Long Way Home (Star Trek: TOS story by Eileen Roy)

K/S Fanfiction
Title:	Long Way Home
Author(s):	Eileen Roy
Date(s):	1977
Length:
Genre:	slash
Fandom:	Star Trek: The Original Series
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Long Way Home is a Kirk/Spock story by Eileen Roy.

illo by Virginia Jacobsen for this story in The Sensuous Vulcan

An Example of VERY Early Slash

It was published in the print zine The Sensuous Vulcan which contains four very early slash stories; Desert Heat, Long Way Home, Cooling One's Heels, and Interlude.

Author's Comments: 2017

[ER]: I remember the general feel of the story, the details. That was my version of the — this was after I had been introduced to slash, and I was gobsmacked, thank you. It was incredible! So this was my version of seeing if I could do anything like that, and, as I recall, it’s very mild.

[MG]:... I’m not surprised to hear that since it is now considered one of the earliest published slash. Were you aware of that at the time? That you were a little bit pioneering?

[ER]: No. I thought it was a response to – oh goodness! What’s her name? The person who did the first slash story. [Gayle F], thank you. It was a response to Gayle’s story, and Gayle may not have been published at that time because I read it at a convention, in the room, with about 17 people buzzing in and out, and I finished it, and I went back, and I reread it two more times to see if I could memorize it. It was just something I wanted to keep forever, and I still remember phrases and some of the feeling of that [Gayle F] story. So, it was a response to Gayle Feyrer; it was not—I didn’t come up on my own. She is the torchbearer.

[MG]: Was that the first peek at slash that you ever found?

[ER]: First piece? It was the first time that I ever even realized that it was a possibility. It was Athena bursting from the head of Zeus, whole.

[ER]: I don’t think [I circulated "Long Way Home" before it was published in the zine]. As I recall, it was—I said, “Hey, I’d like to do something for this scene, and I finished it, sent it to them, and they published it, so it was not—I don’t have a circle. I am fairly solitary, so I don’t—things don’t really circulate before they’re finished.

[...]

I got some [feedback] third-hand. Some people liked it, and the people who didn’t like it didn’t talk to me, so it was basically, “Ehh, some people like it.” I’m surprised to hear that it is considered a significant work because I always thought of it as very slight.

Reactions and Reviews

1984

Kirk is on shore leave, in a tavern, on an unreliable, savagely beautiful planet. He is drunk and tripping out on an incredible combination of alien concoctions. But he is happy; he has discovered that he is really not going crazy, because Spock arrives to collect him and drive him back to the base, over the planet's unstable terrain and through the turbulent atmosphere. When a rock slip causes their "rock-sled" to crash, and Spock is knocked momentarily unconscious, Kirk has time to contemplate his uninjured friend, stroking one eyebrow. He ts to himself his love and desire for Spock, and considers all the problems involved in seduction and a relationship. He decides in favor of what might be read as a "slow seduction". Spock awakens, and they leave the ruined rock sled, supporting each other, walking slowly back to the base. This is a lovely little story, a vignette almost, full of word-painting and atmosphere, and not a bit of sloppily over-ripe sentimentality.

1993

I got into slash peripherally and accidentally in my early teens, when I was sold a copy of "The Sensuous Vulcan" and read the first story, by Eileen Roy I think, about Kirk being blasted drunk in this bar on this very odd molten-type, rock sliding planet. He's looking at Spock, who's driving the groundcar, and it hits him -- "Spock and I. I love him...it could happen... *we* could happen." Before that time I hadn't thought of it. When he thought of it, I realized that not only could it happen, but that it *should* happen!