Fic: The Clouds About The Dying Sun
Title: The Clouds About The Fallen Sun
Fandom: ST:XI
Rating: PG
Pairing: Spock/McCoy
Warnings: mention of mpreg, off screen character death, ocs
Notes: Written for cotton candy bingo prompt: “return” and dedicated to antesqueluz. ♥ hun! Thanks for being awesome. Part of Tserillian!verse
Summary: A funeral connects Leonard to a piece of his past.
Ichi looked Spock up and down when she opened the door, appraising. “So you’re the one.”
Leonard rolled his eyes. “Don’t start.”
“You’re a hard man to find, Leonard McCoy,” Ichi said, grabbing their bags. “I was worried we wouldn’t get a hold of you in time.”
Leonard started to say something about losing the number, but Ichi cut him off. “She didn’t mind. She knew you didn’t mean no harm. Now, I fucking minded, and I’m pretty sure Eddie did too, but Mama didn’t.”
“Where is Eddie?”
“Doing religious stuff. She’ll be done in a moment.”
Someone inside the house hollered for “Itchy!” Ichi rolled her eyes.
“I thought Itchy Cold went out of style in first grade,” Leonard said, and got punched on the arm.
“Just put your stuff in your room. Or…I’ll do it after I take care of this.”
“No, we’ve got it.”
Ichi spun in place for a moment, getting her bearings. Then she tore off towards the back of the house, one of their bags still slung over her shoulder. Leonard sighed. He’d get it later.
“Ichiko hasn’t changed much,” he said to Spock. “Married, though; we get to meet him later.”
Spock didn’t say anything. He looked around the room with interest when they got to it, inspecting the wallpaper and the sheets.
It’d been done up for some pink loving child - pink wallpaper, pink curtains, pink sheets. There’s no telling when it was last lived in. There’s a half-empty box of stuffed toys in the closet; most of its contents probably left with the child who’d loved them.
With the door closed, they couldn’t even hear the buzz of talk from downstairs. Leonard fell back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to decide who to call first.
He woke up to Eddie putting a tray beside the bed.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
He shook his head and sat up. “How you been, Edora?”
“Don’t call me that! Fine. Up until recently, fine. You? Mr. Hot-shot Starfleet doctor-person?”
“Fine.”
He scooted over and Eddie flopped on the bed beside him. For a moment, they were kids again - fifteen year old Leonard McCoy trying to convince six year old Edora Moore that this house wasn’t too bad - and any moment Naomi would stop lurking in the hall and come in to shoo her back to bed.
The door stayed shut; the moment was gone. Leonard’s a grown man and Naomi wasn’t there to make sure he was sleeping.
“You’re in her will,” Eddie said. “In between Yata and me.”
“I never told her yes.”
“You didn’t have to; you were hers the moment you stepped in the door.”
There was no jell-o on the tray Eddie brought, so Leonard waited to start on it. Instead they talked. Eddie talked about leading a youth group at her church and working in a library, and volunteering as much as she could. They talked about Spock and Jim, and life on the enterprise, and Joanna.
By the time Spock came back to the room they were laughing themselves sick over Jim’s ill-fated experience with Kabocan squid and the time one of their foster brothers dumped three pounds of calamari down his pants.
Eddie was wiping tears from her eyes when she stood up, running her nose up the side of his face and nodding at Spock.
“I’ll let you get some rest,” she choked out. “And I’ll save you some biscuits at breakfast - they vanish real quick.”
It felt good to laugh; he hadn’t laughed much in the past week, since he got Ichi’s message and started making travel arrangements.
After the funeral - after Naomi’s body was in the ground and they’d gone from the funeral home to her house - everyone gathered together to eat.
They didn’t do this after Jocelyn’s funeral - that was all somber, from the wake to the will-reading. Naomi’s family did their crying at the wake and at the funeral, and when they’d got their crying out they packed themselves into the three downstairs rooms and reminisced.
When Leonard was thirteen and meeting Naomi’s extended family the first time, they’d been a sea of dark faces - everyone a stranger, everyone likely to hurt him as his family had hurt him. Leonard was as orphaned as if both his parents had dove off a cliff.
Now they were his family in all the ways that mattered. His uncles talked about Naomi as a little girl, his aunts as a headstrong woman. His cousins remembered her as “that crazy aunt”, and of course there were a number of Naomi’s foster-children. Some of them Leonard knew and some he didn’t.
Spock looked simultaneously out of place and right at home. Leonard left him next to Naomi’s eldest brother, and headed towards the kitchen. Their voices carried across the room.
“It is highly unlikely that a twelve year old was able to purchase a rare Peruvian spider.”
“I swear on my life she did! Cost me a hundred credits when customs caught up with her!”
Ichi was in the kitchen, looking frazzled.
“Where are the plates? Are we out of plates? Should I - Leo!” she pointed with her free hand. “I saved some wine. You wanna ditch and raid Mom’s closet?”
“Yeah, but no wine.”
She frowned and reached out to feel his forehead. “Teetotal?”
“Pregnant.”
Her jaw drops.
One of the aunts - a round elderly woman, who Leonard remembered as very stern - took the tray of devilled eggs from Ichi before she could drop it.
“Pregnant?” Ichi whispered, breathless. “You- ha - when?”
“Four months.” Leonard said.
Ichi’s mouth opened and closed. Then she pulled him tight into a hug, burying her face in his shoulder. The curls she worked so hard on that morning had fallen; some of her hair was twisted into the chain of her necklace. She smelled like bacon grease and some sort of fancy perfume.
The relatives in the kitchen worked around them, a few of them giving Leonard and Ichi sympathetic shoulder pats.
Ichi took a deep breath. “Yata couldn’t make it. She’s doing aid work on her birth planet, did you know?”
Her smile was wet and wobbly. Leonard’s wasn’t much better. “I figured it was something. She and Naomi were attached at the hip.”
“Mama would’ve wanted us all to be here, but at least you came.” Ichi wiped her eyes. “So I guess I get all the wine. You and Eddie can share the sparkling grape juice. Go find her and meet me in mom’s room in twenty, okay? I need a - fu - does anyone have any tissue?”
Leonard let himself be shooed away and squeezed into the living room to look for Eddie.
Naomi’s room had enough pictures to put an art museum to shame - every child she’d ever loved captured on a collection of datachips, endlessly cycling through pictures and short vids in the frames on her walls.
The frame on her nightstand had a series of family portraits. As Leonard watched, he saw Ichi and her husband, Eddie by herself, Yata and her family unit, the three girls together, and an older picture of him when he was a teenager, the girls pressed in close beside him.
“Yata looks tiny!” Eddie said, pausing it. “How old was she then?”
“Three,” Leonard said. The picture had been taken shortly after Naomi offered to adopt him.
“Three, eight, ten, and ancient,” Ichi said, playfully head butting Leonard’s shoulder. Then she ran her nose up the side of Leonard’s face, much as she’d done ages ago when she began imitating him.
Eddie clicked through the pictures, seeing various aunts and uncles, Naomi and her parents, Leonard’s official Starfleet picture….
“Where did she get that?”
“What? This?” Eddie went back to Leonard’s picture. “They have them up on the net. Mom couldn’t do voice commands well, but she was awesome at image searches.”
Ichi was already in the closet, digging boxes off the shelves. “Eddie, you think she’s got your graduation pic in here?”
They gathered on the floor in front of the closet, digging through the boxes and finding old art projects, report cards, awards, and the like. One of the boxes had four books, old style photo albums, each one with their name on the front.
The first one they open was Yata’s, and they see her tiny blue face in what must have been the first picture Naomi ever got, back when it was suggested she take her in. Beside that was the official list that covered Yata’s appearance, weight, height, and her circumstances.
“She kept all this?”
Each book was just as detailed. They found every school picture Eddie ever took, including her graduation picture. They found the trimmings from Ichi’s first haircut, and a crudely drawn picture of Ichi and Leonard and Naomi together, “My Family” scrawled across the top in Ichi’s wide looping print.
Leonard didn’t expect much in his book - he came when he was thirteen and left when he was nineteen - but it looked like Naomi searched for every scrap of information she could. News articles, random photos taken at public events, the list of award winners for his years at medical school with his name highlighted. She had his wedding announcement, a clip of the list of babies born at his hospital that included Joanna’s name, his name highlighted on the list of Starfleet cadets.
“She was good at regular searches, too,” Eddie whispered. “If she could type it in, she could search for it.”
Leonard took a swig from his bottle of carbonated grape juice. Eddie elbowed him with a small smile, and grabbed one of the bottles of wine.
“Since when are you teetotal anyway?”
“He’s not,” Ichi said. She waggled her eyebrows.
Eddie made a noise around her mouthful of wine, waving her hands theatrically. Leonard sighed and took the bottle from her. “Swallow before you choke.”
“Yata’s husband is pregnant!” she squealed once her mouth was free. “Two babies at once; this is so cool. And hey, if you need a doula or anything I am so there for you. Is it Spock’s? Never mind. Riding low? I bet it’s gonna be a boy! How far along….” She stopped herself. “Sorry, I get excited.”
He scowled. “I have a ship full of excited people.”
“That must be torture.”
He elbowed Ichi and sighed. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Yeah it is.” Ichi grabbed one of Naomi’s hats - a big yellow one that they’d tried to bury ages ago. “I’ll get some snacks and then we can braid each other’s hair and tell our life stories. Hold on.”
She stood, trying and failing to smooth the wrinkles out of her black dress.
“I’ll bring more drinks,” she shouted from the hallway.
Eddie nudged Leonard’s shoulder with her head, smiling and sad all at once. “She’s glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re here.”
Leonard wasn’t completely sure, but he was glad too.
This entry was crossposted to My DW Account. Please feel free to read or comment on either site.
Fandom: ST:XI
Rating: PG
Pairing: Spock/McCoy
Warnings: mention of mpreg, off screen character death, ocs
Notes: Written for cotton candy bingo prompt: “return” and dedicated to antesqueluz. ♥ hun! Thanks for being awesome. Part of Tserillian!verse
Summary: A funeral connects Leonard to a piece of his past.
Ichi looked Spock up and down when she opened the door, appraising. “So you’re the one.”
Leonard rolled his eyes. “Don’t start.”
“You’re a hard man to find, Leonard McCoy,” Ichi said, grabbing their bags. “I was worried we wouldn’t get a hold of you in time.”
Leonard started to say something about losing the number, but Ichi cut him off. “She didn’t mind. She knew you didn’t mean no harm. Now, I fucking minded, and I’m pretty sure Eddie did too, but Mama didn’t.”
“Where is Eddie?”
“Doing religious stuff. She’ll be done in a moment.”
Someone inside the house hollered for “Itchy!” Ichi rolled her eyes.
“I thought Itchy Cold went out of style in first grade,” Leonard said, and got punched on the arm.
“Just put your stuff in your room. Or…I’ll do it after I take care of this.”
“No, we’ve got it.”
Ichi spun in place for a moment, getting her bearings. Then she tore off towards the back of the house, one of their bags still slung over her shoulder. Leonard sighed. He’d get it later.
“Ichiko hasn’t changed much,” he said to Spock. “Married, though; we get to meet him later.”
Spock didn’t say anything. He looked around the room with interest when they got to it, inspecting the wallpaper and the sheets.
It’d been done up for some pink loving child - pink wallpaper, pink curtains, pink sheets. There’s no telling when it was last lived in. There’s a half-empty box of stuffed toys in the closet; most of its contents probably left with the child who’d loved them.
With the door closed, they couldn’t even hear the buzz of talk from downstairs. Leonard fell back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to decide who to call first.
He woke up to Eddie putting a tray beside the bed.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
He shook his head and sat up. “How you been, Edora?”
“Don’t call me that! Fine. Up until recently, fine. You? Mr. Hot-shot Starfleet doctor-person?”
“Fine.”
He scooted over and Eddie flopped on the bed beside him. For a moment, they were kids again - fifteen year old Leonard McCoy trying to convince six year old Edora Moore that this house wasn’t too bad - and any moment Naomi would stop lurking in the hall and come in to shoo her back to bed.
The door stayed shut; the moment was gone. Leonard’s a grown man and Naomi wasn’t there to make sure he was sleeping.
“You’re in her will,” Eddie said. “In between Yata and me.”
“I never told her yes.”
“You didn’t have to; you were hers the moment you stepped in the door.”
There was no jell-o on the tray Eddie brought, so Leonard waited to start on it. Instead they talked. Eddie talked about leading a youth group at her church and working in a library, and volunteering as much as she could. They talked about Spock and Jim, and life on the enterprise, and Joanna.
By the time Spock came back to the room they were laughing themselves sick over Jim’s ill-fated experience with Kabocan squid and the time one of their foster brothers dumped three pounds of calamari down his pants.
Eddie was wiping tears from her eyes when she stood up, running her nose up the side of his face and nodding at Spock.
“I’ll let you get some rest,” she choked out. “And I’ll save you some biscuits at breakfast - they vanish real quick.”
It felt good to laugh; he hadn’t laughed much in the past week, since he got Ichi’s message and started making travel arrangements.
After the funeral - after Naomi’s body was in the ground and they’d gone from the funeral home to her house - everyone gathered together to eat.
They didn’t do this after Jocelyn’s funeral - that was all somber, from the wake to the will-reading. Naomi’s family did their crying at the wake and at the funeral, and when they’d got their crying out they packed themselves into the three downstairs rooms and reminisced.
When Leonard was thirteen and meeting Naomi’s extended family the first time, they’d been a sea of dark faces - everyone a stranger, everyone likely to hurt him as his family had hurt him. Leonard was as orphaned as if both his parents had dove off a cliff.
Now they were his family in all the ways that mattered. His uncles talked about Naomi as a little girl, his aunts as a headstrong woman. His cousins remembered her as “that crazy aunt”, and of course there were a number of Naomi’s foster-children. Some of them Leonard knew and some he didn’t.
Spock looked simultaneously out of place and right at home. Leonard left him next to Naomi’s eldest brother, and headed towards the kitchen. Their voices carried across the room.
“It is highly unlikely that a twelve year old was able to purchase a rare Peruvian spider.”
“I swear on my life she did! Cost me a hundred credits when customs caught up with her!”
Ichi was in the kitchen, looking frazzled.
“Where are the plates? Are we out of plates? Should I - Leo!” she pointed with her free hand. “I saved some wine. You wanna ditch and raid Mom’s closet?”
“Yeah, but no wine.”
She frowned and reached out to feel his forehead. “Teetotal?”
“Pregnant.”
Her jaw drops.
One of the aunts - a round elderly woman, who Leonard remembered as very stern - took the tray of devilled eggs from Ichi before she could drop it.
“Pregnant?” Ichi whispered, breathless. “You- ha - when?”
“Four months.” Leonard said.
Ichi’s mouth opened and closed. Then she pulled him tight into a hug, burying her face in his shoulder. The curls she worked so hard on that morning had fallen; some of her hair was twisted into the chain of her necklace. She smelled like bacon grease and some sort of fancy perfume.
The relatives in the kitchen worked around them, a few of them giving Leonard and Ichi sympathetic shoulder pats.
Ichi took a deep breath. “Yata couldn’t make it. She’s doing aid work on her birth planet, did you know?”
Her smile was wet and wobbly. Leonard’s wasn’t much better. “I figured it was something. She and Naomi were attached at the hip.”
“Mama would’ve wanted us all to be here, but at least you came.” Ichi wiped her eyes. “So I guess I get all the wine. You and Eddie can share the sparkling grape juice. Go find her and meet me in mom’s room in twenty, okay? I need a - fu - does anyone have any tissue?”
Leonard let himself be shooed away and squeezed into the living room to look for Eddie.
Naomi’s room had enough pictures to put an art museum to shame - every child she’d ever loved captured on a collection of datachips, endlessly cycling through pictures and short vids in the frames on her walls.
The frame on her nightstand had a series of family portraits. As Leonard watched, he saw Ichi and her husband, Eddie by herself, Yata and her family unit, the three girls together, and an older picture of him when he was a teenager, the girls pressed in close beside him.
“Yata looks tiny!” Eddie said, pausing it. “How old was she then?”
“Three,” Leonard said. The picture had been taken shortly after Naomi offered to adopt him.
“Three, eight, ten, and ancient,” Ichi said, playfully head butting Leonard’s shoulder. Then she ran her nose up the side of Leonard’s face, much as she’d done ages ago when she began imitating him.
Eddie clicked through the pictures, seeing various aunts and uncles, Naomi and her parents, Leonard’s official Starfleet picture….
“Where did she get that?”
“What? This?” Eddie went back to Leonard’s picture. “They have them up on the net. Mom couldn’t do voice commands well, but she was awesome at image searches.”
Ichi was already in the closet, digging boxes off the shelves. “Eddie, you think she’s got your graduation pic in here?”
They gathered on the floor in front of the closet, digging through the boxes and finding old art projects, report cards, awards, and the like. One of the boxes had four books, old style photo albums, each one with their name on the front.
The first one they open was Yata’s, and they see her tiny blue face in what must have been the first picture Naomi ever got, back when it was suggested she take her in. Beside that was the official list that covered Yata’s appearance, weight, height, and her circumstances.
“She kept all this?”
Each book was just as detailed. They found every school picture Eddie ever took, including her graduation picture. They found the trimmings from Ichi’s first haircut, and a crudely drawn picture of Ichi and Leonard and Naomi together, “My Family” scrawled across the top in Ichi’s wide looping print.
Leonard didn’t expect much in his book - he came when he was thirteen and left when he was nineteen - but it looked like Naomi searched for every scrap of information she could. News articles, random photos taken at public events, the list of award winners for his years at medical school with his name highlighted. She had his wedding announcement, a clip of the list of babies born at his hospital that included Joanna’s name, his name highlighted on the list of Starfleet cadets.
“She was good at regular searches, too,” Eddie whispered. “If she could type it in, she could search for it.”
Leonard took a swig from his bottle of carbonated grape juice. Eddie elbowed him with a small smile, and grabbed one of the bottles of wine.
“Since when are you teetotal anyway?”
“He’s not,” Ichi said. She waggled her eyebrows.
Eddie made a noise around her mouthful of wine, waving her hands theatrically. Leonard sighed and took the bottle from her. “Swallow before you choke.”
“Yata’s husband is pregnant!” she squealed once her mouth was free. “Two babies at once; this is so cool. And hey, if you need a doula or anything I am so there for you. Is it Spock’s? Never mind. Riding low? I bet it’s gonna be a boy! How far along….” She stopped herself. “Sorry, I get excited.”
He scowled. “I have a ship full of excited people.”
“That must be torture.”
He elbowed Ichi and sighed. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Yeah it is.” Ichi grabbed one of Naomi’s hats - a big yellow one that they’d tried to bury ages ago. “I’ll get some snacks and then we can braid each other’s hair and tell our life stories. Hold on.”
She stood, trying and failing to smooth the wrinkles out of her black dress.
“I’ll bring more drinks,” she shouted from the hallway.
Eddie nudged Leonard’s shoulder with her head, smiling and sad all at once. “She’s glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re here.”
Leonard wasn’t completely sure, but he was glad too.
This entry was crossposted to My DW Account. Please feel free to read or comment on either site.