Title: Closure
Summary: Spock leaves his home near Atlanta to help the Romulan people before their world is destroyed by a supernova.
This story assumes knowledge of the events depicted in the 2009 Star Trek reboot movie. It also assumes familiarity with my S/U stories beginning with "A Woman's Touch." If you have not read those stories, you need to be aware that in my storyline, Spock and Uhura have a long and happy marriage during which Saavik is like a daughter to them, and Spock remarries 19 years after Uhura dies.
This story follows "The Waking Man."
Closure, Prologue
Spock stood high in the back of the auditorium and watched the restless crowd beneath him. Despite the bittersweet undercurrent in their emotions from having lost so many classmates, the cadets were understandably excited. They had not even officially graduated, although graduation would be little more than a formality at this point, and they had participated in a mission that had averted the annihilation of Earth. Some of them had even been personally responsible for the success of the mission, and no one had been more responsible than the man at the front of the auditorium waiting for the ceremony to begin. The news had not yet been made official, but he had no doubt that Jim was to be recognized as the new captain of the Enterprise. He did not attempt to suppress his feeling of gratification at having contributed in no small way to Jim's success.
The cadets were all so young.
Their lives had been set upon a path that was no less valid than the path his own life had taken. The catastrophic events that had created this timeline had seemingly wiped out his own timeline, yet he knew that his own timeline had existed. He had lived that life. It was real. Could his life as he knew it have simply been erased, just like that? From the moment he had understood that his actions had altered reality, he had pondered the possibility of returning to the future and warning himself to act more quickly, bypass that last quality check, skip that last night's sleep, do anything to get himself into the ship and on his way to delivering the red matter sooner. He could save Romulus and save Vulcan, and in the process cause the reality he was experiencing now never to have existed. Did he have the right to do that? These people, with their lives full of promise and excitement and love and loss, did they not cherish their existence just as much as the people in his own universe cherished theirs? And had his universe truly ceased to exist? The more he considered it, the more he thought that it continued without him, merely running in parallel with this one.
So, assuming that it continued without him, he could go back for no other purpose than simply to return. He could be with his wife and family again. When he had used a ship to do this before, it had been with only a small group of people who had managed essential ship functions. With the proper planning, he could pilot a ship by himself and accomplish the same thing. He would go backward in time to a point before the timelines diverged, and then he would go forward again in the timeline he wanted. Of course, when he, Jim, Nyota, and the rest of them had traveled back in time to find the whales, they had merely been visitors to the past, and their actions had not spun off a parallel timeline. In this case, he would stay once he reached his destination. However, if he were extremely careful and returned to the same point at which he had left, it would also not spin off a parallel timeline. He could step right back into the life he knew.
He remembered the last uncomplicated day in the life he knew. There were no difficult decisions to be made that day, when he, T'Val, and T'Mya went to South Carolina for Rachel's wedding.
End prologue