Authors Note: thank you all so much for the reviews. I think this is the last chapter, actually I know it is. So here she is, the entire story, all finished. Which is a good thing because this chair is starting to hurt my butt. So please R and R!!!

It would be cliché and trite to say "the rest is history". It also would not do the intricate relationship the two men formed justice. They walked together as one being, dark and light, yin and yang. They were an eternal friendship in a situation with a five-year time limit. If one were to review, in succession, the missions and situations the two officers were involved in the years to follow that one chess game, they would think they were witnessing two very suicidal brothers. Brothers of different parents, perhaps, but brothers all the same.

Doctor McCoy remembers how, at one time, they both beamed up from a landing party, looking disheveled, Kirk sheepish and Spock stoic. They were covered in lacerations, Kirk was limping and Spock had a sprained wrist. They had been captured, they said, and with a shake of the head, McCoy had fixed them up. As he watched them leave, hip to hip, one with a swaggering gait and a smile, the other with an eye brow raised, the doctor realized that, for the duration of the mission, they would equally spend their time, quite simply, attempting to keep the other one from dying. McCoy would spend his time attempting to keep them both from doing so. With a gentle sigh and a lazy wave of a hypo, Leonard McCoy had allowed their forms to disappear as they walked into the turbo lift and he into sickbay, knowing they would be back again soon enough. They reminded him of two small boys, running to their mother with silly grins and skinned knees, holding the others hand while antiseptic was sprayed, both trying not to cry when it stung. That was how it would always be with the two of them: It would be okay until life started to hurt, and it would be okay when the pain began, for the simple fact that they had hands, and they had each other.