Prologue: Fourteen Months Earlier
A crowded room. People moving about quickly, going about their lives, paying her no notice. She feels strangely out of place, and not sure she should be there, even though she knows that, logically, she is supposed to be there just as much as anyone else in the crowd. Her eyes scan the room, although she isn't sure what she hopes to see.
There's a yell from behind her, and many sets of eyes turn to look at the man who caused the disturbance. Hers are among them. But unlike everyone else in the room who has turned to him, it is her eyes he meets. It is her that he makes a beeline towards.
He is so recognisable, even out of uniform; his blonde hair and blue eyes and pink human skin standing out amongst the alien crowd.
"Tsuruna* Sycune," Jim Kirk drawls elegantly, in the same manner that has made many a woman – and a few men - weak at the knees. He tips his hat almost mockingly, but she gets the feeling it is not she who is the joke. "Fancy seeing you here."
"Captain Kirk," she says, giving him the customary salute.
"Please," he says, waving the salute off with a wide grin. "All things considered, I really think you should call me Jim."
"Congrats," Doctor McCoy said from somewhere to the side of the examination table. "You're pregnant." His voice, however, indicated that his felicitations were far from sincere.
Sycune's eyes widened noticeably. "I'm what?" she asked.
"Pregnant. Full of eggs. Fertilised eggs. Eggs that you are going to need to lay somewhere in the near future."
"I know what pregnant means," Sycune replied, almost sharply. "But you have to be mistaken."
"The scanner doesn't lie, lieutenant," McCoy said. "It says you have over one hundred developing life forms inside your egg sack. Welcome to motherhood."
"No," Sycune argued. "That's not right. You don't understand. I cannot be pregnant. It is not biologically plausible. Your equipment must be malfunctioning."
McCoy eyed her. "You're one of Spock's, aren't you?" he asks. "A science officer? You all talk like him."
"I work closely with Commander Spock, yes," Sycune said. "But it's not pertinent to my situation."
McCoy sighed. "Well, you can deny it all you want. You are pregnant. I realise it's unusual for your age-"
"Unheard of," Sycune interjects.
"You're a medical marvel then," McCoy said with biting sarcasm. "As I was saying, it's unusual for someone your age to bear fertilised children. I assume why this is why you didn't use contraception?"
Sycune nods, almost dumbly. "You assume correctly, Doctor."
"Your circumstances are unusual, I'll grant you," McCoy admits. "We will need to discuss them further. In particular, the location of your… birth? Laying? I'm sorry, I'm a little out of practice with the terminology of your species."
"That is quite alright, Doctor," Sycune felt herself saying. She felt a little like she was on auto-pilot; she hadn't yet accepted the fact that she we pregnant. "I find that I, too, need some time to acquaint myself with the idea. May I please schedule another appointment to consult with you further?"
He agreed, but she recognised the expression that humans used to show concern on his face. It was not unusual, but she did not entirely understand why he wore it. She had used the correct formal words to request an appointment; she was sure she had not broken any rules of custom or strange human taboo.
She did not dwell on it. She had more pressing matters to worry about. Swinging herself off the bed, she felt her tail twitch behind her and gave a small sigh of relief. That was undoubtedly the worst part of medical examinations; the necessity of lying on her back while being scanned meant that her tail was confined and compressed during it, a sensation which the Rhagoh as a species found distinctly uncomfortable. Sycune was no exception.
"Lieutenant Sycune," Doctor McCoy said as she slid off the elevated bed. "This may be a personal question, and you're under no obligation to answer, but may I ask who the father… or fathers… are?"
Sycune paused. The Doctor would find out inevitably, of course. Not only because it was a cross-species pregnancy but also because of who the paternal parent was. But did she really want him to know right now?
"I assume doctor-patient privilege still applies, Doctor?" she asked.
"Of course," he replied.
"Even where the knowledge may prove controversial or affect the doctor personally?"
Sycune saw the doctor's expression flicker before it was replaced with a more unreadable one, but she was not yet so well versed in human expression and emotion as to be able to read what it was. "That goes without saying," Doctor McCoy said smoothly.
"I needed your confirmation of it," Sycune said. "Because the only possible father is Captain Kirk."
Several hours, and an entire gamma shift, later, she found herself staring into the small mirror above the sink in her shared bathroom. Red, pupil-less eyes stared back at her out of a face of jet-black scales. Where humans had hair, she had four red frills that protruded from her head at different angles depending on the emotion she wished to convey. Amongst her species, changes of facial expression were difficult and unnatural. Communication using her face would be as illogical as humans expressing themselves by wiggling their ears. Instead, the Rhagoh used their frills in much the same way as humans used smiles and frowns.
Her face was otherwise similar to a human's, except for the protrusion of her jaw and nose which formed a very small snout. She'd read descriptions of her species from the viewpoint of humans in the text books in the academy, which had described her facial structure as "catlike". She'd seen a few cats in her time on Earth and disagreed. Cats were disgustingly hairy and their bones were delicate and fragile. There was nothing fragile about her.
Her scales extended down her neck, beneath the collar of her Starfleet uniform. Her only scale-less patches lay over her egg-glands just above her hips, and even they were covered with a thick hide for protection.
Often she wondered how the human race had managed to survive its primal stages to progress to space exploration. Her body could not easily stand modern weapons, it was true, but in primal times their species had survived a harsh environment to develop technology to aid their survival. From what she knew of Earth's evolutionary history, humans had developed in an almost-equally inhospitable place, filled with natural phenomenon detrimental to their welfare and millions of other species all clamouring for survival. It was counter-intuitive, in her opinion, that weak and fragile humans had survived where magnificently strong species such as Earth's rhino had declined and faded away.
Behind her, her tail flicked back and forth. Uhura had once described its movement as 'catlike'. She didn't know what it was with the human species and cats, but it seemed to her that if they could link it to a cat, they would. Personally, she found cats creepy and unfriendly, and it was almost insulting to her that people described her species as having 'catlike' qualities, even if they were positive ones such as grace and balance.
The door connecting to the other quarters swung open suddenly, startling her. "Oh, I'm sorry, Sycune," Uhura said, seeing her there. "I didn't know you were in here. The door was unlo- What's wrong?"
Sycune realised her frills were angled downwards and quickly smoothed them back on her head. Most people on the Enterprise did not know how to read her body language, and since joining Starfleet she'd experienced great freedom in her expressions. It was rarely necessary to hide her feelings, because the humans (and most of the alien species aboard) could not understand the manner with which she expressed them.
But unfortunately she often forgot that Uhura was one of the few people who could read her body language. One of the first things Uhura had asked her when they found out their rooms adjoined was if she could teach the human woman her home language. Sycune had readily agreed; it made her less homesick to have someone to speak with in her native language, and Uhura was a quick learner, interested in learning every tongue that caught her ear. The two had quickly bonded while they conversed – stiltedly at first – in both Standard and Rhogan.
"Nothing," she said quickly. "I'm fine."
"You're clearly not," Uhura said switching to Rhogan. "Don't flatten your frills. I saw that look."
There was something about Uhura's familiar tone that made Sycune drop her pretence, allowing her frills to flare downwards again. Or maybe it was just the use of her native language, right at the moment when she wanted her family and her own species around her to reassure her.
"I've run into a bit of a problem, Nyota," she said, also in Rhogan. Speaking in the clicks and whistles that combined with the guttural throat sounds that Rhogan had in common with the English language reassured her a little, and made her shoulders slump in resignation. "I think I might have made a mistake."
To her relief, Uhura didn't say anything. She just took her hand and led her back into her room. She sat them down on her bed before asking, "What's happened?"
"This is an unusual situation," Doctor McCoy said, as they sat in his small office a few days later. "Not unheard of – there have been members of your species who've had their eggs fertilised when they were older than you are now. But there aren't many of them, and it's never been across species. That could possibly explain why you fell pregnant so easily, despite it being biologically unlikely."
She didn't really want to hear McCoy speculate on the biological facts of her species. She knew how her species reproduced; they had only a brief window for fertilising their eggs when they first hit sexual maturity, and although conception is extremely likely, the young age at which sexual intercourse had to happen for this to occur meant that many of her species chose not to have their own children. It was an evolutionary trait designed to ensure a higher ratio of young to parents; they laid hundreds of eggs at a time, and while not all would hatch, there would still be far too many for a single pair of rhagoh to raise alone. They were designed to band together like wolf-packs to raise the young for a better chance of survival.
She'd missed her chance at egg-laying; she'd been studying to join Starfleet. It hadn't been something she'd regretted, even seven years after the window of opportunity had closed. The good thing about intelligent species was that they weren't bound by the evolutionary design of their kind. Should she desire when she was older, there were plenty of adoption agencies that operated on Ragohn. In fact, due to an imbalance in the amount of parents to hatching young each year, Ragohn had been one of the first planets to open their adoption services intergalactically.
"What about the development, Doctor?" she asked. "Will their parentage affect their gestation?"
"It already has," he said. "You're only fourteen months along, but already they have developed appendages. You'll be ready to for external ovipositionn in just over five months."
"That means laying eggs?" Sycune asked. Her Standard wasn't that good.
"Right. You'll be able to schedule shore leave for that time, to return to your home planet for breeding purposes. You'll be attended by the doctors once you get there, and by me in the meantime." He looked at her seriously. "Neither the parentage nor the age at which you conceived should cause further complications," he told her. "The only difference will be the half-human part of them, which will make gestational development quicker. Instead of taking twelve years to hatch, they'll only take nine. And they will form slightly differently to both humans and rhagons."
"How differently?" she asked.
"History teaches us that it'll vary. It'll be like a basket of mix-species kittens. Some'll look like their mum, some'll look like their dad, and some'll be a mixture of the two."
If Sycune had been human she would have rolled her eyes. Again with the cat comparisons. "And… adoption is still an option for them?"
"Very much so," McCoy said. "I look briefly into Rhogan birthing and adoption programs. It turns out half-human children are high in demand, intergalactically."
"It is your species' tendency towards racism," Sycune told him. "You try to overcome it, but you still want other beings to be as much like you as possible." She said the words without thinking, and did not consider their offense until after she'd said them.
But Doctor McCoy just smiled wearily. "Something tells me you and Mr Spock must get on like a house on fire," he told her. "You are very similar."
"Commander Spock is an intelligent and logical individual. I'll accept your statement as a compliment," Sycune said carefully.
McCoy laughed at that. "Not actually what I meant, but alright," he said. "Now, about the father…"
"It is not Starfleet regulation for the father to be informed," Sycune said automatically. "Nor is withholding it from him breaking any sort of intergalactic law."
"It's not against regulation, no," McCoy said, and Sycune could tell he was speaking carefully. "And as your doctor, I won't pressure you into informing him. But both as your doctor and as Jim's friend, I will urge you to consider notifying him. Regardless of what he says, this pregnancy will be carried out on your terms, and for your peace of mind, Starfleet regulations are designed to protect junior officers who engage in relations with superior officers. And I know Jim. He's a good man. He'll-"
Sycune held up her hand to stop him, seeing as he'd barely taken a breath since he started. "I will, of course, tell Captain Kirk," she said. "I didn't intend to suggest otherwise."
McCoy must have realised he'd gone on a spiel, because he flushed lightly at her words. "My apologies," he said. "I should have let you speak. As Chief Medical Officer, should you wish I can stand in with you when you tell Jim. Starfleet regulations advise this."
Sycune hesitated, and McCoy added. "I'm also Jim's friend. That might help matters. And I can answer any questions he might have."
"Alright then," Sycune said. "Thank you, Doctor McCoy."
"Just doin' my job, kid," he told her. She didn't feel insulted by him calling her kid; she knew that was just his way. She'd even heard him calling Jim Kirk 'kid' before, and he was the captain.
"Still," she said. "Thank you."
"So you're going to tell him?" Uhura asked her later that afternoon.
Sycune nodded. "Tomorrow," she said. "McCoy's scheduled a meeting."
"How do you think he'll take it?" she asked. "Your reaction was surprisingly emotional… for you. Do you think he'll react strongly?"
"The surprise caught me off guard," she replied. "I did not expect to ever lay eggs. And as for Captain Kirk…" Sycune raised her frills in her equivalent of a shrug. "I'm not sure," she said. "To be honest, it's better for him that I fall pregnant than any of the other women he's slept with. My eggs will take a long time to hatch, and even then my species place a very small emphasis on genetic parentage. It is not unusual for fathers or mothers decide to have nothing to do with any of their children, or just to raise some of them, or to invite in multiple people from outside the gene-pool to raise the young."
"You sound like a very laid-back species," Uhura said. "Parenting-wise."
"To us, you seem very strange and uptight. You have all sorts of formal adoption processes and fights over custody, insistence that there be no more than two parents, and an obsession with having a genetic link to your young. We form emotional bonds with our chosen offspring that last a lifetime, and that counts for us more than any biology."
"Your species are truly wise," Uhura says, laughing, but Sycune does not think she is teasing. "How many parents did you have?"
"Twelve," Sycune says. "I was part of a large pod. All my brothers and sisters and serioth are genetically related to me, and they did not separate any of us. It is less common."
"Serioth?" Uhura asks, frowning at the unfamiliar word.
"Third gender," Sycune explained. "You would call them intersex, although they are not quite the same."
"Aren't there arguments?" Uhura asks. "Amongst the parents, when there's so many. Humans have trouble with marriage and parenting when there are just two people; doesn't having a lot more decision makers just exacerbate any conflict?
Sycune smiled fondly. "We are not as argumentative as you humans," she told her friend. "There are arguments, of course, but I think these happen whether there are two parents or twenty."
"But having so many children… I was raised with two parents and two siblings, and it sometimes seemed that there wasn't enough of my parents to go around the three of us," Uhura said. "Having so many siblings, even with an increased number of parents, makes it seem like a school or an institution rather than a family."
"You are very open-minded, Nyota," Sycune said, "but unless you actively try to stop yourself, you still think like a human. You see things in human terms. Our species is not like yours. Our methods are different, but our needs are different as well. We do not need so much supervision, and the majority of our parents do not hold down jobs. For all but one or two members of the larger pods, a family is a full-time commitment for the first ten years; after that they reintegrate themselves into the workforce while everyone takes turns in helping the young take their first steps into the world on their own.
"It's not all the same, of course. We have small families like you do, of only two or three parents. We even have single parents, although they are rare. Our society is varied; even more so than yours. But we form deep bonds. It would doesn't matter that I have over fifty siblings; I am as close to any of one them as you are to your sisters."
"Of course," Uhura said. "I didn't mean to offend. It is just strange to me."
Sycune smiled. "A lot of thing humans do are strange to me. This, for instance." She attempts to move her shoulders in the way she'd seen humans do.
"Are you trying to shrug?" Uhura laughed.
"I am. I know what it means, but I do not understand why you do it. It is so uncomfortable… all that spinal twisting…"
"I guess we're pretty illogical creatures," Uhura said with a smile.
"Indeed," Sycune said smiling back.
"Impossible," the Captain said, pacing back and forth in the cramped quarters of Doctor McCoy's office. "It's been months. It's been over a year!"
"My species has an extremely long gestation period, Captain. Your human DNA is speeding up egg development, but only by a small amount. I have no doubt that you are the father."
"But I take shots!" He turned to Doctor McCoy. "Don't I, Bones? I'd had my injections, even all the way back then?"
McCoy sighed. "You had," he confirmed. "But."
"But?"
"But. The injections work by giving the sperm an avoidance to human eggs; in a human female, they'll avoid penetrating the egg at all costs. This type of contraception works on some other species, but generally only the ones closest to humans. Rhagoh, it seems, is not one of those species."
"And you couldn't have told me this before you gave me the shots?" Jim had paled considerably. "God, how many children might I have running around out there?"
Bones sighed. "Did you completely miss 'Fleet orientation?" he asks. "This is why we recommend barrier protection such as condoms. And it's also part of the reason why there's a Starfleet regulation requiring you to get permission from your Captain and your Chief Medical Officer before you engage in intimate relations with an alien species."
Kirk rubbed the back of his head. "There's a regulation for that?" he asked. "I guess we've got some things to talk about after this then." He turned back to Sycune. "What are you going to do about the eggs?" he asked.
"I'm going to return to my home planet and lay them," Sycune answered. The question was expected, but she was still pleased he'd asked it. Humans were one of those species that had weird notions about getting rid of developing children. It was probably because, for them, fertilisation was so easy but laying children was so difficult. It was one of the many disadvantages of not laying eggs. "It will take nine years until they reach maturity."
"Nine years. Woah." Jim seemed surprised by the answer. "That's a long time." He paused, and then asked almost hesitantly, "Do your people have any requirements for the father?"
McCoy watched Sycune carefully as she answered. "While the eggs develop there is nothing to be done," she told him. "For the mother or the father, whether they want to or not. We have specially developed breeding facilities to store them in until they come to term." She deliberately left out that, historically, the eggs were laid in large breeding caverns, and overcrowding often resulted in multiple hatchings which had sometimes meant that parental groups went home with the wrong children and did not discover this until years later after the familial bond had been formed.
"And after hatching?" Jim asked.
"That is up to you," she said. When he frowned, she hastened to correct herself. "That is, it is up to the individual biological parents," she said. "Should neither of us return to claim them, then they will be given to other family groups in any way the facility sees fit. If we do return, though, we have primary claim to them, along with whatever family group we choose to form."
"You mean if one of us returns alone or together?" Jim asked.
"No, I mean if we return with other individuals who wish to be part of our parental group."
"Rhagoh society is largely polygamous, Jim," Bones explained. "And although mating occurs between two different-sex individuals, the majority of the species is polysexual. They also form individual romantic relationships within parental groups, so that there may be twelve parents but everyone is paired off with one another, or arranged in groups of threes or fours. Or the whole group may be romantically and sexually involved with each other. Their version of monogamy is not the same as ours."
"Do you even have monogamy?" Kirk asked. "If you've got socially-acceptable ten-person orgies?"
"We have agreed monogamy," Sycune said. "If you are with one person, or two or three people, and you agree to remain within the boundaries of that relationship. And it is not usual for a person to stray outside of their parental group."
"The point is," Bones said, interrupting, "Should you wish, Jim, you could raise these children in nine years' time, with any partner or partners you wish. So long as the group is agreed on before you accept the children."
"What if I didn't have a partner?" Jim asked. His voice seemed a little hoarse to Sycune. "Or if I did, but didn't want to have anything to do with the children? Or if I wanted to raise them on my own?"
Bones raised his eyebrow at this, but Sycune replied calmly. "You could not raise them on your own if I too wished to raise them. Usually in such circumstances an agreement is struck to raise them together, or to split the eggs between us and leave any excess to the facility to deal with."
Jim reeled as if he'd been slapped, and even Bones, who'd researched her species, looked surprised. "That's so… cold…" Jim murmured.
Sycune shrugged. "It is our way," she said. "Families are not formed in blood. They are formed in love and protection and fulfilment. The eggs growing inside me are not my children; they are potentially my children, should I choose to accept them. If I do not, they will be passed along to parents who can love them more and raise them better than I. For this reason, my species does not quibble over splitting up biological siblings. Our brothers and sisters and serioth are those who we are raised with, not who we hatched with."
"It's not so strange, Jim," McCoy murmured. "In fact, that's human psychology at its finest. It's how human adoptive families describe themselves, after all."
"I guess I can understand that," Jim said. "Even if it is strange that they have such an efficient system for splitting up birth families."
Sycune felt bound to defend her species. "We are not totally without the desire to protect our DNA," she protested. "We make allowances for parents who wish to raise their own young."
"I think I need some time to take this in," Jim muttered, pushing out of McCoy's office.
As the door swung shut behind him, Sycune and McCoy exchanged a look. "I needed him to sign my leave form," Sycune said.
"Give it a few days," McCoy advised her. "You seem to have come to terms with it quite quickly, but for us slow, sentimental humans, parenthood is a lot to take in."
"He need not be a parent-" Sycune started to say, but McCoy cut her off before she could finish.
"It's different for us," he said. "We are raised in a culture of parental responsibility. If you create a child, it's yours to care for – or to ensure that it's cared for."
"It will be cared for," Sycune replied. "No matter what action Captain Kirk takes."
"Yes, but for him," McCoy said, "the decision to help raise it is a very important one."
"He has nine years to make it."
"He still needs to accept that there's even a decision to make."
Sycune considered McCoy's words. Against her will, she was reminded of the numb shock she'd felt upon hearing the surprising news. That had been mostly because it was an extremely unexpected turn of events but, she supposed, this must be equally as unexpected for the Captain. "Humans are very empathetic creatures, aren't they, Doctor McCoy?"
He frowned. "I'm not so sure what you mean."
"You have so many loose emotions floating around, and that's the only way you know how to deal with them. We do not feel as much as you. Vulcans do, but they deal with theirs using a system of rigid control and suppression. But humans… you let them sweep through you, but to prevent yourself from living in a world of chaos you learn to pull them back when they may become distressing to others. You do not always succeed… but you try. And you call this empathy, and teach your children that it is right."
"You don't have a concept of empathy, where you come from?" McCoy asked, surprised.
"We have a concept similar to it," Sycune said. "But it is looser, and we give it much less importance. Perhaps we are wrong for that. I think should Captain Kirk and I both choose to father these children, I would not be adverse to him teaching them. Thank you for your assistance, Doctor McCoy."
As she strode out of his office, her tail twitching behind her, she could have sworn she heard him mutter, "Damned unemotional aliens".
She followed the doctor's advice and waited a few days before requesting Captain Kirk sign her leave form. She sought him in his quarters after his shift was over, and when she entered, he seemed to be wearing a resigned expression, as though he'd been expecting a visit from her. Wordlessly, she held out PADD with the form he needed to sign
"Do you have a preference?" he asked her, as he scrawled his signature on the form.
"I'm sorry, Captain?"
"After they hatch. Do you have a preference for how this will work?"
She chose her answer carefully. "Nine years is a long time. A lot can change. I do not know what I will be doing in nine years, and I suspect that you do not either."
Jim snorted. "I'm hoping I'll still be on this ship."
"Is that likely, Captain?" she asked. "Given how fast you've risen through the ranks, it is not unreasonable to assume that you'd have been promoted to Admiral by then."
"Not if I can help it," Jim muttered.
"You can still be a father aboard a star ship," Sycune said. "Not all parents stay with the young. You would have shore leave, and there would be a group of us to do the day-to-day work."
Jim shook his head, but Sycune recognised that it was not refusal. "Your way of parenting still baffles me," Jim replied. "Although I imagine I'll get my head around it given time. It seems as though I'll have to." He handed the PADD back to her.
"You do not have to do anything, Captain," Sycune said. She realised she was subtly being dismissed, and turned to the door. But before she reached it, she turned back.
"Nine years is a long time," she repeated. "And you do not need to do anything, either now or then. But can I ask you a favour?"
Jim looked surprised. "What is it?" he asked, almost suspiciously.
"Can you contact me? Before they hatch. Even if it is just to tell me you will have nothing to do with them."
"I think I can do that, Sycune. In nine years?"
"In nine years."
The corner of his mouth twitched upward in a small smile. "It's a date," he said.
Epilogue: Nine Years Later
A crowded room. People moving about quickly, going about their lives, paying her no notice. She feels strangely out of place, and not sure she should be there, even though she knows that she is no more out of place than anyone else in the crowd. Her eyes scan the room, although she isn't sure what she hopes to see.
There's a yell from behind her, and many eyes turn to look at the man who caused the disturbance. Hers are among them. But unlike everyone else in the room who has turned to look at him, it is her eyes he meets. It is her that he makes a beeline towards.
He is so recognisable, even out of uniform; his blonde hair and blue eyes and pink human skin standing out amongst the alien crowd.
"Tsuruna* Sycune," Jim Kirk drawls elegantly, in the same manner that has made many a maiden weak at the knees. He tips his hat almost mockingly, but she gets the feeling it is not she who is the joke. "Fancy seeing you here."
"Captain Kirk," she says, giving him the customary salute.
"Please," he says, waving the salute off with a wide grin. "All things considered, I really think you should call me Jim."
*Tsurana is a Rhogan semi-formal honorific, similar to the English "Mrs" or "Mr".