Disclaimer: I own nothing!
A/N: I've had this in the works for a while now, and am just getting to write it. *Smiles* I hope you enjoy this. The next one in the series is happier than this. Though, despite the angst, I love fluffy Sarek.
Warnings: mentions of dead and suicide and Spock being raised on earth.
Sequel to: Come In, To My Parlor, and Said the Spider.
*
From the beginning, it had always been just the two of them. Mom and Spock. Amanda and Son. They had never had a man to fill the position of father to Spock, but he really didn't care. As long as he had his mother, he would be fine. They would be fine.
Mom was a nurse. RN. She traveled, taking Spock with her when she couldn't book a hotel immediately. Spock saw a lot of waiting rooms, crying families, and coloring books. He carried change only in his small pockets back then as he walked around to eat out of snack machines. They had much gas-station food back then.
Spock swore he would never touch another veggie-dog again after that time.
From a young age, he was easily entertained with newspaper, pens, and coloring books. Really, it was the art. Drawing, coloring, sculpting. It was one of the reasons he'd been so excited when they had settled into a small town with a big hospital that paid well. He finally got to go to school.
Art class became his haven where he honed his skills and perfected his techniques. Even when the other kids teased him, then ignored him, he always had his art, and Mrs. Waddle, to fall back on. He took college classes and did art for the rest of the day that he had at school.
It really hadn't been his fault that he was so smart. All he and his mother had had for reading material had been a dictionary and mother's school padds.
He'd grown up with Webster being his best friend.
But then, then it had changed.
He had entered high school, and found his corner of a place in the art room beside a senior girl with dark eyes. They had hit it off, and Spock had gotten one of his first human friends.
He knew now, that their friendship had never meant to last.
She had already planned to kill herself after graduation. Spock was an unexpected light in the otherwise dark world for her. He had been her friend, but in the end, she had already had it all worked out.
Spock found her with her brains painting the wall behind her bed, the 9mm antique Beretta fallen to the floor with a brightly wrapped birthday present for him.
He still had the unopened gift, the letter of goodbye, and the memory of her damn funeral to stay in his mind for the rest of his life.
During the funeral, he had sent her off with an inside joke that had gotten him kicked out of the funeral home by her parents and had ended up coming to her grave later that night with a bottle of booze and a pack of cigarettes.
He lit her cold stone a cig, opened the bottle, and poured it on the ground for her to have in her coffin. Her closed coffin because she had blown her brain out. The stupid bitch.
It had been more than a year later, with multiple trips to the therapist, before he had started to leave his pain behind.
He had hid away all of his art work from that time of mourning, except for the ink print of her face, smiling, happy. He kept the linoleum and proofs, and the almost empty bottle of ink on his dresser where he could always look and remember that, before she had died, she had been happy…if only once.
Then the worst had happened.
A drunk driver had hit his mother on her way home from work.
He had been so angry that night, so upset. She had said that she would be there, for his Academic Team game, and had never shown up. His team had won, but his mother had died.
He didn't find out until the after party and had turned on his phone.
The hospital had been trying to call him.
He answered the strange number.
The woman's voice had come on.
Spock couldn't really remember what had happened next except that he had got to the hospital in one piece without his phone and with a scrapped knee.
He had identified the body.
He had cried.
He had written out the messages from her address book for the funeral.
It was just close, if not old, friends until he had found the area code for contacting Vulcan. He was smart. He knew that the man showing up would likely be his father.
He had been teased all through school about being a bastard.
He had planned the funeral.
Something small, nice, she would've liked it.
He gave her the glass birds that she had bought for him from a flea-market in Utah.
But now, Spock came to with a quick snap when he felt as someone laid a blanket over his shoulders. He blinked open his tired eyes at the feeling of a thermometer under his tongue and groaned at the bleary picture of Sarek standing over him.
Right. He was on Vulcan now.
Shit, he was supposed to present in class today.
He raised a hand to grab the stick under his tongue, but a hand closed over his wrist and laid the leaden thing back down. Spock found he didn't have the strength to pick it back up again.
"Rest, Spock." Sarek's deep voice washed over him in a warm wave, and Spock could feel the lightest, unobtrusive brush of compulsion as it touched his mind. Sick as he was, he still fought it.
"No." He didn't recognize his own voice. He just didn't want to go back. He didn't want to think about her, about earth. He wanted to stay away from them. Even now, he felt the tears well up and slide down his cheeks at the thought of his mother's funeral.
And here he had thought he had no more tears to cry.
His hand caught his fathers in a tight grip, and he felt Sarek's other hesitantly run through Spock's messy hair with a soothing gesture. Spock felt his body start to fail with exhaustion and tried to struggle back awake.
"Sleep easy, son, for I shall protect you."
He thought he heard Sarek whisper to him in Vulcan, but with his feverish state, he would never be sure.
He went to sleep.