Title: Female Pon Farr

Author: Saavant

Contact: saavaant @ yahoo . com

Series: TOS

Rating: [Moderate Content]

Codes: T'Pring/Stonn

Part: 1/1

Summary: After the events of "Amok Time," Stonn makes a shocking revelation.

Disclaimer: Paramount/Viacom owns 'em. Even ones like Stonn and T'Pring who don't show up more than once. I don't, and I can't profit monetarily from writing about them.

Archive: Sure.

Acknowledgements: This story was inspired by a comment made by Salatrel. Thanks, Sal, you have a wonderful way of getting my thought processes going (and my muses).

FEMALE PON FARR

I awaken satisfied as I have not been for many days; a fire that has burned in my body and mind since I first felt my mate's blood calling me is now gone.

Finally, it is cooled by the completion of this half-link, this less-than-marriage-more-than-betrothal, into its necessary final form, the deep bond that is more than a marriage. For a tenday that incompleteness has torn at me, growing each hour more unbearable, like an equation for which one critical variable eluded me, like a body all intact except for the absence of sensation in one limb. The irritation one feels at something unfinished, but magnified to a desperate passion, when the finishing becomes the most necessary goal in the universe, and all else ceases to exist. For ten days and ten nights this has blazed in the center of my soul, eaten me alive with licking flames, and I did not know the world around me, or my own actions, or even my own feelings, anything but this need within.

It is said that the male suffers an even greater loss of control. What he experiences, I do not wish to know.

And now it has been quenched. I find that I am sprawled across a pile of soft quilts in that small shelter built just behind the place of Koon-ut-kal-if-fee, the cool deep room underground where I was brought when my parents saw that my Time was about to come upon me. They explained it as the Place of Mating. I was afraid, and ashamed, and many other things that I should not have been. I do not remember a millisecond of the hours I must have spent here. Only heat, fading to cool; incompleteness, with a missing piece fitting into place. Relief, indescribable. Then nothing.

I turn over and see my lover waking. I touch two fingers to his face, trail them along his jaw and throat. His hand meets mine somewhere between his neck and shoulder and we begin to caress each other's fingers, delighting in the sharing of sensations and thoughts through this so-simple contact.

Ah, Stonn. His mate died only last Tasmeen, and his Time was not expected for a number of years, so arrangements for a new link were not seen as a pressing matter. But it came early to him, as it sometimes does, and I remember seeing it begin to grip him, days before mine did, days before I even suspected that mine might be upon me soon. And having no living bondmate, he was drawn to me. After our families had dined together one cool desert evening, he and I sat in the garden, not speaking for a long while, and then suddenly, as one, as if out of nowhere, we clasped each other's hands and confessed our desires.

I run my paired middle and index fingers up his palm. *Are you sane now?* I ask him, sending a mild amusement along with pictures of him at dinner that night. Pictures of him hungry for none of the food, his only hunger clearly visible in his face each time he looked at me. Pictures of the moment when he realized, dimly, that he was being impolite, and made an attempt to eat a small fruit from the bowl at the center of the table. Pictures of hands clumsily reaching, knocking over dishes in the process, finally seizing his quarry, but in a grip so tight that it burst, its juice spattered all over the table, leaving him with nothing but a hand full of wet rind and pulp and a bewildered expression.

His mind laughs softly at the image. *I did that?*

*You did. And this,* I answer, showing him a memory from three days later. A memory of standing at the window of his chambers, watching him try to calm himself in front of the firepot. A memory of the grimace on his face when he realized the meditation was not working, and lifted the heavy artifact, burning incense and all, to hurl out the window, smashing into a bent lump amid a cloud of fragrant smoke, only a pace away from my own feet.

*We men,* he replies, his shame only half in jest. *How we lose our logic at this time.*

*I am sure I was quite mad as well. What did I do?*

As I ask that, I realize that Stonn is unlikely to remember my Time as I remember his. But just as I am about to apologize for the preposterous question, another realization crashes down on me, with the brutal swiftness of a sandstorm in the heart of the desert.

Before I sank into the fever, I was linked to Spock.

When...? What...? Why...? How...? More questions are churning in my mind, fighting to be asked, but none can even put itself into words. The only way a Vulcan can divorce her bondmate is...

*Kal-if-fee.* The word rings in both our minds.

And suddenly I see pictures... dimmed by fever and desire, but recognizable pictures, true memories. Memories that Stonn has, that I do not...

"Kal-if-farr!" I hear T'Pau say. She is calling me to make the choice of mating. But I break all tradition. In this distorted mirror of the past, where flame licks around the edges and I am the center of everything, the center of everything rushes to the platform, blocks my chosen one's hand from the gong, and cries, "Kal-if-fee!"

The choice of challenge.

I watch as in a stupor as the scene progresses, each moment more horrifying than the last.

"I make my choice... This one!"

"He does not understand... His blood does not burn... T'Pau, I plead with thee..."

"These men are friends! To force them to fight until one of them is killed!"

"Spock! No!"

"It's finished. He's dead."

The pain hidden deep in his eyes as he demands my explanation, and my smug self-satisfaction as I give it.

"Flawlessly logical."

Before I know what I am doing, I have torn myself away from my lover, I am beating my hands on the quilts and sobbing.

Yes, it was logical. Flawlessly, brutally, horribly logical. And I am crying, crying out in fury at the curse of my sex.

For all that a man goes insane in his Time, breaks things, throws things, shouts and rages, there is no madness like the madness of logic to which we women are condemned. To lose control, yes, but not to outward perception. To become a monster of cruelty, while retaining a capacity of emotionless reason as cold as the desert at midnight.

It must at some point have been necessary, in ancient times when the Kal-if-fee was nature's way of ensuring that the strongest males survived to breed. But so gruesomely out of place in a civilized and peaceful society!

More so, if anything, than the animal passions the males endure. Theirs, for all its physical violence, is a gentler blood fever. The Fire of my mate drove him to kill his captain, but it was my Fire that made the choice to let it do so.

I know that my mind in its current state was not responsible for the tragedy I caused two friends who had never done me any harm. I know that I am better suited to Stonn than to Spock, that if our marriage had come about differently, I would be more satisfied with him than with the one chosen for me. I know that my actions purged the fever in both of them, when otherwise it is quite likely that one would have died.

And I cannot manage to forgive myself on any of these grounds.

Illogical, yes. But I will find pure logic only when I am Burning. And having once seen pure logic, I wish with all my soul that I would never Burn again.

END

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