Title: For the World's More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand
Fandom: ST:XI
Rating: PG-13/R
Pairing(s): gen-ish, mentions of Spock/McCoy and Kirk/OC
Warnings: Character death, OCs, mentions of mpreg, bizarre alien biology, angst
Notes: All thanks and praises be to the lovely tenshinokira for her wonderful beta. She provided helpful advice, patiently endured my desperate flailing, and then pushed me to make the story better. There are not enough words to express how grateful I am. She's also the source of the summary.

The title is from a poem called "The Stolen Child" by William Butler Yeats. More specifically, this part:

"Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand"

Summary: The Enterprise tries her best to protect her people. Sometimes things don't work the way they're supposed to.

They meet in the mess hall. V'toyev looks up as an ensign in science blues approaches her usual table. The ensign sets down her tray with a shy smile. V'toyev can tell she's new; in her six months as a lieutenant, she's made an effort to speak to everyone on the ship at least once. This one has an unfamiliar face.

V'toyev grins at her. "How do you like the Enterprise so far?"

"It's okay. Scary sometimes, but I enjoy it. Do you like it?"

"I love it! It's such a rush, especially when we're in the middle of an attack and the engines are straining and consoles are exploding and the ship is shaking like it's going to fall apart…."

"Actually, I prefer research missions."

V'toyev pauses a moment before laughing loudly. "Those too." She holds out a hand. "My name's Nogbura. V'toyev Nogbura."

"Maybiv Tkonyilya."

V'toyev steps out of the way as a giggling Joanna McCoy streaks past, followed by a stern-faced security officer.

"Where're you headed, Kinston?" she calls as he strides past.

"Observation Deck," he yells back, "soon as I catch her."

"Don't let the doctor see you."

"Commander Spock I'm worried about," Kinston says, and rounds a corner.

"V'toyev! Hey!" Maybiv knocks heads with her and scoots over on the bench. "How'd your physical go?"

V'toyev smiles. "Good. Dropped off my eggs, got my teeth checked, normal stuff. It took a bit longer than usual, because he had to throw up. Yours?"

"Good. Checked my tongue." Maybiv makes a very human face. "Whatever he uses to paint that red circle is disgusting."

"Urgh. I can imagine. I fetched you something tasty though."

"Really? What?"

V'toyev holds up a finger and leans forward over the table. After a moment she coughs up a damp but otherwise undamaged apple, followed by one battered looking cookie and a small handful of grapes. V'toyev nods and glances at Maybiv. "See something you like?"

"Hmm," Maybiv says, considering. After a moment she nods, and her tongue shoots out to snag a grape. She smiles and V'toyev smiles back.

"Who do you think would grieve me when I die?" V'toyed asks as the ship limps to Starbase Twelve.

Maybiv clucks in displeasure. "We just got away from a Klingon attack! Can we not talk about this?"

"Come on," V'toyev whines. "Tell me. Would you?"

Maybiv glares. "Of course I would! Why would you even ask me that?"

"Just checking," V'toyev says, as if that makes up for it. She shifts on the narrow bunk that clearly wasn't made for two. "I think Kirk would. He'd miss fucking me, at least."

"He likes you," says Maybiv. "He sees you as a friend."

"That too. It's a shame we don't fuck too often. He's sensitive for days, sometimes, after." She turns her head to look at Maybiv. "Is that normal, do you think, for a human's piece?"

Maybiv shrugs, a human gesture she picked up at the academy. "I don't think so. Has he complained?"

"Not a peep."

"Then it's probably nothing. Maybe it's just his piece; humans are all different."

"Mm." V'toyev looks up at the ceiling again. "Humans are so different. They bleed from their slit rather than lay, and when they feel strongly water comes from their eyes. Sometimes I worry how they'll grieve me when I die, if they'll grieve me at all."

"Why do you talk about death tonight?" Maybiv asks, staring at the ceiling like V'toyev is, watching the pictures she'd hung there to make the room feel more like home.

"Gregor Kinston died today, and no one made time to go and grieve him."

"I'm sorry," Maybiv says. "Maybe…humans do it differently…maybe they're waiting 'til the big service, where they send all the dead out into space at once. Maybe they're waiting 'til then."

V'toyev sighs and clicks her back teeth. "Maybe. It just feels wrong."

They lie there in silence, listening to the hum of the ship, pressed close.

"Would you grieve me?" Maybiv asks softly.

"Of course," V'toyev replies, and takes her hand. "If you died, I'd grieve you like my own sister."

They're in the Xenobiology lab now, talking while V'toyev replaces fried circuitry in the DNA Sequencer.

"Who do you think'll die first?" V'toyev asks, voice muffled from inside the machine.

Maybiv clucks. "Why do you talk about death so much? Isn't it scary?"

V'toyev shrugs in a human way and picks up a set of pliers. "I talk about it because it's scary, to help me not be afraid. Answer the question."

"Hopefully neither of us," Maybiv says, and then "I don't see how this kind of talk doesn't make you sad."

"I think it'd be me." V'toyev says as if she hasn't heard. "I work in Engineering and all. You're in Sciences; they don't usually die."

Maybiv slumps against a nearby console. "I'd be more worried if you were Security, really. You'd have been dead the first week for sure."

"I'd have lasted a month, at least. I thought you had a better opinion of me."

"It's not you I have a poor opinion of. It's the universe. It's full of terrible and beautiful things, and even the beautiful things are dangerous."

"You're not dangerous," V'toyev says. "You're my sister."

Maybiv smiles – it's such a human expression, and accompanied by a happy shudder that's more normal. "You're right, we are sisters. You're the closest sister I've ever had, closer than any blood relative I've got. But you…I think you're dangerous."

"Only sometimes," V'toyev says, and laughs. "Pass me those wires."

"I'll be on tomorrow's away team," Maybiv says to V'toyev, who's sitting on the other side of the table.

Rec-room Three is busy. The crew has the usual pre-away mission jitters, spawned by too many accidents.

V'toyev puts down the cookie she'd been about to swallow. "Since when?"

"Since Commander Spock said so. It's nothing major, just taking a few samples. There aren't any sentient life forms that we've been able to detect. The beam-down point will be humid, which is wonderful."

"Ooh, humidity." V'toyev swallows the cookie she's planning to save for a mid-shift snack and clicks her front teeth thoughtfully. "If you want, I'll see if I can get assigned to your transporter bay. Which one are you in?"

"Seven."

"Seven. I think I know who's there tomorrow; I should be able to work something out." She picks up another cookie, pressing her front tongue flat and opening her second set of teeth so she can chew. "Are you scared?"

"A little. But we're not the first team down and we'll only be down for an hour. I'm even less afraid now I know who'll be working the transporter."

"Yes, but don't get cocky. We should go to bed early tonight."

She and Maybiv knock heads over the table and make quick work of the cookies.

Everything happens too fast to remember clearly. There is the away team screaming for help. V'toyev beaming them up with her heart in her throat. Calling to sickbay. Maybiv falling to the ground, eyelids fluttering out of sync – one horizontally, the other vertically. Blood everywhere, in so many different colours – red and blue and green all over the floor, all over her arms. Maybiv's blue blood drying navy on V'toyev's orangish-brown skin.

Then Maybiv is gone – sickbay – and V'toyev is left standing in the middle of the room with her best friend's blood all over her hands.

"Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck."

"Shut up," Leonard barked. "Get out of the way."

"Fuck," Jim says again. "How'd we even…. Fuck."

Jordan, who'd lead the away team and is currently choking on his own blood, starts to seize. Nurse Igandi is ready with a hypo. Beside him, Crispin is looking a little green. Leonard fights down his own nausea – stupid fucking pregnancy – to tell Crispin to move his ass.

Jordan is the worst off, though the rest of the away team isn't much better. Chapel's got a handle on them, thank goodness. He boots Crispin towards her – he's got no time to deal with greenhorns.

Jordan goes limp and the monitors begin to wail. Jordan's heart has stopped.

Nothing works. Every goddamn trick they've picked up in two and a half years does not a damned thing.

Leonard swears. Igandi calls it.

Nogbura is the last person Hikaru Sulu had expected to see at his door. He's seen her from a distance – with Jim mostly, but also in sickbay and transporter rooms. Her teeth are chattering like she's cold.

"Kirk's not here," he says.

She looks down. "Sorry. He wasn't, and I was hoping, but…. Sorry."

"Are you alright?"

She shakes her head. "My friend was on the away team," she says. "I was looking for someone to talk to."

Part of him wants to invite her in because she looks pitiful, but he doesn't know her very well and he's in the middle of playing cards with Pavel.

He's thinking of a way to tell her to get lost without sounding like a dick when she starts backing away and apologizing for bothering him.

Pavel – when did he come to the door? – reaches out and catches her hand. "Would you like to play cards with us?"

Maybiv slowly blinks open her eyes and sees Sickbay and V'toyev's tired face.

"Va ktoyeltk?" V'toyev grunts.

"Tired," Maybiv answers. "I feel tired."

"Do you hurt? I'll get a nurse…"

"What happened?"

"You were attacked on the planet by some type of insect. You're sick."

"Sna?' Maybiv asks in her mother tongue, and V'toyev looks away. Maybiv nods. "It was coming eventually. I'm happy I got to be with you again first."

"You aren't dying," V'toyev hisses. "You're just sick. The doctor won't let you die."

Maybiv sighs and closes her eyes. "Will you get the doctor then? Or a nurse? Whether I'm dying or just sick, I'm still in pain."

"You aren't dying," V'toyev says again as she stands to get a nurse. "You aren't."

Maybiv blinks horizontally to show that she's heard and waits.

Leonard watches the ensign blink first vertically, then horizontally, then both sets of eyelids at once. He nods. "Any sticking? Dryness?"

She shakes her head.

"Okay. Now," he puts on a face shield and lifts a metal tray. "Hit the target."

With obvious reluctance, she launches her tongue, hitting the red circle on the tray with a wet slap. When she pulls it back she grins. "You made it taste sweet! Thank you!"

He rolls his eyes and scowls, taking a few steps back. "Shut up and hit it again."

V'toyev gently presses her forehead to Maybiv's. "How are you feeling today?"

"Hurting," says Maybiv. "You should have come yesterday; I was better then."

"You were even better three days before that."

Maybiv snorts weakly, then winces. "Everything is dry," she says. "The air, my throat. It hurts."

"Can the doctor give you something?"

"He's tried. How did you get here anyway? Is your shift over already?"

"Mr. Scott sent me away. I was too worried about you to be any use," V'toyev says, and shows Maybiv the burn on her shoulder.

Maybiv squawks. "No, no. You have no business being hurt. It's bad enough that I'm here; I don't think I could bear it if you were stuck here also."

"I'd rather be with you than in engineering!"

"You love the ship, and you're good at what you do. You hate being stuck in one place doing nothing."

"But I am doing nothing!" A graveling noise rises in V'toyev's throat and she struggles to push it back. "You're my sister. I should be here with you, taking care of you, being close to you, not tapping at consoles in engineering like you're some…some…vaghastoyeh, some person I don't love!"

Maybiv understands then, slower than she probably should have. "Some pair we are, trying to mix our two cultures with a human one," she says, and her words are almost bitter. "The only thing that gives me any comfort here is knowing that it's me instead of you."

"And nothing would comfort me more than to be here in your place."

Maybiv carefully eases over on the bed, and pulls a protesting V'toyev down beside her. "You can't be here for me like we want to; human rules are different, and you are needed in engineering. I cannot leave sickbay to pass away in my room like I would want to, because human rules are different, and Dr. McCoy is still trying very hard. So you'll…" She has to stop and steady herself, because the words hurt more than she'd expected them too. She rests her head against V'toyev's shoulder and starts again. "So you will stay with me tonight, as long as they'll let you, and tomorrow you'll go back to work; and when I die, you'll grieve me like family should, and say my people's words over my body. It's a compromise."

"You aren't dying," V'toyev says, but there's no conviction behind it.

An eerie clicking and gurgling sound echoes through Sickbay. The nurses move quietly about their duties.

Grimfaced, Jim Kirk enters and heads straight for Doctor McCoy. "How's my away team?" he asks in a low voice. "Maddox? Tkonyilya? Brillstein?"

McCoy shakes his head.

Kirk swears, slamming his fist into the nearest biobed. "All of them?"

"Ensign Tkonyilya lasted the longest."

"And what is that noise?"

McCoy scowls. "Not every species has tear ducts, Jim."

He jerks his head to the left, where an open curtain shows Lt. Nogbura rubbing her forearms over Ensign Tkonyilya's still face.

They watch in silence as Nogbura rubs her forearms across Tkonyilya's skin, Tkonyilya's grey skin turning purple in response, watch Nogbura's face - contorted in anguish as she makes that horrible sound.

McCoy sighs and closes the curtain.