Good, you're awake Jim," Bones appeared in the corner of his eye, coated in light from the ceiling of the med bay. He flashed a light in his eyes and ran the tricorder over his skin as Jim tried to sit up, and was surprised that Bones let him. And his head didn't spin, which was a miracle in of itself.

"Bones," he said in amazement, turning his hands over before his eyes. "You are a magician."

"Well, not quite Jim, but could you say that again while I record it?" Jim rolled his eyes and swung his legs out of bed, watching Bones to make sure he wasn't over stepping his suddenly loose boundaries. "But in all seriousness, you were really in a pickle there kid. Your blood really had turned to acid. So I pumped it out. That's why you're feeling so chipper. You have totally new red stuff running through your veins." Jim jumps to his feet, hand mid motion to make a comment when suddenly the world turns upside down. Bones saves him from a hard fall, lowering him back into the bed.

"Whoa there Jim. You're still not one hundred percent, even with the ultra-oxygenated goo I pumped in you. We had to grow it first, and that took twenty-four hours. You've been out for nearly thirty hours total."

"Thirty hours…" Jim trailed off, knowing he should remember something. It hit him like the entirety of the Enterprise and the world span but this time it wasn't from him being sick.

"Spock," he said, lurching back to his bare feet and glancing wildly around. "Oh God, Spock."

He was lying on the bed across from him, well more like strapped. His head lolled to the side and his lips were parted slightly and coated with green liquid that could only be his blood. Someone, Bones probably, had changed him out of uniform and a blanket covered his legs, but his chest was bare and mottled with bruises. Remains of three different restraining straps and a pair of metal cuffs lay scattered around him. Bones put a hand on Jims shoulder, but he didn't feel it.

He actually thought his first officer was dead until he flung his head to the side and moaned, neat black bowl cut practically destroyed and sticking out in all directions. His chest rose and feel rapidly, too rapid for it to have been human.

"Spock," he said again, like that would make it better. He watched as the man's back rose off the bed, arms straining at the cuffs as he let out a strangled scream. His wrists were rubbed raw from the metal, and when he screamed again Jim had to turn away. The man was still unconscious.

"I'm sorry Jim. There's nothing I can do for him except keep him under, and that just seems to make it worse, so I let the drugs wear off." Jim looks to Bones, not giving a damn if desperation showed on his face.

"And?" The man just grips his shoulder tighter.

"It was hell Jim. He was lucid for maybe a second, and you know what he- ah, never mind."

"Bones. Don't make me make an order."

"Actually Jim, Scotty is acting Captain…" Jim glares, and Bones holds up his hands. "Sorry." He runs a hand through his hair. "He said to kill him Jim. To sacrifice him before he killed you," Jim's face goes ghost white and he sits heavily on the bed. "But if it makes it any better, the next thing he said involved making you scream so loud the people on Earth could hear it…"

"Not helping Bones." Jim snapped, dropping his head into his hands. "Oh God, he's dying, and I have to have sex with him. And if I have sex with him, I'll die."

"Well…" Bones said, and Jim's head snapped to him.

"Well what Bones?" he gritted out. "We are losing time here!"

"Well… there is no guarantee it would work…"

"Spit it out!"

"We could try a meld. No sexual contact, just mental. That could stave off the fever long enough for you to recover, and for some of his… ferocity to abate."

"Okay. Let's do it."

"What? No snappy comeback about how you like it rough?"

"Shut up Bones. Now get me over there!" Jim shouted, slamming his fist into the biobed. Bones held up his hands in defeat.

"Okay, okay whatever you say Jim boy. But you have to calm down."

"I am calm!" Bones shot him a look and he pinched the bridge of his nose, taking a deep breath. "Sorry Doc, just a tad stressed. My first officer is about to die and I can barely see one universe." The bio bed crunched and shifted as McCoy say beside him and put a firm hand on his shoulder.

"I know kid. It'll be okay. Come on," he hefted Jim across his shoulder and they shuffled across the floor, to the chair already placed by Spock's bed side. He sank into it gratefully even though it had only been about five steps it was still a trip. Bones flipped the bio bed at an angle where Spock's hand dangled by Jim's face.

"I hope you know where the fingers go Jim, because I sure don't." Said Bones unhelpfully.

"We've never done this before Bones," he says and places the soft pads where they belong, ignoring the slight stickiness that comes with still drying blood.

"Too much information Jim. Okay, he should come to soon, this about how long it took for the drugs to dissipate last time. His body is literally burning them off, like alcohol." Now that Bones mentioned it, Spock's fingers were extremely warm. No, hot. Almost burning, but pleasant, like a really hot shower.

"Just out of curiosity Bones, how long sense his last dose?" Jim shifted in the chair, moving the fingers slightly. The doctor frowns.

"Fifteen minutes."

There is a grunt from the table, the fingers shift slightly, and Jim is gone.

For a moment his brain is so overwhelmed by the sensation he just blanks, and all there embodies him his burning, burning, consumed by the heat and the pain and the need, and just like it was there it was gone, his brain creating dream like images to deal with the new sensations. What he saw first had to be Spock's mind.

It was glowing, glittering, like a reversed reality where the edges of everything were color and the inside black. The image was almost like an apartment complex, a towering rectangle based structure composed of many other smaller cubes, and little dashes of light that flitted between them, getting progressively brighter until they reached the blinding center, which had to be Spock himself.

Jim became intrigued by the color and shape of the structure after he got beyond the sheer wonderment of it all. There was no other way to describe it other than mind sex, the sheer beauty and enjoyment of sex with the intellectual stimulation of the mind thrown in. Well, he mused to himself, that's what it was, wasn't it?

At the very top, Jim took it as what the world saw, the compartments were perfectly symmetrical and a brilliant cerulean, shimmering in the darkness. This looked entirely Vulcan to Jim, the dashes of light coming in a repeating pattern. However as one went down through the structure the color got greener and more organic, until one reached the bottom and the structure was gold and almost root like in its structure, with little rhyme or reason but beautiful like a fractal, or nature. Shots of blue and gold went through their opposite sections, and Jim wondered if that slight imperfection pushed at Spock constantly.

Suddenly there was a roar, and he turned his metaphysical eyes downward, under the structure and for the first time he noticed it. A roiling sea of red so dark it nearly matched the black that surrounded Spock's mind. It bubbled and frothed and something reminiscent of lightning flickered there.

So that was why Vulcans built their palace of logic. To hold back that.

As he 'watched' that same sea jumped, and like a giant wave it grew over the structure and came crashing down across the blue Vulcan logic, draining through the perfect cubes and towards the light in the very center of the structure.

It had begun.

A mirror slammed down in front of him, and he two startled blue eyes stared back at him. It had to be his reflection, but as he squinted and looked closer the image did not. Instead it tossed its head back and laughed. White teeth flash and his eyes spark with suppressed humor. This had to be how Spock saw him. That laugh reflected back at him, warped and tinny but noticeably his. Jim turned his head to find another mirror, and then again, and he span around, pressing his palms to the cold glass to find he was trapped in a mirrored room, his 'reflections' stretching into infinity.

He turned forward again, the face that was not quite his grinned back at him. Then it glanced over his shoulder and the eyes got softer, the smile gentler. The lips moved, and after a moment the works reached him.

"Spock, spock, spock, spock…." The whispered replicated and warped themselves, twisting into more of a mumbled hiss than a name.

"You should not have come here." The voice was real this time, and he whirls around to see his refection still standing there, but Spock standing at its shoulder. He was not reflected in any of the other mirrors. "I have tried to contain you here, but my mind is weakening. I can no longer maintain the barriers. Pull out of my mind Captain, or you will be consumed."

"And you'll die Spock," he said it because it was true.

"There is a 99.81 percent chance that I would indeed perish in the blood fever."

"Those are not good odds, even for us Spock." The Vulcan's eyes grow sad, melancholy glowing there like tears on a human.

"I always liked it when you said us, Captain. Leave now, and do not return. The ship-"

"The ship needs you Spock," Jim paused, then pressed his hand to the glass. "I need you." Spock let his head drop in resignation. Then two dark brown eyes rose to his blue ones.

"I am sorry Jim." And the mirrors shattered, raining around him in silver projectiles. He covered his head and closed his eyes instinctively, and when he opened them he was on Vulcan. Wind howled like a lonely wolf, roaring past and carrying a cloud of red dust that caused him to cough and squint. The rocks rose and fell in stunning formations, and the massive sun glared like the evil eye from a yellow sky.

Then the dessert was gone and he was in a Vulcan school, standing alone in the audience hall, hand clutching papers that he let fall to the ground, and Jim was over whelmed with emotions that were not his own. A bitter hopeless and loneliness swamped him and he screamed.

A girl, with cold eyes and colder words that burned like molten led, and the need to kill so thick that Jim nearly choked.

A soft hand on his hair, a softer voice asking what he had done to it and his shame, his quiet shame from cutting it to match all the others because he could stand it no longer.

The council of elders, their old wrinkled faces and his own father sitting amongst them, and hatred, hatred so strong it blinded him and triumph so high he wanted to laugh aloud but for some reason he could not.

A boy rose to take the stand, a cocky boy who did not understand real thoughts beyond petty victory and the thrill of cheating, and Spock's shock of seeing the face of this boy and his ascetic pleasure and Jim's shock at seeing himself there.

The pain. The overwhelming, all-consuming pain that screamed through his veins and his mind and it burned, oh it burned and seared and destroyed him from the inside out and he could not move, he could not breathe because Vulcan was dead. And wickedly, shamefully, the loss of his mother was worse.

The release. The need to get away from the pain. The need to leave his mind, to escape but there was no escape. He had no escape. A punch to a jaw. A hand wrapped around a delicate, throbbing throat. Seeking release. His hands wrapped around dark, warm skin. His lips pressed desperately to dark, plush ones. Seeking release. Hands brushing a hypo filled with a vaccine poisonous to Vulcans. Seeking release. Hands wrapped around the cool metal of a phaser, setting it to kill. Seeking release.

The blades and the lights, they were cloning him, they wanted to clone him. He had to stop the process, if he stabbed his heart it would stop the operation. Seeking release.

They were killing Jim, Jim was screaming, he was screaming and no matter how hard he pulled at the cuffs they would not break.

Jim was going to be killed, the teeth were inches from his Captains neck and no matter how hard he threw himself against the plastic it would not break.

Pink lips on his own. The taste of salt in his mouth, the pressure against his hips.

Mine.

Need.

Need more.

Must have release.

Seeking release.

Release.

Release.

Jim tore himself from the memories, subconsciously realizing they'd sweep his mind away and he'd perish. The sheer power of the emotions was enough to kill him. He opened his metaphysical eyes, gasping and staggering, bracing his hand against the wall, which belonged to that of the Enterprise. He looked up, taking in his surroundings. It was the Enterprise, but it was warped, twisted so he was on the bridge, but there was a cell, and an engine in the corner, and the science labs stretched infinitely to the left.

"Jim," said a voice from the cell and Jim was there in an instant, dodging the consoles and pressing his hand to the walls on either side of the force field.

"Spock," he gasped, looking into calm brown eyes that he suddenly understood. "Spock what is this place?" He said, glancing around. Deep primal instincts were coming forward in full force, and the hairs on his neck were telling him something was watching him. Something that wanted to have him for lunch.

"I'm not sure Jim. I believe it's my subconscious."

"That makes-wait, did you just use a contraction? Twice?"

"I did," Spock said, raising an eyebrow. It hit Jim do hard he actually rocked back on his heels. Spock's eyebrow was human. And his ears were blunt and round and, totally, utterly human.

"You're human Spock."

"Indeed," he said and he grinned. Well, in reality it was a small smile, but for Spock it was closer to an insane grin. The humanness of it was flooring. The man rose to his feet, and the form shimmered for a moment, and Jim could see the back of the cell. "This is my human half Jim, the part not affected by the blood fever. Normally it is kept here, in this cell, but obviously that has backfired." He didn't speak like Spock either, not really, yet it was him. There was no denying it.

"So what are we going to do?" Jim asked, glancing over his shoulder. Something was watching him.

"We are going to do nothing Jim," Said human Spock, sitting back down in the cell. "You are."

"Mine," something susurrated behind him. Jim span on his toes, dropping into a crouch and spreading out his hands, ready for a fight. However, he stood up, brows dropping into a V.

"Spock?" And that was all he got to say.

There was an impact, and he felt the resistance in his bones as they creaked and groaned. He braced himself to hit the cold floor of the bridge we he had become friendly with enough times before, but it never came. Instead he landed on some form of bedding, because it was soft and warm, but he could not see it. All he could see was the vague outline of Spock. The angular monster from the bridge was gone, replaced by the hybrid he loved, still mostly lines, but with a gentle curve to his lips and deep soul-drowning eyes. He was everywhere at once and nowhere at all, when Jim tried to focus on his face it was gone, but he knew it was there.

"Jim," he said, and the word was a whisper and a shout, repeated into infinity and not said at all. "I need you, Jim."

"Spock," he whispered, but he heard it more as a scream. There was pain. He could taste the iron on his lips, but he also tasted copper, like water left in a metal bottle too long. There was heat as well, like heat from a fire along with heat from a warm body, and it was everywhere, yet he was also freezing to stone. There were lips on his, soft and warm and a tongue in his mouth, yet he was crying, and he was so alone. So alone. There was a hand on his hip, and then it was ice, and then it was plasma and he was definitely screaming now but along with being tremendously awful it was so wonderful, because along with all the pain there was love. And he knew Spock was there. He could feel him, even though he could barely see him. He realized half these sensations were his first officers, and that was why his mind was so muddled, because there were two people in it.

"Love," the word was there, rolling like the ocean and burning like a star, sputtering into darkness before detonating like a super nova through his consciousness. It was in Spock's voice. "So this is the sensation," the sentence reverberated between their two minds, getting quieter and louder before stopping along with all the unbearable feeling. It left in its wake a lamentable absence, yet there was a certain peace in nothing.

Out of the blackness came Spock, his Spock, not a mate maddened beast or a human he barely recognized. His science blues were crisp and perfect as they were everyday on the bridge. He held up his hand in the Vulcan salute.

"I love you, Jim." He said and Jim spread his own fingers, pressing their hands together.

"I love you too," he said, and grabbed that hand so stoically distant and pulled their lips together in a soft human kiss.

Somewhere there was a hissing noise, and a sharp prick in his, arm but Spock's Vulcan lips were so warm and he wanted to hold those four little words the man had just said between them forever, because he knew it was extremely unlikely for him to ever hear them again.

"Good morning sunshine," drawled an irritated (what else is new?) McCoy. Jim blinked against the onslaught of sick bay light.

"Five more minutes," he said, rolling over. He fell out of his chair and onto the floor, which woke him up pretty well. Shaking out his hair and trying to regain what little dignity he had left, he straightened his shirt, just as his IV dripped into his eye. He swore and rubbed at his face. Bones was laughing somewhere in the distance. Spock was quiet beside him, hand limp on the edge of the table. Yet somehow Jim knew the worst was over.

Yet he still wouldn't be against sex later…

"Stop thinking about sex Jim." Bones was definitely a secret telepath. He couldn't be that obvious.

"And yes Jim," the good doctor said, rubbing his hands in a towel, "You are that obvious."