Warning: This is for the kink meme, and once again I'm going to put the prompt first, so the people who might find the story upsetting can avoid it.
The Prompt:
I want Amanda. She is pregnant with Spock. She has had several miscarriages before and decides that if she loses this one she is giving up on the idea altogether, eventually she gives birth. happy ending.
So this is sad and angsty with an uplifting ending, don't read if you don't like that sort of thing.
And just in case you're wondering, I am working on something fluffy, and I'll post it soon. I just got distracted by this prompt. So never fear, fluff is on the way!
This one wasn't real, because if it was real, that would mean getting emotionally involved and Amanda didn't want to deal with any of that. This was the last time—Sarek had agreed, or no, she had convinced him, screaming and crying, pounding her fists against his chest. It was tampering with nature, he had argued at first, before describing his deeper, more personal offence that she should want to throw his seed away.
"I just can't do this anymore!" she'd cried hopelessly, sitting down and putting her face into her hands. And when he'd put his arm around her, she'd seen—she'd felt that in his mind, never having another child, when there was only the one, who was so lost and so far away seemed a far worse fate than the constant stream of failed attempts, the pinwheel of hopes that never stopped spinning.
"I'm sorry, I just can't do it anymore," she'd whispered, wishing things were different, wishing she had the courage to do it—for him. And he hadn't answered, but slowly lifted her into his lap and pressed his cheek against hers, running his hand down her shoulder and across her dress which fanned out over her full body. He didn't like it, but he agreed. There would be no more attempts. They sat there a long time, as the sun changed angles and moved slowly across the room.
She'd never known she'd wanted kids before Sarek, but there were so many things she'd never known she'd wanted before him. There had been so many things she'd worried about back then: her career, her friends, finding the perfect man. But she'd never quite fit—always the quiet, kind, looked-over one, far too practical to engage in the usual workplace and social drama. Always the responsible one, the spoilsport that followed the rules and made everyone look bad.
She'd met Sarek when his car had broken down not far from her school, because of course she was the sort of person who went and helped when she saw someone's car broken down. He'd already summoned his attendants to look after the matter of getting his car fixed and finding him transportation to his next meeting, but he chatted with Amanda while he waited. She wondered if it came with being an ambassador, but she liked him immediately. He seemed so interested in every detail of her life, her family, her school. Somewhere in there, he asked her out for dinner, and at the time, she didn't know what to make of it. She considered the possibility he might be interested in her. She considered the possibility he might want to thank her for stopping to help him. She considered the possibility he might be collecting data about his constituents.
But that night, his intentions became clear as he shuttled her to a small, out of the way restaurant, accompanied by a driver and two guards who seemed to have been trained not to ask questions. As they ate, he subtly flattered her while interjecting the story of his life: his Vulcan upbringing, his career, his deceased wife. He didn't tell her about his son—that was for a few weeks later, when they were sitting in front of the fireplace after a romantic evening and he told her his deepest secret. That he always blamed himself for the way things had turned out with him. That he had been too young, too self-absorbed to pay proper attention to his son.
It was two months later when Sarek let his hand brush against hers, and at the time Amanda had thought it was an accident, although since then she had come to realize that accident wasn't a word that existed in his vocabulary. As he touched her, she felt a burning passion. He had pulled it away, as if embarrassed, but later that night, he had followed her into her apartment and pushed her against the wall, kissing her possessively. He touched her mind, and she could hear him thinking violent thoughts towards any man who so much as thought about touching her. Amanda didn't think there was much risk of that, but it made her feel special that he cared about her so much, wanted her so badly.
The next time Sarek saw her, he was down on his knees with a ring that must have cost two months of some exorbitant, interplanetary salary. This meant leaving everything, giving up everything she had ever known to follow Sarek to an alien world. And she thought that there were so many things about her life that she didn't like that she might as well start a new one. And she loved Sarek, she knew that and if sacrifice wasn't love, what was? She put on the ring and she kissed him, and she could feel her mind fill with wild glee.
She had been so young and naive back then, only thinking of the dream of having a man whisk her out of her day-to-day life, not the reality. She had never thought much about what her life would be like on Vulcan. Of course, there was no work for a human teacher, and of course she didn't have access to the gym, the TV, her usual diversions. And the servants wouldn't let her do a bit of work. Without Sarek, the days were long and boring.
She tried to socialize, but people seemed to disapprove of her. Sarek had never said anything to her, but Amanda knew his family questioned his judgement in marrying her. Alien whores went with Sarek's position like political summits and drunk evenings competing over who could recite the most digits of pi, but he had actually brought one home.
"You say that you believe that humans are just like us," Amanda heard Sarek tell his mother one night, "But then you say a human cannot be a proper wife."
Sarek must have convinced her though, as when Amanda met her, she was nothing but guardedly polite.
Those first two months were the worst, though. Each day seemed endlessly expansive, and sometimes Amanda wondered if she could get through the next one. And there was no timeline—she was sure she could get through a month like this for Sarek, or even a year, but what if she ended up slowly sacrificing her entire life for him? But she didn't blame him—he had been completely honest, she just hadn't thought it out.
Then just as she was starting to give up, just as she was wondering if she would ever be able to bring herself to leave Sarek, she'd met T'Eleel. It had happened one morning when Amanda was so bored, that she had demanded to go into market despite the servants' insistence that they would fetch anything she needed. Reluctantly, they'd helped her cover up—they felt the wife of someone of Sarek's stature shouldn't be showing skin in public, and she'd gone and looked at booths for a couple of hours. Eventually, she saw T'Eleel buying jewellery for her eldest daughter, who was about to be bonded. She had three other kids, and a nanny to care for them waiting behind her.
"They are so well behaved," Amanda had commented, in standard, without thinking. T'Eleel raised an eyebrow, as if she didn't believe this, before seeing Amanda's face.
"You are Sarek's wife," she stated.
Amanda nodded and they got to talking and it turned out she lived only a few houses away. Amanda thought that she had heard of the family—Vulcan mating was extremely inefficient, and four children was an improbably huge family. Behind their backs, there were always rumours that they had 'used technology'.
T'Eleel came to visit the next day, and the servants, perpetually prepared for such an occurrence, served her and Amanda tea and pastries. T'Eleel turned out to be quite the gossip and stayed talking to Amanda until Sarek came home, and she realized the time and ran off. But the next day, she called to invite Amanda to meditation group, and after that it was a fundraiser for the temple, and soon Amanda was doing all the things that the other wives did to keep busy.
Some women snubbed Amanda at first, but T'Eleel had a sharp tongue, and had no problem telling off anyone who was rude to her, while slipping in any nasty rumours she might have heard lately. So Amanda started feeling a bit more at home on Vulcan, and thought she might even be starting to like the way things had turned out.
But she was also starting to feel a bit jealous of T'Eleel. Her children seemed so darling, and once, when she had brought her youngest to meditation group, Amanda had stroked her little ears and whispered,
"I wish I had one."
"Me too," T'Eleel had joked. Her four-year-old had managed to combine her Persian rugs with cold cream that morning.
"It is all predetermined," she added, mimicking the tone of the meditation group. But then she leaned in close to Amanda's ear and whispered,
"But I have heard screwing helps."
Amanda had to cover her mouth to keep from piercing the meditative silence with laughter.
T'Eleel was right, though, and a few months later, Amanda was pregnant. She was so happy, she loved Sarek and knew he wanted to make up for the mistakes he had made with his first son. And he was so pleased when she told him—none of that human stuff, being afraid of responsibility, thinking that getting his wife pregnant was a bad thing. But he was also concerned. Amanda had always thought that it would be enough just to conceive, but it turned out that the baby would need genetic modifications to have any chance of surviving.
So Sarek took her to see the best genetic scientists he knew, and they poked her and prodded her for hours before putting her into a chamber to do modifications. She was completely alone—Vulcans didn't believe in the emotional need to be accompanied, and the chamber was bright and garish, with none of the comforting silver and white that humans associated with technology. But it was painless as they promised, and at the end, they said the modifications had been a success.
She was so excited, and Sarek was too, in his own quiet, understated way.
"My son," he would whisper sometimes, putting his hand on her belly, and she could feel that her having his child made him truly happy. She had never quite appreciated how important family was to Vulcans, but now she knew that he considered having another son one of the best things that could happen.
The first one lasted five months. One evening, Amanda was sitting on the couch reading when she felt cramping followed by excruciating pain.
"Sarek!" she screamed urgently, and the servants got to her before he managed to get down from his study. But it was obvious from the way that she was clutching herself that she needed to go to the hospital. They loaded her into the car and Sarek ran down and joined them and they started driving.
Amanda felt woozy and disoriented. She wasn't quite sure what was happening. She felt breathless and thought she might be bleeding, but she wasn't quite sure. As they turned in, they were met by a group of paramedics in white robes who carried her into emergency. She was really having trouble breathing now.
They undressed her, and then she heard a doctor say to Sarek,
"Her blood is mixing with the baby's blood, this is very dangerous. I recommend immediate removal of the fetus."
"Is there any chance of saving him?" he asked.
The doctor shook his head,
"At this point, miscarriage is inevitable, and waiting could seriously damage your wife's heath."
"It is logical then," Sarek agreed after a minute, and the last thing Amanda could remember was being wheeled into surgery.
When she woke up, it was a few minutes before she remembered what had happened. She opened her eyes, and blearily saw Sarek. Then she remembered his conversation with the doctor.
"You didn't let them?" she whispered, and he walked over confused. And then she looked down and felt her belly,
"You let them!" she accused.
"You were very ill. They said that nothing could be done," he said impassively.
And then she closed her eyes. She didn't want to talk with him.
Her anger lasted for weeks. She was angry at Sarek and angry at herself. Her baby had been doing so well, up to that morning. How could they have possibly known that it was inevitable? She should have fought harder she thought, she should have stopped them, no matter what they had said. What if they had pulled out a perfectly good baby?
T'Eleel was sympathetic and kept quiet for once as Amanda spent an entire afternoon explaining why Sarek was a terrible person. But a few weeks later, they heard back from the scientists who had done the genetic modification. They had analysed the fetus and said it had no heart, lungs or brain. There was no way it could have possibly survived.
Amanda cried a lot that day. She was glad to be free from the guilt, but she was also sad that her baby had never had a chance. But strangely, the news made Sarek feel much better. A child without a heart, lungs or a brain didn't seem like much of a child to him, so he didn't feel it was as big of a loss. Amanda thought that this was a terrible thing to think, and got upset at him until he told her quietly that he couldn't just change the way he felt because she wanted him to, that he had to be far more practised in emotional control to do that. And he thought that she should focus on the good news: the scientists were pretty sure what the problem in the baby's genetic code was, and they thought they could do a better job the next time.
And while they wanted to try again, Amanda was still too upset, and so was Sarek, although he wouldn't admit it. And he wasn't much interested in her anyhow. He was feeling sluggish. After arriving on Vulcan, she had come to realize that Pon Farr was only part of Vulcans' varied and cyclic sex drives. There were many theories about this, whether it was the portion of the day that was lit, or the gravitational pull of nearby planets. But Amanda always believed the one about pollen, because the days that Sarek couldn't take his hands off her, it was always windy.
So it didn't surprise her that on a day when it was storming so severely that the windows were moving in their panes, Sarek cornered her after dinner with ardent eyes. She wasn't sure if she was ready, but when he put a finger to her forehead and sheared his passion with her, she wanted him. It hurt more than she expected—in their haste, the surgeons hadn't been so careful about where they'd cut, but it felt good to be in his arms again. It felt good to be together again.
It was a few months before she was pregnant again—or at least she thought she was pregnant. The doctor said it was hard to be sure. She had to be pregnant for two months before they could do the genetic modification, and before then it was hard tell reliably whether she was pregnant at all, especially after a miscarriage.
"But I know I was pregnant," she told the doctor after her period was three weeks late, "I felt sick and it was heavy."
"Of course a late period is going to give you cramps and be heavy," the doctor told her and Amanda wanted to hit him.
This happened three more times, once getting up to two days before the two month mark. Amanda tried to convince herself that it was just the hormones from the last one messing things up, but she never quite managed. But then, she got to the second month, and went into the chamber again and they did the modifications. But as time went on, she began to worry constantly.
T'Eleel tried to comfort her by saying that it was improbable that the geneticists had made a mistake twice, and Sarek told her that it was all predetermined and worrying was illogical. But neither helped. She worried that ever cringe and tug was a sign that something was wrong with her baby.
"When is a Vulcan infant viable?" she asked Sarek one night as they watched the news.
"About six months, like a human," he said, trying to encourage her. But she could feel his thoughts sometimes, and while she knew that he wasn't lying, he was leaving out details. Viability was a concept that assumed that the only thing preventing a baby from surviving was not having spent enough time in the womb. With a genetically modified baby, that wasn't a valid assumption. The organless baby had shown them that.
As she approached six months, she walked on eggshells, terrified that her pregnancy was about to end. But she crossed six months, and then another week passed and then another. She was at seven months when she went into labour.
The birth went extremely well—the biggest problem was that Sarek thought that it was illogical to attend considering that it could take a whole two days for her to give birth. The nurse said that the fact the she was more upset about this than her physical condition was a good sign. It went quickly, even with the scarring from the haphazardly-done surgery, and Amanda was relieved to hear a soft crying after what seemed like only minute.
"A girl," the nurse said, even though Amanda had already known that. She looked so excited that the nurse took pity on her and let her hold the baby for a few minutes before taking her away to bathe and immunize her.
She was tiny, but had a perfect little nose and mouth and ears. As the baby sucked at her finger, Amanda decided that she was going to call her Emily. Sarek hadn't thought that the name was appropriate for a part-Vulcan child, but that's what he got for deciding that his daughter's birth wasn't an important enough event to attend.
The nurse took Emily away, and came back a few minutes later with her cleaned up and dressed in a jumper that was surprisingly cute for a Vulcan hospital. Sarek finally showed up, and he looked so pleased and almost cracked a smile as he delicately lifted his daughter above his head. It warmed Amanda's heart to see him moved her close and kiss her on the cheek, and then bounced her lightly, holding her to her chest. He was far too happy to be worried about trivial issues like names.
As Sarek was cradling Emily, she let out two coughs. This was normal for a baby getting used to breathing, but after a few minutes, she started to cough more, a heavy, hacking cough. Sarek handed her back to Amanda and went to get the nurse, who took one look at Emily and whisked her off.
They could hear the coughing from another room, and then just heavy breathing and then an eerie silence. They didn't know it at the time, but Emily had a genetic defect and her blood had been slowly solidifying since birth. The doctors had tried to save her by giving her anti-coagulants, and she had bled to death.
It was a long, terrible ride home, and Sarek told the driver to stop right before they got to their house and ran ahead. At the time, Amanda had thought that he was getting the servants to come and help her, but later she learned that he had the traditional "new born party" had already been in swing, and he was making sure that the last guest had left and the last decoration had been taken down so that they could grieve in private.
Those first few days were the worst of Amanda's life. That hour that Emily had been alive had been so perfect, and it seemed so wrong that she was gone. And it was worse seeing how it affected Sarek. He was emotional and irrational, often lashing out at the servants over the smallest details of the funeral arrangement. And once, Amanda found him sitting on the edge of the bathtub, crying. Not loudly, but there were definitely tears running down his cheeks. She touched him, and she could tell that he irrationally thought that he was being punished for everything wrong that he had done. Seeing Sarek in that state frightened Amanda. If he couldn't hold it together, what hope did she have?
Eventually, the funeral passed, and they tried to return to life as usual. Sarek went to work at the embassy, and Amanda tried to get back to her daytime activities. T'Eleel would come and visit sometimes, always without her children, but Amanda found it hard to care about her gossip, and always cut the visits short.
"You are doing great, I have no idea what I would do," T'Eleel always told her, but Amanda didn't agree with her. She still thought about it every single day, and some days she thought the grief would overwhelm her. But slowly, the grief faded and Amanda just felt numb.
She started agreeing to everything T'Eleel invited her to, and stolidly marched her way through. She said that it was okay if she started bringing the kids over again, and the first time, she felt a dark cloud of jealously, but she managed to breath evenly and tell herself that it wasn't T'Eleel's fault what had happened. That T'Eleel was a good friend and deserved all the good things in the world.
Eventually, Sarek wanted to have sex again, and Amanda agreed, because regardless of how she was feeling, as she had to start doing things, she had to move on. And she was late for her period one, two, three, four times. But she tried not to think about it. Tried not to count at all. But the fifth time, it became obvious even to Sarek that she was coming along, and they went to see the genetic scientists. Amanda was ambivalent, but Sarek convinced her,
"If we go, he might make it, but if we do not, it is certain."
And she felt him grow, like the last one. Then he passed the six month mark, and then he started to kick. This was when Amanda really started to worry. He would kick a lot one day, and then he would stop, and she would be afraid he was dead, but then he would start again a day later. There were whole nights she would stay awake worrying, waiting for him to kick.
It was one of those frazzled, sleepless mornings that she'd screamed at Sarek,
"I just can't do this anymore!"
And he'd reluctantly agreed to put an end to it, although she wished she hadn't screamed at him, she wished she could be strong.
So, then, it was just the waiting. Waiting for the baby to be claimed by one of the myriad of imagined dooms. Not that it mattered, because she'd already accepted that it wasn't going to work out. That it was going to end and then they would stop trying.
But he made it full term. He made it full term and three days. And while Amanda found herself thinking darkly that soon they would find out what genetic defect he had, she couldn't help but cling to an inkling of hope.
It was a complicated birth, he was quite large, and in the end, they had to cut to free him. Amanda heard a loud wailing cry, and she motioned to the nurse that it was okay to clean him up and do her stitches before she held him. She could hear him scream the whole time, and eventually he was washed and dressed and in her arms.
She looked at him, not sure what to think. Would he really be okay? Would it be better just to not get attached? But then he looked at her with his huge eyes and started sucking at her neck and she knew that she could never let him down, that no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't keep herself from loving him.
Sarek came and brought them home, and there must have been a hundred people packed into their living room. Amanda saw all of Sarek's family, some of his colleagues from the embassy, and much to her surprise, her mother and her sister.
"Well, there he is," her mother said, taking the baby from her arms and inspecting him, "What did you call him again?"
"Spock," Amanda answered, deciding to pass on the naming shenanigans this time.
"Gorgeous," her mother said, staring at Spock with a crooked grin, her fingers lingering on his ears, as if they were the one imperfection that couldn't be helped.
But Amanda didn't have much energy for standing, let alone socializing, so she took him back and went to sit on the sofa.
"I told you that it was highly probably that you would have a healthy baby," T'Eleel said, coming up behind her. She had her husband with her, and Amanda could hear her kids running around underfoot in the living room.
T'Eleel picked up the baby and admired him, and then passed him to her husband.
"Give him back!" Amanda yelled, but she shook her head at her,
"There are a hundred people here who want to see him."
And Amanda tried to get up, but her muscles were still stiff from giving birth and she just fell forwards, which T'Eleel found amusing. But she could hear baby Spock crying in the distance, so everything was okay.
"I don't think I'm ever going to get sick of that sound," Amanda told T'Eleel after awhile.
"Trust me," she said, "I think you will."
That night, after all the guests had left, a very tired Sarek and Amanda went up the stairs. Sarek had moved the crib into their room, as Amanda said that there was no way she was going to be separated from Spock for awhile.
As she fell asleep, she felt Sarek's hands close around her, she felt his love well up through her. And she thought she could feel a tendril from the baby across the room as well. And she wondered if conquering all was too much for love. And she certainly knew that love wouldn't save her. But maybe it was enough that love had changed everything.