Title:  Life . . . Death . . . Life. .  . Love?      Part Three

Author:  Shoshana

Summary:   On board the Bounty (The Voyage Home)         

    McCoy asks Spock what it is like to die, prompting

    unexpected memories.  Prose sequel to the fal-tor-pan

    poem Through a Glass, Darkly (Spiced Peaches XXVI).

Rating:  PG-13 (for mild sexual content in Part II)    

Pairing:  S/Mc    Includes brief mention of McCoy’s

     canonical relationships with various women, and brief

    reference to a possible past male partner of Spock’s.

Word count (Part Two):  2600  

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

     quark or vibrating string of it.

Why did you choose me

You green-blooded son of bitch

And why did my heart choose you . . . .

          -  Leonard McCoy

             Through a Glass, Darkly  (Canto II)            

“These peaches you brought over look delicious,” McCoy said.   “Are you sure you don’t want one?”  Taking a peach from the basket on the table, he offered it to his guest.

Amanda shook her head.  “I’m not especially fond of them.  But I’ll warn you,” she said with the mischievous smile McCoy had first seen so many years ago on the Enterprise, “my son likes them quite well.”

His mouth watering, McCoy replaced the peach. 

“I’m sorry to have missed Spock,” Amanda said.  “Sarek was informed on very short notice that he must attend the Arcturian conference after all.  We leave in a few hours.”

“Spock’s attending a staffing meeting with our once and future Captain,” McCoy said.  “He’ll be sorry he missed you.” 

“Please give him my apologies.  We won’t be returning to Earth before the Enterprise begins its maiden voyage.  The fruit wouldn’t keep, except in stasis, and I thought you and Spock might like these other things, to take with you on the new ship.  Or leave here, in your apartment.”  On the table sat, in addition to the basket of peaches, a glass-enclosed display case holding nineteenth century Terran medical instruments, and an old-style hardbound book.  On the floor were two boxes, the larger one unopened, the other holding a quartet of Vulcan antiquities:  a dagger, a short sword, a bronze mirror and a small copper statue of what McCoy guessed (or at least fervently hoped) was a mythological beast. 

“Family heirlooms which haven’t been displayed for years,” Amanda had said of the Vulcan artifacts.  “To replace the ones Spock lost when the other ship went down.”

How strange, McCoy had thought, to hear the Enterprise – the first Enterprise, his home for so many years, and destroyed in the process of saving Spock – referred to as “the other ship.” 

In five days the Enterprise –A would launch.  Jim had referred to it as “home” on first sight.  Yes, the new ship would be home. 

Spock would be there, sharing quarters with McCoy.  

“Amanda, I thank you again for the peaches.  But this –” McCoy said, touching the glass case, “– I don’t know what to say.  I can’t imagine the time and trouble you took, or the cost, to have it put together.”

“Leonard, you gave Sarek and me something far more precious.  Our son’s life back.  And now, his personality as well.  I can never repay those things.”

“I wasn’t just me.”

“I know,” she agreed.  “That’s why there are gifts for the others, too.”  She gestured toward the unopened box.  “You and Spock will have to distribute the gifts.  They’re all labeled.  I wish I could do so myself.”

“They’ll understand.”  Starfleet personnel were familiar with being given orders on short notice.

Amanda continued, “You’re the one, though, who has eased my son’s long loneliness.  I am grateful for that as well.”  She leaned in over the table, placing her right hand over McCoy’s.  “I’ve hoped for almost twenty years, Leonard, to see this day.”

“For Spock to find a partner, after the marriage with T’Pring fell apart.”

“For him to find you.  For the two of you to find each other.”

“You knew?”  McCoy leaned back in his chair, staring.  “That Spock was in love with me?  That far back?”

“Oh, yes.  And you with him.  I saw it right off, during that trip to Babel.”

“Jim and Uhura have told me they suspected it years ago.  But you were around us such a short time.”

“Do you remember what I told you, when I said goodbye after you decided to undergo the fal-tor-pan?”

McCoy searched his memory.  Slowly, he said, “You told me, ‘I hope someday you know why my son picked you.’ At the time, I wondered what you meant, especially since I was wondering myself why Spock picked me to hold his katra.  Did you ever share your suspicions with Sarek?”

“Not until Spock went to Gol.  I was convinced he went because he wanted to forget you.  You wouldn’t have known, of course, but his mentions of you in his letters dropped off after your marriage on Yonada.”

During the five years of the first mission he had been clueless about Spock’s interest in him.  And, for the second half of that time, married.  After the voyage ended he had tried to make a go

of it with Natira on Daran V, but it hadn’t worked out.  Natira, sensing his discontent, had thought he missed space travel, or, as he had lied to her in the end, Earth.  Instead, he had been hankering after a certain Vulcan whom he had heard had gone to Gol. 

The second of his ex-wives would no doubt be filled with revulsion when she caught wind of his relationship with Spock.  The Fabrini execrated homosexual behavior.  The Oracle, he had been told, was a highly effective deterrent.  He had not been tempted to test it.  

“Sarek was skeptical,” Amanda continued.  “He calculated a twenty-seven point three percent probability that Spock loved

you, and an eighteen point six probability you loved Spock.” 

Amanda smiled.  “My husband has conceded my mother’s intuition was correct all along.”

“He actually thought it more likely Spock was in love with me than vice versa?  I find that surprising.”

“He thought you were excessively irritable with our son.  ‘An illogical way of expressing affection,’ was Sarek’s comment.”

“I thought gift giving was, too, to Vulcans,” McCoy said, smiling.  “So, tell me, how did you ever think of replacing my medical antiques?  I know Spock didn’t tip you off.”

“Shortly after I heard you and Spock had both survived the fal-tor-pan, I asked Jim what I might give you in thanks.”  After their long stay on Vulcan, Amanda was on easy terms with her son’s six friends from the Enterprise.  “He suggested replacing the display case.”

“I’m amazed Jim was able to remember the contents so accurately.”  It had been a long time since Kirk and McCoy had served on the same ship, and in any case antique medical instruments weren’t something McCoy would have expected Jim to pay close attention to. 

Amanda laughed.  “Oh, that wasn’t Jim.  Scotty described and identified them, I think with some help from Hikaru.”

That made more sense.  While never showing interest in the

repair of biological machinery as opposed to that of all things mechanical, the engineer occasionally had expressed curiosity about the hardware utilized in the healing arts.  McCoy vaguely remembered once discussing with Scotty the contents of the display case on his office wall.  And Sulu was always eager to expand his fount of often arcane miscellaneous knowledge. 

McCoy said, “And this book – ‘Poems of the Tiburonian People’?  That’s no Vulcan heirloom.”

“The book is Spock’s.  A friend gave it to Spock when he left Vulcan for Starfleet Academy.  A young man Spock’s age, a Catullan-Tiburonian hybrid who was the son of the Catullan ambassador to Vulcan.  Spock knew only a smattering of Tiburonian, which is why it’s in translation.  He kept it with him throughout his early years of service in Starfleet.  He left it at our family estate, along with all his belongings except the clothes on his back, when he went to Gol.  Afterwards, he asked for the book, but it had been misplaced.”

“Nice to know even Vulcans lose things,” McCoy commented wryly.

“Oh, I suspect Spock blames human rather than Vulcan negligence,” Amanda replied with equal wryness.  “He’s just too polite to say so.  Several times over the years Spock asked about the book.  I found it only recently, while I was sorting through things in storage picking these out.”  Amanda motioned to the open box. “The book had fallen into a large vase.”

“I don’t remember Spock ever mentioning having a friend from Catulla.” 

“Dagyarul died a few years later, while Spock was still at the Academy.  I was on Earth when word came.  I could tell Spock was very upset, though he said little.”

A Catullan-Tiburonian hybrid, McCoy thought.  Even more of an outsider on Vulcan than Spock.  And surely a close friend, for Spock to have kept the book with him for so long.  Could they have been lovers?  McCoy did not ask; he doubted (if indeed lovers they had been) that Amanda knew; he doubted he would ever know.  He had his own secrets of past loves, sweet and painful both, he doubted he would ever share with Spock.   

Amanda said, “Congenital abnormalities led to his early death.  His health problems always made me realize how lucky Sarek and I were to have produced a healthy child.  The doctors had doubted Spock would be viable.”

Amanda was silent, ruminating on the past.  The turn of conversation quieted McCoy as well, as he pondered the future.  Did Spock, the doctor wondered, want children?  For that matter, did he want another child?  He and Spock both had grown daughters.  McCoy pushed the thoughts aside; it was too early in his relationship with Spock to be worrying about such things.

They talked only a short while longer, then Amanda took her leave, for she had not yet finished packing.  They hugged before she left, and she said, “Perhaps by the time we see each other again, you and Spock will give me another excuse to go looking for gifts.”

“Amanda, if you’re talking about a wedding – Spock and I haven’t made any plans.”

The peach McCoy ate after Amanda’s departure was as juicy and sweet as it had looked.  After finishing it, McCoy put away the two boxes and the display case.  Spock would decide what to do with the Vulcan heirlooms; the display case was going on the Enterprise-A.  Curious about the book Spock had carried with him in space for more than fifteen years, McCoy opened the volume.  Spock was not averse, McCoy knew, to reading poetry, but it was hardly his regular reading material.   

On the inside cover was a long inscription, presumably from Spock’s friend Dagyarul, but handwritten in Vulcan, which McCoy could not read.  Thumbing through the book at random, McCoy found wedged within its pages a small sheet of paper with a column of perhaps a dozen numbers – stardates, by the look of them, listed in chronological order – neatly printed in Spock’s precise script.  Glancing at the scrap, he recognized the dates were from the first half of the Enterprise’s initial five-year mission.  He laid the sheet aside to look again at the book.     

The poem on the left was titled “Never to be Mine.”  A love poem, perhaps?  Well, that was a common enough theme throughout the literature of the known worlds.

NEVER TO BE MINE                    

I was pierced through the heart

The black night you married another

Your love for her a lance through my wounded heart

As the two of you sliced the wedding loaf

My happiness was knifed

Bleeding away when together

You mixed and drank the blood-red nuptial wine

I flinched when you took the ceremonial knife

And marked her as your own

But not because I shrank from witnessing

Her momentary pain which I so envied

And when the marks of belonging

Were carved in turn into your expectant flesh

By her cruel and loving hand

Secret, unacknowledged pain stabbed my soul

A wound unseen

But more tender and persistent than your own

For my wound would never heal

Your bed, your love, your life forever given to another

Never to be mine

Aloud, McCoy repeated phrases from poem’s opening lines.  “’I was pierced through the heart’ . . . ‘the black night’ . . . ‘a lance through my wounded heart.’”

During the conversation in which his memory had begun to return, Spock had been remembering this poem. 

A poem of unrequited love. 

McCoy shuddered.  The Tiburonian “mark of belonging” sounded painful.  He was more familiar than he cared to be with the unpleasant components of a number of alien marriage rituals.  

Vulcan’s koon-ut-kal-if-fee was much bloodier than the ritual cutting described in the poem seemed to be.  McCoy remembered, as well, his own “mark of belonging,” the implant called the Instrument of Obedience carried by all adults on Yonada, and placed in McCoy during the brief marriage rite with Natira.  The thing had been damn painful, when the Oracle wanted it to be.  McCoy had been relieved when Spock had removed it.    

An inchoate suspicion growing in his mind, McCoy took a more careful look at the handwritten sheet.  Though unable to identify some of the fourteen stardates, McCoy now recognized most as missions in which Spock’s life or his own had been in danger, often with one of them saving the other, or as occasions he and Spock had enjoyed especially cordial interactions.  The visit to Vulcan for Spock’s wedding was listed, as was the time McCoy, crazed with cordrazine, was lost in twentieth century New York, and the mission to Minara II, where McCoy had come so close to dying at the hands of the Vians.  The final entry, the sole one designating an extended period, was 5451.1 – 5473.6.

McCoy thought back.  The Enterprise had rendezvoused with Yonada on 5476.3.  In the three weeks immediately preceding,

he and Spock had been collaborating on a cytology experiment. 

McCoy remembered their interactions during that time as having been exceptionally amiable.  Jim, among others, had commented how well they were getting along.  Oh, they had argued, but without rancor, and their mutual needling had always been in good fun.  

Then had come his diagnosis and, consequently, his hasty, misguided marriage.  For a long while afterwards, his relationship with Spock had deteriorated, alternating between polite reserve and outright coldness, before finally settling back into uneasy friendship.  McCoy had attributed the change to himself; he had regretted the marriage immediately, and had distanced himself from Spock, with whom he was in love and whose company he now found more painful than ever.   But looking back, McCoy could recognize a change in Spock, as well; he remembered especially Spock’s aggressive hostility towards him on Sarpeidon.  Perhaps more than just time travel had accounted for Spock’s violent behavior.

Had Spock read this poem, McCoy wondered, following his marriage to Natira?  The list ended abruptly, three days before the visit to Yonada.  McCoy recalled his own secret, unacknowledged pain at the prospect of Spock’s wedding.  Spock may well have felt a similar anguish when McCoy had married.  His hurt might have been more acute – and presumably more extended – because

McCoy’s marriage, unlike Spock’s betrothal to T’Pring, had not been terminated until well after the five-year mission’s conclusion.

McCoy replaced between the pages the handwritten sheet with its cryptic numbers.  His suspicions about the poem and the list, like his questions about Spock’s long-dead friend of his youth, would remain unasked.  The events of the five-year mission lay many years in the past.  Its secrets were Spock’s to keep, if he so chose.

There was another question, however, to which McCoy knew the answer, and he hoped Spock knew it, too.  A question, echoed in the title of the poem McCoy had just read, and posed to him in plaintive confusion by Spock, on the bridge of the Bounty:  “Mine?  Truly?”

Gently shutting the book, McCoy said, “This old country doctor is yours now, Spock.  And for the rest of his life.”