Title: Circular Death

Warnings: Character death and general darkness, spoilers for Yesteryear, Amok Time, TWOK, TSFS, and the reboot.

Summary: Spock Prime has lived a strange and dangerous life. These are the five times he knew he'd die - sometimes correctly, sometimes not.

Author's notes: This is... weird for me. Normally I'm very very much a dialogue person - I can write pieces that are entirely dialogue without realizing it - but this contains not only no dialogue but no personal names. I don't know if it has some nice effect, or if it just comes off as weird. Also, I don't know where this whole idea came from. I really do love Spock Prime, and I kind of hate to make my first official fanfic be basically an excuse to rehash the angst and death in his life, and add some more on top. I'm not usually this morbid, I swear!

Five times in my life, I have been quite logically convinced that I would soon die. And though I am quite alive now, I have once already been proven correct. I am well aware that such a statistic is not normal, but the course of my life - indeed my very existence - has never been normal. I am a hybrid between a Vulcan and a human, two species that were never meant to interbreed. All the medical prowess of both worlds was invoked to insure my conception, gestation, and birth, yet after this, neither world had a place for the unique, mismatched child that had resulted. And partly because of this, I first encountered impending death.

#1

I was seven years old at the time, and attempting to prove my worth and Vulcanhood to the quietly disapproving full-blooded Vulcans around me. The kahs-wan, the traditional ordeal in which I was to prove myself, was yet a month off, but pressed by my own uncertainty and the insults of my peers, I set off into the Forge that day without alerting my family. I have never been certain quite what logical purpose such an endeavor would serve, but to the boy that I was, it seemed the only thing that I could do. And in a strange way, I am glad that I did so.

I had not been in the desert long enough to realize the futility of the exercise when I encountered a le-matya. Naturally, I had seen pictures and holovideos of these huge predators, but I will readily admit that it is an understatement to say I was terrified. Several thoughts made their way through my head as I fled - namely, that I would soon die a painless death from a bite to my neck, that I was vaguely pleased that I had not simply frozen at the sight of the le-matya, and that possesing such presence of mind was not going to do me any good at that moment.

My beloved sehlat - yes, beloved, for such emotions are permitted with regard to one's childhood pet - saved me, along with a man I knew as my visiting cousin. As we left the unconscious le-matya, he told me several things which would guide my later choices in life. Yet in a strange way, they were also my previous choices, for my supposed cousin had been myself.

#2

Many years later, and also several years earlier, I had entered Starfleet and was serving as first officer aboard its flagship, the Enterprise. My pon farr, something I had hoped I would be spared, came upon me and forced us to Vulcan. My betrothed declared kal-if-fee, and had I been capable of such thought processes at the time I would have been convinced then that I would die. Her mate was physically fully a match for me even when both of us were clear-headed, and at the moment he had a distinct advantage over me there. Moreover, he would have kept in practice with the traditional weapons of our people, as I had not been able to do for some time. But I could not reason thus under the circumstances, and registered only dull surprise when my betrothed announced that, defying apparent logic, she chose my captain as her champion in the traditional battle.

The two of us fought then, and in the haze of plak tow I willing attempted to kill my captain, first with lirpa and then with ahn-woon. Finally, it appeared that I had indeed killed him, and as my mind cleared and I fully registered that I had just choked my captain - and my friend - my blood ran cold in deadly contrast to the heat of plak tow, and I knew I would die. Starfleet would court-martial me for the murder, and likely sentence me to death. But even if they ruled extenuating circumstances, I knew I could not live with the knowledge of what I had done - I would commit ritual suicide even if the justice of others spared me.

Neither course of events came to pass, for the ship's doctor had perpetrated an admittedly ingenious ruse to spare the captain's life. Very briefly upon finding him alive, the remaining disturbances in my system prompted me to display overt happiness at his presence, which, though a source of humor for both of them for months thereafter, made me realize the sort of effect this unique assortment of humans was having upon me.

#3

Years passed again, and our lives diverged for a time before reconnecting. We were again aboard the Enterprise, this time for the purpose of training the next generation of cadets. The innocuous mission we had all expected violently disappeared before our eyes, as a man we had thought safely isolated returned to wreak his vengeance. We were all in deadly danger then, yet I was certain enough of our abilities together that I did not believe the battle would kill me, or any of us. Indeed, we managed to defeat the madman, who died with a melodramatic quote from Terran literature, unable to damage our ship further.

But what he had done in his last desperate efforts was quite enough - the warp engines were damaged beyond use, and the object of our conflict was set to explode such that it certainly would kill us. At that moment, I was for the third time convinced I would die, though not from the explosion. I had sworn loyalty to this ship and this captain, and I would discharge that duty in whatever form it was required. There was only one logical thing to be done, I was the only logical one to do it, and so without giving myself time to think it over I quietly vacated the bridge en route to engineering.

There were humans - friends - in engineering who soon realized that I intended to save the ship at the expense of my life, and tried valiantly to prevent me. I could not allow them to do so, though in incapacitating one of them I took the opportunity to set one safeguard against my complete death. And so the Enterprise and all others aboard her were spared, and shortly thereafter, mere inches from a friend I had saved, yet impassably far from him, my conviction of impending death was proven correct.

#4

My last measure to insure my survival in some form was not in vain, and soon my mind and body were largely reunited. Many decades passed, filled with occurrences which I do not have the time to narrate in full. The friends I had made during the first part of my life died off and left me alone - they had human life-spans, and we had always known this would happen, yet it was still hard to bear, even with my hard-won emotional stability. There would never again be a place for me on any Enterprise, and I accepted that.

I followed my father's course into a career of diplomacy, specifically with the intention of closing the ancient rift between my people and the Romulans who are still so strikingly like us. In this endeavor I was not entirely unsuccessful, but one particularly unusual effort I was forced to make toward that end resulted in the shattering of my hopes and those of billions of other people. Through a strange course of events, I was transferred through time and reality, into this timeline where I now reside. And I was not alone.

A far larger ship had pursued my own small vessel, captained by a quite rightly vindictive Romulan. He captured my ship, and in the moments before I disembarked into his cavernous hold, I felt for the first time in many years the knowledge of certain death. The captain was mentally unbalanced, and even a perfectly rational man would order my painful execution on the spot, I knew. And I would have deserved it, I believe.

I half-knelt, half-collapsed in front of him, as much from the exhaustion of the past week as from any vain hope that he would spare me. But he did spare me, for he had other plans - less deadly for me, perhaps, but far more painful. He spared me for the sole purpose of allowing me to witness directed at my own planet - my own people, my own family - the destruction that had taken his own. With a smile devoid of anything akin to pleasantness, he left me with appropriately warm clothing, so that I could be quite physically comfortable as I watched the implosion of what was unmistakably the planet I had left in another universe.

#5

My planet might be lost, and with it the culture and family that I certainly shall not deny I loved. But this reality still held a starship Enterprise, and aboard it all the familiar faces that I had not seen so young for over half my life. They were holding their own against the universe as valiantly as they had in any incarnation, yet they would need all the aid they could acquire in the posts they held so prematurely. There was not much I could do publicly, thanks to the deep secrecy which surrounded the Romulan's arrival, and much of my usefulness consisted of narrating to the relevant Starfleet officials the potentially dangerous or valuable things which another Enterprise had discovered, in years which were long past and simultaneously had yet to come. The contradictions which had long comprised my life came full circle as publicly I yet again disguised myself as my own cousin, under the name which I had used over a century before.

I was still an ambassador, and the remnants of my species accepted me in this capacity. So it was only to be expected that I should eventually find myself aboard the Enterprise as a passenger, being transported to a planet which had long been at peace in my time, but here was still in the throes of a civil war. The crew all greeted me warmly, though none knew quite how to treat me, even my own alternate self. The journey was short, and all too quickly I vacated the familiar guest quarters with the intention of beaming down to go through the familiar motions of diplomacy.

The currently dominant faction of the natives had no such peaceful intentions, and apparently wished to seize the Enterprise in order to demonstrate their superiority. Though suicidally determined, they did not succeed in capturing the ship, and indeed did not appear to have done any damage apart from several dents in the hull and assorted minor damage to the corridors where they had fought with the crew directly. The bridge crew had just begun to chatter with relief about the fact that the ship always attracted any delusional beings within a radius of several light-years, when a call came through from engineering.

The distinctive voice of a very agitated chief engineer came over the intercom, reporting that while the crew's attention had been on fighting off the raiders, others had apparently been engaged in strategic sabotage. The transporter circuits had been damaged beyond any easy repair, the shuttlebay doors were locked and would not respond, and the warp engines were going into overload and would kill anyone who got near them. I quietly left the place at the back of the bridge where I had stood to observe the encounter, and as I did so, thought in grim humor that now not only my alias had come full circle.

What had to be done was obvious yet again, and I was still the only logical choice. My alternate self would have served as well, sharing my inhuman resistance to the deadly radiation, but this reality needed him as it did not need me. In life all that I have done for them was to take from them the lives they would have had, but in death, sacrificing myself permanently this time, I will serve them far better.