Spock

Robert Chase had been on board the Enterprise for fourteen weeks. In Spock's opinion, that was fourteen weeks too long.

It was his fault, technically speaking. His mistake that lead to Chase accidentally making his way onto the Enterprise in the first place. It wasn't his choice to allow him to stay - that was a combination of Chase's asking, his assertion that he has nothing left for him on earth, in his own time, and the Captain's decision to honor his request for asylum. And for the first several weeks, it had been quite strictly that. Chase was nearly three hundred years behind current technological standards, and they couldn't very well have him roaming the corridors like some child touching everything... 

Because it had been his fault, Chase was now his responsibility. Chase had been set up with adjacent quarters sharing a common bathroom so that Spock would be able to easily keep tabs on him. It was barely tolerable. The only thing that made it even remotely so was the fact that Chase couldn't access his quarters, but simply knowing he was over there was worrisome. There was the reality of what the plan was for him in the long term, and the Captain was not remotely as concerned about this point as he should be. The only viable option was to lie, which Spock objected to while at the same time realizing there wasn't much choice in the matter. Chase would require a plausible identity to be created, a backstory, records, some method of securing a future for himself. Much of the time he'd been on board had been spent doing exactly that, set up with a PADD with limited access, unable to send or receive messages beyond the few people he had already made contact with on board the ship, and without access for doing anything that had any real effect on any ships systems. Mainly, it was loaded with medical texts and the information necessary for catching up on the past three hundred years. During the first part of the time he spent immersed in his reading, he wasn't as much of a burden on Spock. Not that he was generally burdensome, but there were times that he was trying. Like when Spock discovered he had managed to access the medical labs without explicit permission. It didn't help that Bones seemed to enjoy the idea of letting him in where he didn't belong, even if there technically wasn't any damage he could do when he was there. That wasn't the point - the point was that if he wasn't allowed access to a given area, he should not be in there, period. Rules were rules for a reason, and Spock wasn't willing to bend those rules, especially given the fact that in the event anything did go wrong, he was ultimately responsible for Chase's actions. 

A few weeks in, Chase had complained of feeling restless and so Spock had reluctantly begun escorting Chase to the Officer's Gymnasium for sparring. There were, over the past several weeks, repeated instances of rather unusual, inappropriate behavior from Chase. He noticed it mostly during their regular sparring sessions, times when it almost seemed as though Chase was less interested in actually sparring than he was in pushing into Spock’s space. This wasn’t something that he was prepared to tolerate, but it also wasn’t something he’d been prepared for at all. At first, he hadn’t quite known how to react, and he had started to feel himself grow frustrated by it and then it had begun to elicit different responses from him. There was a tension between them beyond simply irritation, and it was one that Spock flatly refused to acknowledge. Chase was his charge, his responsibility, and there was no way that he was about to cross that kind of boundary with him. 

When it began to happen today, when Chase was deliberately putting his body pointlessly too close for sparring, as if by placing it closer he was forcing Spock to take some action on it, Spock simply stepped back into a resting stance. He raised an eyebrow and regarded him with curiosity and irritation, and calmly asked, “Do I need to remind you again to adhere to sparring protocol?”