Sarcasm is an adjusted stress reaction.

See, I love Price for the slashiness, and I am a sucker for multiple-Kirk stories. But the writing is so abstruse as to be nearly indecipherable: I kept thinking I was just too stupid to get the sense of their convoluted sentence structure but I really don't think that was the problem. Oddly, Fate and The Prometheus Design are much "better" written, and much less interesting.