AN: Okay well. I bought a house and got a dog and finished this monstrosity which I think I'm going to try to turn into a book? And it only took seven, nearly eight months. I'm so sorry D: I hope this is even a little bit worth the wait. It's twenty-two thousand words! Enjoy?

(I should probably have waited to post this until I was somewhat less tired so this could be pithy and entertaining. Sorry for that too!)

Chapter Six: The Beldam

Spock came to awareness of himself in an unfamiliar room. Or—

He thought it was a room.

The place he was in was closed on three sides. He sat in one corner, looking out into the darkness beyond the fourth, open wall. Something important was missing. He looked up and could not see where the walls ended. They stretched above him farther than his eyes could track, then tapered in against each other, closing him into a pyramid with an empty side.

He should go through the empty side. Something important was missing.

The walls became an oppressive presence around him, above him, crushing in against his psyche. Slowly, with more effort than he assumed it would require, Spock levered himself up. Despite how low the walls felt, they did not actually touch his head when he stood. Instead, they continued to give the impression of closing less than a foot above him. An illusion? He tried to focus on his surroundings, pick out details that might confirm what of this was real.

When he touched a hand to the wall on his left, it felt cold. Rough. It had the texture of unfinished wood. But he could not smell the wood. If it were real, shouldn't he be able to smell it? To his eyes, it looked like...

He couldn't tell. It shifted and warped continuously, now painted white, now a dark brown. It dizzied him until he squeezed his eyes shut against it. The floor under his feet lurched, not enough to throw him down but so that his stomach twisted. When he opened his eyes, it stilled, firm as stone, while the walls continued to warp. Everything about the room appeared to conspire against his remaining there, so he took a step forward, toward the empty wall. And another.

A third.

Soon he stumbled out, panting, unsure why walking put such a strain on him. He glanced back at the room, wanting to understand.

Alarm jolted across his skin.

It was gone.

He stood now in a dim room filled with towering piles of clutter or garbage or—

Something important was missing.

"Spock!" a person called, somewhere out in the garbage. "Are you there? Spock!"

It sounded like a child, male, maybe, high and shrill with panic. Who in this place would know to call for—

Jim.

Jim.

He'd lost Jim.

They were in Jim's mindscape, they'd come here to fight the Beldam, Jim should be here—

Jim had been a child when he lost his eye to the button. Could he be a child now?

"Jim," Spock tried to call. His voice was rough with disuse, as though he had a physical voice to be rough in the mindscape. Concern hummed under his skin, but—e

Skin? He was in Jim's mind, how did he have—

"Spock!"

The Vulcan blinked and straightened, looking around for the source of the voice. He tried to focus, to gather himself enough so he could stretch his consciousness in Jim's direction.

It didn't work.

Shock jolted through Spock, causing him to draw in a deep, unsteady breath. So. He was either not in a mindscape anymore or...

Or?

"Spock!"

Spock spun to face the voice, closer now. Jim? Or a facsimile of him? Did it matter?

Did it matter?

He assessed the garbage around him, which formed, he realized with a rising sense of trepidation, a sort of maze. The walls of detritus rose just too high to see over, even if he jumped. They were made of what looked like old toys, broken household appliances, wrinkled or stained clothing, all the refuse of Terran living. They weren't sturdy enough to climb. Spock began walking cautiously down the narrow hallway they created. After roughly one hundred yards, the walkway ended, splitting left or right.

"...Jim?" he said, projecting despite his disinclination to draw the attention of unfamiliar entities. Regardless of what else walked this maze, he had to find Jim. Even if Jim was somehow, unbelievably, a child.

"Spock!" the young voice cried.

Spock turned left, walking quickly without quite running. Toys and loose mechanical parts began to roll out of the walls, skittering under his feet as though drawn there. He stepped over or around them, once kicking a deflated black and white ball out of his way, never pausing in his effort to track down the voice.

The more of them he avoided, the more tumbled down. Soon he was taking long strides between the as-yet free spaces on the floor, arms out to help him balance.

A small toy car whizzed at his head.

Spock ducked, lifting one arm to protect himself as he increased his pace. A toy doll in the shape of a human baby flung itself into the back of his right knee, buckling it slightly as the doll made a warped sound almost like words.

The hall ended again in another fork; Spock darted right. He made it only a few steps before the walls began to crumple in earnest, dumping their garbage on his head and shoulders, knocking him around as he tried to push through.

To where? The maze could go on eternally. He had no idea where he was, or why, or what had happened to Jim. None of his skills at the meld seemed to have any impact on this...place. Reality. Whatever it was.

Spock fell.

The maze collapsed, burying him. He couldn't struggle, couldn't push up against it, couldn't get any leverage to wrench himself free. As the toys and machines continued to build up, he began to lose even the space for breathing.

Then, all at once—

Freedom.

Spock sucked in a greedy breath, coughing stale air out of his lungs as small hands grabbed one of his arms and pulled.

"Hurry," that same young voice said, tight with urgency. "You have to get up. There's something in here with us!"

With a little assistance, Spock was able to get his feet under him. When he looked up, the maze stretched out around him once more, in order just as it had been, not a single shirt or doll out of place, as though the attack on Spock had never happened. As though something had—

Breathless, Spock looked down.

Jim stared back up at him, solemn, perhaps ten Terran years old. His hair was short and disheveled, his black and white striped shirt stained with something rusty red, hopefully actual rust and not dried blood. He wore faded jeans and battered sneakers. Altogether, it was a fitting outfit for a rambunctious young boy.

Except Jim had not been wearing a young boy's outfit when they went into the meld. He'd been wearing a red flannel shirt and Starfleet-issued sweatpants, claiming he wanted to be comfortable more than fashionable. Instead of shoes, he'd worn wool socks. Every inch of it came to him from a loved one: the shirt had once belonged to Dave; the sweatpants were purchased for him by McCoy as a joke when Jim first joined the Academy; the socks had been knit for him by Donna.

Jim wore artifacts of his family's love as a suit of armor, and not one of them had forced him to admit it. When he first took Spock's hands, sitting with him in a magic circle, Spock had felt the truth of it, bright beneath layers of anxiety and fear. Calling attention to the clothing then served no purpose except to potentially cause Jim embarrassment or additional stress.

Calling attention to the clothing now might have...unfortunate results.

So Spock didn't. He tucked the information away, quiet in the back of his mind, and focused instead on Jim's well being. The boy seemed physically whole, worried but not frightened, and his eyes—

His eyes

They matched, the same pale blue in the right and the left, unspoiled by the Beldam's button. Spock reached up, surprised to find his hand trembling, to run his fingers under the vibrant left eye, marveling and uncertain. "How is this possible?" he asked. Wonder filled his voice without his intent.

The little Jim looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"Your eye—" Spock shook his head, withdrawing his hand to fold it with its pair behind his back. "It's nothing."

Uncertainty filled Jim's expression. He touched his own left cheek. "Is there something wrong with it?"

"No," Spock said honestly. That, actually, was the problem: something should be wrong with it. "How did you come to be here?"

"Don't you remember?" Jim asked.

"No," he said again, and offered nothing further.

Jim bit his lip in what might be worry. "Did you hit your head?"

"How did you come to be here?" Spock repeated.

"Are you mad?" Jim blurted.

Spock shook his head. "Merely curious. I have no memory of this place and found it difficult, approaching impossible, to navigate. And yet here you are, not in an expected way. I would ask that you do your best to explain."

The child curled one hand into the hem of his striped shirt. His expression washed with hurt, eyebrows pulled together, impossibly blue eyes wet with tears. "You are mad at me. I'm not stupid; I can tell."

"You will have to believe me." Spock did his best to gentle his expression. "I am not experiencing any particularly strong emotion at all, much less one so volatile as anger."

"Prove it," Jim demanded, lower lip stuck out in a pout.

Spock extended his hand. "Shall I share my emotional state with you?"

Jim hesitated, then took Spock's hand. His eyes sunk closed under the calm Spock projected on him. "Sorry," he mumbled, refusing to relinquish his grip. "You're right; you're not angry." He shook his head, looking distressed now. "I can't seem to keep hold of my emotions here."

"Can you not guess why?" Spock asked.

The child shook his head again.

Interesting. Did he not realize he'd been regressed some twenty years? Was this place keeping the knowledge from him, or did it simply feel more familiar to be that age when facing this enemy?

Spock filed those observations away as well.

"How did you come to be here?" he asked for a third time.

Jim's hand twitched in his. "I'm not really sure," he admitted. "I...woke up here, I guess? And then started looking for you."

"The maze did not attempt to collapse upon you?"

"What?" Jim's eyes went large and round with shock. "No! It doesn't—" He looked around hesitantly, as though he didn't trust his surroundings. "It...doesn't look like a maze? At least not to me. It's just a basement. I mean." He kicked one of the walls. Distantly, Spock heard something bounce and rattle, as though someone in a different room had kicked a toy. "It's cluttered, but it's just a basement." He looked back over his shoulder. "It's... Actually, I think it's the basement of the old farmhouse in Iowa?" A faint shudder worked down his spine. "I didn't want to ever come back here, but I guess that makes sense."

"Why is that?" Spock asked, trying to see the room the way Jim did.

"This is what it looked like last time, too." His mouth pressed into a thin line. "She does that on purpose, I think. Makes her web look like where you come from, so she can improve on exactly what's wrong."

"This is the Beldam's web?" Spock moved even closer to Jim. "Are we here physically?"

Jim looked up at him. "I think we must be. It feels real, anyway."

"The meld can mimic reality. After all, reality is experienced in the brain." Spock looked around again. "Can you lead us out of here, Jim? Is there an out?"

"There was last time." Jim assessed the room around them that only he could see. After a moment, he nodded. "Yeah, I can see the stairs leading up to the kitchen, that should be an out." He tugged on Spock's hand, offering him a weak smile when Spock looked down at him. "Better stay close, okay? I'll lead the way."

"As you say," Spock agreed, resigned to another blind rush through gaps and spaces while Jim told him when to leap or step or freeze. "Is this how it looked the last time you were here?" he asked.

Instead of telling Spock to shut his eyes and jump, Jim led him down what looked like the left-hand split in the maze. Curious.

"This is what it looked like after I figured her out," Jim said, grim expression unsuited to his boyish face. "Or, well. After Kit showed me."

They walked a few minutes in silence—still down the walkway Spock could see—before Spock gripped the little hand in what he hoped felt like a comforting manner. "Will you not elaborate?" he asked. "If you feel comfortable sharing more details, I would like to hear them, and it seems we have the time."

Jim's breath shuddered out in a sigh. "It's— She makes wonders," he said, looking around at the room beyond Spock's vision. "And when you break out of her hold, the wonders kind of...collapse. So down here." His free hand gestured wide, nearly colliding with the wall. "It was...beautiful, y'know? She took this boring, awful room, and filled it with treasures and games like a carnival, all of them run by my step-father—my Other step-father, just a puppet she made to please me. He was so much better. It was all so much better. It was just—" One corner of his mouth curved in what might have been a sneer. "It was too good to be true."

Something about this—

They reached another split. They could go left or right, or at any point Jim could instruct Spock to shut his eyes and take him through the maze's non-existent walls in a straight-shot to the exit.

Jim turned right.

Spock stopped walking. He looked down at Jim, into his curious blue eyes, matching as they never did. As they never should.

Something about this was wrong.

Spock gripped Jim's hand hard, jaw locked as he pushed out with his telepathy. Instead of brushing Jim's consciousness as he usually did, Spock dove through their link to see what was there. He wanted to find Jim, of course, the warmth of him, underscored always with danger and the threat of violence. Maybe he would touch Jim's mind as it had been before the button, some echo of the purity that must have lived there before she'd wounded him.

If only he had found Jim.

Jim was not there.

Tethered to the other end of his hand was a sucking, gaping darkness, a void so complete it nearly defied understanding. The void noticed him. It reached for him with hungry, sticky threads. Spock gasped, gagged, and could not pull away.

The creature holding his hand grinned, too wide, a split in its face filled with sharp, jagged teeth. Its eyes melted as he watched, helpless to step away. Buttons glinted back at him, black, unending. Absolute.

Ravenous.

Spock could not pull away.

Somewhere, distantly, someone called his name.

The creature opened its mouth in an impossible, yawning stretch, wide enough to consume him.

A large, solid body slammed into Spock, knocking him aside. Shadow slashed at the creature, splitting it from shoulder to hip. It screamed, burst and sagged, sand pouring out onto the floor, emptying its skin until all that remained was a burlap pile.

"Are you all right?" Warm hands fluttered over his cheeks and down his neck to settled on his shoulders. After a moment, they squeezed tight, giving him a hard shake. "Spock! Are you all right?"

Spock blinked. Finally—finally—he looked up from the sand and broken sack. Blue eyes looked back at him. Mismatched. The sky and the sea. "Jim," he whispered. His lungs ached as though he hadn't taken a proper breath in hours. "Jim," he said again, and sucked in a deep, sharp breath.

One of Jim's hands cradled Spock's cheek. His expression filled with worry. "Did it hurt you?"

Almost without thought, Spock's mind reached for Jim's, seeking truth through the connection pressed into his face. He shut his eyes, listening, desperate.

Jim flared in senses, light and darkness, opals in onyx, a harmony of warring parts.

"I am unhurt," Spock said, resisting the urge to pull a piece of Jim into himself, let it live there in comfort, always within a thought of communication. That was not a decision to make on his own, without Jim's consent, so he resisted. He opened his eyes, covering Jim's hand with his even as he withdrew his mental touch.

...Withdrew? But they were in a meld. How could he—

"Where are we?" he asked, watching Jim's eyes fill with bitter unhappiness.

"With the Beldam," Jim said, jaw clenching in anger. "Somehow. She brought us into her web, just as it was the last time I saw it. Right before we killed her."

Spock consciously did not look at the sack and sand. "This...child. The creature. I cannot believe it is the Beldam."

"Ha! No." Jim glared at the remains. "One of her constructs. They're dolls or something. Just extensions of her will. She used them to flesh out the world, but only as long as they were tempting and obedient." He shook his head. "I don't know why she'd make one of me. She had weird ideas about love, though. I'd honestly rather not understand."

"It told me it saw this room differently than I do." Spock looked up toward the tops of the walls towering over them. "I see a maze, made of..."

"Garbage," Jim spat.

Spock inclined his head. "It told me it saw the open basement of what it claimed was your childhood home."

"Well, I don't know about seeing the basement." Jim took Spock's hand, stepped over the remains, and began leading him back in the direction he'd come from earlier. "That may have been a lie to trick you into going where it wanted you to. Which, in case you can't guess, was the wrong way. Come on, I remember this part. Let's get out of here."

"Then we are in a maze," Spock murmured. "You see it too."

Jim nodded, pulling Spock left at the first fork. "It probably did too, because this is a maze. She turned it into a maze to trap me when we tried to escape this way."

"Will the way out you remember lead us from the house?"

"No. That's not..." Jim's inner war buzzed through their hands to itch under Spock's skin. He glanced back to give Spock a half smile. "Not really the goal." They walked a few moments in silence, then Jim sighed deeply. "I'll be honestly: I have no idea what's going on. None of this should be here. The door we used back then, to get to this awful place and then get back, was in the basement, at the end of the maze." He gestured down the hall they were in using the hand holding Spock's, dragging the Vulcan's arm along for the motion. "I'm actually taking us to the beginning of the maze because we're not here for an escape, we're here for the Beldam. And if she's here, she's upstairs."

"How are we here?" Spock asked.

Jim shrugged. "I don't have even the first clue."

Spock frowned. "Are there clues?"

"No." Jim grinned back at him. "It's an expression. What do you think, though?" He flapped a hand at the garbage wall. "You're the mind meld expert. How did we get here?"

Spock also had no clues. "I have a hypothesis," he admitted. "Though...there is, at present, no way of falsifying it, which I do not prefer."

"Well, shoot. Even your guesses tend to be better than most people's best-tested hypotheses." When Spock glanced at him, Jim smiled, nudging his side with an elbow. "You're not in the sciences for nothing. So lay it on me. We've got at least, what, five or seven minutes left in the maze." He towed Spock around another corner. "What's the hypothesis?"

"We are not in the Beldam's web."

Jim's disbelief flared hot against Spock's mental shields. The Terran glanced around, face impassive as doubt highlighted every way in which this scenario matched his memories. But Jim did not admit his hesitations. What he said was, "Go on, I'm listening."

Interesting. "I hypothesize the meld worked as intended," Spock continued, allowing Jim his private concerns. "We are not physically in the Beldam's web. However," he continued before Jim could phrase an appropriate retort, "consider that the Beldam has had many years of unfettered access to your mind. She has had an unbreakable, unblockable link to your mind, which we have seen, from a distance, as..."

"Poison," Jim said when Spock could not settle on the word he meant.

Spock inclined his head, following Jim around yet another corner. "Just so. In this instance, however, we did not wish to build blockades around her poison, to mitigate its damage or weaken it flow. We wished to battle it. Do you remember what we did?"

Jim slowed to a halt, eyes shut as he thought. Spock felt him reach inward, looking for the Beldam in his mind. He felt the jolt of fear when Jim couldn't find it, followed by slow realization. "We went into the poison," he breathed, eyes wide when they met Spock's. "She built all this in my mind?"

"That is my hypothesis," Spock agreed. "And yours is a particularly powerful mind, Jim. It always has been, around and under the Beldam. Adapting to her would have increased your natural ability. She had a lot to work with."

"Then how do we beat her?" Jim demanded. "She could be anywhere! She could be all of this." He kicked the wall viciously. It swayed for a moment, raining four or five torn stuffed animals down on them, before settling. A harsh sigh huffed through Jim's nose. "Well, fine. So that puts my plan out of commission. Any ideas?" he asked, hands propped on his hips even though he still held Spock's in his right.

"Perhaps abandoning your plan is not necessary," Spock said. "Tell me what you thought would work, and why it cannot now. We will go from there."

Jim gestured expansively with his free hand. "I figured we'd go to her room. There's a den on the main floor where most of her...weirdness centered."

"Weirdness?" Spock prompted, wiggling his fingers against Jim's hip. Jim tightened his grip until he stopped.

"Like." Jim's nose wrinkled in distaste. "When she started to reveal herself, or, I guess, when hiding became less important, the world stopped...being like mine."

"I do not understand."

Jim heaved in a deep sigh. "I'm not sure how to explain it," he admitted.

Spock stroked a thumb over the back of Jim's hand. "Try your best, Jim. We do not know what detail will be important."

"Okay." Jim kicked one of the stuffed animals. "We might as well keep walking. We have to get out eventually. Come on." He started walking, tugging Spock along in his wake. "So, when we first came through, this place looked like my house on the other side. Exactly like it. Every detail was the same, except...better. Perfect. We had a mirror in the front hallway," he explained, face turned away so Spock couldn't see it.

Intentional? Hmm.

"It was broken." Something in Jim's voice twisted, sharp as shards of glass. "We should have just replaced it or taken it down or— Well. I think my step-father kept it as a reminder."

"Of?" Spock asked, neutral as he could be, hoping to tempt further information before Jim realized what was happening.

From the amused half-smile Jim shot back at him, his attempt was unsuccessful. "Not really the point. The point is: the Beldam's front hallway had the same mirror, utterly identical, except it wasn't broken. It wasn't even smudged. Every facet was in its ultimate perfect state. The whole house was like that. She even tried to make the people like that, replacing them with her sack creatures." His jaw clenched. "It was all so fake. Even an idiot should have spotted it."

Spock yanked on Jim's arm, forcing him to stumble and turn around. "You were not an idiot," he said, flat and clear so Jim could hear his sincerity. "You were a child suffering unconscionably at the hands of adults who should have protected you." When Jim tried to turn away, Spock cupped his cheek with his free hand, waiting until their eyes met to continue. "Listen to me, Jim: None of what happened to you was your fault. Not before you went to the Beldam; not during; not after. You survived, and I must always be grateful for the bravery and strength it took."

Jim drew in a shuddering breath, emotions so tangled and confused even Spock could not sort through them. It did not surprise Spock when Jim's only outward reaction was to change the subject. "So she had this parlor," he said, stroking his thumb over Spock's before turning away to continue leading him through the maze. "It was toward the back of the house. Originally, it looked like it did on the other side, in the real house. The longer I was here, though, the more it changed. I don't know if her power to change it was failing, or if she just got...I don't know." He shrugged. "Complacent, maybe. She had to know I wasn't going to leave."

"What did the room look like when it was hers?" Spock asked.

"Buggy." Jim shot a grin over his shoulder. "There were there colorful armoires or something shaped like beetles, and her chair looked like one too, and they could all, like, skitter around. It was gross. Not as gross," he added firmly, "as, I mean, she had this box? It looked like gourmet chocolates, but they wiggled. She offered me one, called them cocoa beetles from Zanzibar, if you can believe it."

"I see no reason to doubt it," Spock considered all the questions spawned by Jim's description. "Did you try one?"

Jim's whole body shuddered in disgust. "Ugh. No. I mean, they were— Did I mention the wiggling?"

"You did," Spock agreed, sending his amusement to Jim through their joined hands. "You also proved to be an adventurous companion when we were children. The likelihood of you tasting one versus refusing seemed roughly even."

"I don't even want to know what my allergies would have done," Jim sighed. "I probably would have puffed up and saved the Beldam the trouble of—"

"Perhaps," Spock interrupted, "this is not the opportune moment to joke about your death."

Jim looked back to smile apologetically. "If this were the Beldam's web," he said once he turned around again, "I would have bet she'd be in the beetle room. Since we're not—"

"I cannot guarantee the Beldam knows this is your mind," Spock cut in again, "and not her web. You killed her, did you not?"

"Yes." Satisfaction curled through Jim's mind, dark and gleeful. "We sure did."

Spock hesitated before asking, "How?"

"We cut off her head," Jim said cheerfully, "with a garrote that used to be piano wire. Head's up," he continued in the same haunting tone. "We're near the end of the maze. Well, the beginning."

Untruth crept from Jim's hand into Spock's. He had killed the Beldam, but not this way. Why would he lie about the method? What did it matter if she was strangled or...something else?

Did Jim's faith in Spock run so thin?

They stepped out of the maze together, into a small open area around the base of a set of dark, ominous stairs. Jim locked his eyes on the door at the top. Spock kept his focus on Jim, trying to understand. Longing to.

Jim startled slightly, glancing back at Spock with a confused half smile. "Everything okay?"

Ah. Their connection was starting to go in both directions. Inevitable, really, considering the strength of Jim's mind, how adaptive it had become under the Beldam's weight. She would have ruined him, and he resisted. Of course he would be sensitive to Spock's presence in her darkness.

"I am well," Spock said, not quite answering the question. Since he did not yet know how best to phrase what he himself wanted to know (why why why), he did not ask.

Jim seemed to sense this—or at least enough of it to nod, albeit with noticeable reluctance. "Okay." He tipped his head toward the stairs. "Shall we?"

"Our plan is to find her, perhaps in the beetle den, and fight her." Spock stroked his thumb over Jim's comfortingly. "Though determined, it seems...vague. How shall we fight her? We have no phasers, no weapons of any sort. Is there still a piano we might take wire from? Or do you think we could overpower her?"

Jim looked at him in silence for a long moment before blowing out a sigh. He turned to sit on the stairs and run his free hand through his hair. When Spock attempted to release his other hand, though, Jim's grip tightened. "Don't," he snapped. His shoulders, bunched tight around his ears, dropped marginally. "Don't let go," he said, not quite looking at Spock while his face pinched with some unnamable expression, worried and fearful and resolute. "I feel...indistinct. Scattered. Like if you let me go, I'll dissolve into the air." His mouth twisted. "Into the maze. Into her web."

"Have you felt this way long?" Spock touched Jim's mind with more purpose than earlier, seeking a reason for his friend's unease.

"Since I got here." Jim shook his head. "And I don't even remember that very well. The only time I felt like me was when I was saving you from the doll." He looked up at Spock, something like panic building in his eyes. "Am I even here, Spock? If I'm only me when I'm with you, am I really here?"

Spock lifted his free hand to Jim's psy-points. "May I?" Jim responded by shutting his eyes and tilting his head to rest in Spock's palm.

To meld within a meld should be impossible. Or—perhaps a better word would be needless. How did one touch a mind one was already in? No Vulcan had ever experienced a situation like this, though, had never entered a mind to be caught in another's web living there. An enemy's web, slowly devouring its host, turning it into—

She was turning Jim into—

Spock, at first, didn't understand what he was seeing. He went into Jim's mind and found...threads. Not through his mind but of it. Something had taken his mind, his consciousness, his very self, and spun it into wire. Jim couldn't sense it, was likely so used to this configuration, creeping as a fungus into every nook and crevice, that it seemed normal. Despite the strength of his mental touch, Jim was still psy-null. No amount of meditation or focus would enable him to see the full landscape of his inner self.

So now he was part of the Beldam's trap. She had made of him a web, stretched wide over her darkness. If they failed, if she killed Jim and ejected Spock, this would be a handy stepping stone into the real world.

How could they save him? Spock's desperation welled outside his control, a tide of fear that threatened to drown him. If Jim was part of her now, how could they save—?

But then, had Jim not been part of the Beldam this whole time? For as long as Spock had known Jim, the Terran had carried the Beldam's button. They all knew it was a link she used to feed off his life. It took longer, due to his having killed her, but was no less inevitable for it. Spock knew that. He'd used his time on Vulcan to prepare himself for this fight.

Why fear it now?

Spock had vowed, as a teenager, to sever the Beldam's connection to Jim. He would fight her at Jim's side, using the tools and weapons unique to his heritage. Until now, he had assumed that would mean cutting the button's link. Now it seemed that had been presumptuous. To break the button, to kill the Beldam, they would first have to unravel this web made of Jim.

Well, fine. So they would.

He tried to show the web to Jim, to get his impressions on its weaknesses, but it seemed Jim could not be guided through any more layers of his own consciousness. Spock layered comfort over Jim's rising distress in an absentminded way, most of his attention on the web. In the outside world, a spider's web could be pulled down with a simple wave of one's hand, but this was too big. What could they do instead?

Collapse it. Break its contact points, its anchors, and let it fall. Spock looked for the anchors and found them, three distinct places that darkened and strained the web.

But where?

"Jim," Spock murmured, trying to share the...the feeling, the knowledgeof the anchors with him. "She has tied you into this world. Made it of you. We must tear it down to free you and weaken her. Do you see this?"

Jim's struggle to understand echoed through his mindscape. His frustration mounted as his attempts failed. "No. Can you describe it? Do you think describing it would help?"

"Perhaps," Spock allowed. "Depending on the purpose. I do not think I could describe it well enough for you to develop a mental picture."

"You could give me the highlights," Jim huffed, frustration bubbling through their link.

Spock tilted his head. "The thought occurred to me as well." Jim looked chastised, although that had not been Spock's intention. "I believe that our best bet of undoing this web is to pull out its anchor points and letting it collapse under its own weight."

"You think it'll be that easy?" Jim asked skeptically.

"That would depend," Spock pointed out, "on how easy it is to destroy the anchors."

Jim made a rough sound. "Sorry, Spock." He cleared his throat. "I know I'm being a dick. You're just trying to help and I keep—"

Spock touched Jim's cheek with his free hand. "It is well, Jim." He pushed a sense of ease and comfort through their link: a Vulcan smile. "You are under enormous pressure, and the risk to myself is comparatively low. Your emotional reaction is expected." Jim winced, so Spock tried again: "What I mean is that I understand why you would be short with me and do not hold it against you."

"That's not much better," Jim sighed. "I should try harder to be grateful for your help."

"Later," he said. Jim started at him, eyes wide as flashes of innuendo passed from him into Spock and back until they were both flushed.

"Oops," Jim said weakly.

Spock school his expression. "Later," he said again. "For now, we must focus. From what I saw, there were three anchors. Does that number hold any meaning here?"

"Yes," Jim said, surprised and then resigned. Then, thankfully, his whole being filled with purpose. His shoulders straightened as he stood up from the stairs. "It holds a lot of meaning. In fact, I know exactly where we have to go." He turned to face the maze. "She made wonders, right? Places and things to amaze and delight, so I'd pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

A frown creased Spock's forehead. "The man behind—"

Jim waved him off. "An old quote from an old movie. Never mind. The important thing is: She made three wonders."

Spock's confusion cleared. "Ah. The three anchors."

"Got it," Jim agreed. He gestured toward the maze behind them. "Might as well start with this one. How do you figure we destroy it? Fire?"

"Certainly not." Spock frowned. How did they destroy it? "Let us not approach the problem as a behemoth; perhaps each wonder will have its own weakness."

Jim nodded. "Makes sense."

"Did the maze have a heart?" Spock asked. "If it has a central point, perhaps we might find the key to its defeat there."

"I guess," Jim said, sounding reluctant.

Spock cocked his head, considering Jim. The Terran seemed...unusually morose. Too hopeless, for how early into this battle they were. "Have faith," he said. Jim looked away rather than meeting his gaze, even when Spock ducked his head to try and force the issue. He considered his situation: without faith that they would succeed, that there was a way to push through to victory, their mission was doomed from the start. Jim's optimism often produced the seeds of his best, wildest ideas. They needed him at his best, not in despair.

Not half broken.

Healing the Beldam's intrusion would be the work of years, which they did not have. How to shore up Jim's faith?

Chekov, of all people, came to mind. Chekov, a novice to what he was and the world he lived in, who never feared, never wavered, whose faith burned in his eyes to anyone who spent even a moment looking. Chekov, who had volunteered to be a reservoir of power for Jim to draw on. But how to tap into that power?

Jim jolted unexpectedly, blinking in surprise as he finally looked at Spock. "What is that?"

Spock glanced at their hands, linked in a solid conduit. "What is what?"

"Don't be coy," Jim said, annoyance shifting from him into Spock. "Just answer the question."

"I will," Spock promised, opening his own confusion for Jim to see, "once I understand what you mean."

"You just—" Jim made a frustrated sound. "You did something just now, it felt like..."

"Like?" Spock prompted.

Jim lifted his free arm, pantomiming what looked like floating or buoyancy. "Light. Not sunshine light, just...less heavy. Like you lifted the whole room off my shoulders." He swallowed hard. "Like maybe we're not totally fucked."

Interesting. Did Jim feel it when Spock even just thought of Chekov? Spock studied Jim's face closely as he brought forward a memory of Chekov after they fought the Narada, wanting for nothing outside of his sire's approval.

Jim shuddered, eyes falling shut as breathing caught and skipped.

Spock's next action was more a product of instinct than thought. He seized the momentum building in Jim's emotions, offering every memory he had of Chekov before reached into the Terran's mind to look for more. He found Chekov in every bright spot, every corner of joy, of belief. It was a simple trick to turn those remembered emotions back at Jim. Even a psy-null mind could layer similar enough emotions. Soon Jim seemed to glow with it, with the faith borrow from his dear little friend. Shackles of darkness fell away from him on a level just beyond what Spock could see. But he felt it.

They both did.

Chekov's faith settled over Jim like a cloak. Only then did Jim open his eyes, burning with new determination. "So," he said, warmth and humor replacing despair. "What was that?"

"Cheating, I think," Spock admitted. "I am not sure."

"Something you learned mind meld prodigy school?" Jim teased.

Spock shook his head. "No. I do not think other Vulcans would think well of what I did, but I—" He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. "I had to. It worked."

Jim grinned at him. "Sure did. That bitch did something to me, didn't she? It felt like..." He shook his head. "I don't know. Bad. Heavy."

"Hopeless," Spock offered.

"Ha!" Jim stabbed a finger at him. "Yes." He summarized his feelings on the topic with a delicate full-body shiver, as though he could shake it off. "Anyway. It worked! We'll figure out the how of it later." Then he turned to face the maze, shoulders squared against it. "You were right, there is a middle of the maze. If it's still there, it'll be a little, like, courtyard." He made an incomprehensible hand gesture. "We had a picnic there, me and— They set it up in a gazebo, if you can believe it. I think that might be the anchor here. It certainly seems important enough."

"Perhaps all we shall have to do is destroy the gazebo," Spock said, letting a bit of his optimism rise into Jim.

He got a crooked smile in return. "Well, stranger things have happened." After one last breath to steel himself, he stepped into the maze, drawing Spock with him. They remained mutually disinclined to release the firm grip they had on each other's hand, which was...

Well. Not fine. Not even normal, or unremarkable. For a Vulcan, it meant something, to be this continually tied into another person. It must have specific meaning for a Terran too, as Spock had never witnessed any two cadets so closely linked for such an extended time. So it meant something.

But Spock and Jim as Spock-and-Jim had meant something for a long time now. Perhaps one day they would investigate what. Perhaps they would let the truth of it grow between them, undisturbed. For now, they moved through the Beldam's maze, tethered, a unit in two pieces, together in the face of a greater enemy.

At first, their trek was tedious. Jim seemed confident in his ability to navigate the corridors, as though he somehow still remembered all the twists and turns from his childhood. Spock did not protest; with Jim, the odds were about even as to whether he actually remembered or just had a plan in case they hit a dead end.

The walls began collapsing.

A stuffed toy tumbled down, landing a few steps behind them. Jim did not pause, but he did glance back. His expression shifted, a shadow of unnamable emotion that shot a spike of concern through Spock. Neither of them spoke even though their pace increased. Perhaps if they did not acknowledge the toy—

Another toy fell, followed immediately by a third. They turned a corner and were immediately forced to dodge a small pile of detritus knocked clear of the wall by...something. "Come on," Jim snapped, stepping lightly over the strewn garbage to pull Spock into a run.

"Jim," Spock began.

"Come on," he said again, low and hard.

They ran. Behind them, licking at their heels, the Beldam's maze collapsed. It tried to block the corridors Jim sought, though he did not allow it. Sometimes they scrambled over low, swelling barricades. Sometimes Jim simply threw his shoulder against the pile to topple it. Occasionally Spock recognized a trap first and yanked Jim around to avoid it. Unfortunately, for all the world seemed real, they were still in Jim's mine, so it fell to Jim to work on the majority of the "heavy lifting", as the Terran phrase went.

Spock thought of Chekov and passed his faith to Jim.

The most exciting moment of their flight happened when Jim said, "This way!" on a laugh and proceeded to run up a stack of shifting garbage to clamor atop one of the walls. They ran along it together, until it, too, collapsed. Spock fell forward against Jim's back, using his psychic advantage in this place to stabilize himself as they surfed back to the ground, running even as they landed. Jim's delight glowed in Spock, who held on tight.

Eventually, inevitably, they reached the center. Spock learned what a gazebo was: a small, roofed structure with open sizes. This one was octagonal, bearing simple waist-high lattice panels on seven sides. The eighth side had smaller panels framing an opening attached to a set of three small steps.

A boy stood in the center of the gazebo, perhaps fourteen years old, with brown hair and black button eyes. His mouth yawned in a threatening grin. "Hi there, Jimmy," he said. "Finally came back to play! Just like I always knew you would."

"It's not a game," Jim said, shifting where he stood as though he couldn't decide if he should prepare for an attack or approach the creature head on. "It never was."

"We are all toys in Mother's game," the pupped said, voice melting low and syrupy like a music box winding down. "Even you."

Jim's lips pulled back in a snarl.

Spock squeezed his hand. "Must we disable this being?" he asked, studying the Beldam's creation. "Is it the anchor? Or the gazebo?"

"My money would be on him," Jim said, low and furious. His free hand flexed as though he was trying to contain a strong drive toward violence.

"Aw." The being's slow, warbling voice held a ragged edge of mockery. "You would kill your own brother? Mother wouldn't approve."

"You are not," Jim snarled, "my brother."

"You're right." It tilted its head to one side at a hideous angle. A human's neck would have to be broken. "I'm better than your brother. At least I didn't run."

"True." Darkness rose in Jim, viscous under his skin where Spock could sense it. Claws of it stretched out toward the Beldam's creature, nearly visible as its menace stretched. Jim released Spock's hand to square his shoulders. Shadows stretched long around him, even against the light. "But maybe you should have."

He struck.

The creature braced itself and was flung aside anyway. Jim's power crunched the gazebo like a depressurized ship in space. Its composite pieces scattered around them, embedding in the walls of the maze and slicing through the creature's sack cloth skin. Spock raised an arm to protect his face: needlessly, as it turned out. The shrapnel bounced off his sleeve without so much as snagging a thread.

Intentional?

Jim advanced on the creature, slow and inescapable as the tide, malice in every line of his body. Spock knew he would win this confrontation, would crush his opponent as easily as the gazebo. To what end? The creature would be gone, the Beldam's web weakened. Would that matter if Jim lost himself to her power? Even now, it ate its way across the floor and up Jim's limbs in equal measure, consuming him and his enemy. The Terran planted himself in the epicenter of the gazebo's destruction, raising his arms to conduct the shadow around him like an orchestra.

The Beldam creature exploded, torn apart by Jim's tainted power, then whipped around in a maelstrom of violence that built ever larger with Jim, and Spock at his side, safe in the eye. Within moment, the vortex flattened all the towering walls around them, turning the twisting maze into so much confetti. Eventually—inevitably—the winds and fury boiled higher than even the basement could contain. Jim's power pushed out, up, away, building pressure until Spock felt his ears might burst. He waited, hoping Jim would regain himself, realize his excess and draw the back inside.

He didn't. The storm rattled the floorboards above their heads, reaching a thousand spindly fingers like spider's legs into developing cracks to pry at the very foundations of the house in Jim's mind. If Jim didn't make it stop, they might all be lost

If he couldn't make it stop, their end might be worse than simple destruction. One of Jim's hands spasmed, a small, concentrated effort that went nowhere. He could not even form a fist as the bedrock of his resistance.

How could Spock help him? Chekov's hope would do nothing here. Jim needed to fix the crack in his control, to repair, to—

Oh.

To heal.

Spock stepped forward, lifting one hand to wrap it around the back of Jim's neck. He shut his eyes—habit, here, more than anything—and drew on all the memories Jim possessed of Dr. McCoy. In a moment, he had them, a twisting, determined knot of healing stones and tea and meditation techniques and even an exorcism. Spock let them pool in the space between his palm and Jim's skin for a single, lingering moment.

Damn it, Jim, the memories whispered.

Spock flattened his palm, giving McCoy's presence no avenue except forward, back into Jim from where he'd come. In a heartbeat, he filled Jim, every corner of him, with light and strength and purpose. With healing.

The darkness flickered. The storm crumbled. Jim took a deep breath.

Everything settled.

Beneath his hand, Jim began to tremble. "Are you well?" Spock asked, crowding close to peer at his face. He stroked his thumb along Jim's hairline in thoughtless comfort.

Jim's mouth thinned into an unhappy line. Something nearly like panic fizzled under his skin. "She nearly got me this time," he said, low and broken. "If you hadn't—"

"There is no profit in considering what might have been," Spock interrupted firmly. "You protect us perhaps more vigorously than you intended. Nevertheless, we are protected. The creature is destroyed. The maze is destroyed."

"And the anchor?" Jim asked with a heavy, shuddering sigh. "I don't feel any different."

Spock looked at him, layering as many types of sight as he could, and admitted to himself that Jim did not appear any less tied to the landscape than he had been when they first arrived. He turned his sight outward, searching the evenly distributed detritus for an idea.

Something amid the tattered garbage glowed. Spock slid his hand down from Jim's neck to take his hand and draw him toward it. They knelt together, Jim confused but resolved to wait, Spock sifting through thee garbage for—

A small sphere of glass, clear but for a fan of color at its center. It cast light and shadows around it, disproportionately heavy for its size.

"One of Sam's marbles," Jim murmured, reaching out to it in what seemed to be a subconscious motion. His eyes took on a gleam not unlike the odd little object. As though they were reflecting each other.

Spock drew back and stood, releasing Jim's hand to take another step back when the Terran protested. He dropped the marble on the ground.

And crushed it under the heel of his boot.

The basement screamed. Spockrealized he'd covered his ears in an effort to protect himself from it only in retrospect, when Jim grabbed his wrist and had to pull it away from his ear to draw him into a run. As they fled, the room collapsed around them, pulling into itself like light at the edge of a black hole. It did not leave empty space behind; the room utterly ceased to exist, as true and incomprehensible as existence before the Big Bang. The deepest primal pieces of Spock's mind spooked like a common Terran horse at the depth of nothing closing in around them. Adrenaline surged through his veins. He had Jim hefted over his shoulder and was sprinting up the stairs with him before the first inkling of a thought about such a plan could suggest itself to him.

They burst through the door that way. Spock tripped as the basement vanished behind them, leaving a smooth wall and yellowing wallpaper where the basement bad been. He and his precious cargo tumbled to the ground, panting and frantic, immediately clustering as close together as they could.

"What the fuck," Jim managed after a solid minute of clinging to each other while staring at the wall.

"I have no explanation to offer," Spock said, calm and even as he patted Jim down without even looking at him. "Are you well?"

Jim swatted at Spock's seeking hands. "I'm fine, everything's fine, I—" He blinked, as though finally taking stock of himself. "I...feel fine?" The words came out half confusion, half wonder. Spock slid a hand over Jim's to feel the tangle of it. "Breaking the marble, it...I think it worked. I feel different." He shut his eyes, Terran and button, basking in the sensation of distance from the Beldam, partial though it was. "How did you know to shatter it?"

"I did not know," Spock admitted, stroking his thumb along the soft skin on the inside of Jim's wrist. "I...guessed, I suppose you could say. Rather, I knew the item needed to be destroyed, regardless of its impact on the web."

"How did you know?" Jim asked. He gathered his legs underneath him as though preparing to stand, then tipped sideways to lean against Spock instead.

Agreeable. "It had an effect on you," Spock explained, leaning his head on Jim's. "On the button. You hardly seemed aware of anything else once you set eyes on it. I destroyed it to prevent its goal, whatever that was."

Jim blew out a long, low sigh. "Thanks," he said, relief and gratitude and something indescribably warm shining bright through every place they touched.

Spock nodded minutely, careful not to unbalance Jim's head. "It was only logical."

"It was that too," Jim agreed with a quiet laugh. He nudged Spock with his elbow. "Okay, spit it out. I know you were helping me back there, when the Beldam was making me despair, and also when she almost consumed me. How?"

"I am not fully sure myself," Spock admitted. "I could sense what she was doing, certainly, but had no good way of combating it. I thought you needed—hope. When I phrased the need to myself that way, our link offered a solution: Chekov."

Jim blinked. "Pavel? What about him?"

Spock drew upon Chekov's memories once more, stirring them in Jim, who shut his eyes to bask in it. "He has been a source of hope for you for many years now. And he did offer to be a repository of strength for you, had you need of it. So I...let you remind yourself of him. His hope."

"And when I was falling to her power?" Jim murmured.

"I am certain you can guess who I tapped for that." He teased out a strand of memory linked to any number of instances where McCoy's teas or rocks had saved Jim in the past.

"Bones." The word came out soft and reverent as a prayer. "But how? They aren't with us. They stayed with the Doyles."

"At the risk of sounding cliché, Jim." Spock squeezed his hand. "They live in you."

Jim sat up to scowl at him. "That's terrible."

Spock shrugged. "What is, is."

"Well anyway." Jim stood, stretched, and offered a hand down to help Spock stand. "We should probably keep moving."

Though Spock required no assistance to get to his feet, he took Jim's hand. "Indeed." He looked around. "Where is the next wonder? Do you know?"

Jim's face twisted through a number of emotions before settling on a combination of distaste and resignation. "I can guess," he sighed, dragging his free hand over his eyes. "When I was here as a kid," he continued, beginning to walk toward a door leading outside, "there were three people other than the Beldam, each with a fun thing we could do. She picked the worst relationships I had and made them—" He shook his head, harsh and bitter. He glanced back at Spock, giving him a glimpse at a sour half-smile. "Better. Perfect. Everything I always dreamed they should be."

"A compelling lie," Spock murmured.

"Irresistible bait," Jim agreed, pushing the door open so they could walk out into the surrounding land. It seemed to go on for countless miles in every direction, though it felt much smaller, close and oppressive. Another type of bait? Freedom, or the implication of it? "I certainly fell for it hook, line, and sinker. If Kit hadn't been there, well." He nodded toward the barn standing across the yard. "That'll be the second anchor, most likely."

"What is it?" Spock asked. "Besides a barn," he added when wicked amusement bubbled across their connection.

Jim smirked at him but said, "I should just let you find out on your own, keep the mystery alive, but that sounds like a good way to die needlessly, so: It's my step-father. Frank. And something fun we used to do."

"Something fun in the barn." Spock studies its lines, the light and dark of its wood and peeling paint, trying to understand the competing sense of safety and threat it radiated with growing intensity as they approached. "Did you have horses?" he guessed, more to distract Jim than out of any real sense of interest. Whatever they had done, Spock would help Jim fight a corrupted version of it soon enough.

"Ha! No." Jim shook his head, then tilted it thoughtfully. He led them to the large barn door only to stand in front of it, studying its weathered frame thoughtfully. "I mean, I guess metaphorically? Metaphorical horses might have been involved."

Spock frowned. "Metaphorical...?"

"Wait for it," Jim said, and pushed the door open.

The barn groaned as they stepped into it, an ominous sound of threat and distress that made Spock's ears hum unpleasantly. Though the structure appeared sound, it gave a sense of rotting, slow collapse. Light filtered through high windows in a pale imitation of sun, illuminating rafters and a dirt floor and a red automobile with no top and its front compartment opened to reveal an old fossils fuel-powered combustion engine. Ah.

Horsepower, as the Terrans used to call it. As Jim once called it during a daring, ridiculous escape from Cerberus via a stolen vehicle not too dissimilar from this one At least that finally explained how Jim had known the proper method to "hot wire" it.

A man stood beside the driver-side door, holding a dirty rag in his hand even though everything else in the barn was perfectly clean. He did not move except to smile, blank and wide beneath his button eyes. "Welcome home, Jimmy," he said.

The sudden spike of Jim's anger surprised Spock, who was more used to patient, boiling fury when this particular Terran found himself caught up in battle. "Jim," he began, attempting to thread some of his own caution through Jim's volatile emotions.

Jim seemed unwilling—unable?—to let Spock's warning distract him. "Don't call me that," he snarled.

"Jim," Spock said, trying to draw him closer by their linked hands, trying to break through whatever means the creature was using to ensnare him. "Jim, listen to me, I believe this being is trying to—"

"But you used to like it." The Beldam puppet pressed a doughy hand against its own chest. "You used to like me. Didn't we have fun together, rebuilding this old thing?" It put one hand on the car, which flickered beneath his touch, going from whole and perfect to a crumbled ruin in a pattern like a heartbeat. "Maybe we should let you wreck it again and start over. Huh? Would you like that, Jimmy? Just the way things used to be."

"None of that was real," Jim spat. "None of you are real. Break it, fix it, it doesn't matter. It doesn't exist."

"This is not real either," Spock said, tugging Jim against his side but unable to make him look away. "This thing is angering you intentionally, Jim, do not—"

"That's a rude thing to say to your father," the creature said, smile fixed even as its face began melting around it, sliding down like wax in an oven. "You should apologize before Mother finds out. You don't want her feelings to be hurt, do you?"

"I want Mother to die," Jim said, fury funneled into a cruel smile. His intent crept through Spock's shields, painting shades of violence and revenge over Spock's deliberate calm.

"Later," Spock interjected, shaking Jim's arm to pull his attention. "At the moment, what we want is the anchor. What do you think it might be?" He nudged Jim toward the vehicle. "...Something large?"

Jim's head ticked to one side, nearly but not quite a shake, nearly but not quite looking at him. "Ah. No." A shoulder shifted in a rolling shrug, pressed so close against Spock that he could feel individual muscles moving. "Something related to it, though, I bet."

"Are you looking for this?" the creature asked, drawing a key out of the front pocket of its denim outfit. "Mother thought you might."

Jim's attention refocused like a laser sight. "Give it," he demanded, striding forward with his free hand held out.

"Ah ah." The creature drew the key back toward itself. "Mother wouldn't like it if I let you have another piece. And what Mother wants—"

"I will fucking kill you," Jim seethed.

"That's the trick, isn't it, Jimmy?" The creature's voice began melting as surely as its face, slurring through tone and diction. "We were never alive."

"Give me that key or I swear to god I will—"

It flipped the key up, letting its head flop back against its spine to catch the anchor in its gaping maw. What happened next couldn't really be called swallowing, though Spock did watch the small object work its way down the creature's sagging neck.

Jim coiled beside Spock, a feeling as physical as it was emotional. His hatred seemed alive, rolling under his skin like thunder in storm clouds. "You think that will stop me?" Jim snapped, hand wrapped so tight around Spock's it might have hurt, had Spock been Terran.

"It is goading you," Spock insisted. "You must resist its influence!"

"Influence to what?" Jim curled his lip at the creature. "I don't need any influence to tear this thing apart!"

"Temper, temper, Jimmy," the Beldam creature gurgled, scuttling back like it had tentacles rather than legs. Its torso, arms, and head flopped bonelessly with every movement. "What would Mother say?"

The sound Jim made then was a snarl, underscored by shards of darkness that spiked from his shadow off the floor and through the creature. Three of the shards hit, lancing through its right side, severing one arm. The others pierced the bar wall like arrows. Lines of black infection bled away from them into the wood, crumbling it like the passage of a thousand years.

As the creature laughed, oozing its way across the floor with unnatural speed, Jim struck. He left Spock, dropped his hand, coated his arms in shadows from elbows to fingertips, and launched himself at the creature. Almost immediately, Spock caught his breath: Jim was going to lose.

The Terran fought like a creature possessed, rabid and unfocused, displaying none of his usual skill for strategy. Dark Beldam magic poured from him, leaching back in through all the cracks it left in Jim's defenses, breaking him open to fill him up with all the power he hated. He had to seal himself against it, block the power and focus on retrieving the key. Their goal meant more than victory against this lowly, ruined creature. How could Spock help him remember it? Maybe he had other memories, like with McCoy and Chekov, that could return control to him.

But their connection was broken. Jim was too far, moving too fast, for Spock to grab him and reassert it. He needed a link to search for the memories Jim needed, and he needed contact for a link, but if he couldn't catch Jim—

They were already connected. This entire world was a psychic manifestation of Jim's own mind. To be in it, Spock had to be already connected. All he needed to do was widen that link a little, flesh it out, make it more of a bond than a touch. Which was, objectively, deeply unethical. Such bonds required years of commitment and thorough understanding from each partner.

Usually, they were not made in life-or-death situations. Spock reasoned that Jim would rather be alive and himself and victorious and bonded than unbonded and a new iteration of the Beldam. So he reached deep, searching for Jim's presence amid the clatter of his useless battle. When the clear sense of him resisted discovery, Spock knelt, touching battered flooring that was nothing more than an imagining of Jim's mind.

It blossomed around him, up through his arm to slide over his skin like a gossamer cloak. Every part of him felt surrounded—every part of him was surround, here in this strange meld. Spock pulled that feeling inside himself, spinning it into a starlight cord that tethered them together out into eternity. At first, the connection drifted limp in the air, present but unfocused. Spock touched it, sending a pulse of his intent to draw it tight between them. He felt Jim notice it, felt his curiosity, felt the way it started to break through the Beldam's rage. A good start.

Not enough.

He strengthened the connection further, forging it into a fledgling bond that he might have to apologize for later. For now, it was needed.

Spock sent his own trust and determination through the bond, feelers to check Jim's mind for readiness. Jim accepted his intrusion with a natural, absentminded skill that gave Spock a moment of pause. Did he welcome Spock because was used to intruders, or because it was Spock?

Later.

While Jim and the Beldam puppet fought their way through the rafters of the barn, Spock searched Jim's thoughts for any shade of focus or battle strategy. At first, there was nothing. Then, as he dodged a blow, there. A suggestion of planning, glittering just beyond the Beldam's rage. Spock seized it, catching it in his hold to examine it more closely.

Sulu shone in his grip, a dozen instances in a hundred fights, each with the swordsman showing the kind of unshakable focus that would make Sulu an exemplary helmsperson one day. He often helped keep Jim on task as well; no small accomplishment.

Instead of pulling on strands of Sulu to feed Jim, Spock grabbed as large a metaphorical handful as he could, heaving it at the howling chaotic mess of Jim's thoughts. He felt the moment Sulu's influence superseded the Beldam's. Even if he hadn't been able to feel it, he would have been able to guess. The instant it happened, Jim broke away from the Beldam's puppet, putting almost the whole barn between them. He waited for the creature, awkward with its speed, to round on him, then just—

Cut off its head. Before it could even begin falling to the floor, Jim struck again, using his clawed right hand to rend its middle open. It poured to the ground in heaping piles of sand. The key landed on top of the largest pile.

Jim picked it up. "So," he said, flipping it into the air casually before catching it in a fist. "That's done."

Spock approached him somewhat warily. "Are you well, Jim?"

A muscle clenched in Jim's jaw. "Define well."

"Jim."

"I think I'm..." He rubbed a thumb over the key in his hand. "Slipping."

His distress fizzled down their link, drawing Spock to his side. "You are feeling the Beldam's influence more strongly."

Jim blew out a sharp breath, tangling their fingers together in a desperate grip. "She's winning. I— It's never been like this. Before. I couldn't even tell it was her influence. I thought it would get better as we pulled out the anchors, but, Spock, what if it doesn't, what if she—"

Spock pressed their foreheads together, breathing deep and even until Jim matched him. He sent comfort and conviction through the bond. "You have overcome every escalation of her attacks since you were a child. You will overcome this too. I am with you now, Jim; I will not let her have you."

"Yeah about that." Jim's gaze was sharp and curious when it met Spock's. "You gave me Sulu, didn't you? The way you gave me Bones and Pavel. How did you do that when we weren't touching? And why can I still feel you?" He stroked his thumb up the side of Spock's hand. "Hand-holding means something different for you, doesn't it."

Embarrassment flared in Spock, quickly tamped down before Jim could—

"I'm right, aren't I, that's why you're blushing."

"I am not," Spock said, calm and firm. "Vulcans do not blush."

Jim squinted at him. "Then it feels like you're blushing. Why can I feel that?" He swung their joined hands. "Because of this? I couldn't before, though."

"Perhaps we should focus on the task at hand," Spock suggested dryly.

"Evasion." Jim made a pitying sound. "You're not very good at it. So what's the thread?"

"Thread?" Spock echoed, trying to feel the bond as Jim might.

"Yeah, kind of a reddish golden thread." Jim shut his eyes to focus on it. The bond manifested around him—around them, a tangle of gilded light and fire. For a moment, he let himself be filled with wonder and curiosity.

Now was not the time.

Spock bumped his shoulder against Jim's, knocking him out of his concentration. The visible manifestation of their bond vanished. "It is potential," Spock said. "We will have to discuss it later. It will be a long discussion," he insisted before Jim could protest. "At the moment, we lack time for it. Come, Jim we must press on. Where is the next anchor?"

Jim sighed but relinquished. "The attic," he said, tugging Spock after him toward the barn door.

"You're confident," Spock observed.

"There's not really anywhere else it could be. Oh, wait, let's take care of this first." He dropped Spock's hand to grasp the car key he'd torn from the Beldam's creature firmly.

"Wait," Spock said, too slowly, "the barn will—"

Jim snapped the key.

Everything crumbled. Large chunks of not just the barn, but the ground and sky and world broke off in great vanishing chunks, leaving behind a humming world of white static. Spock grabbed Jim around the waist and ran, eyes locked on the side door of the house they'd left not long ago. After a few stumbling steps, Jim found his footing and raced beside him, cursing all the while. They fell through the door just as it slammed shut, sealed against a reality that didn't exist anymore.

"You might have waited until we were inside," Spock observed mildly while picking himself up off the floor.

"Oops," Jim said, sheepishness curling through him. "Yeah, that's my bad. I'll, uh. Not do that. In the future."

He offered Jim a hand up.

"I don't know what the hand thing is," Jim said, accepting his grip, "but I know it's something. You'll tell me about it after, right?"

"As soon as this task is accomplished," Spock agreed, "you are safe, and we have a moment of quiet, I shall explain everything."

Jim squeezed his hand, smirking a little at the reaction he could no doubt tell Spock was attempting to subdue. "I'll hold you to that."

"The final anchor?" Spock prompted.

"When I was a kid," Jim said, leading Spock from the kitchen into an adjoining hall, "I used to imagine all the ways this place could be better. One of them was that my dad had all these books in the attic, real books, boxes and boxes of them. I wanted to make a library. Somewhere cozy and safe to read. And the Beldam— Well. She did what she does best, when faced with a dream."

"What in the library do you think will be the anchor?"

"Genuinely no idea," Jim sighed. They approached an old stairwell, stretching up into darkness so complete Spock didn't know how high it went. Jim took the first step.

On Spock's peripheral, something cold reached out. He turned, startled, and saw a solitary door on a long wall, paint peeling and flaking onto the floor. Nothing moved as he watched, but the sensation of movement set his heart racing. The door was stationary even as every instinct trained into him by the greatest psychics on his homeworld told him it was slinking toward them, crushing the distance with slow, inescapable intent. Vulcans were a warrior race who bent themselves toward peace for their own betterment; nothing in their culture or heritage predisposed them to flight.

And yet, facing this door, watching it, feeling it, Spock knew with certainty that they must run or die. He must take Jim with him, drag him out if necessary, escape this maw of—

A different kind of cold touched his other side, not creeping, a rush of menace and fury scored through with black determination. Spock jerked toward it to find Jim looking at the door in the hall beyond them.

"Not yet," he said. To Spock. To the door. To the house or this place or everything. "We have to finish weakening her first. Then we can go into the beetle den."

"The beetle den," Spock echoed breathlessly.

Jim smiled at him: not a friendly expression. "You'll see," he promised, and took another step up into the shadowed stairwell.

Spock followed him, drawing on his strength and focus to find his own center again. Before he was finished ridding himself of the Beldam's brief influence, they reached the top of the stairs. Another door awaited them, smaller, lit by a broken bulb that flickered ominously.

"Into the fray," Jim said, low and humming. He glanced back at Spock. "Last one. You ready?"

No.

"I am," Spock said.

"Liar," his bondmate murmured. He pushed the door open anyway.

The library was breathtaking. Light spilled in through skylights and a solid wall of windows. Dust filtered through sunbeams, giving the room a nostalgic appearance. Bookshelves bisected the floor, raising up nearly to the peak of the roof. Rather than simply staying on the shelves, the books flew around like birds, settling in among the rafters or on the assorted comfortable seats or floating lightly above their heads.

Spock felt awe whisper through him and resented it. This place was a dream, fantasy, a trap set for a small boy. He looked to Jim, reaching for him through their bond at the same time, to gauge his reaction to being here again.

A flavor of resignation laced through with bitterness met his inquiry. Underneath all that, Jim longed for the library, too. For the sanctuary it had been. For the peace he'd found here and nowhere else in his life.

For the man who organized the books.

Far above their heads, perched on the tall stacks, that man whistled. Jim looked away with a deliberate grit of his teeth, but Spock's attention snapped up in automatic reaction. The man was handsome, blond hair and blue eyes in an aesthetically pleasing face. He looked to be roughly their age and smiled down at Jim with a beatific expression usually reserved for iconography imagery. In Spock's mind, Jim hummed with desperation and regret and a deep, bitter longing.

"It's good to see you again," the man said. His voice stayed low and soothing and still managed to reach them from his spot so high above them.

"Who is he?" Spock asked Jim.

"I used to wonder," Jim said, muscle jumping in his jaw, "if she could only make the people and places I knew, or if she could take things from anyone in the house. That guy up there, is he what I wish he'd been? Or is he a puppet made of who my mother and brother remember?"

"Jim," Spock said, sympathy making his heart wrench in his side. "Is he—"

"George Kirk," he confirmed with a short, sharp nod. "My father. Yeah."

The cruelty of giving Jim his father only in a trap seemed almost too much, even for the Beldam. But then what better bait for her web? What sweeter gift could she have offered?

"Can you do this?" Spock asked, earnest even as he flooded the bond with as much sympathy and comfort as he could. "I will handle the final anchor if you need—"

"How?" Jim replied, smile bright and dangerous as a knife. "Of the two of us, I'm the only one with weapons."

"It is your mindscape," Spock argued. "If you imagine a weapon for me, I could—"

"No." Jim took a deep breath. "I fell for it the first time, you know? I bought every inch of this place, all three wonders, the Beldam pitch at the end, all of it. She only missed out on my other eye because Kit attacked her, and then she went after Kit, and I couldn't let her so— No. I have to do this myself. I have to break the things she used to break me." He looked at Spock, direct, demanding. "Do you understand?"

Spock took a step back. "Not fully," he admitted, "but enough of it. I will do as you say."

"Thank you." Jim tipped his head to look up at the floating books and the sack monster sitting above them. "I have no idea what the anchor is," he admitted. "But I'd rather not look for it with Peanut Gallery George up there judging us. So I say we murder him first, get that out of the way, then figure out which of these books or light bulbs or whatever is the one we need to break."

"Doubtlessly I should be concerned by the propensity for violence on display," Spock said, already scanning the room for a clear path to the puppet. "However, in this case, I believe I can make an exception."

Jim stabbed a finger in his direction. "Truth. Now let's get up there."

They tried. Jim climbed the bookshelves and was knocked down by fluttering books. He looked for something to use as a rope or a ladder and found nothing. He tried imagining a way up but could produce only weapons made of the Beldam's darkness. He then attempted to hurl the weapons at the ever-watching sack monster, again to no success.

"Is that the best you can do?" the creature asked, sounding amused. Its voice echoed at them from every corner of the attic, as though the room itself found their efforts laughable.

Jim's frustration surged, not just through their bond but visibly. Ire bubbled off his skin in viscous black dregs.

Spock tightened his hold, dragging Sulu's focus back to the fore again. "Please, Jim, do not give into her. Resist. We will defeat this creature and her and be free of this place. But you must resist."

"I can't— I can't think." Jim gasped a breath, shoulders heaving as they curled forward. "There's so much, she's just so angry, and I—" His voice lowered to an unnatural growl. "And I am too."

The Beldam was using him, his emotions, twisting them against him as she has when he was a child. This wasn't a battle to be strategized; Sulu couldn't help. But then who could? Which of them could show Jim how he was being manipulated? Which of them understood human emotions enough to—

Oh.

Of course: Uhura.

But Jim did not know her, not as well or long as Spock did. So Spock dug inward first, drawing forward the thread of Uhura's cool understanding, her intuition and insight, usually directed toward others but with no fear of turning it inward. Once he had her essence coiled bright in his mind, he bundled it down their bond, adding it to the pool of deep respect and curiosity Jim already had regarding her.

Almost immediately, the black sludge dripping from Jim's struggling form to the floor vanished. His breathed evened out; his head cocked thoughtfully. Understanding filled him like a cool breeze, and he straightened at last.

"Huh," he said in summary, his own thoughts glowing in the room like a star. "Oh, I— Oh. That's— Frankly," he said, turning to Spock, "I'm annoyed at myself for falling into a dumb, emotionally dense manchild stereotype."

"In your defense," Spock replied mildly, "you are in the middle of something very like a possession."

Jim made a dismissive sound, surveying the room with fresh, clear eyes. "If it were possession, it'd be easy to fix," he mused, squinting up at the Beldam creature. "Sadie could have whipped up an exorcism ages ago. This is more like...the way minerals replace organic matter to create fossils. Same shape, different thing entirely. It's okay, though, we'll excavate me in time to save most of my fleshy bits."

"Even for you," Spock said, sending his amusement down their bond, "that is...quite a metaphor."

"Eh." Jim rolled his shoulders as though preparing for physical exertion. "I can feel her picking at Uhura's understanding. I'll end up lost in my own anger again, tricked by her, sooner rather than later. Before that happens, I need your help." He turned to Spock, determination fierce in his eyes. "Who can you give me who will get me up to that bastard up there?"

The answer to that even simpler than the previous: Who other than Montgomery Scott?

Spock dug for memories of Scott, fleeting and fantastic, his flash of genius that so well-matched Jim's. More, he drew on Jim's memories, seeking Jim's admiration for Scott's unusual way of approaching problems, threading the resulting combination of insight and inspiration through the problem of how to reach the Beldam creature.

"Oh," Jim said, head tilted back, a wicked blend of surprise and delight twining down their bond. "Ha, yes, that's perfect. Don't freak out," he added to Spock. "I'm giving it all I've got."

Alarm flared along Spock's skin. "Jim, what does that—"

Jim was already gone. He threw his arms forward and up in a motion like he was snapping a whip. In the downward arc, ropes of darkness curved into being, already undulating with the force of Jim's movement. The whips wrapped around fluttering books, two or three each, sending the entire flock into frantic flight. They were stronger than they looked: the book yanked Jim off the ground, propelling him toward the top of the bookshelves.

When he reached the height of the books' ability to lift him, the whips dissolved. Jim fell at an angle, toward the shelves. At the last moment, he covered his hands and feet in shadow claws, slamming them into the woods and stationary books to slow his descent to a stop. He scaled the bookshelves in a manner more like a cat than a person, leaping lightly from hold to hold, sending waves of knickknacks and damaged books toppling to the floor. Spock suspected he was displacing most of the objects due to spite rather than necessity: Sometimes he had to reach out of his way with a hand or foot to get all of the items in his range, which he did without fail.

The Beldam creature did not react to Jim's advance, at first. Slowly, as Jim got higher, switching between captured books and scaling the shelves as necessary, it began to lean forward. Light glinted off its button eyes, blue as none of the others had been, unmoving and tracking Jim's progress at the same time. It loomed further and further over the edge of its perch, until Spock could not understand how it prevented itself from falling. Nothing else about it changed; it did not grip the edge of the shelf, did not curl its legs to anchor its leaning torso. It just...bent forward, its whole body bent forward on an axis that should have been impossible. Even its expression stayed perfectly the same, fond and beautiful around the blue buttons.

Beneath Uhura's understanding and Scott's ingenuity, the Beldam's rage began to grow once more. Spock couldn't see Jim's face, but he could feel the way his lip began to curl. Instead of smooth, quick motions, his ascent became jagged, uncontrolled, causing him to slip and fumble when before he'd demonstrated grace even Kit would have praised.

Spock fought to reinforce Uhura's and Scott's memories. He tried to bring in as many of the others as he could, too, patience and healing and everything else, layered together to protect Jim from the Beldam's influence, even one moment longer.

When Jim was only a few feet from the top of the shelves, the Beldam creature finally stood. It did not retreat back onto the shelves. Instead, it lifted impossibly into thin air, straightening until all its limbs dangled limply like a marionette's, lovely smile vacant in a listlessly tilted head. It flew back into the unseen space at the top of the bookshelves as though yanked by an unseen hand.

Jim growled and followed it, without thought or hesitation. Then they were both gone, and Spock had to watch from his fixed point on the ground, surrounded by ruined books and broken trinkets and the surge of malice suffusing their bond. For the most part, Jim's battle against his father's puppet was silent. There was occasionally the soft sound of scuffling feet or the tearing of cloth, the spilling of sand.

Spock clung to his people's teachings in an effort to be calm, to be a source of serenity against the sea of Jim's rage. He ran through standing meditations and centering techniques and the higher-level psychic exercises designed to temper overly powerful, unruly minds. He couldn't tell if it helped Jim, but it certainly allowed him to get his own budding panic under control.

Jim would be fine. He would either finish his battle and settle back into suppressing the Beldam's poison, or they would work together to push it back, or Spock would fight the Beldam himself for Jim's freedom. Somehow.

And then Jim landed beside him, hardly making a sound. Spock did not physically jump, but he recognized the roll of surprise he sent down their bond.

For a moment, Jim grinned, mischievous and pleased, looking more himself than he had since perhaps their childhood. Then he straightened fully, rolling his shoulders back, stretching his neck with a satisfied sound. "Got him," he said unnecessarily.

"I see," Spock replied, equally extraneous. He tucked his hands at the small of his back to keep himself from pulling Jim close for a physical inspection of his well-being. They were in Jim's mind-scape; any wounds he received here could not be corrected with first aid. "Now shall we turn our attention toward locating the anchor?"

"Got that too," Jim said, more proudly this time. He held out his right hand, curled tight in a fist. He spread it flat to reveal two blue buttons, one with some thread still hanging from it. "Everyone always said I had my father's eyes." He grinned, sharp and dangerous as a blade. "Guess I proved them right."

Spock peered at the buttons. "Which is the anchor?" he asked.

Jim shrugged. "Don't care. I'm gonna crush them both.

"In your bare hands?" Spock asked, one eyebrow lifted in a show of skepticism. "Or will you manifest yet more claws?"

"Eh." Jim waved his free hand dismissively. "It's my mind. I can be strong enough to crush buttons if I wanna be."

Spock touched the tips of his fingers to those of Jim's right hand, carefully directing his thought away from the deeper meaning. "Be sure to wait this time," he said, dry as a Vulcan desert, until we are no longer in the place that will vanish once the anchor is destroyed."

"Point," Jim agreed. He shoved the buttons in his pocket and gestured toward the door. "Ready?"

"More than." Spock took Jim's left hand in his own, giving it a gentle squeeze when Jim's surprise and happiness curled down the bond.

Jim tugged him close unexpectedly, using Spock's momentary unbalance to press their foreheads together. "Don't think I missed whatever that finger thing was," he murmured, eyes bright with mischief.

"We will discuss it later," Spock said, more promise than dismissal as he struggled to keep the blush he could feel on his cheeks and the tips of his ears from growing.

"Mmm," the Terran agreed. He brushed the tip of his nose over Spock's before pulling away to stride purposefully toward the door. "Better get this over with, then."

At the bottom of the stairs, Jim paused to pull the buttons out of his pocket again. He kept one tucked in his palm and pinched the other between both forefingers and thumbs at opposite edges to snap it down the middle. Once it was broken, he discarded the pieces to repeat his destruction on the second.

The door to the stairs slammed shut. It shuttered and rattled alarmingly, not just the door but the frame in the wall as well, like it was a painting tacked to the drywall. After a moment, it froze in place, cockeyed, before turning gray and crumbling in ash. The last remnants of it drew inward as though sucked into a black hole, and it was gone. All that remained was a smooth wall covered in peeling, faded wallpaper.

"So." Jim grinned at him while rubbing his hands together. The buttons had crumbled too; the halves in his hands had turned into clinging dust. "Good call, making me wait to break those until we got clear of the attic. I don't know where things go when they leave here, since it's technically my mind and everything, and frankly I'm not all that interested in finding out. So yeah." He gave Spock a thumb's up. "Thanks for standing between me and an idiotic death. Again."

"It happens with such frequency," Spock said, straightening first his shirt and then Jim's, "one might almost think there was a career in it."

"Ha!" Jim nudged their shoulders together and twisted his fingers with Spock's. "If Starfleet throws us out but doesn't lock us all up, I'm sure I could find a way to make saving me a full-time gig."

"I look forward to it," Spock said, as dry as he was serious. He sent a curl of his affection down the bond. "Are you ready?"

Jim filled his lungs in a deep, sharp attempt to pretend he could bolster his courage with air. "No," he said firmly. He squeezed Spock's hand. "But we don't really have a choice. The web is unwinding."

"Can you feel it?" Spock asked, peering in to Jim's eyes to try and read the effect such an event would have on him. He could sense nothing of it through the bond. Perhaps he might have been able to with a full marriage bond, but the fledgling thread singing between them at present could tell him only about Jim's emotional state. "Will you be all right?"

"I can kind of feel it," Jim said, rolling his shoulders to shift the sense of...whatever it was the Beldam was doing. "I won't be all right until we get her out of my head."

"Do you have a plan for how to do that?"

Jim made a vague gesture. "Not...not really? I figured we'd wing it again, like with the others."

"Do you think that wise?" Spock asked, as evenly as he could. "I have no weapons to use against her, and your greatest asset here is the power she gave you. I do not mean to frighten or unsettle you, Jim; I also do not wish to be taken off guard by her and defeated here at the end. Tell me truthfully: How did you and Kit kill her in your youth? I know you did not strangle her," he said when Jim opened his mouth with lies itching down the bond. He lifted their joined hands. "It will be very difficult for you to, as you might say, pull one over on me while we are here and joined."

For a long moment, Jim visible struggled between taking offense and making a lewd joke. He deflated with a sigh. "Okay," he said, turning to lean against the rapidly aging wall. "Okay, so—no. I didn't strangle her. I—" Jim shook his head, looking strangely bewildered. "It's hard to remember what we did, exactly. I know we took her apart, after she was dead. After we killed her. She looked like my mother—my real mother, the one who didn't want me—right down to freckles and scars, except for the buttons. But the longer I stayed, the more sure it was that I wouldn't leave, the more...comfortable she got, the less effort she put into pretending. She got...long, and tall, and thin. Whatever she really is, it looks a lot like...like a spider's body with a human torso. But her legs and arms and fingers, they aren't—right. They're—" He shrugged helplessly "I don't know how to describe it. She's like a spider made of sewing needles. All the eyes and tips welded together like mechanical parts. So once she was dead, we disassembled her, so she couldn't pull herself together and come for us. Even while the world she built was collapsing, long after I should haves stopped, I kept at it. Kit's the only reason I went through the door at the end, and even then—" He brushed his fingers over the button in his left eye. "I wouldn't have made it through without Sadie. She bound the button so I could pull it out of her world. The big trap."

"How did you kill her, Jim?" Spock asked, low and gentle, passing all the acceptance and love he could through their small, glowing bond.

"She went after Kit," Jim said insistently. "Do you understand? I could give myself to her but she couldn't have Kit. I saved her from Frank, took beatings I didn't have to so he wouldn't find her. And she stayed when she should have left. She was the best thing in my whole world. When the Beldam went after her, called her vermin, I—" He swallowed hard. "I already had the button by then. It was new, and I could feel how much power was in it, her power, reaching for the life in me, to eat up what I was so she could keep going. I just...I was so angry, I pulled back. Started unwinding her first." He shook his head on a bitter laugh. "She sure wasn't expecting that. It distracted her enough so Kit could get loose. I honestly don't know how I killed her," he said with anther shrug. "I kind of blacked out or something. Kit never told me how long it took, or what exactly happened, but I came to holding a trophy like a bludgeon, both hands bloody with this awful black gore." He blew a long stream of air through pursed lips. "Don't know how that's gonna help us right now though."

Spock didn't know either. Would the Beldam be corporeal enough for a physical attack? If so, would she lower her guard enough for Jim to dismember her a second time? "We will think of something," Spock said.

"When?" Jim tipped his head back to indicate the wallpaper falling apart behind him. "This whole place is dying. Soon we won't have a choice other than to go in the beetle den. Winging it might be our only option."

"It is not my preference," Spock said.

"That's because you're smart." Jim gave him half a crooked smile. "However this ends, I want you to know—"

"Don't," Spock snapped.

"Other than Kit," the Terran pressed on stubbornly, "you are the best person I ever met. My life would have been so empty without you, Spock of Vulcan." His smile warmed. "Even in the years without you, you were my guiding star. I hope we survive this, so we can figure out what happens after. But if not, if this is it—"

"Jim," Spock begged.

"I want you to know it was worth it. This place, the Beldam, the button, all of it was worth it, just because it brought me Kit. It brought me the Doyles, and the Henderson, and Bones and Hikaru and Pavel and Scotty and Uhura. It brought me you. I wouldn't change a thing." He leaned forward to press a brief, sweet kiss against Spock's mouth. "It has been a pleasure, Spock. Right from the start."

Before Spock could form a response, Jim pushed away from the wall. He dropped Spock's hand, spun on his heel, grabbed both handles of the double doors standing between them and the Beldam, and threw open the beetle den.

The room was dark, not in the way a room was without any lights turned on, but in the way it felt when one came indoors after being outside in full sunlight. He felt momentarily blind as his eyes strained to make out details of the space around him. The general shape of the room resolved first, small for a Terran sitting room, smaller certainly than the Doyles' or Hendersons'. Wallpaper with an indistinct pattern peeled from the corners downward. There were two armchairs and a low table arranged around a fireplace burning low, basically down to embers.

Spock shut his eyes to give them time to adjust better, then nearly shook his head at himself: They were not in a dim room. They were in a dim corner of Jim's mind. Spock reached out with a psychic touch and stoked the fire, as it were.

In the fireplace of Jim's mind, flames leapt high, not orange but green, unnatural fire that cast wicked shadows across the room. Spock finally understood why Jim called it "the beetle den", anyway: Unlike the false normality of the rest of the house, this room was done in an insect motif. The table and chairs were in the shape of different impossibly-colored, fat bugs. The wallpaper was bright purple covered in dark stag beetles. Even the hardwood floors were laid down in a pattern like a spider's web.

The only thing missing was the Beldam.

"Jim," Spock murmured, half-turning to face him, "where do you think the—"

Jim hung in the air behind him, limp as any of the other puppets had been. His head lolled back and to one side, toes four or so inches above the floor, expression smooth and blank as a doll's. Thin black tendrils spread out from his button eye like a web across his face. A shadow stretched out behind him, long and still despite the flickering fire. It crept up the wall and stretched to form spindly arms and a half dozen unnatural spider legs. The body of the shadow was nothing like Jim's, all sharp angles and fine points.

The Beldam.

It twisted and stretched in Jim's shadow, head tipped back, mouth open in a sharp-toothed, silent scream. Spock lunged forward, intending to grab Jim's shoulders and shake him out of...whatever trance this was.

His hand burned where it touched the Terran, not hot like a fire but bubbling like acid. He pulled back with a hiss, cradling the visibly unharmed but aching hand close to his chest. "Jim," he called, broken. He cleared his throat. "Jim! You must wake up!"

Jim did not wake up. The Beldam wrenched her arms up, and Jim's moved too. Slowly, a manic, evil grin split Jim's face.

Spock's heart raced in his side. The fire flared up and out of its hearth, spreading like an oil spill up the wall, throwing the Beldam deeper across the room. She laughed, not in a way Spock could hear but one he could feel in his bones, chill and aching.

Jim did not wake up. He lurched forward through the air when the Beldam shadow began walking in place.

Jim would kill him. He would consume Spock under the Beldam's power and be lost, he would never wake in the Doyles' apartment, would never triumph over the curse of his childhood. They would not face Starfleet and their future together, whatever shape that took. Jim would be lost.

They all would.

Spock searched frantically for a solution. He reached out through their bond to try and jostle Jim's consciousness awake, hoping he could fight the Beldam as no one else would be able to. All he felt where Jim should be was an empty, gaping maw, screaming and hungry. He tried to kindle the memories and support of Jim's friends like he had when facing the wonders but nothing was there for him to latch onto or stoke into greater awareness. He pulled up his own thoughts and feelings of the crew and fed them to the emptiness but they just—

They slid off.

"Jim," Spock begged. "How can I help you? What can I do to—"

An idea blossomed, whole and foolhardy and desperate. The Beldam's hold on Jim was old and deeply anchored. Spock would need to supersede her claim with a something even older and deeper. Nothing in Jim's life existed before the Beldam; nothing of use, anyway. But Spock had already begun to form a link with Jim that reached back through eons uncounted, a bond of minds and hearts and souls, one that lived in his blood ever waiting to be shared.

So he shared it.

Spock rent himself open, flaying his katra to offer the pieces of it to Jim. The child he'd known and lost; the adult he'd sought and found. All the parts of Jim that made him dear and singular and t'hy'la, beyond the Beldam taint, just Jim, pure and sweet. He offered himself to Jim, all wrapped up in his memories of the man himself, giving Jim a link to himself, bound at the core to Spock, beyond any hope of sharing with another. The Beldam screamed.

And Jim woke up.

He gasped in a breath, spine bowing back as his head snapped up and his eye opened. Behind him, the Beldam shadow skittered and twinned. The second image twisted until it was Jim again. For a moment, all was still. Then Jim dropped back to the ground, catching himself in a crouch with one hand touching the floor, face alive with a vicious snarl. He didn't move, but his shadow did, launching itself at its enemy in a long, furious streak. The room began to shudder.

Spock rushed forward to cover Jim's body with his own when the first pieces of ceiling collapsed. He put a hand to Jim's face, pressing it into his own throat as the black spider webbing pulled back in toward the button. The Beldam screamed again, that voiceless feeling that rattled Spock's bones. He glanced back at the wall to see how the battle was coming along.

Only Jim's shadow remained.

The fire went out. The walls turned grey and began to flake.

Jim put his hand over Spock's. He curled his free arm around Spock's waist. "Spock," he said, low and intense.

"I am here," Spock said immediately.

"I just need to know..."

"Anything," Spock promised.

Jim pulled back just enough to look at him. His one blue eye was sparkling with mischief as he ran his fingers over Spock's. "Did we just get Vulcan married?"

Spock felt his cheeks and ears and even his throat warm with a blush. Jim leaned forward to press their mouths together. The last remnants of the Beldam's web collapsed and for just a moment, they were together in Jim's mind, touching and touched, bound in the only way that mattered to Vulcans.

Yes, his very self replied, embarrassed but not ashamed, not regretful.

Good, Jim replied from all around him, satisfied and smug. Let's go tell the others. Have a party or something before Starfleet locks up.

Starfleet might not—

Nice optimism! Let's find out.

I love you, t'hy'la, Spock whispered.

Taluhk nash-veh k'dular, Jim said, taking the words from Spock with a skill greater than many of Spock's Vulcan teachers. Now enough dawdling: time to face the music.

Spock's own reluctance to leave the meld was impossible to hide. Still, he let Jim draw them together and up, toward the outside world.

We'll come back, Jim thought.

Oh yes, Spock agreed, sending a depth of promise and intent that made even Jim stumble. Of that I am certain.

…

They woke on the hardwood floor of the Doyles' apartment, surrounded by runes and still-burning candles, as wrapped up together in the physical world as they had been in Jim's mind.

Somewhere beyond them, someone popped the cork of a champagne bottle.

"Warmest congratulations on your marriage, Jim darling," said Sadie Doyle fondly with an enormous glass of bubbling alcohol in each hand.

"And here's to many more," Frank Doyle added, pouring most of a new bottle into equally large glasses.

"Frank," Sadie scolded with a laugh. They clinked their glasses and drank, one after the other, until all four were empty, then moved into the kitchen to make more.

"What," said Bones.

Jim tipped his forehead against Spock's and started laughing.

"Did she say married?" Bones demanded. He paced along the edge of the circle but didn't break through.

"It's about time," Kit said from where she walked just in the doctor's shadow. "The Hendersons went home for a brief and unspecified emergency related to some vampire thing, but they'll be back when they can."

Hikaru made an impatient sound. "Forget that," he said, scrubbing a few of the runes away so he could rush to their side. Once the circle was broken, the candles spontaneously, simultaneously went out. Jim felt Spock's curiosity raise its formidable head.

Kit reached them first: She eeled her way between Jim and Spock to curl up and purr in the almost nonexistent space between their chests. "Congratulations," she said, soft and warm, layered in meaning as she butted her head up into Jim's chin.

He grinned, rubbing his cheek against hers. "Thanks. You started all of this; I'm glad you're here at the end, too."

Hikaru ignored their quiet moment, pushing at Jim's shoulder until they were eye to eye. "What happened?" he demanded.

"What do you mean?" Jim asked, brow furrowed in concern. "Like, in general? Or do you have a specific moment in mind?"

"In summary," Kit said, "they beat the Beldam."

"Not that. I felt you..." Hikaru seemed to struggle for the right word. He touched his fingers to the center of his chest before drawing the away in a jerking motion. "Kind of tugging me."

"Oh!" Pavel lifted his head out of the pile of blankets in the corner he was burrowed in to escape the stay beams of sunlight spilling in around the Doyles' thick curtains. "I thought I must have imagined it. Did we feel the same thing?"

"I think I did too," Uhura said, putting down the hand of cards she was playing with Scotty. He and a scowling Bones echoed her.

"So what was that?" Hikaru asked. "How did you do it?"

"Did it help?" Pavel added.

"Wait," Kit protested, one ear ticking back. "How come I didn't get tugged?"

"I—" Jim looked at Spock, then back around at the others. "It's—" Kit butted his chin again.

"You offered," Spock said, turning to Pavel. "You said if Jim had need of you, to draw on you for strength, that you would be his reserve."

Pavel's expression opened with surprise. "You were able to?"

"Sort of," Jim agreed.

"And you didn't pull on me?" Kit complained, turning her friendly rub into a warning nip.

"Sorry." Jim stroked a hand down her back. "You're too close for it, I think. I needed them for new, external stuff. You're basically bedrock."

Kit bit him again, just to be contrary.

Bones chose that moment to shove a tricorder in Jim's face. "Explain."

"Spock kind of—" He made as descriptive gesture as he could. "Gave me you. All of you. Or, well, each of you in turn. When I needed help."

"You are a master of words," Uhura teased, chin cradled in her palm.

"Chekov spent some time catching us up," Scotty said. "Sounds like a hard fight."

"It was, uh." Jim stack his hands together. "Layered. Which is why I needed each of you one at a time, instead of all at once."

Hikaru twisted an impatient hand in the air. "No, go back. That doesn't make sense. What?"

"I'm sure this is all very interesting," Frank said from the kitchen where he was pouring a few mostly-gin martinis. "But I don't care, and you've been here an awfully long time now. Perhaps you'd like to leave and let my wife and I get back to what really matters: drinking all these terribly important drinks."

"Now Frank," Sadie said, taking and consuming one of the martinis in the space between words. "Jim has been as close as family to us for most of his young life! Surely we can extend him the courtesy of giving him time to explain to his friends and new space husband how he used the power of love and the latent psychic abilities of not just himself but also the aforementioned space husband to defeat the looming monster of his childhood by replacing her cursed web with one of their own design, built by weaving the strands of their mutual devotion into something that will bind the six of them together through all their lives and perhaps even beyond." She clinked a new glass against Frank's. "It shouldn't take long at all. There's only four of them to catch up, since Jim and Spock where there and Kit knows everything anyway, as any good cat would."

Everyone stared at her.

Someone knocked on the door.

"Now see here!" Frank called toward the hall. "We are not at home!"

"Delivery," the person on the other side shouted back. "I have a summons for Jim Kirk and the unauthorized crew of the unauthorized Narada mission. From Starfleet Command."

"Oh shit," Hikaru said, almost surprised. "I forgot all about that."

"We only got back from space a few hours ago," Bones said with eyes narrowed suspiciously. "How could you forget?"

Hikaru motioned at Spock and Jim, the apartment, the Doyles. "We have been a little busy."

"I think," Pavel said, inching toward the window with his mount of blankets, "that if I had protection from the sun, I could carry everyone outside through—"

"I'm sorry, darling," Sadie interrupted. "We simply do not allow that window to be opened."

"That's how the bees get in," Frank agreed.

After a pause, Scotty raised one finger and opened his mouth.

The Starfleet courier knocked again, somehow managing to make the sound stubborn. "I am going to deliver this summons whether you want me to or not."

"We choose not!" Frank said.

"I just I'd deliver it anyway! Now open the door and embrace your paperwork-intensive fate!"

Frank turned to his wife. "Say, Sade, do we know a Starfleet Command?"

"Well, I don't know, darling, I can't seem to recall. Perhaps we met them at an auction."

"Ha!" Frank threw his drink back around his laugh. "Unlikely. I remember everyone I meet at auction, as you know."

"I do not know," Sadie said, swirling her own drink around in her glass. "In fact, I think it's often quite the opposite. Do you remember the time when Secular Charlie— "

"Hey!" The courier banged on the door. "Let me in to deliver this already, this isn't my only stop."

"Oh my god," Kit groaned. "Somebody just get it already before I do."

Pavel zipped across the suite in less than the blink of an eye to open the door with a guarded expression. "…Yes?"

The courier frowned at him. "There's no need to be rude about this, you know," they said, shoving an old-fashioned paper clipboard at him. "Sign please."

"But I— "

"Sign."

He signed.

The courier handed over a single plain white envelope with a cheery "Have a good day!" and vanished back down the hall.

"You know," Pavel said, closing the door thoughtfully, "I cannot put my finger on it. But something about that delivery person was a little strange."

"Focus." Kit pawed at his ankle. "What's the letter?"

Pavel tore it open. "It is vague," he said grimly as he scanned the contents. "We are required to attend a meeting tomorrow at the Academy." He looked up at the others. "There is a time and location. We are instructed to bring only ourselves and tell no one."

"This is going to go one of two very different ways," Jim said. He finally got up, lending a hand down to Spock. When the Vulcan took it, Uhura wolf whistled. "Soon," he told Spock firmly. "We're having that conversation soon."

"After the meeting," Spock agreed. He tangled their hands together then pulled away, crossing his arms behind his back with green tinting his ears. "Either in holding for our trial and/or imprisonment, or on the way to whatever suicide mission they assign us to in order to take advantage of our obvious skills and also, as you might say, 'disappear' us."

"Pessimist," Jim teased. "Maybe they want to thank us. Stranger things have happened!"

Most of his renegade crew heaved a chorus of heavy sighs. "Thanks for jinxing us," Kit added. She leapt up his back to settle on his shoulder. "Now we're gonna get fed to some monster that'll eat us in unspeakably horrible ways."

Jim frowned, then startled, then laughed in a burst of mirth that seemed to surprise him. "Been there," he realized, "did that! First time surviving's the hardest, I'm sure."

"You're think we're distracted." Bones strode across the room to snatch the letter out of Pavel's hands. "But we're not." He read through the summons. "Christ," he grumbled, then glared at Pavel. "Did you look at the time on this? We'd have to leave pretty much immediately to get there on time! Do you even have your parasol? Are you planning to just walk into an important meeting covered in blankets?"

Pavel sulked deeper into his pile. "I will be fine," he said.

"We'll figure it out," Hikaru promised.

"It'll be a fine challenge to pass the time," Scotty agreed as he and Uhura started picking up their card game.

Jim looked around at the candles and chalk circle and assorted runes. "Uh." He scratched the top of Kit's head and glanced up at the Doyles. "Do you have a broom, or...?"

Sadie and Frank looked at each other in apparent confusion. "Broom?" Sadie asked.

"Why in the dickens would we have one of those?" Frank added.

"Whatever they are," Sadie said pleasantly, clinking her glass to Frank's before they knocked both back.

"How do you still have functioning livers?" Bones demanded.

"Assumptions," Jim and Pavel chorused.

"Can we focus," Bones snapped.

Someone threw the front door open. "We're back!" Donna announced. She twisted her parasol to get through the doorway but otherwise kept it up and unfurled. "How is he doing? Is it going well? Has there been any movement?"

"It seems as though he might have succeeded in his task," Dave said, coming in behind her and swinging the door closed. "Given that he is standing before us with Kit once more upon his shoulder."

"My baby!" Donna rushed forward to pull Jim into a crushing hug. "Free at last! You look brighter and lighter and more handsome than ever." She cupped his face between her hands. "Tell me all about it, Jim dear. Did you slit her throat? Or tear her limb from limb? I hope it was appropriately violent and painful!"

"Perhaps with a good bite thrown in at the end," Dave agreed, wrapping one arm around Jim and one around Donna. "From your old man."

Jim laughed, gripping each of them tight in turn. "Yeah," he said, not caring how tight his voice sounded. "That's pretty much how it went."

"Well I want to hear all about it," Donna said, looking around for a place to sit down.

"Um," Pavel said, taking the letter back from Bones to offer it to Donna. "Perhaps that will have to wait a day. Or two."

"Whyever would we wait?" Donna asked, tone pitched in the extra sweet way that meant she was ready to murder. She took the letter and read it over, then wrinkled her nose. "Oh, bah. Work meetings. They're just an endless chore, aren't they?" She passed the letter to Hikaru and dug in her somewhat enormous handbag. "If you must go, I'm sure you'll need this, Pavel dear." She produced his parasol, the one he'd left in the Doyles' magical expanding town car.

"Thank you," he said, taking it with a blink of surprise.

"And if they try to arrest you and throw you in prison for being a go-getter where all this world-destroying nonsense is concerned," she said. "Do let us know, all right? Dave and I will come get you on the next full moon."

"It would be a pleasure and an honor to feast upon those who would hurt you," Dave said, "while in my werewolf form."

"Cool," Jim said, hands planted on his hips, grin large across his face. "That's the exit strategy taken care of before we even get there."

Pavel deployed his parasol. "The entrance strategy too!" He turned a grateful smile, bordering on worshipful, to Donna. "Thank you for this."

"Don't even mention it, Pavel." Donna reached out to pat his head. "You're my only grand-sired, after all."

"This is really sweet," Bones began, "but we—"

"Isn't it though?" Sadie said, doing a circuit of the room to press a glass of champagne into each person's hand. "So before you all go off...being imprisoned, or whatever it is young people do these days, let's have a toast!"

"A toast!" Frank shouted from the kitchen. He hurried to join them, a martini glass in hand. "Oh," he said once he saw the champagne. "My drink is improperly dressed for the occasion."

"Shall I help you?" Sadie offered.

"Too late!" Frank tossed his empty glass back toward the kitchen, then held out a hand for one of Sadie's champagne flutes. "Now, to what are we toasting?" He wound his free arm around Sadie's waste. "Your devastatingly good looks?"

"No," she said, drawing the word out thoughtfully.

"My devastatingly good looks?"

"They are quite dashing," Sadie agreed, "but no."

"Did we open a new bottle of Scotch?"

"Not since this morning."

"Is it my birthday?"

"No, Frankenstein, not for months."

"Is it your birthday?"

"A toast," Hikaru interrupted, lifting his glass. "To Jim and Spock: For beating the Beldam!"

"Is that what this was!"

"Not just to us," Jim protested. "It was everyone. I couldn't have done this if we hadn't been together."

They lifted their glasses in a brief moment of victory. Once the last drop of alcohol was consumed (and Frank and Sadie had wandered off to find more gin), Bones and Spock joined forced to get the crew organized and back in their aggressively borrowed ship. It took an hour to get back to San Francisco, another forty-five minutes to ensure everyone was in their dress reds and looking as smart as possible before heading out as a team to face their doom.

The meeting location was a room in a building in a part of campus Jim had never been to. Which struck him as odd, as he'd previously thought the campus thoroughly explored.

"Have you ever?" he asked Pavel.

"Never," Pavel said, eyes wide in the shadow of his parasol.

The thing that set him on edge, that got under his skin and raised all the hairs on his body and painted sweat along the back of his neck and his hairline, is: It was a beautiful building. Gothic. Dark lines and sweeping arcs, spiked turrets and what even looked like gargoyles tucked in the shadows. The building was gorgeous. It looked ancient, too. Age radiated from it like an almost physical force, like it had been standing on the west corner of the Academy since before Starfleet or the Federation or even routine space flight. Jim began to reach down, to pull up the Beldam's power and examine the structure from behind her Other veil. Then he remembered—

She was gone.

Not forever. She was a being spawned from shadow and hunger, she could never be destroyed forever. But her hooks in him were gone, her right to his life erased. He still had the button, but the connection between them was severed.

Did he even have any Other power left?

Spock tangled their hands together. When Jim glanced at him, Spock inclined his head without turning to face him, sending a sensation of support and encouragement.

So Jim shut his eyes and reached deep, down where the Beldam had once lived. He'd been right: she was gone.

He'd been wrong: the shadows and hunger remained, a pool of it that felt familiar but...free. This power was his now, cut off from her and left behind. A piece of Jim as sure as his button. He teased a thread of it out, wrapping it around his sight before opening his eyes,

The building glowed.

"So I'm not sure what this means," he told his crew as he let the shadow-vision slip from him, "but this whole building is Other."

Bones threw his hands in the air. "Because of course it is."

"Is that better for us," Uhura asked, "or worse?"

"Could go either way," Hikaru said with a shrug. "Depends on if we derailed Important Plans by sending that monkey's paw away or Set Things Right.. We might as well flip a coin."

"Or just go in," Scott suggested. "Face firing squad. Get it over with."

Jim looked at Spock, whose belief even now warmed the air around them, solid as the ground beneath their feet. He looked at the others, a line of determination and loyalty behind him. Whatever end waited for them, they would face it together.

"Okay," he said, squaring his shoulders. "Let them do their worst. I'm ready."

…

He was not ready.

"We want to offer you a commendation."

Jim blinked, feeling the world kind of tilt around him. "...Pardon?"

They were gathered in a dark, dark room down a dark, dark hall, as spooky in real life as it had been in uncountable ghost stories told when he was little. Spock stood by him, tucked close behind his right shoulder. At first, when it was them in a deeply unsubtle circle of light, they others had formed a solid semi-circle of support at parade rest. Then the judges' bench before them lit up like a firework, revealing three figures, women, old but not ancient, waiting for them. The judges didn't look like anything other than Starfleet brass. But they felt like—

Even Uhura and Scotty clustered tight behind him, tangled with the others for...support or comfort or defense or something. Not like it would have helped. Whatever these women were, sticking close wouldn't be enough to save them if this went south. Jim had never felt so much power so distilled, and that was what he could pick up without pulling shadows up out of his core.

"Would you look at that," Pavel said wonderingly, pressed up close to Jim—to his sire. "What are they?"

"And why aren't they saying anything?" Uhura added in a low murmur.

Jim pulled up his darkness, passing a layer over Spock as well, and looked back at the women.

One of them looked unchanged: dark hair just starting to have streaks of grey, an unremarkable face, eyes black as space. The other had lost twenty or thirty years, all the wrinkles and grey melted right off, until she was as young or younger than any of them. The third had stooped, frail with age, hair white as bones, as close to a skeleton as Jim had seen since his last appointment with Dr. Wentworth. Spock felt his shock and rummaged through his memory for understanding just as the others began to realize what it was they were seeing.

"Maiden, Mother, and Crone," Bones said, managing to make the observation sound like a curse.

"The Fates," Hikaru breathed. "Holy shit."

"We want," they said again, in such utter unison it might as well have been a single person, "to offer you a commendation."

"What," Jim said hoarsely.

The youngest Fate leaned forward, eyes warm with mirth. "Com-men-da-tion," she enunciated slowly.

"Why?"

Spock pinched his hip in subtle discouragement: Do not antagonize the unimaginably powerful supernatural beings.

Right.

"Sorry," Jim managed, trying to straighten back up into something more like proper form. "Uh. A commendation for what?"

The Mother made a dismissive gesture. "Oh, we'll figure out what to call it later. We certainly can't say what it's actually for, can we?" She produced a pair of elegant opera glasses to peer at him. "You hacked the Kobayashi not long ago, didn't you? Then let's say creative thinking, shall we?"

"Excellent idea," the Crone agreed, voice worn with age. She pointed a gnarled finger at them. "It even has the benefit of being true: You are quite an unusual thinker, James Tiberius Kirk."

"I have some questions," Scotty said. Uhura slapped a hand over his mouth with a hissed later.

"I, also," Spock said, "have questions."

"Yeah," Jim agreed. "Starting with: What the fuck."

The Mother leaned on one arm of her chair, propping her chin in her hand. "Well, we'll need something to fast-track you to captain."

"What," said most of Jim's crew.

"Something official," she continued, eyes focused on Jim's like lasers. "Since we can't use 'led a grep of renegade cadets on a mission to save Vulcan and the world by removing an extra monkey's paw from our reality via the outright theft of a still-experimental Starfleet vessel'. One might say your creative thinking was so far outside the box, you were basically in a world without boxes."

"I am so confused," Hikaru said. "And also suspicious."

"Listen, we know you." The Maiden gestured to include all of them. "We admire your work. Not just what you've done as students, but while you were in New York, too."

"Not just New York, of course," the Crone said, leaning over the Mother to pat the Maiden's forearm.

The Maiden nodded. "Of course," she said in unison with the Mother. "You've done work all over," they said, "and we've admired all of it."

"Most of it," the Crone amended.

"Yes, most of it," they agreed.

Jim flailed his hands through the air. "Wait!" he demanded. "Please," he added quickly when they looked at him with all the power of Fate behind them. "Can you please explain what's going on a lot slower? Pretend I'm, just, indescribably confused. I thought we were going to be charged with treason and thrown in prison!"

"And then broken out of prison," Pavel said with a nod, "by a werewolf and a vampire at minimum."

"And then live our lives on the run," Scotty said around Uhura's hand, "defeating monsters or something."

Jim looked pained. "I work with...really, really optimistic people."

"Be realistic, Jim," Spock said, hands tucked placidly at the small of his back. "The probability of us being tried and sent to prison is not functionally at zero."

"I deeply distrust the way you phrased that," Bones muttered.

"Because," Spock continued without pause, "this being, whom I believe Sulu called the Fates, has clearly elected to use us toward its own purpose in the future."

"Oh man," Hikaru whispered, his cringe apparent just in the way he spoke. "Maybe please don't refer to the Fates as an it. You are going to get us smited."

"Smote," Uhura said reflexively.

"Whatever," Hikaru hissed.

"That would be a terrible waste of talent," the Mother said, mouth curving into a grin. "It's not only Jim we're after."

"Not only Jim you're after for what?" Jim demanded.

"To work for them," Spock said. "Of course."

"We've seen your destiny, James Kirk," the Fates said as one, "and the destiny of those whose lives have been woven with yours. You are meant to do as you have been, fixing the Other, saving those you can, stopping those you cannot."

"Then why are you keeping me at Starfleet?" he asked.

"Does the Other begin and end on Terra?" the Crone asked, one eyebrow ticked in challenge. "What was it you fought on Tarsus?"

Jim shuddered. "That's not how I want to spend my life," he said, eyes dropping to the ground as fear worked its way under his skin. He jerked a hand back toward the others. "That's not what I want for them. If the choice is Tarsus forever or prison—"

"Do you assume there will be no selkies in space?" the Maiden asked. "That we will send you to battle with Beldams and the Tarsus creature but deny you encounters with unicorns and ? That you will never again have need to negotiate with vampires and werewolves at war?"

"Does the Other begin and end on Terra?" they asked as one.

"We've needed an Other team for a long time," the Mother admitted. "But it's—more difficult than you might think to put one together."

"Other beings are creatures of habit," the Maiden said. "They do not want to move or change, and that includes going to space. But you, Jim." She spread her hands to encompass his team. "You've put a command crew together without even drying."

"You have always had the hand of destiny upon you," the Crone said with a smile. "Perhaps now you begin to understand why."

Jim looked at Spock, then back at his crew, then around to the Fates. He touched Spock's thoughts through their bond, checking to see if he'd figured out the gimmick. "So what's the catch?" he asked.

The Fates tilted their heads as one. "This is not a trick," they said. "This is a mission."

"You will not be removed from Starfleet Academy and thrown into prison," the Maiden said.

"You will graduate with honors and captain a ship within five years," the Mother said.

"You will gather your crew back together and explore the stars," the Crone said.

"Specifically," they continued, "those stars with Other troubles."

"To save and be saved," Spock murmured. "As you have done since before I met you."

"I can't make that decision for my crew," Jim objected. He twisted around to face them. "I don't have the right—"

"I'm in," Hikaru said.

"Me too," Uhura and Scotty said in unison. Uhura finally lowered her hand to wipe it on Scotty's shirt and then give him a high-five.

Pavel shrugged his shoulders when Jim turned to him. "I will go with my sire. To prison. To the stars. To war, or peace, or exploration. I will go with my sire, or not at all."

"If you think I'm going to let you out of my sight for one minute," Bones began, hands on his hips.

"My only condition," Spock said to the Fates ("Nobody gives the Fates conditions," Hikaru hissed frantically to Pavel, who patted him on the shoulder.), "is that I serve with Jim, until I serve under him as my captain. I will not be parted from him."

"We don't break up married couples," the Crone chuckled.

The Maiden flicked a hand toward Bones, who had been swelling with outrage even since Spock cut him off. "The doctor, too, will stay close."

"My sired might also want to serve with me," Jim pointed out.

"I do not need to be directly beside you every moment of the day," Pavel protested. He linked an arm through Hikaru's. "As long as I work with people who know what I am—who are not afraid of me, and can help me from becoming hungry—then it might be a nice adventure, to try on my own."

"You can't survive just on Hikaru," Jim protested.

"We know how vampires work, Jim Kirk," the Mother said, laughter in her voice. "And we have more say in the operations of Starfleet than you realize."

"Kirk and McCoy and Spock will serve together," the Crone said. "Uhura and Chekov and Sulu will serve together."

"Scott is not a cadet," the Maiden said, "and cannot work up through the ranks with you."

Scotty wilted, then tried to look positive. "Don't worry about me," he told them with a brave smile. "I'll keep myself busy and, uh, out of trouble until we can meet up again."

"Admirable," the Fates said, layers of laughter in their voices.

"But perhaps you will settle for being assigned to engineer on the ships where you compatriots serve," the Maiden said. "We can split your time fairly evenly, if you like."

While Scott was beaming and knocking shoulders with the others, Spock's head tilted in thought. "How is it you have such control over our assignments?" he asked.

"We are the Fates," they said.

"Even if we hadn't served Starfleet since its inception," the crone said, "it isn't difficult to know who to place where for an advantageous promotion."

"Fair," Jim said with a nod.

"You will serve together as the bridge bridge crew of the Starfleet flagship Enterprise before five years are done," they said. A shiver of...something—inevitability, or longing, or the sensation of waking up to a dream knowing it would come true—passed through them, traveling along the web Jim and Spock had woven between all their minds.

"So it is spoken," Hikaru murmured, making a sign for luck that his grandmother had taught him.

"So mote it be," Bones said, touching the back of Jim's neck to seal the blessing.

"Kit will be your Ship's Cat," the Crone said, cackling at Jim's embarrassed expression. "We'll make sure she can stay with you, so don't bother hiding her in your room next time."

"We so rarely get company," the Maiden sighed. "Bring her along when we call you again."

Jim grinned and bowed his head. "So mote it be," he agreed.

…

Five years later, Jim strode onto the bridge of the Enterprise, Spock at his shoulder, Kit trotting by his feet. The ship was crewed by a startling number of Other creatures, intrigued by the prospect of serving—safely—off-world. Jim had done more to bring Other into the modern era than any Terran before him, an ambassador simply by virtue of doing what he did while being what he was.

Pavel had a hand in that too, of course. Vampires saw the stories of his unbelievable exploits and joined Starfleet in droves. It helped, of course, that Bones had figured out a way to synthesize a blood-substitute that met the average vampires both physical and metaphysical need, freeing the entire species from their timeless bonds. Unsurprisingly, vampires made excellent members of Starfleet. They were strong and fast and capable, hard to injure, quick to heal. The Fates kept them contained on the ships already crewed by Jim's people, and they flourished.

Their success drew werewolves and witches and other creatures, such that by the time Jim was set to take command of the Enterprise, nearly thrity percent of his subordinates were Other of some kind. Bones had a three-day rant about having to be CMO for people with so many different needs, many of them strictly off-book. But he prepared all the while, stocking up on herbs and crystals hypos, with a note of curiosity about the entire effort that even he couldn't hide.

After a private conversation, the Fates sent Scott to the Enterprise six months before anyone else was set to arrive. He made firm friends with her in that time and promised to introduce Jim properly once he had command.

Jim stepped onto the bridge. Pike was waiting for him, smile wry and proud. "I relieve you," Jim said, salute sharp as the horizon.

"I am relieved," Pike said. He wished Jim luck, took Number One, and left Jim to the ship.

"Welcome aboard, Captain," Uhura said from her station, smile teasing and bright.

"It's good to be here," Jim laughed.

Kit hopped up onto his seat. She couldn't tease him, not with so many people around who hadn't yet figured out the secret of cats, but the way she flicked her tail said enough.

Bones stepped out of the turbolift. "Well?" he demanded, hands on his hips. "Come on! You owe me a physical."

"Soon," Jim promised.

"It is good to see you, sir," Pavel said from his spot beside Hikaru.

"We've got a little welcome aboard party planned," Hikaru ordered. "Just something small, to start off on the right foot."

The comm on Jim's chair buzzed. "We're ready to go when you are, Captain," Scott said. "Admiral Pike and his group are safely back aboard the station. We're cleared to leave."

"I have the briefing for our next assignment," Spock said. "I can deliver it at your convenience."

Jim pet a hand over Kit's head, so full of love and joy that, for a moment, he couldn't speak. "Mr. Sulu," he said at last.

"Aye, sir," Hikaru said, smile clear in his tone.

Kit got up onto the back of the captain's chair, making space for Jim to sit. Spock came to stand by his right hand; Bones stood at his left.

"Take us out," Jim said.

…

And so it was.

The End