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Chapter Text

TWENTY YEARS AGO

The Ardennes Forest, Belgium
1916

Sarek could smell the bodies burning from 2.45 kilometers away.

Immediately, he ordered his driver to stop, then raised his hand out the window to call the small convoy to a halt.

“Sir?” asked the young lieutenant nervously. Sarek ignored him, stepping out of the lorry’s passenger seat and directly into the middle of the road. This, of course, forced the other drivers following behind to stop as well, or else risk running over one of the single most important diplomatic figures in the whole world.

They stopped; but they were not happy about it.

The white-haired man with spectacles who was called Hargreaves - special attaché to the American ambassador in London - climbed out of his own car, which had followed closest behind Sarek’s own, and a few of the cargo drivers followed. They approached the Vulcan warily, radiating confused annoyance. Sarek had expected as much. This cohort had developed a strong mutual respect over the course of their rather sensitive work together, despite the cultural differences among its members. Nonetheless, there were times - and Sarek suspected this was about to be one of them - where questions of jurisdiction became somewhat thorny. It was not always clear to Hargreaves, or indeed to Sarek, which of them had final authority on any given matter, and most of the time they worked it out with many polite gestures of deference; but neither were afraid of drawing a hard line when he believed himself best suited to make the proper decision. The lack of clear hierarchy was a source of continual vexation to Sarek, but this was the cost of diplomacy; it would not be received well were he to wield the might of Vulcan as a blunt instrument over the Englishman’s head every time he was incorrect. 

And after all, this was not a Vulcan initiative. It was a human one, to which Vulcan had offered her aid and support. Their edict of noninterference did not permit them to take a side in combat - not even to draw this endless, bloody war to a halt for the preservation of human lives; T’Pau had been quite clear on this point - but it placed no restrictions on aid to civilians, and when Sarek had announced his decision to commit Vulcan resources to the cause of preventing famine, she had not stopped him.

The Commission for Relief in Belgium, formed by an international coalition of diplomats and financiers, was tasked with the challenge of getting emergency resources to towns whose entire stores had been appropriated by the occupying Germans. While British troops deliberately broke German supply lines to starve the troops at the front, Belgium - who only produced 21.24% of the food her citizens needed, and was dependent on German imports that were now cut off - teetered on the brink of outright famine. Any food grown, sold or produced in Belgium, or sent in by other relief agencies, was considered German property, and anyone with access to food was answerable to German soldiers. But CRB troops were not, and the supplies in their trucks were technically considered the property of the American ambassador in Belgium, which meant they were generally allowed to pass through occupied territories without egregious interference.

It was, however, entirely up to the occupying German soldiers whether or not they told CRB the truth about where the endangered villages were located; and it was plain that today they had lied.

“Why the devil have we stopped?” demanded Hargreaves. He was elderly, for a human, and rather hot-headed; Sarek noted with interest that vasodilation had already set in, causing his cheeks to flush pink with displeasure. His driver and assistant - a dark-haired young woman addressed as Miss Norwick who Sarek had come to respect very much - laid a rather quelling hand upon his arm.

“We were informed by the German liaison officer at Reims that this region was uninhabited,” Sarek explained. “Before the battle two years ago, there were five villages between here and the river. All were destroyed, and their citizens forcibly relocated.”

“Yeah, so?” called out a voice from the back of the crowd. American, by the accent. Sarek was becoming rather fluent in that large nation’s regional nuances. He was 83.2% certain this speaker hailed from the state called New Jersey.

“The liaison officer lied,” he informed them. “As a Vulcan, my senses are sharper than yours. If we divert from our planned route and continue east down this road, proceeding deeper into the forest, in a matter of minutes you will all know what I know: that somewhere in these hills, a village survived the Battle of the Ardennes, against all odds, and did not burn with all the others.”

“Your point?” pressed Hargreaves.

“It is burning now,” said Sarek. “I can smell it. You will too.”

Hargreaves looked a little sick. “You mean,” he began uncertainly, taking a step toward Sarek and lowering his voice, “that you can smell -”

“Yes.”

“Not just buildings and trees and things, I mean, but rather - that is to say -”

“They are burning their dead,” said Sarek. “And it is being done carefully, and deliberately. Probably in a structure which was designed for the purpose. You will notice, Hargreaves, that we cannot see the smoke. And no other signs could be detected from this distance by human senses.”

"Meaning nobody passing by would know a thing if they hadn't got a Vulcan with them."

"And no one who had sequestered themselves for two years at such a remote location, cut off from their environs, would be likely to know about the existence of the Commission and our work -"

" . . . and therefore would have no reason to imagine a Vulcan might ever happen by. They'd be thinking themselves entirely in the clear."

"That is also my conjecture."

The two men exchanged a long look full of meaning.

“Our orders were to continue on to Liège,” Hargreaves reminded him. "'No deviations.' The fellow was quite explicit."

Sarek nodded. “Affirmative.”

“This road is the only route the German soldiers approved for the convoy. Go off map, and we’ve no idea what’ll happen. They won’t care that the Americans have sent a Vulcan with us. They won’t care that all we’re carrying is food. We’ll have a target on our backs just like anyone else who crosses that border into occupied territory. They could shoot us on sight.”

“They would perceive such an act as well within their rights. The risk to our lives increases by 782.4% if we diverge from the route as established between the Commission's board of trustees and the German government."

"So you're asking us all to follow you on a potential suicide mission."

Sarek opened his hands in a gesture of acceptance. "Kaiidith."

The Englishman nodded briskly. “Good, then. We’ve said it out loud so we know it’s been said, and we can’t pretend later that we didn’t know what we were doing." He signaled to the other men to return to their vehicles and prepare to continue on. "Now get back in your lorry, Ambassador. We’ve got to follow your Vulcan nose through the woods until we find out what the devil is going on, and it sounds like time is of the essence.”

Sarek gave the man an approving nod as they both returned to their vehicles, and the convoy turned sharply to the east, leaving the main road behind and disappearing into the thickly forested hills. Nobody fired at them from the cover of the trees as they did so, which seemed as auspicious a beginning as they might realistically expect; but it would only grow worse from here.

The lorries picked up as much speed as they dared through the narrow openings in the rough terrain, guided by the keen eye of Hargreaves' driver Miss Norwick, who Sarek had been informed was raised in an exceedingly rural corner of England and was therefore skilled at navigating such landscapes. Under her leadership, no one in the convoy had experienced so much as a punctured tire yet. Still, it was slow going, and he found it a challenge to suppress his mounting impatience and concern.

Not for the first time, Sarek found himself in disagreement with his grandmother's inflexibility on such matters as shared technology; with a Vulcan aircar, this journey could be completed in minutes, irrespective of road conditions. But T'Pau held firm; food and medicine were permissible, "because the humans cannot turn them to their own ends and adopt them as tools of warfare," but his requests for a starship with a human and Vulcan crew had not been granted. As yet, she insisted repeatedly, no human of her acquaintance could be trusted at the helm of such a vehicle without succumbing to temptation and using it to forcibly dominate the rest of Earth. The Andorians and Tellarites were ready to begin exploring negotiations for some form of interplanetary alliance; the humans, she believed, were not. They had not yet developed the technology of space travel, they were ravaged by preventable social ills, and their civilization was in its infancy. 

It was fortunate that Spock's education only required him to reside with her on Vulcan for half the year; without regular, sustained periods of immersion in his mother's culture, Sarek suspected his son might have been taught by his House Mother to fear, disdain or resent it, rather than truly seeing its possibilities for greatness if only the right visionary human leaders could be found.

On and on, the convoy plunged deeper into the ancient, tangled depths of this largely uninhabited wilderness, and even the proliferation of lush greenery all about them could not suppress the ever-worsening smell. Judging by his own driver, who barely managed to keep one hand on the wheel as the other frantically clutched a handkerchief to his nose in distress, they had passed the point at which any of them could possibly deny what they would find when they arrived at their still-unknown destination. Sarek himself, of course, was able to muffle his own olfactory senses in order to minimize the unpleasantness, but he could hear choking noises from the men in the back of his lorry. They could smell smoke now, acrid and bitter, but somehow still preferable to the other stench it helped to conceal.

Sometimes the smoke smelled only of burning wood and plaster. The clamor of panicked human minds around him always eased, for a few seconds, at that - as though they could pretend that nothing was on fire more sinister than a few buildings.

But the reprieve never lasted for long.

Sarek consulted the map they had been provided. “TARSUS,” it said in square block letters, just a dot buried in the hills of the Ardennes and ringed on all sides by outposts of German troops. If an error had, in fact, been made - if this village had been reported destroyed with all the others but had somehow, quietly, survived - then they would not have received a single morsel from the past two years of emergency supply shipments. They would be living off only what they could forage without coming down from the hills far enough to alert the Germans to their presence.

He wondered if the humans were prepared for the scale of what they might find.

The dirt road wound deeper and deeper into the forest, leaving the open fields and farmland behind. It was early afternoon, and the sun shone high and bright in the summer sky, but they lost it quickly, with the height of the trees. In the abrupt onset of darkness, Sarek’s driver did not see the mud-streaked young man who leaped out of the bushes into the road, flagging them down, until they were very nearly on top of him. 

"Sprechen Sie Englisch?” he called out, waving frantically, as the lorry ground to a halt. “Parlez-vous Anglais?”

“You’re in luck, boy,” called Hargreaves, motioning for the rest of the convoy behind him to stop. He climbed out of the lorry, followed by a couple of uniformed officers, hands dropping to the holsters at their hips just in case; but the Vulcan, stepping out of his own vehicle and following them into the road, already knew they would not be needing them.

At least, not for the fair-haired young man with the wild eyes and mud-streaked face who stood presently before them with an expression of desperate, overwhelmed gratitude. His emotions buffeted Sarek’s shields with such relentless urgency that he was obligated to pause and reinforce them before approaching.

“I am Ambassador Sarek,” he said to the man - no more than a boy, really, by Earth standards; perhaps a few years younger than Spock - as he stepped forward. “This convoy represents an alliance of English and American diplomatic efforts, aided by the Vulcan embassy in London, commissioned to deliver food to Belgian citizens who are suffering from the effects of the German blockade.”

The young man’s face lit up. “You’re CRB?” he exclaimed, sagging in relief. “My God, I’m glad to see you. So am I. It’s how I got stuck here. Midshipman First Class James T. Kirk of the United States Navy,” he added, with a crisp salute. “Honored to meet you face to face, Ambassador Sarek. You spoke at my commencement ceremony at Annapolis. I don’t mind telling you how happy I am to see a Vulcan face right about now. We’re in a hell of a lot of trouble.” He looked from Sarek to Hargreaves and back again. “I see you’ve got weapons, because you’re peacemakers but not fools,” he said dryly. “Our convoy had to cross the same enemy lines you did. The real question is, have you also got medics?”

“Six,” said Sarek, gesturing to one of the lorries at the back of the convoy, “and my own skills at healing are not insignificant.”

Kirk nodded. “Then I think the trucks had better go up the hill to Tarsus, or what’s left of it. You won’t like what you find up there, and it’ll take all hands. And every gun you’ve got. Who’s good with children?” Miss Norwick stepped forward to volunteer, and Jim nodded at her. “Good. That’s plenty. You, ma’am, and you, Mr. Ambassador, come with me. I’ve got people injured about half a kilometer west of here, and a truck will never get near them. We’d better divide and conquer.”

“Will the task when they arrive be self-explanatory,” Sarek inquired, “or will Mr. Hargreaves require your presence in order to direct him?”

A dark cloud passed over the boy’s face. “You’ll get all you need to know based on who runs toward the trucks and who runs away from them,” he said grimly. “And if it’s all the same to you, sir, I’m not sure I could stomach the sight of them again. I was there when the slaughter began, and our group only just got away with their lives. There were people up there I knew, I can’t -” He stopped, swallowing hard. “If it’s all the same to you,” he said again, “I would rather not remember them like that. But if you request it, sir, of course I’ll go wherever I’m most needed.”

“Slaughter?” Sarek repeated. “So there are armed combatants?”

“That's what we were running from,” said Kirk. “With your Vulcan senses, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m guessing you followed your nose here, and you’ve already figured out the same thing we did. It’s a cleanup job now. Burning the evidence. They’ve got guns, and plenty of them, but you’ve got something in your trucks which will keep you safer than any of us. Something I’d have given anything to get my hands on six months ago.”

“What is that?” asked Hargreaves, but Sarek was already ahead of him.

“A radio,” he guessed. “Someone in that village has gone to great lengths to conceal their presence, not merely from the German fortifications at the base of the hills, but from the American outpost nearby which might have sent assistance long ago. We are well within communications range, and may find surrender easier to negotiate if the perpetrators believe mass reinforcements are following us shortly.” At Kirk’s relieved nod of agreement, Sarek turned to Hargreaves. “I will see to the injured with Midshipman Kirk,” he said. “I leave the greater task ahead in your capable hands. Take the radio, and do not hesitate to contact the American army base should assistance be required. Authorization Sarek seven alpha bravo seven zero. At top speed they are no more than 3.43 hours away.”

The elderly Englishman looked troubled, but he only gave a nod, whistling to the trucks to continue winding along the dirt road up the hill. Hargreaves’ young driver, who'd gone into one of the lorries to retrieve a medical kit, hopped gracefully back down again and followed the two men into the forest.

“This is Martha Norwick,” said Sarek to the young man, by way of introduction. “A botanist with expertise in the field of agriculture. She has been working with a team of British, American and Vulcan scientists to develop a new strain of wheat which would regenerate quickly after suffering fire damage.”

“War-proof wheat,” said Kirk, with a grim chuckle. “Wish I could say I didn’t think we’d need it ever again, but after what I’ve seen . . .”

He fell silent for a few moments as they picked their way over fallen tree roots. The damp, rotted smell of old leaves was not pleasant; but it helped, at least, with the fouler aroma which was far more palpable on the road. The young man had sought his refuge wisely.

“Are you able,” Sarek began in a careful tone, after a few minutes made it clear that Kirk knew his way and was perfectly capable of navigating while making conversation, “to tell us what happened?”

“He happened,” said the American bitterly, and the raw emotionalism in his voice would have shocked any other Vulcan but Sarek, who was familiar with the depths of raw, unfiltered human feeling. It was plain that in his natural state, Kirk was expressive and dynamic; those three words encompassed a vast range of sentiments, from anger and hatred to a grief tinged with self-recrimination. This young naval cadet had apparently rescued a significant number of hostages from the massacre of their village, and kept them alive in the woods, an impressive feat even without the presence of enemy troops so nearby; yet it seemed he held himself responsible for not having done more. 

“To whom do you refer?” he asked.

The young man’s voice turned cold and dark with fury. 

“Governor Kodos,” was all he said.

Chapter Text

PRESENT

Martha woke to find the bed empty.

The pillow was cold to the touch, and so was the sheet beneath it, which meant she hadn’t heard him wake. Sitting up in the dark and feeling around her for the bedside lamp, she blinked into its sudden, unwelcome glow and immediately identified the culprit: the latch of one casement window had come loose in the night, and the howling wind off the moors had stolen its way over the high stone walls of Norwick House and into her bedroom.

Rising from the bed, she took her silk dressing-gown from its hook and tied it about her waist, padded barefoot across the ancient flagstones of the bedroom which had housed all the lords and ladies of the manor since the time of William the Conqueror, and muttered a brief yet colorful string of curses at the wayward latch as she tugged it back into place.

The night’s lesser task accomplished, she steeled herself and set off in search of the greater one.

Thomas, she knew, would be in one of exactly three places. His routine, when the dreams came upon him, was at least consistent. If she were very fortunate, she would find him in the kitchens; this meant he was lucid enough to decide that a good hot cup of chamomile tea was all he needed. If she were some degree less fortunate, she would find him in the library, which meant he was stewing again, and there would be a long, fatiguing argument neither of them would enjoy before he would finally relent and permit her to usher him back up to bed.

The third option was the most alarming, and in the past six months it had only happened twice; but still, out of habit, Martha took the steps at the back of the house and checked the south door leading out from the gun-room to the garage and stables before she went anywhere else, and breathed a sigh of enormous relief to find it still bolted solidly shut.

Thomas had not gone out onto the moor in the storm, which meant she could breathe a bit easier.

The kitchen was empty, though she put the kettle on anyway, suspecting she might need a cup herself. Once the pot stood ready and steeping, she made her way back up to the main floor, following the sounds of muttering and soft shuffling footsteps on carpet until she reached the library. All the lights were on, and the door stood open, but the fire had gone out hours before; in her dressing gown, with bare feet, Martha felt a trace of chill, and wished she’d brought a cup of tea with her after all.

For a long moment, she leaned against the doorway of her ancestors’ library, watching her husband puttering around with an old, ratted cardigan sweater hastily thrown on over his striped pajamas, looking like a cross between a small boy and a very old man. He hadn’t put his mask on - he mostly didn’t, around the house, now that the servants didn’t live in - but the livid purple ripples of scar tissue had never bothered her. On the contrary, she tended to feel it was good for him to go without it from time to time and let the damaged flesh breathe a little.

It wasn’t quite sleepwalking, the physician in Princetown had explained, because he was awake while he was doing it, and not so much inside the nightmare itself as he was trapped in an extension of it. Fixated, as it were, on the nightmare’s subject. Still, he was not really lucid or aware of what he did when these fits came upon him, and Martha often caught him regarding new additions to the great cork board in the corner of the room with confusion, as though he could not recall having placed them there.

As she watched, he fumbled through a mountain of newspaper clippings on the little library table, plainly hunting for something in particular, and uttered a small cry of triumph when he found it, darting over to the board in order to pin it in place. Martha could not read the text from all the way across the room, but she did not need to; she was the one who had shown it to him at breakfast, and she knew perfectly well what it said.

“KARIDIAN COMPANY’S NEW ‘HAMLET’ TO PLAY EXETER.”

Seven words, that was all; and now he was pacing in the middle of the night.

He turned back around, from the board to the table heaped with clippings - theatrical notices in half a dozen languages; he’d tracked every step of their continental tour - and looked up just then, seeing her in the doorway. His gaze was dark with emotion, yet curiously blank; for one brief, frightening moment, Martha Leighton felt absolutely certain that her husband had forgotten who she was.

Then his eyes cleared, he straightened up, and he cast a somewhat rueful glance from her dressing gown to the board and back again.

“Just after three,” she replied to his unspoken question, which was all the apology she knew she would receive. “Darling, come to bed. You can’t do anything tonight.”

“No. No, I can’t sleep. I’ve got to drive to Okehampton and get the 5:16 to Exeter if I want to make it to London by morning.”

“You’re doing no such thing,” she said firmly, stepping into the room. “Thomas, the storm -”

“I know, dammit, but -”

“They don't even open until tomorrow night,” she added. “Darling, there’s nothing for you to do in London. They only arrived from Southampton yesterday, and nobody at the Lyceum will know anything more about them than you do. Even if you could make it all the way to Okehampton in the Bentley - and I’m not at all sure you can; the road will be nothing but muck - you know perfectly well you can’t just hang about the stage door and ask questions.”

“That’s not why I have to go,” he said, setting down the clippings and crossing the room to grip her shoulders in both hands. “Martha, Jim’s in London.”

Martha blinked at her husband, stunned. This was nowhere on the list of things she expected him to say. “Jim?” she repeated. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, he rang after dinner.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“You’d already gone up to bed.”

“What on earth is he doing in England?”

“He didn’t say,” Thomas replied, with a trace of his customary dry good humor, “which with Jim, usually means he can’t say.”

Martha snorted in agreement. “At the back and call of the brass, as always.”

“And the Crown,” Thomas reminded her, “since that executive officer of his happens to be the son of the Vulcan Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of St. James.”

This interested Martha, and she forgot her vexation for a moment. “He’s got Spock of Vulcan with him?”

“He’s got the whole lot with him. The Enterprise is in dry dock in Belfast for the next month. Hull repairs or some such. They arrived by train this morning and the High Council is putting them all up at the Vulcan embassy in Regent’s Park. The rest of the crew’s on shore leave already, but Jim’s got meetings at the Home Office keeping him in London.”

“How is he?”

“Don’t know. We didn’t get into pleasantries much.”

“How did he sound?” Martha pressed him impatiently. As though Thomas didn’t understand perfectly well what she meant.

Thomas shrugged a little helplessly. “You know Jim. Bright and charming as always. You can’t tell over the telephone if that really means anything. He might only be . . . well, you know. Doing what Jim does.”

Martha nodded, brow furrowed, thinking it over. Jim really was rotten on the telephone. Never gave anything away. And of course, there was always a chance they were making a great fuss over nothing; Gary had been gone for three years, and the fact that there’d been no one serious since might mean something, or it might not. One got over shock fairly quickly; it was heartbreak that lingered, and in that arena most people found James Kirk difficult to read.

Not the Leightons, of course; not after twenty years of a friendship forged during wartime, in the worst imaginable circumstances. They didn’t see him much anymore, and he seemed quite happy with his new ship and crew; but Thomas did have a point. They wouldn’t know if Jim was truly all right unless one of them actually saw him.

“You’re not going to tell him about the telegram, are you?” she asked, returning with great reluctance to the topic which had brought both of them to this library at three in the morning to begin with.

Thomas scowled, becoming petulant. “I’ve got to tell him about it, haven’t I?” he insisted. “Be sensible, woman. ‘COLONEL EDWARD MOULTON DEAD AT 76 IN MARSEILLES TRAFFIC ACCIDENT,’ not three weeks after Dorothea Eames falls down a staircase and breaks her neck in Frankfurt? You don’t think that means something? You don’t think Jim has a right to know? Dammit, Martha, that’s five of eight! There’s no one left but him and me and that Irish boy no one’s been able to find. And the tour goes to Dublin next!”

“Yes, but the tour isn’t coming to the wilds of Dartmoor,” Martha could not stop herself from pointing out, “which pokes something of a hole in your theory. Exeter’s as near to us as they’ll get. Besides, I thought the Irish family took that boy to America. And you said yourself that Jim Kirk didn’t decide on a trip to London until just now, but the players have had this tour booked for weeks.”

Thomas frowned at her, turning away and returning to his board. “You don’t believe me.”

“I don’t know what to believe,” Martha said honestly. “I’ve been staring at those two faces side by side for the past six months the same as you, and I still couldn’t swear to you whether they’re the same man or not.”

“That’s why I need Jim,” Thomas insisted. “Jim will help. Jim will believe me. I’ll take him to the Lyceum, to see the London performance, and he’ll be convinced, I’m sure of it.”

“He’ll have a Vulcan with him,” Martha reminded him. “One whose own father was there for the aftermath, and saw it all. Saw the body himself. And if it’s true what they say about them having photographic memories -”

“Absolutely not.” He was adamant on this point, surprising her. “No one but Jim can know.”

“You like Spock, Thomas. You’ve said so. You told me yourself you thought his proposals for sub-Saharan irrigation techniques were quite remarkable. The two of you were thick as thieves at that conference.”

“I like him just fine, and I like his father too. But this is too damned dangerous to let in anybody else.”

“Then how exactly do you propose to get Jim down here? You can’t very well drag him away from the Home Office just to spend a few nights in Devon with his friends, playing chess and going for walks. But if you told Spock the truth, he might be able to work through backchannels and -”

“No.”

“It’s an invaluable asset, don’t you see? They share minds with each other, Vulcans do. Sarek won’t be back from his own world until April or something, and I don’t suppose we’ve any way to get him a photograph of the actor; but Spock may well have seen Sarek’s memories. It would be just like having him there as an eyewitness.”

“I don’t trust anyone but Jim. Dammit, Martha, you saw what happened in that village! You were there. We trusted those people, and they turned on us. On each other. People are selfish and rotten inside, that’s all there is to it, and when hard times come they’ll push you in front of the bullet to save themselves. I won’t risk being betrayed again by bringing anybody else into this, and you better not either. The only person it’s safe to trust is Jim.”

“Even if Spock’s testimony could prove you right or wrong once and for all?”

Thomas’ face darkened, and she scrubbed her hands over her face wearily, realizing too late that she’d put her foot in it. She was never at her best at three o’clock in the morning.

“I didn’t mean,” she began, but it was too late. Thomas shoved past her and stormed up the stairs, which Martha knew meant trouble. He was going to his wardrobe, to change his clothes, to drive to London, because she’d overstepped the mark and lost her chance to reason with him.

“Right or wrong,” he repeated bitterly as he went. “Right or wrong. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Martha?”

“Thomas, you’re being ridiculous,” she protested, racing up the stairs behind him. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“The hell you didn’t. You want me to put the whole case before Jim’s pet Vulcan and ask him what he makes of the matter. Ask him if he thinks I’m mad.”

“I didn’t say that. No one’s said that.”

“You don’t think I can feel you all thinking it?”

“I don’t think you’re mad, Thomas,” she insisted, following him into the bedroom and dropping wearily onto the side of the bed while he changed into traveling clothes. “I think you have an obsession, one that isn’t healthy. If you’re right, it’s a matter for the Belgian police. If you’re wrong, you’re pointing the finger at an innocent man. Either way, isn’t it best to know? Then we could put it behind us, once and for all. Things could go back to the way they used to be. Back when you thought he was really dead.”

Thomas whirled on her, his good eye blazing with vicious fury. “I never believed he was really dead,” he hissed at her, “and if you did, Martha, you’re a fool.”

“Twenty years, Thomas,” she reminded him. “Nobody can hide that long.”

“He could,” Thomas muttered darkly. “He was capable of anything.”

As always, Martha found herself unsure what to do in the face of her husband’s abject insistence that the self-appointed governor of a small Belgian village was some kind of mythic figure. The psychiatrists had informed her that it was hardly a rare phenomenon; the human mind found it easier to exaggerate the power of its foes sometimes rather than confront one’s own weakness, or the fact that sometimes things just happened which you couldn’t help at all.

The slaughter at Tarsus had been like that.

Martha hadn’t been there for the two-year reign of terror as the walls slowly closed in around the villagers, culminating in that inferno which destroyed Tarsus forever; all she knew was what she’d been told, and God knew it was sufficient to fuel a lifetime of nightmares. She’d married Thomas Leighton - one of Harvard’s best and brightest, a once-in-a-generation scientific mind with a passionate sense of justice and a resolute insistence that famine was a solvable problem - knowing that trauma still simmered in his blood and bone like banked embers. It had felt perfectly manageable to her at the time, and for awhile they’d made a good life together in spite of it.

Until six years ago, when Thomas saw Anton Karidian’s picture in the papers, and everything went to hell.

Thomas stepped out of the wardrobe, prosthetic mask firmly in place for travel, and Martha sighed and gave up. “Mary will be up soon to feed the chickens,” she said. “Ask her to wake Henry. He can take you to Okehampton in the horse-cart, and you’ll still make your train. I trust a horse in this rain more than a Bentley.”

“Do you think so?” Having gotten his way, Thomas was all smiles again. “Yes, you’re probably right. Henry’s always up at four-thirty anyway, so I won’t have interfered with his day much.”

“Promise me that you’ll stick to the road, and don’t take the shortcut over the tor. The wind is wretched tonight.”

“I’ve lived here ten years too, Martha,” he reminded her, slipping on his shoes and heading down the stairs. “I could find my way from here over Widow’s Tor to Princetown with my eyes shut. I’m not a child.”

“Humor me,” said Martha patiently. “Go to London. See Jim. Take him to the theatre. Bring him back here for a night or two with his friends, if they’ll come. Do whatever you like, Thomas, you’re a grown man. Only for God’s sake don’t be stupid about it. We don’t call that place ‘Widow’s Tor’ just for local color, you know. Lose your footing in the darkness and you’ll break your neck. Is it really worth that, just to spite me for telling you not to?”

Thomas stopped in the grand foyer, the front door open, and turned to look at her gravely, his hand still fixed on the brass knob. Behind him, the wind howled across the moors, the sun still a long way from rising in this gray, grim place. Blighted hawthorn trees reached toward the sickly white moon with grasping, skeletal fingers, scattered across the low hills beyond the dark expanse of the great Grimpen Mire.

“He killed four thousand people, Martha,” he said in a broken, desolate voice. “Three hundred and forty-six were children.”

All the fight went out of her at this, and she nodded dully as she sagged against the doorjamb, suddenly exhausted. “I know, darling,” she said in a low voice. “I know. I know he did. And I can’t lose you, too.”

Thomas kissed her, stepped out into the driving rain, and closed the door behind him. Martha watched him go until she was certain he really was headed down the hill to the groundskeeper’s farmhouse by the main road, and not up over the tor.

Once he was out of sight, she returned to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of tea from the still-warm pot, dosed it with a liberal splash of brandy, and carried it to the telephone-desk in the study. There she rang a number both she and Thomas had dialed many, many times before, and asked the same question they always asked. The answer had not changed, but this time Martha did not find that fact reassuring.

No, said the woman, the five-year-old boy Midshipman James Kirk had saved from the Tarsus Massacre had never been found. He had been adopted by an Irish family who subsequently moved with him to America. There was a chance they had changed their name from Reilly at some point, because the trail went cold only a few years later.

Martha hung up the phone, thinking. Twenty-five was old enough to demand answers from your adoptive parents to the fundamental questions of who you were. He must know the truth, whoever and wherever he was.

All she could do was pray that the Irish boy, James Kirk, and Thomas Leighton - the only three remaining Tarsus survivors who had seen the governor’s face - never found themselves in the same room at the same time. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible would happen if they ever did.

Chapter Text

TWENTY YEARS AGO

Tarsus Village
The Ardennes, Belgium
1916

“Your first question,” Kirk explained as they walked, “is going to be how the hell it was possible for something like this to happen without anyone knowing about it. But you’ve seen how deep these woods are, and the trees are ancient. Just the one road, so you’ve got to go single-file; fine for an aid convoy, of course, but you can’t mount an attack from there. The Germans invaded a little over two years ago, and naturally the first thing they did was sever all communications. No newspapers, they cut the telephone and telegraph lines, and nobody in that village had a wireless. At first, the Germans stayed down at the base of the hills to the south, where there were a cluster of larger towns they used to house and provision the troops, and more or less set up a base camp there. Well, that was fine, for the tiny villages buried in the woods much higher up the hills, because locals who knew the territory could get from one village to the next on foot, through the woods to the north, where a German motorcade can’t go. But then, of course, within a year or so, they’d drained those towns dry, and there was no more food left, so they went hunting about for new territory.”

“And they found Tarsus,” Sarek guessed.

Kirk nodded. “They didn’t storm the battlements or anything, as the locals had rather expected. Probably it was just too remote. They didn’t want to bother housing soldiers in a camp so far removed from their fellows, and if you weren’t born and raised around here these woods are deadly at night. So they never really invaded, you see; they just sent a fellow to take over as governor of the town, with orders to hand over everything in their farms, gardens, pantries and storehouses that the Kaiser’s troops might need. And, well, even for a town of no more than eight thousand, it takes a hell of a lot to keep everyone alive.”

“Hence, I presume,” the Vulcan replied, “the need for your services as part of a CRB convoy.”

“We were deployed from Liège with food and medical supplies, oh, seven months ago, I think it was. Massive convoy, twenty or thirty trucks, and we’d planned to cover a much broader swathe of the Ardennes. The Germans didn’t want to let us pass, at first, and I suppose I don’t mind telling you that a few bribes changed hands - we had contraband brandy and chocolate with us, and I’ve found few things work better. Finally, they agreed to let us through, but the map they gave us said all the villages in this part of the forest had already been destroyed. We’d have skipped them entirely if we hadn’t seen the children.”

“The children?” repeated Miss Norwick, in some surprise. She hadn’t addressed young Kirk directly until now, but Sarek had watched her dark, keen eyes appraising him as she took in the story he told. 

“Three girls on the road, just about ten minutes further up than where you found me,” he said. “Pale as ghosts, and bony too. You could tell right away they were starving. We put them in the back of the truck and a few nice officers with a paternal air got the whole story from them. Governor Kodos had arrived one day and taken over, told them all he’d protect the village from German invasion and keep everyone safe if they obeyed his orders, and so far everyone had, only they’d run out of food by Christmas - meaning, three months before, at least. It was March when we got there. The rules were that everything in the storehouses when Kodos arrived had to go down the hill to the German camp, and after that, they could keep half of whatever they produced and grew; but a blight of some kind had swept through everyone’s gardens, something in the soil the girls didn’t quite understand, and even the root cellars full of potatoes and onions that usually kept them going during a hard winter were gone now. And the animals ate the plants, of course, which meant the meat was contaminated too. The girls had snuck into the forest to look for leaves and berries. Taking a chance on poisoning themselves rather than starving.”

“Good God,” said the young woman. “How lucky you arrived on time.”

“Well, yes and no,” said the American. “You see, the convoy split up. We’d begun to suspect perhaps it was as bad as all that across the whole region, and the Germans had been lying to us about how many people were going hungry. So we wanted to send a few trucks to each of the villages we’d been told were destroyed, just to get a clearer picture, and then report back to the American base to see what they wanted us to do. Because you see, up here, we were more than seventy-five kilometers from where the big fighting was, down south around Neufchâteau. It occurred to me that maybe, if we could find a way to cut across German lines toward Liège, we could use the CRB trucks to help evacuate the children. And maybe some of the elders and the folks who were sick, too. We thought, actually, that Governor Kodos might support the idea; fewer mouths to feed, and all that. He’d seemed like a reasonable man at the beginning, and that’s important. Remember, these were people whose neighboring towns and villages had all been burned to the ground, or entirely occupied by German troops. They were free, and safe, and no one was shooting at them. The only problem was food, and at the time, that problem seemed fixable. I suspect at the beginning, everyone was so happy to have someone confidently promise to protect them from violence that at first he seemed like a godsend, and nobody really wanted to acknowledge how . . . odd it all was.”

“What was odd?” asked the young woman.

“He was damned cagey about who'd sent him, for one thing," said Kirk. "He didn't seem to be with the Germans, exactly - I mean he spoke it fluently, but when he talked about the military he said 'they' instead of 'we.' Little things like that. And I found him oddly evasive about where he'd been living before, what brought him to Tarsus, his qualifications for the job, that sort of thing. And of course in hindsight, you look back and think, 'well, my God, Jim, you utter fool, how could you not have said something right away?' But you're both CRB, you know what it's like. We go to the worst kinds of places and see the worst kinds of things. No one calls us in when things are going well. But when we got to Tarsus they had clean water, their waste management systems were working, and their children and elders were still alive. Those are usually signs of a steady hand at the wheel. It really did seem, at first, that if we could solve the hunger problem, the whole town would bounce back pretty nicely, and we all felt awfully good about that. Sometimes you're too late, or the problems are too big to fix with anything short of evacuation. This wasn't like that. This seemed like a problem that could be solved perfectly well with about six convoy deliveries a year, for however long the war lasted, and we weren't unwilling to bribe German patrols with more chocolate and brandy to keep letting our trucks through. I really did think -"

He broke off here, his voice catching briefly, before he composed himself to resume.

"I really did think," he said, "that everything at Tarsus would be all right again one day."

"So Governor Kodos presented himself to you, at first, as a competent and efficient manager of municipal services," said Sarek. "Yet he was unable to provide to you any evidence of his qualifications? Any names of towns or villages over whom he had previously governed?"

"Not one, and he got very shifty when you asked about it," said Kirk. "But he was charming too, you see, and extremely persuasive, and so you told yourself at the time that you were imagining things. He  took over the old mayor’s house when he arrived, but he was a bit of a recluse. In fact, those girls we met  said they’d never seen his face at all, which struck us as damned odd; but when we reached the village and asked around we found that actually that was pretty generally true. Folks met with him, from time to time, but he never came out into the town square to address the people or anything, not even when he'd first arrived, and that's the sort of thing you assume governors are always doing, isn't it?"

"Particularly if it didn't seem he'd been sent there by the German occupation," said Miss Norwick, frowning. "I mean the government didn't appoint him to do this job, it seems, from the way you've explained it."

"Not as far as we can tell," said Kirk. "He gave all his orders through the Rijkswacht - that's the village constabulary, sort of a local military police - and every once in awhile he might make time on his schedule for the members of the town council. But he wanted nothing to do with the village as a whole. In hindsight, of course, I'd have looked harder at that. A politician who doesn't like politicking? Aren't they always trying to get the Common Man on their side, for the next election?"

"I see." Sarek considered this. "He was behaving, then, in the manner of a leader who did not believe such matters as future elections concerned him at all."

"Christ, I love Vulcan brains," said the American, relief in his voice. "You got there a great deal faster than we did, sir. That's exactly it, only we couldn't put a name to it then. Just a creeping sense of unease about the whole thing. I did get to know him a bit, you see; he was always very willing to make time for the CRB officers, of course, because at the beginning he couldn’t afford to make enemies of us. There's two other Americans - a scientist named Thomas Leighton and a nurse called Dorothea Eames - and then a retired British army colonel named Edward Moulton. Our plan was to stay there for two weeks and wait for the rest of the convoy to return while we worked with Governor Kodos to get a clearer picture of what was happening with the crops, and how many civilians we might be able to evacuate with his support. He was nothing but gracious, then; thanked us profusely for the supplies we’d brought, and assured us we could trust him.”

“And did you?” Sarek asked.

Kirk thought about it for a moment before answering. “I don’t know that I did,” he finally replied honestly. “I just couldn’t understand, then, why he knew his people were hungry and frightened and never once felt it his duty to reassure them. Even with lies, you know, as politicians so often do. I still think lies would have been more comforting than silence. I wondered, at times, if perhaps he’d left another life behind he was hiding from. Maybe he was a Belgian collaborator, not a German at all, and had reason to fear a Belgian who read the newspapers might know his face and his real name. Or maybe  he’d been drummed out of the Kaiser’s service in disgrace and this assignment was a punishment. Something of that nature. But now I think it’s simpler than that.” He turned to look at Sarek. “I don’t think he avoided meeting the people of Tarsus simply because he was a man with secrets,” he said grimly. “I think he knew already, even then, what he was going to do . . . and he was too cowardly to look them in the eye.”

Miss Norwick stopped walking and turned to Kirk. “What did he do?” she demanded. “You were only meant to stay two weeks before your convoy returned, yet you say you’ve been trapped here since March. Seven months behind enemy lines, not four hours from an American base, but CRB never came back to get you? For God’s sake, Mr. Kirk, what happened in that town?”

It was silent for a long, long time.

“We gave him the list,” Kirk finally said, in a hollow voice. “The convoy made contact with headquarters and radioed back to us that the refugee camp in Liège could be ready in two weeks to take up to four thousand at a time, and to start with Tarsus; they'd arrived at the next village over, and it wasn’t in such bad shape. Closer to the outskirts of the forest, which meant arable land, and whatever blight had struck here seemed to pass them by. They were hungry, and desperately in need of supplies, but they weren’t on the brink of death just yet. Prioritizing by need, then, we all agreed to begin making preparations to evacuate vulnerable civilians from Tarsus. There were two members of the town council - or what used to be the town council, before Kodos disbanded it - named Michel Dubois and Marc Lambert. They escaped with my group, you’ll meet them. They can fill in a lot that I can’t. They were both older, and had lived in Tarsus all their lives. Knew every soul who’d ever been born there, and they worked with CRB to fill every slot on that list of four thousand. It was about half the population, give or take. Everyone who was young, healthy, fit, strong, with skills that translated to survival - military experience, hunting, medicine, things like that - were assigned to stay. People with the best chance of defending their village if the Germans invaded. People who could survive longer on limited rations, in case our CRB delivery had to last for months or longer. So we hatched a plan: the convoy would rendezvous with CRB central command at the refugee camp, pick up three more trucks, and stock them with stretchers and wheelchairs, before coming back around the long way to the other side of the hills where the Germans don't patrol as regularly. We'd bring people down the hill in groups to load them into the trucks, about 150 at a time, beginning with the most urgent medical needs. Working round the clock, four hours there and four hours back or so, we thought we could get all four thousand people evacuated in about ten days. We'd accounted for anyone  elderly or pregnant, who couldn’t run if they had to. Kids. Folks who were ill or injured. Everyone wanted to get their most vulnerable loved ones to safety, so the ones who stayed behind wouldn’t have to worry about them. We gave the list to Governor Kodos. And then . . .”

Sarek made the leap before the girl did, and even his long-entrenched Vulcan equanimity was rattled by the young man’s story - not merely by the wasteful, illogical cruelty of the governor, but by the guilt Kirk and his colleagues must have felt, for what was done to the people of Tarsus they had endeavored to save.

“The radio was the first sign,” Kirk said, visibly collecting himself. “One day it just stopped working. We couldn’t reach the convoy anymore. Mrs. Eames is a whiz of a mechanic, and she took the whole thing apart, but somehow the internal wiring had gotten damaged in a way even she couldn't fix with the equipment she had.  Well, we didn’t worry too much, at first, because that was only a week in. They’d be back for us in seven days. In the meantime, we did what we could. Treated wounds, stocked cupboards, worked on our list. We wanted to be ready when everyone came back.” He swallowed hard. “We waited,” he said helplessly. “We waited so long. We waited while all the food ran out. But they never came back.”

Miss Norwick’s eyes were dark with emotion. “If you’ve been without a newspaper or a wireless for seven months, Mr. Kirk,” she said gently, “you wouldn’t have known. There was an attack on a CRB convoy earlier this year. In March, I believe it was. The food was all stolen and the officers shot. The German ambassador to the United States did apologize for violating their agreement, claimed whoever had done it acted without permission of the German military, and compensated CRB for the cost of the stolen food; but no one ever figured out how it happened, or how to prevent it happening again. That’s part of the reason why Ambassador Sarek is traveling with us; even the renegade Germans don’t dare risk harming a Vulcan citizen and giving their whole planet incentive to enter the war.”

Kirk’s jaw clenched a little tighter, and he gave a grim, steely nod of acknowledgement. Sarek thought that her words served only to definitively confirm a fact he had long suspected. 

“He was probably telling the truth, as far as he knew it,” Kirk finally said. “The German ambassador. I mean, that it wasn’t stolen by the military. We assumed it had been, at first. For months, we thought about that outpost at the bottom of the hills, in the garrison towns, where surely the enemy troops were feasting on all the flour and sugar and bacon and beer and apples and coffee they’d stolen from the people of Tarsus, while we carefully doled out the two truckloads we’d brought with us to hold out as long as we could. Until the blight came back.”

Sarek turned to look at him, surprised by this. “The same blight as before, which destroyed their food stores prior to your arrival?”

“That’s what we were told,” Kirk said. “The moment we realized the convoy was late, that something must have happened to them, we put the healthy folks on strict rations, to ensure that the folks who needed more could get it. A few bites of porridge a day, maybe some thin soup if anyone had been permitted to go foraging. We rotated, so everyone got at least a few proper meals a week. But then people started dying. Something like food poisoning began to sweep through the whole village, striking at random. Kodos blamed a fungus, said someone must have brought it back in from the woods, and banned anyone from leaving the village again. We didn’t realize until the third wave of deaths,” he said helplessly, running a hand through his mud-streaked hair with a gesture of weary resignation, “that it was only striking people from the list. And I’ll regret every day that I didn’t put two and two together sooner.”

“My God,” the girl murmured. “Killing off the weak outright? Didn’t you say your list included -”

“The children,” Sarek finished for her, his voice unusually grave. 

“They began with the people who were already sick,” Kirk said. “That’s why we didn’t realize right away. As soon as we did, we confronted Kodos about it, of course. Demanded the list back. He claimed he’d destroyed it, and we were imagining things. The weak die first from hunger, he said, that's simply the way the human body works, and there wasn't any grand conspiracy in it. Well, that was about the point at which CRB decided we’d rather take our chances heading down the hill to the German outpost, pleading diplomatic immunity, and begging for the use of a radio to call in reinforcements from the American base. And not just food, but soldiers. We were trying to hatch a plan to depose Kodos, in the hopes of evacuating everyone. It seemed increasingly clear that the whole town was in danger. Well, that was about when a clever person would guess we found ourselves knocked over the head, thrown in the governor’s root cellar, and held under armed guard without any hope of escape. And there we sat, for months.”

“But how could he possibly justify such an outrage?” demanded the girl.

Kirk shrugged, lifting a drooping tree branch for her to pass beneath it, as she followed him through the trees. “Lambert and Dubois filled in some of the blanks for us,” he explained. “To get out ahead of the thing, after the food had well and truly run out - this was about three weeks ago - he summoned an emergency meeting in the town square. His officers read a message informing everyone that no further aid was coming, that they had been forgotten by both Britain and America, who had never truly cared about their plight anyway, and that their primary responsibility was to keep the young and strong alive, in order to rebuild the village after the war was over. He told them about the list - which of course now had all the CRB personnel’s names on it - and said that everyone on it would be making a grand and noble sacrifice to ensure that their loved ones would live.” He shook his head. “We were dragged up from the cellar for this, and thrown in the center of the firing squad with everyone else,” he said, “and I guess I’d thought that with only a handful of village police, we’d be able to find an opening to force our way through. But it was more than a handful, by then. We missed a hell of a lot, imprisoned in that root cellar.” He closed his eyes against the memory. “It was dozens,” he murmured. “As many as forty or fifty, I think. I couldn’t even count. Armed with German guns he’d gotten from somewhere, which we didn’t even know he had.”

Sarek exhaled deeply, unwilling to give the young man any sign of how profoundly disturbed he was by this new revelation. “So he managed to turn the citizens against one another,” he said. “Offers of access to food or resources, no doubt, in exchange for their service as his private militia. To murder their own neighbors and friends.”

“It was a nightmare,” said Kirk dully. “There was a kind of madness to it. Starvation will do that. And the lies you have to tell yourself to justify such violence. Kodos had always claimed to value discipline, order, but in the end there was no order to it at all. Just people running wildly in every direction and other people firing at them to make them stop. It was only sheer dumb luck that I escaped myself,” he added. “I mean there wasn’t anything particularly heroic about it. I found a corner of the town square just on the edge of the treeline with only one fellow guarding it, and I took my chances. Because he remembered me.” He couldn’t look at them anymore, Sarek noticed, his eyes fixated on the narrow path in front of them, winding uphill through the mossy earth. “He had a little sister,” Kirk went on flatly. “Sweet kid. She’d been sick when we first arrived seven months ago, and we had penicillin with us. He told me we’d saved her life. He saw me coming, with the rest of CRB and as many civilians as we could gather up with us, and he held his rifle up to stop us just like he’d been told to do; but in the end, his hands were shaking, and he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Made sure we had the little girl and his grandparents, waved us all through into the woods, and stayed behind to hold off anyone who came after us. Got a bullet through the chest for it.” Kirk’s voice was suddenly sad. “I can’t stop wondering if maybe, if he’d been allowed to live, he might have . . . I don’t know. Come around. Realized what they were doing was wrong. I wanted to believe there was hope. But maybe that’s fruitless now.”

“This was three weeks ago, you said?”

Kirk nodded. “I got seventy-six people out, including everyone from my team. They only stopped to grab all the supplies they could find, but we ran out fast. We tried a few times to sneak back up and see if we could extract anyone else. It was more and more kids each time,” he said a little hopelessly, “because so many of their parents are gone now, and the other adults around them are frightening. He didn’t kill them all at once, you see. There was nowhere to bury four thousand people, and one big fire like that would be spotted. It’s been in batches small enough that the smoke dissipates by the time it gets up over the treeline, and at night you can’t see any signs of it. Anyway, a few days ago a few of us went back up on another night raid and saw a group of Kodos' men in the town square handing out food from CRB crates to the folks who'd taken his side in the uprising. We hadn't seen a CRB crate in months, and I knew full well that the convoy hadn't returned yet, or there'd be American soldiers combing every inch of the woods for survivors and none of those men would have been armed with German guns. That meant someone must have a hidden stockpile somewhere. So last night my friend Tom  chased a hunch back up the hill to the governor’s house, and found a whole storeroom packed to the brim with food and supplies. For seven whole months, Kodos and his soldiers had been feasting like kings on an emergency relief delivery meant to save the lives of thousands of people; meanwhile, we were out here feeding handfuls of wild nuts and berries to kids so skinny you could count their ribs.” He turned, then, and Sarek was startled by the intensity of the anger on his earnest young face.

“You’ll see, I guess, why I wasn’t too surprised to hear Miss Norwick say that the convoy was murdered,” he said, voice sharp with bitterness. “It was Kodos who did it, not the German garrison. He killed those aid workers, and stole everything they had for himself.”

Chapter Text

PRESENT

“If you’re curious, Jim,” said Bones dryly, as Sulu reached the end of the long gravel drive and slowed the vehicle to a halt, “the best time to have mentioned that your ‘friends in Princetown’ actually live about eight miles outside Princetown, across the spookiest stretch of land in God’s kingdom, in the most haunted house I’ve ever seen, was two days ago. Back before I said yes to this field trip, when it wasn’t too late to vote for Scotty’s proposal to pop up to Edinburgh to do some good honest drinking. The second-best time would have been at any point over the last four hours, rattling over the moors in the back of that blasted truck. I guess the third-best time is right about now.”

“All right,” said Jim in a placating voice, as he hopped neatly out of the truck's open rear hatch and gave Uhura his hand to help her down after him. “Now, first of all, Bones - and let’s get this over with before our hosts are within earshot, shall we? - we all know you hate traveling outside the United States, because you don’t trust ships, trains, or foreign roads, and you don’t like anybody else’s food or weather. Why you enlisted for the United States Navy at all is still anyone's guess, but there it is. We’re used to the griping by now, but the Leightons aren’t, so if you wouldn’t mind pretending not to be a curmudgeon for at least the first day, it would really help things along. Second of all, this is England, and you won’t get very far here if you can’t tell the difference between a place that’s haunted and one that’s simply old. Norwick House has been in the family since about a thousand years before there were McCoys in Georgia, so show the grand old dowager some respect.”

“Third of all,” remarked Uhura, joining the others where they stood on the gravel drive to take in the sprawling estate, “I’m sorry, sir, but Dr. McCoy is right about the moors. I know you’ve read The Hound of the Baskervilles, and so have I. If you’d shown us a photograph before we all bought our train tickets, I might have said no, too.”

“Treason,” Jim reproached her, shaking his head in mock dismay. “I knew Bones wouldn’t be swayed by the promise of literary atmosphere, but I had higher hopes for you.”

“Oh, I’ve read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as many times as you have, sir. Only I never particularly wanted to be in them, especially not at the cost of putting off the Oxford Library to next week. Spock’s mother was so generous and offered to arrange introductions with some professors of linguistics I’m dying to meet.”

Jim turned to his Vulcan first officer, who was watching the little scene play out as the rest of the crew disembarked from the two open-backed British Army trucks which had carried them and their bags from the Exeter train station. “And I suppose, left to your own devices, you’d have gone with Uhura and your mother to whoop it up at the Oxford Library,” he said, a note of playful accusation in his voice.

Spock raised one perfectly arched Vulcan eyebrow. “I do not believe 'whooping' would be well-received in such an environment."

“And that’s all the backup I get?”

“You will note that I have made no protest about this week’s agenda, Captain,” Spock remarked, with a faintly smug glance at his complaining colleagues. “In dismissing the terrain of this region due to negative emotions incited by its spurious literary associations, Dr. McCoy and Lieutenant Uhura have neglected to consider that the moors of England are of great scientific interest to the geologist - particularly those highly unusual native rock formations which the locals refer to as ‘tors.’ I look forward to exploring them during our stay.”

Jim felt his cheeks warm slightly, and ducked his head to hide a quiet, pleased smile. He knew Spock well enough by now to tell when the Vulcan was secretly vexed but politely making the best of things, and when he was really happy; and in his own serene, contained way, he was happy now. Jim had sold him on Dartmoor by appealing to his explorer’s heart, in an effort to compensate somewhat for the odd, difficult first impression Tom had made when they ran into him two weeks ago in London. And not only had Spock agreed to come, he had talked all the rest of the bridge crew into putting off their own plans for the remainder of shore leave, reminding them that Dr. Leighton’s research was vital to their mission and they owed him the courtesy of a fair hearing.

He was trying to think of a way to thank Spock for his faith in him which wouldn’t feel too weighted or awkward when a bright female voice called his name, and he turned to see Martha making her way towards them.

Jim hadn’t been to Norwick House in a long time. As he watched her approach, he tried to regard his old friend as a stranger might, wondering what his friends and crew saw when they looked at her. She was slight and slim, with glossy brown hair and dark eyes, and the kind of aristocratic beauty that wouldn’t look out of place stamped on a Roman coin - high cheekbones, delicate nose, sloping brow. Tom was always a little rumpled, but Martha never set foot out of the house unless she was neat as a pin, and today was no different; Jim smiled as she drew nearer, admiring the chic lines of her green wool skirt and gray sweater. 

Then she reached the end of the drive, and his smile collapsed abruptly. He recovered well, and none of the other humans seemed to notice; but Spock’s eyes, as always, were a little too quick, flicking from her to Jim and back again, and he suspected it was too late - that Spock had already seen what he saw.

Her skin, unnaturally pale beneath a heavier-than-usual application of face powder. Her cheekbones, sharper and more prominent than they’d been last time he’d seen her. Dark circles under her eyes, a faint corona of red around the chocolate-brown iris. New lines at the corner of her mouth.

Jim felt an odd little twist at the pit of his stomach. Something at Norwick House was very, very wrong.

Then “My God, look what a mess you’ve made of your boots,” she exclaimed, embracing him with unabashed delight and kissing him happily on both cheeks. “Don’t you dare track all that on my nice carpets. They’re older than your entire country.”

“You’re the one who lives in the mud capital of England,” he retorted, laughing, as he returned the embrace and pulled back to get a better look at her. “Yet somehow, it never seems to cling to you. Perfectly put-together as always.”

She waved this off. “Native blood. Now, Mr. Spock of course I know,” she added, lifting her graceful hand to offer him his people’s traditional greeting, which he returned with a respectful bow, “but I see a great number of other very cold and hungry-looking people whose acquaintance I’d love to make properly once I get you inside, where there’s a good fire and cozy chairs to put your feet up. Though you’ll want to get your trucks round back to higher ground,” she added, addressing Scotty and Sulu, both still at their respective wheels. “This road tends to wash out with a bad rain. And the tradesman’s entrance has a lift for your trunks and bags.” She pointed ahead to where the estate’s curved drive turned right and disappeared behind the house, then took Uhura by the arm. “You’re the linguist, I presume. I’ve been dying for a chance to speak with you. Jim sings your praises in every letter. And I imagine the gentleman grimacing at the sky is Dr. McCoy.” She smiled at them both. “I’m Martha Leighton, and I’m very glad you’ve all come,” she said. “I’ll fill in and give orders in the temporary absence of your captain, since Jim always has to take his walk first - can’t set foot inside the house until he’s first paid his respects to Widow’s Tor.”

“Best view of Dartmoor,” Jim said without apology.

“We won’t wait for you,” said Martha, patting Bones on the back as the trucks made their way down the drive. “I'll feed you all a very good tea as soon as my husband returns from town, which ought to be any minute; but in the meantime, I know the face of a man who wants a drink when I see one.”

“Well now,” said Bones, pleased. “There’s that famed British hospitality I’ve heard so much about. Lead the way, ma’am.”

Martha kissed Jim on the cheek again before leading his friends away toward the house - some in the trucks, some on foot - and for a moment he watched them go. 

The sky was gray over Norwick House, but the threatened rain hadn’t arrived yet. Jim looked at the old place in silent pleasure, taking in its grand lines and gothic arches. It was a little ramshackle in places, as thousand-year-old estates tended to be, and its mistress had complained often about the cold and the damp; but Jim’s romantic soul had never been able to resist the allure of a stone wall thick with ivy and climbing vines. In old paintings, the great house stood out against its environment in stark relief, but time and age had weathered it, blurring its sharp edges until it melted back into the landscape as though it were part of it. Just another mossy tor rising up from the earth, ancient and timeless and melancholy and beautiful.

Jim liked it here, but only for short visits. He suspected for the people who lived on the moors, that melancholy would be difficult to resist.

“Is your habitual walk to Widow’s Tor a solitary one,” inquired a low voice from behind him, “or would company be agreeable to you?”

Jim turned to see that his first officer had remained behind when the rest of the company departed. “Your company, Mr. Spock, is always agreeable to me,” he replied with a smile, and waved the Vulcan after him down the footpath which branched out from the winding gravel drive through the high, wild grass of the moors. “Just don’t get ahead of yourself and go off exploring, mind you. There’s really only the one safe path; things get very swampy very quickly through here, and it’s damned easy to lose your footing.”

“Indeed,” Spock replied, “I was informed by the publican at our last stop that the nearby Grimpen Mire claims between ten and twenty lives each year, between humans and livestock.”

Jim nodded. “Tom lost a good horse once that way. A proper moorland horse too, grew up in these parts and everything. They know to avoid it, but the whole terrain changes after a bad rain. It slipped and lost its balance in the mud and took a tumble off Widow’s Tor, straight into the Mire. Awful thing. I’m not as foolish as a horse, I promise,” he added. “Martha says not to come this way in bad weather, and I promise I never have. But the clouds look rather ominous today, so I’m getting my walk in while I still can. You don’t mind the chill, do you?”

“Vulcans stationed on Earth are provided with biothermic garments designed to be worn beneath human clothing,” said Spock, which was not really an answer, but it made Jim laugh.

“All right, all right. I won’t keep you long. It’s only just across here, and up this hill.”

“I do not object to the climate,” said Spock. “In fact, Captain, I am grateful for the opportunity afforded by this exercise in order to speak with you alone. It did not seem prudent to mention in front of the rest of the crew, or Mrs. Leighton,” he added, as Jim stopped to turn back to him, brow furrowed in confusion, “but as your first officer, I hope that you are aware I consider it my duty to hold in confidence anything you might wish to share with me.”

“About what?”

“Whatever is plainly troubling you.”

Not quite certain how to respond to this, Jim began walking again. The path was too narrow to walk two abreast, leaving Spock behind him, but he could feel the Vulcan’s dark gaze upon him with a palpable weight. They crested the hill and descended to the lower ridge, carefully making their way over and around the vast boulders, until they reached the outcrop known as Widow’s Tor. A lone spindly hawthorn tree marked the spot, reaching its long-nailed claws up toward the gray sky, and Jim made his way to one of the vast, flat stones beside it, taking a seat and waiting for Spock to join him . . . which, after a moment, he did.

Side by side, they gazed out toward the horizon, neither of them thinking at that moment about how many thousands of times over the years they'd done exactly this. Standing together at the rail of the forecastle, salt spray in their faces, watching a new shoreline shimmer into view; or maybe watching the first glimmers of a golden dawn shining warm and bright over an expanse of blue glass sea extending forever in all directions. They did all their best talking side by side, looking out ahead at whatever was coming next, whether the horizon promised thrilling new adventures or the comforting familiarity of the sea which had become home. Everything clicked into view just a little more clearly, when Spock was beside him; like adjusting the focus on a camera. He felt it now, though without putting it into words. He simply breathed easier, and let himself believe it was nothing more than the fresh country air.

It was still a beautiful afternoon, though it might be the last for awhile. Watery sunlight peeked through a few thinning patches of dark cloud, and Jim took in the vast green and brown expanse of Dartmoor spread out beneath them. He couldn’t stop thinking about that night in London. How odd Tom had seemed, how feverish. Insistent that he cancel his dinner plans with Spock; insistent upon that Norwegian touring company’s Hamlet, even though Jim had been more in the mood for Noël Coward. Whispering every time the white-haired actor playing both the old fathers set foot onstage, and squeezing Jim’s arm as if urging him to pay attention.

“What is between you? Give me up the truth,” Polonius had demanded of a pretty blonde-haired Ophelia whose face Jim couldn’t make out clearly from the back of the stalls.

“He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders of his affection to me,” she had replied in a sweet, innocent voice.

Jim hadn’t entirely been sure what he was meant to pay attention to, unless it was that this was about the point in the play where things began to go off the rails for poor Ophelia; but Tom’s irritability grow, as though he’d expected some reaction from Jim and he wasn’t getting it. After the performance, he hadn’t seemed to want to bring it up again, but was once more oddly insistent about getting his way - this time, for Jim to come down to Norwick House to see him and Martha so he could show off his newest breakthrough. They’d finally managed to develop a successful strain of fire-resistant wheat, and he wanted to show Jim his research in person. 

Which made perfect sense. And yet . . .

“I reiterate my earlier offer,” Spock prompted him again. “You are . . . disquieted about something. Perhaps even worried.” Jim exhaled deeply, unable to deny it. “Something to do with the Leightons,” he guessed. “Was it the discrepancy in their accounts?”

Jim turned to him, startled. “What do you mean?”

Spock hesitated. “Your past is your own,” he went on carefully, eyes still fixed upon the late afternoon sun softened by the low fog over the moors, “and whatever has brought us to this place, I trust you to have your reasons. But they are not the reasons Dr. Leighton has stated. I think we may dispense with prevarication. The story does not hold together at all.”

Jim’s face went carefully blank.

“I was with you on your way out of the embassy when we unexpectedly encountered him,” Spock said. “He claimed to be in town on business and, having completed a day of various errands and meetings earlier than anticipated, wished to invite you to dinner and the theatre. But his hair, coat and scarf were exceedingly damp.”

“And?”

“The rain showers that day were intermittent.”

“Spock -”

“No one who had spent the day going back and forth across London from one indoor location to another,” said Spock, “could possibly have managed to catch every rain shower throughout the day in order to leave his overcoat unable to dry fully in between.”

“He came up by train, Spock, he told us so. He didn’t have a car with him. Probably he was walking from place to place and was just unlucky.”

“Or,” Spock ventured, “he lied. He took the train up from Devon very late at night, or early in the morning, and sat in Regent’s Park outside the embassy all day long waiting for you to come out of it. Which means he had some reason not to simply ring the doorbell and wait for you indoors. And I can only think of one reason why that might be.”

Jim turned to meet Spock’s dark, thoughtful gaze. “He didn’t want to run into a Vulcan,” he said, a little helplessly, half an admission and half a question.

Spock nodded. “He was not pleased to see me, and seemed quite determined to spend the evening with you alone. Naturally, of course, as your old friend, this is perfectly logical behavior. However -”

“However,” sighed Jim, surrendering, “you’re too damned clever by half, Mr. Spock, and they couldn’t quite slip it past you that Tom’s invitation to Norwick House was meant only for me. It was Martha who rang the next day and asked if the crew might wish to come along, and offered to put us up in the country for as long as we pleased. And who specially inquired if Spock of Vulcan, whose work she and Tom admire so much, might be available to join me.”

“She specifically desires the presence of a Vulcan,” Spock observed. “He specifically does not. I do not yet know why; and I suspect, at this juncture, neither do you. But it seems to indicate a point of discord between them; and it is this discord, I think, which makes you wary. Your friends have, perhaps, a . . . complicated marriage,” he offered tactfully. 

Jim snorted in rueful agreement. “You don’t even know the half of it,” he said. “Two geniuses stuck in one house, alone in the middle of nowhere. By the end of the week, you may be regretting you said yes to this.”

It was silent for a long time before Spock turned back to look at Jim. “Fortunately,” he remarked, in a dry, amused voice, “as you are perfectly aware, having spent time with my parents - you will not find me intimidated by complicated marriages.”

Jim’s laughter echoed down the rocks of Widow’s Tor, and as they rose to their feet, he could have sworn the wintry sunlight was just a little brighter.

Spock is here, he said to himself over and over again, as he watched that lithe, dark form cut neatly through the gray sky down the path back toward the house. Spock is here, and everything will be all right. Whatever’s the matter with Tom this time, we’ll figure it out together.

You’re worrying over nothing, Jim, old boy. Everything will be all right.

Chapter Text

TWENTY YEARS AGO

Tarsus Village
The Ardennes, Belgium
1916

The American led them toward a line of boulders which formed a rough crossing over a little stream, and in the distance beyond it Sarek could see a small clearing in the woods. Blankets, coats and linens had been strung between the trees as a form of makeshift shelter, and beneath them he could see the dark shapes of many bodies crowded together. Most were lying down, and very few were moving.

“I must speak bluntly,” he said to Kirk. “How many are upon the brink of death, without immediate intervention? There are Vulcan mind-healing techniques to stabilize the wounded, ill, or dying, but the process cannot be rushed. Miss Norwick and I will be obligated to, as you humans say, ‘divide and conquer,' so that injuries which are not fatal may be given into her care."

“Well, it’s no good pretending I’m not biased in the case, but as it happens I’m also right,” said the young man, picking his way cautiously across the slick rocks and motioning for them to follow exactly where he stepped. “The worst off by a long shot is my friend Tom Leighton. Little things like cuts and bruises we've got handled, more or less. No antiseptic or anything, but hot water at least. We've got a few bullet wounds for Miss Norwick to take a look at, but all of them were reasonably clean. Bullets went right through, so they bleed something awful, but then there's nothing to dig out before it gets infected. Small blessings, I suppose. And then at last count I believe eleven broken limbs altogether. We haven't been able to do much for them but tie on a splint and try to keep them lying still. And that's just what's new, of course. I mean to say, plenty of people had illnesses or injuries that existed already that were either aggravated by having to run such a far distance or not being able to get at their medicine or simply just being hungry all the time."

"Perfectly manageable," said Miss Norwick.

"Good. A few of the injured are children, too, which is why I asked before. You see, Tarsus did have two doctors of their own, and both of them . . . well, I suppose they're Mr. Hargreaves' problem now, if they're still alive up there. But they sided with Kodos on the day of the riots, and the children haven't forgotten it. I've got a lad with me named Christophe, who's the nearest thing there is. He was sort of a general factotum about the doctors' office, errands and cleaning and the like, as well as the pharmacy dispenser, but his wife was the nurse. She . . . well, she didn't make it. I think it's helped him just having something to do, and being able to put to use the things he picked up from her. But we haven't seen proper antiseptic or medications or decent sterilized tools in a long time, and there's only so much you can do with strips of old shirt soaked in hot water. I trust you and Christophe to triage the supplies you've brought with you, who needs them right away and who can wait. But I'd like the ambassador to see Tom first, if that's all right."

"Tell me about him," said Sarek. "What is the nature of his injury?"

"Burns," said Jim bluntly, "and some of the worst I've ever seen. I don't imagine either of you are particularly squeamish, but plenty of the others at the camp are, and I don't mind telling you I was glad he was unconscious when they brought him back. I wouldn't have liked him to see people screaming at the sight of him. That sort of memory sticks with one. He's a friend of mine from CRB, and I feel responsible for what happened to him here.  He’s a brilliant scientist - somewhat in your line, in fact, Miss Norwick,” he added. “Biology and chemistry and agricultural studies with an emphasis in the science of food. Preservation techniques, how to extend storage and prevent contamination, that sort of thing. CRB left him here when they went onto their next stop because he wanted to investigate the recurring outbreaks of that blight which kept destroying their food stores. Kodos and his men offered to set him up with a workspace and samples and tools, let him see what he could find out. Somehow they kept never quite getting around to it. Tom began to get the sense they were putting him off and putting him off. Another warning sign we wished, of course, that we’d heeded earlier. Well, anyway, he went back up the hill last night to have a look round, and he found the kitchen door of Kodos’ house unlocked and unguarded. Colonel Moulton and Mrs. Eames went too, and I’ll let them tell you what they saw; but the long and short of it, sir, is that his face is so badly burned on one side that he’s lost the use of one eye, and it wasn’t a clean burn at all. We’re afraid infection has set in already, and honestly it’s a mercy that he hasn’t regained consciousness yet; Christophe has tried to keep the flesh clean and probably everything we’re doing to him hurts like hell. If we can’t get him to a proper doctor soon, I don’t know what there is to be done.” He looked at Sarek rather helplessly. “He’s a scientist and a farmer,” he explained. “All of these people, everyone except Moulton and me, they’re civilians. They didn’t sign up for this. Tom Leighton’s a good man. He just wanted to help people. He’s not a fighter. If I’d gone with him, I might have . . . But I suppose that’s no good now. If he resents me for the rest of his life, that’s fine, as long as he makes it out of here and lives to do it.” 

As they approached the clearing, Sarek found himself once more compelled to reassess his observations about the kind of person Midshipman James T. Kirk really was. Bold, charismatic, clever, perceptive, reckless to a moderate degree which Sarek accepted as developmentally appropriate for a human male of his age and background - these had been evident from the beginning. But as they entered the small enclave of Tarsus survivors which Kirk had made his domain, Sarek noted in pleased surprise that the young man was also . . . logical.

The makeshift refugee camp was divided into distinct areas with clearly delineated boundaries. Beneath the largest tent, the ill and injured had been neatly laid out; this had, at first, been the only section visible, and left Sarek with the impression that the majority of those present were supine in the middle of the day, indicating ill health. But in fact, the clearing extended much farther on all sides than it had initially appeared, and the many active, busy people inhabiting it kept generally to the perimeter. Everywhere he looked, he saw signs of clearheaded, practical thinking . . . such as placing the hospital tent in the center of the clearing, away from the trees, where fresh air and sunlight would be most plentiful; arranging the latrines at a far distance from both food storage and patients, well downstream of the area for laundry and bathing, which itself was downstream of the water for cooking and drinking, thus minimizing the risk of contamination; pots full of water permanently at the boil, along with buckets of cold water and even some fragments of hoarded CRB soap, beside both the medical tent and at the cookfires; and much more. All around him, he saw adults and older children engaged in a range of tasks. One large grouping - in which even a few with splinted legs were participating - sat in a large area of open grass, stripping the leaves off tree branches and weaving them together into what Sarek realized were makeshift beds. Stepping closer, he observed that everyone lying beneath the hospital tent was in fact elevated several inches off the damp ground on one of these, padded liberally with dry leaves. Near the cookfires, another small cluster of persons were tending a large pot of water boiling over a tiny fire for what smelled like weak but real tea, lining up small misshapen cups carved from pieces of wood.

At the back of the clearing, furthest from both the swift-flowing stream and the open flames (again: flawlessly logical), Sarek finally saw the children. They were under the supervision of a small group of adults in a ratio of approximately 1:7. This appeared quite satisfactory, ensuring that  each child was able to receive attention, care, and play, without diverting more working adults than necessary from their other urgent tasks. 

James T. Kirk could not be more than twenty-two years old by Terran reckoning, and quite plainly he did not see himself as a hero. By his own account, Sarek had observed, his memories of the past seven months in the village of Tarsus were marked with regrets - choices he now wished he had made differently, people he still believed he could have saved. He trusted his own instincts, but not enough, not yet. So early in his military career, he was accustomed to obeying orders, and that had led him astray here - through no fault of his own.

Seventy-six people, he had said. Children and elders. The injured and ill. No food, except what they could steal back from a violent, armed mob. Seventy-six people, alone in the woods, for three weeks . . . and not a single death. 

But the most remarkable sight which Sarek beheld as he looked round the camp was not the orderly assembly lines of people briskly and competently executing their tasks. It was not the aroma of weak, diluted tea which indicated even the supplies Tom Leighton had brought back from last night's raid were being carefully rationed. It was not even the astute, practical measures taken to prevent the spread of disease and contamination (separating the latrine from the drinking water, elevating the patients off the wet grass, soap for hand washing near the cookfires), which demonstrated evidence of a scientific mind.

No, the most remarkable sight before him, Sarek realized, was the laughter.

Across the clearing in the children's tent, an elderly man  playing a game involving hand movements with two small children, who kept toppling over with sheer hilarity.  To his left, at the vast metal stew-pot where tea was being brewed, three women tended it together in the midst of a whispered conversation which involved much quiet chuckling. And in the assembly line of mattress-weavers, two adolescent boys paused occasionally to flick wet leaves at each other, causing great amusement to everyone seated near them.

This, Sarek felt, would provide ample fodder for meditation, not merely tonight but for many nights to come. This was the phenomenon he was forever attempting to explain to T'Pau, who still did not understand it.

These people were refugees.  They were cold, wet, hungry, ill, injured, frightened. They had survived unspeakable horrors and witnessed things they would never forget. Every one of them was haunted by grief, or rage, or both. And yet still, they could laugh. James Kirk had protected not only their lives, here in this hidden, secret place - but their humanity too. 

Sarek turned to look at the young man at his side, taking him in as though for the first time. Somewhere at the very back of his mind a gear clicked into place and began turning. He would look back, a century or more later, and remember this as the moment he first began to realize who James Kirk was . . . and who he might become.

(I watched young people whose parents had been murdered find camaraderie even in the weaving of hospital beds," he would explain to a member of the Vulcan High Council one day, years from now. "The humans are more emotionally expressive than we are, Elder, this is certainly true; but I believe that expressiveness is the key to their resilience. We have much to teach them, but we also have much to learn.")

As they strode into the clearing, Kirk stepped forward.  “Good news, everyone!” he called out in impeccable French.

This visibly startled the entire gathering, leading Sarek to deduce that no one here spoke above a lowered voice as a matter of course. Kirk instantly commanded full attention. Those who could rise to their feet did so, and branches dropped out of hands as everyone looked at him expectantly, some clinging to each other at the sight of two strangers as if not daring to hope. 

“You’ll never guess who I happened to find on the road,” Kirk began cheerfully. “How many people recognize this esteemed gentleman’s face from the newsreels?”

A hushed gasp went up around the camp, and a number of those standing near enough to observe the points of Sarek's ears (now flushed rather green with cold) came a little closer, some of them even whispering his name in a kind of awe.

“I knew CRB would come back for us one day,” Kirk added. “I just didn’t realize it would be the Ambassador of Vulcan! And me with mud all over my face, smelling like an Iowa cow pasture.”

This caused ripples of laughter to cascade through the camp. By now, even those lying down in the infirmary tent were struggling to sit up and see what was happening.

“Now, I’m going to ask you all to do something very difficult,” the American said, changing tone, his voice suddenly grave.  “I’m not going to tell you to stop being afraid. That’s impossible, and me asking it wouldn’t do any good. What I will ask is that you remember we’re all in this together. All of you lost family and friends up there - some to death, some to the grip of evil. There are CRB trucks on their way to the village right now, with a radio, and we don’t know what they’ll find, but the danger is over. The Americans know where we are now, they know what happened, and there will be reinforcements on the way. Ambassador Sarek has given his word, and they always say a Vulcan never breaks a promise. I know you all woke up this morning the same way you've done every day since whenever it was you arrived here: wondering if this would be the day they finally found us. I'm here to give you my word that tomorrow morning you'll wake up and finally be able to think something different. That's not to say everything will be a piece of cake from here on out; your homes are gone, your country is under occupation, our whole world is at war. I'm not going to pretend we don't all have damned difficult days ahead. But still, you've  all done something extraordinary, and I’d like you to take a moment and look around you right now."

He took a few steps further into the clearing, as the crowd drew in closer, riveted by his words. " Look at each other," he said again, in a quieter voice, which nonetheless seemed to fill the whole clearing. "The people standing next to you. You’re a family now. We all are. We made it out of this alive, and we didn’t let him change us or break us. And that doesn’t make up for everything we’ve lost . . . but it’s not nothing, either.”

Shaking off a brief wave of emotion before it threatened to overtake him, the young man gestured to the second stranger standing beside him.  “This is Miss Norwick,” he said, “and I’m turning her over for sickbed duty. She’s at your disposal with a full med kit. Use up whatever she’s got. I mean it, Christophe,” he added, addressing a dark-haired young man standing in the infirmary tent.  “No hoarding. Tonight, it will be my pleasure to extend to you all the hospitality of the United States Army, where they enjoy such luxuries as medicine and actual beds; but first, we’ve got to get every last one of you all from here to the road, and that’s going to take all hands. E lspeth, Lotte, Philippe, let’s feast like kings today. Cook up everything we’ve got. Hell, bake a cake if you’ve got it. Lucie and Claude, we’re going to need to convert some of these beds into stretchers. Work with Christophe to see who can walk as far as the main road unassisted, who can walk if they’ve got some help - a splint, a stick, a pal’s shoulder, anything - and who needs to be carried. Anyone good at lifting heavy things, report to Lucie. Anyone not escorting the injured or carrying a stretcher, Michel will assign you a child, and they’ll be your responsibility until we get to Liège. Everyone clear on their orders? Elspeth, can we be ready to eat in . . . let’s say, two hours? All right. Good. Colonel Moulton, Mrs. Eames, I need you for a moment. We need to debrief Ambassador Sarek, and then he’s going to see what he can do for Tom. Any questions?”

In hindsight, Sarek reproached himself for taking this long to fully register a set of subtle but plain signals which ought to have taken his full attention long ago. Fortunately, the young man had given him the perfect opportunity to intervene and address the matter.

“I have one,” said Sarek, pitching his voice so that everyone in the clearing could hear it. “I suspect, however, that it would be fruitless to address it to you and expect an honest answer, so I will ask the others. Will someone inform me, please, how long it has been since Mr. Kirk himself has eaten or slept?”

This garnered exactly the response he had anticipated: a somewhat sheepish, truculent expression from the young man, and a combination of knowing laughter and fondly exasperated sighs from the audience. Ultimately it was Christophe, de facto supervisor of the makeshift infirmary, who replied.

“He ate breakfast the day before yesterday,” he informed the Ambassador. "My breakfast schedule, it is the same as his, so I know that I saw him in the line."

“But he did not eat,” piped up a girl from the line of weavers. “He was served breakfast, that is true; but a few of the children were crying, so he shared out his bread between them. He had water and tea, that is all.”

“He was awake all last night waiting for Tom to return from the village, then sat at his bedside through morning,” said a man from the crowd. “The night before that, both of them were down at the creek helping with the laundry.”

“I’m fine,” Kirk insisted stubbornly. “Look, I’ll eat later today when everyone else eats, I promise. I’ll clean my plate like a good little boy. But every healthy adult has been on rations since we got here, and we didn’t know how long Tom’s supply haul would have to last us. We couldn’t have predicted that you’d turn up the very next day. I’ll be perfectly happy to eat whatever Elspeth puts in front of me.”

“And sleep?” Sarek pressed him.

The younger man, looking rather like a small child caught out by his parents, furrowed his brow as if struggling to think. “It can’t be more than about four days or so,” he finally said. “And really, sir, in the scheme of things, it’s not so -”

Sarek estimated a 92.4% chance that he was about to say  “it’s not so bad,” but he was not afforded the opportunity. A gentle pinch at the back of his neck, and Kirk's knees buckled like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Sarek caught him adroitly and lifted him in both arms, carrying him over to an empty bed in the medical tent. As he carefully lay the young man down and covered him with a spare dry blanket, he heard a rather surprising sound:

A crowd of seventy-six people bursting into applause.

James T. Kirk, he thought to himself, as he followed the man named Christophe to Dr. Thomas Leighton's bedside, was going to need a minder. His capacity for greatness would be severely curtailed by the fact that, it seemed, left to his own devices, his tendency would always be to push himself to the breaking point. This was a camp filled with competent, intelligent people, and James Kirk had realized how badly they needed to feel useful, in order for their days to have a purpose beyond simply drowning in their grief. He was a natural leader, someone people would listen to and follow; but he was also a man of forceful personality, and no one in this camp had been sufficiently strong-willed to ensure he took care of himself. Perhaps before his injury, Leighton had been capable of shouldering more of the burden of leadership; but Sarek did not really think so. Kirk behaved like someone who had taken the reins by necessity in order to make unilateral decisions, and Leighton probably obeyed them as willingly as everyone else.

What he needed was a partner, someone equally as strong-willed, whose strengths and weaknesses would be a complement to his own. Perhaps if T'Pau were not convinced by the notion of entrusting Vulcan technology to a human, she might be willing to consider the strengths of a partnership between human and Vulcan. One particular Vulcan, perhaps, who might benefit from being challenged and enlightened by a human so very different from himself and yet so potentially compatible.

Perhaps this human was not merely what Earth needed, or what Sarek's new peace plan needed.

Perhaps he could be what Spock needed, too.

Chapter Text

PRESENT

By the time Jim and Spock made it back to the house, that odd air of unease seemed to have dissipated, and they found the group spread out amicably across the estate’s main floor, waiting for their host to return from town so his wife could serve the tea. Uhura was eyeing the rows of magnificent family portraits in the grand entrance hall, while Sulu covetously examined a rack of ancient swords nearby. Through a half-open door they could see Bones and Scotty playing billiards with a crystal decanter of something between them. The atmosphere already felt like a cozy week-end house party, which pleased Jim very much.

Ever the efficient executive officer, Spock's first stop was to locate the small contingent of lieutenants who had been permitted to join their seniors on this outing, to ensure that they were behaving themselves and not unduly incommoding their hosts. He went to go make his rounds and left Jim at the parlor door, where inside he found Martha - who’d been to Russia at least three times - seated at the tea-table by the fire and indulging Chekov as he chattered away about his hometown.

"Perfect timing," said Martha, as Jim took a seat in an overstuffed armchair. "I just saw the Bentley turn into the drive. I was terribly cruel in forbidding your Mr. Scott a tea cake until Thomas returned, but he was sufficiently pleased by the quality of our Scotch that I expect I'm forgiven. And the tea cakes are still warm, so it all worked out anyway." Her head lifted, looking towards the doorway behind Jim. "Oh good. Here he is."

Jim's chair had a high back, and faced the windows at the back of the room. From the somewhat uncertain expression on Chekov's face, across from him, Jim had a pretty good idea of what he would see before he even turned around.

Dr. Thomas G. Leighton - winner of the 1930 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, three time Franklin Medal nominee, holder of five honorary doctorates in agriculture, and recipient of a special civilian Commendation of Valor from President Woodrow Wilson for his heroism during the Great War - was in one of his moods, the sort which could only be described as “manic.”

Tom was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a semi-permanent air of disheveled annoyance about him, as though wherever he was and whatever he was doing, you’d caught him in the midst of something important in which he hadn’t really wished to be disturbed. Jim, who had known him before the terrible events which had changed them both so profoundly, wasn’t put off by it; but he was acutely aware of how Tom was perceived by other people. The events of Tarsus, of course, had been classified, and young Chekov didn’t have clearance; Jim couldn’t very well explain to him exactly why this well-respected but reclusive genius stormed into the room practically vibrating with some alarming, barely-suppressed emotion, why his mood swings swung so violently from hysteric glee to bleak despair. At times like these, the combined desires to protect Tom from the world, and protect the world from Tom, made it difficult to be around him when anyone but Martha was in the room.

There was nothing for it except to cross the faded antique carpet as swiftly as possible, grip his friend's upper arms in two strong hands, and say, “Come and have a cup of tea, Tom, and meet the rest of my crew.” In a quieter voice, he followed it with, “It’s all right, old man. I’m here. Whatever’s upset you, it’s going to be all right.”

Tom glanced back with a conspiratorial glint in his dark eyes. “I’m not upset, Jim,” he whispered, oddly exultant. “Not anymore. Not now. I’ve done it. You’ll see. You’ll see when you meet them.”

Jim furrowed his brow. “Meet who?”

“Come sit, Thomas,” said Martha firmly, her voice just a little too pointed. “I hadn’t got round to explaining that yet; you know Jim always likes to have his walk first, before he settles in, and he’s only just got back.” She turned to Chekov. “Pavel, darling, do you mind popping out to the hall to collect your friends?” she asked, so charmingly that Jim could tell the younger man suspected nothing amiss. “Now that Thomas is here I’ll cut the cake and everyone can have something to eat. And then we’ll tell you all about our rather exciting plans for the week to keep you amused out here in the boring old countryside.”

“Right away, ma’am,” said Chekov eagerly, practically saluting, as he nearly fell over his own feet to dart out the door, and Jim was forced to suppress a chuckle. Martha’s charisma was difficult for most people to resist, when she was really putting it on. But it didn’t escape him that she was very much performing the role of hostess, and his amusement didn’t last long as he watched the polite smile drop swiftly off her face the moment they were alone.

“Jim, I need you,” said Tom, gripping his forearms in trembling hands. “We’ve never been this close, not in twenty years. You’ve got to go along with it, do you hear me? Go along with whatever I say, so your men don’t suspect.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ve been asked here under false pretexts,” Martha interrupted briskly. “You’re a clever man, darling, surely you’ve guessed that. And your Mr. Spock, too.”

“Yes.” Tom turned surly, casting a dark glare at his wife. “She would call in the Vulcan, never mind that I said we didn’t need him. I only wanted you. You’re the one I need, Jim. You’re the one who’s got to believe me.”

“Tom, whatever you need, you know I’ll help you,” said Jim patiently, as he attempted to extricate himself from his friend’s increasingly painful grip. “Only you still haven’t said what you need me to do. You promised me a great scientific breakthrough I could take back with me to the Home Office, but if a tour of the laboratories needs to wait until tomorrow I’m not in any rush.”

“It’s got nothing to do with -” Tom began impatiently, but was silenced by a discreet throat-clearing from his wife.

"I beg your pardon, Captain, Mrs. Leighton, Dr. Leighton," came Spock's voice from the doorway. "I have seen to the sleeping arrangements of the six lieutenants belowstairs. They have been instructed to keep the kitchen, storage areas and hallways clear of their personal belongings so as to avoid inconvenience to your domestic staff. When I arrived, they were already quite immersed in both their meal and their revelry; when reprimanded for their haste, they informed me they were obeying explicit orders from their hostess."

"Quite so," Martha said, waving him in, as the others soon followed with Chekov. "It's their shore leave too, why shouldn't they get to let their hair down a bit? One of my worst traits, Mr. Spock, is that I always want young people to like me. I suspected I'd make six new friends by telling them they should tuck into their tea right away, and I was right. Now, come in, all of you, have a seat and meet my husband." She poured from the steaming silver pot and began passing out cups of fragrant tea as the rest of the bridge officers took their seats on the cozy armchairs and sofas clustered round the tea-table. "Mr. Spock, I know, has met Thomas two or three times before." 

“Yes, pleased to see you again,” said Tom with a rather absentminded ta’al as he took a sandwich and seated himself next to Bones on the settee. “Live long and prosper, and all that.”

“Peace and long life,” replied Spock politely. “We are honored to be guests in your home.” He accepted a cup of black tea from his hostess, and sipped it with a subtly approving expression. (Spock was rather a snob about tea.) As the others dove for a tiered dish of ham sandwiches and a platter of beautifully iced little cakes, Jim saw Martha pick up a small covered dish from someplace and pass it across the table to her Vulcan guest. Lifting the china lid, Spock made a quietly pleased sound at the sight of a very pretty display of brightly-colored Vulcan delicacies. They liked fresh vegetables, cooked as lightly as possible, without meat or dairy, and it seemed Martha had done up something rather architectural-looking with cucumber, radish and watercress. Jim suspected Spock would enjoy it immensely, and the thought of Martha making a special effort just for her Vulcan guest made his heart swell. It mattered so much to him that the two of them get on, and he hadn't realized until this moment just how nervous he'd been that for some reason they wouldn't.

“Thomas, this is Jim’s good friend Dr. Leonard McCoy,” Martha went on. “You’ve met him too, remember, only it was years ago. And all the rest of these lovely people are new since last we got a tour of the ship. Lieutenant Uhura is a linguist and translator, one of Amanda Grayson's protégés. These are Mr. Scott, Mr. Chekov, and Mr. Sulu. And as Mr. Spock informed us, there were half a dozen junior officers far too intimidated to take tea with the captain’s personal friends, so I’ve given them full run of the servants’ quarters.”

“Aye, and they’ve made themselves quite at home,” said Scotty wryly. “Found 'em stuffin’ their faces with scones and cream when I went down to check the wireless had been set up proper, and there was a game of cards already on. Young Lieutenant Riley’s a right fair poker player, and I believe he’ll have taken Masters and Palmer for everything in their purses by the time we ship off back to London.”

“I did apologize for the less glamorous accommodations,” Martha remarked, “but I was heartily assured by all parties that the downstairs bedrooms were positively luxurious compared to life aboard a ship.”

“If they’ve got their own rooms, it certainly is,” said Bones. “We’ll have to pry them loose at the end of the week to get them out of your hair, Mrs. Leighton.”

“You must be remodeling upstairs, then?” Jim asked. “You said on the phone that you'd put us all in the main hall on the third floor; but even without a staff that lives in, I've never known you to use those empty downstairs bedrooms for guests unless the fourth floor rooms are occupied too."

“Ah. Yes. Well,” said Martha, a trifle evasively, “they are.”

“You’ve got other guests?” Jim was puzzled. “Have we come at a bad time?”

“You’ve come at exactly the time you were invited, don’t be daft,” Tom replied curtly. “We’ve only got a tremendous surprise. To help make this week more, er, exciting, don’t you know. All alone out here in the country. I’ve arranged something rather special. Do you remember the company of actors, Jim? The show I took you to in London?”

“Oh.” This surprised him. “Yes, of course. The Karidian Company. Quite impressive. Lieutenant Uhura was disappointed to miss them in London, but thought she might try to catch them in Exeter.”

“Then she will be very pleased to learn,” said Tom, “that in fact, the performance in Exeter has been canceled. Or rather, it’s been moved. To Norwick House.” He gave Jim an odd, rather conspiratorial smile. “They’ve been staying here all week, to rehearse. The whole of Dartmoor has been invited, for a grand performance in our very own ballroom this Friday. You’ll get to meet them all.”

“The actors?” Jim repeated blankly, looking from Martha to Tom and back again. “You mean to say - the whole Karidian Company is here, at Norwick House? I wish you’d told me. We would have been happy to move our visit to another week. That’s an awful lot of guests all at once.”

“No!” Tom’s eyes blazed with sudden fury. “No, Jim, dammit, it has to be now, don’t you see -”

A light touch from his wife on his forearm quieted him somewhat, but not before casting a rather heavy awkwardness over the room. Sulu and Chekov eyed each other uncertainly. Scotty shifted in his seat, never at his best when the complex tapestry of human emotion was on display. Bones and Uhura, both keen observers, pretended to busy themselves with their cups of tea while regarding the scientist with sharp eyes that missed nothing.

And Spock . . . 

Spock, Jim realized, was watching him.

This fit with the conversation they’d had earlier, he realized. Bones and Uhura were observing unusual behavior from their host, correctly intuiting that he was distressed about something. Spock was primarily concerned with whether Jim knew yet what it was.

Damn it all, he wished he did. The whole thing was so odd.

“What my husband meant to say,” Martha interjected smoothly, “was that we invited you all here specially so that you could enjoy the performance, and maybe make friends with the actors too. We don’t get many glamorous European artists down here in our part of Devon, and the arrival of the Karidian Players is big news.”

“What a thrill,” said Uhura, dark eyes bright with excitement. “I can’t think how you managed to convince them to change their itinerary with such short notice, but I’m certainly pleased you did. I’m very much looking forward to meeting them all. I saw Freya Bergen's Lady Macbeth in New York when I was just a girl. She's marvelous. And Karidian himself hasn't toured with them in years! How grand to be able to really meet them properly; though what a pity for that theatre in Exeter."

“The theatre in Exeter was no longer able to accommodate them,” said Tom, in a maliciously gleeful tone. “There was a flood under the stage. A pipe burst, or some such. Rotten for them, as you say, but we were more than happy to step in. Many of the ticket buyers have automobiles, of course, and can get from Exeter to Princetown with no trouble. And then we’ll have the locals with their horse-carts to get them the rest of the way.”

“They can’t get here by car?” Sulu was puzzled by this. “We did just fine.”

“The farmers are saying it looks like rain this week,” Martha explained. “It’ll wash out the road from here to Princetown. Moor ponies know their way blindfolded because they’ve been born and bred to it, but you’d never let a visitor in an automobile try to find their way alone. They’d lose the road and end up in the Grimpen Mire.”

“That sounds rather foreboding,” Uhura remarked with a shiver.

“It’s a pit of death,” intoned Tom somberly. “If you ever walk up to Widow’s Tor, young lady, watch your step in the dark. You’ll pitch straight over the edge of the cliff and into the Mire, and then no one will ever see you again.”

Uhura blinked at him, a little stunned by this. 

Martha swatted her husband on the arm, affecting a pretense of playful archness but visibly furious beneath it. “Don’t go frightening the guests, Thomas,” she said firmly. “That’s enough of that. It’s the weather,” she added apologetically to Uhura. “He gets melancholy when the cold goes on for so long, and it makes one rather miserable and dramatic. Say you’re sorry, darling, and do please remember that our guests are here to have a nice time.”

Tom harrumphed an apology to Uhura, who received it with her usual grace but never quite took her eyes off him again after that. Jim could see she was troubled by his unpredictable behavior, wondering what lay beneath it - and wondering too, he suspected, whether her captain knew more than he was letting on.

Still, Tom was sufficiently chastened by that little lecture to snap out of it a bit, and after a few leading questions from Dr. McCoy about his research, he relaxed enough to become almost friendly. But there was something in the way he continually eyed Spock - a kind of suspicious resentment - which Jim could not help noticing, and didn't like at all.

“It must be terribly thrilling,” said Uhura, as they rose from the tea table and Martha escorted them to the grand staircase at the end of the foyer, “having such magnificent actors in your very own home. Getting to dine with them every day, watch them at their rehearsals, really see the thing come together.”

“Well, we stay out of their way when we can help it,” laughed Martha. “The fourth floor of Norwick House used to be the domain of children and governesses. There’s a good-sized schoolroom up there which we’ve long since turned into a kind of secondary parlor for guests, and that’s where they’ve been rehearsing. We have a few girls from the village pub who come and go as extra kitchen help when we need it, and they’ve met more of the actors than we have, bringing up sandwiches on trays and such. They keep such odd hours, you know. We dine quite early in the country, but theatre people don’t stop to take their supper some nights until ten or eleven o’clock. And then of course they’re abed the next day until Thomas and I are about to sit down to lunch. We’ve given them free run of the place, but we hear them more than we see them.”

“It'll be us keeping their hours tonight, though,” added Tom, that odd, manic light returning to his dark eyes. “They’ve taken the night off from rehearsing, so we’re giving a little party. Nothing too formal, you know, just neighbors, but all the theatrical folk will be there, and we thought it would be rather good fun for all of you. We’ll have cocktails in the drawing room at eight with a buffet supper, and maybe dancing or cards. All depends on the weather, of course; if the rain comes, the locals will want to get back before the road gets too ugly. But it will be a night to remember," he added, eyes flashing, "of that you can be certain."

“But in the meantime,” his wife said, “you’ve all had a long journey which began quite early this morning, and might welcome a few hours to rest and refresh yourselves before you’re expected to dress up and be charming.”

“They can certainly dress up,” Jim said wryly. “And Uhura and I, at least, are always charming. Mr. Sulu, too, when he likes. It’s hit or miss with the rest of them.”

“Well, I like that,” retorted Scotty in a somewhat indignant tone.

Bones gave him a comforting slap on the back. “No one’s more charming after five drinks than you are, old boy,” he said. “And that’s the highest praise I can give.” 

Scotty seemed somewhat mollified by this, and it made everyone laugh, lightening the somewhat uneasy mood which had begun to hover round them again. Jim made his way up the stairs to his bedroom feeling a little better. 

Tom was under a strain of some kind, that was evident, and the presence of all these additional strangers was damned odd - the man hated guests, as a rule - but at least Martha seemed a little more steady than she’d looked at first glance. Maybe he’d read too much into the whole thing, and both of them were simply tired. 

Well, Jim was tired too.

It had been seven months since their last shore leave, an all-too-brief weekend in Amsterdam where he’d only gone ashore for half a day. It wouldn’t even have been that much, if Bones and Spock hadn’t teamed up to force him; he was buried in schematics, and the notes he’d promised Sarek were overdue. The two had conspired against him, practically shoving him overboard to get him off the bridge, until he’d finally relented and spent a pleasant three hours with Uhura at the Rijksmuseum looking at Rembrandts and Vermeers, followed by a dinner of roast venison at The White Room with Bones and Scotty. 

Spock had greeted his return to the bridge that evening with a displeased little sniff, wordlessly indicating that he did not at all believe his captain had obtained sufficient recreational time to accomplish the intended benefits of shore leave. Jim, smiling to himself, had said nothing. They had blocked out the entire next day to hole up in his office and go over Sarek’s blueprints; Spock didn’t need to know that the prospect of spending a whole uninterrupted day just getting to watch his brilliant Vulcan mind at work and dreaming about their future was a thousand times more rejuvenating than riding bicycles along the canals.

But this was different. Jim had a week ahead of him with nothing to do but breathe good country air and eat good country dinners and hear about Tom’s thrilling new scientific breakthrough, whatever it was. There was a magnificent wine cellar and an even better library, a cocktail party and a play. And Spock was here, which meant long morning walks and leisurely games of after-dinner chess and all the other quiet pleasures of his company which were so rare and precious when their lives were regimented by ship’s time.

“Bring something formal for dinner,” Martha had instructed them. Jim couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Spock in black tie; for fleet events he always wore his dress uniform. The question of what he would wear to dinner tonight gave Jim a tiny flutter he dismissed immediately as nerves. A nap would help; clearly he had absorbed too much of his hosts' anxieties, and it was beginning to rub off on him.

Martha deposited them all at their various bedrooms on the third floor.  She and Tom slept about a hundred miles down the hall and around the corner, in the old east wing where the lords and ladies had kept their private apartments; they were wretchedly drafty, and most of the adjoining rooms had gone unused since Queen Victoria’s time. Jim had only set foot in that part of the house a handful of times, but he knew enough to know it wouldn't have helped his case with Bones in claiming the manor wasn't haunted.

Not even Bones, however, could possibly find fault with Martha Leighton's guest rooms. The grand, sweeping staircase which ascended from the main floor curved around to open onto a majestic open gallery overlooking the marble foyer, papered in gold and red velvet with a row of beautifully ornate doors. Uhura was all the way down at the north end, which placed her right next to a spacious bathroom for her own private use; while down at the south end, four rooms and another bathroom faced each other around a little sitting area, which Bones, Scotty, Chekov and Sulu would share. The two central doors were the most opulent, one of which was Jim’s usual room for visits. Ordinarily, however, when he visited Northwick House he came alone, so he’d forgotten one of the room’s key features until Martha patted him on the shoulder and left him to make his way inside.

It was connected to the room next door.

“Ah,” Jim said a little uncomfortably, as Spock entered his own room and turned with a raised eyebrow to meet his gaze through the gleaming white bathroom with both its doors standing open. “Yes. I’d forgotten. Um, well, you see, in the olden days, when a married couple traveled together, it would have been scandalous for a hostess to put them in the same room.”

“And equally scandalous, I presume,” said Spock, “for either of them to be seen in the hallway at night going from one room to the other. Particularly since anyone downstairs might see them doing it.”

“Exactly. The highest-ranking guests naturally got the nicest rooms. They called these the King’s Suite and the Queen’s Suite, though I’m not sure any real kings or queens ever stayed in them, and I took a liking to the Queen’s when I first visited half a lifetime ago because it had a larger fireplace and a softer bed. Which I suppose makes you King for the week.”

Spock cast an eye about him with mock gravity. “I will endeavor to do the title justice."

“And you’d better get used to bossing me around, for a change. England didn’t used to let queens do much, with a handful of exceptions.”

“I prefer an interpretation rooted not in English politics,” said Spock, “but in chess.” He took a step toward the bathroom door just then, a dark shape framed in blinding white which made him look almost like a shadow in the bedroom’s dimmer light. “Perhaps the arrangement of rooms is eminently suitable after all. Perhaps that room is yours by right because of all the pieces arrayed on the board, you are by far the most valuable. The king is constrained in his movements, and under frequent attack from his opponent’s pieces. It is the queen who commands the battle, who can move in any direction, who seizes opportunities others miss, who secures victory against impossible odds.”

“The queen’s job is to protect the king no matter what,” said Jim, leaning in the other doorway, regarding Spock across the sea of snowy white tile, feeling strangely giddy. “She’d burn down the world rather than let anything happen to him. Without the king, it’s all over; there’s no point to it all anymore. So yes, I suppose you may be right.”

Spock looked at him in silence for a long time. “Jim,” he said. “It has never been your responsibility to protect me. It is mine to protect you, and it is one I bear most gladly. I consider it not a burden, but an honor. Please allow me to perform my duties, even though for the next week our formal roles do not apply. Please listen when I urge you to be careful.”

Jim blinked at him, a little startled. “Of what?”

“I do not yet know.” Spock’s jaw was tight with a sudden frustration. “I am unable, at present, to identify its source; but something in this house is very wrong.”

This was so very near to Jim’s own thoughts that he could do nothing except offer Spock a helpless, resigned shrug; he didn’t know what it was, either, and it was damned hard to evade a danger he couldn’t see. “I’m always careful, Spock,” he said, with a playful grin, trying to pass the moment off as a light one; but Spock did not smile back.

“If I may be of any aid or assistance to you, Jim,” he said in a low voice, “if there is ever anything I may do . . .”

“We’re in a comfortable old house, surrounded by friends, with nothing ahead of us but a week of leisure,” Jim pointed out, reminding himself as much as Spock. “You may offer me your good company, and I will be extremely content with that. There’s nothing here I need protecting from except, maybe, an old friend who’s been through hard times and is sometimes a little erratic because of it.”

Spock’s dark eyes grew sharper, suddenly. “You have never informed me how you first came to make Dr. Leighton’s acquaintance,” he said.

"High school. That's not a secret."

"And his wife?"

"Ah. Yes. You're not allowed to ask that, I'm afraid."

“I am aware that much of your work during the war has been classified.”

“Theirs has too. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that the scars Tom wears on the outside aren’t the only ones he took home with him. In a way, you know, they’re easier. Burns fade faster than nightmares do.”

“The war ended eighteen years ago,” Spock reminded him. “It is certainly plausible that a trauma so old still affects Dr. Leighton’s overall mental state - lack of sleep, for example, as you say. But if the source of his present agitation has its roots in that shared history, then something new has happened. When I first made his acquaintance nine years ago, his behavior was significantly more measured.”

“I know,” said Jim wearily. “I know, Spock. Something’s off, and I can’t say what.”

“And you will not rest until you know, and have found a way to fix it, to restore your friend to himself.”

Jim ran a hand through his hair, a little abashed. “That’s giving me a lot of credit.”

“No.” Spock shook his head. “It is simply who you are, Jim. Where you love, you love unreservedly. The Leightons are clearly important to you. I believe already you have adopted their problems as yours to solve.” He folded his arms and regarded his captain sternly through the bathroom door. “And if you are to do so, you will require your full strength. I strongly suggest at least two hours of sleep before the evening’s festivities commence.”

“Yes, Mother,” said Jim obediently, which - as anticipated - earned him that reproving look of Spock’s he enjoyed so much, which was only just barely on the right side of the insubordination line.

Spock, he knew, would use the hours for his meditations - the Vulcan equivalent of a long, restorative nap - and would knock to awake him in time, as he always did. Jim was only too happy to strip down to his underthings, use the freezing cold basin on the dresser to wash off the dust and grime of travel, don his pajamas, and make himself quite cozy in Martha Leighton’s impeccably maintained guest bed.

"Where you love, you love unreservedly."

What a strange thing to say, he thought drowsily, as the comforting scent of Spock’s meditation incense drifting in beneath the bathroom door soothed him into sleep.

* * * * *

He woke to the anticipated knock, and had plenty of time for a bath and shave before dressing for dinner. He was just fussing with his bow tie when he heard the second knock, this time at the door to the gallery instead of the one from the bathroom . . . meaning it wasn’t Spock.

“Come in,” he called from the little shaving mirror on the vanity, as he adjusted the knot again, and to his great surprise it was Tom who flung the door open.

“Need to talk to you,” he said shortly. “Now. Before drinks. Didn’t get a chance to explain downstairs, before your whole bloody crew tromped in for their tea. We’ve got to speak alone before you meet all the others.”

Jim turned around and stared at him. “Good God, Tom, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he exclaimed, concern twisting in his gut. Tom’s dark eyes were shining with a strange, sinister light, and the flush on his cheeks didn’t seem healthy. “What’s the matter?”

“Can’t tell you here,” Tom said crossly, with a pointed gesture toward the shared connecting bathroom. “The walls have pointed ears, dammit. Come with me. East wing. Martha’s there. We’ve got to tell you, old man. We’ve got to explain.”

And with that, he simply turned on his heel and stalked out.

Jim, scrambling to keep up while attempting to fasten his cufflinks at the same time, followed him down the gallery and around the corner of the vast carpeted hall toward the oldest wing of the house, where the air was colder and the ceilings higher and the atmosphere decidedly more gloomy. “Tom, of course you know I’m happy to help with anything you need, but it’s nearly eight o’clock. Do we have time for this? Aren't your guests arriving soon?”

“Oh, they’ll wait,” Tom grumbled. “My bloody house, isn’t it? Feeding them for free, aren’t I? They’ll wait and they’ll shut up about it. You’ll see, Jim, when I explain it all to you. You’ll see how it was the only way.” 

Baffled by this, Jim simply surrendered, and let Tom lead him up to the great double door with its curved gothic arches which led to their private rooms. It was a large suite, rather medieval in style, with a fireplace big enough to burn a man alive and narrow casement windows. The master’s bedroom, which they shared, and the mistress’ bedroom, which they used as a kind of office, lay behind another set of closed doors. Before him, Jim - who'd only been back here a handful of times, and not for many, many years - saw the comfortably shabby little sitting room he dimly remembered. Two battered old leather Chesterfield sofas faced each other across a low coffee table beside the fire, heaped round with books, discarded sweaters and old teacups. A faint scent of lemon hung in the air; both of them took their tea with sugar and lemon, no milk, and a few of the cups still had a browning curl of rind in them. It was homey, and cluttered, and pleasant. Jim found himself wondering whether perhaps most of the rest of the house was for show, and this was where they did their real living.

Martha, seated on one of the sofas, rose at his entrance. She was wearing a plum-colored silk gown with beaded straps, and the diamonds at her ears and throat were dainty but quite real. As she passed behind Tom and Jim to lock the door, he observed that the dress was cut rather scandalously low in the back, which pleased him.

Good for her, he thought. The neighbors would be coming. She'd worked hard to win them over, these stubborn, unfriendly moor folk with their inherent mistrust of outsiders. They'd liked her father and grandfather, and they'd have accepted her as their own without question if she’d only stayed in Devon to manage her own land and married a sensible Devon boy who rode horses, instead of a brooding, bad-tempered genius with a jarring American accent who'd turned the stables into a laboratory "where Lord knows what devilry goes on." Martha had resolutely refused to apologize for any of it, and simply wore them down over time by being her irrepressible self. A different woman would have worn modest navy blue and dowdy old pearls, to avoid causing comment; Martha didn't give a damn, and that was why he liked her.

“You're a vision,” he said, kissing her cheek.

“You’re all right, I suppose,” she said, eyeing him critically in his tuxedo. “That knot’s appalling. Aren't you a sailor?"

"You understand that rope and bow ties function rather differently."

"Yes, but your eyes don't, do they? It's absolutely lopsided, you plonker. Give it here.”

“For God’s sake, Martha, there’s no time!” bellowed Tom, and Jim turned in surprise to see his friend’s face hot and red with emotion.

After twenty years, the dance was as innate to both of them as if they’d been born to it, both Jim and Martha leaping into action in tandem as they pulled apart, bow tie temporarily forgotten. 

“All right, Tom,” said Martha, deliberately gentling her voice, making her way over to the little sideboard where a pitcher of water sat beside the siphon and decanter.

“All right, old boy,” said Jim, matching her tone as he took Tom’s arm and guided him over to the sofas by the fire to sit him down. “She’s here. I’m here. We’re all yours. Tell me what I can do for you. Tell me how I can help.”

Martha returned with a glass of water and watched Tom without speaking until he drank it. By the time he set it down on the coffee table, his hands were no longer shaking quite so badly, and they both exhaled a little. Martha returned to the sideboard and poured two suspiciously generous glasses of brandy. She pressed one into the hands of a restless, pacing Jim, then took the other and seated herself beside her husband. Her face was carefully blank, in the way that meant she was trying to recuse herself, become temporarily invisible, to let Tom speak uninterrupted. Whatever they'd brought him here to listen to, apparently Tom would be explaining it. Jim was familiar with this posture, and he perfectly understood its dual functions - to support Tom in difficult moments by giving him the time and space to form his own thoughts without distraction, and to avoid making herself a target for his ire if he snapped - though he suspected it would never make him entirely comfortable to watch Martha simply switch herself off like that.

Still, it was Tom's show, at the moment, so Jim gave his friend his sole focus. Whatever the secret was, he was about to be let in, and that could only be a good thing, couldn't it?

Tom leaned forward, eyes flashing with intense emotion, only barely leashed. "Jim," he began, “the day we’ve been waiting for has finally come.” 

Not quite sure what to make of this odd beginning, Jim waited patiently for more, which seemed to vex Tom somewhat.

“Oh, don’t play that game with me," he snapped. "You know everything I know, Jim. You were there! You saw it all! We never imagined we would have a chance like this, and we’ll never get a better one. Oh, but he’s crafty; he knows more than we even suspected. It’s down to you and I now, and we can’t let the bastard slip away from us again.”

“Tom.” Jim shook his head. “Tom, I’m sorry, but you’ve lost me. I don’t understand what’s happened. I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“You were there, Jim!” Tom hissed. “You sat next to me in the theatre.”

“The theatre?” Jim blinked at him, startled. “This is about the actors?”

“I tried to tell you, but you didn’t listen.”

“Tell me what, old man?” he pressed, but Tom’s eyes had gone hazy, as he began frantically scrabbling through a pile of papers on the coffee table, and Jim knew that wherever he was right now, it wasn’t here at Norwick House. His mind was someplace else, somewhere Martha and Jim couldn't follow.

“That voice,” Tom whispered, as he seemed to find what he was looking for, plucking a cut-out newspaper photograph from the untidy heap and holding it up with shaking hands. “He's back. That man on the stage. I'm certain of it. That was Kodos the Executioner.”

END OF ACT I

Chapter Text

TWENTY YEARS AGO

American Aid Workers’ Outpost
Liège, Belgium
1916

“Your friend will live,” said a low, grave voice from above him, and Jim scrambled to sit up from his cot. He hadn’t realized he’d let himself fall asleep. Ambassador Sarek was looming over him like a solemn shadow, backlit by the setting sun outside the open tent flap.

Good Lord, he must have been out for hours.

“I gave orders that you not be disturbed,” said the Vulcan dryly, plainly aware of his thoughts, which Jim imagined were written all over his face. “You were as fatigued and malnourished as anyone else in your camp, Mr. Kirk, though you refused to acknowledge the fact. Three nights of adequate sleep and nourishment are insufficient to restore the human body to full strength. You will require more rest than usual for now.”

“I might, but I won’t get it,” said Jim, disentangling himself from the blankets and coming to his feet. “Military life leaves little room for the luxury of afternoon naps, I’m afraid, sir. And now I know never to leave the back of my neck exposed to a Vulcan,” he added lightly. The Ambassador’s somewhat extreme measures had apparently been the source of such hilarity among the refugees that Miss Norwick said the children had turned it into a game; one of them would pinch another’s neck, with the goal of collapsing to the ground as dramatically as possible. Certainly becoming the subject of a playground joke was not a fate Jim would seek out, precisely; but the very existence of such a thing as jokes said so much about the resilience of children that all he could do was laugh, in order to keep from crying.

“I do not apologize for my actions,” Sarek replied primly. “You know perfectly well, Mr. Kirk, you would not have slept otherwise.”

Jim snorted at this, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, since the older man was obviously right.

“You said Tom’s okay?” he asked, stepping back into his boots. “Can I see him?”

“At present, he is asleep,” Sarek replied. “They will keep him in the infirmary another night for observation; however, the infection has been treated successfully. The damage to his burned flesh is permanent, which is regrettable; however, an exceedingly competent surgeon was able to intervene in time to save the other eye. He is now as well as can be expected, given the injuries he has suffered, and recovery will be slow; but he will not die here. None of them will.”

Jim nodded wordlessly. “Good. Okay. Good. Thank you. The nurses haven’t let me see him so all I’ve got was bits and pieces, and I was afraid -”

“No lives were lost,” said Sarek. “Every refugee you saved from Tarsus survived, and all of them are recovering. The worst casualties will be Dr. Leighton’s burns, and a small handful of mobility limitations which can be easily accommodated with a walking stick or wheelchair. The children resumed adequate nutrition in time to prevent permanent damage to their growth or long-term health, and your camp’s hygienic practices prevented illness or infection from setting in. Your success rate was one hundred percent, Mr. Kirk. I wonder if you realize how rare that is.” He stepped back toward the entrance to the dormitory tent and gestured outside. “If you are amenable,” he said, “I would appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.”

Jim was surprised by this. “Of course, sir. May I ask, what about?”

“Several topics of interest,” said the Vulcan, as Jim followed him out into the violet light of the chilly Belgian evening. “I would like, first, to speak with your friends Mrs. Eames and Colonel Moulton, for a fuller report on the night of the fire. Do you know, Mr. Kirk, where I have been the past two days?”

“I - oh. Well, no. I suppose I hadn’t thought. I appreciate everything you’ve done for us, sir, but I hope you didn’t think - I mean, I would hardly expect a man with so many important demands on his time to - that is to say, sir, I’m only a midshipman, and -”

“I returned to the village of Tarsus,” said Sarek, cutting off Jim’s rather awkward rambling mid-sentence, and a chill fell between them.

They walked in silence for a moment, weaving their way through the large army tents toward the officer’s mess, where dinner was just getting underway. Jim could smell roast chicken, and he turned away so Sarek wouldn’t see him blinking back tears. 

All his friends would be eating hot roast chicken tonight. It still felt like a kind of miracle.

“Once the refugees in your camp were settled under proper care,” Sarek continued, “there were two other questions of significance to address, where CRB lacked the jurisdiction to act unilaterally. The first, of course, was what to do with the other three thousand and eighty-two survivors. They required food and medical care too, of course, but many of them had also either committed or enabled criminal acts, and all of them benefited materially from the mass deaths perpetuated in that village. Violent crime has been exceedingly rare on Vulcan for over one thousand years, Mr. Kirk, and we have no framework for effectively addressing it. I am not an officer of the law. My concern is exclusively for the well-being of the innocent; which families can be safely reunited in order that healing may begin, and which cannot? The question is beyond the scope of CRB. At the moment, they are safe, they have food and medicine, and they are clean and well treated; but they are confined, until more is known.”

“That’s the most you can do right now, then, I think,” Jim agreed. “God knows nobody deserves to starve, even the wicked; but you’re right that some of those refugees don’t want their friends and families back, after what they watched them become. Nothing to be done about it, I think, except take it case by case.”

“Affirmative.”

“What was the second thing?”

“To undertake a comprehensive investigation of the crime scene,” said Sarek gravely. “To begin to understand, insofar as possible, who Kodos was, and how he came to Tarsus. Extensive questioning has been conducted among the survivors we found in the village when we arrived, those who must have been closest to him; yet their stories were fragmented and inconsistent. Inquiries have been sent through intelligence channels to all the German garrisons, and the other villages under occupation throughout the Ardennes. What few photographs of him exist came from one of the women among his chief lieutenants, who had a camera and occasionally documented the gatherings which took place in his estate. Relevant images have been circulated to newspapers and on newsreels, with no effect. To date, no more is known about the man than you knew the day he arrived in Tarsus. We had hoped an investigation of the house itself, along with the remains, would yield more answers.”

"Then he . . ." Jim swallowed hard. "Then he really is dead? You found a body? It's certain?"

"We found a body," said Sarek. He did not elaborate. Jim turned to look at him, a question in his eyes. Sarek nodded, as if in response to it.

" The Belgian police wish to bring the case to a swift conclusion," said Sarek. "I wish to bring it to an accurate one. At present, we are at odds.  You see now why I wish to speak with the witnesses. They saved the life of Thomas Leighton; but if Governor Kodos died in that fire, then the answers we seek may have died with him. I would like to know exactly what they saw."

* * * * *

The Vulcans at Liège lived a modest distance from the more densely-packed tents of the camp, where soldiers and refugees were crowded in side by side. Those posted to Earth tended to have stronger mental shields than ordinary Vulcans - or so Jim had been taught at the naval academy - which enabled them to share close quarters with humans and avoid being overwhelmed by the onslaught of emotions and thoughts. Still, as a gesture of respect, the four in residence here had been granted a degree of privacy. Jim noted with some interest that they had clearly also been permitted to utilize their own technology - something they generally avoided in mixed company on orders from the rather frightful-sounding T’Pau, the planet’s Eldest Mother and apparent ruling voice.

Thus, when Sarek pulled back the tent flap and ushered Jim in behind him, he was astonished to find himself inside a space which did not resemble a tent at all. 

Ambassador Sarek had been posted to Belgium for a year and a half, with Liège as his home base, which made this something like an ad hoc diplomatic outpost. Jim wondered, as he stepped inside and looked around, who the quarters had been designed to impress. Or maybe intimidate? Certainly a deliberate choice had been made not to shy away from reminders that he hailed from another world. This was not necessarily a space designed to put humans at ease by surrounding them with human trappings; it seemed rather, to Jim, an invitation to consider how very much larger the universe was than whatever little corner of Earth one called home.

It made him think of Hamlet, a bit. He'd played the role in high school, and still had bits of it memorized, floating at random through his mind at the oddest times.

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

The tent's canvas walls seemed to have disappeared entirely. Jim appeared for all the world to be standing inside a cave of red stone atop a high plateau, with a strange red orb hanging in the sky over the horizon which did not look like either a sun or a moon. The images were so real that he felt his feet stutter to a halt, for fear of tripping over the cliff’s edge and tumbling down the rock face to the forbidding desert below. For half a moment, he wondered if he had accidentally stepped through some kind of portal to Vulcan itself. 

Sarek - who had made his way over to one of his aides in a far corner of the tent full of odd devices Jim badly wanted a look at - watched him take in his surroundings, eyebrow lifting in mild amusement at the younger man's confusion. "When Vulcans travel offworld for extended periods," he explained, "we are more than usually reliant on the disciplines of meditation to balance the mind and katra, a practice whose efficacy may increase if one anchors oneself in familiar landscapes. Such portable holoprojection devices as these are commonplace. The desert you see below you, Mr. Kirk, is called Vulcan’s Forge. I was born and raised in a city called ShiKahr, which is located at the southernmost edge of the desert. My aides hail from the same region. This land is home to all of us.”

The words "holoprojection device" shifted Jim's perception of the landscape around him away from baffled wonder at accessing a portal to another world, and toward eager curiosity about his first real peek at the tantalizing secrets of Vulcan technology. Feeling a little bolder, he took a step toward  the edge of the “cliff,” then another and another, and realized he was looking at  something a little bit like the projectors they used for reels of film in the cinema, but on a much grander scale than anything human beings had yet invented. Where a cinema screen was simply one flat rectangle in front of you, the Vulcan holoprojector's image was in three dimensions. Below him, red sand. Above him, red sky. It was remarkable. He found himself unexpectedly grateful that Vulcans didn't cram their reception rooms with a lot of unnecessary furniture - preferring, it seemed, floor cushions and lots of airy space - or he might have walked right into a table.

“My God, what a place,” he murmured, dazzled by how real the world around him seemed to be, even now that he knew it was simply an artificial construct of technology. He still felt, in his bones, as though he were really standing atop that cliff overlooking Vulcan's Forge. The haze of heat in the air, the stillness of the dry brushy grasses; a day with no wind. In the distance, a bird flew over the valley in lazy circles. A Vulcan bird!, he thought, excitement surging in his chest. If the bird flew closer, would he become the first human besides Amanda Grayson to ever see it? 

Dimly aware of others entering the tent behind him, Jim wandered along the canvas walls, taking in the sweeping landscape, and tried to recollect everything he'd learned about Vulcan in his science classes at Riverside Elementary School. Space studies had always been his favorite subject.  Slower revolution and rotation than Earth, he knew that, which meant longer days and years; and higher gravity, too.  Cooler toward the poles, with a climate something like a temperate rainforest, but desert on most of the central continents.  They’d evolved to adapt to the heat, with a second inner eyelid and bodies that didn’t sweat and blood that looked green because it contained more copper than iron. 

Would a Vulcan bird possess fascinating differences, too? Or would it look on the surface quite similar to the birds of Earth - just as the young female aide preparing tea at the table behind him looked, on the surface, like a human who simply possessed ears and brows more pointed than his own?

He caught himself in the middle of this thought, ruefully amused at his own hubris; naturally, of course, wasn't the inverse of this also true? That female aide might very well be looking at him and thinking to herself how very like an ordinary Vulcan that young Human navy officer appeared, save for his unnaturally rounded ears.

He wondered if the birds of Earth were strange and alien to her, if she had accepted this offworld posting because she felt the same awestruck wonder about the oceans of Terra as he did about this place called Vulcan’s Forge.

Then a familiar voice with a crisp British accent said "Done gawking at the scenery, my boy, or shall we let the tea get cold without you?", and Jim reluctantly set aside the indulgence of fantasizing about visits to other worlds, returning to the urgent business of his own. 

Colonel Moulton, who had spoken, had entered with Mrs. Eames while Jim was still daydreaming, and been conducted by Ambassador Sarek over to a large round tea-table of the sort one saw in Japan - low to the ground, obligating them to sit upon cushions rather than chairs. The Vulcan kept a close eye upon the elder of his guests as everyone lowered themselves to the floor, prepared to offer assistance if required; but apart from a few good-natured quips, all three humans settled in quite easily. Moulton did not like to be fussed over. He was fifty-three, a British army general who had retired early ten years ago or so due to a leg injury that hadn’t healed quite right, leaving him with a trace of a limp that was just visible if you looked hard enough; but he prided himself on the fact that it scarcely slowed him down at all. He had the pep and iron constitution of a man half his age, and Sarek seemed to sense without needing to be told that the worst possible way to build trust with the man would have been to haul in human table with four ordinary chairs, assuming he was incapable of taking tea with a Vulcan in the traditional Vulcan way. And getting off on the wrong foot with Colonel Moulton this early in the process wouldn't bode well for anyone. He had a reputation as a tough old walnut, and he had earned it. Jim first met the man the day the convoy rolled out for the Ardennes, and more than once over the course of the last seven months he’d found himself grateful for the man’s impenetrable levelheadedness. He'd heard other CRB newcomers call him terrifying, but Jim had been ready to trust him right away, because Moulton had what Jim considered to be the only endorsement worth a damn in the whole camp: that Mrs. Eames liked him.

Sarek descended into a cross-legged position with a surprisingly easy grace, given the many layers of his long robes, and Jim forced himself to silence his chattering, distractable mind again. (Neutral colors, long sleeves, many layers; traditional garments designed to protect the wearer from the sun on a hot desert world, but adapted for the cooler climate of Earth. On Vulcan, would they wear lighter colors and fabrics? Did Amanda have to stay indoors? What was it like for Sarek, the first time he ever saw a winter?)

The young Vulcan aide who had been tending to the teapot poured a steaming and aromatic red liquid into four clay cups before recusing herself, leaving the ambassador and the three humans alone.

"Well, then," said a no-nonsense American voice embroidered with the telltale lilt of Brooklyn. "Shall we call this first meeting of the 'I Hope Kodos Rots In Hell' Society to order?"

Jim choked briefly on his tea, and looked up across the table at the face of the person he secretly considered his favorite in the whole camp.

Dorothea Eames had been a hospital nurse before the war, and everything about her gave off the brisk, matter-of-fact competence of someone who’d spent two-thirds of her life covered in blood and was therefore impossible to shock. She was a very tall, very large woman with steel-gray hair, thick black spectacles, and a face Tom described behind her back as “rather horsey.” Tom was highly intimidated by Dorothea, but Jim doted on her. She’d been quiet about it, always, but from the moment Jim arrived she’d known what he was. “Mine was an Irish girl,” she said once out of nowhere the very first time they were alone, driving a cargo truck to one of the supply pickups. The remark had been prompted by nothing, and yet he’d known instantly what she meant. “Back home in New York. Siobhan was her name. Black hair and white skin and red lips. I called her Snow White. Just in fun, you know. We were so young.”

“Where is she now?” he’d asked carefully. The answer wouldn’t be a nice one, whatever it was. Dorothea Eames lived at CRB headquarters alone.

“Married an Irish boy,” Dorothea said, looking out the window as the lorry rolled through the streets of London to the docks. “Didn’t want to. If she’d wanted, I wouldn’t mind. Some are like that, you know.”

“I’m like that,” Jim blurted out, almost without meaning to.

“Ah.” She nodded approvingly. “Thought you might be.”

“What happened to her after that? Do you ever see her? Is she happy?”

“Died in childbirth thirty-two years hence,” said Dorothea shortly. “Sixth baby, maybe the seventh. Something went wrong. Padraic didn’t know what to do. Just paced and panicked. She died, the baby died, and I apprenticed myself to a surgeon who practiced an art most well-brought-up people don’t speak of. I’ve seen too many dead women in my life, young James. I don’t wish to see any more if I can help it. I’m telling you this now because if it’s something you’re squeamish about, or you have Christian objections, or you don’t want to work with an old lady who breaks the law, you’d better tell me now. HQ wants to put me in your unit for the upcoming tour of duty in Belgium, but I like to know what kind of man someone is before I follow him.”

"I'm the kind of man who thinks anything you can do to save lives is the right thing to do,” Jim said honestly, “and if you don’t mind my saying so, Mrs. Eames, I think you’re rather marvelous.”

She’d snorted at that, but there was something like a smile on her face.

"I'm also not Christian, if that helps," he added. "I'm Jewish."

Mrs. Eames brightened at this. "Ah. Excellent. Never met anybody Jewish I didn't like. Well, no, that's not true. That's just being polite. I got into an almighty row with Esther Rabinowitz over hair ribbons in the second grade, and we held that grudge for about forty-six years. You're not related to an Esther Rabinowitz from Brooklyn, are you?"

"Not if it will cause a fight over hair ribbons, no."

She snorted again. “What’s your young man’s name?” 

“Gary,” Jim said. “Gary Mitchell.”

“Hmmph. Sounds American.”

“Well, yes.”

“Hmmph.”

“You and I are both American, Mrs. Eames.”

“Yes, but I think you’d do better with a French boy. Or Russian, or Greek or something. You want adventure, James Kirk. You want to fall in love with someone from a world so different from yours that they’ll never run out of stories to tell you. What does your Gary do?”

“At present, ma’am, he’s with the Office of Naval Intelligence.”

“Oh.” She seemed mollified by this. “Well, all right. Then he’s got interesting stories, at least. That’s something.”

Jim grinned at her. “Then I have your blessing?” he teased. “By the way, they all call you ‘Mrs. Eames’ back at the office, but am I right in supposing that there’s never been a Mr. Eames? You just find it easier to avoid nosy questions if everyone treats you like a respectable widow?”

Mrs. Eames turned and regarded Jim with a slow, approving smile spreading across her face. “All right, young lad,” she said. “You’ve got the look of trouble about you, and that’s a point in your favor; but you’ve got brains, too. I think we’re going to do all right together, you and I.”

* * * * *

Across the tea table, Jim met her eyes, and read a new kind of vulnerability in them, beneath the mask of impervious calm and dry humor. Kodos had frightened Dorothea, badly, and even to Sarek of Vulcan, this wasn't a story she wanted to tell.

It's all right, he tried to tell her, with his wordless, reassuring smile. He's dead and gone, and he can't hurt anyone ever again. We're safe now. It's over. 

Dorothea smiled back, but it didn't reach her eyes, and Jim knew in his heart that she didn't really believe it.

Dorothea wasn't certain that the danger was over at all.

Chapter Text

PRESENT

Jim dropped heavily onto the leather sofa behind him, the drink in his hand entirely forgotten, and stared blankly at his old friend. “Kodos?” he repeated, incredulous. “You mean to tell me you’ve dragged my crew and I all the way out here to your godforsaken corner of nowhere, just to accuse an actor of being Kodos?”

Tom stared down at the carpet, refusing to meet Jim’s gaze. “He is Kodos,” he repeated stubbornly, his voice quiet with haunted rage. “I’m sure of it.”

“You said you’d had a breakthrough in your experiments,” Jim reminded him with a weary sigh. “What am I supposed to tell the Home Office, that you lied? That you brought us down here with false information?” Tom said nothing. Neither did Martha, but her raised eyebrow was eloquent. Jim sighed again. “You're not only in trouble, you've put me in trouble, too,” he said, gentling his tone slightly. You couldn’t snap at Tom when the ghosts came over him like this, they’d learned that the hard way.

“I did it to trap Kodos!” Tom insisted, a plaintive note in his voice.

Jim gritted his teeth. “Kodos is dead.”

“Is he? Is anyone sure? A body burned beyond recognition?”

“Tom.” Jim shifted tactics, putting on his most reasonable voice. “The Belgian government closed the book on that case years ago.”

“Then let's reopen it,” Tom countered, voice pulsating with urgency. “Jim, four thousand people were butchered.”

He always said it in that same tone; Jim had noticed this over the years. As though the rest of them had been forgotten. As though the number wasn’t seared into Jim’s memory too. Four thousand. None of them liked to see it anywhere anymore. The Pacific Ocean was over four thousand meters in most places; sometimes Sulu would call out depth measurements from the echo sounder and Jim would need to grip the armrests of the captain's chair with both hands until the nausea passed.

Already exhausted, he did what he always did in these situations, and turned to the dark-haired woman sipping her brandy on the sofa beside him. “Martha, you tell him."

She shook her head. “I can't tell him anything, Jim,” she said, leaning her head back against the sofa and closing her eyes with an air of resignation which told him that the couple had probably spent the past two hours arguing while he napped, and she’d eventually lost or given up. “He's been like this since the company first announced this tour.”

He gave them both a closer, more appraising look, and once again he didn’t like what he saw. They were both too pale, cheekbones too pronounced, and Martha’s expert hand with a powder compact couldn’t entirely hide the dark circles under her eyes. He wondered if the nightmares were back. He wondered how long it had been since Tom had slept . . . and therefore how long since Martha had slept.

Suddenly too restless to sit still anymore, Jim took himself over to one of the casement windows, which looked out onto the moors behind the house. Already, he saw automobiles and horse-carts filling the drive, guests disembarking dressed in their cocktail finest and making their way around toward the front of the house. Well, for better or worse, Tom had gotten his wish, Jim reflected grimly; the party was happening, and it was too late to stop it. But he couldn’t permit this to escalate any further.

“Kodos is dead,” he said quietly. “I'm satisfied of that.”

“Well, I'm not.” Tom’s voice was unsteady, suddenly, and even with his back turned Jim knew Martha was watching him, anxious and tired and worried and frustrated and hopeful that Jim could fix this. “I remember him,” Tom went on, voice distant, like he was reliving it again. “That voice . . . the bloody thing he did . . .”

Jim forced himself to turn around, to meet Tom’s gaze head-on, calm and unperturbed. The corner of his face which wasn’t obscured by the mask was pinched and taut, jaw twitching. He hadn’t been this bad in a long time.

“Jim,” his friend pleaded. “Jim, I need your help.” Voice rising in excitement, he surged to his feet towards Jim. “There were only nine of us left who actually saw Kodos. I was one, you were another. If he's to be exposed -”

“He’s dead.” Jim cut him off swiftly and repressively, goaded past the point of patience by being forced to relive all of this again. He didn’t talk about this. He’d never talked about this. Even Spock and Bones didn’t know. 

He tried to deliver those two words with enough curt finality to put an end to the topic; but Tom couldn’t be deterred. 

“Then it will be a ghost Martha and I welcome as our guest of honor tonight,” he said sullenly, as if daring Jim to protest. “That’s why I invited the entire company to the party. I have to be sure.”

He didn’t say, and I need you to be there, but he didn’t have to. Jim could hear it in his voice.

With a sigh, he made his way over to sit on the sofa across from Tom, taking another long swig of brandy to steady his nerves. Martha, whose own glass was empty already, rose from her seat and fetched the decanter, bringing it back across the room to top them both off. Their eyes met as she filled his glass, but her expression was guarded, and difficult to read. Jim wasn’t entirely sure whether she wanted him to humor Tom, or talk him out of this.

Then, “There’s a girl,” said Tom, with an offhand casualness that didn’t fool either of them. “Pretty. Blonde. The one who plays Ophelia. They tell me she’s his daughter. I’d like you to . . . get close to her.”

Martha’s back stiffened as Jim set his glass down on the tea table a little too hard.

“I don’t do that anymore, Tom,” he replied coldly.

“During the war, you -”

“The war is over,” Jim reminded him.

“Is it?” Tom made a faint noise like a scoff. “For you, maybe. Not for me.”

“Let it alone, Tom,” Martha said sharply. “Jim said no.”

“Why?” Her husband’s voice was wheedling, plaintive. “He’s not married, is he? Do you see a ring on that finger?”

Jim took a deep breath, struggling to remain calm, as he attempted to formulate an even-handed response to the frankly absurd implication that marital vows were the only reasonable deterrent to the kind of work Jim had done intermittently in the Office of Naval Intelligence and hoped never to do again.

“Not every culture exchanges rings, you know, Tom,” said Martha in a rather odd voice, dry and tinged with amusement, interjecting before Jim had a chance to speak. “Perhaps he’s found someone from . . . somewhere else. A place where they do things quite differently.”

Jim’s head snapped up, and he regarded her across the room as she set the decanter back on its silver tray. She caught his gaze, unapologetic, and raised one dark, sculpted eyebrow in so perfectly calibrated a Vulcan impression that Jim felt his cheeks flush hot and red, and he immediately looked away.

It all went over Tom’s head, however. “What the devil are you talking about, Martha?” he grumbled irritably.

“Nothing,” she said smoothly, dropping a hand on his shoulder. “It’s nothing, darling. I was only having a go at Jim, for old time’s sake. You know I always like to play with him a little.” She pressed a swift kiss on the top of her husband’s head, stroking his back in a soothing, almost maternal gesture that made Jim ponder for the hundredth time how damnably complicated this marriage must have always been behind closed doors. Twenty years ago she'd been dazzled by the brilliant scientific mind in front of her; neither she nor Jim realized, then, that she was signing on for a lifetime of helping him manage his demons. Jim wasn't sure she would have chosen differently, knowing what she now knew; but she would have come into the thing prepared, at least, and that was something.

“Why don’t you go on downstairs and say hello to Dr. McCoy,” she suggested, rising to take Tom by the elbow and gently but firmly pushing him from the sofa towards the door. “Go show him where we hide the American liquor when we’ve got guests in the house. He'll keep you company while you do the hello-and-welcome handshakes with the neighbors.”

He cast a somewhat forlorn look back at her. “Aren't you coming?”

“In a moment,” she said brightly, with a kind of forced cheerfulness Jim didn’t buy for a second. “I just want a quick little word with our golden boy first. We’ll be right behind you.”

Tom knew better than to be the ordinary kind of jealous, of course - there’d never been anything like that between Jim and Martha - but he was enough himself for a faint flicker of suspicion to darken his stern eye. But in the end he relented, and disappeared out the bedroom doors, closing them heavily behind him.

By wordless agreement, no one spoke until the clump of his footsteps had turned the corner of the long hallway and faded away.

“All right,” said Jim, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees and looking her dead in the eye as she made her way back from the door. “Give it to me straight, old friend. How bad is it?”

Martha didn’t mince words. “Quite, quite bad,” she said bluntly, as she dropped wearily back into the sofa across from him, and took another long drink of brandy.

“Thank God I got here in time before he did something irrevocably stupid. What can I do?”

“That’s the hell of it, Jim,” said Martha, pouring herself a drink approximately twice the size of her last one. “I don’t know. I mean I really don’t, this time.”

“The actor.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “I know.”

“What do you think of it all?”

She opened her hands in a helpless gesture. “I wasn’t there until after,” she reminded him. “I never saw the man alive. Just grainy old Belgian newsreels which might have been anybody.” She took another sip and thought for a moment. “He was damnably clever, Governor Kodos,” she remarked slowly. “You always said so.”

“From your point of view, then,” Jim offered, “he might be, or he might not.”

Martha nodded. “That’s the trouble. And yet . . .”

She trailed off mid-sentence, rather abruptly, as though she’d thought better of whatever she was going to say; but Jim observed with keen interest that her eyes had the unfocused look they got which meant she was puzzling something out.

So. Something she was definitely thinking, but wasn’t entirely sure yet it was wise to say aloud.

Interesting.

Jim gambled on the direct attack. “Out with it,” he said firmly. “I can see your wheels turning.”

Martha finished her drink in one swift gulp and set the glass down, brow furrowed in thought. “It’s just that I have a sort of funny feeling about the whole lot of them,” she finally said.

Jim blinked at her, startled. This was unexpected. “What, the players? Really?”

“It may be that Karidian is lying,” Martha allowed, her voice contemplative. “But do you know, I’m not entirely sure, actually, that he’s the only one.”

Jim took a swing. “The daughter -”

“No, that’s not it either.” Martha shook her head, lip curling in annoyance; though not at him. An idea was plainly nagging at her, just on the periphery, where she couldn’t quite get at it, and Jim had known her well enough for long enough now that he took her hunches seriously. “I just have a sense of something off about the whole thing.”

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark?” Jim quipped, but it didn’t land; her frown only deepened, and she shook her head as if his words had unsettled her.

“God, don’t joke about it,” she murmured. “That ghastly play.”

“You don’t like Hamlet?”

Jim had intended to press her further on the topic of why she found the presence of actors in the house so unexpectedly disconcerting; but he’d been unable to prevent his tone from coming out ever so slightly wounded, and it lightened the dark mood between them immediately, calling forth a snort of knowing amusement.

“If you want a lengthy debate on the literary merits of the Bard of Avon, call Thomas back,” she retorted dryly. “Bore each other to death with your quotes and theories and leave me well out of it. I’ve never gone in for that sort of thing.”

“No, you haven’t, have you?” Jim chuckled. “Not an ounce of poetry in that soul. Blessedly practical.”

“My mother named me for that Bible story, with the bickering sisters. You know the one?”

“Only very vaguely,” Jim teased. “It’s in your half, not my half.”

This finally got a proper laugh out of Martha, which pleased Jim immensely; some of the shadowed misery seemed to die out of her bright green eyes. “My Bible knowledge isn’t much better than my Shakespeare, as you can see,” she conceded, grinning, “but you’ve heard of the brother, because everyone has. Lazarus of Bethany. The one who died and then got brought back, you know.”

“Yes, that’s a name that sticks with you,” Jim agreed.

“Well, he lived with two sisters named Mary and Martha, and they were all great friends of Jesus. Had him round in the afternoons for tea and a spot of preaching. Mary liked to go sit out in the living room with the lads and listen to the sermons, and Martha got terribly cross with her. Jesus took Mary’s side, of course,” she added, “and I suppose it was nice of him to defend a woman’s right to be part of all the men’s big conversations; but not helping her sister get dinner on the table for Jesus and the house full of guests he brought over only made twice as much work for Martha in the end. Big ideas are all very well; but someone’s got to make sure the laundry gets done.”

Jim eyed her over the rim of his glass. “And that’s how you see yourself here, I suppose,” he ventured. “Tom has the run of your father’s estate to conduct his research and hobnob with all the greatest scientific minds of the day; and you’re back there in the kitchen, making sure the geniuses get their tea on time.”

“The lot of a scientist’s wife,” she said, shrugging gracefully.

Jim snorted. “Funny.”

“What?”

“Just that you’ve forgotten who you’re talking to.” 

Her eyes snapped up and met his gaze with a flicker of surprised irritation.

“How often have you given that little speech, Martha?” he pressed her, leaning forward. “You’ve got it down pretty well. The players would be impressed, I think. It almost sounded natural. Bible story’s a nice touch.”

“Oh, go to hell,” she retorted, but there was no real heat in it.

“You’ve never once stood quietly by, waiting in the kitchen, while the brilliant men made plans in the other room. I understand why you’ve had to pretend with everybody else, why the rest of the world calls them all his inventions and not yours -”

“Stop it.” There was real anger in her voice now. This wasn’t a topic of conversation she generally permitted.

“I’ve known you as long as Tom has,” he reminded her.

Her voice had a frosty edge to it. “And you haven’t seen us in years.”

Jim shook his head. “People don’t change that much.”

“You have.”

Jim set his glass down and looked at her keenly, unable to puzzle out the odd note in her voice. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, his own voice ever so slightly dangerous, and Martha immediately surrendered.

“Nothing,” she said, sagging back against the sofa as if all the fight had gone out of her. She suddenly looked ten years older, and very, very tired. “Forgive me. I’m in a rotten mood today, Jim. Brandy always goes to my head.”

Jim wondered if this was by way of a partial admission that the three drinks he’d watched her toss back in this room weren’t the first drinks of the day.

“I can certainly understand that you’re both a bit on edge, having the players in the house,” he ventured carefully.

“It’s just off,” she said helplessly. “You’ll see what I mean when you meet them. One can’t quite put one’s finger on it, and yet . . .”

“I’ll keep my eyes open,” he promised her. “And . . .” He hesitated for a long moment, thinking of the faint flicker of mania in Tom Leighton’s dark eye, of a wife sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night to soothe her husband’s nightmares for the thousandth time. “I’ll talk to the girl if I get a chance,” he said, a little reluctantly. He didn’t relish being used like this, and bringing up Gary like that had been an ugly thing to do; but Tom wasn’t in his right mind today, and if it was possible to reassure him, get him to drop this, then a little calculated flirtation wouldn’t kill him. 

Even if his heart wasn’t in it, and even if it seemed Martha had already half-guessed why.

“Don’t mind anything I said tonight,” she murmured suddenly, as if reading his mind, and she reached out to take his hand in hers. “I upset you, Jim. I’m sorry.”

“I’m just . . .” He struggled to gather himself to explain. “What you said, about the wedding ring. That’s not why.”

“I was being spiteful and horrid,” Martha said firmly. “I shouldn’t have joked about that.”

“He isn’t -” Jim looked down at the carpet, suddenly unable to look at her anymore. “There’s nothing between us, in that way,” he explained, attempting to keep his voice level. “And there can’t be.”

Martha was too clever to miss the most important word in that sentence. “‘Can’t?’” she repeated.

Jim shrugged ruefully. “It’s complicated. Their telepathy plays a part in things. They bond through the mind. Some of it I understand, and some I don’t; they’re extremely private.”

“You could ask him,” Martha suggested pointedly. “Something I’m going to assume you haven’t tried.”

“He has a wife at home,” Jim replied, cutting off this line of inquiry before she could press any further on such a painful spot.

“Oh.” She received this thoughtfully, chastened. “Well, I suppose that’s that, then. Is she pretty, at least?”

“I’ve no idea. We haven’t met her.”

“Hasn’t he got a sort of - oh, I forget what it’s called; Thomas told me about it once. A flat little screen like a film reel, only you can talk back to it. And they use them like the telephone.”

“A communicator screen, yes. But he’s never spoken to T’Pring on it in front of humans. I only know about her secondhand, really. Spock doesn't talk about her. Amanda mentioned her sometimes, years and years ago, but then she stopped. Uhura assumed they'd gotten some sort of divorce - whatever that looks like on Vulcan - but Dr. McCoy says no; she's still listed as his bondmate on his medical records at the Vulcan embassy. We did try to reach her once, when Spock was injured in that bombing in Morocco. He had the device with him, and Uhura knows how to use it, but it got smashed up when the roof came down on him."

"Came down on you," she corrected, "and he leaped in to shield you with his body so you didn't get crushed. At least, that's how you told the story five years ago."

"Well." Jim busied himself with taking a long drink of brandy. "Anyway. We couldn't get to the hotel to cable the embassy without going back out in the open, and we didn't know if the coast was clear yet. So we just had to sit tight and wait until morning, and by then he’d done his Vulcan healing trance and was perfectly fine. But anyway,” he added, a little flustered to have revealed so much, “he's a respectable married man, and so was I when we met, so it simply isn’t that sort of relationship.”

Martha regarded him thoughtfully. “Would you like it to be?”

The truth, obviously, was impossible here, so Jim did the best he could under the circumstances. “Spock's never given any indication of being inclined that way; so, no. We’re both perfectly all right as we are.” She raised that nearly-Vulcan eyebrow again at him, and he glowered at her. “We are,” he insisted. “He’s my first officer, and my best friend, and a brilliant scientist, and I’m lucky to have him, and that’s all there is. And any hint out of you that that isn’t all there is would make your Vulcan guest exceedingly uncomfortable. Got it?”

Martha grinned at him irrepressibly. “Methinks the captain doth protest too much,” she said sweetly.

Jim kicked her in the shin with the toe of his dress shoe; but gently, so she’d know all was forgiven. “Very funny,” he retorted, rising from the sofa and offering her his hand. “Now, we’d better get downstairs before your husband and my medical officer get so deep into the hooch that Bones tries to get himself cast in the play.”

She took his hand and let him help her up. “He’d make a pretty good Yorick,” she offered thoughtfully. “You don’t think he’d mind loaning us just his skull for the week, do you? If we promise to get it back to him.”

“It’ll be perfect,” said Jim. “There’s not nearly enough in it to get in the actor’s way.”

Martha laughed. “That was good,” she said, as he followed her out into the hall. “I’m going to set you up for that one again later, so you can do it properly in front of him.”

“Spock will certainly have thoughts of his own to add,” Jim said, hiding a smile. "They don't actually hate each other, by the way, I should warn you of that in advance; they just do it for the exercise. Don't let the little jabs fool you."

“Mmm. Perhaps they’d make a better Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.”

“For someone who claims to hate Hamlet, you seem to know the names of quite a lot of the characters.”

“They’ve been here a week, Jim,” she complained, “and they’re actors. They’ve trained all their lives to be heard from ten miles away. I’ve learned nearly all of act four by heart, completely against my will, just from one day of weeding when they were rehearsing in the school-room with all the windows open. And it's only Monday.”

“I think there’s a tiny chance you’re exaggerating how dreadful all this is,” Jim said as they reached the landing, and the merry chatter of voices down below became audible. “By Saturday breakfast, they’ll be on their way to their next port of call, and you’ll have your house to yourself again, and both you and Tom will feel a hundred times better about the whole thing.”

If Martha had had a response to this, she didn’t get a chance to make it. Bones stormed up the stairs with a grim expression on his face and seized Jim by the elbow.

“If you want any of us to survive this weekend unscathed, you’d better get in there now,” he said grimly. “You too, Mrs. Leighton. I can either be a guest or a doctor but I can’t be both, and God in heaven knows I haven’t got a clue what to do with him.”

“With who?” Jim stared at him, startled.

“With Dr. Leighton,” said Bones. “Tell me the truth, or don’t; I guess that’s your choice. But there’s something wrong at that damned cocktail party, and I think both of you know what it is.”

Chapter Text

TWENTY YEARS AGO

American Aid Workers’ Outpost
Liège, Belgium
1916

“I appreciate your willingness to revisit such highly distressing memories,” Ambassador Sarek began, setting down his clay teacup and steepling his fingers in a somewhat contemplative posture, “but it is vital that we reconstruct the sequence of events which led up to the fire that destroyed the house of Governor Kodos. Mr. Kirk has informed me that the two of you accompanied Dr. Leighton up the hill to the village on the night in question, and therefore at present are the only reliable witnesses to what transpired. I would like to hear your account in as much detail as possible.”

Colonel Moulton and Mrs. Eames exchanged a fleeting, uneasy look with one another, and Jim suddenly realized that amidst all the chaos over the past three days - getting the refugees settled, dealing with the ill and wounded - possibly nobody had asked them to revisit these memories since the night they'd come running through the woods with the smell of smoke on their clothes, following behind a cart full of stolen food and carrying a screaming Tom Leighton. It occurred to him, though perhaps it was a somewhat unorthodox manner of investigation, whether there might be a simpler way which spared them the difficulty of giving a lengthy verbal account.

"Mightn't you simply look into their thoughts, and see what they saw directly?" Jim suggested. "I'm afraid I don't know the Vulcan term for it, but surely the sort of thing you did to stabilize Tom has other applications."

Sarek blinked at him, briefly stunned into silence by the notion. Jim had never seen the Vulcan's face so openly expressive; he looked mildly scandalized, as though Jim had just asked him to rob a bank or share his wife. He realized a little too late that this must be considered wildly presumptuous under the strict laws of Vulcan etiquette; but it became clear that he'd really put his foot in it when he watched the two humans across the table recoil in unison, both uttering the same horrorstruck gasp, like a scene from a musical comedy.

“Good Lord, no thank you,” shuddered Moulton. “Begging your pardon, Mr. Ambassador, and with all due respect to your people's honored customs, but the human brain isn’t built to be . . . well, touched like that.”

“Certainly not,” agreed Mrs. Eames forcibly. “James, I’m surprised at you. What a thing to say.”

Sarek reached for the clay pot to refill everyone's teacups, as though even he required a moment to compose himself. "There is no offense where none is taken, Colonel Moulton," he finally said. "I am quite in agreement with your assessment. There is no disrespect in merely noting a factual difference. It is important to clarify, Mr. Kirk, that what Vulcans refer to as kash-nohv - the meld, or the mind-touch - takes many forms. That which I performed on Dr. Leighton is but one. My purpose was to access the electrical signals sent from his brain to his cells in order to speed the process of healing, to intercept the transmission of pain signals being sent along his nerves, and to stabilize his vital signs. He was unconscious at the time, so his mind did not resist me, and his body was significantly weakened. The meld was nonconsensual, a regrettable necessity; unless death is imminent, no Vulcan would perform such an act without explicit affirmation that the human party understood the procedure and the risks. In an emergency situation, with consent by proxy from yourself and the intent only to preserve his life until he was transferred to a human medical practitioner, I was able to defend the act as permissible. Though T'Pau was not pleased," he added, in a somewhat resigned tone, and it suddenly occurred to Jim for the first time that he'd asked Sarek to do something for which he was answerable to his own House Mother. It was possible the ambassador had been hauled into the principal's office about it (at least via long-distance communication, which was certainly better than having her here), and Jim had inadvertently gotten him into trouble. 

"Your wife is a human woman, isn't she?" asked Colonel Moulton. "You've done it with her, I suppose, or is that a bit too personal to ask?"

"Not at all. Though we have indeed shared the mind-touch on certain occasions - for the sealing of our marital bond, to facilitate the formation of a bond between herself and our son Spock, and on occasions when she has experienced pain with which I was able to assist - the intensity of the experience is not pleasant to her. I am fortunate in my years of training in the Vulcan healing arts, which permit me an unusually high degree of dexterity and precision. In other words, to accomplish the necessary task as expediently as possible in order to spare her distress. Our son, however, whose mental landscape is naturally both human and Vulcan, experiences the mind-touch quite differently. My wife Amanda has described the sensation as though my own meld is a scalpel, and Spock's is a waterfall. She finds the experience of melding with him to be significantly more taxing; fortunately, however, humans possess a far wider range of tools for emotional connection and communication than the meld alone, and their relationship has not suffered for it. Still, you will find me exceedingly conservative on this matter, I fear, Mr. Kirk. This is not a practice we utilize in order to collect information which might be obtained in a far less invasive way. I would conjecture that both Mrs. Eames and Colonel Moulton are observant witnesses with a great attention to detail, and I am confident in their ability to provide me a clear picture of events.”

Jim nodded and picked up his teacup, feeling a little as though he’d revealed more of himself than he'd really meant. He supposed it made sense that the Vulcan meld was something serious, maybe even intimate, and they didn’t do it just casually, so Sarek’s restraint seemed understandable; but the reticence of the other two humans was not. Weren’t they curious in the least what it would feel like, to have someone else’s mind touch yours? Yes, all right, maybe it would be a little awkward doing it with Sarek, of all people, especially since Jim knew his own mind to be a decidedly untidy place; rather like inviting him over to your apartment before you’d had time to clean up, and letting him see all the empty beer bottles and old newspapers and dirty laundry lying about.

He took a sip of the tea which Eames and Moulton were politely pretending to drink. It was strong, bitter, and highly spiced, with a smoky kind of note in it somewhere. Alien tea from an alien world. Maybe the very cups themselves were Vulcan. Was he touching the clay of another world’s soil? Drinking the leaves of another world’s tea plant? How extraordinary. He breathed it in, and found himself wondering about the son. Jim knew the ambassador was married to a human because it had caused such a great deal of talk when it happened, but he didn't think he knew anything about the boy called Spock. A waterfall, to his father's scalpel; now that would be a fascinating experience.

Of course, it had now been made abundantly clear to Jim that one didn't simply walk up to a Vulcan and ask if they'd be willing to meld with you so you might see what it felt like, so if Spock ever did come out here to visit his father Jim wasn't sure his chances would be any better with the child than the parent.

Still. Maybe someday. There were a lot of Vulcans in the world; surely one of them was curious and rebellious too.

“It was the CRB crates, you see,” Mrs. Eames began, as Jim returned to the present. “When we heard they’d been handing out supplies in the town square to the folks who’d stayed with Kodos, we knew there must be a stash someplace. And the governor’s house was naturally the only building that nobody was allowed in, because it had been under guard all the time. But Edward had a theory that they might have eased up a bit on the patrols by then, with the population so reduced and all us renegades - so they thought - dead of starvation in the woods. We’d sent people up a few times since, you see, but quietly, and not to take anything anyone would miss. Folks went back to their own houses for clothes and pots and pans and soap and blankets and things, but only a little at a time, and never clearing a house out altogether. That would tip our hand, and they’d come looking for us. But Tom got a bee in his bonnet about those crates. I think he had an inkling before the rest of us did, you know. I mean that it was Kodos who’d killed all our friends from CRB and taken the whole haul. That convoy was hauling what would have been at least a year's worth of food for a village of eight thousand, and only one truck’s worth out of thirty had ever been distributed. The crates it had come in were long gone. But these were new, all the goods still wrapped, and Tom was sure they were being stored at the house. So he and Edward planned a night raid -”

“And Dorothea came along to keep watch,” said Moulton, “because she can do bird calls. Such an odd skill to have, really, and yet damned useful it’s turned out to be.”

“And if you think that sounds like a meager crew, you’re right,” she said frankly, “but we did have five other fellows concealed just inside the treeline in case it came to a fight. We’d never been able to get our hands on a gun, but we had some knives, and slingshots. Not ideal, but the best we could do.”

“We got to the governor’s house and sure enough, no guards to be seen at all,” said Moulton. “We couldn’t believe our luck at first. We came around back - from where the forest borders the outbuildings and such  - and there was an old farm cart in the garage, which mercifully didn’t squeak or rumble too badly at all. Well, Tom insisted on going in alone first. Nimble as a cat, that one. He slipped in and then out again quick as you please, and told us there was an empty kitchen just inside the back door. On the other side of it there were stairs down to a cellar, and inside that cellar, sure enough, there were shelves and shelves of every kind of CRB food box you could imagine.”

“The cellar also had a window,” said Mrs. Eames, “a rather large one, which was convenient for our aims. Tom crept back inside and down the stairs again, while Edward wheeled the cart around to the window, which was concealed from the front gardens and the lane by a great big hideous rhododendron. I kept to the shadows around the exterior of the house, ready with the mating call of the Common Chiffchaff in case I saw anyone coming and the boys needed to leg it. But actually, everything went quite our way right up until the very, very end. It was my fault, you see, Ambassador. I’m the reason Tom was hurt.”

“Poppycock,” said Moulton firmly. “She blames herself, and so does young James, but you’ll see when you hear the story why they oughtn’t at all.”

“We’d finished packing up the whole cart, you see,” Mrs. Eames explained, “absolutely stuffed to the brim with tea and flour and dried meat and all manner of tinned foods. Even powdered milk for the little ones. The coast was clear, so Tom had closed the window again and come back outside through the empty kitchen, and Edward was pushing the cart through the grass to the treeline. Well, I suddenly thought to ask if there was any chance the house had bottles of brandy lying about. Or alcohol of any other sort that Kodos wouldn't miss. Only we hadn’t anything else we could use for disinfecting, and it seemed a useful thing with so many injured people. Now, the rest of this is conjecture, mind,” she cautioned, “but I think perhaps what happened is that he went back down to the storeroom, and he looked there but didn’t find any. And maybe he felt a bit bold because it had all been so easy so far. So instead of just tiptoeing up and down some stairs in his sock feet, stealthy as a burglar -”

“He decided to rummage through the kitchens on his way back out,” Jim finished for her. “That’s what I think happened, too.”

“Governor Kodos would have noticed bottles missing from his kitchen,” Sarek pointed out, considering this. “Dr. Leighton might have endangered the whole camp with this change of plans, were it not for the fire. Your question was a perfectly sensible one, Mrs. Eames, but the prudent course of action would have been for Leighton to inform you that there was none to be accessed at that time.”

“He wasn’t thinking like that,” Jim explained. “He has a strong sense of right and wrong, and when he gets angry it can - well, cloud his common sense a bit. It’s what makes him so good at his work, he’s incredibly tenacious and bold, but he wasn’t assessing his surroundings with the prudence of a Vulcan just then.”

“Don’t get defensive, James,” Moulton reproached him mildly. “We all love young Tom, and no one’s saying he deserved what happened to him. But he’s a grown man and he made his own choices. You going along couldn’t have stopped him, so it isn’t your fault. And Dorothea only asked a question, she didn’t dare him or anything. He was angry at Kodos, and I think he hated the thought of the man sitting up there in his comfortable armchair by the fire, drinking a nightcap and reading a book while the rest of us shivered and starved. In that moment he simply wanted to take something away from the fellow that would hurt. That’s all. Perfectly human, and I daresay not even wrong. It just happened to backfire this time.”

“The kitchen adjoins the parlor,” Mrs. Eames told Sarek. “I don't know if there was enough left standing when you went back yesterday in order to understand how it was all laid out, but that part's important. The wall curves round a bit, so you can’t see the back door if you’re sitting in the parlor. Well, I think what happened was that Tom did find the governor’s stash - not just a single bottle of brandy, and not just CRB-issue, but probably all manner of lovely things the last governor had left there. And, well, I simply think he tried to carry too many bottles at once. I heard a hell of a crash.”

“Broken glass was found on the floor from multiple bottles of brandy as well as sherry and rum,” said Sarek. “I believe your surmise is correct. Please continue. What happened when you heard the crash?”

“Well, I did a hell of a Common Chiffchaff, first of all, to give the boys in the trees a heads-up, and let Edward know to get a move on. The sound was loud enough to wake the whole house, and anyone on the upper floor turning a light on would have seen him with the cart. But the thing was damned heavy, so I raced over there to help get it through the treeline and out of sight. Three of the fellows who’d been waiting there took it back down the hill to the camp, and the other two came back with Edward and I when we realized we hadn’t seen Tom come running out. I’d thought he must be right behind me, but when I turned back I realized he wasn’t. And then we began to smell the smoke, and pretty soon the whole place was ablaze.”

“It had not rained in some time, I believe,” said Sarek. “The house was almost entirely comprised of wood, much of it quite old, and the thatch insulating the roof would have been exceedingly dry. Given the volume of liquor spilled on the kitchen floor, Mrs. Eames, I presume you and I are of one mind that it was the origin point of the conflagration?”

The older woman nodded.

“Dorothea has a damned good head on her shoulders,” said Edward, “and knew to take off her coat, dunk it in the horse-trough, and hold it over her head as she went in. Smart. Wouldn’t have thought of that.”

“I found Tom lying in the kitchen, Kodos lying beside him,” she said. “There was broken glass everywhere. I suppose Kodos was in the parlor next door to the kitchen, heard the crash, surprised Tom trying to escape, and the two fought. There were coals spilled out of the fire and a poker lying beside Tom’s hand. One of them must have tried to use it on the other, but with all that liquor on the floor, a few spilled coals would be all it took.”

“She put out the flames on Tom’s clothing and managed to carry him out,” Edward went on, “and between the four of us we got him out of the house and into the forest just before the guards arrived. Thank God for that, because Tom was in a bad way, and it was hard to keep him quiet enough that they wouldn’t follow us. Only a fire that big devouring their leader’s home would be enough distraction.”

“His isolation and secrecy worked in our favor, just that once,” Jim explained. “He didn’t have any soldiers living in the house. When you rule by manipulation, I suppose you don’t need them.”

“Anyway, it took long enough for the Rijkswacht to wake and dress and sound the alarm that the whole house was a lost cause by then,” said Dorothea. “Nobody bothered to try going in to save Kodos. Instead . . . well, it seemed that all of them began looking out for themselves. Running around the village locking people in their homes, and then smashing in the windows of the governor’s house to steal whatever could be stolen before the fire spread to the other wing. Furniture, dishes, clothing, papers, anything. The storeroom only had one door, the one up through the kitchen, and nobody was stupid enough to try and brave it, so I suppose if the wooden kitchen floor gave out, all that food was lost too.”

“It was,” said Sarek. “The house was destroyed very nearly to its foundations. It interests me that you say no one made any efforts to rescue Governor Kodos from the flames. You must have assumed, then, that he had perished.”

“Well, naturally.” She seemed surprised by that. “He was knocked clean out, wearing a dressing gown of velvet, lying on the floor while all manner of liquor soaked into that thick fabric. The flames hadn’t gotten to him then, but it was only a matter of time.”

“May I ask,” Sarek said cautiously, “if you have a theory as to the manner by which Dr. Leighton came by his injury?”

“I think Kodos shoved his face in the fire,” she said promptly, “and that’s when he went for the poker, to try and knock him away. It’s a ghoulish thing to do to someone and I can’t say most human beings in the world, even the wickedest ones, have the stomach for it. But Kodos? Yes, sir. I’d believe it of him.”

“You did, er, find his body, then?” asked Moulton. “I mean I suppose it’s a certainty. He didn’t get away or anything.”

“How could he have gotten away?” the woman demanded, giving the tea table a light pounding for emphasis. “Edward, my dear blistering idiot, he was lying unconscious in the middle of a fire, and we saw no trace of anyone else in the whole house. If someone was with him, they would have come running too when they heard the crash. But no one arrived until the guards did, so who else could the body have been?”

“Colonel Moulton’s real question,” said Ambassador Sarek, “is whether, in a town where the bodies of the dead were burned with regularity in order to dispose of them, the corpse of another man might have been placed after the fact in the wreckage of the house.”

“Who would do a thing like that?”

“Anyone who wished to mislead some future investigator into believing that Kodos was dead when he was not. Naturally, we were forced to explore this possibility.”

“And?” pressed Jim, in sudden alarm. This thought hadn't occurred to him at all.

Sarek paused for a moment. "I do not believe it likely," he finally said. "If you require greater specificity, Mr. Kirk, I would calculate the odds at 84.21% that everything transpired exactly as Mrs. Eames believes it did. The body was burned beyond recognition, but enough of one femur remained intact to deduce that it was a male of the correct height. Fragments of both charred velvet and black hair were also detected. An inventory of the other cremated dead of Tarsus contributed little information of use for narrowing these odds any further, as Kodos had not felt the need to bury them separately.”

This was a wholly new piece of information to the three humans sitting around the tea table, and it seemed to unravel Moulton entirely. “You mean to say they were just . . . just a pit of ash, up there?” he murmured hoarsely, face going suddenly white. “All those people? Innocent people, elders and children, the greengrocer’s wife who walked with a cane, and that old man the kids called Grandfather because he always used to have sweets in his pockets and the boy with the lung condition who was always bringing home frogs from the creek. All those people, thousands of them, and he didn’t even give them the dignity of graves.”

He set down his teacup a little too hard with suddenly shaky hands. Jim looked over at Dorothea and knew she was feeling the same thing; he was, too.

They’d held it together all right until now, because there were jobs to do. In the woods there’d been people to keep alive, wounds to tend, children to feed. Then they'd escaped from that hell, and it had been three days of reports to make, paperwork to file, and thousands of newcomers to provide new homes for, not to mention that Tom had spent the whole of it inside a surgical tent to which his friends had been denied entry. All three of these humans knew that prized Vulcan skill, compartmentalization. All three had carefully locked away in a box their all-consuming anger and grief . . . until this very moment, now, when their nervous systems finally understood that it was all over, when they sat comfortably sipping tea in a place they were entirely safe from danger. Suddenly there it all was, bursting back up again out of the box like a geyser.

They didn’t even have graves.

Moulton pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to dab uselessly at his streaming eyes. Dorothea, beside him, leaned in to rest her head upon his shoulder, shaking with sobs. Jim sat utterly still, tears streaming down his own face, feeling something huge and dark and cavernous open up inside him, an ache he knew he would live with for the rest of his life.

Sarek of Vulcan watched impassively, but there was no judgment on his grave, composed face. “Tushah nash-veh k'odular,” he said quietly. “That is what my people say in such moments. It means, ‘I grieve with thee.’ I cannot offer you false consolation or wish away your pain. It is here, and it is real, and it is far from over. I can do no more than stand beside you within it. And you have my word that whatever may be done to make restoration to the people of Tarsus, I offer up all the resources of the Vulcan Embassy to do so.”

“Can the Vulcan Embassy prevent the next Kodos?” demanded Mrs. Eames, wiping her eyes and sitting back up again. “That’s what frightens me most, Ambassador. All of Europe is at war. We only know about this one because enough people survived to tell the tale. How many other tyrants like him are out there looking for their next target? How do we stop it all? How do we become a planet of real peace, like yours, where no one has to go to sleep at night frightened of a man like that ever again? If Vulcan could accomplish that, I’d call it a miracle.”

“A miracle it might be,” agreed Sarek. “But miracles, Mrs. Eames, are only unlikely. They are not, by definition, impossible. Someday . . . perhaps. Not today, or tomorrow, or in the next ten years. But yes, I think . . . perhaps, someday. We shall see.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

PRESENT

Jim only had to wonder what the hell Bones could possibly be talking about for the duration of their swift, anxious journey down the grand staircase. The moment they entered the party, the explanation was clear.

Tom was already drunk.

The drawing room at Norwick House was a two-story affair, quite a bit longer than it was wide, with a great wall of stained glass windows on one long side and a gargantuan stone fireplace on the other. Above the fireplace, a sort of balcony or mezzanine circled the room on three sides, accessible either from the main room by small spiral staircases at each short end, or from a door in the center which led out to the second floor portrait gallery at the top of the grand stairs. At present it was crowded with people talking and laughing and clinking their glasses of champagne, and Jim had the curious sense of walking into a fishbowl as he entered, feeling their eyes flick downward to watch him. The party was in full swing down below as well, and Jim felt a brief initial surge of confusion about how any traveling theatre company could possibly employ so very many people - until he caught sight of a few ruddy-cheeked, white-haired gentlemen with the look of Dartmoor about them, muttering anxious prognostications about a fog rolling in that night. 

Of course, he'd forgotten. The locals were here, which raised the stakes considerably. The actors wouldn't care, particularly, if a man they'd never see again after next week behaved oddly; but the Princetown neighbors would, and they had long memories. Jim felt a prickle at the back of his neck, thinking of all the dark shapes laughing down from the shadows above, and wondered how long before the whole thing went to hell if nobody did something about it.

Tom, clearly having spotted them the moment they entered, loudly greeted both his friend and his wife with a too-wide smile which indicated he’d forgotten being cross with them before, and lurched across the drawing room toward them, nearly knocking over a table. He held a full glass of something clear in his hand, which sloshed everywhere as he went, splashing a few people who got too close.

“You will see, Jim!” he hissed in a kind of stage-whisper, as he staggered over towards them and grabbed his friend's arm with a manic sort of urgency. “It’s just as I said! You’ll see!”

“I certainly will see it, old friend,” Jim replied in a jovial voice, carefully pitched just loud enough to be heard over the music by all the people standing close enough within earshot to be giving their host strange looks. “You said you’d show me, and I haven’t forgotten. One of your books, was it? We’ll go have a look right now. Won't be a moment!” he called behind him lightly as he slung an arm over Tom’s shoulder.

Obediently, Tom let Jim steer him firmly out of the drawing room and down the hall to the library, the first empty room in sight, where Bones - who’d followed close behind - plucked the glass out of his shaking hand.

“Thomas, what the hell have you done?” snapped Martha, closing the door behind them. “We weren’t ten minutes behind you. How many have you had?”

“I thought it was only one, but I don’t remember anymore.” His voice was fuzzy around the edges, and some of the fight had gone out of him. He suddenly seemed more confused than anything else. “Sorry. Sorry. I’m sorry, darling. Rotten of me. I didn’t mean to. Things were just odd. It's like they don't see me. No one to talk to. Drink didn't take the edge off. Don't remember pouring this one, but I must have, musn't I? Don't know how many others there were.”

“You were supposed to go find McCoy,” his wife reminded him patiently. 

“Didn’t see him. Hiding somewhere."

“I was up in the balcony, talking to Spock,” Bones said. “He seems to have taken up a post as unofficial sentry, by the way, though I guess we can get into the weird behavior of Vulcans at parties another time. Anyway, I came down the stairs from my bedroom and saw folks already heading in through that door from the portrait gallery just off the landing, so I went in that way too, and he was the first person I saw. We were together when Dr. Leighton came into the room."

Jim looked over his shoulder at the Leightons. Tom had been coaxed into an armchair by Martha, who was making him drink a glass of water from the carafe which sat beside the whiskey decanter on the desk. He turned back to the doctor and took a step closer, arms folded, lowering his voice. "Do you mind telling me what you saw?"

"You mind telling me why you need to know?" Bones countered pointedly. "I've been to funerals with more pep than this cocktail party, Jim. What the hell have we walked into?"

"For right now, I just want to find out how drunk my friend is. He doesn't quite seem able to remember."

"Well, he came into the drawing room from the main door, same as you did. Said hi to some people - all locals, I think - and then made a beeline for the bar. He seemed to be looking around for someone - and if you say it was me, I'll believe you, though he didn't really seem like a fellow looking for a friend to pop open a bottle with, if you know what I mean. As a matter of fact, he looked damned suspicious."

Jim made a noncommittal sound at this, feeling a surge of anxiety. Had Tom been looking for Kodos, to accost the man then and there?

"Did he, er, seem to find . . . whoever he was looking for?"

"Oh hell, Jim, I don't know. You didn't get close enough to see, but it's a circular kind of thing; bottles on one side of it, trays of poured cocktails on the other, and a whole lot of party guests with no manners just crowding all round it instead of doing the gentlemanly thing, taking their drink, and getting the hell out of the way. Point is, once a man in a black tuxedo disappears into that sea of black tuxedos, you lose him."

"Only men in that part of the crowd?"

"No, no, a few colorful dresses mixed in too, but I wasn't watching them, and neither was Spock. We don't share your priorities at parties," he added, with a flicker of mischief. "Anyway, at some point he sort of shoved his way out of the thicket of tuxedos, and he was holding a glass of something clear in his hand. Gin, if I had to guess, and based on his behavior right now I don't even know that I'd accuse him of sullying it with tonic. Knocked the whole thing back in one gulp, Spock and I both saw that, and we didn't like the look of it, I can tell you. Man wasn't drinking for fun. Spock asked me where you and Mrs. Leighton were, and why you hadn't come in all together, and I said I felt sure you'd be along soon, and that's when I saw Dr. Leighton begin . . . I suppose accosting people is the only right word for it. Sort of cornering the theatrical folk, and saying something to them I couldn't hear, but it seemed to make them all a little twitchy. So I squeezed through the crowd of stagehands and supernumeraries on the balcony, and came down one of those creaky little deathtrap spiral stairs to head him off at the pass."

"Where was he then?"

"I intercepted him on his way over to pester the fellow at the piano. Asked him if he wanted to go with me to the dining room to have some cake or a ham sandwich, and he said something a little wild about not being able to think about food 'on a night like this.' Sort of excited look on his face, if you get me. I didn't like it at all. I put him in a chair in the corner and ordered him to stay put, which is when I came to get you. He would have been out of my sight altogether for, oh, I don’t know. Six minutes? Seven?"

"Was he out of Spock's?"

"He wasn't supposed to be. I picked a chair that was clearly visible from the balcony, and I know he saw me give him a sign. But when we came back in just now Leighton was coming back from the bar, same as he'd been the first time, and that glass in his hand looks just like the one we saw him drink before. I can’t tell you, ma’am, whether it was the second or the fifth," Bones said to the woman who had drifted over to listen in on the rest of their conversation, "but I saw with my own eyes that it wasn’t the first."

Jim exchanged a swift glance with a visibly worried Martha. “You said you couldn’t be both,” he reminded Bones in a low voice. “I think we both choose ‘doctor,’ if it’s all the same to you.”

“And I suppose you’ll consider it an equitable division of labor for me to take charge of the patient while you go back in and bend your elbow with the theatrical set,” Bones muttered crossly. “Well, fine. Strong black coffee ought to do the trick. Mrs. Leighton, which way to the kitchen? And he’d better eat something too.”

“End of the hall and down the stairs. I’ll take him.”

Bones shook his head warningly. “You’d better go back with Jim. I don’t think the atmosphere in the drawing room was funny because your husband had too much to drink; I think he had too much to drink because the atmosphere was funny. Though how or why, I can’t say.” 

Jim froze.

Martha had said very nearly the same thing, just a moment ago, hadn’t she? 

It’s just that I have a sort of funny feeling about the whole lot of them.

It may be that Karidian is lying. But do you know, I’m not entirely sure, actually, that he’s the only one.

Jim began to suspect that it would be harder to keep Bones out of this than he’d originally thought, as the doctor glowered from his captain to his hosts and back again. “Anything going on here I should know about but don’t?” he asked pointedly.

For a moment, Jim considered simply telling him the truth, Government Secrets Act be damned.

It was the voice of Sarek in his head which finally stopped him.

A record of public service which is unimpeachable, he’d said. That was the cost of his future command. T’Pau would sniff out any weakness, and it was far from certain they’d complete their work before she changed her mind. What if Anton Karidian was innocent, and a false accusation from the crew of the Enterprise lost them all the dream of a lifetime? He couldn't risk taking that away from Spock.

Still, lying to Bones left a bitter taste in his mouth.

“Nothing at all,” Martha lied smoothly, sensing his indecision and stepping in before he could do something reckless. “Come on, Jim. There’s a whole company of actors waiting to make your acquaintance. I do wonder how everyone’s getting on in there,” she added. “Your crew, the actors, the neighbors . . . sometimes throwing all one’s groups of friends into one room is great fun, and sometimes it’s a disaster. I don’t think most people have had enough to drink yet for us to decide one way or the other.”

“From our end, you’ll find that Lieutenant Uhura is carrying the team,” Bones informed them. “Those actors are hanging on her every word and hissing at each other over her like alley cats. When I left to come find you, they'd just found out she knows how to play Vulcan music. The boys went pretty well through the roof at that.”

“I’m glad at least one person is having fun,” said Martha dryly. “Thomas, no more drinking for you, I mean it. Jim and I are going to go make the rounds. Go have a coffee with Dr. McCoy and then let him put you to bed early. In the morning after Jim’s met everyone, we can talk more about . . . all of this then.”

Tom nodded, a little truculent but mostly agreeable, seemingly a little abashed now. Bones looked from Jim to Martha curiously, but in the end he didn’t press it. 

“All right, old man,” he said to Tom. “Lead the way.”

Once the doctor had led Tom down the hall toward the kitchen, Martha turned back to look at Jim a little helplessly. “For God’s sake, we can’t let all this go to waste,” she said, leaning wearily against the doorframe. “We’re agreed, you and I? Whether this man Karidian is what Thomas thinks, or isn’t, we’ve got to know. This will never end otherwise.”

“Martha, what the devil do we do if he’s wrong and he won’t believe us?”

She gave a brief, mirthless huff of laughter. “What do you think I wanted you to bring your Vulcan for? If you and I can’t convince him, the next person I’d go to is Sarek. And he’s not here . . . but if he’s ever shared minds with his son, even once, then Spock knows what Sarek knows.”

“But Spock doesn’t know. The War Office classified the whole story, beginning to end. No one who was at Tarsus is allowed to talk about it.”

“Well, of course, not publicly. But surely as your friend, and your first officer -”

“Spock doesn’t know.” His voice was firmer this time, and Martha looked at him in some surprise.

“You’re certain of that?”

“I am.”

“How?”

"You don't think it's come up more than once, over the past eleven years, that Sarek's never told his son how we met? And that Spock knows he isn't allowed to ask? Hell, I'm not even sure Amanda -”

“Of course she does.” Martha was resolute. “People tell their spouse these sorts of things, Jim. That’s what a marriage is for.”

“Well, I’m not married,” said Jim, feigning a lightness he didn’t feel, “so even if I did feel like committing treason, I haven’t got anyone to do it with.”

“So you never -” Martha began, but then shook herself lightly, as if casting off a thought. “Never mind.”

“No. Say it.”

She took a step toward him, her eyes suddenly sad. “You never told Carol, or Gary,” she guessed. “People you’d thought, then, that you were building a life with. A forever kind of life. And yet the darkest, most painful piece of your history was still hidden from them.”

“Maybe because some part of me already knew it wasn’t a forever kind of life,” said Jim, the words coming out almost reflexively, before he stopped short and realized what he’d said.

The silence which followed this was an uneasy one, and he saw Martha regarding him rather strangely. 

“Well,” she finally said. “I don’t suppose we have the time, right now, to go digging into that rather extraordinary revelation you seem to have just had, and all the bits of your past it’s causing me to rethink; but once all of this is over I think we’re due for a good long talk. We don’t . . .” She hesitated. “We don’t get to talk about you very often,” she admitted, with a flicker of something like guilt. “It’s about him, so much of the time, when you’re here. And you never complain, because that's not the kind of man you are, but I’m not always certain we’re the friends to you that you deserve. I like your new people very much, by the way,” she added. “You seem happy. I think it’s all a very good thing. Only so many times today I’ve thought to myself, ‘Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy know the man Jim is now so much better than we do,’ and I feel rather bittersweet about it. Pleased for you, I mean; but a little sad for me.”

“My crew could always use another scientist,” he said before he could stop himself. “You could come with us, on the new ship. Think of the adventure. How long has it been since you’ve gotten to do something just for yourself?”

Martha smiled at him, her eyes suddenly bright with tears. “I’m his wife, darling,” she said, kindly but firmly. “I couldn’t bring him with me, and I couldn’t leave him behind. There’s no real choice.”

“I didn’t mean -”

“You did, but that’s all right. I do it too, sometimes. Catch myself thinking how much easier this would all be if things were different. If I could have known the man he was when you first met him. But I can’t, and I didn’t, so here we are. I’ve made my choices.” She stepped forward and leaned up on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “But I love you for asking, old friend,” she said. “And I’m so very glad you’re here.”

He gave her shoulder a brief squeeze as she stepped back, straightening her dress and patting her hair to ensure it was still impeccable. “All right, now, we’ve been gone a long time, so we’d better not come back together. You go first, and I’ll duck out to the butler’s pantry to pour another tray of cocktails. Let everyone think I’ve been off doing hostess things.” She picked up a heavy crystal tumbler from the desk and poured him a generous splash of whiskey before pressing it into his hands. “Now go. I’ll follow in a moment or two, so nobody sees us together and thinks you were in here all that time making love to your hostess. A lapse in good taste like that is the last rumor I need.”

“I’m not quite sure whether to be offended by that or not,” he complained. She stuck her tongue out at him, which he reciprocated, then straightened his suit jacket and strode out the door.

The coast was clear as he left the library. As he made his way back through the grand entrance hall to the drawing room, he could hear the light tap of Martha’s slippered feet as she darted out behind him in the other direction. He was debating whether or not to enter on the main floor, or head up to the balcony to find Spock, when the drawing room door opened and a figure stepped out.

“I take it you're the welcoming committee,” laughed an impossibly radiant young woman with a voice like delicate silver bells, and Jim found himself briefly speechless.

It was a voice he'd heard before, though he hadn't paid enough attention at the time. But this was unmistakably the pretty blonde Ophelia Tom had mentioned, the daughter of Anton Karidian.

But was she the daughter of Kodos the Executioner? Or was she the daughter of an innocent man Tom was about to accuse of murder?

Jim found himself oddly unable to tear his eyes off her. She could not have been more than half his age - twenty at the most - and she moved with an ethereal, almost inhuman grace. She was very blonde and very fair, with pink cheeks and wide blue eyes and a smile of angelic sweetness. Her evening gown was peach satin, rather modest in cut, and she wore simple pearls at her ears and throat. He took a wordless step toward her, then another and another, scarcely aware of himself doing so, as she approached him with her hand outstretched in an expression of delight, beaming at him as though he were the only man in the world, the person above all others she had most wanted to meet. 

Jim stared, faintly dumbstruck, for entirely too many wordless minutes, at one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen in all his life, and experienced a wholly unaccountable reaction to her presence:

A fleeting chill of foreboding skittered down his spine.

It’s just off, Martha had said. You’ll see what I mean when you meet them all. One can’t quite put one’s finger on it, and yet . . .

Smiling up at him through thick dark eyelashes, she gestured at his glass. “Is that for me?”

Jim returned to himself abruptly and shook off the odd little moment, reaching for his own practiced charm and, in some relief, eventually finding it. “Why not?” he said agreeably, handing her the glass. She took a long drink from it, with a faintly pleased expression, like a person who knew how to appreciate good whiskey, before handing him the glass back. Jim wondered if that, too, was a piece of theatre, or if it was the first truly authentic thing she’d done.

“I saw your performance in London,” he said. “May I extend my appreciation?”

“In London? And here you are all the way in Devon, over a week later, to see it again! How delightful, Mister - Mister?”

“Captain,” he corrected her politely. “James Kirk, United States Office of Naval Intelligence."

“We are honored,” said the girl, eyes widening as he took her hand and kissed it. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Captain Kirk.”

“And you are,” he began to say, but the necessity for introductions was removed by the approach of Martha carrying a tray of some pale gold cocktail topped with froths of white, probably a gin fizz. Jim found himself marveling at her efficiency, or possibly at the equipment in her butlers' pantry; twelve gin fizzes in five minutes was a feat he'd never attempt himself.

“Oh, hello, Miss Karidian,” she said warmly. “That’s a smashing frock you’ve got on. This is my old friend Captain James Kirk of the Enterprise. Jim, this is Lenore Karidian. She plays Ophelia.”

“Yes, I recognized her from the Lyceum,” said Jim, taking the heavy silver tray from Martha’s hands and following her over to the center of the crowded room where the cocktail bar was set up, near the open double doors to the dining room. It was circular, as Bones had said, and still crowded with people, though most obligingly stepped aside to let their hostess through, and Jim set the tray down beside several laden with glasses just like the one he'd seen Tom with earlier. They looked like gin and tonic, except that these all had a beautifully delicate little slice of cucumber as garnish. He tried to remember if he'd seen a cucumber in Tom's. Not that that meant anything, of course; he could simply have eaten it, or tossed it out. The glass, however, did look the same.

"Oh that's right, of course. You saw her in London, with Tom. I'd forgotten." Martha's lies rolled smoothly off her tongue as she gave her guest a polite smile.

"Quite a performance, and one I’m looking forward to seeing again," Jim said, ostensibly replying to Martha but with his eyes fixed on the blonde. "Closer, this time,” he added with a playfully arched eyebrow. “Compared to the Lyceum, the ballroom at Norwick House is a far more . . . intimate venue.”

Lenore received this exactly as he’d suspected she would: with a self-satisfied little smile, the face of a woman who knows exactly what game is being played. Jim wasn’t sure who he resented more, in the moment: Tom, for assuming he’d agree to play this role; Gary, for all those years in the field teaching him exactly how to get this good at it . . . or himself, for falling back into it so effortlessly that it hardly felt like acting at all.

“Mrs. Leighton, I must thank you again for your generous hospitality,” the girl said sweetly.

“It’s our pleasure,” Martha replied with perfect equanimity. “This old house feels quite alive this week. Now, can I give you a drink? Champagne, whiskey, gin fizz? And . . .” She looked around the drawing room suddenly, as if puzzled. “ . . . something for your father?”

The air in the room changed a bit, at this. Jim saw two men standing near them at the bar who’d been reaching for martinis, whose hands froze in midair. A few of the conversations spilling over from the clusters of people standing within earshot flagged for a moment before resuming. And the gentleman at the piano behind them hit an odd, jarring note in the middle of “Begin the Beguine” from which it took him just a little too long to recover.

Neither of the women appeared to notice, their attention suddenly focused sharply on one another. 

“Oh no,” said Lenore, with a laugh that seemed slightly forced. “Father won’t be coming down.”

This, it seemed, was news to Martha. “But he is the guest of honor,” she reminded the girl, and though her voice was still perfectly polite, there was an edge to it which hadn’t been there before. “Our friends have traveled a great way to meet him.”

Lenore’s beatific smile did not waver. “He's far too fatigued for company tonight. He’s asked to have his supper brought up to him on a tray, like usual.”

Martha paused just a bit too long before replying. “Has he?”

“I hope it’s not too much trouble,” Lenore said sweetly. “Your domestic staff have been so kind. I do so hate to make additional work for them, or for you, on a night when you’ve already put in so much effort.”

Martha shook her head. “No trouble, of course. Though if he’s feeling unwell, Dr. Abernathy over there by the fireplace is our regular fellow in Princetown." She pointed to a rather good-looking dark-haired fellow of about fifty with a neat salt-and-pepper beard, who was holding forth to five or six of what appeared to be the other locals. "He'd be happy to pop up to the fourth floor and have a word with your father if anything serious is the matter. I've known him all my life and he's discretion itself, if you're worried at all about publicity. Do let me call him over, and -"

“No!” Lenore’s interruption was abrupt and startling. Jim and Martha looked at her rather oddly. “No doctors,” she explained, collecting herself. “They agitate him so.”

Martha eyed her narrowly. “And you as well, it seems," she pointed out.

Lenore dismissed this. “I worry for his health,” she said sadly. “He is all that I have in the world, you know.”

“It certainly seems you take very good care of him,” Jim remarked, tossing her a dazzling smile to take a bit of the heat off Martha, and was gratified to see Lenore thaw considerably. “He’s quite lucky to have you.”

“Thank you, Captain. But it is I who am the lucky one.”

Bones entered the room just then, and Martha saw him as soon as Jim did. Tom, they both noted immediately, was not with him. This seemed like a good sign; perhaps he'd drunk his coffee and gone upstairs quietly, and would be apologetic in the morning.

"Excuse me," said Martha, laying a hand on Jim's arm and exchanging a brief, meaningful glance with him. "I've got to have a word with Dr. McCoy. I misplaced something earlier, and he said he'd look into it for me. Back in a moment."

Jim gave a nod of approval at this, taking her meaning, and Lenore gave her a polite parting smile as she slipped off, leaving the two of them, for the moment, alone.

"What will you have, Miss Karidian?" Jim asked, gesturing at the trays of drinks in front of them. "A martini? Champagne? Shall I get behind the bar and choose something blindfolded, and we'll see where the evening takes us?"

Lenore laughed. "A gin fizz, I think. I trust Mrs. Leighton's skills more than yours, at present."

"I'm heartbroken." He plucked a glass from the tray he'd carried in for Martha and handed it to the girl, who accepted it gracefully with a small, elegant hand. "She was only cross on my behalf, by the way,” he added. “She knows how much I had hoped to meet your father here tonight personally.”

“I'm sorry, Captain Kirk. He has a rigid rule about that. He never sees anyone personally, and he never attends parties.”

Jim raised an eyebrow. “An actor turning away his admirers? Very unusual.”

“Karidian is a most unusual man. You saw Old King Hamlet, and Polonius. That was my father.”

Jim smiled at her. “Then I’ll talk to Ophelia,” he said, setting down his glass of whiskey and leaning against the bar to face her directly. “‘I do know, / When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul / Lends the tongue vows. These blazes, daughter, / Giving more light than heat, extinct in both / Even in their promise as it is a-making, / You must not take for fire.’ A warning, not to trust men who toy with hearts. Funny, his advice to his son is the famous bit, isn’t it? ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’ 'This above all, to thine own self be true.’ Good common sense for anyone, yet Laertes does nothing with it. And all Ophelia gets is ‘Keep your knees together, young lady.’ I suppose she wasn’t the first or last daughter in history to suffer such a lecture, but he certainly doesn’t seem to think of his children as equals."

"Fathers don't, always, do they?"

Jim picked up his whiskey again and sipped at it with a casual, nonchalant air. “You’re an only child, I suppose? Or have you a brother offstage as well as on? Does the great Karidian have other children who didn’t go on the stage?”

“You're surprisingly well-versed in Hamlet, Captain Kirk,” she countered archly, “so I'll answer your question by testing you on Twelfth Night.”

“Ah.” Jim laughed. “Let me guess. You were about to say, ‘I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers, too.’”

Lenore gave him a long, appraising glance. Jim could have sworn that her soft blue eyes sharpened just for a moment, almost calculated, as though she were taking him in and reassessing her first impression. That odd sensation of menace grew more intense.

Then she threw back her head and laughed, her face the picture of guileless, unguarded delight, and Jim suddenly wondered if he was imagining things.

“A true disciple of the Master!” she exclaimed. “We might do this all night, you and I. What a thrill to find a naval man with such a passion for Shakespeare. It’s such a pleasure to perform for those who truly appreciate his words."

"I always aim to give pleasure," Jim replied warmly.

Lenore smiled back at him, lounging against the bar in a posture which displayed her curves to full advantage. Jim mirrored the posture agreeably, leaning on one elbow and crossing one ankle over the other in an attitude of insouciant charm. In doing so, he looked up for just a moment over Lenore's head, catching sight of the balcony behind her.

And standing on the balcony, looking down at Jim and Lenore with a tight, unreadable expression, was Spock.

Uhura had teased Spock at breakfast this morning for wearing his uniform when everyone else was dressed for the country; they were on leave, after all, and the uniform wasn't required. Spock had replied to her with something equally playful, in his dry, quiet way, but Jim had known it wasn't the truth. He knew the real reason. The simple fact of the matter was that whenever Spock left the safety of large cities with Vulcan embassies where people were accustomed to seeing the occasional pair of pointed ears in a crowd and thought nothing of it, he got nervous. Wearing the uniform of the American navy changed the way people like bartenders in rural pubs tended to look at him; or at any rate, Spock believed it did. His Vulcan appearance marked him as a stranger in a strange land, but the uniform gave him the comfort of proof that he was a stranger with a right to be there. Jim had never seen any humans treat him with rudeness or disrespect, but he wondered how much of this anxiety was simply caution passed down; when Sarek was younger, before the war, the world wasn't so used to Vulcans. Perhaps for him, it had been different. Be that as it may, Spock generally tended to wear his uniform on leave even when he didn't have to, at least for the first few days in a new place, like a sort of security blanket, and Jim had been prepared to see him arrive at the party tonight in his dress uniform for the very same reason.

He hadn't.

He had, in fact, done exactly the opposite. He was wearing Vulcan robes.

Jim had never seen Spock in Vulcan formalwear before.

Sarek's wardrobe, over the twenty years Jim had known him, tended toward the dusty sort of neutrals Jim might have associated instinctively with someone who hailed from a desert. His usual ensemble was a kind of tan or cream linen sort of thing, with all manner of browns and coppers layered atop it, and long draped sleeves. He'd worn rough homespun fabrics in the field, of course; but the handful of times Jim had seen him presiding over formal gatherings of diplomats and heads of state, though the fabrics themselves might be rather better - stiff washed silks rather than coarse linen - the muted hues never wavered. A signet ring of some amber-like stone was as flashy as Ambassador Sarek's wardrobe tended to get.

Spock, Jim realized with a helpless surge of affection, must take after his mother. Amanda Grayson was still a wonderfully stylish woman for her years, and this ensemble had almost certainly been packed by her human hands in Spock's traveling-case.

It was velvet, a deep midnight blue which Jim almost thought black until someone standing nearby on the balcony walked away and the light on him shifted. The hue made his always-pale skin appear as luminous as if he were edged in moonlight, and brought out the blue-black gleam of his shining hair. Such a startling, intoxicating contradiction he was, this cool pale being who glowed like an indigo sky hung with infinite stars, who hailed from a hot red planet and whose people were forged in fire. Cool like a dip in fresh water on a sultry summer day - bracing, energizing, invigorating, a person whose very presence made you feel more alive - and yet never cold, despite what other humans sometimes said about Vulcans. Spock crackled with energy, all that impossible Vulcan brilliance and strength contained inside that deceptively still and composed form, and damn it all, Jim knew that he was staring, but he didn't know how to make himself stop.

Unlike the monastic severity of Sarek's silhouette, where the underlayer of the robes always sported a high collar, Spock's exposed a tantalizing column of pale throat nearly down to the collarbone. It was edged in silver embroidered script; Vulcan characters, maybe? It was impossible to read in the dim light. The trim crossed over his chest as though the robe was of the sort that wrapped round one like a kimono, not a solid tent of fabric which went over the head like Sarek's. Jim could not repress the image of a velvet-draped Spock, lying cool and pale against the red silk draperies of the King's Bedroom, waiting to be unwrapped like a gift.

Jim swallowed hard, feeling his cheeks go warm and pink, a reaction he fought desperately to suppress. Lenore was too quick to miss it, following his gaze up to the balcony and regarding Spock for a long moment with a rather odd expression before looking away. Spock's own face did not change; but when Lenore cleared her throat to redirect his wayward attention back to her, and he reluctantly tore his eyes away, he could feel behind him that Spock was still watching.

"So," remarked Lenore, in a delicately pointed tone, guiding him back toward the present. "Captain of the Enterprise. Interesting."

"So, Ophelia. Interesting," Jim replied, collecting himself. "What's your next move?"

"We play two performances at Penzance, if the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry can get us there. We have our own lorries and caravans when we tour throughout Europe, but in England and Ireland we've found ourselves unfortunately dependent on the hospitality of others, and given the size of the packing crates needed to travel with all our scenery, Mrs. Bergen has found that making transportation arrangements with military personnel is often the most efficient way to get from place to place. We were only able to fit ourselves into a few farmers' carts out here, you know, because we haven't room in the Leightons' ballroom to build a full set. We've only brought a fraction of our gear with us, which makes us rather more portable. The rest we left in Exeter. Getting us to Cornwall is a much bigger job."

"Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry," Jim repeated, musing. "They're based at Victoria Barracks, aren't they, in Bodmin? That's John Daly's regiment."

"Do you know him?"

"Quite well. A hell of a captain. He'll get Elsinore Castle to Penzance in one piece, never you mind. Or, however many pieces it's in now, all piled up in those boxes." She laughed at this, and he leaned closer, resting his elbow on the bar beside them, allowing his body to shift a bit nearer to hers. "You were very impressive as Ophelia."

"Thank you," she said, with a raised eyebrow. "And as Lenore Karidian?"

He smiled. "Very impressive." He took a step closer, softening his voice and his posture, all the old tricks coming back to him with the ease of muscle memory. The coy smile, the glance half-shadowed by eyelashes, the glance which took her in head to toe with respectful appraisal. He could feel Spock watching behind them, and tried his hardest not to think about that blue velvet robe. "Lenore," he said in his most alluring voice. "I'd like to see you again."

"You mean professionally?" asked the girl in an innocent voice. So. A shift in tactics, then. She'd decided to step back and make him come to her. Punishment, maybe, for letting his attention flag.

"Not necessarily," he replied easily, and allowed her to take what meaning from it she would.

She gave a soft, thoughtful hum at this. "I think I'd like that. Unfortunately, we must keep a schedule."

"You don't have a schedule now, do you?"

"You mean leave?" She feigned surprise at this. "But I've only just arrived."

"So have I."

"And you hate to overstay a welcome," said Lenore, in a teasing voice. The question left unspoken was would you like to come upstairs to my bed?, and Lenore took a step towards Jim, plainly considering it. He steeled himself for the inevitable, awaiting a yes he didn't want at all but would probably have to follow through, when the girl's face changed. She was looking over his shoulder at the room behind him, and she furrowed her brow as if seeing something or someone that surprised her. Jim resisted the urge to look too interested and turn around, instead casually shifting his stance for a better angle toward the massive cheval mirror hanging on the far wall; but he saw nothing of immediate significance. After a moment, Lenore seemed to collect herself, and gave Jim a sweet smile.

"Better not," she said. "We are guests of honor, after all. Someone might miss you."

She did not exactly flick her gaze back up toward the balcony on that "someone," but she came close enough to make the meaning clear. 

Tom's orders notwithstanding, Jim felt only relief, and a determination to get whatever he could out of her to present to his friends tomorrow morning to prove he hadn't missed an opportunity by not sleeping with her. Surely there were other ways. He'd always been good at getting people to talk about themselves, after all, and as Gary had taught him all those years ago, that was the heart of most undercover work. Silly to think of it as being faithful to Spock, who wasn't interested or available and hadn't asked for that; but somehow, Jim realized uncomfortably, it had begun to feel like that anyway.

"In the absence of Mrs. Leighton to do the duties of a hostess properly," said the girl, bringing him back to the present, "might I introduce you to the rest of our company?”

Jim did look behind him at this remark, startled to realize that both Martha and Bones were gone, and he fought back a surge of concern. Masking it as well as he could, he gave her a courtly bow and a cheerful “Lay on, Macduff,” which made her laugh again, and she took him by the arm to lead him into the fray.

Circumstances would later necessitate utter clarity on the question of how many people, altogether, were presently crowded into the two-story drawing room of Norwick House . . . including those spilling over into the parlor and the library and the hallways and the powder rooms and the portrait gallery and so on as the evening progressed. When all were ultimately accounted for, the number was fifty-four. This included two Leightons; four servants borrowed from the Princetown inn; eleven crew members of the U.S.S. Enterprise; the seven principal actors of the Karidian Company of Players; five ensemble actors and eight stagehands, technicians, dressers and such, who were all housed in town at the inn; and twenty-seven locals, about evenly divided between men and women. What constitutes a "large party" is, of course, relative; the common room aboard the Enterprise, for example, could not possibly hope to accommodate such a quantity of guests without squashing them in like cattle from wall to wall. But the size of the Norwick House drawing room, running very nearly half the length of the south wing, made that number feel rather meager, and three disparate groups who at present knew only each other and were not yet drunk enough for real mingling could not possibly fill it to capacity. What had taken shape instead was a sort of archipelago, clusters of varying sizes spread out across the room which helped support the illusion of a bustling and lively gathering, though in fact at present most of these islands remained largely self-contained. Jim and Lenore, in fact, appeared to be one of the few examples anywhere of guests who had broken away from the group with whom they had arrived.

A crowd of locals had settled in more or less semipermanently at one end of the bar, and Lenore deftly extricated them from it by taking Jim's arm and guiding him the long way round, passing the open double doors which led to the dining room. He was amused to see the buffet area dominated by his own junior staff, dressed to the nines and loading up plates full of cake. Elizabeth Palmer and Kevin Riley belonged to Uhura, both stationed in the communications department. Engineer Charlene Masters and transport operations lieutenant John Kyle were two of Scotty's, while Esteban Rodriguez from the science department and Larry Matson from the command track were here under Spock's watchful eye. Jim suspected that if their XO had not been standing on the balcony immediately above them, outside their line of sight, Matson would not be holding a bottle of champagne in each hand. Well, hangovers were how the young learned their limits. Jim passed them by unnoticed, just another man in a tuxedo to whom they paid no attention, and left them to their merriment. 

Next door to the dining room, only one of the card tables in the parlor was occupied at present, by a group of ladies whose sensible shoes proclaimed them locals. Lenore steered him briskly past before anyone could stop them and invite them to make up a hand of bridge, for which Jim blessed her, and they made their way by this rather circuitous route around to the other side of the room, where a mixed crowd had gathered around the very old but still serviceable grand piano in front of the stained glass windows. A slim gentleman with slicked-back salt and pepper hair was playing a breezy medley of Cole Porter which seemed to hop about at random; Jim caught fragments of “You’re the Top” and “It’s De-Lovely” as they approached, and he watched for a moment, rather fascinated. The sprightly melodies were a decidedly odd fit for the fractured gathering, and he wondered whether the man was doing his utmost to turn the thing around come hell or high water, or whether he was simply oblivious to the mood around him and doing what he liked.

“Nigel Braithwaite,” said Lenore. “Our Hamlet, of course. You may recognize him from the cinema.”

Jim didn't, but he made a sort of noncommittal "hmm" noise which might be easily taken either way. “How thrilling.”

As they merged into the little crowd, Nigel turned to give Lenore a nod, giving Jim his first look at the man’s face. He was extremely handsome, with the polished good looks of a man whose face appeared ten feet tall on cinema screens: dark hair, dark eyes, tidy mustache, an impeccably fitted suit. Everything about him was so perfectly put together he almost looked . . . artificial, somehow. At the Lyceum, they’d been seated too far back for Jim to make out anyone properly, but he’d remembered Braithwaite’s performance. Highly physical and quite intense, rather modern in style, but impressive. Funny to see him now, looking a bit of a peacock, and compare the man's offstage persona to his onstage one. But then, of course, people often said that about actors, didn't they? One could hardly be surprised not to find him a Hamlet in real life. Hamlet at a cocktail party, Jim thought, would be rather unbearable.

Jim suddenly remembered Martha's vague, uneasy feeling that something amongst the company didn't feel quite right, and decided to play dim with Lenore and do a bit of digging to see how far it got him.

"They always say there's a hell of a lot of money in cinema, don't they?" he said to Lenore, lowering his voice discreetly. "More than the stage, I mean. Braithwaite must also be a passionate lover of Shakespeare, to choose this over that. Or does he travel back and forth, and film during the months when the company isn’t touring? I suppose there's cinema studios in London too, so perhaps it's not so far as California every time."

Lenore’s jaw tightened. She appeared to be on the verge of a rather ill-tempered remark when a scowling Nigel - who seemed to have heard them, despite the loud surrounding chatter and his own insistent tinkling on the keys - subtly shook his head at her in what almost seemed to be a warning expression.

"Naturally," she finally said, "every member of the Karidian Company is dedicated to the words of Shakespeare, and to my father's creative vision. It would be absurd for someone who did not share such ideals to remain."

“Right.” Jim was not entirely sure what to say to this, except that it seemed meant more for Nigel's benefit than his own, and that it plainly was not the first draft of her intended remark. But if he’d thought to ask more about it, he wasn’t given the chance; Martha returned just then, plucking the now-empty glass out of Jim’s hand and pressing a refill into it. 

“There you are,” she said, with a deliberately too-bright voice. “I lost you in the crowd for a moment. Are you doing the rounds? Awfully good of you, Miss Karidian, but I’ll take it from here. I just had to settle a minor household matter, but I'm happy to resume custody of the wayward seafarer.”

“I don’t mind at all,” said Lenore sweetly.

“No, no, I insist,” said Martha, equally sweetly. “Hostess duty, surely you understand. You are a guest in this house. Please, don’t trouble yourself.”

“Not at all. You've gone to such trouble for us. This is quite a gathering for a household which seems to entertain so rarely. There’s such a lot on your plate. I was happy to step in."

"Do you know, talking of plates, actually, there is something you could do for me if you didn't mind," said Martha. "Jane and Flora are simply up to their ears in the kitchens, refilling platter after platter so that Mrs. Smith's girls from the pub can run back and forth to keep the buffet stocked.  I'm afraid no one's had a moment to fix up a plate for your father, but I'm sure he'll want something to eat soon if he's unwell and planning to retire early. There's more of everything down there and they'd be happy to fix up a covered dish for you to take up to him. Anything he likes, of course. The game pie's quite good, and there's such a lot of ham I expect we'll be eating it for the rest of the month. You know better than any of us what might please him best, and do of course bring him a cocktail or sweets or any other thing he might like, since he's missing the festivities. You don't mind, do you? Only Flora is buried in profiteroles and Jane was crying because one of the ducks was burned, so it's a bit of a madhouse belowstairs."

Even Jim, who had known her for twenty years and loved her very much, was forced to concede that this was a rather shocking lapse of hostess etiquette on Martha's behalf; but he did not take it half so poorly as Lenore Karidian, whose blue eyes turned absolutely ice cold for a moment which went on just long enough to make everybody uncomfortable.

Then she recovered herself, smile with perfect equanimity, replied “Why, of course, Mrs. Leighton,” and departed without looking back.

Jim raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, shut up, I know," Martha hissed as she took his arm. "That girl just gets under my skin. I can't say why. It's just impossible to relax altogether when she's in the room. I suppose you met Nigel?” she added under her breath as she drew him a few steps away from the piano. “Apparently quite a hit at the pictures.”

“So Lenore said, though I haven’t heard of him. And his medley lacks focus.”

Martha kicked him lightly in amused reproach. “I’d rather have someone at the piano than be stuck with only the gramophone, though. At least Nigel is . . . upbeat.”

“You’ve done your best, old girl,” Jim said sympathetically. “If the thing doesn’t gel properly into a real party, you can’t blame lack of effort. Maybe food will help; everyone's in a better mood after they've had a few pieces of cake.”

“Mmm.” She considered this. “Perhaps. Your Doctor McCoy is an angel on earth, by the way."

"No, I don't think so. You've got him confused with somebody else."

Martha laughed. "Well, if you mean the short temper and the grumbling, I feel quite at home with men like that. Reminds me of my grandfather, rather. Anyway, he took Tom downstairs to the kitchens and filled him with coffee until he seemed quite lucid again, and then they sat for a bit in the servants' parlor where it was quieter so they could talk. Tom was still a little woolly-headed, and McCoy couldn't really get a clear answer out of him as to whether he'd had another drink or two after the one he witnessed, or whether it had simply been irresponsibly strong. He said he was behaving like someone who'd had five or six, but Tom didn't seem to think it could possibly have been that many. We'll never know, I suppose. Anyway, he took Tom upstairs and tucked him into his own bed - Doctor McCoy's bed, I mean, not Tom's and mine - I suppose in order to keep a closer eye on him, since it's just at the top of the stairs. Or maybe in case he needs medicine later, if he isn't well. He didn't really say, but I trust him to have his reasons."

"He usually does," Jim agreed. "Tom couldn't be in better hands, Martha. Don't worry about any of this until the morning."

"Yes, that's just what McCoy said," Martha agreed. "I'll certainly try. Without Anton Karidian as the guest of honor or their host, I'm afraid I'll be more than usually reliant on your charms to keep the locals from complaining. It took everything in me not to lose my temper at Tom even worse than I did, and usually when we're trying to avoid falling into that sort of godawful row, the best thing for us is to get some breathing room. I'll be calmer at breakfast, and he'll be terribly apologetic, and it will all be fine, but from now until then I'm selfish enough to accept McCoy's offer to take him off my hands for one night. Oh Lord, there’s Freya,” she said suddenly, grimacing at a cluster on the other side of the room. “We’d better go give your boys a moment to catch their breaths.”

Jim followed her gaze to where Chekov and Sulu stood near a rather impressive glass-front curio cabinet, beside a middle-aged woman in a severe black dress and small gold pince-nez who sniffed rather disapprovingly at Jim and Martha as they approached. 

“Mrs. Bergen,” Martha greeted her politely, “I see you’ve met some of our guests from the Enterprise. This is her captain, James Kirk, a very old and dear friend. Jim, this is Freya Bergen. She’s been with the Karidian Company of Players since its founding in Norway, and you’ll see her tomorrow night playing Hamlet’s mother Gertrude.”

“Very pleased to meet you, ma’am,” said Jim, extending his hand.

“Charmed,” said the woman coldly. “I was just informing your subordinates -”

“Yes, that’s my navigator Lieutenant Pavel Chekov, and my helmsman Hikaru Sulu. It’s their first time in England, as a matter of fact, and they're so looking forw-"

“ - that Anton Karidian’s interpretation of the classical tragedies,” she sailed on, exactly as if he had not spoken, “reveals an unparalleled knowledge of the human condition. This is his fourth Hamlet. Each time, he unearths a new layer of meaning. His facility with textual analysis is remarkable. You young men,” she said sternly to Sulu and Chekov, “will learn a great deal from this literary experience. Now, obviously the most significant primary source to which one looks for context would be the Gesta Danorum of historian Saxo Grammaticus, written around the year 1200, the earliest full history of Denmark. It contains the tale of Amleth, or Amlóði, which means 'mad' in Old Norse, from which Shakespeare drew extensively. One must consider, however -"

“Well, we won’t keep you,” said Jim cheerfully, taking Martha’s arm and waving goodbye to a stricken Chekov, watching him depart with betrayal in his young eyes, as a glum Sulu took a seat on the chair behind him with an air of weary resignation, and settled in for the remainder of the lecture. 

“Was that cruel of us?” he whispered as she led him away. “I like a tale in Old Norse as much as anyone, but there’s something of the schoolmistress about her.”

“Between us, she’s a nasty piece of work,” Martha whispered back. “I’m tempted to like her only because Lenore doesn’t, and Lenore brings out the claws in me, which I’m not terribly proud of; but I don’t exactly find Freya restful company either.”

“She and Lenore don’t get on?” This interested Jim.

“Oh, I suppose it’s just actresses, you know. Isn’t that what they always say? Only Mrs. Bergen is oddly territorial about Karidian. Any chance she gets to flaunt her preferential status, she will. She was the first Karidian Player, you know, back when Lenore was still running around in diapers, and she never lets anyone forget it. She's a sort of de facto co-director, as far as things like logistics, I mean she's the one who manages all the fuss with the tours, so she's quite bossy, and naturally the younger folk bristle at it a bit, but she seems harder on Lenore than she is on the others. Anyway, I’ll make sure Pavel and Hikaru get a good nightcap before bed to make up for it, and maybe some chocolates too. They’re doing the rest of us a service by keeping the actresses apart, at least. Where has Lenore got to, I wonder?” she added, rather absently. "Taking a plate up to her father shouldn't have taken more than a few minutes. Perhaps he's bored and wanted a chat."

Jim looked around at this remark, realizing he too was unable to spot a flash of peach silk anywhere in the crowd, either below or above. His gaze did briefly cross Spock's, still standing on the balcony in very nearly the same position, and from the expression on his face Jim suspected Spock knew exactly who Jim had been looking for. Something a little disapproving flashed in his dark eyes, and Jim hated how effortlessly the training from all those years ago came back to him - Gary's voice reminding him that a bit of jealousy was good, in such cases, because it helped to sell the bit. If Lenore thought Jim's best friend was resentful of her intrusion on their country holiday, that would only serve in Lenore's mind to confirm Jim's interest as genuine. 

Still, it felt ugly to use Spock like that. Not for anything less than the four thousand dead of Tarsus could Jim hold himself back from charging up that wrought-iron staircase and telling Spock absolutely everything. 

Martha tugged at his arm, returning him to the present. “At least one of your lot is properly enjoying herself,” she laughed, gesturing to a threadbare velvet settee in the corner where two earnest young men were chattering away to Uhura with smitten expressions on their faces. “That’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I’ve forgotten their proper names, I’m afraid. Karidian has a rather feudal approach to the art of theatre, and discourages the ensemble from hobnobbing with the principal cast. And he sent the stagehands to the Three Moons in Princetown; apparently he never sleeps under the same roof as the laborers. Appalling snob. I invited all of them for cocktails, partly because it seemed mean not to and partly to dare Karidian to say something to me about it. That’s when I thought he’d be joining us, of course. Oh, there’s Scotty,” she added, as they spotted the chief engineer at the center of a small crowd of brawny fellows who all wore their formal dress with a faintly uncomfortable air. “The one with the ginger whiskers is the stage designer, and I think the other lads with him do the sound effects and the lighting. They’ve been all over the ballroom this week while the actors rehearse upstairs, so I’ve run into them coming and going a few times. They’re nice boys, all of them. For some reason, I’m so much more comfortable with them than the actors; I don’t know why.”

“Because, you, also, are an appalling snob,” said Jim, “only in reverse. The more posh someone is, the more you hate them.”

“Do you know, I think you might be right,” said Martha. “Oh Lord, I heard the word ‘voltage.’ They’re talking shop. Hurry along or we’ll be dragged into a fervent discussion about the electric and I can’t think of anything I’d enjoy less. I’d better introduce you to the locals while you’re here.”

But introducing Jim to the locals, of course, took a great deal longer than expected. Martha was unable to resist labeling him as an American naval captain "and war hero," which in a crowd of rather traditionalist English villagers was like throwing red meat to sharks. Instantly the actors were forgotten, and Captain Kirk became the brightest star in the room. All manner of ruddy-cheeked, white-haired fellows his father's age wanted to shake his hand and thank him for his service, and this was generally met with long-winded anecdotes detailing their service, upon which Jim was then expected to comment. For an hour and a half, or very nearly, he gamely stepped into Tom's shoes to follow Martha about the room and back her up as she made her graceful excuses for the absences of both her husband and the famed thespian guest of honor they had been promised. They made their way through a lengthy circuit of the drawing room, dining room and parlor until every neighbor had been charmed so thoroughly they could not possibly go home tonight complaining of the poor hospitality at Norwick House. From time to time Jim looked up toward the balcony and saw Spock still watching, and from the occasional flickers of concealed amusement on the Vulcan's face, Jim suspected his keen hearing was perfectly able to pick up how very many tedious conversations Jim was being forced to endure about horses.

Only three people, on their tour of duty through the mingling crowd, drew themselves to Jim's - well, not suspicion exactly, but at least a sharper notice: the doctor, and the groundskeepers.

"Jim, this is Michael Abernathy, the physician in Princetown," Martha had said, as a gentleman a notch or two older than Jim with a dark hair and beard rose from an armchair beside the fireplace where he'd been chatting with Bones, and he recognized the fellow she'd pointed out earlier to Lenore. "We grew up together, as a matter of fact. Michael, Jim Kirk of the Enterprise is an old friend of Tom's from America."

Dr. Abernathy, who'd appeared perfectly friendly and amicable during the first half of this introduction, had turned to stone by the end of it. "A friend of Tom's," he repeated in a rather incredulous voice. "Now there's one I haven't heard before."

Bones and Jim exchanged a brief glance of surprise at this remark, which had clearly nettled Martha. "Mind if I ask what precisely you mean by that?" Jim inquired pleasantly.

"Precisely what I said. That I don't believe I've ever heard tell of a visitor to Norwick House who was here as a friend of its master, not its mistress."

"Well, he's old friends with the mistress too," said Bones carelessly. "Known 'em both for twenty years or so. If you grew up here, you must have crossed paths before; Jim's come down to visit many times, haven't you, Jim?"

"I spent the war in Belgium," said Abernathy. "I remained in Europe for several years afterward. There were . . . painful memories, at home. I only returned to Princetown to set up a permanent practice five years ago."

Jim felt his blood run cold. "Where in Belgium?" he asked politely, striving to keep his voice level. "I, er, know it a little."

"All over, really, but my home base was a town called Vervier. Suffered badly during the Occupation. Famine, disease, all sorts. They were greatly in need of doctors."

"Oh, no, Jim was much further north than that, in Antwerp," Martha lied smoothly. "You wouldn't have crossed paths. Vervier is near the Ardennes Forest, you see. Closer to the German border than the Dutch."

"Well, that's quite noble of you, to go where doctors are most needed," said Jim, a little rattled, and not quite sure what to make of this. "You must find Princetown quite a change of pace from the Continent."

"My father passed away and left me his practice," said Abernathy. "It was . . . time to return home and face things."

"Face things?"

Oddly, it was Martha who seemed more embarrassed by Jim's question than Abernathy. "Coming home again after so long an absence is always difficult, isn't it?" she said hastily. "Anyway, Dr. Abernathy, Dr. McCoy, I'm so pleased the two of you seemed to be getting along so well. Sorry we interrupted your opportunity to talk shop."

This lightened the mood, and both doctors laughed heartily. "More like arguing shop," said Bones. "We both subscribe to all the same medical journals, but you caught us in the middle of a heated disagreement over an article from last month about that study at Yale with the monkeys -"

"The bilateral prefrontal lobotomy presents tremendous opportunities for the field of psychiatry," said Dr. Abernathy. "The monkeys who received the procedure became exceedingly docile. It could be a revolutionary technique in treating violent patients."

"Hogwash, and you know it," said Bones cheerfully. "Humans aren't monkeys, and no proper doctor would treat them as one."

"Well, be that as it may, and speaking of patients," said Abernathy. "Martha, would you like me to look in on Thomas while I'm here? Dr. McCoy told me he's taken him upstairs and put him to sleep in his bed, and I'm sure he'll feel better in the morning - he always does - but if you'd like me to go have a look . . ."

"That's all right, but thank you," said Martha. "I suspect what he needs is sleep. He was a bit cross with me earlier in the evening, and he won't like it if he thinks I'm sending every doctor in the house up to check on him. It'll feel like hovering, and you know he can't bear that. If he isn't himself by breakfast, and Dr. McCoy thinks something ought to be done, he'll ring you. And now we'll leave the two of you to your argument about removing the brains of monkeys, because I suspect if I don't give the vicar and his wife a chance to fawn over our American war hero I'll never hear the end of it. So pleased to see you, Michael," she added, patting his arm as they moved away, and the doctor wasn't entirely quick enough to repress the look of pained longing which flitted across his face at the touch. Then Martha took Jim's elbow and steered him away.

"We haven't really got to talk to the vicar again," she said under her breath. "Michael doesn't have to know we just came from there. I only said that because he's in the parlor, and we can get there the long way, which gives me a moment to explain. It isn't what you think."

"What do I think?"

"You were thinking that Verviers is awfully near Tarsus."

"It is."

"I know. But it's also near Liège." Jim turned to look at her, curious. "The work I did during the war was classified," she explained. "Where I was stationed wasn't. My friends and family could write to me there."

"Then Dr. Abernathy -"

"Came to Belgium to woo me, with the expectation that we'd return to Princetown together after the war," Martha sighed. "All my life our parents expected us to marry. No one took it harder than Michael when I came home with an American husband, and he stayed in Europe for years afterwards to have a sulk. I was pleased when he came home, because I assumed he'd got over it. I'm not always sure he has. He and Thomas can't stand each other. If Thomas thought I was sending Michael up to make sure he hadn't drunk himself to death in his sleep, there'd be no end of a row about it tomorrow."

"He's still in love with you," Jim pointed out. "And you're a fool if you don't see it."

"He probably is," said Martha, "but I can't make that my problem. The answer's been no since I was sixteen and he first started asking. I refuse to feel badly for his inability to hear it."

"Oh. Well, all right, that's fair. I mean if he asked you properly and you said no properly, that ought to be the end of it."

"If only it had been, my life would be a great deal easier. He actually is quite a good doctor, you see. Very well versed in the new modern techniques."

Jim wasn't so sure he agreed with this. "Bones read me that article about removing the brains of those monkeys," he said uneasily. "The thought of doing that to a human just to control them makes my blood run cold."

"It's all theory, darling. The practical ethical questions are decades away. Oh, the Greers are in the dining room, and you haven't met them yet. We'd better pop in there next. They're longing to meet you."

Henry and Mary Greer made nearly as strong an impression upon Jim as the enigmatic doctor had done, though for quite a different reason. They were a married couple in their early sixties, both big and bluff and jolly and red-faced with snow white hair, rather like a children's picture postcard of Santa and Mrs. Claus. The Greers were the groundskeepers of the Norwick estate, who lived at the far edge of the property where it met the main road to the north, in a small cottage Jim dimly remembered passing this afternoon when they'd come in by truck. The conversation had begun quite amiably, with the usual exchange of war stories and a lengthy catalog of the Greers' livestock and how they were doing (Jim wished he'd had Spock with him for this; the Vulcan's eidetic memory would have captured the name of every single cow and chicken in the province, and it would have been fun to quiz him on it later). It was only after Martha casually mentioned that they were related that the conversation took a turn.

"Of course, the Greers are Norwicks too, indirectly," she said. "Going back to a great-grandfather's sister, or something. I've forgotten. But there were Greers in that cottage as far back as I can remember, and as far back as my father could remember, too."

"Old Alistair - him as was Lord Norwick in the Napoleonic Wars," explained Henry Greer in his broad Dartmoor accent, "had a sister named Sophie who married a farmer what Alistair thought was beneath the family dignity. Settled some land upon her as a dowry, but cut her off from the family fortunes. His grandson Philip was the one who tried to make right, bringing the families back together and all, and our Mrs. Leighton's branch of the family have never been nothing but good to us. Her father and grandfather were the best of men. We watched her grow up. Taught her to ride and used to take her out for walks on the moors. Showed her the shortcut across the Tor which leads into town and how to avoid the Grimpen Mire and how to hunt crows -"

"Which she was awful good at," added Mary.

"I suppose in a way," said Martha, "they're the only family I have left. They've got children and grandchildren of their own, which Thomas and I don't, of course, and the land has been in their family's care for such a long time. Thomas and I always felt that if anything should happen to us, naturally we'd make provisions for the laboratories and our research to be passed on to the institute for the work to continue, and to benefit future scientists, but that the property itself ought to belong to the Greers."

"That's very generous of you," said Jim. "You might have sold up and moved to London or New York or Paris years ago, to continue your work there, and I always rather wondered why you didn't. But of course, then you'd have strangers living on Norwick land, and you mightn't be able to guarantee your family could stay in their home."

"For ourselves, we've always been perfectly happy in that little cottage," said Mary Greer. "But it's such a load of a mother's mind and heart, Captain Kirk, to know one's children will be provided for after one is gone."

"I can imagine. And do they live with you, your children?"

This was the moment at which the conversation became ever so slightly odd. Henry looked at Mary, who looked back at her husband, with an expression which seemed oddly furtive. Martha, briefly distracted by greeting the innkeeper's wife as she loaded up a plate with little cakes, missed the exchange; but Jim was not quite sure what to make of it.

"They're men grown now," said Mary finally. "Went off in the world to live their own lives and such, as sons do. Why, look how far from your own home you've got to! Where in America are you from, did you say?"

"I didn't, but it's a town called Riverside, Iowa. Thomas Leighton and I were at school together there."

This led into many enthusiastic requests to learn more about Iowa, a state about which they knew nothing, and a great curiosity about Tom's younger years, which made Jim faintly hopeful that at least two people in this crowd of locals didn't hate his friend. Still, it was odd that the couple had seemed unwilling to say more about their children . . . especially since those children would become the masters of Norwick House if anything happened to Tom and Martha.

Finally, after their chitchat with the Greers began to flag, Jim played the ace up his sleeve he had been reserving in case of emergency, and informed them that he was terribly sorry but he needed to step away just for a moment to find his first officer. Martha took the opening presented, and slipped away with him, and they made their way up the nearest of the two little iron spiral stairs before anyone else managed to stop them, breathing a sigh of relief at the brief interval in which no one accosted them for further small talk. Jim had exerted himself to a herculean degree in the attempt to cover for his absent friend, and he rather hoped Tom's apology at breakfast would be profuse.

The crowd on the balcony had thinned somewhat from earlier in the evening, and that telltale flash of peach was visible at the far end, where a small bar and seating area had been set up. Jim felt sure he would have seen Lenore come back into the drawing room if she'd returned while he and Martha were circulating; but perhaps she'd been up here all the time. She could easily have come down by the grand stairs after delivering her father's dinner, and returned to the festivities through the door in the second floor portrait gallery.

At their approach, she looked up from the champagne glass into which she’d been moodily staring and brightened perceptibly at the sight of Jim. “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?” she said archly, lifting her glass towards him in a wordless toast.

Jim responded with his most alluring smile. “Isn’t that my line?” he replied, matching her flirtatious tone. “Oh, that I were a champagne glass in that hand, that I might touch those - well. I suppose the rest wouldn’t be gentlemanly.”

“For propriety’s sake, you’d better have your own,” said the girl, laughing, as she turned back to the little marble-topped sideboard where the champagne bottle stood in its frosty silver ice bucket. As she poured him a glass, Jim thought he heard a sound from behind him which was almost a sigh. Neither Martha nor Lenore seemed to notice it particularly, but it had the effect of drawing Jim’s attention to the mismatched cluster of chairs clustered nearby, three of which were occupied. Spock stood behind them in the shadows, still keeping watch over the gathering like the "unofficial sentry" Bones had described; but he drew a little nearer to the small party on the far end of the balcony once he saw his captain settle in to join it.

The blue velvet robe with its silver embroidery did, in fact, wrap at the waist. Jim tried very hard not to think about it.

“Oh, forgive me,” Martha said. "I'm an appalling hostess tonight. Lost my train of thought in the midst of my introductions. Jim, you haven’t met the rest of the cast.”

“My fault,” Lenore demurred, blushing prettily, but made no move to tear her gaze away from Jim to acknowledge the other people nearby. “I’m a terrible distraction.”

“I’d believe that,” said Jim, smiling, before turning his attention to the others.

“Everyone, this is my old friend James Kirk of the American navy," Martha said to the three seated people. "He’s captain of the ship whose crew you’ve been chatting with all night, though I knew him many years before he was this impressive. Jim, this is Brian Doyle,” she said, gesturing to a large fellow with strawberry-blond hair who was built like a rugby player. He recovered swiftly, hearing his own name, but Jim had quite definitely observed him with his eyes fixed on Lenore, their expression far from affectionate. He looked deeply annoyed about something, verging on open dislike. “He plays Laertes, Ophelia’s brother, and he does all the fight work too. Teaches them how to fall properly and stab each other with swords and so on. I find it all fascinating,” she added, smiling at Brian, who promptly lost all animosity and directed a boyish grin back at her which made it suddenly clear how young he was, probably only a few years older than Lenore.

Beside him sat a great bear of a man probably sixty years of age or thereabouts, with a robust beard and a rather sensational suit, gray linen lined with a bold plum silk that matched the scarf he wore in lieu of a tie. He eyed Jim approvingly with the tactful, wordless expression of a gentleman of certain proclivities who is testing the waters. Jim smiled back at him with the practiced expression that meant yes to his assessment of Jim’s own proclivities but a polite, regretful no to the implicit invitation. Oddly, this seemed to amuse the older man, and his expression lost its carefully constructed veneer of artificial neutrality. His eyes were sharp and keen, but his good humor seemed genuine. This, Martha informed him, was Saul Friedmann, who portrayed the murderous Uncle Claudius. He greeted his hostess in a booming baritone with an Austrian accent, complimented her gown, and then observed that he had also caught Brian admiring it from above while she made her rounds. This made Brian flush red to the roots of his hair and mutter what Jim strongly suspected was a string of curses in Irish.

“And this is Simone Villard,” said Martha, cutting in promptly to offer the embarrassed boy a reprieve, gesturing to the third person seated in the little circle of chairs, and Jim realized with a start that until Martha said her name, he hadn’t even noticed the girl at all. “She’s the newest member of the Karidian Players. Only just joined the company six months ago or so, when this tour began, so Hamlet is her debut.”

Simone Villard seemed to freeze like a cornered animal as the group’s eyes turned toward her, and the rather helpless expression she directed at Lenore Karidian - who looked, if such a thing were possible, practically through the girl instead of at her - made it immediately clear to Jim who had made that forlorn little sighing sound while he and Lenore were flirting, and why.

“Simone plays Horatio,” offered Saul, coming to the rescue in a way which told Jim that the older man saw exactly what he did. “A remarkable girl. So young, yet so open in her performance. No artifice to this one. Every emotion, she wears on her face.”

This seemed fairly self-evident to Jim, onstage or off. Simone was quite tall, nearly of a height with Brian, with dark hair and eyes and a teenager's gangly, awkward earnestness, even though she was very probably in her mid-twenties. Exactly the sort of person a Lenore Karidian would overlook entirely, no matter how much talent she had. Shy, honest, kind: not traits that would get her noticed by the dazzling, self-assured leading lady she seemed rather miserably pining over.

“Horatio was always my favorite character,” Jim said, smiling at her. He’d felt compelled to say something to put her at ease anyway, but this happened to be perfectly true. “I’ve always felt that he and Hamlet have the one real love story in the whole play.”

Simone brightened at this, which pleased him; but the most unexpected reaction was Spock’s. He approached slowly to stand behind the dark-haired young French girl’s chair, as if suddenly interested in following the conversation. 

“I think so as well,” Simone agreed. “Monsieur Karidian, at first he was not persuaded, and Mrs. Bergen was not either. But Monsieur Braithwaite called it ‘a capital idea.’”

“Nigel wanting everyone to be in love with him,” scoffed Brian. “Shocking.”

“Hush.” Saul elbowed him. “You know it is not like that with Nigel and Simone. He has simply a soft spot for the girl. As do I. There is nothing improper.”

“He has always been very kind to me,” Simone said. “This is my first theatrical company, you see.”

“Is it? Where did you perform in France?”

“Oh, no, I - no, I was not an actress in France.” She seemed suddenly nervous. “In fact, I have never acted before. Monsieur Karidian found me by accident.”

“By accident?” Jim repeated. “You mean to say he just stopped you in the middle of the Champs-Élysées, said ‘By golly, that’s the Horatio for me,’ and hired you on the spot?”

"Even better," laughed Brian. “In church, if you can believe it."

“In church?”

“She was singing,” said Saul. "A pity, Captain Kirk, that there are no songs in Hamlet. Gott in Himmel, what a voice."

"And quite a remarkable career shift," said Lenore. "She's listed in the playbill as Simone Villard, you know, but until six months ago that name had been at the bottom of a drawer collecting mothballs. She was Sister Marie-Bernadette when Father hired her. Rather funny, isn't it? Hamlet tells Ophelia, 'get thee to a nunnery,' and here we are, having pulled our Horatio out of one."

This was a startling piece of new information about the girl, and Jim's curiosity was perhaps quite natural; but it did not escape his notice that the girl herself hadn't volunteered it. Lenore's last remark had been quite plainly directed at Jim, an opening to redirect the conversation back to herself - and to sex, probably, which was what that line meant in context when Hamlet said it - but Simone seemed to fold in on herself at hearing such a deeply personal element of her biography tossed out in such an offhand way.

"It is often the case, I have found," said Friedmann, sailing into the gap while Simone stared down at her shoes, "that a seasoned practitioner of Shakespeare unearths new truths in these age-old stories when sharing the stage with someone who is new to the craft. No regimented training, no artifice, no decades of microscopic attention to each nuance of the text. She is wholly natural. A perfectly human, unstudied Horatio. It is a pleasure to watch her work, we all feel it. Even the great Karidian, when they share the stage together, he cannot help but respond to the honesty of her performance."

Lenore seemed rather inclined to dispute this, but she was not afforded the opportunity.

"Captain Kirk's knowledge of France is, I believe, inferior to my own," Spock said, in the prim tone he used to indicate to strangers that he was making a joke and they were permitted to laugh. "Upon hearing that you were French, Miss Villard, you watched him immediately presume that Karidian had met you in Paris. With a name like Marie-Bernadette, however, I would venture a different theory entirely." 

This surprised both the girl, and everyone else, into turning around to look at him. Lenore's blue eyes narrowed, but the actors were suddenly more interested in Spock than they'd been before, and Martha was openly delighted.

"Am I correct," the Vulcan went on in his most gentle, courteous tone, "in my conjecture that you are in fact from Lourdes?"

Simone looked startled. "Oui, monsieur."

"I'll say, he's awfully good," said Brian Doyle. "Do me next, Mr. Spock."

Spock raised an eyebrow. "From your coloring, the probability that your lineage stems from the Irish province of Munster, encompassing the south and east of that nation and home to the highest preponderance of redhaired individuals, is approximately 93.2%. If forced to narrow it down with greater specificity, the particular regional nuances of your speech would indicate the counties of Tipperary or Limerick. Yours is not an obscure or difficult case, Mr. Doyle. But I did not venture my theory as to Mademoiselle Villard's heritage because of her accent or her coloring." He turned to look over at Jim. "The Sisters of the Immaculate Conception are the proprietors of the holy shrine in that town," he explained. "French Catholics believe that Mary the mother of Jesus appeared there in a vision to Saint Bernadette. There is a grotto with a freshwater spring which they considered to be a highly sacred location." He turned back to Simone with a curious expression. "Was Anton Karidian visiting to take the waters when you first made his acquaintance?"

“It is a place many come to unburden themselves,” said the girl, in a rather cryptic tone. “I met him first five years ago when I had only just entered my novitiate. He returned to visit many times when his company passed through our town. The older sisters were fond of Macbeth,” she added in a faintly conspiratorial tone, and this got a chuckle even out of Brian. If he'd really grown up in Tipperary, probably a nun or two figured into his own past as well. “We spoke often. I found him a man burdened with great cares. He did not share them all with me. But he was kind.”

“And then, as he so often tells the story, he heard her sing at vespers,” said Saul. “And it was like the voice of an angel. What psalm was it again, child? 'By the waters of Babylon . . .'"

“And then old Karidian said anyone who already had such a good singing voice could surely develop a speaking voice worthy of the words of Shakespeare,” came a voice from behind them, and Jim looked up to see Nigel Braithwaite ascending the wrought-iron spiral staircase. “Quite right, too. We’ll make something of the little nun one day, you just watch.” He stuck his hand out for Jim to shake. “Didn’t get the chance to greet you properly down below,” he said. “Caught me in a bit of a musical meander and I didn’t like to be disturbed. You’re Kirk, the naval man? Pleasure to meet you, old boy. I suppose Mrs. Leighton asserted her rights as hostess to snatch you back from the claws of our Lenore. Well-played, milady.” He doffed an invisible hat at Martha, who smiled back rather tightly. Nigel’s description had been a little too accurate, and it was plain that neither of the women liked it.

“You’ve come just in time,” Lenore said, masking her evident displeasure behind a sweet smile. “Captain Kirk said something quite shocking I’ve been meaning to press him on further. He thinks Hamlet and Horatio are the only true love story in the play.”

“Yes, and so does Simone, and so do I,” said Nigel easily. “Captain Kirk, your Shakespeare instincts are marvelous. What led you to that conclusion?”

“I suppose I just always found it rather romantic, even as a boy,” Jim admitted. “The kind of love which begins in friendship has always appealed to me. Ophelia is the one that got away, isn’t she? He comes back to Elsinore after all those years and there she is, just as dazzling as he remembered, and there’s a powerful nostalgia in that. She’s a kind of fantasy to him. Impossibly alluring, but not quite real. But Horatio is the person he brought with him. He’s the one Hamlet can talk to. His anchor. I like that.”

“Surely not an anchor,” laughed Lenore. “What an unromantic choice of words. Something wrapped in heavy chains, which weighs one down? Isn't an anchor just another word for a burden? Heavens. No thank you. No, I've always felt that the the real tragedy of Hamlet is the way the younger generation are robbed of the future they were due. Hamlet knew exactly what life he wanted. He only appears indecisive to the audience because we meet him in a moment where the foundation beneath his feet has been utterly ripped away, and he's forced to start over, with no good options. He was supposed to be the heir to a kingdom, but his father lost a battle to Fortinbras of Norway and now the whole kingdom is forfeit. None of it was Hamlet's fault. He went away to university at Wittenberg to study the ways of princes. He held up his end of the bargain, didn't he? And Ophelia did too. She ought to have been next in line after Gertrude to be Queen of Denmark. They were meant to be together. They deserved that throne. They did everything they were supposed to do to get it fairly. It was their birthright. But Claudius commits the ultimate sin - he kills the king - and the whole world fractures. In the end, nothing short of death can wipe that slate clean.”

“Now, we all agree on the Claudius bit,” said Nigel. “Freya’s schooled us on it more than once. The metaphors of chaos and disorder woven throughout Shakespeare’s plays anytime someone kills a king. Ghosts walk, beasts eat each other, the very stars in the sky can’t be trusted. A broken world. It happens in Macbeth and Julius Caesar too. But I can’t agree with you on Hamlet and Ophelia, and I simply won’t play it that way. He doesn’t care two pins for her, and I don’t think he ever did.”

Lenore’s face darkened, and the unguarded anger on her face startled Jim. It seemed entirely out of proportion to light ribbing between actors about their interpretations of their characters.

“It’s no slight against you, old thing,” Nigel went on breezily. “It’s just quite obviously the way it’s written. I mean to say, he’s a beast to Ophelia, isn’t he? Calls her a whore to her face more than once. Her father and brother see him coming from a mile away; that’s why they don’t want her having anything to do with him. It’s sex for Hamlet and nothing more. For love, one must look elsewhere. And of course with a woman as Horatio, you can get away with playing the deep, repressed emotions that are really in the text, and even in stuffy, old-fashioned towns they don’t blink at it. Clever of old Anton to hide it in plain sight like that. Horatio is the only one Hamlet trusts, isn’t he? The loyal best friend who stands at his side. The one really honest person in that whole viper’s nest of a castle. The one Hamlet entrusts to tell his story after it’s all over. No, you’re built to fuck, my darling, not to marry,” he said brightly, with a flash of real malice hidden inside his playful tone. “And I must say, you play that role as if you were born to it.”

It was Brian, rather unexpectedly, who surged to his feet and took two long steps toward Nigel, and for a bizarre moment Jim really believed the young Irish lad was going to hit him. He hadn't seemed to care for Lenore Karidian himself at all, so it was damned odd to see him leap to her defense; but perhaps it was less to do with her and more a dislike for Nigel. Were the nasty little digs something that plagued all of them? Was this part of what Martha had sensed, in the dynamic of the group which had made her so uneasy? Did he pivot so swiftly from charm to cruelty all the time?

Then "Sit," said Saul Friedmann, in a calm, quiet voice, and instantly the cord snapped. Both men deflated in unison, shoulders slumping into a truculent, sullen posture as the defiance ebbed away.

Brian sat.

“You will apologize to Miss Karidian, Nigel,” he went on, in that same even voice. For a moment, Nigel seemed inclined to protest; then Saul rose from his seat. He didn't move, or step towards the other man. He simply stood, giving Jim his first look at the older man drawn up to his full height. Nigel was slight and dapper and lean as a whippet, and Saul dwarfed him to a degree that might have been comical had the atmosphere not sizzled with such bizarre tension.

Nigel was cowed immediately. “Oh, all right,” he muttered. “Sorry, Lenore. You know I never mean anything by it.”

“You will apologize to your hostess, for your boorish behavior while you are a guest in her family home,” Saul added. “And to her friends Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, who have now been made uncomfortable. Brian, you will apologize to them too.”

This both actors seemed less reluctant to do, and their apologies to Martha in particular were quite sincere.

Saul nodded, mollified. "Good. And now, as I see some of our local guests are beginning to depart - those who, I think, are hastening to avoid the possibility of rain and fog - I suggest we adjourn to the foyer, make ourselves charming, and offer them our most cordial personal invitations to this weekend's performance. Lenore, as always, I trust you will lead by example."

Then, before any of them could protest, he swept them all down the spiral stairs at the end of the gallery and back down to the drawing room.

Martha peeked over the rail. "Oh drat, they are leaving," she sighed. "I committed the cardinal sin of the hostess and stayed in one place too long. The bad weather must be on its way already, so the Princetown folk will be wanting to get back before it turns into sludge altogether. I'll find you both again. Spock, darling, have you eaten? There's a whole tower of Vulcan food on the buffet in the dining room. None of it's touched any meat, I promise."

"Your thoughtfulness is most appreciated, Mrs. Leighton," Spock said in his warmest voice.

"I think we can advance to 'Martha' now, at this level of intimacy," she said as she rose from her seat, dropping a hand on Jim's shoulder as she made her way past them. "We very nearly had to break up a fistfight, and I always think that rather seals a friendship in iron, don't you?"

Then she glided down the staircase behind the actors, leaving Jim and Spock alone.

Jim looked over the railing to where the crowd in the drawing room continued to break apart. He saw one of the girls from the inn, neat and tidy in her white apron, begin gathering up the used glasses from the bar, and he suddenly thought about the room two stories overhead where Anton Karidian sat alone with his dinner tray, removed from all the world. The thought of it gave him a faint chill, for reasons he couldn't immediately identify.

He turned back to look at Spock. “If I say ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’ will you laugh at me?”

“I would not,” Spock replied solemnly. “My own feelings, Jim, are very much the same.”

Chapter Text

TWENTY YEARS AGO

American Aid Workers’ Outpost
Liège, Belgium
1916

“Is it that you don’t like women at all?”

Jim’s eyes lifted to follow the sound of the unexpected voice, startled to see Miss Norwick - who he'd rather lost track of, since they returned to camp - dropping gracefully onto the grass beside him, heedless as always of the conditions of her skirts. He sometimes took his breakfast out here behind the mess tent, when the weather was fine; she must have seen him, and followed him out with her own. Jim marveled at her ability to tuck her feet elegantly beneath her in one smooth, fluid motion, without spilling a drop of tea from the tin cup balanced on her tray.

He gave an uncertain chuckle, not quite sure what to make of the question. “Whatever makes you say that, ma’am?”

“Well, it’s ‘miss,’ first of all, if you’re going to be like that about it, but I’d really so much rather it was simply ‘Martha.’ And to answer your question, we've known each other for nearly a week now,  and I’m quite pretty, actually, yet you haven’t tried to make love to me at all.”  She pulled a flask out of her pocket and passed it over to him with a mischievous grin. “Checking to see that I haven’t lost my edge, you see,” she explained irrepressibly. “If it’s your fault, then I don’t mind. If it’s my fault, I shall have to do something about it. So naturally I’d rather it was yours.”

If Jim had, at any point, actually wanted to kiss Martha Norwick, that would have been the moment, right there . . . for he laughed, really and truly, a proper laugh with his whole heart and voice, for the very first time since his truck arrived in Tarsus seven whole months ago.

He happily accepted the flask, took a long swig of surprisingly good brandy, poured a liberal splash into his coffee, and  turned to look at her with new, appraising eyes. She was no longer just a very attractive young woman, a fact he’d noted the minute she stepped out of the lorry on the road up the hill to Tarsus; and she was no longer merely a capable, resourceful person who had borne the aftermath of those horrors with an absolute moral clarity while soundly keeping her head on her shoulders.

He took her in anew - her quick, flashing eyes, her determined chin, her playful smile - and saw for the first time someone with the potential to be a real friend.

“Well, now you’ve wounded my feelings, Martha,” he replied primly. “Maybe I’m just a decent fellow who doesn’t go about throwing himself at girls who haven’t said they’re interested.”

Martha nodded thoughtfully. “I think that’s probably true,” she agreed. “It’s in the eyes, I think. You have kind eyes. And you look at girls like they’re just people. I suppose really that’s why I asked. I mean, whether it’s only men.”

Jim raised an eyebrow. “Not only,” he offered carefully, waiting to see what she’d do with it; but she simply nodded, as if that was all she’d really wanted to know. “You’re a good-looking girl, Martha, and really clever and practical and interesting, and I expect probably very, very funny once someone gets to know you. Not to mention," he added, "the rather fascinating question of what the hell you're doing here."

Was it his imagination, or did the question fluster her a little? She seemed suddenly uneasy, and broke eye contact to busy herself with taking the flask back and screwing the cap back on. "I don't know what you mean," she said, a little evasively.

"I meant, how an earl’s daughter ended up driving a lorry through enemy lines in an active war zone to deliver humanitarian aid."

"Oh, Lord, don't say 'an earl's daughter' like that," she laughed, rolling her eyes. "Americans who've read Jane Austen are positively hopeless." 

Her amusement seemed perfectly genuine, but Jim thought he detected a flicker of relief . . . as though she'd imagined he meant something else quite different, something that wasn't to do with class or birth or status at all, and was glad the conversation had steered itself back onto safer ground.

Maybe there was a story in how Martha Norwick came to join CRB. Maybe he'd learn it one day, or maybe not. She had as much right to her own secrets as anyone else.

"Anyway," Jim said, "to return to  the question I suspect you’re really asking - and taking it, I suppose, more in the spirit of curiosity rather than an attempt to extend an offer -"

"Correct."

"There's a boy at home, you see," Jim explained. "Or, well, not really at home anymore, not literally. I'm not always allowed to know where he is, but it isn't Iowa. His war work's nothing like mine, and he can't say much about it. But he's with the Office of Naval Intelligence, and says they like him there. He's hopeful that if he gets promoted again, he'll be in a position to put in a good word for me, and I might be reassigned so we could be together. We've never really talked about it, but I suppose I've always hoped that after the war . . .” 

His voice trailed off suddenly, and he had to blink back the sudden sting of tears.

Seven months trapped in Tarsus, unable  to get word back to Gary to let him know he was still alive. No telephone, no radio, no hope of rescue until CRB had arrived. He'd wired ONI as soon as he could, once they returned to the camp, but Gary still hadn't replied yet. This didn't mean anything, necessarily; he often went dark for weeks at a time. But Jim had never longed more intensely for even a few words from him. His experience at Tarsus left him more certain than ever of the importance of CRB's work, but he also needed to be with the boy he loved again, just to have someone hold him and kiss him and remind him that he was alive and it was all right.

“You still haven’t given up hope on him,” Martha observed, nibbling at a triangle of toast spread thickly with marmalade. “That’s nice to see. That makes me like you better. You can picture an ‘after the war.’ A better time than this one. Sometimes, do you know, I worry I’ve lost that. I keep forgetting that this wasn’t always our life.”

“Ah, but that’s dangerous,” said Jim. “You can never let yourself get used to evil, Martha, no matter how long it lasts or how much of the past it obliterates. No matter how many lies it tells you about its own inevitability. Back there, in that village, we had no other choice. We had eight thousand souls to keep alive. Even after the horrors began, we still had to believe that everyone’s lives were worth saving. That everyone deserved an After. We had to let ourselves believe in a Tarsus that would be free of Kodos one day, just an ordinary village again full of decent people who took care of each other.”

“But that wasn’t true, was it? Kodos led the charge, but he was one man. Those 'decent people' turned on each other. There is no peaceful After for that village. Burning it to the ground and beginning again was the only way. They’d never be able to sleep in their beds again in those houses. They’d smell the smoke and hear the screaming.”

“Well, yes, naturally. I mean that's only sensible. I always knew that. But you have to tell yourself a different story, don’t you, for any of it to be worth fighting for? If we’d decided seven months ago, ‘well, that’s it for Tarsus, give the place up for dead, every man for himself,’ we’d have had no reason to give a damn.”

“You’d have found one,” said Martha. “You’re incapable of not giving a damn, James Kirk. I wonder if it will be your downfall someday. You care about everyone. Perhaps a little too much. Because you could never have stopped those four thousand people from dying, and neither could Thomas Leighton; but you’ll punish yourselves for the rest of your lives as if you’d failed to save the ones who died, rather than succeeding in saving the ones who lived.”

“Tell that to Tom,” Jim said gravely, with a heavy sigh. “He’s the one who’ll take it to heart, I think, even more than I do. He’s the one I think won’t ever -”

He stopped himself.

“Won’t ever be all right again,” Martha finished for him gently. Jim nodded. “Well then,” she said briskly. “We’ll just have to do something about that.”

“The company of a beautiful girl might help,” Jim said, sipping his coffee thoughtfully as he looked out at the horizon. “But she’d have to be made of pretty stern stuff. Not the type of delicate flower who minds being around a fellow whose face is covered in bandages and wakes up screaming in the middle of the night.”

Martha turned to him with a steely glare, and for the first time Jim was surprised to see a flash of real anger in her dark eyes. “I live in the same war zone you do, pretty boy,” she snapped. “Not one thing I’ve said or done from the moment we met has given you cause to think me as shallow and insipid as all that. You've no idea the things I've -" She cut herself off, shaking her head, her jaw set. "I’d like us to be friends," she added coldly, "so I’m going to give you one more chance, and we’ll both pretend you didn’t just say something damnably insulting. But you’d better not do it again.”

She held his gaze for a long time, as if daring him to argue, but seemed surprised when he simply nodded and extended his hand for her to shake. 

“If you’ll forgive me one lapse for the insult, I’ll forgive you for the misunderstanding,” he said with a wry smile. “I was offering you a compliment, Miss Norwick. I wasn’t describing the kind of girl I thought you were. I was describing the kind I already knew you weren’t.” He grinned at her. “Shall we call it a draw, and begin again?”

She gave a faint sniff, but seemed a little mollified, and passed him the flask again after dumping a decidedly unladylike splash of it into her tea.

“Fine,” she said. “Then tell me more about Thomas Leighton. If I’m meant to charm him back into good humor, I’d better have some notion of where to begin.”

* * * * *

Jim would pride himself later on the fact that few of his schemes had ever been so immediately effective as the one to lift the spirits of his still-recovering friend by introducing him to the spirited, sharp-tongued girl who'd helped rescue the Tarsus refugees. Tom was already grumbling less, eating more, and had almost smiled today, which pleased the nurses a great deal. He'd been stubborn as a mule at first, and refused to let Jim bring Martha inside, unwilling to let a pretty girl see him with bandages all over his face; but as soon as it was clear she didn't at all find him repellent or frightful, and simply treated him as a man with an injury just like dozens of other men here, something inside him had shifted, and at times he was almost the old Tom again. It never lasted more than a few minutes at a time, but Martha was hopeful, and Jim suspected there was a good chance she was even more stubborn than Tom. His friend's scars on the outside were healing as well as they could be expected to do, and the invisible ones might fade with time too. Jim's soul felt lighter than it had in months.

It was upon returning from one such visit to the infirmary that Jim encountered one of the other people in the camp whose future welfare had been keeping him up at night, trying to decide what to do.

It had been a very nice morning so far. Tom was in a good mood, and had gotten into it with Martha on some thrilling new development in agriculture sciences from a Swiss biologist, which had been going round in all the scientific papers earlier this year. Jim had never been so happy to be bored. They'd stayed as long as the nurses would let them, the two scientists arguing heatedly about something having to do with cross-breeding subsistence crops, until it was time for Tom to take his medication and rest, then stopped by the officer's mess on the way out for a celebratory coffee. If one stood just to the east side of the main entrance to the mess, one could look straight down a long row of metal huts toward a gathering of large tents some distance away which currently housed the Tarsus refugees. Jim, standing in the sunlight as he and Martha debriefed on the morning's visit, was unknowingly silhouetted for perfect visibility from that angle.

Thus it was that - despite the certain knowledge that he would never, for the rest of his life, take a good cup of scalding hot coffee for granted ever again - Jim found himself wishing it was not quite so scalding as a small brown blur sped along the dirt path towards him and crashed full force against his leg, only then revealing itself to be a small boy around five years old. 

Martha snorted with laughter as coffee splashed all over the front of Jim’s shirt (not a uniform, thank God, just a t-shirt; they were still treating him like he was on medical leave, over his vociferous protests), and he sternly rebuked the boy in French so stilted and broken that it only made him giggle.

“I heard you back there at your camp,” she reminded him, as he awkwardly hoisted the kid onto his hip in order to walk him back. “You speak it better than that.”

“I’m pretty good with languages, I'll have you know. French, Spanish, Italian, well, all the Romance languages, I mean once you’ve got one you’ve got them all. I couldn't write poetry or anything, but I can get the basics across. And then German, because CRB required it for enlisted officers. And a little Russian and Polish, by necessity.”

“Necessity?”

"Well, you want to be able to talk to everyone on your crew, don't you? We had all sorts at Farragut, some who'd only just emigrated - that's the Farragut Naval Training Station in Idaho," he explained, seeing the look of confusion on her face. "I noticed that a few particularly brilliant navigators weren't getting picked for training exercises because their English wasn't very good yet, and the other Americans overlooked them. Both unfair and short-sighted, I thought. So I decided to help things along by learning a bit of their languages too, and try to somewhat meet them in the middle. Worked with a Polish engineer from New York on my last ship. Best I ever found. No other ship would take him because his accent was so thick. So I bought a Polish dictionary and became his translator until everyone finally realized how good he was, and that he was worth keeping, and finally began making the effort themselves. Which, I mean, they ought to have done from the beginning," he added. "Only sometimes people need to be shown first, how a crew becomes stronger when everyone aboard is different from each other. When no two people's minds work in quite the same way. If I'm trying to solve a difficult problem, I don't want ten more Jim Kirks, do I? They can't teach me anything new. I want someone who can think of things I'll never think of. Anyway, when Kévin -"

He paused as the boy perked up. Jim murmured to him again in pathetically bad French, which caused the boy to bury his face in Jim’s shoulder and giggle some more.

“He doesn’t speak any English,” Jim explained. “Sorry. Forgot he'd obviously respond to the sound of his own name. Everything else we're saying is just babble to him, so it's perfectly safe. Anyway, his parents were on the town council. Good people, well-respected. They never trusted the new governor, not a bit, from the moment he arrived; but their word carried a lot of weight in that town, so he humored them at first. Met with them one on one, pretended to hear them out. But then when things took a turn, their names wound up on the list. The kid used to say things sometimes, in his sleep . . .” He swallowed hard, lowering his voice even though he knew it wasn't necessary. “He was all alone when we found him, wandering in the woods, and he didn’t say a word for days. Silent. Frighteningly so. Martha, I think Ko-” He stopped short, looking down at the child anxiously. “I think the governor,” he amended, “went to their house to snip away that loose end before anything else happened. I think he did it himself, and the boy’s parents only had just enough time to hide him someplace to keep him safe.”

“Oh, God.” The girl’s face went very white at this, and she reached out to take the boy from Jim’s arms. Instantly, he curled up happily against her shoulder - all the children in the refugee camp had taken to Martha’s no-nonsense ways, and Kévin was as fond of her as anyone - and seemed to doze off. Absently, she stroked his back as Jim sipped his coffee and they strolled through the dirt path between the large canvas tents. “So he’s got no one.”

Jim nodded. “He must have stayed in some cupboard or closet or something for at least a day, maybe two, all alone, waiting for the furor to die down. He was too little to understand what was happening, but he knew that he couldn’t make any noise. And then finally, once the town was quiet again, once it was just the chosen few up there and everyone else was dead or gone, he snuck out of the house and into the forest, and when we found him he was still too scared to make a sound.” He shrugged a little sheepishly. “I don’t know how I thought of it, really, or why; but speaking French really badly was the only thing that made him laugh, and the more we could get him to laugh the more we could get him to do other things, like eat and bathe and sleep, and finally to talk. Left to his own devices, he would kind of just . . . go into a fog. And now he’s kind of latched onto me. But God knows I can’t take him with me when I go back to work on a ship that’s got no room for children.”

“Well, don’t look at me,” said Martha with a raised eyebrow. “Some women are natural mothers and some are natural aunts, and I'm a natural aunt. I like to have them for an hour or two and then return them to someone else.”

“That’s the stuff,” Jim agreed. “I’ll make someone an excellent Uncle Jim one day, but I’ve never had any interest in doing the thing myself. Only I’m not sure what we do with the kids, then, from here on out. The ones who haven’t any family at all, even distant relations, might be put up for adoption, I suppose, but the memories . . .” He shook his head. “It’s hard to imagine how anyone recovers from this.”

"We do have Vulcans here," she reminded him. "Can't Sarek do whatever he did back at the camp for your friend?"

"Apparently it's gauche to ask about that," he said wryly. "I stepped in it a bit the other day. I wondered why he couldn't just meld with the colonel and Dorothea to get their memories of that night -"

"Oh, that was clever of you. I'd never have thought of that."

"Well, they all looked at me as though I'd stripped naked and painted myself purple to do a jig, so I'm not sure that's an angle that will get us anywhere."

Martha paused, considering. "Sarek might consider that the circumstances here make a difference," she pointed out. "Maybe it's a very private thing with a great deal of weight attached, and they won't simply trot it out as a solution for anything which might be done just as well another way."

"That's more or less what he said, yes."

"All right, but there is no other way to do this. He's got training as a healer, he said so. On Vulcan that means mind as well as body. He's probably the equivalent of a Harvard-educated brain surgeon in this area, Jim. It's a stroke of real luck that he's here. I think we've got to put it to him, at least. I'm well aware the experience of having one's thoughts touched is rather skin-crawling for humans, or so people say anyhow, and I don't know that I'd do it myself; but what kind of life does Kévin have in front of him if his mind never leaves this place?"

Jim nodded grimly. "It's a point worth considering," he said thoughtfully, reaching out to stroke the little boy's soft brown hair as he stirred in his sleep, responding again to the sound of his own name. "We'd better take it to Sarek, at least. If there's anything else we can do for the children short of Vulcan mind intervention, I trust him to think of it; but I'm out of ideas here myself, Martha, the same as you."

* * * * *

“It is certainly possible,” agreed Sarek, sitting cross-legged on an embroidered mat beside a small iron brazier in the back corner of the Vulcan tent. “I am uncertain, however, if it is wise.”

They had plainly interrupted him in the middle of his meditations, but Jim knew enough about Vulcans to understand what a compliment it was to them both that he wasn't annoyed. He seemed to trust that if they'd asked to speak with him immediately, it was because they had something to say worth hearing. He'd given their arguments fair consideration, but Jim wasn't sure he would be easy to persuade, after the awkwardness of his first attempt at introducing this topic.

Sarek's objections this time, however, lacked the faintly scandalized indignation from before. It was plain he'd been worried about this too, and hadn't come up with any better ideas yet.

“They’re children,” Martha protested. “They’ve got their whole lives ahead of them. They deserve the same shot at happiness as any other child does; stability and trust and care and all the other things children need. Administration is still processing all the refugees, I know that, and matching people back up if they've got families to return to; but Kévin doesn't. If their families really are entirely gone - I mean everyone who might possibly take them in or care for them was in Tarsus, and they’re all either dead or going to prison for war crimes - then isn’t it a kindness to free them of those traumatic memories to start over? Shouldn't Kévin get to be a five-year-old boy who remembers growing up loved and safe, instead of remembering watching his parents shot dead right in front of him?”

“The human mind is a living organism, Miss Norwick,” Sarek reminded her. “Even if the boy were somehow able to fully comprehend the undertaking, to offer informed consent to everything I must do, who is to say that at age ten, fifteen, twenty, he would feel the same way he does now? What if he wishes one day to understand his own past? What if the knowledge that his parents sacrificed themselves to protect him is a piece of information worth preserving?”

“There must be a loophole of some kind,” she argued. “Block off the memories while he’s a child, at least; let him grow up happy and carefree with loving parents who tell him only that he was adopted. Then once he’s older, if he begins to ask questions about his birth parents, or wants to learn more about his past, once he’s old enough to be told the truth -”

“ - then his first question will be why the truth was kept from him,” said Sarek. “Miss Norwick, the massacre happened. I cannot undo that fact. Not even for the children's sake.”

"We've got to consider it as a safety measure too," Jim pointed out. "Kodos is dead, but his followers aren't. Even if you divide up the four thousand who survived Tarsus into those who actively fought alongside him and those who simply didn't stop him, that's still dozens and dozens - maybe as many as hundreds - who did unspeakable things to their own neighbors. Once the law's done with them, once the investigators have heard every story and everything is documented and known, a great many of them will end up in jail. What if one of them gets out one day and wants revenge? Wouldn't the safest thing be to take away the refugees' memories, and make sure the ones in prison know it? Then we get them the hell away from this place to anywhere that isn’t Belgium. Divide the children and the others who might be in some kind of danger among different countries, to begin again far, far away with a new life and a new history. Make them so untraceable they couldn't even give themselves away by accident, because they don't remember Kodos at all. Seems to me that's about as safe as we could make them."

"You posit two different and wholly contradictory types of criminal, Mr. Kirk,” said Sarek. "Let us take as a example the Rijkswacht, the Tarsus constabulary who were so crucial to Kodos' plans. They have a greater degree of - in your vivid human parlance - 'blood on their hands,' than any other group in that village. They bear the highest degree of responsibility for the deaths of the four thousand people whose names on that list; but it was not their list. That is to say, their own feelings about each individual, their own desire for that person to live or to die, to be harmed or to be well, were not germane to the matter. For Kodos, who planned it all, it was personal and strategic. We may never fully understand what motivated him into eugenics and genocide, but he plainly had a motive. Those specific deaths benefited him in some way. Was it a form of human scientific experimentation for which he imagined he would receive praise? Was it an attempt to selectively breed a populace he considered stronger and more pure, with whom to conquer more territory? We do not know, but more significantly - neither do the Rijkswacht. Such matters were not their concern. To them, and to the hundreds of others who joined them, it was simple. They were hungry, and they were frightened, and they had been promised security and food. Their animal instinct for self-protection was in control. Certainly petty conflicts, hatreds, feuds may have played into their feelings about which deaths were more or less regrettable than others; but they killed for simple need and gain. They followed orders so that they would live. Now, imagine one of the former Rijkswacht officers released from prison at the end of a twenty- or thirty-year sentence. He would be in late middle age, or past it. What do you suppose he would do? Would he not simply wish to forget, to change his name and begin again in a place where his unspeakable crimes were not known, to put Tarsus behind him forever? And if so, what would young Kévin be to that man? Why would he matter? As a Vulcan, I cannot approve of the human system of involuntary incarceration. But that man would not emerge from prison still the same starving, desperate beast he had been when he entered it. The shortest of the sentences granted was, I believe, fourteen years. That is plenty of time for self-reflection and wiser counsel to prevail.”

“With all due respect, Ambassador Sarek,” said Jim, “you’re thinking like a Vulcan. These are humans. They committed absolutely shattering atrocities, and they did it to people they knew. The human mind will tie itself in knots to avoid confronting the reality of such guilt. Some certainly might emerge from the other side having found inner peace; but you can’t rule out the opposite either. Someone might emerge after spending fourteen years or more just absolutely seething, worse than they were when they went in. Might come out of there going mad with resentment. Plotting revenge. Rewriting the history of Tarsus in their own minds until they themselves are blameless, and it’s someone else’s fault altogether that they fired that gun. And then if they ran into one of those people in the street one day, or saw their name in the papers, they’d go right back to being that violent cornered animal driven by their basest instincts. Not starvation this time, not fear of death, but shame which has metastasized into hate. And you’re for it as much as we are,” he added. “Every member of the rescue convoy made enemies that day. Classifying the whole mission will help at least make it more difficult for someone to trace the names of the officers who were there; but in my opinion, sir, the best way to protect those people is by hiding them all over the world as well as we possibly can.” 

“We need a town council,” said Martha. “Gather everyone after dinner tonight in the mess. CRB and the refugees both. We’d better put the whole thing to them, and let them decide. It’s their lives we're talking about, after all.”

Jim turned and gave her a curious look. “It’s yours too,” he reminded her.

Unexpectedly, she laughed. “You haven’t seen the place where I’m from,” she said. “Have you ever read The Hound of the Baskervilles? You seem like someone who has. Devon's not all lovely farmland and quaint country lanes. Anyone who wants to get to me will have to make their way across one of the most dangerous stretches of England, to a remote hilltop fortress no one but a native of the moors could reach by foot, and which is wholly inaccessible by automobile after a rain. Take one step wrong off the path and you'll tumble into a sinkhole of mud and get pulled under quicker than lightning. I could hardly be better protected if I lived inside a bank vault.”

“Unless one day, fourteen to thirty years from now, you invited a murderer into your home without knowing it,” Sarek remarked pointedly. “A circumstance whose probability increases by 782.3% if you agree to have your memories removed, but the murderer does not. And for the murderer, I can do nothing. Those who committed crimes at Tarsus will remember them for the rest of their days. Upon them, Vulcan cannot and will not intervene. To alter their memories consensually grants them a reprieve from the sting of conscience which does not serve the cause of justice. To do so without consent . . . we call this kae'at k'lasa, the mind-attack, and it is the highest crime on Vulcan. I do not need to speak to T'Pau in order to assure you quite emphatically that she will never agree to using this tool upon prisoners or criminals simply in order to render them docile. Mr. Kirk, if your supposition is correct about the way forcible incarceration may affect the human mind, we must give strong consideration to the question of whether protecting these children emotionally and psychologically by the removal of their traumatic memories risks endangering them in other ways we cannot foresee."

"Either way, I think Martha's right that it's a decision we can't make for them," said Jim. "What we need to know from you, sir, is this: if someone does wish to have their memories removed, and is capable of consenting to the act, whether adult or child - will you do it?"

"I do not know," the Vulcan answered gravely. "I will meditate upon the matter until it is time to gather, and will have an answer for you by then. Either way, I believe it is imperative to solicit the guidance of the adult refugees regarding how we are to proceed. We are all in agreement on the central point, Mr. Kirk. Something must be done about the children. But you have raised important questions of future safety which cannot be easily dismissed. I do not wish for you to look back one day upon this decision and recall it as the moment a wheel was set in motion which would one day bring danger to your doorstep. Even on a ship at sea or in the wilds of Devon, trouble might someday find you."

Chapter Text

PRESENT

Having risen from his seat as Martha and the actors departed, Jim found himself rather fidgety, and paced a bit along the balcony rail as the crowd in the drawing room below began to thin out. He could still hear voices, and suspected that some contingent of the gathering had moved the party to the dining room below where he stood; but the large room with its damask walls, dark wood, and stained glass appeared suddenly rather lonely and shabby, all the life gone out of it, with a faintly ominous air though the lights were still brilliantly lit. Jim leaned over the rail and looked down at the circular cocktail bar in the middle of the room, which was about two-thirds visible from this angle, and wondered.

“Mr. Spock, you know Doctor Leighton,” he finally said, breaking the silence which had fallen after the departure of the others. “Would you say he's given to fantasy?”

Spock moved up beside him, as if interested in the direction of Jim's gaze - and perhaps therefore, his thoughts - and considered the question for a moment before shaking his head. “A good empirical research scientist,” he replied. “Steady, reputable, occasionally brilliant.”

Jim nodded grimly. “With a very long memory,” he muttered, half to himself,

“I have no information on that, Captain.”

“Of course. Sorry. My mind is wandering a little. It’s already been . . . rather a strange night.”

Jim didn't take his eyes off the room down below, but he could feel Spock watching him. "Will Mrs. Leighton's social standing among her neighbors be negatively impacted by the events of the evening?"

"Events?" Jim repeated. "Why, did you see something dreadful I didn't?"

"I saw Thomas Leighton and Anton Karidian conspicuously absent from a gathering where both were expected," Spock pointed out. "There was much comment on the matter, as she no doubt anticipated."

"Damn. That's the last thing she needs on her mind right now."

"The consensus included no criticisms of her own behavior or hospitality. General public opinion holds that both men behaved quite poorly toward her, and that her graciousness under pressure did her much credit. Attitudes toward Dr. Leighton, however, are not uniformly positive. I inquired about the possible impact upon her social standing due to -" He hesitated, as though choosing his words carefully. "An understanding among his neighbors as to the cause of Dr. Leighton's erratic behavior and the long absence which followed," he finally said.

Jim sagged wearily against the balcony pillar. "That's very tactfully put, Spock," he said. "I don't suppose anyone else in the room phrased it that way."

"Most were a good deal more blunt," Spock admitted.

"'Old Tom got drunk again and his wife had to put him to bed.'"

"Words to that effect, yes. I am no more enlightened now than I was during our walk about the source of their marital discord," he added. "I will not inquire whether or not you have been taken into their confidence since. I trust that if I may help in any way, you will permit me to . . . prove myself worthy of your trust.”

There was an odd note in his voice, and Jim turned to look at him. “Prove it? My God. As if you hadn't already, a thousand times over." He shook his head. You’re my right hand, Spock, and you always have been,” he said frankly. “I’ve never trusted anyone as I do you. I’m damned grateful you're here, or I think I’d lose myself entirely.”

Spock looked away, and Jim thought he imagined a faint green blush darkening his pale cheekbones; but it faded as quickly as it came. Perhaps he'd imagined it.

"I do not wish to keep you long from Mrs. Leighton - from Martha," Spock corrected himself, which made Jim feel oddly warm inside, "in case she has need of you in her husband's absence. However, I have stationed myself here for the duration of the gathering as an observer, and I have cataloged five facts of potential significance. I request permission to share them, in case the information is of any use in alleviating the crisis in which the Leightons find themselves."

"On one condition," said Jim, folding his arms and staring directly at his first officer. "Spock, did you get anything to eat tonight?"

Spock's eyes grew rather shifty. "The Vulcan metabolic system -"

"That's a no."

"I am perfectly -"

" - stubborn, yes, thank you, I'm aware. Your report can hold its horses for two minutes until we're both comfortably seated with a full plate in front of us. I picked at a sandwich while we were hobnobbing with the neighbors, but I was forced to do a great deal more talking than eating. And according to local municipal regulations, it's illegal to let party food go to waste in this county."

"I do not believe you could produce documentation to support that claim, sir."

"Hush. I'm starving, and I bet that whole tray of Vulcan snacks is still completely untouched. People tend to come to this sort of do for the cake, not the vegetables. Dinner on Vulcan looks like garnishes in England." He held up a hand to silence the protest forming on Spock's lips. "Stay there."

As he made his way down the spiral stair he spotted a few locals making their goodbyes and a cluster of stagehands gathered around the bar with Chekov and Scotty, but nobody made any effort to stop him from ducking into the dining room to raid the buffet. He nabbed a three-tiered silver étagère which was heaped high with beautifully ornate vegetable sculptures, nestled in crushed ice to keep them pretty, and which did indeed look as though the other guests had largely bypassed its offerings; it was nearly pristine. For himself, he snagged a half-picked over platter of tiny sandwiches, and then spotted a bottle of chilled seltzer water, which he tucked under his arm. Making his way swiftly back up the stairs, he was relieved to find the balcony still deserted; no one had joined Spock during his absence which might force them to delay their conversation. 

Jim set both plates of food down on the little coffee table, plucked two clean champagne glasses from the little makeshift bar at the end of the balcony, and took a seat in what had been Brian Doyle's chair. He poured a fizzing coupe of seltzer for both of them and handed one to Spock, who took the chair across from him.

"Cheers," said Jim with a cheerful clink, which Spock reciprocated in faint amusement. "Now, you'd better clean your plate or Martha's feelings will be hurt, but I also want to hear your observations. If you think a thing's important, it usually is. I've been no slouch myself, by the way. I've got a few stories for you as well."

"If they pertain to the residents of Princetown, I am extremely interested in your findings," Spock said as he sipped at his seltzer. "My fodder for observation in that arena was more limited, as few of them ventured up to the balcony. I therefore concentrated my attention more directly upon the players, where more information was available."

"Good. A divide and conquer strategy. We always do well with those. And as it happens, you're right. You saw Martha trotting me around all night in the role of Understudy To the Husband, and I had the opportunity to speak at least briefly with just about all the locals."

"Which of them drew your attention?"

"Well, the groundskeepers are distant poor relations, as it happens. Just like in books."

"The Greers who reside in the small cottage at the edge of the property?"

"Yes, and they seem lovely. Known Martha all her life, and her father before and so on. Sounds like several generations of Greers have served as caretakers of the land, going back to bad blood a few centuries ago between a brother and sister where the girl who married into the Greers was cut off. When Tom and Martha die, the Greers get the house."

Spock raised an eyebrow. "They are quite elderly."

"They've got children and grandchildren, apparently. I can't remember now if she said how many, or anything about them. I rather think not. Maybe I thought they were going to and then they didn't. I forget now, actually, what I asked. But anyway, given the circumstances -"

He cut himself off suddenly, realizing he'd been about to explain that this gave the Greers one hell of a motive for murder. It was possible, actually, that Karidian didn't come into the thing at all, except for having a face that reminded Tom of his worst memories; perhaps Tom's unbalanced mental state - verging on paranoia - might be due to sensing a threat a good deal closer to home, but he hadn't been willing to admit it. Perhaps Tom and Martha were in real danger from somebody else entirely . . . danger which would not simply roll off to Penzance on Friday when the actors left but would remain behind, dogging their heels at close range, where Jim could not protect them.

But he couldn't explain any of this without mentioning Tarsus. And apart from the fact that telling Spock he'd been at Tarsus was a violation of the State Secrets Act, it was also breaking a promise he'd made to Tom tonight and another he'd made to Sarek eleven years ago. And that was all if Karidian was innocent. If Governor Kodos really was here, in this house, under no circumstances could he be permitted to fix any attention whatsoever on the son of the Vulcan ambassador he must have known by now had liberated his captives. Which meant Spock must be discouraged from paying too much attention to Karidian, if Jim could help it.

Spock seemed to be watching the conflict play out across Jim's face, and read the gist of it even without words.

"You are gravely troubled by something," he said. "Jim, do you have reason to believe your friends' lives may be in danger? Is this the true nature of your investigation, and the reason you are wary of speaking more openly even to me?"

There was a faint softening in those last three words which caused Jim's heart to twist a little.

Even to me.

Even to the person who is usually taken into your confidence first before anyone else.

Even to the partner with whom you usually share everything.

Tom hadn't liked sharing Jim with Gary, either; at least, not at first. Tom had been there before anybody else, and even though he'd never shown any signs of an inclination toward wanting Jim's heart for himself, nor ever seemed to resent Jim's relationships with women, there was something spiky and unresolved between them anytime another man stepped into Jim's right hand place - whether sexual, romantic, or platonic, it didn't seem to matter. When Tom was in one of his manic periods, it was exactly the wrong time to try and ask him to be more sensible about something like that (God willing, he'd be in a better mood tomorrow), but Spock had immediately sensed the man's desire to keep "outsiders" (anyone, that is, except Jim and Martha) from having any of the information they might require in order to help him.

"I don't have any real evidence that that's the case," Jim said a little uneasily. "I'm simply trying to understand what we've walked into down here. That's all."

Spock looked troubled by this, but finally nodded, declining to press it further. "This information about the Greers may indeed be of value. What was your second observation?"

"Dr. Abernathy hates Tom," said Jim, "and it seems to be because he was in love with Martha when she was younger. Resented Tom for stealing her away, it sounds like. She never returned his feelings, but for some reason he moved back to town anyway. Maybe he likes torturing himself."

"Or maybe he had reason to suspect the problem would not last long," Spock pointed out. "Jim, you have just suggested two very credible motives for someone to wish one or both of the Leightons dead. Were you truly not aware of this in presenting them to me?"

Jim swallowed hard, rattled by the frank clarity of his friend's tone.

"If you were Dr. Abernathy," Spock went on, "or Mr. and Mrs. Greer, and you wished to murder a person you see quite often, the most logical setting would be a night where numerous other people are coming and going from the house  to deflect attention from yourself. If a tragedy had occurred while they were alone in their home, the doctor who attends them and the groundskeepers who live on the property would naturally find themselves at the top of the suspect list."

"Numerous other people watching each other," Jim reminded him. "It would take a hell of a lot of nerve to carry that out in plain sight in front of so many witnesses, and I'm not certain any of those three have the fortitude for it."

"You may be right. Nonetheless, it is worth learning more about all three, and watching them closely."

"Agreed," said Jim. "Now it's your turn. Read me in on the actors."

Spock chewed ruminatively on a radish carved into the shape of a rose and swallowed it before speaking. "I present these in the order in which they occurred to me as significant," he began. "This is not necessarily the order I assign to their importance, or the chronological order in which they took place. That is my first disclaimer. The second is that I have, naturally, omitted those incidents which are too obvious to have gone unnoticed by you. The fact that Martha was surprised by the absence of Anton Karidian, which must mean at some earlier point she was assured he would attend. The fact that Thomas Leighton became intoxicated suspiciously quickly in the company of a large group of guests. The fact that so many of the players openly dislike one another. Naturally you yourself will have already observed these things."

“It would have been difficult not to," Jim agreed, popping a cucumber sandwich in his mouth. "So what have you got for me that you caught and I missed?”

“Nigel Braithwaite,” said Spock, “is badly in need of money.”

Jim sat up straight, sandwiches temporarily forgotten. “That’s a good beginning, all right,” he said approvingly. “Is he a co-owner in the company or something?”

“He would like to be. It is an ongoing point of contention. In fact, I believe the recurring disputes between Karidian and Braithwaite over management of the company’s affairs are an underlying cause for his dislike of the daughter. Braithwaite invested heavily in a film production which abruptly shut down a year ago. He was unable to recover any of his funds, and has accumulated significant debt. The precise amount is not known. He joined this tour six months later, with the understanding that Karidian would eventually offer him a share in the company, improving his financial outlook considerably. Lenore Karidian, however, has repeatedly vetoed the notion. Logically, on her part," he added, "since her own profits would decrease if a fourth shareholder was added.”

“Fourth?” Jim repeated. “Who’s the third?”

“Freya Bergen. She gave Karidian a loan twenty years ago which financed his first production. She has been a shareholder longer than Lenore, in fact, who only came into her funds when she turned fifteen.”

“And she’s how old now?”

“Nineteen.”

“Long enough to get used to that money, then. And to want to avoid splitting it with someone you don’t like.”

“Much of this information was gathered via Lieutenant Uhura and Mr. Scott’s conversations with members of the cast and crew who are generally treated by Miss Karidian as beneath her notice,” said Spock. “The class dynamics at play, you have no doubt observed. This financial discord is widely considered, in your parlance, ‘a ticking time bomb.’ They do not imagine it will be long before an eruption of some form takes place.”

“May they be far, far away from here when it does,” said Jim fervently. “I don’t particularly want to become enmeshed in that, do you?”

“Certainly not.”

“Of one mind, as always.” Jim grinned at him. "What else did you spot?”

“Two salient points in the biography of Simone Villard. First: that she was once a nun, and now she is not, a point of inquiry from which both she and Saul sought to deflect us.”

“I assumed the obvious, didn’t you?”

“That she experiences attraction to women, and currently suffers an unrequited passion for Lenore Karidian.” Spock nodded. “But that does not entirely answer the question, Jim. There are many reasons a person might leave a religious vocation. Many are reasoned and sound. Perhaps the constraints of monastic life no longer suited her and she desired a new career. Perhaps her personal beliefs evolved away from the Catholic theological framework. These would indicate rational planning and honest self-reflection. They would illuminate for us a particular type of thinking and decision-making. From this, one might extrapolate that Simone Villard is a pragmatic young woman who knows her own mind, not easily swayed by exterior pressures. This would be of note, as it contradicts the manner in which she presents herself. But other motivations would paint the picture of an entirely different sort of person - one prone to impulsive behaviors under the influence of ungovernable emotion. Did something happen at the monastery - a conflict with her superiors, a liaison gone wrong, a tragedy or even crime of some variety - which she was compelled to flee? Did she experience the sudden and violent desire to blow up the comfortable stability of a too-quiet life? Or did Anton Karidian's daughter join him on at least one of his visits to Lourdes, and -"

"Good God." Jim, pouring more seltzer into his glass, flinched so hard at this that he splashed some on the carpet. "You don't think there's any possibility she left for Lenore?"

Spock gave the infinitesimal head tilt which translated from Vulcan to Terran as a shrug. "There is insufficient data to make such a determination at this stage," he cautioned. "I note only that the omission was significant, and we will not understand Miss Villard fully until we know more.”

Jim sipped at his seltzer, thinking this over. "Seems a damned intrusive thing to ask outright, but one might get at it by fishing," he ventured. "If she's the newest addition, then everyone else was already booked for this tour when she joined. If nothing else, whether it was precisely the truth or not, I'm interested in how Karidian himself explained it."

"Affirmative. The omissions might be as instructive as the facts."

"Bergen strikes me as the most likely person to be in Karidian's confidence, with her nose in whatever's going on in the company, and Friedmann seems to be the one the girl's most likely to have confided in. I don't think either would be willing to answer questions from strangers. Braithwaite seems to like her, though, and it doesn't seem hard to get him to talk. Possibly he's the way in. What’s your third thing?"

“That she met Anton Karidian while he was on a pilgrimage to the grotto of Massabielle, outside the town of Lourdes, a place revered in the Catholic religious tradition as a site where miracles are granted. Penitents anoint themselves in the waters of the spring and pray for healing of the mind, body or soul."

Jim paused, sandwich halfway to his lips, rather struck by this phrasing. For a moment he simply sat turning the word "penitent" over and over in his mind, wondering about it. Had Kodos been a man of faith twenty years ago? if Karidian was Kodos, was he searching for absolution now?

"Naturally the phenomena are unscientific and unverifiable,” Spock added primly. "I am more interested, however, in what ailed Anton Karidian at the time, and whether he departed that place believing he had obtained the healing which he sought.”

Jim nodded. “And whether he unburdened himself to the kind little novice who took him down to the waters and overheard his prayers."

"And whether her daily presence on this tour is, in any way, an element of some penance or gesture of atonement," Spock suggested. "We cannot discount the possibility that she possesses information about Karidian which is known to no one else. Perhaps not even to his child."

 Like whether he murdered four thousand people in Belgium twenty years ago, Jim silently added, before dismissing the notion as too absurd to consider. A nun wouldn’t leave the convent to start a new life with a mass murderer, would she, even to serve as his conscience in human form? But then why had she done it? Whatever was between them was emphatically not romantic or sexual in nature, and didn’t even seem paternal, necessarily; but it was something, and Jim wanted to know what it was. What power had the shy, awkward novice with the angelic voice held over Anton Karidian, and what had he offered her in return which she’d chosen over God? 

It would be Karidian's performance on Friday which might hold the most valuable information; but Jim thought it might just be Simone Villard who he was suddenly the most interested in seeing take the stage. It was impossible to imagine the timid, retiring, near-invisible creature he'd met stealing the show, and yet he didn't think Lenore would bother being so cruel to her if she wasn't really good. And if she was, in fact, such a brilliant actress that even the veterans of stage and screen marveled at her skill . . . well, didn't that mean she might be acting now? Was it possible that the real Simone Villard wasn't a mousy, guileless baby deer at all, but someone putting on a calculated performance of one which had fooled everybody around her?

Or was Tom's paranoia rubbing off on him, and she was just a girl with a skill that a seasoned director had tapped?

“We’ll save for another day,” he said to Spock, “the fascinating question of just how you came to know so much about Saint Bernadette and the shrine at Lourdes. I know perfectly well your mother is Jewish and there’s not a Catholic to be found in your whole family tree. On either side,” he added teasingly, which tricked a wry little smile out of Spock before he put it away again.

"Having accompanied my family on their travels to the Masjid al-Haram, the Hagia Sophia, and the Fushimi Inari Shrine, you are perfectly well aware that my father takes great interest in all the religious, spiritual, metaphysical and philosophical belief systems of Earth," said Spock, adding in a more conspiratorial tone, "It is a personal indulgence he omits in his reports to T'Pau."

"Yes, but he never took me to Lourdes, and now I'm feeling left out." Jim nibbled on another sandwich, this one egg and watercress. "Don't worry, I won't rat him out to his grandmother. Now, what have you got for me next?"

"I found it noteworthy," Spock said, picking up a sort of abstract chrysanthemum which appeared to be made out of long French beans cut into little ribbons, "that no one, at any point, has mentioned Lenore having a mother.”

Jim blinked at him, startled. This hadn’t occurred to him at all.

“Freya Bergen and Saul Friedmann have been performing with Anton Karidian since Lenore was a very young child,” Spock reminded him, after chewing and swallowing his chrysanthemum and reaching for another. “In fact, I believe Mrs. Bergen was a frequent artistic collaborator even before the Karidian Players were formally established. If there was, at any point, a Mrs. Karidian, they would surely have known her. Yet the company tends to speak of Anton and Lenore Karidian as a two-person familial unit; the mother has been erased from the narrative. If she was much beloved and deceased, human sentiment would generally necessitate at least a passing mention."

"Mmm. That's a point. Sort of 'wouldn't dear Susan be so proud of how you've grown' sort of thing, from the elders to Lenore all the time."

"Indeed. Conversely, if she had been widely disliked, or was estranged from her daughter, or she and Karidian were not married, or if any other circumstances existed which might be weaponized against Lenore to attack her own character -"

"We'd have gotten a nasty little zinger about it just now from Nigel Braithwaite."

"But instead, nothing," said Spock. "It is as though she has never existed. Naturally this may be meaningless, but it is curious all the same. Particularly regarding the question of money."

"Oh." Jim sat forward, thinking it out. "You mean, like what you were saying before about Braithwaite. The actors get paid the same amount for their work no matter how the tour sells; but if it's a hit, the shareholders are the ones who get rich off it, and they're dragging their feet about cutting him in. So if they ever hit pay dirt, and some woman came out of the woodwork saying she was Lenore's mother -"

"The state of the company's finances is unclear to me," said Spock, "but by all accounts, the current tour is a measurable success. Miss Karidian may find herself a very wealthy young woman by the end of it, and an estranged parent might see an opportunity. It is a possibility worth exploring further."

"You're damned right it is. I hadn’t caught that one at all. I must say I’m impressed you’ve managed to collect so much intelligence at one cocktail party. You'd make a hell of a detective."

"I think not," said Spock. "It is my general understanding that the role of the detective in Terran literature - I presume this to be your primary point of reference - is an individual brought in after a crime is committed to ensure that the culprit is brought to justice. My aims here are quite different."

Jim polished off the rest of his seltzer. "How so?"

"Jim, I am attempting to prevent any crime from taking place at all," said Spock seriously. "And so, I think, are you."

This stopped Jim short for just a moment, hand frozen in midair reaching for the glass bottle. He hadn't quite let himself put the thought so boldly, but there it was. Spock had said aloud the thing Jim was trying desperately to avoid thinking, while knowing it was of little use.

"What's the fifth?" he said, recovering himself as swiftly as he could, splashing seltzer into his glass and knocking it back all in one cold, bitter gulp. He didn't want Spock to say the word "murder" again in speaking of the Leightons. The thought of it had unsettled him more than he was willing to admit.

Spock hesitated at this for the first time, as though he were thinking better of disclosing something, and when he looked up at his captain there was an expression of open concern in his dark eyes. “I cautioned you before, Jim, to be careful,” he said. “Some of this may be no more than gossip, without any bearing on the Leightons. But one person, at least, has revealed himself to be dangerous. You witnessed it as well, but I think it is still worth noting."

“Dangerous?” Jim repeated, brow furrowed. “You're talking of Braithwaite, I suppose. I'm not sure I agree with you there, Spock. I think he's got a nasty streak, certainly, and debt makes people do desperate things. But that little dig at Lenore just seemed like petty spite between colleagues who don't get on and are forced to spend a great deal too much time together. Unless you meant Doyle, but he didn't trouble me either, not really. I think Scotty would tell you he was just being Irish. It might get to one, after awhile, having Braithwaite forever mutter those poisonous little quips under his breath; but I think for a man like Doyle, a good fistfight clears the air. They'd have been fine by breakfast."

"You mistake me," said Spock quietly. "I was referring to Saul Friedmann.”

"Friedmann?" Jim blinked at him a little stupidly. "Sorry, are we thinking of the same man? The fabulous old bear in purple silk who dotes on Simone like a proud uncle and never even raised his voice?"

"He did not have to raise his voice," said Spock. "That fact is worth noting."

"Well, all right, I'll grant you that he won that staring contest with Braithwaite, but Braithwaite strikes me as a fellow whose bark is worse than his bite. Willing to call you all manner of filthy names under his breath but he's probably never taken a punch properly in all his life. It wouldn't have taken much to bring him to heel."

"Naturally," said Spock. "I do not consider Braithwaite's behavior to be particularly indicative of anything beyond exactly the sort of verbal malice you have noted. I find Brian Doyle's behavior to be the most illuminating."

"Doyle? Really?"

"Jim, Brian Doyle is the company's combat instructor," Spock reminded him. "He is an expert in multiple forms of of weaponry as well as hand-to-hand combat and martial arts. He has an athletic background, and is both physically imposing and extremely strong. Even on such brief acquaintance, I would not suppose him to be a man who is easily cowed. Would you?"

"Well, no. Of course not."

"And yet at one word from this man, he obeys. Friedmann says 'sit,' and he sits without question. Friedmann did not appeal to the young man's better nature, he did not attempt to persuade him against causing a disturbance at a social gathering, he did not even threaten. He simply gave an order, and Doyle followed it. If he were as friendly and good-natured as you seem to think, Doyle would not have allowed himself to be seen adopting a posture of such deference in front of strangers. He is young, rather hot-headed, and seems more inclined toward an irresponsible lack of fear than an excess of it. But I think Saul Friedmann frightens him, and that fact is of significance to me. I believe there is more to his story than we know, and I do not think it is a coincidence that he reveals so little of himself."

"You think he might really be dangerous?"

“I cannot say. Only the Leightons possess sufficient information to determine the most likely direction from which future trouble might come, because only they - and perhaps yourself - know what secret they are keeping. I urge caution; that is all.”

Jim was attempting to muster a diplomatic yet vague reply to this when Spock suddenly froze, going as still as a wild animal who has suddenly scented a predator on the wind. He held up a hand as if to urge silence. Jim strained his senses, looking around the deserted balcony and wondering what Spock had observed that Jim hadn't. In the silence of anticipation, they heard a soft click.

As if the sound had broken a spell of some kind, and time had instantly resumed again at ten times speed, Spock vaulted out of his chair with Jim hot at his heels, headed for the middle of the balcony's long brocade-papered wall and the door which led out from it onto the second floor. Spock pushed it open and darted out into the portrait gallery, but it was deserted. As one, they raced down the sweeping grand staircase, feet pounding against the polished boards with a rapidity that would have awakened comment had anyone been standing at the bottom when they finally descended; but nobody was. A few scattered clusters of actors and crew still milled about the grand entrance hall, with other stragglers coming and going through the dining room doors, nibbling on sweets.

Spock looked at Jim.

Jim looked at Spock.

"There are too many variables," said the Vulcan in a low voice, a little helplessly. "Multiple exits and entrances. People on every floor, coming and going. The servants, the actors, the neighbors, the Enterprise crew."

"You heard footsteps, before the door shut," Jim guessed. "Someone listening in."

"But I am unable to deduce who," said Spock. "The thickness of the carpet in the hall affects the sound. I cannot tell you whether it was a heavy or light gait, a large or small shoe. We may conjecture that it was not any of the guests from Princetown who have been seen departing, but that is insufficient to draw a more accurate conclusion."

"All right, well, that's a place to start, at least," Jim said, squeezing his arm through the sleeve of those elegant black robes he'd been trying to ignore for the last half hour. "We'll talk to Martha and see who's still hanging about or if all the locals are gone. She's just over there with Bones and Uhura."

Spock nodded, and they made their way across the large marble foyer to where the great front door stood open, letting in a rather chilly breeze. Martha was leaning against the doorframe, looking out toward the moors as they approached.

"Guests get off all right?" Jim asked casually.

"Oh, you missed the whole parade," she laughed. "At least twenty minutes ago. Look, the rain's already started, and a nasty fog rolling in with it. Trust a farmer to know. One of our neighbors sent the word round and swept everyone out of here just in time, or else we'd never have got rid of them. None of them are foolish enough to brave the road to Princetown when it's half washed-out and they can't see to find their way. Mr. Friedmann was an absolute lamb about it, had the whole company standing by on the porch to shake hands and invite them personally to the performance on Friday, but he was efficient about it too. No lingering about."

"They were kind enough to give the rest of the theatrical folk staying at the inn in Princetown a lift back too," added Uhura, "and that certainly made the house feel quieter again. They were a lively bunch."

"Then no one from Princetown," said Spock, "and no members of the Karidian Company except the principal cast, remain in the house?"

"Only Dr. Abernathy, who managed to wear me down about Tom," said Martha. "He asked again if he might go up and check on him, just to make sure, so I finally relented and told him where he was. That was while everyone else was getting their coats and hats, and I haven't - oh, there he is," she cut herself off, as the village doctor came striding through the entrance hall. Jim very carefully did not look at Spock, but he knew the Vulcan was thinking the same thing he was: if Bones had put Tom to bed in Bones' own room, which was right at the top of the main staircase, why would he come back down again through the servants' stairwell in the back?

Or had he been doing something else all along?

"Tom all right?" Jim asked the man as he approached, hand outstretched to say goodbye to Martha.

"Oh." The man appeared somewhat startled by the inquiry. "Oh, er. Yes. Sound asleep. We didn't exchange words. Probably he won't even remember me looking in. Still, all's well." He shook Martha's hand before taking his coat and hat from the rack near the door. "If you need anything, I am no more than an hour's distance," he said. "Less, if the fog and rain clear sufficiently tomorrow to make the moors passable again. If you need anything, Martha, anything at all -"

"I don't imagine I will, but that's very kind," said Martha in the sort of firm, polite voice one uses with a puppy who is getting a bit above his station. "Dr. McCoy has taken excellent care of Tom tonight and we are fortunate to have him under our roof for the remainder of the week. Thank you very much all the same. Goodnight."

And with that, he had no further recourse but to depart.

"Well, that's that," said Martha, sighing. "He'll always find a way to linger if he gets me alone without Tom. Exhausting. I do really think that's the last of the neighbors, though. Everyone else left ages ago."

"Yes, and if you're doing roll call," said Bones to Spock, "you should know that our young lieutenants betook themselves back down to their basement lair with about a dozen platters of leftover cakes. If you have a heart in that Vulcan chest of yours - oh, my apologies, in that Vulcan side - then you'll leave them to it. Let the youths have a vacation."

"It is not my intention to negatively impact anyone's recreation," said Spock. "I was simply inquiring as to the whereabouts of the other guests."

"Well, we've been here," said Uhura. "It got rather stuffy in that drawing room, so Dr. McCoy and I followed Mrs. Leighton out as everyone was leaving and then stayed because the cool air felt so pleasant. We've been watching the fog roll in over the moors. It's lovely. Now, I believe you'll find Miss Karidian, Mr. Braithwaite and Mrs. Bergen in the dining room. And there's Mr. Friedmann and Mr. Doyle over there with Mr. Scott," she added, nodding to a bench in the corner where the three men were chatting. "Chekov and Sulu went downstairs with Lieutenant Riley and I suspect they're at the card party now."

"Thank you," said Spock. "And where is Miss Villard?”

Uhura looked startled. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "Goodness, how awful. I forgot her, somehow. Don't tell her I said that. She's such a sweet little thing; it's just that she rather has a way of making herself invisible, doesn't she? One simply forgets she's there."

"I can see her plain as day," muttered Bones. "Don't know what's wrong with the rest of you. That's her coming down the stairs, isn't it?" He gestured across the entrance hall where they all turned to see the young woman descending the last few steps with a decidedly nervous air. Bones caught her attention with a wave, and beckoned her over impatiently. Seemingly rather startled to be noticed, Miss Villard made her way uncertainly across the marble foyer towards them.

"Is something the matter?" she asked. Jim was surprised to note that she was practically trembling.

"Nothing at all," Bones said kindly, in the hearty, jovial voice he used every time he was forced to interact with children. "Folks were just wondering where you'd got to, is all. Did you have a nice time?"

"Oh, my apologies," the girl murmured, not quite meeting anyone's gaze. “The heel of my shoe, it came loose. I went back up to my room to change them. Forgive me, I did not think I would be missed. And yes, the party was lovely. We are so grateful for your hospitality, Mrs. Leighton. This was very kind of you."

"No trouble at all," Martha assured her. "I was quite happy to do it. Now, did you get something to eat, my dear? Would you like cake or coffee? Why don't you come with me. A few of your friends have set up shop in the dining room with the sweets, and the party seems to have more or less moved in that direction." She put her arm around the girl's shoulders and escorted her away before she could protest. Bones and Uhura followed their hostess, as Jim closed the front door behind her with an ominous thud.

He didn't follow right away, and neither did Spock. They watched the others go, and Jim found himself reflecting that, while he had not paid any attention whatever to the shoes Simone Villard had been wearing before, he did recall with perfect clarity that the telltale click of the door into the portrait gallery had sent them both down the stairs in pursuit of whoever had been listening.

Neither of them had thought to look up.

If Saul Friedmann really was dangerous, Jim reflected, as the jovial older man made his way arm in arm with Scotty toward the dining room, the last person he'd want overhearing Spock's suspicions was the girl who seemed to trust him with everything. Had Simone been eavesdropping on the landing, and ran upstairs afterwards to change her shoes as cover?

Was it Dr. Abernathy, lurking about after checking on Tom for some reason he'd been unwilling to disclose to Martha?

Or was there someone else in this house - so full of people coming and going, as Spock had said, so damnably difficult to trace anybody's whereabouts - who hadn’t been where they were supposed to be?

Jim exchanged a silent glance with Spock, and saw the same grim thoughts etched on the Vulcan’s sharp, elegant face. 

The cocktail party might be behind them now, but their week here was only just beginning. There were four more days until the night of the play. If they hadn't discovered what was amiss at Norwick House by then, Jim could not repress the thought that something terrible was going to happen . . . and it was up to him to find a way to stop it.