Sad Spock:

By the time Captain Ivanivna of the USS Ride comes aboard, he and Captain Kirk have completed an abbreviated report on the status of the Enterprise and copied the ship’s logs of the events since the Enterprise responded to Vulcan’s distress signal a day ago.  He sways on his feet, sure that his internal clock has been compromised as well.  But no.  His universe has been cleaved and bent and rendered unrecognizable, and it has been just over a day.

The crew is exhausted, but no one tries to go off duty.   Only when Kirk sees an engineer injure himself and a console because sleep deprivation made his hand shake does he mandate four hours of rest to all crew on a rotating basis.  Spock ignores it.

They meet Captain Ivanivna in the transporter room.  She has seen the site of the battle of Vulcan, deceptively clean because most of the wreckage was swallowed by the black hole.  She seems amazed to find the Enterprise intact, but even more shocked to learn that the cadet brought up on academic dishonesty charges is apparently the savior of earth.  Beside him, Kirk bristles.  Not from accusations of cheating, but the idea that he deserves such credit.  Kirk hands her the data padd, speaking of Mr. Scott and Mr. Chekhov’s brilliance, Mr. Sulu’s piloting skills, Lt. Uhura’s unique ability to decode Romulan, and Spock’s crucial role.  Kirk speaks of him with a tone that connotes pride or awe.  Spock does not understand.  He corroborates the events that led to Kirk being captain, and refers to him as captain throughout the meeting, in an attempt to make clear his support.

What he does understand, as he walks an empty corridor after the meeting, is that he will disembark the Enterprise — the ship that saved his life, saved his father’s life and the cultural heritage of his people, saved his mother’s planet, if not his mother herself — and board the Ride along with the man who actually saved all of those things.  He will go with his captain and a handful of senior crew, the medical staff caring for Pike, and most of the Vulcan survivors.  They will travel to earth at Warp 3, taking minutes to cross the distance that the Enterprise will require months to traverse.  He pauses by a terminal.  He feels ill equipped to debrief Star Fleet, but he and Kirk have been central to the events of the last day, and no one else can explain them as thoroughly.  

And yet, he finds he is loath to leave.  It is illogical.  The ship is limping.  Torn nearly asunder.  Compromised.  Like him.  And perhaps that is why.

He hesitates for only a moment before activating the terminal and retrieving the long-range sensor scans he had recorded as the Enterprise sped off toward Earth.  Toward Earth and away from the darkness.  He watches as the black shrinks, not just from the growing distance.  And then, abruptly, a gold-tinged light appears where there had been nothing.  

Spock aches.

It is an illusion, of course.  He has not witnessed the rebirth of his planet.  The ship merely moved faster than light, and beyond the distance which the light from the planet’s destruction had traveled.  But his mother was still alive when this light reflected from the planet’s surface.  And as he had when he first recorded it, Spock makes calculations.  This light is from when she ran for her life.  This light is from when she meditated in the katra arc.  This light is from earlier in the day, when she would have tended her small garden.  This light… he does not know what she had done the day before.  He did not communicate as faithfully as he promised, busy with obligations at the academy.  He does not know what this light meant in the life of his mother.