AN: To those who thought that Spock Prime was going to make an appearance, I feel I should put you out of your misery right away. It's not Spock Prime. Sorry :P Thank you for guessing, though. It shows that you're putting some thought into this, which is lovely.

Also, to those who have inquired about my posting schedule: I promise nothing. I've read too many fanfics which say, in their ANs, that they will never be abandoned by the author, yet the newest post was made more than a year ago. I don't want to do that to myself or to you. Therefore: no promises.

I hope you enjoy it, anyway :D

In Which They Meet They Mysterious Contact

The next day, Kirk got a comm message from Spock who'd had a comm message from his mother who had, presumably, had a comm conversation with le contact mysterieux (Kirk was unable to articulate exactly why saying 'the mysterious contact' in French made the whole affair sound a few orders of magnitude more dashing and noir, but he felt certain that it did). 'The mysterious contact' sounded like the title of some B-movie adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes novel. Also, no matter how much sarcasm he used when saying it, he still felt incredibly foolish saying things like "So, dinner with the mysterious contact on Thursday?"

But (as he'd explained to Spock), 'le contact mysterieux' sounded like a code-name for an internationally renowned spy.

Spock, true to form, merely raised an eyebrow at this and informed Kirk that his French pronunciation was atrocious.

Kirk then told Spock that he, Spock, wouldn't know dashing and noir if they hit him in the face. Spock raised another eyebrow at this, and the discussion ended there as Kirk tried to remember whether Spock always raised the same eyebrow, or whether he had them on some sort of rotation.

XXXXXX

Amanda was cooking dinner for them again. Kirk felt slightly uneasy about that, as, having never cooked a proper meal in his life, it seemed like entirely too much work to put into something that would shortly be eaten. But his half-hearted offers of assistance had been rebuffed, so he and Spock (having arrived unfashionably early by design) were left twiddling their thumbs in Amanda's living room.

Sitting on the couch, Kirk fidgeted with his hands. Finally, he turned to Spock and said, "Look, I know you're going to say 'no,' because you've been saying 'no' all week so I know that asking this is completely illogical. So we can skip that bit. But, do you know who we're going to be meeting?"

Spock looked imminently amused. When Kirk kept looking at him expectantly, he raised an eyebrow (this one his version of an eye-roll) and said, "No, Captain, I do not."

"Care to speculate? Your mother seems to know this person. Maybe you met him once." Kirk badgered shamelessly.

"I doubt that this is so. If the person's identity had some relevance to my past experiences, I find it probable that she would have shared it with me. In any case, speculation, in this situation, is useless."

"Thought so." Kirk said with a sigh. "Thanks for humoring me, anyway. Again."

"You seem to be more 'worried' than I am about this meeting." Spock observed.

Kirk squinted at his friend. "Maybe I am, at that." He sighed again. "But if she wanted to put us at ease, she's totally going about it the wrong way."

"I must agree. Her choice of tactics is…puzzling." Every time Kirk had asked her about the identity of le contact mysterieux she had dropped a not-hint for him. As in, "Oh, I'm sure you wouldn't know him, Captain" or "He's younger than you might expect" or even, "He comes from a highly respectable family, Captain. I highly doubt that this is some sort of scam."

"Well, she's your mother. You must have some idea what's going on."

"I assure you, I do not. I may have lived a large portion of my life with her, but that does not mean that I always understand her thought processes." Kirk blinked confusedly, trying to pinpoint why what Spock had said seemed so familiar. "The most likely explanation is one that you have already arrived at; she enjoys, as you so colorfully put it, 'toying with your mind'."

Kirk was about to reply (with what, he didn't know yet) when there was a knock on the door. Kirk froze, then felt foolish and stood up. "Do you want us to answer it?" He called into the kitchen.

"No, no, that's fine. Just a sec." She called, the running water indicating that she was washing her hands. She emerged after what Spock would no doubt have identified as 'certainly more than a second' had he not grown up under her care and, early in his life, realized the futility of such observations.

She opened the door. From where Kirk was standing, he couldn't see the person, but he could hear the warmth in the voices of Amanda and the stranger. She even gave him a peck on the cheek. "Oh, do come in." She said, ushering him out of the doorway and towards the others.

Kirk had to admit; for all Amanda's vagueness, she hadn't lied. Kirk doubted the man, the Human, could have been more than five years his senior. The guy was wearing a nondescript black suit with a white shirt, had darkish, somewhat conservatively gelled hair, and was utterly and completely unfamiliar. Kirk glanced at Spock who also, as predicted, didn't seem to know the guy.

"Gabriel," Amanda said, gesturing to the former contact mysterieux, "You already know Commander Spock and Captain Kirk. Spock, Captain, meet Gabriel Lindstedt." A round of handshaking followed, and Amanda ushered her guests over to the dining table before returning to the kitchen. With amusement, Kirk realized that she'd left them to figure out the seating arrangements for themselves.

"I am grateful that you agreed to meet with me." Gabriel said, taking the seat nearest him with, Kirk imagined, the aplomb of one claiming the center square in a game of tic-tac-toe. "It is…exciting to meet two people with your experiences."

The guy didn't look particularly excited. He didn't look particularly unexcited, either. In all, he exuded a quiet alertness and possessed the relaxed air of one sure that everything would, more or less, go as planned. He was also, in appearance, dress, and attitude, totally and unmitigatedly bland.

Kirk claimed the seat across from Gabriel, and Spock the seat next to Kirk. "So, it's happened to you, too?" Kirk asked cautiously.

"Ah, no. You see, it was my great-grandmother, now sadly decease, to whom this phenomenon occurred." Kirk restrained himself from rolling his eyes. How the hell had he ended up stuck in a room with two members of the Prescriptive Grammar Sect? "She lived with my parents and was generally the one to tell me bedtime stories. In her younger days, she was also a member of Starfleet. She even commanded a ship, the Kansas, for over a decade. It was small, mostly for surveying scantily explored parts of space and taking scans of things Starfleet might find interesting." He waved his hand vaguely to indicate that he'd never paid much attention to that part. "She told me stories of her adventures while serving in Starfleet. Obviously, some parts were embellished and others completely repressed, but as far as I can tell, they generally had some basis in truth. And sometimes, she would tell me stories where time was stopped." Gabriel paused his story as Amanda called for them to come help her carry the food out.

Once they were settled again, he resumed, "I believed every story in the way a child does. This was a person I knew telling me things that had happened to her; obviously, every detail was true. Once I became older, I was confronted with the fact that not everything she had told me was…accurate, especially after I handed in a report to my teacher in 4th grade detailing my great-grandmother's involvement in the Crisis of Gren Elthos." He smiled a bit at that. Kirk forced himself to not fidget with his food. For some reason, he didn't feel like eating until he'd heard the rest. Did this guy have nothing more than bedtime stories to give them?

"Hurry up, dear." Amanda said to Gabriel lightly. "We can always fill in more details, later." She winked at Kirk, and he resisted the urge to make faces at her.

"So, just as I spent my pre-teen and teenage years convinced that my Nana had told me a great load of lies, I spent my university years realizing that, perhaps, she hadn't. I spent those years combing over every report or tidbit of information I could gather from her service years, and many of the accounts and events felt strikingly familiar. I spoke to people who had served with her. And…I realized there were a few instances where things simply did not add up. There was one instance where she was performing an EVA—this was before she was a captain—and her tether broke. Everyone was sure she was lost. This was more than fifty years ago, remember. The ship didn't have any small craft with precise enough maneuvering capabilities for rescue. Plus, she had been knocked away from the ship with a fair amount of force; her maneuvering thrusters were not powerful enough to bring her back to it.

"And yet, it seemed like no more than an instant later that she was keying in the code to open the EVA hatch. They had seen her blip, on the scanners, as she drifted away. And yet, she had, apparently, never left. She laughed it off, told them the scanners must have been faulty. 'No other reasonable conclusion,' the report said. But" he shrugged, "I had heard a different, a fantastically different, version of the story. One about punching a Human-shaped hole in a cloud of space dust, frozen in motion. One about calculating angle, momentum, and force, and about drifting for so long that the stars seemed to form the outline of words, if only she could focus her eyes the right way. One about a journey which lasted forever, yet took no time at all." He, like Kirk, had been picking sparingly at his food, but it seemed to be borne more from a sense of propriety than anything else.

"Not that I've ever been stuck in space like that, but it does sound very familiar." Kirk admitted slowly.

"I, also, observe parallels between my own experiences and those of your great-grandmother. As she served in Starfleet, there is a chance that I have heard of her. What is her name?" Spock asked thoughtfully.

"Karen Mohr."

Spock's eyes narrowed slightly. "Would she be the same Captain Mohr who initiated first-contact with the inhabitants of the planet designated Chiron Beta Prime?"

Gabriel smiled. "You have some experience with the planet, do you not?"

"Wait, wait, you're saying that she, your great-grandmother, was the one that…" he turned from Gabriel to lean closer to Spock and continued in a whisper, "…that Ludicrous Hat was talking about?"

Spock lowered his voice to mirror Kirk's, but the pitch was such that the entire table could easily hear. "Indeed, Captain."

Gabriel leaned forward with interest. "They mentioned her to you?" His face remained stoically blank, but his voice betrayed a hint of excitement.

"Yes, they did. Fascinatingly enough, they saw—" was that a quickly suppressed smirk on Spock's face? "—some similarities between Captains Mohr and Kirk. Tell me, did your great-grandmother mention her feelings about heights to you?"

Gabriel seemed puzzled. "I'm not sure I understand you."

"Was she afraid of heights?"

"Ah! No, she most certainly was not. Once, we went on a family trip to…I think it was a national park. My parents took my elder siblings rappelling, but I was too young and I was left, as usual, in the care of Nana. We waited at the top of the cliff as they went down and then hiked back up. I was terrified of the edge and wouldn't go near it. Nana, on the other hand, walked right up to it and spread her arms out to the sides. She said that she felt as though, if she stepped right off the edge, she would, ah, 'float like a little leaf, right down to the bottom,' or something along those lines. For some reason, that image has always stuck with me." Gabriel gazed at the wall behind Kirk's head, lost in reminiscence.

Spock waited a moment, then asked, "Did you ever talk with her, tell her that you believed her experiences to be more than bedtime stories?"

Gabriel shook his head ruefully. "I did not. She was very ill, her last couple years of life. By the time I was convinced that there was something to learn, moments of lucidity were rare. The doctors said it had something to do with exposure to exotic forms of cosmic radiation, but most of the family's convinced that it's just something they say when they don't know the cause." He shrugged.

"Could I ask," Kirk said slowly, "why you've been so…open with details from your life?" The entire time the man had been talking, Kirk had been curious about this. Gabriel's manner was very reserved, which felt at odds with the amount of personal information he had divulged. He'd slipped from 'great-grandmother' to 'Nana' quite easily, yet he didn't seem the type of person to allow that switch to happen unconsciously.

Gabriel smiled a bit. "It is, actually, due mostly to a suggestion made to me by dear Amanda. She is the only person to have heard all of our stories first-hand. She said that she saw certain parallels between out accounts, and she felt there might be more. Also, I see no reason to try to hide anything. I want answers and confirmation, just as much as you do, and so the last thing I wish to do is withhold details.

"So, just to be clear, you don't know any more about this thing than we do?" Kirk asked, the question which had been resounding through his head for most of the conversation finally given voice.

"I'm afraid that you both know more than I do." He confirmed.

"In all your research, you did not come across accounts of other beings to whom the phenomenon might have occurred?" Spock asked, the tone of his question indicating the conclusion he had already reached.

"I have not. Have either of you done any research on the subject?" Gabriel's tone was not reproachful. He sounded, at most, mildly and politely curious.

Kirk snorted. "Oh, just a bit. T'Ping's Discourse on Time, Groglackgr's Theories on Time, and How it Might be Stopped, even Halloway's tomb; The Search for and Study of Tachyons, and How They Might be Utilized in the Mastery of Time. We've read everything we've been able to get our hands on, from the improbably theoretical to the unhelpfully numeric. Granted, we've focused on the science of the thing which isn't that helpful because it's not like we can use any of the equipment while in Safe Mode, but—"

Gabriel sat up in interest at that, and when Kirk paused, he asked, "How do you mean? Why can't you use any equipment in…ehm, 'Safe Mode'?"

For a moment, Kirk was confused by the question. The answer was so simple; he couldn't imagine how someone could not know it. He glanced quickly at Amanda and Spock, but neither of them seemed inclined to field the question. He turned back to Gabriel. "Because it doesn't work." He answered simply, shrugging.

"How do you mean?" Gabriel's eyebrows were furrowed in puzzlement.

"Um, it…well, if something is on, it stays on. If it's off, it's off for good. And if something thinks or observes, it freezes along with the people, animals, and plants. I can read a book—a paper and ink book—because nothing is destroyed or created when I do that. Well, except in my brain, but when I'm the only thing moving it seems pretty clear that I'm an exception to the rule. Um. Sorry, I'm not sure of a better way to describe it."

"No, no, it's fine. It makes sense, as far as any of this makes sense. I simply hadn't thought it through."

A pocket of silence invaded the room. Kirk hadn't been sure what how he'd expected this meeting to go, but this certainly wasn't it. He almost felt disappointed. What use would some half-remembered bedtime stories do them? But at the same time he felt some stirrings of hope. He was pretty sure that Gabriel could be believed. The facts of Karen Mohr's Starfleet career could be independently verified and, quite honestly, what could there be for the man to gain through tricking them in this way? It had to be real, and that meant that there was a third point of data to be added to their search. Maybe they would be able to learn something, after all.

Spock spoke up, distracting Kirk from his thoughts. "Mr. Lindstedt, might I inquire as to what it is you do when you are not pursuing information on your great-grandmother?"

"Well," Gabriel said slowly. "I am not employed, in the traditional sense. You see, I am the youngest child of Albert Lindstedt and Evelyn Boyd Granville." From the look on confirmation on Spock's face, Kirk suspected that these names meant something to him.

As though sensing his confusion, Spock turned to Kirk and explained, "His mother comes from a family of diplomats and politicians. She is the sister of Charles Granville, the man who held the office of Prime Minister of Great Britain for a decade. Her cousin, Marie Krieger, serves on various coalitions both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, and her mother, Sophie Granville-Rhodes, was the Terran ambassador to Andor, a position she held for four decades until she retired to form the nonprofit organization HungerCure. I feel quite sure that there are many more family members which I am unaware of."

Gabriel nodded a bit, looking slightly amused and embarrassed. "You've hit the high points, though. My siblings are all much older than me, so by the time it came for me to make decisions about my future, my parents were already wrapped up in the education and careers of my siblings. I got a degree in political science and served as an aid to an ambassador or two, helped organize a few events" he said, waving his hand to indicate that the details were unimportant, "and, as it happens, I have been involved in the past few editions of Federation Star."

"Ah." Spock said quietly.

"Exactly." Gabriel nodded. "Everyone else was too harassed to bother wondering about how you both managed to get to the downtown district of the planet so very quickly. And, well, I'm not sure I should tell you this, but some of the organizers were told to expect some sort of disappearing act from you, Captain."

Kirk tried to squawk indignantly, but nothing came out. He cleared his throat and tried again. "It was Pike, wasn't it?"

"They did not tell me from whom the advice came."

"Hmph."

"You must admit, Captain, that the Admiral was correct in his projections." Spock pointed out, a twinkle in his eye.

"Yes, well, I'd hate to disappoint the old man." Kirk laughed. He glanced at Gabriel to gauge his reaction and caught the other man staring at him. "What?" He asked, curious.

"You both have spent a significant amount of time together, in and out of 'Safe Mode,' correct?" Spock inclined his head in agreement. "I have received the impression, both from Amanda and my great-grandmother, that each instance of frozen time seems like an eternity." This time Kirk nodded, wondering where this was going.

"Do either of you ever become tired of the company of the other?"

"Um." Kirk winced. "Not really? I can't speak for Spock, but my biggest…problem…with Safe Mode is the aloneness. There're time when it feels like we've said everything we could ever possibly say, done everything there is to do, but the idea of simply getting up and walking away…that's never a serious alternative."

"I must agree." Spock intoned, nodding.

Gabriel stared into space again, pensive. He sighed, "I have spent more time that I would like to admit trying to imagine what it would be like, but I fear I will never truly know. From Nana's stories, I received the impression that these…freezes were not something she had any control over. Is it so with you, too?"

"Your impression is accurate." Spock confirmed. Gabriel sighed again, a disappointed smile twitching his lips. "However, I think there is more we can learn from each other. If you would consent to trading correspondence, I would like to investigate certain details further."

The great-grandson of Captain Karen Mohr nodded. "I was going to ask you the same thing, actually. Yes, I would like that very much."