A/N: So I'm sticking my toe back into the Trek fandom ahead of the new movie with a one-shot, written for the One Shot Party challenge at The Beta Branch. Many thanks to the lovely beta community there for their support! The prompt is: "My life has taken on a palindromic quality." Enjoy!

1:36:31

Spock was waiting to die.

Starfleet training, not logic, told him to press a futile hand against the oozing wound on his side. He estimated one hour, thirty-six minutes, and thirty-one seconds of air remaining. Based on his last known position, there was no way the Enterprise would reach him in less than four hours.

What was left of the atmosphere reeked of smoke and burnt flesh. The emergency lighting flickered and Spock caught a glimpse of Ensign Jenner's body slumped across the remnants of the flight controls. The console had exploded when the shuttle had been hit by phasers. She and Spock were lucky. Saito and Hurowitz had never made it back to the shuttle. They would never leave that barren moon.

His bleeding head lolled to the side and the skin of his cheek prickled against cold metal decking. There was 1:36:31 remaining in his life. Something Vulcan in him was deeply satisfied by the symmetry, by the palindromic quality, of the number.

Automatically, his mind said: palindrome, noun; a sequence that may be interpreted in the same way forwards or reverse.

The word dragged him back to his earliest training on Vulcan. He felt the corner of his mouth tugging upward at a sudden sense of irony. There did seem to be an oddly palindromic quality about his life in that regard.

He inhaled the thick air. That was illogical. Air (the standard oxygen-nitrogen mix preferred by Starfleet) did not significantly increase in density at standard temperatures. Rather, the oxygen concentration was becoming depleted and his hypoxic brain interpreted the sensation as "thickening." His human side laughed at his Vulcan need to impose rigid order on these last hours. The human attributes always manifested strongly during periods of high stress-

Spock caught himself before he giggled (a symptom of hypoxia, no doubt). His whole life really was a repeating series of Vulcan versus Human. It seemed appropriate for his death to follow suit.

But Spock could not bring himself to release the pressure on his wound to allow it to bleed freely.

Another emergency light winked out. The temperature inside the cabin was dropping as the last vestiges of life support faded. His eyes closed, blotting out Ensign Jenner's form.

Ensign Jenner immediately started the emergency take off sequence. He was impressed by her coolness under fire. Spock himself took up a defensive position at the rear airlock, trying to cover Saito as he fled from the pursuing pirates. A stray blast seared against the Vulcan's side, knocking him off his feet. Spock watched helplessly as Saito was cut down by phaser fire less than two hundred meters from the shuttlecraft. He dragged himself back inside and shouted at Jenner to take off.

A horrible popping noise rang through the cabin, startling Spock into a half-sitting position. He sank dizzily back to the deck. It was nothing; just the metal of the damaged shuttlecraft buckling as it cooled.

He didn't want to die.

Sudden anger burned through him at the thought. It was stupid to lie here instead of doing something, instead of fighting to survive. There had to be something Spock could do!

He had nearly pushed himself up onto one elbow before his Vulcan side asserted itself again. This time he was unable to prevent a bubble of laughter from escaping his lips. Clearly he was becoming contaminated by the Captain and his irrepressible optimism. The ship was dead: engines gone, communications gone, hull cracked and life support gone. The garbled voice of the computer (before power failed, anyway) had been quite adamant on that point. There was nothing Spock could do.

He opened his eyes and watched the water vapor in his breath freeze white as he exhaled. A faint burning sensation was beginning to pool in the bottom of his lungs as the oxygen content of the atmosphere continued to dwindle. He wondered how much time he had left now.

Somehow it felt both eternal and fleeting.

Spock's eyelids were too heavy to keep open for long. He could feel his muscles trembling against the metal decking as his body automatically began to shiver in response to the decreasing temperature inside the cabin. The autonomic reaction irritated him, even as his mind drifted elsewhere.

At first he hadn't wanted to take the mission; it was too remote, too risky. But nothing was too risky for the Captain, and the Captain insisted Spock needed the field experience. Starfleet wants the pirate problem resolved, Spock. Pike'll kill me if I go myself, you know he will. Spock had allowed himself be persuaded. The mission called for a commander with a cool head and steely nerves, and who better than a Vulcan to fulfill the role? It was logical, but that did not mean Lieutenant Uhura had been pleased when she had found out.

In theory, the mission was quite simple: have an away team infiltrate the group of pirates and get them to lead Starfleet to their lair. It had even worked for a few days. Until someone accidentally found Hurowitz's Starfleet issued transmitter.

All hell immediately broke loose.

The pirates had shot Hurowitz on sight while Spock watched through his binoculars. Saito panicked and ran. Jenner activated her own communicator and began guiding him towards their location.

Spock grabbed his phaser and vainly laid down cover fire for him. A large group was heading in their direction; too large to be handled by Spock and Jenner. It was time to flee. He called the abort and they retreated to the shuttle. Jenner barely had them into the air and blasting towards space before they came under phaser fire by one of the pirates' motherships. Two direct hits and their shields were gone; Spock had no memory of the final blast that killed Jenner and sent his head slamming into the edge of a console.

The Vulcan awoke to the smell of burnt flesh and cool electronic warnings of FAILURE IMMANENT. Jenner was plainly dead. Automatically, he gasped out a request for a damage report only to have his suspicions confirmed: he was dead in space.

Dead in space, with nothing he could do and not even the slightest chance of rescue.

"Spock!" a familiar female voice snapped. It was sharp but affectionate: Lieutenant Uhura. Spock looked up hopefully-

The cabin was still dark and cold. Jenner had not moved. There was no sign of Nyota Uhura. He let his head drop back to the deck. Intense disappointment warred with a feeling of chastisement in his chest. Her voice had merely been a hallucination by his hypoxic brain; his dying human mind trying to comfort itself.

One of Spock's eyebrows quirked slightly upward. There was no denying the comfort that even simply imagining her voice had given him. He wanted to feel it again, if only to help ease the awful burning that choked his lungs.

Perhaps his human half was not so foolish after all.

He was panting now, his body futilely trying to compensate for the low level of oxygen by increasing its rate of respiration. Stars were bursting before his eyes. His time was up.

He was dying. A thrill of fear shuddered through Spock's body as the realization set in. He swallowed hard. Not even his Vulcan training could completely suppress his instincts, and the fear of death was one of the strongest. Blackness encroached on the periphery of his vision. He mouthed Nyota's name, unable to summon the breath to say it aloud, and allowed his eyes to fall shut for the final time.

Such a typically sentimental human action; dying with his lover's name upon his lips. The Vulcan High Council would be appalled. The corner of Spock's mouth twitched slightly in amusement.

It seemed rather fitting, after all.

The return to consciousness was slow and hard-fought. The first thing he became aware of was that he was no longer shivering. Something tickled against his face, and Spock felt his skin twitch in response.

This was puzzling. The last thing he remembered was the cold darkness of the crippled shuttlecraft. There was a soft whirr from somewhere near his face. The bit of his skin that had tickled suddenly felt warm, but it was not an unpleasant sensation. Voices murmured around him. It took a few moments for them to coalesce into anything but meaningless sounds.

"You see that?" a male voice asked, sounding pleased. Through his mental fog, Spock recognized the Captain's voice. "I think he's finally waking up, Bones."

Another male voice said: "I told you, a little tri-ox works wonders."

His lagging brain caught up with his observations and Spock recognized the voices of both the Captain and Chief Medical Officer Doctor Leonard McCoy. The whirr probably belonged to a dermal regenerator, which would explain the odd sensation spreading across his temple. "I had not expected to wake again," Spock said hoarsely, without opening his eyes.

He heard both humans jump at the sound of his voice. Spock forced his eyes open. He couldn't help wincing in the bright light of Sickbay. His head throbbed sympathetically. The relieved face of Jim Kirk slowly resolved out of the brightness. He grinned widely when Spock recognized him.

"You nearly didn't," the doctor said sourly, from over Kirk's shoulder. He retrieved a medical tricorder from the table beside Spock's biobed and waved it over the first officer. "That kind of oxygen deprivation would have killed anyone else, not to mention the concussion."

"I was under the impression the Enterprise was not within range for a rescue," Spock stated, ignoring the twinge of fear in his stomach.

The doctor rolled his eyes. The Captain's grin widened. "I may have had Scotty break a few…minor safety regulations."

Spock cocked an eyebrow. The gesture tugged uncomfortably on his newly-regenerated skin. Another time he would have asked for more information, or attempted to calculate the exact distance and warp speed that Scott would have had to coax out of the engines in order to reach him before he had suffocated. For now, he was content to be alive. Briefly, his thoughts drifted to Lieutenant Uhura. He was slightly (only slightly) surprised she was not in Sickbay.

"She's on duty," Kirk said, guessing his thoughts. "I told her she could wait here until…but well, you know how she is. Anyway, it's good to have you back, Mr. Spock."

Spock didn't smile, but he wanted to.

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