cos and mos

this was originally going to be somewhat longer with just quick little complimentary/complementary links to other stuff i saw that was similar as i was just getting started writing but in revisiting those ([1] [2]) as time went on (and on, and on) i realized that i had written absolutely nothing original whatsoever and had no real way of properly/gracefully finishing it and never really would. concepts go stale, unfortunately, i guess. so here's absolutely nothing original whatsoever. sorry

"You know, I almost thought you were coming onto me, what with the dinner, and the Alice in Wonderland, and everything."

"Almost, but...?"

"But there was something different about you."

"Something married?" He seemed to derive inordinate joy from the idea that the only remarkable thing anyone should notice about one Admiral - sorry, now Captain, except he hadn't exactly been sorry, had he? - James T. Kirk was the fact that he was contented like only a man who'd wanted to find a life partner and had then gone and done so (and oh, how he had gone and how he had done) would be. Which...proved itself out.

Still. That was Kirk's point. It wasn't Gillian's.

"Something gay," she clarified with a satisfying click of her tongue rolled into and out of her left cheek. If she was being honest with herself, which she unfortunately did have the choice whether or not to do (three centuries' travel in time and out of it left a heck of a lot of room for convenient miscellaneous error), it was nice to be able to just say that, and not feel like it'd be misinterpreted as a light-wash slur by people more different to her than anything like the same. "And him too," she continued, nodding likewise self-assuredly, "except...more with the LDS."

"Aha. I see." Kirk could already tell that she'd never drop that bit as long as she knew him, and then probably a good while longer after that.

"But still...you were so..."

Mischief glimmered in Kirk's eyes, more than twice as much as he'd ever had in the whole of the quest for the whales. "I'm afraid I don't quite know what you mean, Gillian- matter of fact, can I call you Gillian?"

Smartass. "You already did. No going back now."

"I'll keep that in mind." And double smartass on you.

"But gosh, you sure seemed happy to see me. It just threw me off, I guess - because of the married thing."

"Oh, you mean in the transporter? Well, Ms. Taylor," and she wasn't offended at the playful reposition of title, somehow, because her Ph.D. had been so many centuries ago, why not spring for a little change of pace, "I think it's just because you happen to remind me- well, us," he gestured at Spock, who acknowledged with a slight fond inclination of his head, "of someone we know."

"Oh?"

"A certain Mr. Saavik." When he said it, Jim couldn't help but grin at his husband. Oh, how they'd missed her.

"Mister Saavik? Now why the hell" - because Gillian would bet anything they still had hells in the twenty-third century, even if they didn't spend all their time on Judeochristian Earth, it couldn't possibly be that much of a futuristic utopia - "would I remind you of a Vulcan?"

She'd come to learn the name of Spock's illustrious first-contacted homeworld without undue trepidation, though his father had been absolute zip in terms of help on that front. The thought of having to meet even one Andorian, or Caitian, or Betazoid, or Klingon, or whoever else along with him had been unsettling in its own right, because it wasn't even outlandish!

Rather, it was one thing to jump forward three centuries in human society on a whim. It was quite another to ingest the social mores of everything and everyone else that was and were out there all at once along with it. She'd like to get started on a good foot, peopleside, and leave the various heedless embarrassments contained to Kirk's group.

But anyway. This Mr. Saavik. Gillian Taylor was no sociologist (or xenolinguist, as Uhura had indicated it was termed), but it was plain as anything that he had to be some relation of Spock's. Kirk's too - because of the married thing. Maybe their son...? Were surrogates no longer needed in the twenty-third century?

Good gosh.

And Kirk was still smiling at her, in that endlessly-irritating endlessly-charming really-gay-and-congenial-because-look-how-happily-he's-married way that he apparently had. She couldn't decide if she was dreading or cheering the idea that wherever she ended up taking gainful employment, it might be far, far away from him.

One thing was for certain, it wouldn't be in landlocked Iowa. That much sure as anything hadn't changed, and never would, barring the second coming of Pangea.

Well. Maybe they could dig up some dinosaur bones to stave off that one, if the time ever came. Too bad T-Rexes were more closely related to birds than to humpbacks.

Focus, Gillian. Reality - spatial and temporal, never mind just metaphysical.

Kirk still hadn't stopped grinning. Every so often the center of his lips twitched, top and bottom rolling against each other in a gentle, toothless bite back of mirth.

At last, however, he relented. "You're right, you're right, you're really nothing like a Vulcan, excepting your achievements as a brilliant, one-of-kind scientist, but this one..."

Gillian had had just about enough of the runaround, so she turned promptly to Spock. Thank heavens, he seemed to be about to roll his eyes as well, though slowed by the readying of what appeared to be a reluctantly human response.

"Mr. Saavik, as the Captain has illogically chosen to describe our young friend, is, unofficially, our adopted daughter."

Our daughter, Mr. Saavik. So the "something gay" ran in the family no matter whether they were blood relatives or not. (Whatever this meant that her subconscious was saying about Sarek, she didn't want to know.)

Oh, what was she thinking? These were career Starfleet officers, which Gillian had readily clocked as being a prissier, nobler version of the Navy well despite all their pretensions to being very much not a military organization. Kirk called all of his crew "Mr." except for Uhura, and she'd just been plain Uhura most of the time.

("Nyota," Gillian had relished in the name once she'd learned it, and listened to it positively sparkle off her tongue - the other woman's wink certainly hadn't hurt in that department, either. Something gay...sure, ran in the family.)

Mr. Saavik. A scientist, and a Starfleet officer of some kind, or rank, or order, and the daughter of Admiral (always Admiral, just as to Spock he was clearly always Captain) James T. Kirk. And his ditzy bathrobe-wearing husband who slingshot starships around the sun twice before breakfast if necessary, but not if he had to guess about it.

Incredible. Gillian could feel herself exhaling the way she'd always imagined Gracie felt making breach. This Saavik would understand her. Would understand...

She wasn't sure what, exactly. But she would understand.

Because...how could anyone?

"Do you remember?"

"I have found that I do remember you, Saavik-kam."

Vulcans didn't blush; Saavik just blinked slightly more rhythmically.

"Not me. Do you remember him?"

"Come on, Saavik, there are more important things than Spock remembering little ol' me."

They thought of David. They thought of Amanda.

"I wish I could agree with you, sir."

"Sir? C'mon, Mister, we passed you off to your blind date like I was your father. Can't you call me..."

What?

Surely not actually "Father"; none of them, not least Spock, would actually go anywhere near broaching that.

It didn't need making conventional, anyway. Saavik enjoyed being called "Mr." and "Mister" and "Sir" all alike, so it served for gender just as much as it served for faux-militance.

But "sir"? As much as he loved her?

...well, yeah. Because Montgomery Scott pulled double duty, shelling out the appellations for both himself and his husband.

Saavik was observing him quietly, lips nigh-imperceptibly pursed into something that might resemble a duck face, if Gillian tried it on.

"I take your point," Jim offered after a salubrious beat of silence, curly head springing up in jaunty energization. His crows' feet and crinkled grin, too, flicked to the side, and there was Spock, looking doubly amused.

"Seems like I'll never get anywhere fast with Vulcans calling me names," he joked. Of course, he might die never knowing what Sarek actually thought about him behind closed doors.

"What do you think of Bones?"

"I find the nickname apt. He is quite bony."

A stiff-nosed comment like that should have put Gillian right out - what was wrong with this person, that they didn't know their fathers' best friend in the world was named the way he was because of his profession, not his constitution?

The thought, right after she'd thunk it, felt distinctly like it had been planted there by Dr. McCoy himself. Maybe back in the hospital. She still didn't know exactly what was up with the bathrobe, and it was readily apparent that when or if the erstwhile admiral felt like saying so, he'd explain with much more than just plain and simple gusto, but she'd gleaned some from Chekov, in his awkwardly similar garb.

"Mr. Spock is a Vulcan," he'd said uselessly, but it was fine because Gillian had found that she'd never had the chance to hear such a thick Russian accent without surreptitious glances being cast about no matter how perfectly nice the person seemed. In other words, she'd found the bludgeoning of the normally so severe consonant charming, and laced her fingers together beneath her chin to indicate rapt, adoring attentiveness.

"He has always been the best of us all. Only Captain Kirk could ever come close - and, well...they are closer than anyone." There had been so much love and admiration wrapped up into that canine-pointed smile that Gillian had had to refrain from smushing loose fist into cheek, propping and sighing. A bunch of loons, that they were, but a family like that on a starship like the pictures (holos?) she'd been shown of the Enterprise...it was beautiful, really it was.

Chekov had concluded, "So, if anyone else had been- in such a state as Captain Spock, when we left Vulcan, they would not have been permitted to come aboard. Vulcan was safe for him. His mother was there, and also Mr. Saavik." Odd, the lack of mention of Sarek, beside the clear point that even in scrubs, they couldn't have left poor Pavel back in the 1980s, regardless of any potential utility to the ship. "But Mr. Spock came with his captain just like you came with your whales. They...would not have been happy otherwise."

After that, there had been some apologetic mutterings about how of course a brilliant young scientist like Gillian with so many new and interesting things to discuss certainly didn't want to be hearing about the cosmic love affairs of two very strange but very wonderful old men, and some return about how she understood, of course, obviously they meant so much to everyone, and the final musing that truly, their presence at the core of every Enterprise mission made these strange most recent voyages the most important things the combined crew of them had ever done.

"That is love, I think," he'd said. "We have done so many things. And they brought us together to do them, with proud smiles and absolute faith. They have...inspired us."

It was, then, with that thought in mind that Gillian returned her presence of mind to the quaint restaurant table across which Saavik sat.

The opportunity seemed nigh to ask a deep question, a compelling fold of bony, lithe fingers over elegant, fair knuckles that said here, I know you're a thinker, and I'm going to engage with you on it, because that's important to me-

But the opportunity seemed just as ripe to take the prescriptive, slow going and toss it out the window, because these were a bunch of nuts, and they all loved each other so, so much.

So Gillian knew it was her turn:

"Do you like Italian?"