She was beautiful.
His mouth almost twitched.
What was left of her to see that is.
Spock leaned against the estate's cool hand quarried stone, careful not to let his somber heavy ambassadorial robes make even the smallest of sounds as they brushed the wall.
He knew full well how utterly sharp those graceful upswept ears of hers were.
And he had absolutely no desire to find himself drafted.
The small anteroom looked like it had suffered the unique creative mix of a high yield explosive device and a catastrophic natural disaster.
Slick red mud—the irony of that on searing hot Vulcan made his eyes glint—was slathered over knee height all along the stone walls. Its strangely fascinating scribbled chaotic application bore amusing testament to the developing creativity of the tiny talons that had so excitedly 'painted' with it. On the ancient tiled floor, great slowly congealing piles of it were swirled together in intricate swirl designs from the exploring travel tracks of small tails. Delicate claw marks noted favored scrabbling spots and bizarre holes inside the deeper mounds revealed particularly pleasing wallows where a wriggling body had worked its way happily almost to the cool tiles themselves. A great shallow bath—a full bathing tub's breadth and a kitchen pan's height—occupied most of the center of the destruction. The undulating, writhing roll of watery red mud within it designated that as the original source of the mess. And the source of the barely directed chaos.
Rrelthiz's hatchlings.
They were, he found to no small amount of delight, somehow even more active than Saavik herself had been as the half-wild child she had been.
Six fragile and utterly over excited whipping tails frothed and flung more mud in every direction as the tiny sinuous bodies dove and rolled and clambered seven-fingered over each other within the bath. Coated slickly in the protective mire, their black bodies and colored stripes were almost camouflaged entirely.
A useful fact not lost on them in the slightest as they repeatedly attempted wildly ingenious 'escapes', their merrily glittering liquid black eyes and happy piping squeaks showing how completely entertaining they found this ongoing 'game' with Saavik to be.
And the obviously deliberately feigned sternly reproving frown on her face and the way she shook her finger at them in mock outrage at their 'naughtiness' only encouraged their happy antics.
Spock's eyes softened.
It was good to see her playing with the hatchlings again.
After that last . . . .
He had quietly feared for his aduna. Even the strongest hearts could only bear so much. The darkness that had always haunted her eyes had slowly deepened into blackness and she had gradually silently withdrawn from even the most beloved of her joys.
Spock felt the cold subconscious brush of a shiver along his skin.
He still remembered the way his heart had seized in unspoken dread the night he realized that the great worn rock outside, where she had always taken up her nightly quiet ritual of watching the stars, had been abandoned to the merciless shifting sands of the desert long enough to have almost disappeared entirely.
And he hadn't noticed.
Spock drew his heavy robes tighter about himself and forced his mind away from that night of terrible realized dread.
A sudden hysterical outbreak of high pitched warbling laugher brought his attention instantly back to the present.
Saavik had just upended a small pail of freshly cool mud on six mischievous little heads and they were joyfully fiercely retaliating by flailing their tails in even wilder mud splashing to try and splatter her back in wickedly merry vengeance.
Spock's mouth almost moved upwards in his own amusement.
Not that they could possibly get her more utterly mired than they already had. But they were determinedly trying with all the ferocity of happy children focused on a righteous cause.
His dark eyes found his beloved again and his amusement increased. And then faded.
Her past as an almost feral beast scrabbling from moment to moment for desperate survival amid abandoned buildings and corpses had meant her bones had been held together by more absolute filth than skin. When he had taken her from Hellguard, it had come to no great surprise that she had immediately associated physical cleanliness with social acceptance. And by the time she had entered Starfleet Academy as a cadet, there were few who could claim to be more perfect in grooming.
Not that Saavik could ever be justly accused of vanity. In fact, she errored rather viciously to its opposite even to today. The bitter shames and searing hatred she'd suffered from had combined with the heart-breaking realization that she would never be able to completely shake off her outcast abandonment and cruel birth's judgment. And it had permanently scarred deep into her psyche. Though there was no one more courageous and honored in his mind than the woman he now called beloved, no one more compassionate and driven to protect those who could not protect themselves—there was also, in ugly irony, no one in his mind who simply could not yet fully see her own value. Though she had come light-years away from that abandoned and brutalized feral child, that child still ghosted behind her eyes when she looked in mirrors.
Some hearts needed longer and harder scrub downs than skin.
Especially when they kept receiving more suffering shame.
This last . . . this last had almost succeeded in destroying her utterly.
Would have, in fact, were it not for a certain old friend who knew all too well herself the moment when shame swallowed hope alive.
Rrelthiz.
The universe loved sweet irony almost as much as it loved the bitter.
Where once Saavik had faithfully reached into the void to grasp a despairing taloned hand, Rrelthiz had seen her friend start to fall and lunged for the save.
And then gently set six tiny hatchlings into Saavik's deeply wounded soul to make sure she stayed saved.
Spock shook his head softly at himself.
Sometimes karma was a gift.
At that exact thought, one of the more inventive ones—Bbhes, he believed from what scant view of identifying stripes could be seen through the mud—suddenly coiled and launched himself twisting in a rather clever attempt for playful evasion of his caretaker. He actually caught the rolled edge of bath, but the metal proved too slick for his talons and he skittered wildly out of control. And flipped dangerously too fast over the edge with a suddenly frightened squeak.
Then Saavik's hand was there and Bbhes was wriggling with the happy warbling that amounted to Carreon giggles and snortling his tiny muzzle along her soft fair skin. His tail tangled itself around her fingers and his tiny talons clutched into flesh, unintentionally scratching her.
Saavik gave the hatchling a gentle disciplinary tap on his muzzle but both Spock and Bbhes could tell from her eyes that she was more pleased at his acrobatic cleverness than displeased.
"What will your mother say if you come to harm in my care?"
That immediately got the rest of the brood shrieking in their version of outrageous laughter.
Bbhes stretched his lithe neck out to its fullest length to give Saavik a teasingly corrective nibble on her nose for such complete apparent Vulcan silliness. "Sssafe! Sssafe witths Sssaavik!"
Pained memory surfaced unexpectedly and stiffened her face. "No, Bbhes, I cannot-"
But the little hatchling would not be dissuaded from his truth. And overrode her with a piercing interrupting hiss and then a not so gentle disciplinary poke of tiny talon.
"Yesss! Sssaavik keep sssafe from-" He flung seven fingered talons so wide apart to take in the entirety of his world that he nearly knocked himself right out of her hand, forcing Saavik to make a second protective snatch to keep him safe. "Sssee?—evverytthsing!"
The other five of the little brood all began nodding wildly in children's utter confirmation of obviously unassailable fact, their tails waving mud in all directions with their absolute certainty. "Mmmotthher, sssaysss!" they chorused as backup proof.
Saavik's pain resisted but then gave slowly way to hesitant awed wonder as she stared down at six pairs of perfectly trusting black eyes. And Spock felt something deep in his chest ease away along with it.
She was healing.
Saavik abruptly sighed so deeply that it seemed to come from her very soul and eased.
But six little necks had snapped straight up in suddenly hugely intense curiosity and the hatchlings tilted small heads at her back and forth in delighted thought at the apparently intriguing introduction to a fascinating new sound.
"Wwhhatt tthhisss?" Demanded Bbhes. He drew out a long soft breathy hiss in uncanny mimicry of her sigh and stretched his muzzle out as far as he could reach to stare up into her face.
All the other Carreon children piled hastily all over themselves and pressed excitedly against the side of the bath closest to Saavik, their tails quivering in their kind's extreme fascination for the explanation of a new sound.
"Wwhhatt tthhisss? Wwhhatt tthhisss?" They all began repeating her sigh back to her over and over, faster and faster, their little rapidly inflating and deflating throat sacks making them look like a tiny over stimulated pile of animate fireplace bellows. "Sssaavik! Sssaavik! Wwhhatt tthhisss?"
"It is . . . difficult to explain," Saavik hedged.
And the six pairs of liquid eye positively lit up. "A ssstory?!" they all shrieked in child delight.
And the next moment Saavik had to desperately lunge to steady the bath as a sentient mud tsunami of writhing tails and scrabbling talons rolled over the metal side and slopped directly into her lap.
She openly winced.
Then tiny sharp talons where carrying dripping red mud coated little bodies all over her, as the hatchlings climbed to their apparently chosen places about her person, tails wrapping tightly to secure them on her now completely destroyed clothing.
Spock's eyes glinted as Saavik obviously gave up on trying to do anything more than keep all of them from accidentally falling off. Only when she was sure the little ones were safely mud glued to her, did she grimaced in personal revulsion at the state she was in. And then reluctantly accepted it as she looked fondly into the little faces staring excited up at her for their story. She shoved mud tangled hair out of her face and carefully eased back against a wall as plastered in muck as she was.
"In human culture, it is called a 'sigh'. On Vulcan, the word is jltpa."
It amused Spock to absolutely no end to see her so filthy and bedraggled and yet still falling instantly into her own version of what Bones had so irreverently once called Spock's 'lecture mode'. She clasped her hands loosely in front of her in unconscious echo of him and he watched a small muddy body promptly resettle on top of folded fingers. All over her, muzzles laid comfortably against her as they settled in, their liquid black eyes watched almost unblinkingly with the single-minded attention of the very young.
"It is a release of breath which, when varied in sound or duration, changes meaning to give a variety of expressions. I first learned it from Ambassador Spock."
His eyebrow instantly rose in curiosity. She had?
The Carreons chattered in sudden excitement, sensing the beginning of their story was starting.
"When I was young-"
"New hhattchhed?" hissed Ssaalz in eager question, tail tip twitching rapidly.
Spock instantly recognized, with some partiality, the youngest and most curious of Rrelthiz's brood. And the one named for friendship's Blooded mark between his beloved and the Carreon, whose friendship was sealed both ways in life and honor saved.
And the one named after Saavik.
She stroked tiny Ssaalz with genuine adoration. "Approximately ten or so years after being newly hatched."
Then she had to pause in the story and give loving stroking to all the others to soothe the instantly jealous squeaking and ferocious sibling tail lashings for competing attention. Once everyone was happily wortling in their throat sacs again, she continued.
"Ambassador Spock had been trying in vain to encourage me to read-"
Six pairs of eyes when positively huge in disbelief.
They knew quite well the voracious reading habits of Vulcans—and Saavik in particular, for she had been reading to them every evening before they slept ever since they had arrived in their protective travel mud crate.
Saavik colored. "I preferred to be physically active."
Ssaalz tilted her tiny head curiously. "Play?"
"Explore."
Sounds of instant understanding spread through the brood. Carreons loved exploring new things almost as much as they loved hearing new sounds.
"And I was having . . . difficulty . . . reading."
"But—Vvulcan!" Protested Bbhes.
Spock could see Saavik visibly trying to avoid mentioning any number of sensitive past subjects. It was little Ssaalz who saved her having to broach more pain. The smallest of the hatchlings mournfully stroked Saavik's finger with her little sharp talons.
"Yyou sssmalll, sssame me. Hhhard keep up. Allwaysss behhind."
Saavik looked down at her name's memory with something deeply old that needed no words to be understood between them. "Yes, exactly."
The story had to be paused again as the hatchlings crawled all over both Saavik and Ssaalz, giving soft comforting hisses and gentle, encouraging muzzle rubbing.
Tiny Ssaalz's tail curled in a return of happiness and Saavik's face had eased again. She took a deep breath.
"Ambassador Spock believed that I should not give up-"
For a moment she faltered and he found himself holding his breath, then she forced her shoulders straighter and continued, touching Ssaalz.
"—so he searched to find something that would capture my interest. Enough to make me hold still long enough to read it." Her eyes glinted in dry memory. "Unfortunately for him, he chose the human tale Treasure Island."
Spock winced in memory of the near heart failure he'd had. And once again experienced a vast relief that he hadn't given her something like The Odyssey-or it might have been ten years before he'd seen her again.
The Carreons wriggled in renewed excitement.
"Sssay!" they demanded over and over. "Sssay!"
Spock shuddered at the near decade of life he had lost when he had come into the Saavik child's small room. And found an empty bed and a forlorn open window to only darkness outside.
It was the first moment when he had finally and horrifyingly understood himself exactly what his mother had felt that day his six year old self had fled into the desert to be free at last of the cruelty of his peers because of his human heritage.
After all these years, he could still remember the absolute fear.
A fear he had felt again all too recently.
And the reason he still remained home, refusing his duties elsewhere.
He could not lose her.
And though the blackness in her eyes had slowly faded back as he held her almost crushingly through the bitter nights as she sweated and trembled and fought the demons that stirred to all real life in her nightmares—and though she had at last carefully swept the sand from her star stone and once more watched the sky—he found he could not force himself to leave her side.
Not yet.
His eyes found his beloved again, seeing the way she looked down at the little ones with more of her than he had seen in months.
She was filthy. Her rich chestnut hair tangled and caked with red mud—her clothes an absolute wreckage and her fair skin scratched and smeared with muck. But her eyes, though still all too heavily shadowed with a soul's exhaustion, held no longer only the consuming blackness.
Saavik was stronger than she had known.
She just needed a little more time to heal than they had thought.
And she would. She would heal. Spock felt it in his heart. Felt it with a certainty stronger than logic.
Because last night he had gone to her stars watching stone beneath the great dome of the desert sky. And though he had found it still silently abandoned, his ever so slightly trembling fingers had touched the worn smooth stone. Quietly, sometime when he had not been watching, Saavik had returned and gently swept away the burying sand.
And hidden from anyone's sight, Spock drew his heavy robes about himself and settled back against the cool stone, feeling peace at last ease slowly into his soul as he watched his wife tell her story to six mud covered tiny Carreons.
She was beautiful.
She was so very beautiful.