And Everything Is

Fanfiction
Title:	And Everything Is
Author(s):	Toni Cardinal-Price
Date(s):	1983
Length:
Genre(s):	slash
Fandom(s):	Star Trek: TOS
Relationship(s):	Kirk/Spock
External Links:
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And Everything Is is a Kirk/Spock story by Toni Cardinal-Price.

It was published in T'hy'la #3.

Summary

"Kirk is approached by Bob Wesley as he sits alone at a bar."

Reactions and Reviews

Jeez.... Pain and despair leaps off the pages. It gripped me. I don’t know where Kirk finds the strength to go on. Hope, I guess. If he’d lose that, he’d be dead.

There's no better conveyor of anguish than Toni Cardinal-Price. I'm always pleased when my browsing brings me to one of her treasures of expression. The reason she is able to reach us with the characters' pain— Kirk's in this instance — is her apparently fathomless understanding of love and the depths to which the real thing reaches our souls.

As much as I've wallowed in Kirk's grief while Spock is at Gol, I'm always ready to absorb just one more dose. If you were to read only one, though, and this short story was your choice, you would feel Kirk's loss to the marrow of your bones.

Pain surrounds Admiral Kirk like a smothering blanket as he tries vainly to escape at the bottom of his brandy glass. Bob Wesley searches him out at the bar where he spends more and more of his empty evenings. For awhile the stricken man is able to ignore the compassion and understanding, then the dam breaks. In one of the most agonizing scenes of this type that I've read, he leaves the bar with Wesley, then something catches his attention and he dashes down the street. Catching up to a tall Vulcan, he grasps him desperately in his arms before realizing he holds a stranger. "It wasn't him" he gasps as Wesley reaches him. It will never be Spock.

I heard years ago that Toni Cardinal-Price lost her life in an auto accident involving a drunken driver. To this day I wonder why someone so sensitive and caring was taken from us in such a way. Whenever I read her stories, though, I have no doubts at all why she was put upon this earth. Thank you, Toni, wherever you are.