Spock's ship had hit an ion storm, and the crew was busy doing repairs when he beamed up.

"Can you get down to deck three and make sure all the deflector panels get replaced," the captain said over the Comm. as soon as he had stepped off the transporter pad, "Everybody's running around down there like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off."

So Spock took the turbolift down, and as he ordered everyone to line up and give status reports, he could feel T'Annis brooding. But as the ship moved forward, and he began to assign tasks to teams, her feelings faded, and by the time he was helping the slowest team catch up, he could hardly feel her at all.

No one wanted to be stuck onboard doing repairs once they got to Earth, so everyone on the ship worked well through the night. They finished with a few hours to spare and started doing regular maintenance so that when they arrived, the ship would be in perfect condition.

Spock was beamed down in front of Starfleet Headquarters with a couple of crew members. The towering San Francisco skyline was a skyline was a shock after a week on New Vulcan. As he walked to his car, and there seemed to be more people in the parking lot than he'd seen the entire week.

But when he got home, his street was isolated. It was mid-afternoon, and there was no one out except for a couple of moms dragging their kids in a wagon. Spock went inside and sat down. He hadn't slept in forty-eight hours and was tired, but he knew he had to wait or his sleep pattern wouldn't adjust. He thought of calling Nadine, but she was probably still at the library. Eventually, he went into his study and stating replying to all the messages that had been left for him at work since he was gone.

It had been years since Nyota had been in the study. When she'd retired, she'd left it to Spock and his secrets. It was the only place in the house that wasn't full of signs of her. As Spock had walked through the door, he'd seen Nyota's shoes in the closet, and her blanket on the sofa. As he'd gone to the study, he'd walked past pictures of him, Nyota and Nadine during better times. It seemed strange, thinking of picking Nadine up from the police station and getting calls from school every other day as better times, but now he knew they were. He and Nyota had never really appreciated how good those days had been.

Spock thought of T'Annis and tried to summon his guilt, but it wouldn't come. He wasn't feeling his betrayal, he was feeling grief. And in a way, T'Annis had nothing to do with it. He'd known her for only a few years and Nyota close to ninety. And now she was gone, at least most of her, and while everyone else was rushing to finish up repairs so that they could get home to their families, Spock was alone. And maybe he was a bit like a frog boiling to death in hot water, not realizing the entirety of his loss as the temperature went up degree by degree. But T'Annis had brought it into sharp relief, reminding him of what his life had been like with Nyota.

Finally, the clock hit twenty hundred hours, and Spock decided it was late enough to go to bed. He slept fitfully, plagued by dreams of T'Annis. Not the dreams he'd had before, but reverberations of the dreams of her childhood, as if his brain was adjusting itself to being away from the link. Parts the week were interspersed as well. Once, Spock thought he felt Sunak climbing over him, and moved over to make room on his pillow. But then he opened his eyes and there was nothing but darkness and the empty room.

Spock got up early and waited until it was time to go visit Nyota. He picked up Nadine on the way.

"How was your holiday?" she asked once she had got into his car.

"Pretty good," he answered honestly.

"I think you got a bit of a suntan," she joked after a minute.

And Spock felt his chest tense up slightly, but that was all she asked before launching into a tirade about how her new boss was against her.

When Spock and Nadine got to the hospital, they checked all their metal belongings, a new hospital policy, and went into the ward. They walked to her room, and when Spock saw her, the guilt started to return, the same fear he had felt upon returning from his first time with T'Annis. But when he looked at her more closely, he saw how frail she was, something he had tried to avoid thinking about before now. And then he felt more sorry, not guilty about betraying her, but about leaving her alone while she was so vulnerable.

"Spock," Nyota said after a minute, through squinted eyes. He was the only person she recognized consistently anymore.

"And who are you?" she said brusquely, turning to Nadine.

Nyota had been having trouble remembering Nadine for some time now. In the beginning, it was just because she had aged, and didn't look the same as she used to, and Nyota would remember as soon as she said her name. But now, not the name or the face or even family photos would remind her. Sometimes Nyota would even get hostile, thinking that it was some sort of trick.

Nadine tried not to take it personally. She did take it personally.

"A friend," she said bitterly, not wanting to get into it.

Spock questioned Nyota about her week, but soon she went blank and he started to read to her. As he read her eyes became slits. He wondered if she was listening.

After an hour or so, a nurse came and said that visiting hours were over, and Spock and Nadine left. They stopped at a restaurant for a late lunch on the way back.

"I think that you should try to explain to your mother who you are when she forgets," Spock said softly once they'd been served. He thought that she should be honest. It was something he felt strongly about.

"Why?" Nadine demanded, sticking her fork angrily into her food, "So that she can say that I'm a fraud?"

"It might jog her memory," Spock replied calmly, "She might be pleased to see you, even if she does not remember all the details."

Nadine gave him a disbelieving glare.

"Be pleased to—" she stumbled, before looking up and staring Spock in the eye.

After a pause, she lowered her voice to a crisp whisper.

"She—she never loved me, you know."

Spock tried to argue, but he never got the chance. Nadine had started to rant, itemizing every way she thought that Nyota had mistreated her. Spock sat calmly, knowing Nadine, having heard these things before. Knowing that on some level, she just needed to vent.

When she was done, Spock took her hand and told her, as he had so many times before, about the three babies that had never made it, and how Nyota had never gotten over them. But he stopped part way through, somehow realizing that that didn't make it better for Nadine. That it would never make it better for Nadine. In a perfect world, he and Nyota would have had children of their own and Nadine would have never been born and Nyota would be in good health. But it wasn't a perfect world, and Spock knew that no matter how badly he wanted to make things right for Nadine, he couldn't.

She started crying.

"Oh I wish," she breathed between sobs, "Oh, I wish mom could remember me."

And Spock put his hand on her shoulder and stroked her hair, wishing things were different.