It has always bothered me, how much the crew of Voyager touches Tuvok. Spock was half-human, and permitted even less contact. A scene with Paris and Tuvok in a corridor sparked the following vignette.
I would prefer he not do that. He walks partly beside me, partly behind me, hands gripping my shoulders in a brusque massage, telling meto "lighten up."
He does not understand what he is doing, that the touch is more than the most intimate of Vulcan companions would offer. He has no such claim on me. I greet even my wife with only two fingers caressing. More than that would be unseemly, unwise.
I think of the delicate beauty that is my wife -- my wife who is strong enough to share the plak tow. Her beauty opens under our touching fingers, deepens with the contact of fully clasped hands, and engulfs me when our lips meet at last. She shares my fever and sates my heat, true, but it is the couplings in the years between, in the gentle sharing of her beauty, that I treasure most.
But hers are not the hands that touch me now.
An emotion presents itself, and I begin as my master taught me, to analyze it, name it, study its origins so that I may unmake it. I do not get beyond naming. Disquiet.
The name surprises me, for I had expected annoyance or irritation, and not this unusual category. Before I can understand how it came to be, it runs across my accustomed calm leaving ripples which are slow to fade.
His fingers knead into my shoulders again, and I know I am speaking the words he expects, logical and distancing. My mind is silently contrasting the rough touch with that of T'Pel my wife.
I have seen his hands move with delicacy in small taps across the computer interface that connects him to the thrusters, the engines, the maneuvering jets. He pilots this starship with all the restrained care of my two fingers touching T'Pel's.
If he could fly Voyager unrestrained, would it be like the gentle intensity I share with my wife when we mate without need? Or would he fly with the wildness of the fever? Or would it be heedless and unthinking, like his hands on my shoulders here in this public corridor?
We part, and I express my disquiet as the restrained irritation that ever seems to amuse him. He smiles, thinking that he has done, as he calls it, his duty to keep old Tuvok shaken up a little.
I would prefer he not do that.