Title:  Firepot

Author:  Shoshana

Pairing:  S/Mc

Summary:  Spock’s firepot sees far into the future

       (up to and including the boys’ eventual deaths).

       This fic ignores the events of STXI.

Rating:  G

Disclaimer:  I do not own Star Trek.  Not a molecule, atom,

       quark or vibrating string of it.

Foolish Vulcan.  Once again you have lit the incense within me.  Straight and

quiet you sit before me, composing your body, calming your mind.  Emptying

it of thought and of emotion, in an effort to escape the nettlesome swarm of

illogical thoughts sent you by the humans with whom you serve. To leave

behind, temporarily, the human self which threatens to overwhelm you.  But

most of all, to escape thoughts of him.  The irritable and irritating human who

frustrates and fascinates you, the one with the intense blue eyes.   

I’ve seen him here in this room, though rarely.  He feels the attraction, too,

and like you, he resists it.  And so the two of you will continue your verbal

dance of jabs and jibes, until for a time you both return to the worlds on which

you were born, not admitting that your true home is with each other.

But in the end, you will capture each other, surrendering to yourselves,

and to love.  In an hour of peril and sacrifice, it will be to him you turn, to

make him, unknowingly, the vessel of your essence.  In the rebirth that

follows that crucible, the two of you will finally come together, eventually

to bond and marry.  You will spend together, in contentment, though seldom

in peace, the second half of his life, and the middle third of yours.

And one day, more than a century and a half from now, an aged woman

named Saavik will take a lock of hair from a man long dead, and a lock of hair

from a man recently dead; and in a private ritual agreed upon many years

before, she will set them aflame within me; and when they have burned, she

will collect the tiny pile of ash, and will make pilgrimage to the birthworlds of

those two men, to scatter that ash on thick red clay and red desert sand.  And

she will recite words chosen long before, phrases lifted from ancient rituals

of two worlds:  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  Spock and Leonard, forever

parted, now never parted.”  And then, mourning you both, she will give you

up, to alien sun and native land, and to your planets’ winds.