Chapter Text
Jim liked to sing, sure, but he was dead on his feet and his voice was raw from the dust of the mines. There was no telling what kind of vocal sounds these people would consider tuneful, either. At least with an instrument, it would be easier to demonstrate technical mastery. Leonard looked to Spock, heart in his mouth.
As far as Spock ever frowned, Spock was frowning. Leonard felt slightly sick. In the months they’d been trapped on this godforsaken planetoid, this was the first time they’d so much as seen a chance to escape. They had to take it.
“I see several stringed instruments,” Spock observed, his voice low. He sounded tired. They were all tired. “But nothing which resembles a Vulcan lute. It is possible I could play another instrument in the same manner, but the results are, at present, uncertain.” In other words, it would turn their long shot into something so distant they’d struggle to see it.
Leonard looked again over the options they had been given. His eyes alighted upon one of the smaller instruments, tucked behind a large percussive object. He swallowed tightly. Face fixed forward, he stepped up to the speaker’s platform. Behind him, he could feel Spock restraining the urge to follow and pull him back from danger.
“I accept the challenge, on behalf of my husbands. We share our minds, you can take us as one person.” Leonard was desperate, but he forced his voice to remain steady. “I’ll compete.”
D’Ath peered down at Leonard through their ceremonial veil. They made a sound like scissors gliding through wrapping paper, and raised one arm. The Ummean challenger stepped forward. Leonard took a shaky breath, and climbed up onto the stage. His limbs felt like lead, and his head was pounding. He took another breath and didn’t look back across the room.
“The terms of the challenge are as follows,” said a smaller Ummean official, who had followed the two challengers onto the stage. They had picked up Standard far too quickly for Leonard’s liking – there had to be more than a natural aptitude for linguistics behind it. He focused. No time to think about that now. “You compete on behalf of your cluster.” A mottled lilac arm indicated Jim and Spock, on the other side of the hall. “In the event of your victory, you will be returned to a location of your choosing. Distance is no object.” That sounded good – too good. “Should you be defeated, your life will be forfeit. The remaining parts of your cluster will be returned to the service of Ummea.”
Completely illogically, Leonard relaxed. Whatever happened here, Jim and Spock would survive. They would still have each other, and they would be alive. He could accept those terms. He nodded firmly. “I understand. I’m still taking the challenge.”
“Please select your object of proficiency. Our challenger is skilled in all instruments you see here.”
Leonard’s attention turned back to the array of instruments on the stage. Where was it? He knew he’d seen… Ha. There. Picking between the larger, more polished instruments, he pulled out a small, familiar-looking fiddle. It wasn’t made of wood, but some kind of metal which was warm to the touch. It seemed to vibrate under his fingertips. Leonard retrieved the bow, and balanced it in one hand.
Good.
“D’Rng will take the first turn,” the official explained, guiding Leonard to stand to the side of the stage. “When their performance is complete, you will offer your opposition.”
Leonard leaned back against the wall in a show of confidence he didn’t feel. D’Rng, a huge, violet individual, stepped up and selected a matching fiddle. They gave Leonard what might have been an intimidating glare, if he’d managed to master the facial expressions used on this planetoid yet. As he hadn’t, it looked very much like D’Rng had something in their eye.
For a second, they let the bow rest on the strings. The air was heavy with anticipation. Then D’Rng began to play. Time moved like treacle. The room was filled with a sinister hiss and a deep, resonant first note. What followed was nothing short of terrifying. The bow seemed to fly across the strings like D’Rng’s hand had been possessed by the devil himself. Leonard swallowed hard. A half-forgotten memory surfaced in his mind. He summoned his courage and decided to listen to it.
To do what Jim would have done: follow his instincts.
He only hoped it wouldn’t be the last decision he ever made.
Leonard walked to centre stage. The room was silent after D’Rng’s resounding applause.
“Well, now,” he began, tongue tied up in nerves. By the far wall, Leonard caught Spock’s panicked gaze. Jim was watching too, leaning on Spock for support. Leonard gave a tiny, firm nod.
“Well,” he tried again, and this time the words were stronger. They seemed to come from somewhere deep inside his soul. “You’re pretty good, D’Rng. Now you sit yourself down right there, and let me show y’all how it’s done.”
Leonard set bow to strings.
The music was like fire burning down a mountainside. It consumed everything in its path, leaving glittering black ashes in its wake. It chased the notes D’Rng had left hanging in the air until they seemed to run from the room, wiped from the memory of every person who had ever heard them. There was nothing but this tune, in this moment. Leonard played on.
He played a song that had never before been a song, and a song that had always been sung. The heart of the music never wavered, its exterior shifting and changing until every moment he’d lived, every heartbeat he’d felt hard against his chest, every hope he’d cherished, had turned to sound.
When he lowered his fiddle, D’Rng rose to their feet. Their head bowed low. They placed their own instrument on the boards of the stage, and walked quietly away.
The official, whose name Leonard had never caught, bustled forward. They seemed nervous, now. He wondered distantly whether he’d done it all wrong. He felt as though he’d poured out his essence into the room around him, leaving him spread thin like butter over too much toast.
“Great D’Ath wishes to know your desired destination.”
The words were unreal. And then, very suddenly, they were the realest thing he’d ever heard. Leonard raised his head from his chest and blinked, slowly. “I’m sorry,” he began, “but are you saying… I won?”
A single lilac hand raised. “You have triumphed over D’Rng. You may now name your desired destination.”
Leonard felt weak. He dropped the fiddle and bow, and stumbled down from the stage, crossing the room in a daze. The assembled onlookers parted in a kind of awe. He reached his husbands and slumped into Spock’s waiting arms, pressing his face into his chest for several long seconds. Leonard looked up into those familiar dark eyes, and felt a swell of pride and relief that was not his own. He managed an exhausted smile.
“Home, darlin’?”.
Jim and Spock scooped him up in a crushing embrace. Jim made a sound very like a sob. Leonard found his hand, between their three bodies, and squeezed hard.
He raised his head but didn’t step away. Leonard turned, still in the arms of his husbands, to squarely face D’Ath.
“How?”
The question came from the official, following a series of sounds from their leader. Leonard kept his eyes trained on Great D’Ath when he answered.
“You old devil. You never heard of a place called Georgia?” A slightly hysterical laugh bubbled over his lips. “Well – why the hell not?” This, he spoke almost to himself. He raised his voice again, fierce and strong.
“I’ll tell you this once, you son of a bitch.” Leonard’s blue eyes blazed. “I’m the best that’s ever been. So you just pick us up, and you put us back where we belong, or so help me—”
Jim would maintain, for the rest of their days, that Leonard had actually glowed as he faced down their tormentor. Spock would not ever disagree with him. They were, very suddenly, not where they had been. Red-violet dust clung to their skin, making cuts and bruises sting and torn clothing chafe. But Great D’Ath’s throne room had vanished. The last shred of energy left Leonard, and he fell to his knees – onto soft, cool grass.
Jim staggered, and Spock caught him again, quickly kneeling for the both of them so that he could check on Leonard, too.
“T’hy’la…”
Spock’s rich, warm voice was shattered, rough and aching.
“You…”
It would be hard to say who had moved first, but very quickly, the three men seemed to slip down onto the ground, huddled together and touching as well as they could manage from the positions they had landed in. Relief sapped the strength from their limbs and they lay there, motionless, as the golden sun overhead crept across the sky. Blue was turning to rosy pink before anyone really moved again, beyond curling their fingers into the clothing or around the body of one of their husbands.
Jim stirred first. A cool breeze ruffled his hair, and a little of the dust that turned his golden hair red drifted away on the wind. Jim pushed himself upright, drawing in deep gulps of the fresh air. He thought it tasted a little like the air on the mountains he’d explored during his time at the Academy. If they were on a mountain, then maybe there was also water nearby that they could safely drink. His throat was drier than if he’d spent a week yawning into the Vulcan desert.
“Len,” he whispered, cupping his husband’s cheek with one gentle, chapped hand. “Hey, sweetheart, you did it. You did it.”
On Jim’s other side, Spock began to move. He seemed almost in shock. Of the three, Spock was the one who had hidden his pain the most successfully, in order to convince his husbands to let him take on their work, when they needed it. Now, with nothing to fight back against, he seemed very fragile indeed.
Leonard rolled onto his back and smiled up at Jim’s face, haloed by the setting sun. “Beautiful,” he thought, aloud. “God, I missed the sun.”
Slowly, painstakingly, he pushed himself upright too, and checked over both other men with love, care, and medical precision. Jim was not badly injured, but he was badly in need of water and sustenance. They all were. His examination of Spock revealed a very swollen ankle. Spock refused to tell them how long it had been that way.
“We need to find shelter.”
The very thought of leaving this cool, open space was abhorrent to them all, but night was closing in fast, and they couldn’t sleep in a forest clearing under the stars. Not in their condition.
Jim and Leonard hoisted Spock between them, one arm over each of their shoulders, and following Jim’s intuition, they headed into the forest.
Leonard would swear, he never understood how Jim did it, but within an hour’s walking, they had stumbled across a shallow freshwater stream with a rocky overhang beside it. They set Spock down in the shelter, and set about making camp.
A fire was started, and cool water drunk down until they couldn’t manage another mouthful. Branches propped against the rock ledge made a lean-to, leaves stacked horizontally outside to provide some insulation against the cold of the night. Jim and Leonard crawled in beside Spock, and together the three passed the night in a bundle of body heat and sheer relief.
When they woke, they were surrounded.
“Captain!”
Spock was halfway to his feet before he fell down again, Leonard tugging him firmly back. “Not with your ankle,” he hissed, his other hand curled tightly into the back of Jim’s once-golden shirt.
“Shh, Len, I know…” Jim trailed off, hardly trusting his own senses. How could it be? But it was, he knew it. “I know that voice. Here!” he called out, from behind their makeshift lean-to.
Hands pulled away the sticks and leaves that had got them through the night, and Leonard could have wept for relief.
“Lieutenant Uhura,” he managed weakly. “Well, ain’t you a sight for sore eyes?”
The following weeks passed in a kind of blur. They were taken to a medical centre, and then, when their physical injuries were healed, to a rehabilitation clinic, to recover. They had lived through months of backbreaking labour, trapped and without any hope of escape. They had all, privately, resigned themselves to spending the rest of their days in those dismal mines. They had all begun to accept that they might have to watch both their husbands die there first.
And now, suddenly, all that was over. With their physical injuries healed, it was as if they had never been lost at all.
One year after their disappearance from the Enterprise’s transporter pad, Jim, Spock, and Leonard sat together on a quiet bench in the gardens of the rehabilitation clinic. Jim was reading aloud from an old paper book. Spock, beside him, was running long, supple fingers through Leonard’s hair. Leonard lay across both pairs of legs, his head in Spock’s lap and his legs across Jim’s, the book propped against his knees.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, when Jim reached the end of the chapter. Spock’s fingers stilled, settling against his temples. “What if we just… didn’t go back? Don’t get me wrong, it’s something else, up there, but…” Leonard sighed, and felt Spock’s mind brush encouragingly against his own. He smiled.
“I like this. We’re not getting any younger, and we lost a year to those… people. Would it be so bad if we just… stayed?”
He held his breath, nerves humming. Whatever the others wanted, he would follow them. They all knew that. Nothing would be worse than being parted. It still felt like a lot to ask.
Jim spoke first, letting out his own breath in a rush. “Thank god.”
Leonard blinked. That wasn’t precisely what he’d been expecting. Based on the stilling of Spock’s thoughts, he hadn’t either.
“Honestly, I’ve been thinking the same thing. I want as many years together as we can manage. I reckon the McCoy family farm could use some love, if… if you think that’s something we could give it.”
Jim sounded even more nervous than Leonard had, though Leonard wasn’t sure how that could be possible. Spock drew breath, and set them both at ease. “I concur.” All three seemed to relax into the bench as they realised they were on the same page about this. Spock spoke again, his voice gentle. “I have confronted the possibility of outliving both my t’hy’la. I can accept it, for the time we have and the memories I will forever cherish.” Leonard pressed a kiss to Spock’s thigh, through his robes. Jim reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “I cannot accept the shortening of that time. When it seemed inevitable… it became tolerable only because the same fate awaited us all, equally. To return to space in the knowledge that such dangers may be upon us within a week of our departure is more than I find I can accept.”
It was a long moment before either human could find the words to speak. Eventually, Leonard managed it. “Well, then. Guess that’s settled. We’re going home.”