Warnings: Rated for the use of coarse language (in the second and third entries); also, the third entry, "Starlight", is heavily dolloped with a side of Kirk/McCoy.

Disclaimer: Star Trek is not mine.


The Fall

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Precipice

He misses her first three birthdays.

During the fourth, there's a sharp stab right through his chest when the toddler pinpoints him with a direct look, her eyes quizzical and pondering like she was trying to make sense of something wholly odd. It passes, a brief second, in favor of the pretty cake that her mommy had set out on the table.

It's a vanilla cake with a creamy peach filling, Joanna's fruit of choice.

"It's her favorite."

Leonard just found out today.

It was times like these when the familiar, twisted feeling of something whispered tucked away into his soul—regret—but he hushes it, gently wraps it up so that it doesn't break, and then lets it fall forever away and away into a hole with no end. His own face feels unfamiliar as a smile wobbles onto it when his daughter laughs delightfully and turns to him—big, bright hazel eyes—just like her Daddy's—and smears cake icing all over his nose and cheeks.

There's the faint quiver of a light and Leonard just catches sight of Joceyln at the other end of the table lowering the old holovid recorder, dust still coating more obscure crevices where hands didn't quite touch. Her smile is like his, foreign and shaky like ripples on water that don't quite reach the startling, pretty blue of her eyes. Like the sky.

She places the recorder on the table end with no overt rush, their eyes still lingering at each other—trying to pull something out of each other—the din of Joanna's laughter strangely echoing faraway, her tiny hands still swiping at Leonard's face.

She stands there with slack arms at her sides, the space and air around her ringing with a dull, pulsing emptiness that distorts her and makes her seem like a small, willowy figure at the end of a vast, grassy field that had once been something else.

I love you.

Unbidden, his hand starts to rise as if it were floating upwards on slow water and then the tide stops, and his hand shudders once into an awkward, beckoning position that is half unsure with the intent of grasping or simply hanging limply from cut marionette strings.

His view is smudged with the sugary grease of icing and through white splotches he blurrily sees the image of the small figure ripple and disappear.

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Hold

He wants her to be happy.

She tearfully hugs him on the campus green, her eyes shimmering like crystal drops of a sunny sky, and her smile is wide and true.

I'm so proud of you.

He is the youngest, absolutely youngest, to be accepted into such a prestigious program. He has surpassed his peers, leaving them spinning in his magnificent wake. He is on the fast track to his future and she is by his side.

He wants her to be happy.

Where are you?

Her family sneers at her behind her back, the Treadways are even worse. But it lessens each time his name shows up in the headlines, his hands busy holding a shiny plaque or shaking one of some important person.

Where are you?

He searches for the perfect house, pulls all the strings he has, works overtime night after night until his work and study hours blend together permanently. He sweats and bleeds and claims more headlines. He pushes for a lower down payment. He struggles and struggles because she deserves the very best—not a second rate anything, including a ring. He pushes himself harder despite the cracks that start to weave through him like slick spider webs.

Where are you?

But he falls to his knees—both, not one—because she is not there. She is gone.

Where are you?

Then she is suddenly standing-collapsing-at the back porch door, breathless, eyes like crying glass, her hands grasping the edges of the doorway, knees wobbling at the threshold.

"I'm pregnant."

He wants her to be happy.

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Forever

He is twenty-one and she is eighteen.

They're in love.

They will tell their children that they were each other's first sweethearts. And that their mama snagged the most handsome gentleman at the dance all to herself. And their daddy will tell them that his heart was utterly and completely stolen by an angel, golden halo for hair, who flew to him and took his hand. They will tell them that their mama followed daddy where ever he led because, together, they held the miracle of flight.

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Never

She grabs his hand, snatching it from his own body, ripping him across to the checkered floor of too few bodies and too bright spot lights. She jerks to a stop and whips around, her hand still firmly grasped on his.

His eyes are wide and astonished. Frozen by the stormy intensity of hers.

But, slowly, bit by bit, his hand holds hers too.

He would do.

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Dream

It was all that he ever wanted to do in life, from the cradle and onward he never remembered a time any different from when he wanted to become a doctor. He is bright and young and doors are opening for him like bird's wings gently flapping in the breeze.

It defines him.

He knows that he can make it if he keeps going, keeps climbing, never stopping. Firm and steady on the mountain road where the sun is a pure white and radiant beacon at the very tip top, lighting the way to it.

It was all that she could do but be dazzled by this secret side to the shy but handsome boy whose entire being, she would swear it on her soul, would burst with the biggest smile she ever saw whenever he talked about his one dream.

Then she ached. She wanted to take and hold his strong, sure, kind hands and walk beside him on his glorious mountain road where a luminous future awaited.

So she did.

"Will you dance with me?"

"My darling, until the end of time."