Cover of Night

K/S Fanfiction
Title:	Cover of Night
Author(s):	Killashandra
Date(s):	1998
Length:
Genre:	slash
Fandom:	Star Trek: The Original Series
External Links:	online here
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Cover of Night is a K/S story by Killashandra.

Alison Fiddler for Cover of Night

It was published in the print zine Amazing Grace and was the winner of a 1998 Philon Award.

Summary

"A/U: After the fal tor pan, Kirk relives memories of his destructive and secret love affair with Spock as he waits for the Vulcan to remember him, hoping for redemption and a second chance to make things right. "During their Vulcan sojourn, while waiting for The USS Bounty to be made spaceworthy, Kirk as a night visitor who is merely a shadow of his former self."

Reactions and Reviews

From the beautiful start with Kirk having a vision of Spock coming to him in the darkness to the equally beautiful ending where the realizations Kirk makes are life-altering, I was swept away by the gorgeous images that this author creates.

Try this writing on for size: "I try to say the name but my throat closes on It IVe never been so scared for my own sanity or wanted anything so much as I want to hear my name spoken in that velvet-night voice."

Then Spock is alive and still on Vulcan, but Kirk is not allowed to see him. So poignant as Kirk reflects on the past when they were together on a planet negotiating with the government They stayed together in a beautiful suite.

"We would sit together under the pale triad moons of that world as if unburdening our souls to each other, and never say a word."

The author did an excellent job of keeping the focus on Kirk and Spock while having the backdrop of the negotiations. We didn't need to know all the nuances and facts and figures of interplanetary negotiations— that was only the background.

They go to a formal reception and Kirk gets tipsy (why do I love to see that?) so they walk in the moonlight back to their suite. "By the time we reached the surte, I still felt I was flying but I knew it wasn't the wine any more, it was him/ What a gorgeous moment as they stand at the door. "I felt a kind of pain I didn't understand and I ached to tell him about it. to try to understand."

So beautiful (that word again!) the moment to moment when Spock touches Kirk and they meld. And so passionate out on the balcony at night. They are frenzied in their passion and Kirk begins to lose control. "The feel of him was incredible. I could have tried for years to imagine what he'd feel like and never have come close to the reality of him responding to me, the feel of that velvety skin, the sounds he made, small and choked as if he tried and failed to hold them back." And how Spock would continually get in bed with Kirk at night then never talk about it during the day.

I loved Kirk's realization that just having Spock alive and with him is enough: "It does not even matter if he ever remembers or forgives me At the end. a subtle image of the Vulcan dawn because it was the cover of night where they allowed themselves their desire and nighttime when Spock would visit Kirk. "Never did we acknowledge in daylight what we did in the dark."

One of the things about K/S that is so wonderful is the strong emotional life that we can revel in. I love this author's use of emotions—so deep and powerful— which makes their expression very sensual.

I was was genuinely captivated by this tale of passion, denial and wasted opportunity, all delivered in this author's wonderfully lyrical yet uncluttered style. It's another example of the successful use of first person point of view, in which Kirk's words only enhance the feelings and events he describes. The alternation between the present moment and the past isalso effective, as Kirk mulls over past mistakes while awaiting almost helplessly the outcome of his current situation. Killashandra's prose is, as I said, extremely lyrical. The story is engrossing and a wonderful blend of her imagination with the eventsof aired Trek. Even so, my first impression was that while I loved the story's depth of feeling and ultimately satisfying resolution, I had to suspend a certain amount of disbelief to accept the circumstances of Kirk and Spock's relationship while on board the Enterprise. I kept thinking that surely one or the other of them, intelligent beings that they are, would have broken their self-imposed silence before the situation could deteriorate into disaster. After a second reading, however, I found myself more willing to accept the motivations put forth by the author. "Cover of Night" hypothesizes a Kirk who is initially unable to come to terms with his attraction to another male. His love for Spock is never in question, but its expression is constrained by the perceived threat to his identity and by fear of disapprobation by the military establishment. (It seems clear that the society depicted does not condone same-sex relationships, at least not between Starfleet officers.) Kirk realizes that he desperatelyneeds both the Enterprise and Spock at his side; the Vulcan unquestioningly bows to his captain's need. The tragedy of this story is that their strategy for staying together not only cripples the expression of their love, but eventually results in their separation. The moment of their undoing is absolutely electrifying; it's also a perfect illustration of one of the things I admire about Killashandra's writing. The scene itself is minimally set, without extensive descriptions of Engineering or of the crew members present. Despite this—or perhaps because of it—I had such a vivid mental picture of what was happening. The scene also ends at its climactic moment, leaving the reader with a frozen image uncannily similar to Kirk's description of watching the taped record of the incident, and with the freedom to imagine what happens next. I love this economy of style which so clearly portrays essential events and involves the reader in their creation at the same time.

In “Cover of Night” Killashandra has interwoven the story of Spock’s recovery of his memories following the fal-tor-pan with the story of how Kirk and Spock came to be lovers and how they reacted to that change in status. Both stories are told from Kirk’s point of view and both are full of Kirkian intensity. The characterizations are true and the details are convincing, but the most impressive part of “Cover of Night” is the mood it creates in the reader; Killashandra draws you into her story and wraps you up in it so completely that when you raise your head from that last word you are a little surprised to find yourself looking at your 20th century Terran surroundings when, surely, just a moment before, you were on Vulcan with Jim Kirk.

I can't possibly do justice to this astonishing story. Instead, I offer a few modest comments.

The elegant structure and rhythm contribute enormously to the impact of the story. The alternation of scenes in “real time” on Vulcan and the scenes from Kirk's memory creates a deep rhythmic current, like a sea-tide, of movement and repose. The scenes from Kirk's memory have a passionate, desperate driving force, the scenes on Vulcan a calm, almost expectant stillness. An effective story could have been written in either voice, but the combination, in which each drives the story forward and magnifies the impact of the other, is stunning. After reading probably several hundred K/S stories in which Kirk and Spock agonize about having a sexual relationship in case a bond should form, but this magically turns out to be a non-issue, Starfleet sends champagne and they all live happily ever after on the Enterprise, I appreciated the freshness of this story's perspective and the honesty it took to follow the premise to its logical conclusion. The vivid passages that show Kirk's raw fear of his sexual desire for Spock are worth a thousand pages of telling us the potential problems. The device of enabling Kirk to relate the incident in Engineering by viewing the ship's log tapes was sheer brilliance. Most obvious, it avoided a serious point-of-view problem and enabled the author to tell the story from Kirk's point of view without interruption, which I think was the perfect choice for this story. More than that, though, having Kirk report to the reader what he saw in the tapes also gives the account additional depth and power. It magnifies the sense of relentless, tragic inevitability. In effect, it allows Kirk, while viewing the tape, to play the role of the tragic chorus commenting on his own impending doom. I think that a story propelled by a negative force—in this case, Kirk's fear of disintegration and destruction of his ability and drive to command—is the most difficult kind of story to write. Only the most gifted writers seem to tackle it at all, let alone successfully. I'm thinking of Toni Morrison, who wrote that trying to show the destruction of the heroine of The Bluest Eye was like trying to write about the silence after a shout, or the imprint left by the blow of a hand. Or John Cheever, who struggled with varying degrees of success to dramatize disconnection and mortality, to make manifest “the darkness that lies at the heart of life.” At times in “Cover of Night” I felt that I needed a stronger sense of what was at stake for Kirk, of the forces that made sex with Spock “threaten everything I believed about myself.” The elements of the threat were spelled out plainly—the shattering of Kirk's sexual self-image, the loss of that toughness and drive so basic to his ability to command, not to mention Starfleet—and I think the story suggested that for Kirk, all three were connected at some fundamental level. I wished these negative forces had had more force, more shape, perhaps. Kirk's passion and compulsion has such power, it drives so hard, it seems to need something stronger pushing back. The image of Janice in Kirk's dream was a good start, but perhaps something even more powerful was needed.

But as I said earlier, the challenge of dramatizing the power of negation is a great one for any writer, in or out of fan fiction. And I think this story—especially in the scene in Engineering and the wonderfully understated aftermath— masterfully fulfilled its tragic potential.

From the first sentence, I was entranced, humbled, my emotions on red alert. Kirk was hurting, and his anguish was superbly captured in words, shared equally by me. Expressing someone’s pain, something as intangible and individual as abject grief, is nearly impossible. Yet, it is done here so skillfully it looks easy.

To grasp the depth of that grief, I must relive the past with Kirk, to see just how much he has lost at the hands of Khan. So, along with this strong, determined leader of men, I find myself falling hopelessly but very surely in love with Spock of Vulcan. Companion, friend, anchor against all the ills that befall a Starship Captain. But now, through Kirk’s eyes, I see a different face. A gentle, kind, protective face with eyes as deep as darkest night.

When Spock responds to Kirk’s plea to listen to what he needs to say, Spock takes the human’s face in his hands “with a touch like nothing I’d ever known...(Kirk’s words)..that’s when I began to know, somewhere, that I was playing with fire.” That heat almost overcomes me as I read on, experiencing a meld in which nothing is secret, not affection, not loneliness, not searing passion. Every raw emotion is glaringly intense – their passion, the flame that overtakes them, Kirk’s sudden and icy fear of having broken every rule that has governed his life. Then terrible emptiness ensues as both make the unspoken and unspeakable choice to resume their lives of lonely desperation. Oh, what a sad and terrible choice. Returning to present time with Kirk, I am haunted by the possibility that this one night, this one time was all they would ever share. What a bleak and bitter prospect that now, after the refusion and Spock’s complete loss of memory, that night of fire is all they have of each other. In Kirk’s words, “I feel only a bottomless darkness inside me. I begin to hope that it will swallow me up.” The revelation that they did resume their relationship in a very bizarre manner came as a shock. Spock would come to him, under cover of night, and they would love, but never speak, touch but never kiss, only to return to their posts on the bridge the following day as if nothing was happening. Certainly denial of the cruelest form. And in the present, Spock comes from his place on the hill overlooking the Bounty and watches Kirk sleep. Kirk remembers how it was, how their unspoken fears that their love, if allowed its freedom, would place the ship and crew in jeopardy, came nearly true. Risking all to save Kirk from Miramanee’s planet, defying logic to remain in the Tholian sector. Then, the inevitable. Near tragedy exposes them, spills their desperate secret into a world that cannot, will not, accept. Separation. Endless years of empty, guilt-ridden separation follow. While, once again in the present, under the dark night skies of Vulcan, dreams come true.

Profound.

Cover of Night is a post-fal-tor-pan story. From the opening words the reader is pulled into the swirling morass of Kirk’s terrible grief. The story, narrated by Kirk, unfurls as a series of memories and you, as the reader, are made to feel like a secret is being shared with you – the secret of Kirk and Spock’s double lives. It’s told with such immediacy that you are quickly pulled into the emotional drama. Kirk and Spock are shown to be complex characters, whose loneliness, obsession and love and the need to assuage them are at odds with their sense of duty and Starfleet regulations, leading to their desperate, bittersweet, nocturnal trysts, unacknowledged in the light of day. Now, following the fusion, while Spock is recovering on Vulcan, he is drawn at night to Kirk’s quarters, standing, watching. Kirk doubts Spock has any memory of what they once shared, yet something deep in the Vulcan’s psyche draws him to Kirk the way it had all those years ago. These nightly visits turn out to be a healing for them both. Cover of Night is not just a satisfying and engaging story, it’s a truly masterful piece of writing.

Killashandra's "Cover of Night" always, always manages to push my emotional buttons - no matter how many times I read it. A skillfully interwoven tapestry of show- and movieverse, this story makes the transition from the 5-year-mission to James T. Kirk's promotion and Spock's departure for Gol seamless and utterly believable. Style, characterization, actions, logical progressions - one of the best K/S stories I've ever read.

kirk may drown in regret if he's not careful. spock's coming back to life might have been a second chance, if he had deserved one.