I swore I replied to this. I have no defense for missing this incredibly kind and supportive review. Thank you so much for every single word you wrote in your review. I'm thrilled Sarek's guilt and helplessness is coming through, that it is clear that Spock is spiritually dying and shrinking with every day longer he is kept prisoner in Kirk's control, but also I am very happy that you are enjoying Kirk's characterization of a twisted mixture between vicious cruelty and long-buried tenderness. He still does have some of the kinder traits we know and love about Kirk suppressed and he'd been suppressing them for so long that to bring them out again is going to be a struggle and a dangerous thing to do. Thank you for calling this story worth your time reading - that means a great deal to me. I know it's been a very long time since I touched this story, but I do not have plans to completely abandon it. Things have been just not the greatest or happiest in my personal/real life for the last year and half or so, and that has sucked so much of my creative drive from me asa consequence. Again, thank you so much for your incredibly kind words in this review. I'm so sorry it that I missed it when I was replying. ~ RK 

Spock and Kirk ARE perfect. I'm just channeling them.

Yes, lots more. 12 chapters are written. It's not at the end at that point. I DO know what the ending is. Which is good. I don't usually post without having a destination marked on the map.

No no! Please! This is the cool thing about science fiction rather than fantasy, it's not just: it's magic! One has to do the hard work. Like a puzzle. Science is in the name. (Actually, people call it speculative fiction now, but I keep saying sci fi because it annoys those people no end.)

What really threw me is that after some, um, 25 or more years, on and off, of reading and writing this universe in fanzines and fanfiction I have never seen a story with Spock having a lower body temperature. So it just blew my mind that it could be canon. I was like, WHA? How did I miss that?

The biggest adjustment to thinking of him cooler, for me (and I'm sure if you are used to the opposite, trying to work with the notion of warmer) is the shift in all the symbolism regarding him. Especially as soon as touch and intimacy are involved. I would make him 120F if I could, honestly. That's the logical temperature for him given how hot Vulcan is, but a human couldn't sleep with him. They'd be injured. You'd have to use one of those chastity sheet things like from Like Water for Chocolate with a hole in it, except it would be an infrared thermal blanket with a hole in it. It would be so awkward. :-D

So, I compromise and make him a like a feverish human, which is more or less copying everything I've ever read. I'm so original that way. But that works symbolically for me. Spock is feverish in that he's a fever time bomb because of Pon Farr. He's cold emotionally but warm to snuggle up to whether he wants to be or not. That contrast creates balance. If one were listing qualities and said, well, he's emotionally cold, and cold to the touch. I'd be like, and . . . what else? I need a contrast to get the old juices fired up.

Fever warm is welcoming, embracing, nurturing. 91F is cold. Like a fresh corpse, or an android, or metal, which harkens to robots, machines. It matches Spock, but in a way that piles onto his other natures, not works to balance it. This is where I run into a wall of, gee, how would one write that? Anyway, that's solely my issue, one of many issues I have, personal and otherwise.

Thinking more I realize I'm probably species-ist here. Poor Spock is having the same experience in reverse. Jim is cold. But even that works for me. Since Spock has this threat of going into heat, he quenches himself on Kirk. So the cold thing doesn't come up the same way as it does when I reverse it. Yeah, probably species-ist.

Where that cold body and hot environment thing would work is a story on Vulcan. There I could see making that contrast into something. Some kind of wild defiance of a brutal world, or something.

As to the quotes you pulled. The first bolded one doesn't do anything. Fast blood flow just means heat is being evenly distributed internal to the system. So in the case of a humanoid, their head and feet and torso will all measure similar temps. But if that being is hot, they are hot everwhere and will stay that way. Moving blood around inside the body doesn't move heat out of the body. I'm not even convinced of the explanation of the blood pressure. I'm pretty sure elasticity rather than diameter is more important. The reason dilating the vessels on a human lowers pressure is it changes the diameter from the norm, causing a deficit of fluid relative to the volume of space it occupies. I think the person who wrote that had a weak grasp of science.  Actually, I'm certain they did.

>Expelling heat through radiation is insufficient.

It's impossible unless it's nighttime and the ambient air temperature is below 91F. Heat will always radiate into the cooler system. Use of insufficient here further makes me not trust that writer's grasp of things.

>Vulcans evolved an internal cooling mechanism.

That is the money shot. I'd summarize that as: "It's magic."

If I were concocting a better line to insert here, I'd go for "endothermic chemical reaction in the blood." And then I'd stop there. It's the best explanation, and if you tried to justify it, it's going to run into trouble fast.

The main trouble being producing enough component compounds that will then react in the blood requires, by itself, enormous amounts of energy. Vulcans would need energy input to generate the compounds to do the cooling and all energy input in a humanoid is going to generate waste heat. So, you are going to run into what is called the diminishing horizon, where you boost all of your inputs but the cost of those processes involved pushes the goal out ahead of you again and you never reach your goal. (Not even considering the problems of excretion of the resulting compound from that reaction.)

Unless, and this is the only way I can make this work. There is plant A and plant B each contain one of the chemicals needed for this endothermic reaction. You eat plant A in the morning and plant B later in the day (can't eat them at the same time, your stomach would freeze). Then your body stores them in separate organs and releases them into the blood through some mechanism like bonding to a heat sensitive enzyme so they are released to react as needed. This way the energy  to produce the chemicals comes from some kind of external photosynthetic reaction (i.e. ample sunlight) rather than forcing the Vulcan body itself to become this workhorse chemical factory in order to make these compounds. But if this were the explanation those plants would be central to the culture. Worshiped in house shrines. Plastered on pediments downtown. It would be a thing.

I guess what I'm saying is I don't seen any cultural indication of an endothermic blood reaction. But I'm probably missing a more straightforward explanation. It is freezing cold in a desert at night, maybe that's part of the system . . . But if cold were part of the explanation, Spock's quarters would be freezing half the day and 125 the other half.

TL;DR: cold blood ain't free. :-D

I wanted as much moral ambiguity in this stoy as possible. Once I concocted Kirk as a pirate, an actual one, he had to be damaged and he had to hurt others as a result. But he had to be recognizable too, charming, kind when he'd in control, intelligent as hell. Nice thing about the damage is it makes him capricious, which is very much not a trait of his usual character. But it adds a delicous depth to him that I wasn't expecting.

What I found most interesting about some readers is they found his actions unforgivable, even though he's a fictional character and the other character chooses to forgive him (or not even care) for his own reasons. In my view, Spock doesn't have emotions at the level that's triggering in the reader but that doesn't count, and I should have realized that, but somehow didn't. Even though we write about aliens, in some impossible future, we're really telling stories about ourselves and so it's not possible to make the alienness work to that high degree for every reader.

Spock starts out innocent, but its all naivete and social control. He has no idea who he is absent those things. And yes, he gets corrupted, or is it true curruption or is it just his true self emerging after the loss of those external influences? And yes, I wanted there to be mixed feelings about that. He can't take control of his life without being corrupted, or not under these circumstances. But honestly, maybe not under any circumstances given how much pressure there is on him all the time. That's half of the point of the story is him coming to an understanding of what has been shaping him, and that he's had very little choice in his life. I really liked writing him making choices about what he wants to preserve and what he wants to discard about his old self. Since he's thrown away the fundamentals, he has no basis for morality until he's found his footing again. Case in point, he likes getting McCoy by the neck. His biology tells him its the right thing to do and he's fascinated by this new experience. Now that he's gone through it, he'll make a logical choice about whether to do the same again in similar circumstances. Which brings up the question of whether logical and control equal morality.

On that same note, it's interesting that you thought Spock would want to rape Jim back. I just went through some edits on this story and made it clearer that part of what's biologically happening him to Spock is a process of sexual subservience. I have a nice pseudo bio psyche reasoning for this that if I do write a sequel, I might work in there. I was trying to keep it simple (in concert with Spock's naivete) that a first mating in heat is always rape, therefore it's what one puts up with for the outcome. I know that flies in the face of some views of Vulcan canon, but if Spock is capable of going into a violent mindless trance and kill Kirk in canon, then I figure pretty much anything is on the table.

I like this story for the unexpected issues it brought up. And editing it was really enjoyable. I'd been putting it off thinking I might end up seeing some of the things readers did and thinking. Ugh. What did I do? But I think I'm good. The story does what I wanted it to do, which was to bring a damaged Kirk and innocent Spock to a common place and make them partners without sacrificing either of them.

Thanks very belatedly for your reactions. I love writing fanfic for this reason. Lots of feedback.

Thank you for your review! It really made me smile. I'm glad you liked the fic and the way I wrote the characters, especially since I'm really more comfortable with their TOS incarnations.