Title:  The Wizard, the Witch and the Whirlwind

Part 5:  Day of the Scorpion

Based on The Wizard of Oz  (1939)

Parts 1-4 published in Spiced Peaches XXXV

Author:  Shoshana

Summary:   Spock and McCoy pay a visit to Jim Kirk in Riverside, Iowa.  But the three don’t stay there.   

Pairings:  S/Mc    Dorothy/original character(s)  Kirk/Antonia

Rating:  PG-13    

Word count:  5100

Disclaimer:   Brief dialogue quoted/adapted from The Wizard of Oz, screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Woolf, based on the children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.   I do not own The Wizard of Oz or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  Nor do I own Star Trek.  Not a molecule, atom, quark or vibrating string of it.

Author’s note:  Novella length.  Though a Spock/McCoy marital relationship is an important element of the story, the fic is primarily a trio friendship story.  For the purposes of this work, Jim is not fated to die/disappear aboard the Enterprise-B in 2293.  Thank you to Stef for the beta.  Errors are my own.

Recap of Parts 1 – 4:  A few months following their retirement from Starfleet, Spock and Leonard visit Jim at his childhood home in Iowa.  When the house is hit by a tornado, the three friends find themselves in the magical land of Oz – with  Spock having been transformed into a scarecrow, Leonard into a tin man, and Jim into a lion.  Leonard and Spock soon discover that Leonard’s lubricating oil has interesting erotic effects.

In Oz the trio join Kansas farm girl Dorothy Gale (born 1902) on her journey to Emerald City to consult with the Wizard of Oz. 

Dorothy is being pursued by the Wicked Witch of the West, who conjures prehensile trees and a magic river for the travelers to contend with.  Twice the Witch attempts to entice our heroes into handing Dorothy over to her, offering first to return them home in their normal forms, and later, to give them back their normal forms, with extended lifespans to be lived out in Oz. 

Spock formulates two theories about Dorothy Gale, one of which deals with why Jim believes he has met Dorothy previously.  Spock does not share his speculations with the others.

In the dim light of early morning the landscape did not yet glow with the vibrant, vivid colors peculiar to Oz.  Dorothy was finishing a meal of nuts and fruit.  The group would continue on their journey when she was done.

The five visitors to Oz had stopped for the evening by another stream, near a massive walnut tree and a patch of blueberry bushes standing in a field of lavender.  There Dorothy had been able to eat supper, making sure to ask the tree and bushes beforehand for permission to take their fruits – even the fallen nuts.  Leonard had used his axe to open the walnuts.  Later, Dorothy had slept on a thickly piled bed of sweet-smelling, soothing lavender. 

“At least these flowers aren’t sentient,” Leonard had said, as he and Spock yanked the purple spikes.   

Spock and Leonard, having no need to sleep or rest, had stood guard during the night.  Leonard had been tempted to engage in mutual pleasure play with Spock, via the application of oil from Leonard’s can, while the others slept.  (As Spock had pointed out, the activity could not properly be called sex play, since Leonard and he were technically sexless.) 

Spock had repeatedly declined Leonard’s propositions.  “Dorothy or Jim might wake.”  Vulcans had a deep sense of modesty regarding sexual matters.  “The Witch might return.  Or Oz could pose unknown natural dangers.”

Leonard snorted.  “That’s what I was telling you in the forest yesterday.  You didn’t believe me.”

A beetle buzzed by Spock’s face.  “The last two times we engaged in sexual activity in the open air, you were attacked by arthropods.” 

“How’s that relevant?”  Leonard leaned against the walnut’s wide trunk, arms crossed, reminding Spock of when he would lean against the rail of the original Enterprise’s bridge or the doorway of the quarters they had shared on the Enterprise-A.  “A minute ago you said playing with my oil can doesn’t count as sex.” 

“Technically, it does not.  But the sensation does feel like a sexual climax.”

“Always duty before pleasure with you.”  Spock was tempted, Leonard knew.  He also knew Spock was right that they should not let themselves be distracted while on guard duty.  “Why did I have to marry a Vulcan?” 

“It was an act of logic.  A temporary aberration, obviously.”  Spock held out two fingers. 

They both smiled, as bright moonlight reflected off a pair of outstretched metal fingers.

Their dutiful vigilance failed to prevent Toto from slipping away

in the dark to catch what Leonard in the morning tentatively

identified, from scattered bits of fur, as a chipmunk.

Jim had sniffed the bloody tufts.

“Hungry yet?” asked Leonard.   

“Getting there.”

Dorothy swallowed the last handful of walnuts.  “I know we have to find Emerald City and the Wizard, but I almost wish we could visit that mountain over there.”  She gazed longingly at a lone peak, mostly obscured by clouds, rising like a pyramid from the flat plain.  “I’m sure it must be beautiful up close.  I’ve never seen a mountain before, except in pictures.”

“We have been traveling north,” Spock said.  “That mountain lies to the west.”

“You mean that’s where the Wicked Witch of the West lives?”  Dorothy looked at the mountain with revulsion.

“I calculate an eight-seven point six probability that is the case,” Spock said.  “A mountain is easily defensible.  And traversing a mountain would pose no obstacle for a witch flying on a broom.  Or for flying monkeys.”

“In that case, I don’t want to go there.”  Dorothy turned away.

A swirling, funnel-shaped cloud of flame materialized ten meters away.   The fiery vortex collapsed, revealing the Wicked Witch of the West.

“Ah hah, my pretty!  You say you don’t want to visit my lovely mountain?  But you will!  You will!”  The Witch shook her broom menacingly.  “Very soon, you will be my guest!  Don’t you want to save everyone a lot of trouble, and come along with me now?”

“No!  I don’t want to go to your mountain!” Dorothy said.  Jim placed himself protectively in front of the girl.  Spock and Leonard stood to either side of her.   Leonard picked up Toto.  The terrier was growling at the Witch.   

The Wicked Witch scowled.  “In that case, I suppose I must deal with this motley crew of grotesqueries you call your friends.

“In exchange for the girl, I make you one last offer.  You have turned down lengthened lifespans here in Oz.  I offer you now extended time in your own world – time back, that you thought gone forever.  I can send you back to your own past, with your current memories intact.  The wisdom and knowledge of your maturity, in the bodies of your prime. 

“Not that I am sure any of you three self-sacrificing fools have much wisdom.  But if the three of you come to your senses, you can return to your young adulthood.  I can send you back only to a point in time when the three of you were together.  You must go as a group, to the same time and place.

“Think of cherished moments you can relive, and the regretted mistakes you can correct.  This is your last chance.  I will not negotiate with you again.”    

Jim’s mind rushed to the many decisions or events he wished he could have changed – that he could change, assuming the Witch was telling the truth.  He could marry Antonia.  And there were the disasters, personal and planetary, he could avert.  He would be unable to save Edith, or Gary, who had died three weeks before Bones had first stepped on the Enterprise.  But there were others who might be spared.   

David – the son he had known for such a short time, impulsive and brilliant – alive if Khan Noonien Singh and his cohorts were never wakened.  With that same act of omission, Spock spared a painful death, and Bones spared the ordeals of bearing Spock’s katra and the fal-tor-pan.  Miramanee, if he never entered the obelisk on Amerind.  The men and women – with added guilt, he knew he no longer remembered all the names – who had died, by injury or illness, under his command.  The colonists of Cestus III.  The miners and the myriad unborn Horta, on Janus VI.  The billions of the Malurian star system, and the billions more of the Gamma Seven-A system.  The colonists of Deneva, including Sam and Aurelan, and their younger sons Brian and Jeremy.  And so many others . . . .

But even as Jim thought of saving his brother and his family, he wondered if he would ever have been transported to Oz, if Sam had survived.  Would a Kirk still own the house in 2293, if Peter’s life, and his own, had run a different course?  What would happen if he and Spock and Bones were not at 1939 Garland Lane when a tornado hit on a rainy November morning?   

The paradox, if paradox it was, was irrelevant.  They could not allow the Witch to take an innocent child.   

Spock was recalling the individuals – unlike Jim, he knew each name – who had died under his command.  He remembered, too  the Vulcans who had perished on the Intrepid, and Sybok, the brother he had rediscovered after many years, only to be lost soon after in a strange purgatory.  Leonard thought of Chancellor Gorkon, the Klingon who wished for peace even as he lay dying by a violent act of treachery, and of others, friends and strangers and enemies alike, whose lives had likewise slipped away as he had tried in vain to heal them.  Of Robert and Nancy Cramer, and the lonely salt vampire he had had to kill.   

And Spock and Leonard thought of each other, and of their first encounter.   

Spock and Leonard had met on stardate 1334.2, twenty-two days following the Enterprise’s disastrous initial mission under the command of its new Captain to the edge of the galaxy.  Kirk introduced the two officers in the briefing lounge of the Enterprise, in orbit around Starbase 8.  That first encounter was spent, as the three men would spend so many hours in the coming years, with Leonard watching Jim and Spock play chess.       

The Enterprise had already been scheduled to visit Starbase 8 in order to pick up McCoy, the replacement for Dr. Mark Piper, who was retiring.  McCoy was, Spock knew, Kirk’s choice for Chief Medical Officer from the start, but an emergency detour by his previously assigned vessel had prevented the physician from reporting in time to embark from Earth with the Enterprise.

Collecting the new CMO was no longer the primary purpose of the visit to Starbase 8, however.  The Enterprise had been badly damaged crossing the Great Barrier, and while Chief Engineer Scott had cobbled together repairs allowing warp drive, additional repairs were needed.  The Enterprise also had the grim task of delivering to Starbase 8 the bodies of the crewmembers, excepting those of Gary Mitchell and Dr. Elizabeth Dehner, who had died on the mission.  Kirk knew he would be grilled the next day by starbase commander Commodore Fitzsimmons about the events which had led to the deaths of twelve crewmen. 

The evening was a social occasion.  Business and formalities could wait until Scott, the ship’s remaining senior officer, was available. “Besides,” Jim had said, only half joking, “by this time tomorrow, I may be relieved of my command.”

It was Leonard who had suggested he observe Jim and Spock play that night.  Originally, Jim had challenged Leonard to a match.  The doctor had declined, saying, “I’d rather take it easy my first night aboard.  Let me watch someone else get their ass whipped.”

Spock’s victory that night had perhaps been attributable in part to Jim being distracted by grief and anxiety, tempered by the pleasure of reunion with an old friend.  Spock had had his own distractions to deal with – and they had not centered on the possibility, improbable by his estimation, that he would find himself in command of the Enterprise the next day. 

His sexual experience was very limited, but Spock was no innocent, and was well aware of his attraction to males.  Even so, he was disturbed by the intensity of his reaction to the new CMO.  The Doctor’s passionate opinions hinted at the possibility of a different sort of passion; the evident sensual delight he took in his bourbon intimated a different brand of sensuality.  Spock was grateful for the diversion of the game, which conveniently kept his attention away from McCoy’s wiry body and blue eyes. 

Leonard’s reaction to Spock was similar.  “Lust at first sight,” he called it, years later.  He could only hope that if Spock, or Jim, noticed him staring at Spock’s sculpted face, with its graceful ears and upswept brows, that they would attribute it to his never having met a Vulcan before.  Spock – long and sleek, lithe and elegant, narrow of face and long of ear, exotic and mysterious – reminded him of a friend’s Oriental shorthair cat.  Leonard wanted to unleash the coiled power he sensed within that body.

And unlock the secrets between those pointed ears.  Spock was very reserved that night, more so even than usual.  Jim, noticing his First Officer’s reticence, naturally assumed Spock did not wish to intrude upon his established friendship with the doctor.  Both he and McCoy tried to draw Spock out, without success.  Leonard left the room that evening with a sense of a cool and formidable intellect, and little else.  That much he would have expected, from what he had heard of Vulcans.  Vulcan or not, anyone who could beat Jim Kirk in a chess match sans handicap had to be smart.  Leonard counted not least among his own intellectual accomplishments the two times he had managed to play to a draw with Jim.

Aware weeks earlier that the Enterprise’s Science Officer was a Vulcan-Terran hybrid, Leonard noted Spock’s reluctance to acknowledge his human heritage, and his seeming disdain when he did.  The psychologist was intrigued by Spock’s mental make-up, the physician curious about his hybrid anatomy.  Spock was a book Leonard McCoy wanted to read, in more ways than one.

If not as silent that evening as Spock, McCoy was no more forthcoming about his personal life.  Already established was a pattern which would hold true during the five-year mission and for a long time afterwards:  most of what Spock knew of Leonard McCoy’s history he learned second-hand from the Captain. 

Kirk had told him McCoy was from the American Old South, a fact evidenced by the man’s soft drawl.  The CMO was, like his predecessor and many Starfleet medical personnel, a warrant officer who had not graduated from the Academy.  He had befriended Kirk nine years earlier on Starbase 14, while overseeing the younger officer’s long convalescence following life-threatening injuries in an explosion on the Farragut.  Like Spock and Chief Engineer Scott, he currently held the rank of Lieutenant Commander.  His immediate prior posting had been the hospital ship Jean-Martin Charcot.

McCoy was on easy terms with Kirk, addressing the Captain as “Jim,” a familiarity taken previously only by the late Gary Mitchell.  Spock could not be sure what had passed between the Captain and the CMO earlier, but it was obvious Kirk had confided in McCoy in detail about the ill-starred first mission and the wrenching loss of Mitchell.  Clearly evident to Spock in the doctor that first night were strong opinions, acerbic wit, and, as his comments about Commodore Fitzsimmons advertised, a thoroughgoing lack of respect for military rank.  Unlike Leonard, Spock did not allow himself to wonder what the other man’s character might be, beyond those pungent first impressions.

Over the months which followed, that initial attraction, so unexpected and unsettling, grew into mutual irritation – then into respect, and later, friendship.  And finally, into an equally unsettling and unexpected love.  A love that had not been acknowledged for two decades, until after the fal-tor-pan.  To have those intervening years back, with their bodies young again, and their memories intact . . . .

Chronologically, the age difference between them was insignificant.  Physiologically was a different story.  A Vulcan’s average lifespan exceeded that of a human by a century.  And there was mounting evidence that patients treated successfully for xenopolycythemia did not have normal lifespans, due to accelerated aging.    

Leonard stretched his arm to very gently rest on Dorothy’s back, below the injured shoulder.  Spock, standing on her other side, took the hint, and did the same, so that his hand and arm touched those of Leonard.

Thoughts flowed, memories mingled, so that each saw himself through the other’s eyes as he had been during that first evening on the Enterprise – young, vigorous, virile.  Leonard, if not in his prime as the Witch had offered, not much beyond it.  They experienced the old yearning for each other, sweet and sharp and fresh.  They recognized in each other, too, a new yearning, a temptation for a thing more dangerous even than a passion for an alien fellow officer.

They could not eat of this apple.

//I know it cannot be, Spock.  But darlin’, oh, you were beautiful back then.//

//Lenkam, ashayam, as were thee.//

When the Witch had tried tempting them before, in the forest and by the stream among the violets, Jim, acting in his accustomed role of leader, had spoken for them.  This time, Leonard needed to speak for himself.   Perhaps he needed to hear it out of his own mouth. 

“No.”  Leonard spoke firmly.  “We do not accept your offer.  I speak for Spock.  For Jim, as well.”

Jim’s head swung around to look at his friend.  His teeth bared in a leonine smile.  

“Does this empty-headed tin can speak for you, Captain?”

“Yes, he does.”

The Witch sneered.  “Fools!  In the end, I will have Dorothy.  You will lose.”

Jim said, “You make it sound like a contest.”

“A contest.  Or a game.  If you prefer, a war.  You were a warrior once, Captain.” 

Jim growled, low and deep.  “I still am, you will find.”  His teeth bared, this time not in a smile but a snarl.  “You will also find, in case you don’t already know – I don’t like to lose.”

“You don’t have your beloved ship and its crew to protect you anymore.  This contest is on my turf, on my terms.”  The Witch made a sweeping motion with her free hand.  “Remember – the queen is the most powerful piece in chess.”

“True,” acknowledged Jim.  “But the game doesn’t end until the king can be captured.”

“Give me your pawn, Captain, and I’ll call our little game a draw.”

“No, Madam.  We’ll be playing out the endgame.  Dorothy’s a lot more powerful than a pawn, I think, or you would have captured her already.”

“I will take the girl in the end, and if you are misguided enough to come after her, you will lose your lives.”  The Witch pointed a crooked finger at Jim.  “You, Captain, you overgrown, overweight tomcat – I will make you into a rug for my bedroom.  After all, you like women’s bedrooms, do you not?

“As for you, you ambulatory assemblage of alien alfalfa” – the knobby green finger was aimed at Spock, its long fingernail pointed and curved, like a claw – “I will burn you in my hearth until you are ash.  You like heat, so I’ve heard.  You should feel right at home.”

The claw turned to Leonard.  “And you, dear Doctor, decrepit scrapheap from a hardware store, I plan to melt down to make tin cups for my Winkie soldiers.  In death you can continue to serve the physical welfare of your fellow beings, as you have so foolishly wasted your life doing.  And when I melt you down I’ll be sure to utilize as fuel that scrawny sack of stubble.  You can burn together.  You’ll like that, I’m sure.”

“Go ahead and try, you carping, caterwauling, sharp-tongued harpy,” Leonard said.  “We’re not letting you have Dorothy.”

The Witch shook her broom.  “Twice now, you befuddled funnel-head, you have insulted me, after I warned you not to.  For that, you shall soon feel the sting of my ire.”

Shrieking her ominous laugh, the Wicked Witch motioned with her broom.  She disappeared in a fiery vortex, which thinned to a swirling ropelike shape and finally to a mere thread of flame.  Her laugh lingered, fading with the thinning ribbon, and disappearing with the last spark.   

“I only called her a carping, caterwauling, sharp-tongued harpy just now.”   Leonard was frowning in puzzlement.  “How does that count as two insults?”

Spock said, “Immediately after she left us stranded on the island, you said, and I quote, “That hag’s nastier than a Hagabateelian nightwing scorpion.”

Leonard said, slowly, “But a tin man like me can’t be stung.” 

“True,” Spock said.  “Nor can a man of straw like myself.”  He looked at Jim, Dorothy and Toto.  “But they can.”

“You think she’s planning to conjure up a Hagabateelian nightwing scorpion?” Jim asked, alarmed.  He had seen what a single sting had done to Leonard.

“Or a swarm of them,” Spock said. 

Leonard shook his head.  “They’re solitary.  And nocturnal.”

“Leonard, to quote you a second time, ‘we’re playing by a different set of rules here.’”

“What’s a Hagabateelian nightwing scorpion?” Dorothy asked.

“A very nasty flying bug that doesn’t live in Kansas.”  Leonard’s voice was grim.  “Their sting is dangerous and excruciatingly painful.  Think of a hornet’s sting, several times worse.  And like hornets, nightwings are capable of stinging multiple times in succession.  Two or three stings are occasionally lethal in an adult human.  Without treatment, thirty usually are.”

Dorothy shivered.  “They sound awful.” 

“They are.”  Unconsciously, Leonard touched his right wrist, where a Hagabateelian nightwing scorpion had stung him four months earlier.  “I should know.  I’ve been stung by one.  It was like a hot nail being driven into my skin.”

Hagabateelian nightwing scorpions were five centimeters long, with wingspans of seven and a half centimeters.  The venom delivered by their six millimeter long stinger was a potentially lethal mix of peptides, polypeptides and enzymes with neurotoxic and hemotoxic effects.      

“The Witch’s prior attacks came immediately after our encounters with her,” Spock pointed out.  “Fleeing is unlikely to be of use.  Nightwings can fly forty kilometers an hour.”  He bent down and began tearing lavender up by the roots.  “We should prepare.  We are fortunate we have the bed of cut lavender we prepared for Dorothy last night.”

They had a few minutes to get ready.  Spock and Jim tore up lavender.  Leonard used his axe to cut out squares of sod. 

Jim’s ears twitched.  “I hear humming.”  To their left, two hundred meters away and a few meters above the ground, a small undulating cloud was flowing toward them.   

“Dorothy, get on the ground, in the hole Bones tore out.”  The girl hesitated at the edge of the shallow depression.  “Down, now,” Jim ordered.  “I’ll cover you with my body.”

“But Toto!” Dorothy cried.  “If a few stings can kill a person, won’t one kill him?  And how many would kill a lion?”

Those were questions none of them wanted to see answered.  

Spock picked up Toto and stuffed the struggling dog under his overalls.  “I will lie down and help Jim cover Dorothy.  To protect Toto, I will have to face downwards.  The stingers are long enough they might penetrate my clothing.  Leonard, you will have to fight the nightwings by yourself.”

“Me?”

“Seems appropriate,” Jim said, as he eased his bulk into a low crouch over Dorothy.  “You’re the one who inspired the Witch to send them.”

“Jim, be careful!”  Leonard was tossing clumps of sod and lavender along the edges of Jim’s trunk, especially along his left side.  Spock had laid down and was partially protecting the lion’s right ribcage.  There was not nearly enough material to cover a lion.  “Remember her arm!”

Jim growled.  “You should have thought of her arm, Doctor, not to mention my hide, before you insulted our friend the Witch.” 

Leonard did not have time to respond before the buzzing swarm descended upon the group.  Frenziedly, he began to kill the winged scorpions, concentrating on the ones which landed on Jim.  The nightwings seemed more attracted to Spock’s green clothing and greenish straw than to Jim’s yellow fur. Even so, Jim was stung twice on the left flank by a scorpion Leonard initially missed.     

Five scorpions died ramming their stingers into their own abdomens as they futilely attempted to sting Leonard.  With his paw Jim squashed one nightwing before it stung him on the opposite foreleg.  Spock successfully killed three with his hands.  Leonard exterminated eleven – some with his hands, some with his feet, and others with Spock’s wooden spear. 

Toto barked and whined and struggled throughout his confinement in burlap and straw.  Spock repeatedly had to reassure Dorothy that the dog was well-shielded.   

Leonard stomped on a scorpion crawling on bare dirt.  “That’s the last one.  I think.  But no one move until I can check you, especially Jim’s mane.”  Grinding the brown and yellow arthropod into the dirt until it was an unrecognizable pulp, he took rare satisfaction in killing a nonsentient creature.  “Anyone hear more buzzing?”

Jim’s ears twitched.  “No.”  The tufted tail was lashing.   

“I don’t think I got stung.”  Dorothy’s voice was muffled.

“Dorothy, honey, if you got stung, believe me, you’d know it.  It would’ve hurt worse than when I was putting your shoulder back in place.”

No one witnessed Leonard’s stricken expression, or heard the curses he silently directed at himself, as he looked helplessly at the football-sized swelling on Jim’s flank.  He silenced his inner voice while checking Spock’s surface for nightwings, but Spock was nonetheless aware, through their empathic bond, of Leonard’s deep distress.  Physically uninjured, Leonard was feeling keenly the sting of the Wicked Witch’s rage.  

Jim’s tail lashed irritably as Leonard combed through the thick mane with his fingers.  “Sorry I didn’t get to that one in time, Jim.  Are you feeling nauseated or faint?  Short of breath?”  In his current leonine form, Jim weighed three times Leonard’s human body, but the venom of the Hagabateelian nightwing scorpion was so potent Leonard feared systemic effects even in a lion – not that Leonard would be able to counteract such complications if they did occur.

“No.  But ‘a hot nail being driven through me’ was an understatement.  Maybe a power drill coated with concentrated chili pepper sauce, with bleach poured on for good measure.”

“Wish I had antihistamine and analgesic to give you.”  Local tissue destruction from the cytotoxic venom, Leonard knew, would leave the site of the untreated stings a necrotic crater.  Leonard’s single sting had warranted treatment with a dermal regenerator.  “The worst of the pain will subside in a few hours.”

“Glad to know that,” Jim growled.   

“I’m sorry I didn’t keep my big mouth shut.”

Jim’s tail lashing harder was his sole response. 

Leonard completed checking Spock and Jim.  “You can all get up now.” 

Dorothy thanked Spock for protecting Toto, and Leonard for killing the majority of the nightwings, but her gratitude was understandably directed primarily towards Jim.  Shaken by the severity of Jim’s injury and the knowledge of what she had been spared, her acknowledgement of thanks was solemn rather than effusive.    

“I knew already you were brave,” she said.  “I didn’t realize how brave.  Thank you.”

For a few hours Jim rested.  Catlike, he chose to creep off alone. Concerned that he was out of sight, Leonard sent Spock to observe him.  “He’s not likely to have an allergic reaction at this point, but I’d rather someone were with him.”

They both sensed Jim would not welcome Leonard’s company just now. 

Jim was lying on his uninjured side.  Spock sat down in the lavender fifteen meters behind him.   

The lion’s ears twitched.  “I know it’s you, Spock.  I’ll be all right.  I want to be alone.”

“I will not disturb you.”

They sat in silence for three hours before Jim spoke.   

“Bones sent you, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”  

A silence of five minutes passed before Jim spoke again.  “Damn fool thing he did, pissing off the Witch like that.”

“Agreed.”

Another long silence.  “I suppose you’re going to tell me he feels terrible about what happened.”

“Do I really need to?”

“No.  I’m sure if he could, he’d have let every single one of those nightwings sting him before he’d let it touch anyone else.”

“He said as much.  And meant it.”

Jim rose.  He turned himself around to face Spock, then lowered himself to his belly.  “We were lucky, Spock.  Lucky the Witch didn’t send more nightwings than she did.  Lucky you guessed what she planned to do.  Lucky we already had those cut flowers.  And damn lucky she didn’t send those little winged monsters after us during the night.”

Spock bent his head in assent.  “Jim – if it had not been Hagabateelian nightwing scorpions, it would have been something else.  Possibly something worse.”

“I wasn’t looking forward to tangling with flying monkeys.  Even less now.”  Jim glanced back at his swollen left flank.

“Indeed.”

“I wonder if Peter’s been notified the house is wrecked?  No one else will know we’re missing.  The Witch was right.  There’s no Enterprise looking for us, this time.”

“It is possible time passes differently in Oz.”

Time.  The “gift” the Witch claimed to promise.  “Does Bones wish he could go back?”

Spock knew Jim was not referring to returning to Riverside.  “Leonard . . . has not been well.  Yes.  But he knows it is not possible to accept the Witch’s latest offer.”

“You’re not the only one who’s been worried about his health . . . I give him credit for speaking up.   And you?  Do you want to return to the past?”

“It is not logical to want that which is not possible.”

“I’m not as logical as you.  I’m sorry I didn’t marry Antonia when I had the chance.  Part of me wanted to go back, when the Witch told us that.  Still wants to.  And not just for Antonia.”

“Jim.  I am not as logical as you’re giving me credit for.”

The tawny eyes regarded Spock.  “Twenty years.  You loved each other all that time, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”  It was not precisely twenty years, but Spock could not pinpoint the specific day he had known he had loved Leonard, or when Leonard had started loving him.

The lion gazed now beyond Spock, to where Leonard and Dorothy stood talking under the towering walnut.  “I guessed.  I should have said something.  To one of you . . . both of you, if necessary.  If not on the first mission, at least after V’Ger.”

“It would not have mattered.  I was not ready.  Even after V’Ger.”

“And Bones?”

“He would have thought himself ready for commitment, I think, even in those early years.  I am not sure he was.”  Spock looked over his shoulder, to briefly observe his mate.  He turned back to Jim.  “It is for the best you remained silent, and that Leonard and I kept our own counsel.”

“I wasn’t ready when I left Antonia.  For marriage, or to give up Starfleet for good.  To give up adventure.”  Jim huffed, a sound that might have been a laugh.  “No shortage of adventure in this place.  If we manage to get back, maybe I’ll welcome a quiet retirement.”

“Perhaps.”  Privately, Spock suspected the urge for excitement would inevitably rear its head again in his friend.   

“If I’ve got to be stuck here in Oz, I’m glad it’s with you . . . with both of you.”

Spock inclined his head.

“Go tell Bones what I just said.  He probably could use hearing it.”

A few minutes later, Leonard approached Jim.   He awkwardly lowered himself to a sitting position to be at eye level with the injured lion.  Metal joints, even lubricated, were not as limber as those of human limbs.    

“Jim, I’m sorry this happened.  If I could change places with you, I would.”

Tawny eyes met blue-gray ones.  “I know, Bones.”

“You feeling any better?”

“The worst of the pain has gone away, like you said.  I’m ready to travel.”  Jim got up and walked over to Leonard, who was struggling to rise. 

“You can pull yourself up, holding on to my right shoulder,” Jim suggested.  “But I have something to say, first.”

“Yes?”  Leonard expected a stern admonishment not to again insult the Wicked Witch of the West.  

Jim swung his head so close to Leonard’s the thick mane brushed the metallic face.  He lowered his voice to a whisper.  “The next time that horrible hideous hag from hell shows up . . . let me insult her.”