( open )

[logistical]

When: September 2-3rd, daytime.
Rating: G.
Characters: Spock (logistical) & OPEN.
Summary: Someone has acquired a lute and is playing.
Notes: Wrote in [action] but prose is also welcome.
Log:

[ Spock hasn't yet installed a door to cover that "magnificent hole in the wall" (as Jim has dubbed it. McCoy was far more less forgiving), and claims it is due to lack of sufficient currency. That is true - he prefers to save rather than spend right away - but he is getting quite comfortable simply being a busybody and listening to the goings-on of the other apartment. The transition was inevitable and he shouldn't be putting it off, but the displacement to the City, even with the crew, had not been easy. He found living in a metropolitan area constricting considering he had spent the majority of the past few years on board a spaceship, where they could leave at a moment's notice. He'd have taken the expanse of Vulcan's deserts over this in a heartbeat, and not for purely sentimental reasons. ]

[ However, there's no longer a home except the Enterprise, no family save for her crew, and while he has made an attempt to make his residence presentable he has no intention of getting to know the City. Walks are limited to exercise - though he needed little - and his routine is strict, but offers little comfort or intellectual stimulation. ]

[ Even work is progressing frustratingly slowly. Unlike Jim, who finds other outlets for the restless energy, Spock diverts his into more projects. He would read, but since Khan was at the library, Spock avoids it as much as he can, and he occasionally skims the books Nyota has finished and placed on the shelf to be returned as soon as possible. ]

[ So one day, he quite spontaneously decides to find himself a lute. The exact object wouldn't be present in the City, but there was wood, and strings, he could make do. When he's satisfied, he sits in the middle of the living room, and begins to play. ]

[ Maybe you are visiting. Maybe you are walking by, or coming home and wondering what the music is. Or maybe you are an angry neighbour who wants to know when that racket can stop. In any case, the sound carries. ]

Comments

[phonetical]

[Even though she has a key to his apartment, Uhura rarely visits, preferring that he come to her where there's no hole in the wall and they're afforded some type of privacy that they can't get anywhere else. Today, though, things are a little different when she stops by, grocery bags in hand, and slides the key in the door, pausing when she hears faint harplike sounds through the door.

A turn of the lock and Uhura's slowly pushing the door open, not sure what she's expecting to see behind it. Spock's apartment is usually quiet, silent except for Jim's booming voice through the curtain or the turning of a page. She certainly doesn't expect a Vulcan in the living room with a lute. A particular lute that one would think it be impossible to find in this place.]

[hischair]

[ Holing up in his bedroom for the better part of the day as he works over problems with the new phaser-fire on his homemade PADD, at first Jim thinks that Leonard has left the radio on (Jesus, a radio, he can barely believe where they are sometimes until thoughts like that cross his mind) in the living room. It's not a disturbance but it is distracting, coaxing him out into the apartment proper on bare-feet, a thicker than usual scruff of blond and grey hairs on his jaw as he slides the PADD under an arm and stuffs his fingers in the pockets of jeans. When it becomes apparent that the noise is echoing in real-time, he curiously brushes the curtain between his and Spock's domain aside, briefly suffused with the memory of sharing a bathroom on the Enterprise and giving cursory knocks. He's silent now as he paces inside and finds his attention zoning in on Spock ... with a lute, almost Vulcan were it not for the fact it's obviously been rigged up with the same happenstance grit that Jim's PADD also owns; an approximation of the real thing, clever and unique in its variation.

The soothing, almost warm vibrations shiver harp-like through his skin and set the hairs on the nape of his neck on end, leaning back against the wall to watch strong fingers flutter across strings, their docility a counterpoint to the attentiveness of the player. It's beautiful, and a part of Jim that feels strangely alien aches with the knowledge the source of that music is gone. Even after all this time, unobtrusively letting the song wash over him, he can recall an old Vulcan's sorrow and longing for home, rekindled again like a stolen photograph in his grasp while immersed in the moment.

Blue eyes travel up from clever digits along bowing wrists, watching Spock's expression as he plays. It could hardly be called emotive by any passer-by, but Jim reads the empathy in his friend's dedication and decides not to interrupt. His shoulders slide down the wall after a minute spent dutifully silent as a one-man audience and it's there behind bent knees that the blue lights of his PADD glimmer back to life, content to work in the wake of Spock's artful harmonies. ]