It's not that Spock doesn't like her family, because he does, but they're not his family, and it's not his childhood home, and it's not the neighborhood he grew up in, which despite a five year mission and four years away at the Academy before that is still as familiar to her as the back of her own hand.

"My high school," she says when they're out walking one afternoon, even though it's baking hot. She thinks that he just wants to spend as much time in the sun as possible after so many years on the ship, even though it's not his sun, the one he really wants to be under.

He pauses for a moment, taking in the large building.

He does the same thing, just silently looks when she points out the mark on her parent's kitchen table that she made by breaking a padd on it when she was seven, a story she had told him months ago when they were in orbit around Zeta Eridani VI, thirty six days at maximum warp from Earth.

It's not his first time visiting her family and her childhood home, or his second, or his third, since it's always the first place they return to when they return to Earth, but this stay is longer since they're back, now, jobs waiting for them in San Francisco and the crew turned loose after a long, happy five years together.

But Mombasa is her home – or was – and he can't show her where he grew up, and when they visit New Vulcan it's all new, no memories stored in pieces of furniture or landmarks around the city.

San Francisco is better, slightly, because they have so many shared remembrances of the happy, heady time they spent falling in love there, but the apartment they rent is sterile and bland and she absolutely hates it. Their rooms in the ship were a bit boring, too, but it was the Enterprise and therefore she forgave it for pretty much every shortcoming, not that it had many.

"I want to buy a house," she says while they're folding laundry.

"A house?" he asks and she knows she's surprised him because it's not like him to echo a statement like that.

"Or an apartment or a condo or whatever." She's been thinking about it for a while, ever since they started packing up their quarters on the ship, dismantling the little home they had created for themselves in those rooms. "Something permanent."

"I see," he says and it's better than 'why' or 'explain' or 'based upon what reasoning' and she thinks that she's not the only one who's being slowly driven nuts by their horrible apartment.

"I have five years of savings from the mission, plus that year after – that year while the ship was being refurbished, and the year before that," she says, talking about their past like she always does – like all of them do – the silence filling in for the gaps that are still too hard to actually name. "I think I might start looking."

"Have you established parameters of what you are interested in?"

"No. Yes, I mean, somewhere close to the Academy and HQ. But other than that, no." She starts matching up pairs of socks. "Do you have any preferences?"

"Not particularly."

"Well, if you think of anything, let me know," she says, like she's asking him what he wants for dinner, not if he wants a say in the home she might buy, which he will undoubtedly live in with her.

He hands her a neatly folded stack of her underwear. He's put the nice ones on top, the ones he likes the most, and she shoots him a grin.

"I have savings as well."

"I know."

She puts her underwear away and closes the drawer. He spends money on pretty much nothing. Sometimes a small gift for her, something he knows she wants, occasionally a dinner for the two of them when they're at a space station with a nice restaurant, and once a vacation that was a surprise for their fifth anniversary, which she's pretty sure Jim helped him plan even though neither will admit it. Once, she knows, he sent his father a new isolinear modular resonance actuator, but neither he nor Sarek will actually talk about it, no matter how badly Sarek had needed the device when his unexpectedly blew out. But other than that, Spock's credits are just deposited in his bank account every two weeks, the same as hers.

"Joining our assets would be beneficial as it would afford us a higher priced property, which will likely have a better investment value."

She has no real intention of buying a place just to sell it again, but sometimes Spock needs to justify things to himself in his own way.

"Up to you," she says lightly. "Here are your socks."

"I believe that would be the most logical course of action."

"Good. Great, actually." She leans over and kisses his cheek. "I want to wash the bed sheets today, too."

"They are not sufficiently soiled to merit such an undertaking."

"Hmmm." She kisses his cheek again, his jaw, and down his neck. "But they can be."

"Is that so?"

"Want me to go change?" she asks, nodding over at her underwear drawer.

It's probably incredibly illogical to put on clothes that will just be stripped off within moments, but that doesn't stop him from nodding, his throat working as he swallows, hard.

…

"Why?" Jim asks, sticking his spoon into her cup of ice cream so that she has no choice but to dig her elbow into his ribs and jerk her cup away.

"Stop it, it's like you're five years old."

"Four," he corrects.

"I just want to buy a place to live, and the money's just sitting there in my account and it's a logical investment, or whatever. And what do you do with all your money, anyway, shouldn't you be able to afford six or seven houses by now?" she asks. "Besides buying me another ice cream, you imbecile."

"I give it to kids whose parents were in Starfleet and died."

She nearly drops her spoon, she's so surprised. Not that she should be, because of course he does that, and she probably could have guessed that if she had ever really thought about it. It's so Jim, so incredibly something that he would do, and if she had to guess, his savings account is probably completely empty because there's always someone else who could use that money more than he can.

"Now I feel like crap, thanks. A house can't live up to that."

"Nah," he says, draping his arm over her shoulders, even though she's nearly certain it's just a way to get close to her ice cream again. "If I had someone to buy a place with, I would."

"Really?"

"Really," he confirms, and when he digs his spoon into her ice cream again, this time she lets him. "You two are such adults, I can't even believe it."

She elbows him again for good measure, but not in a way that dislodges his arm from being around her. He's in charge of hundreds of officers, is one of the best captains Starfleet has seen in generations, and he has gummy bears and sprinkles and chocolate chips all over his own ice cream. Hot fudge, too, and whipped cream and he charmed the server out of a grand total of six cherries, so that she's not entirely sure how much actual ice cream is in his cup, versus toppings. No wonder he wants hers.

"Coming back here to the city, I sometimes feel like it was just yesterday that we were cadets," she says, filching an orange gummy bear from his cup and popping it in her mouth.

"Yeah, but you hated me back then."

"You were annoying back then," she reminds him, then rolls her eyes at him for good measure. "Oh, wait, you still are, you just hide it under all your altruism."

"The more things change…" he sighs happily, squeezing her.

He's the best person she's ever met other than maybe Spock, and she is going to have to remember to ask Jim, later, where they can donate.

"If you get ice cream in my hair, you're never invited over," she tells him and hopes – no, knows – that he can hear everything that she's not saying out loud.

He gets serious, now, sometimes, in a way he never did before, and he squeezes her again.

"I'm really happy for you two, you know." She lets him take a bite of her ice cream for that. "You're like a super couple, you're totally perfect together."

She and Spock aren't, not always, and they fight like everyone else does and she more than once has wanted to strangle him, but she's never thought, not for a second, that they wouldn't last this long. But instead of telling Jim that she hopes he finds that some day - since she knows that he knows that she already thinks that all the time - she says, "Glad to know we're Captain Kirk approved. Do you have, like, a seal of approval that we could get? A literal, physical one? Maybe a form that we can all sign? We could file it, I think Spock wants to buy a house just so he can devote an entire room to a filing system."

"I'm happy you got this flavor, too," he says, ignoring her, and this time she scrapes the ice cream he steals off his spoon and back into her cup. "And I'm glad you're going to tell me about all the places you're looking at so that I can be overly involved in this process."

"Spock has an alphabetized list, we'll have to go get it from him."

"It's not done by price, or location, or square footage, or return on investment?" Jim asks, trying to intercept the bite she's attempting to take with his own mouth.

"You are a child. And no, that must have been an oversight on his part, let's go find him and tell him to reorganize all the listings, and maybe he'll defend me and my ice cream like the gallant gentleman he is."

He doesn't, he eats half of it and Jim makes a mess of all the filmplasts she and Spock have compiled, but she can't get mad, can't even come close as she looks at the two of them, their heads close together as they bend over the table like this is just some new mission, some uncharted territory that they'll all figure out together.

…

She and Spock are walking back from seeing a new condo development when she suddenly recognizes where they are. She should have known, because she had just gotten excited that that bookstore was still there, the one where they ran into each other, back when she was tongue tied around him and was trying to talk herself out of having such an enormous crush on her former professor and boss.

"Look!" she says, tugging at his sleeve. "You stand there, like how we were."

"It was over here," he corrects, moving maybe three inches to the left. He touches her arm, moving her, too, until she's positioned according to his precise memory.

It's funny, because they're a perfectly respectable, professional distance apart and she doesn't think she's stood this far from him since they were in these exact same spots, all those years ago.

"Ok, you go. But be as awkward and charming as you were back then."

"I was being logical."

"You were being adorable and I wanted to kiss you so bad."

"If I had possessed that information at the time, I may not have prevaricated by inviting you to share a meal."

"Do it now. Again, I mean," she instructs, rubbing the palms of her hands together and bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet. "Please."

His mouth twitches in a near smile. He doesn't say that this is illogical, or say that she's being irrational, or pretend that he wants to do anything other than repeat the words he spoke so many years ago, the memory of which still makes her stomach leap and her heart beat too fast in her chest, fluttery and rapid.

"I was wondering if you would be amenable to joining me for dinner?"

"Yes," she answers and instead of just smiling at him like she had the first time he ever asked the question, this time she twines her arms around his neck and tips her face up to be kissed, which is hard to actually achieve since she's laughing and grinning so wide. "I love you, you know. You still make me as happy now as you did back then. More so, probably, although I should tell you that I didn't sleep a wink that night, I was too excited and I couldn't get over the fact that we were actually, really going to go on a date."

"I am pleased that your rest patterns have returned to normal."

She kisses him again, standing on her toes to do so. "Me too, but maybe we can keep each other up all night tonight, just for old time's sake."

"I would not be opposed," he says and it's broad daylight and they're kissing on the street corner where anyone can see them and she hardly cares, holding his face between her hands, her chest aching with how very, very much she loves him.

"What are you doing?" she asks when they're half a block away and she's seriously considering hailing a taxi so that they can get back to their terrible apartment sooner, heat passing back and forth where their fingers are twined, but he has paused to glance behind him.

"Considering that corner as a suitable destination for other questions to be posed at a later date."

"That house is for sale," she says, pointing, then works through what he just said. "Wh- what?"

He's not looking at her, just up at the house and probably doing whatever calculations of neighborhoods and investments and equity that he does whenever she brings up a new property for them to look at.

"Would you like to make an appointment to see it?"

"Spock, what were you saying?"

"That if it is for sale, we should consider looking at it."

"No, what were you-" she points behind them. "You- you…"

"I will call the realtor," he say, glancing at the number on the for sale sign.

"Spock." She tugs on his hand and she can feel his amusement, that particular heady joy he gets sometimes, and that sharp tickle of his humor whenever he teases her. "Spock, Spock, Spock."

"Yes?" he asks, but he's already on his comm and someone's answered his call.

She wants to call her mom, maybe, but to say what? Her boyfriend of a decade just obliquely said something about maybe asking her a question at some point in the future? It is so incredibly Spockish that nobody would even appreciate it, would get what he was really saying, which is sitting hot and happy in her stomach, making her completely unable to stop smiling.

Jim, she'll call Jim and tell him. Or no, she'll tell him in person and probably get tackled in a hug because he would totally understand and then she'll have backup to help her pester Spock about it, probably for another five or ten years until anything else actually happens.

Or she won't, she'll keep it to herself, and this spot in front of this house will be her new favorite place, and she drags her toe over the sidewalk, grinning at him, her fingers still laced with his as he speaks quietly on his comm, his own smile hidden from everyone but her.

…

They buy it, of course, and they let everyone else think that it's because it's a good deal or that they'll be able to make a load of money on it or that it's the most logical house to ever exist, or whatever, but it was kind of a whim and it's perfect and amazing and it's the only one that they looked at that made the corners of Spock's eyes crinkle, like he was thinking about smiling.

It's way bigger than anything else they looked at and they can only afford it because it needs so much work, but they both have a year long contracts at the Academy before they can even think about signing up for another five year mission and she's kind of looking forward to a project.

She shouldn't be surprised that Spock likes it so much, since ever since their first trip to New Vulcan he's shied away from anything that's modern, new, unused. She doesn't blame him, because watching families try to grow in a place as sterile and bland as that, with all new construction and no reminders of any history is heartbreaking.

This house has been very, very well used, layers and layers on paint on all the trim and the doors, scuffed wood floors (which she thinks are beautiful and he never suggests refurbishing), outdated appliances (which they both think are terrible and he immediately starts researching new ones) and in the tiny backyard, a tree that's huge and old and has somehow grown despite its home in the city.

"Where do we even start?" she asks, looking around, taking in the airy rooms and the sun shining in the huge front windows. They were her favorite part of the house when they first saw it, how on foggy San Francisco days the house still seems full of light.

Her voice echoes in the bare rooms and it's all a bit overwhelming, but Spock's hand is steadying on the small of her back.

"Jim suggested that our first order of business should be to christen all the rooms."

"He would," she sighs, rolling her eyes, but it's frankly not the worst advice in the world, even though she'll never tell him that. Or that they follow it.

…

"I think you're going to want a whole new heating system," Scotty says, his words muffled since they're coming from behind some type of machinery in the basement that Nyota should really know the name for since it is, now, her property.

"What type?" she asks before remembering that Scotty's a spaceship engineer not a domestic contractor, but he's already answering.

"I imagine Spock'll want it as warm or warmer than your quarters on the ship?" he asks, then doesn't wait for an answer. "And a dehumidifier as well, I assume, what with the way he used to set your environmental controls. I'll see what I can get."

"No, you don't have to-"

"Thursday morning ok?" he asks, wiping his hands on the legs of his jeans and the smears of grime stand out in a way that they never would have on his uniform pants. "I'll bring Keenser, we'll have you up and running right quick."

Thursday night, Spock finally doesn't shiver when she slips his shirt off of him.

"Need to get under the covers before we do this?" she breathes against his ear, nipping lightly at the point in that way she knows he likes.

"This temperature is adequate," he says, his hands trailing over her bare waist and she makes a mental note – while she can still think – to send Scotty a bottle of scotch.

…

"These new security systems are great," Carol says approvingly, turning the control padd Nyota had shown her over in her hands.

"I don't think it'll keep Jim out," Nyota says, emptying the last of the white wine into their glasses.

"Nothing can," Carol sighs and they trade grins, because it's hardly the first time Nyota's pretended to complain about how much time Jim spends in her and Spock's space. "Oh, and here, before I forget – and by that I mean we open a second bottle – I brought you this."

Back when Carol and Spock were first feeling each other out, before they forged the type of relationship that had Nyota bringing them meals to the labs so that they would actually eat, not just continue with their experiments until it was nearly time for the next day's alpha shift, tea had been only thing they could readily agree on, and Nyota still remembers Carol's excitement on the day she realized Spock didn't mind her having a full mug in the lab, because he certainly wanted one himself.

"Where did you find this?" Nyota breathes, turning the tin box over and over in her hands.

"That Vulcan market is finally rebuilt." It's nearly the most direct mention of the destruction of San Francisco that Nyota's ever heard Carol articulate, and the other woman nearly winces, her eyes darting to the side, and her next words come quickly, to cover up what she's just said, the reference to loss that her father had a hand in creating. "I guess the gardens on New Vulcan are growing enough to have exports now, that's what the vendor told me."

"We haven't had this since the last time we were at the colony," Nyota says, happy to let Carol change the subject away from the havoc wreaked on the city. She carefully sets the tin of theris-masu where Spock will see it in the morning. "The replicated version just isn't the same. Thank you, so, so much. He'll love it. I love it, that was so sweet of you."

"Well, now you can get as much as you'd like, the market has plenty, and lots of other things, too."

Nyota takes Spock the next day – later in the morning than they normally leave the house on a Saturday, but he had had some project to finish for work and if he therefore had enough time for a second mug of tea, she hadn't felt the need to point that out to him.

He's a little hesitant when he realizes where they're going and she would have told him, but his project would have miraculously expanded to take up the entire day and probably subsequent weekends as well, because Spock is the master of many skills, and avoiding memories of his home is one that he is particularly adept at.

"You promised me you'd teach me how to cook barkaya," she reminds him and has to tug at his hand to keep him from slowing down their pace even further.

"I told you that eight years, three months, and six days ago."

"Are you retracting the offer?"

He pauses, then says, "That would be illogical."

She forgives him for how annoyed he sounds.

"Then we need ingredients."

He used to keep a bowl of kaasa on his counter, back when he lived in the faculty apartments at the Academy. They still have the bowl, she's pretty sure, and he doesn't stop her from buying a handful of them.

They're gone by the next weekend and when she mentions that she might take another trip to the market, he glances up from his padd, then sets it aside, and has his jacket on before she's done putting on her boots.

…

"You don't have to come," she tells him for the third time that morning, since furniture shopping isn't really Spock's thing, even though sleeping on a mattress on the floor is getting pretty old for both of them.

"I have a vested interest in this purchase," he says, also for the third time, and this time she pokes a finger into his side, lets him slip his hand into hers.

"Slatted headboard," she requests of the shopkeeper.

"Very stylish these days," the young man says approvingly before leading them back into the store.

"Very logical," she whispers to Spock, running the pad of her index finger up and down his palm so that she can feel a slight shiver run through him.

"Is that so?"

"Something to hold on to," she says, then pulls him along after her when her comment seems to have rendered him motionless for a moment.

…

She makes Jim help her paint, even though he complains the whole time.

"You're fine," she tells him. "And please don't leave streaks, I live with a Vulcan."

"What are you even going to do with all this space?" he asks, waving his brush around so that paint splatters over the floor. Her beautiful, original hardwood floor, and she puts both hands on his back and pushes him towards the wall.

"Well, one occupant of this house needs an entire room full of computers, the other needs a place for her dictionary collection, and we were going to set up a guest room except that the person we would be most likely to offer it to just got paint all over the floor."

"For me?" Jim asks and he's not even looking at what he's painting, has turned to smile at her over his shoulder and his brush is getting dangerously close to the trim around the window. She thinks of all the times she used to get to Spock's apartment after class and complain about Jim Kirk and his stupid face, and now his smile is so wide that she finds she can't bring herself to care as much as she should that he's nearly painted over her windowpane.

"Maybe," she tells him, since they'll be eighty years old someday and she'll still relish giving him a hard time.

He gets most of the wall painted with minimal mess and only a handful of patches that are either too bare or have too much extra paint on them, when he turns to her again.

"That still leaves an extra bedroom."

She doesn't look up from where she's cleaning up the drops he left on the floor and really, inviting him over isn't saving her any time if she has to follow him around with a damp cloth.

"I know, I can count. I'm pretty smart, actually."

"Whatcha going to do with it?"

It's one of the things that she and Spock don't really talk about, but she has a cheery yellow picked out for when they get around to painting that room. A versatile, cheery yellow so that they can keep their options open.

Jim drops another big smear of paint on the floor, then steps in it, and she lets out a long sigh, shaking her head at him while he shrugs, that look of innocence that he normally reserves for a room full of admirals turned on her instead.

And damn him, because it totally works as well on her as it does on them.

She starts to clean it up, stops, and ends up leaving it. She'll put a bookshelf over it, or a nice lamp, or something so that it doesn't drive Spock too nuts, since she kind of likes the idea that there's a mark left by Jim, a feature of their house that is already their own history, a story to tell some day down the line.

…

Spock gets as far as retrieving the boxes from storage before suddenly realizing that there's really no way he can't be in the lab right then and leaving before she can even respond.

They're the boxes that she helped him pack up in those days after Vulcan, back when neither of them were certain where he was going when he moved out of his Academy housing.

He had joined the crew so last minute that he hadn't stopped to get any of his things, so that his quarters on the ship were overly bare until she'd moved in with him and brought all her photos and mementos to fill the shelves.

And then when they were back on Earth for that year, it was an equally terrible time, Kirk in the hospital, San Francisco broken and burnt, and neither of them had really been up for a trip down memory lane.

Now, the boxes sit in their empty dining room and she's pretty sure that Spock is going to stay at the lab for as long as he possibly can, rather than look at the pictures of his mother, the blanket she knit for him that used to be draped over his couch, the mug she bought him for his birthday one year, that he always used to drink from.

She replaces the blanket on the couch and the mug in the cupboard, even though he won't touch either, and spends a day hanging up pictures, and another deciding where to put the few pieces of Vulcan art that he still has, the ones he didn't send to his father so that they could be on New Vulcan.

There's a couple other items that she can't identify, and she just leaves them out, hoping that Spock will someday stop avoiding everything and tell her what they are. If not, she'll ask his father, maybe, or just leave them on display like an exhibit of the trials and tribulations of a human being in a relationship with a half-Vulcan, when the latter refuses to talk about the fact that he misses his home and his mom, no matter how much the former assures him that it's ok to feel like that.

"You know what this is?" Sulu asks, turning over a ceramic pot in his hands. She ran into him in the hardware store when she had been picking up more picture hooks and he had been picking out potting soil, and they could have both just replicated what they needed but she thinks that she's not the only one craving interaction with others after so many years living in close quarters on the ship so that any excuse to go out into the world is a good one. Craving interaction, and each other, and she used to see him every day and now sees him maybe once a week, or every other week at most, and when she had invited him over to see their new place he hadn't hesitated to accept.

"A flower pot?" she guesses.

"No. Well, yes, but it's for a really specific Vulcan plant."

She's surprised – impressed, really – that he knows something about Spock's culture that she doesn't, but maybe she shouldn't be since Sulu takes plants very, very seriously, and Spock has so carefully avoided any of these items that she has forgotten half of them existed.

"Can I borrow this and bring it back in a couple days?" Sulu asks. "I think I can still find one, the xenobotanists over at HQ have been propagating them."

"Propagating what, exactly?"

"Oh, and can I see your yard?" Sulu asks without answering her. "Nice," he says to their huge tree. "I like it. Do you have plans for the rest of the space?"

"Nope," she says, staring around. She and Spock aren't exactly back to nature types and they hadn't even been looking for a house with a yard, just had ended up with one.

"Really?" he asks, peering into one of the overgrown garden beds. "Cause it looks like someone used to maintain these really well, whoever used to own this place."

"Spock comes out here sometimes," is all that she can offer.

"Well, I can recommend some low maintenance shrubs or something like that, but you get a lot of sunlight back here, so you could grow flowers or vegetables if you wanted."

She runs back into the house without a word, but she's known Sulu for as long as she's known Spock – and Jim and McCoy and everyone else who seems to be permanently embedded in her life by now – and he just waits for her to get back and doesn't question her sudden absence.

"This," she says, showing him a picture that Spock relocated from the living room into the kitchen and she sees him look at it most mornings over breakfast even though he never talks about it, or even mentions that he moved it. "It was his backyard at his parents house, and his mom had this huge garden."

"Those are all Terran plants," Sulu says, tucking the pot he's still holding under his arm and squinting at the picture. "I could get you those."

"I can help," she says dubiously, because she really doesn't want to end up killing every single plant Sulu brings her, and it's a serious possibility that she might.

"It's no trouble, I'd be thrilled to have a little patch of dirt to play with, get everything established."

Spock never says anything, ever, to anyone as far as she can tell, about the garden or about the pot that Sulu returns with a plant in it that looks distinctly non-Terran. But the picture of Sarek and Amanda's home ends up placed carefully next to the plant, which is one day moved to Spock's desk, and he takes to meditating in the yard when the weather's nice and sometimes even when it isn't, and the garden is always meticulously weeded and watered, even when Sulu doesn't have time to stop by.

…

"I am teaching Interstellar Navigation," Chekov says and she has to reach out and touch his shoulder, again, because every time she blinks he's still wearing instructor's blacks and it's just so strange that she keeps waiting for his uniform to resolve itself into something else.

"That's incredible," she finally gets out, then hugs him, hard. "Do you love it?"

"It is very fun, but the office I was given is very messy."

"They didn't clean it out for you?"

"It is my old professor's office, I did not want it clean, I wanted to have her materials," he says and she nods, thinking she knows a little bit about not wanting to have to start from scratch in a sterile room. "But," he says, brightening, "I have found some exciting items."

Two days later, a package arrives, and she can nearly hear Chekov's voice, a little forlorn, when she reads his scribbled note that he sent her a reproduction, since the original needs to stay at the Academy now that he's unearthed it from among his former professor's belongings.

She unfurls the poster and can't help but gape at it. It's huge, and beautiful, one of the first star charts made during the early years of the Federation, back when only the systems around Vulcan, Andor, Tellar Prime, and Earth were well charted. At the edges of the map are mostly blank spaces, with a red dwarf there, a sketch of a nebula here, and she knows that it's in the wrong place because they were at that nebula not six months ago. Stellar cartography has come a long way since this was made, but moreover, the Enterprise's mission has helped fill in much of the unknowns, and she half wants to write 'here be monsters' along the borders, since it reminds her so much of ancient Terran mariner maps.

It disappears for a few days and she thinks that maybe Spock doesn't want to look at it, doesn't want to see the place where Vulcan was, but then one afternoon he carries it home, framed, and hangs it above their new couch.

"Professor Saeihra should not have left such artifacts in her office, uncategorized and uncared for."

She slips her arms around his waist and leans her head against his chest.

"I'm glad Chekov was the one who gave it to us."

His hand is soft and gentle as it strokes over her back. "I am as well."

…

"It's on loan," McCoy instructs, not for the first time.

"You have made that abundantly-" Nyota shushes Spock, touching his shoulder, because McCoy seems to need to keep saying that.

"If Joanna ever wants it," McCoy clarifies, again.

"We'll take good care of it in the meantime," Nyota promises. "It's beautiful, thank you."

"Better here than in my ex wife's basement," he grumbles, rubbing his hand over the varnished wood with a gentle touch that he normally reserves for his patients. "My Dad's, you know. He made it."

They do know, because McCoy keeps telling them, keeps staring at the table before abruptly looking away again.

"Gotta get back to the hospital," he says, clearing his throat and nodding towards the door.

"We're having Jim and everyone over for dinner on Saturday," Nyota says and ignores Spock's raised eyebrow, since she is maybe making this up on the fly, but the entire crew is still at loose ends and there's no chance that they won't show up at a moment's notice. "If you don't have a shift to cover that night."

"I might," McCoy says and clears his throat again.

He doesn't – or he does but gets out of it – and it's not the conference room or the officer's mess or the rec room, but it's just as good, having everyone in their house, gathered around McCoy's father's dining room table. The sound of familiar voices rising and falling, Jim's laugh cutting through the noise, is enough that she can forgive the lights outside for being streetlights and headlights, not warp trails and the shine of stars they have yet to explore.

…

Sarek walks through the entire house without comment, his hands clasped behind his back.

He pauses just once, in front of a picture of Spock and Amanda of when Spock was maybe five or six, a tiny, minuscule smile playing over his face, an echo of his mother's much broader one.

He glances into the empty, cheerful yellow room twice, once walking down the hall past it and again on the way back.

"Acceptable," he finally states when he has returned to the living room.

"Thanks," she says, grinning, since she long ago gave up being terrified of him and yearning for his approval and now mostly wants to ask if he's been eating enough and if he won't stay a bit longer, spend some time with them instead of returning to his work rebuilding New Vulcan as soon as possible.

He does stay that evening, which is rare, and she makes Amanda's plomeek soup recipe. Both he and Spock clean their bowls and when she puts the pot on the table so that they can help themselves to more, they finish that, too. When she's yawning and finally heads upstairs to bed, they're still talking, and she falls asleep to the sound of their voices floating up from the kitchen.

She wakes again when the bed dips under Spock's weight and she thinks that he must think that she's asleep, but maybe not, because he whispers "Thank you" into the dark, and it can't be logical to say that to someone who can't hear it.

…

"This doesn't mean you're not coming if we ship out again, right?" Jim asks, his feet up on their coffee table even though she can tell that it's driving Spock a little crazy.

She reaches for Spock's hand, squeezes, and he squeezes back.

"Of course not," she tells Jim. They won't be the first officers to leave an empty house waiting for them somewhere on Earth, nor the last. Everyone likes having a home, even if they don't live in it.

"You sure?" Jim asks. "Really, really sure?"

"We are," Spock answers and Jim finally looks like he maybe believes them.

"When we ship out again," Nyota corrects and this time Jim smiles. "It just means that we'll have somewhere to come back to."