Chapter Text
Captain’s Final Log, USS Enterprise, 1701-A, upon her decommission. Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing, and like enough thou knowst thy estimate. The Charter of thy worth gives thee releasing; my bonds in thee are all determinate. For how do I hold thee but by thy granting, and for that riches where is my deserving? The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting, and so my patent back again is swerving. Thy self thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing, or me, to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking, so thy great gift, upon misprision growing, comes home again, on better judgement making. Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter: in sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
Earth, San Francisco, Stardate 2295.180
They had to reserve the largest hall they could find in San Francisco for Admiral Nyota Uhura’s retirement party. Every shipmate, student, mentee, and friend she’d ever had wanted to be there, and most of them made sure they made it.
Her years aboard ship had slipped into fond memory. Twenty five years, now, in San Francisco with Spock; her as head of Starfleet Intelligence; him as Ambassador of New Vulcan. Throughout those years, their home had continually brimmed with the riches of friends. Anyone who had ever served on a ship called Enterprise was always welcome, and any Vulcan. Spock’s two adult sons and their mother, Saavik, were frequent and much-welcomed guests, as was McCoy, who had retired shortly after the Khitomer incident, and Edith, particularly when Jim was deployed.
Captains (and later Admirals) Kirk, Sulu, and Chekov cycled on and off of Earth as their ships came in and out of port, and they visited whenever they were home. Scotty was the rarest visitor; he’d barely stepped foot on Earth in decades, constantly on ships and bases and shipyards across the Federation and beyond, but he called every month or so, if he was in range. She’d been out the last time he’d called, and he’d left her a cheerful message. He’d told her some outrageous story, the details of which she couldn’t quite remember, and had signed off with his love, as always, which she would never forget.
The party was wonderful, full of tributes from people she’d loved so much over the years. She walked serenely hand-in-hand with Spock all day, feeling nothing but blessed. But there were two faces conspicuously missing, and anyone who had ever served aboard an Enterprise had spent the day looking over their shoulders, half expecting their absent friends to walk in with a laugh and an incredible tale to tell. If they were ever going to come home, it would have been today.
They didn’t. Which meant they were truly gone.
By the end of the evening, with just the old guard lingering over their drinks back at Spock and Nyota’s home, Nyota knew she had to speak now, or the grief would solidify into a tradition and no one would ever be able to say their names again. She poured two drinks, which would go untouched, and put them on the table. Her friends fell somberly silent as they realized what she was doing.
“Shipmates,” she said, “raise a glass for Jim and Scotty. Wherever you are, dear ones, may the stars be shining on your faces. We love you and miss you.”
“Hear hear,” McCoy said fervently, and drained down his drink.
Speaking their names broke the wall of silence and sorrow as the stories and reminiscences and tears started to flow.
“...so they walked into sickbay, straight from the landing party, and they’d fallen into something,” McCoy was saying, the evening wrapping up. “Just covered head to toe in slime. And I swear to god, it’s some kind of reproductive ejaculate from a massive animal. And Jim says ‘face it, Bones, it isn’t like this is the worst thing you’ve ever had to scrape off of us.’” The group laughed heartily, and even Spock looked deeply amused at the memory. McCoy sat back with a shake of his head, his smile slowly fading. “Lord almighty, how is it possible that we lost them both in the same damn year? Jim died saving lives on a ship called Enterprise, which was the most goddamned ‘James T. Kirk’ thing he ever did. And Scotty just vanished into thin air, because of course he did.”
“It’s final, with Scotty, as of last week,” Nyota said tearily. “His sister called me. The search for his ship was indefinitely suspended and his death certificate issued. No memorial, she said. No body to bury, and enough tears already.”
The group sighed unhappily. Admiral James T. Kirk’s memorial, of course, had come almost immediately, a massive affair full of somber pomp. Kirk the magnificent. Kirk the extraordinary. Kirk the hero. Jim would have hated it. They hadn't found his body either, but they hadn’t expected to. Being vented into space when a mysterious energy ribbon sliced your ship into pieces wasn’t survivable. Chekov had been there, and Scotty—only a few weeks before his own death—and they’d stood side-by-side, witnesses to that terrible, gaping void.
Losing Jim felt like losing their center, their anchor. There would always be something adrift about the people who remained; they could feel it. After all, if Jim had been alive, he would never have let Scotty slip unnoticed out of a bar, headed for space again, without one last drink. Without saying goodbye. But Jim was dead, and sometime in the middle of a drunken wake for their Captain, Scotty left them forever too.
“I know Scotty was off on some classified project when he disappeared, but does anyone know what it was?” Chekov asked.
“It was the Romulan supernova project,” Spock said simply, to sorrowful nods. “His loss is a significant setback to its success; there were critical plans and equations in his mind that he never wrote down.”
“He was afraid of so much of it,” Nyota said softly. “Of how it could be used for destruction, rather than discovery.”
“Sad experience says he was right,” Chekov sighed, standing to top off his drink. “And yet. He was an extraordinary inwentor. We’ll be set back by decades. Maybe centuries. Starfleet Engineering is digging through every note and log he ewer made, trying to piece together at least some of the things they know he knew. Equations, plans, improvements. They think he’d recently solved ion power. He’d reworked warp equations that would have scaled up speeds logarithmically, and he was designing the first prototype reactors and ships. And who knows where the multiwerse theories would have led? He wasn’t ready to go. And we weren’t ready to lose him.” Chekov’s voice cracked and he scrubbed his hands over his eyes in grief. The news that Scotty’s ship had vanished had come only a month after losing Kirk, and he’d immediately rerouted the Reliant and Sulu the Excelsior as they searched futilely for their friend. Starfleet had given them two weeks before reluctantly calling them off.
“Were he and Mira on, or off, when he headed out there?” Sulu asked, nursing the last of his drink.
Uhura smiled sadly. “Mira is a saint, but you know what Scotty is … what he was like. He couldn’t stay still long enough to make it work. Off, mostly, for all that they loved each other.”
“How is she?”
“Not great,” Nyota said heavily. “I invited her today, but she just couldn’t face it.”
“It was good to see Edith today,” Sulu continued. “She said she was going to take that friendship tour through non-Federation planets that she and Jim had been talking about. They might even pull Enterprise-A out of the reserve shipyard for it. Oh, and had you heard that the repairs from the energy ribbon are done on Enterprise-B? Demora told me they considered renaming her the James T. Kirk, but someone convinced them that it was a better tribute to him to leave her the Enterprise.”
“Thank god,” McCoy drawled, somewhere well past drunk. “We don’t need to be haunted by an insufferable ghost.” He swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Goddammit,” he complained weepily. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
Nyota glanced at Spock, who inclined his head, then took Leonard’s elbow to guide him to the guest room.
“Congratulations, Nyota,” Hikaru said, and leaned forward to kiss her cheek. Pavel did the same, and she walked them to the door. They stepped out into the night, looking up to the sky, as always. It was a comfort to know that the stars themselves were the final rest of their friends.
“What will you do next?” Pavel asked.
Nyota smiled, and stepped back into the warm light of her home. “Begin again,” she answered.
New Vulcan, Stardate 2379.4
Spock stood outside the Jellyfish, the New Vulcan Science Academy’s newest and best ship. Ion powered, impossibly fast, and carrying the most dangerous payload in history—red matter enough to save a star, or to destroy worlds. Spock fought through a wave of deja vu. He’d only seen his alternate universe counterpart’s ship the one time more than a century ago, immediately before destroying it. This felt like nearly the same ship, but completed, he hoped, in time.
Spock had said his goodbyes already. To his shipmates—to Jim, to Leonard, to Pavel, to Hikaru, and to his beloved Nyota—in the long decades before, as short human lives came to their ends. To his sons, to his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, to Saavik, just that morning. Just one more goodbye now. Spock folded his hands behind his back while he waited, and wondered why this one felt so hard.
Admiral Montgomery Scott, ostensibly on loan from Starfleet, but who in truth answered only to himself after his long and unusual life, came to stand beside the Vulcan, and looked up at the extraordinary little ship they’d built together. “She’s ready, Ambassador,” Scott said. “Tell me we arenae just closing the loop here. That this will work, and not just send you intae the past somewhere tae start it all over again?”
Spock raised an eyebrow. “It is to be hoped, Mr. Scott. I believe we are done nearly a decade earlier than the other universe,” Spock answered.
Even with more than a century of preparation, the Federation had been dragging its feet, and Spock and his counterparts on Romulus had despaired of the stagnated project to save Romulus from its dying star. Until, that is, ten years ago when Picard’s Enterprise had arrived unexpectedly on New Vulcan with the long-vanished engineer aboard.
Nyota had tried to tell Spock, toward the end of her life, that she believed Scotty was still alive, and that Spock might meet him again in the future. Nyota’s keen mind had been fading, however, and Spock had humored her gently without believing it. But if anyone could survive for three-quarters of a century frozen in transporter stasis, Spock had considered later in rueful apology, it was Scott. Nyota would not have been at all surprised.
Scott’s abrupt reappearance, and his willingness to return to the supernova project that had been the cause of his long absence, had been most welcome. They’d put their heads down and worked. While their relationship had been intense during their years of service together, Spock and Scott had never been friends, not quite. The word wasn’t enough, and it was too much. They had been like planets orbiting the same star, bound by powerful forces and a shared past, but always on different paths. They were Ambassador and Admiral to each other, Mr. Spock and Mr. Scott.
They talked, sometimes, of the old days, and mourned deeply together when Picard came personally to tell them that Jim Kirk had reappeared briefly, only to die alone again. They had spoken once, and only once, of Nyota, a few weeks after Scott’s reappearance. “I cannae, Mr. Spock,” Scotty had begged, unable to handle more than Spock’s assurance that she had died with the same grace she’d lived.
But beyond those rare flashes, they fell back into old patterns. They trusted each other implicitly, but never quite understood each other, unless they were working on a project. And this project was to save billions of lives, if they could solve it in time. Scott, in his early seventies when he arrived and still youthful compared to Spock, had been as fiercely inventive as ever, and the spark the project needed. It had only taken Scott six months to catch up on and then surpass seven decades of technical changes—a fact which had set him off on a rant about idiots who should have figured out new equations by now, and an intense discussion about whether Spock trusted Starfleet.
Spock didn’t, and neither did Scott. Which meant that the re-written warp equations Scott had discovered a century earlier were carefully guarded on New Vulcan, as was the formula for red matter. Scott hadn’t been happy that they hadn’t come up with another solution, and had stomped off into the New Vulcan heat muttering about destiny and the multiverse.
Complex issues remained, however, about how, when, and where to deploy the matter into the heart of a star. It took ten intense years, but they’d done it. With the foreknowledge of his counterpart’s errors, and driven by his own failure to save Vulcan, Spock believed that in this universe, he would save Romulus. Whether he lived or died doing so was unimportant.
Scott and Spock walked in companionable silence to the hatch of the Jellyfish through the cool of the New Vulcan night. Scott cycled the door, then turned toward Spock.
“D’yeh remember that time you and I invented cold fusion tae save a species, and then you almost died in a volcano?” Scott mused. “Nyota was so angry at both of us for that one. I wonder what she’d say about me sending you intae a dying star?”
“She would be angry,” Spock confessed, and Scott laughed.
“Aye. She would be at that. Godspeed, Mr. Spock,” he said softly, raising his hand in a Vulcan salute. “Bring my ship back in one piece, and yourself, while you’re at it. But if yeh do end up in the past, give them my love, aye? Jim and Leonard. Pavel and Hikaru ... and Nyota.”
“I shall,” Spock said gravely, returning the gesture. He hesitated, then extended his hand. Scotty stared down at it, a little bemused, then firmly returned the handshake.
“Scotty,” Spock said, for the first time in his life. “Live long, and proper.”
“Go boldly, Spock.” Scotty answered, clasping Spock’s shoulder. Then he stepped back and closed the airlock between them. Spock began powering up the ship, and Scott walked away from the last of his shipmates, knowing they would not meet again.
“However this ends, I’m sending him home tae you, lass,” he whispered. He did not turn as the ship rose into the night, carrying Spock to his destiny. Instead, the engineer lifted his face to the stars of New Vulcan’s sky, reflexively picking out Sol, the star of the home he’d never return to, for it was the cradle and grave of nearly everyone he’d ever known.
He blew out a breath and walked alone into the night. “Begin again,” he said.
And the poem that gave this story its title: The Friend, by Matt Hart:
The friend lives half in the grass and half in the chocolate cake, walks over to your house in the bashful light of November, or the forceful light of summer. You put your hand on her shoulder, or you put your hand on his shoulder. The friend is indefinite. You are both so tired, no one ever notices the sleeping bags inside you and under your eyes when you’re talking together about the glue of this life, the sticky saturation of bodies into darkness.
The friend’s crisis of faith about faith is unnerving in its power to influence belief, not in or toward some other higher power, but away from all power in the grass or the lake with your hand on her shoulder, your hand on his shoulder. You tell the friend the best things you can imagine, and every single one of them has already happened, so you recount them of great necessity with nostalgic, atomic ferocity, and one by one by one until many.
The eggbirds whistle the gargantuan trees. The noiserocks fall twisted into each other’s dreams, their colorful paratrooping, their skinny dark jeans, little black walnuts to the surface of this earth. You and the friend remain twisted together, thinking your simultaneous and inarticulate thoughts in physical lawlessness, in chemical awkwardness. It is too much to be so many different things at once.
The friend brings black hole candy to your lips, and jumping off the rooftops of your city, the experience. So much confusion — the several layers of exhaustion, and being a friend with your hands in your pockets, and the friend’s hands in your pockets. O bitter black walnuts of this parachuted earth! O gongbirds and appleflocks! The friend puts her hand on your shoulder. The friend puts his hand on your shoulder. You find a higher power when you look.