Fic: Bookends
Mandana is running when Romulus burns.
Staggering actually, as quickly as she can through the corridors of the starship she is on. She can feel the new life burning within her; waiting to burst out. The medic down the hall is running, very slowly it seems. Too slowly. This is her child; this is the child she and Nero tried so hard for, the child that they had saved for, had planned for, had carved out a space at the center of their lives for.
It is the child that has sent Nero far away in search of more gallicite, the same child which won her a place on the Vulcan ambassador’s ship. As long as she can deliver her daughter safely into the world, the child would grow up with two parents whose love for her would burn more brightly than any supernova ever could.
It would be enough. If they can just live, Nero will find them, and it would be more than enough to rebuild with. Never mind their lost home. Never mind their lost history, their lost people, their lost planet. Just give her her family, and she will make sure they are all fine. It was in their marriage vows: anything can be built with another set of hands.
We are losing the child. Give me the sedative, and begin preparations for emergency surgery.
Six months later, after the crew of the Narada were declared officially dead, lost in the same cataclysm that had taken the homeworld, Mandana looks into an empty set of quarters and contemplates that which can be built with two hands.
~*~
Mandana is still at work when the sun comes up that morning, painting gold across the parchment. She rises to shut the curtains: the moon might have been pale enough to avoid damaging the ancient scroll she is restoring but the sun is never that forgiving.
It takes some time to finish her work, and just as she is putting away her brushes she begins to hear the sounds of her husband rising to begin the day. As she carefully sealed her work away from all the light, humidity, and other dangers that come from a normal environment she heard the vidfeed activate.
Ambassador T’Penda is onscreen, playing the same sound bites from her speech outside the Vulcan embassy three days prior. There is a big push for reunification, in the wake of this last civil war: Praetor Donata has little to say on the matter and thus speculation is rife.
“She looks old,” Nero comments from the food synthesizer.
“She’s mostly human,” Mandana reminds him, needlessly. Most of the known galaxy is aware of her parentage. “They age more quickly than Vulcans.”
Or Romulans. But they leave the truth between them, unspoken. Nero takes his dish from the synthesizer, and begins to program hers. “How goes the work?” he asks, making it sound like more of a non-sequitur than it really is.
“Interestingly,” she replies. “Then again, if it weren’t interesting, I doubt the curator would have asked me to restore it.”
Restoration is, as they both know by now, a tricky thing. The piece of history she has locked away in her study could swing the fate of their entire planet, and take that of Vulcan with it. One slip of her brush and she could wipe it out, or change it completely.
“How is your work?” she asks, more out of politeness than anything else. Predictably, Nero launches into a long tail of how Ayel has come up with an idea for integrating more of the Borg technology into the process of extracting dilithium. It seems impossible for him to do anything without throwing his whole being into it, whether it be as her husband, or a father, or a miner, or an engineer. It’s a good thing, she thinks, that her husband is not a violent man. He could have done terrible things.
She shivers, and tells herself it is merely the effect of the cloud passing overhead.