Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek, Amanda Grayson or Sarek, the Planet Vulcan, The Mirror Universe or anything else Star Trek related. I'd like to give a shout-out to Gene Roddenberry for hooking us all up with Star Trek and another shout-out to Mr. Jerome Bixby, writer of TOS Mirror, Mirror episode.

Note from J.S.: I've given this an "M" rating because it's the Mirror Universe. However I'm trying my best not to be gratuitous about a single thing in the telling of this tale. I don't know where this will take us all but I've been wanting to write this storyline for sometime. Barring life and writer's block I should be able to update it several times a week.

I considered the point one day that since Spock existed in the Mirror Universe his parents had to have gotten together there. This is my take on how that happened. I'm striving to make a story where my readers are honestly worried about the characters in this story, not only Sarek and Amanda but their friends. Read and Review, please.

Sarek of Vulcan

The Vulcan embassy on the Terran home world was strangely quiet that morning. The hallways seemed longer and even more drafty than usual as he forced himself to walk unhurriedly to his office. There was no reason, he surmised, that this day should be any quieter than any day before. Yet it was. He felt a chill go down his back since he knew what that quiet meant.

Sarek of Vulcan was deeply troubled on more than one account. The Terran Empire that he served was uncaring of Vulcan concerns or the concerns of most anyone else they happened to rule. The barbarity of the widespread regime surprised him every day. But the barbarity of his own people could be just as shameful. Logic, after all, could be used to justify nearly anything, for good or for bad.

Too much had happened in the past few years for him to hold this post any longer. And even when he returned home, he would return to a planet that had been divided far longer than anyone could remember. Logic was the only thing holding them together and preventing another civil war. It was not logical, after all, to fight your brother when an oppressor with higher numbers and no barrier to reproduction held you in thrall. And that was just the beginning of it.

Not four years ago the Rihan Empire somehow delivered thousands of cylindrical shaped canisters into their atmosphere. The weapons system of their planet destroyed them all, but one managed to slip through the defense grid. As the last canister detonated, that part of their world looked on in dread. No one knew what it was.

At first, nothing happened. But a joint commission was formed between the V'Tosh Ka'tur High Command and the Syrannite High Command to try to determine what it was that had been spilled into their atmosphere. Almost on the heels of the joint commission beginning to ascertain what had been delivered to their skies, a plague began in their females.

The highly gifted commission was able to put their differences aside and solve the riddle of the virus within a relatively short time. But not before the deadly gift left by the opposing Empire had killed nearly a quarter of the female population of his world. Most of the women who were still sick after the discovery of what it was were able to benefit from the vaccine delivered by the joint commission, but the damage was already done. Within a year's time, every single Vulcan female had been recalled home and forced to either bond or prematurely put herself under the protection of her current bond mate's family and remain indoors whether she wished to or not. And when there were no more single females remaining, they began bonding off every available female aged 16 and over to males in deep need.

Heinous crimes became rampant on the V'Tosh Ka'tur side of the planet, crimes where unbounded (and sometimes already bonded!) females under the age of 16 were being kidnapped and forced to bond to men during their Time. Their bodies brutally used, some of the females entered a state of catatonia never to reawaken to their former selves.

The Syrannite faction could not stand by while this continued, even if it was not on their side of the dividing line. An almost faustian bargain was struck with the Terran Empire. A few hundred Terran females two times a year who had disgraced themselves or their families would be shipped to Vulcan, never to return to Terra Prime, or as some called it, Earth. These females were delivered to farms to be used for males entering their Time on Vulcan, so that the males could continue to live. Whatever happened to the females after that, most Vulcans, especially the V'Tosh Ka'tur, did not concern themselves. The Syrannites handled things a little differently on their side of the border (one human female was held for one Vulcan male at the facility they kept them and after having to help him through his time she did not have to be with any other male except for him), but in Sarek's mind the result might as well have been the same.

Entering his office, he sat down at his desk and faced what he knew was going to come up on his personal PADD that day. It had been placed there by his top aide, already loaded with the information to be dealt with. As he turned it on the list of female prisoners stared at him and he could not suppress the shame growing within him at all of the women he did not know but that were about to enter into a horrible state of being. The empty hallways had already told him this fact. The staff was doing their part in processing these women.

The almost all-Syrranite staff of the Embassy grew quieter on days like this. The treatment of themselves by the Terrans was immaterial in this situation. These women were not the Terran Empire and no one deserved to be thrown at a man in Pon Farr without warning, no matter how evil or barbaric she happened to be. And he refused to believe every woman on this list was evil or barbaric. He'd met too many good humans in his time that were just as disturbed as he was over the state of things in their Empire.

Then his eyes seized on a name on the list and he felt something inside nearly snap. Why was she on this list? What could she have done? In a split second he knew what he had to do. He put his PADD down and turned to his intercom and called his assistant. "Do not yet allow transit of the females. Send the prisoner Amanda Grayson to my office, immediately."