Uhura waited until Sanek scampered back into the house before lacing her fingers through Spock's. His hand was warm in hers. She sat huddled against him, almost defiant in the face of the pervasive heat that blanketed T'Khasi Vokaya's early night. She felt his fear ebbing away, though never disappearing entirely. Instead, it mingled with the surprise and apprehension - confused awe - stretching through the link in long, fluid waves that began again before they could end.

A vision of holding him in her lap, comforting him as if he were Sanek, called up a sparkle of aberrant mirth. Trying to suppress it, she re-imagined them with their reduced bodies - him barely a teen, her past toddlerhood but far from adolescence. The new image was so absurd, she couldn't hide her laughter, let alone stop the feeling from pulsing through their connection.

"What amuses you?" A burn of shame and uncertainly accompanied his query.

Wordlessly, Uhura guided their linked fingers to her psi points, smiling encouragingly through the darkness.

He snatched his hand from hers, abruptly slapping a shield between them as he did so. The bond remained open, telling her what touch could not: the fear had come back, nearly a panic - discernible from what he'd experienced before because it was... for her.

Although she told herself not to be hurt by his withdrawal, the little girl battled with the woman, and several moments passed before she could send him a sense of calm and of understanding, acceptance.

"I... can't," he explained, unnecessarily. "I am unsure I possess the control required to avoid harming you."

She forced herself to smile again, then ducked her head and burrowed deeper into his embrace.

"That's okay. I should have guessed that." She shrugged, the movement causing her cheek to brush against his shoulder. The feel of the coarsely-woven cloth, his heat seeping through, was at once familiar and foreign. She rubbed a second time. Spock felt... safe. He didn't protest when she reached for his hand again. "It's just that... well, it was funnier as a picture."

"Tell me," he said, squeezing her fingers. Encouragement was there, but also wariness.

She tried to recapture the hilarity which had so discomfited him, that had threatened to shake her small body with its uncontrolled strength. She managed another small smile, invisible with her face pressed against him.

"I saw myself holding you. Like you were Sanek. We were... all grown up." She deliberately used the childish phrase, allowing its silliness to transport her back to a brighter place. "And then I didn't want you to think I was laughing at how scared you were, so I made myself see us as we are now." This time, her buoyancy plummeted a the reminder of what had befallen them; the bright place receded with it. "It was funnier as a picture."

Warmth lured her out of her reverie. His free hand cupped her cheek, lifting her face until their eyes met.

"I did not understand," he confessed. "I should have held you like that." The shielding dropped again, and she was suffused with his concern, regret, determination to protect.

She shifted under his touch, unable, or unwilling - with her still-underdeveloped understanding of her emotions - to look at him as she spoke

"You didn't know. And, back then, I didn't know how to ask."

Freeing her hand, she found the closure seam of his rode. For the first time, she noticed that the garment was looser than it should have been. She ran her thumb over the ornamental fasteners.

"I tried," she said, unwilling to hold back the truth now that she had the means to share it. "I didn't know how to- I didn't know how to feel what I was feeling. And I also had no conception of the emotions and the... needs I still remembered, but didn't really have anymore. I just knew I needed you, and that it was different from before the change and that it was different from how you needed me."

Two years of fear and confusing and a seemingly endless loneliness spilled into the bond. Her lessons with his t'dahsu forgotten, she wouldn't have shielded him from her pain even if she had remembered how. With the casual cruelty of a child, she allowed her need to be understood - the need for him to know what she'd endured - rise above any desire she had to spare his feelings.

She clutched the closures, the seam twisting under her fingers.

"I thought maybe it was something like the way I needed Sanek to need me, but... different. And I didn't know how to say that, how to explain it to you. I didn't know how to ask. I couldn't dissect and process any of it. Because I didn't know how to do that anymore."

Regret, remorse - which no Vulcan was supposed to be capable of experiencing - crashed into wonder and unease, blending so completely with what was already there, she thought there should be a word for it. For everything he was feeling. It should have its own definition, description, identity.

"I should have assisted you," he told her. "I should have been able to do what you could not, but..." He tried to pull away, but she just gripped him harder. "Forgive me, Nyota. My error was even more egregious than I have acknowledged."

"You didn't know." It wasn't absolution and she didn't intend it to be.

"Ri loit'lej fai'ei dvel a'ri nash-veh." She didn't need the empathic link or the telepathic bond to know his guilt. It colored his tone, as what little control he still had crumbled.

Because I did not select the correct option, she translated for him.

Because you would not allow me to help make the important decisions, she mentally amended.

Uhura watched in silence as he absorbed the message in what she did not say.

Spock straightened fully, forcing her release him. He pressed his back to the wall and his hands to his face. "I am sorry," he whispered into his palms. "You should not be made to bear the burden of my poor choices. I will no longer oppose... dahshaya. You may have your... p'pil'lay."

Nausea gripped her stomach like a fist. The air was suddenly too thin to fill her lungs. Panic, fueled by fear, regret - frustration that she hadn't made herself clear - tried to overwhelm her senses.

"No! That's not what I meant!" Tears streamed down her face. "I didn't-" She forced back a sob. "I don't want that. Why don't you understand? I still need you."

Her eyes were closed, her face still pressed against his shoulder, but she could feel his hesitation, his uncertainly.

"You don't need to leave me anymore." Talking made her throat hurt.

"Nyota, I-" But whatever he was about to say was lost in the sound of heavy footsteps clattering across the balcony.

__________

"It would be for the best, mwana," Baba said gently. The golden lamplight cast his face in shadow, but she knew his face would be set in carefully neutral lines.

Spock bit his lip, still unsure, and stared at his feet.

Silently, Uhura urged him to agree. She glanced over to the bed where Sanek lay curled up, looking oddly unconcerned in spite of his parents' disquiet. He smiled at her and a surge of confidence filled her.

Turning her eyes back to the three males standing near the balcony door, she stepped forward.

"It'll be okay, Spocky," she whispered, reaching for his hand. "Tela'at will make sure we don't get hurt. And I need to see. I want you to see."

Her husband, so diminished and vulnerable in his new form, looked up at her with wary eyes.

"I am afraid you will be angry with me, ashayam," he said plaintively.

She forced a smile she didn't feel as his hand closed over hers. "Probably. But one of the best thing about human kids? They forgive really easily. Right, Baba?"

No one in the room, except maybe Sanek, could possibly have been fooled, but Benjamin, and even Ambassador Spock, smiled a little anyway.

"Quite often, yes," Baba agreed. "Especially when there is love."

Spock looked from the doctor to the ambassador, his father-in-law to his t'dahsu. Uhura felt him come to a decision.

"Please," he said to his elder self, "help us join our minds."

__________

Sanek turned over in his sleep, butting his head against his father's abdomen and pressing his knees into his mother's hip.

Spock waited until the boy's even breathing indicated that he would not awake. Uhura chuckled softly at her son's human tendency to sleep so deeply, and yet to actively.

"I have been thinking," Spock whispered once Sanek was settled. He reached over their son at stroked her cheek. "If you could explain, using less... emotional terms, why you were more distressed about my methods than by my actions, I am certain I will understand better this time."

Uhura didn't bother stopping her sigh. She really didn't want to go over it. Again. The afternoon would be much better spent working on the ion filter. Or napping with their son.

They had discussed what the meld had revealed at least a dozen times in the three days that had gone by since Spock was changed. There were still many things he didn't quite understand because Spock Tela'at had been unwilling to explore certain areas he'd claimed were for the young couple alone. And because Spock was still too afraid to touch her mind on his own.

"Because you chose for me," she said quietly. "And I let you because I believed I'd failed you and Sanek. Because I did fail to keep him safe, at least. That left me... powerless. I couldn't make things better if you"

Because he'd believed she held so little of Nyota Uhura that she was no longer able to recognize her existence outside its relativity to his. Because he knew she no longer existed in the form he'd become accustomed to defining as her.

With the bond no longer obscured, the shields eradicated, he had the shape of her thoughts as well as her feelings about them. She knew this. She wanted it. Needed it. For him to understand without the misconstruction and treachery that might come from words alone.

"That was not your fault," he asserted. "I was in error to leave you and our son alone while you were so clearly in anguish. What happened was more my fault than yours, beloved. Yet, you have chosen to forgive me for my part in it. For my part in everything."

Why?

The question came through impressions transmitted over the link, rather than through anything he said or through their bond.

"Because I could," she answered aloud.

"For so long, I blamed myself and I thought you blamed me, as well," she explained. "And you were so far away, but doing the same thing I was doing. We were both so busy believing we were at fault, we never really talked about our choices. This time, the decision was mine alone. And I chose happiness. For all of us."

There were things he still wouldn't understand, but she was willing to accept that for what it was.

__________

Even a week after the change and the healing meld, bedtime arrangements remained a challenge. Neither Baba nor Spock Tela'at offered any advice, and in the end it was Sanek who forced the matter. He was reluctant to settle down without both of his parents present. Uhura and Spock made their way to wherever their son chose to sleep.

No one wanted force the little boy to adhere to a stricter discipline just yet.

Tonight, he'd chosen his own bed. It was much smaller than either of his parents', but that didn't stop the three of them from crowding together on it for their pre-sleep ritual.

"Mama's turn tonight," Sanek announced with a yawn.

Uhura's eyes met her husband's across their son. He raised a brow. After a few moments of thought, she decided to do what she should have done for Spock before they beamed down to Gamma Ilé-Ifn65;l8;.

"Eshu is many things to many people, but at the end of the day, he is always Eshu-Elegbara, and a Trickster. Let me tell you some of his stories."

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