so much clearer (with your toothbrush by the mirror)

by justalittlebit

Summary:

Jim'd leave him but he's kind of warm, and if they get divorced he might get left alone with the kids. And then they'd all mutiny.

Notes:

 [Unknown LJ tag]screamlet  betaed and did beautifully. This is a fic for Sweet Charity, for the lovely Geek Lite who can't possibly have been expecting this fic (blame me and me alone, this is what happens when you give me choices) and who was incredibly patient and generous. This is, yes, the Duggar!fic. The title is sort of from Might Tell You Tonight but probably is not the actual line but only what I heard. Cut text from Pageant of the Bizarre a song I have mentioned before because it is one of my favorites.

Chapter 1

so much clearer (with your toothbrush)

Title: so much clearer (with your toothbrush by the mirror)
Author: [Unknown LJ tag]raphaela667
Pairing(s): Kirk/Spock
Genre: crack and is reality tv fusion a thing? Do we have that now? I don't want to start it.
Disclaimer: Not mine, never was, never will be.
Warnings: mentions of sex, same-sex marriage, pregnancy (lots of pregnancy), premature babies and just a lot of babies in general
Rating: R
Summary: Jim'd leave him but he's kind of warm, and if they get divorced he might get left alone with the kids. And then they'd all mutiny.
Notes: [Unknown LJ tag]screamlet  betaed and did beautifully. This is a fic for Sweet Charity, for the lovely Geek Lite who can't possibly have been expecting this fic (blame me and me alone, this is what happens when you give me choices) and who was incredibly patient and generous. This is, yes, the Duggar!fic. The title is sort of from Might Tell You Tonight but probably is not the actual line but only what I heard. Cut text from Pageant of the Bizarre a song I have mentioned before because it is one of my favorites.

00:03

This happens, sometimes. Jim'll wake up in the middle of the night, just like this, hot and sweaty and all tangled up in dead-to-the-world Vulcan, sometimes a baby or two (today it's T'Pala, three and chubby). Anyway, he'll wake up, all of a sudden, like he used to when they were under fire on the Enterprise and he will think; holy fucking God, there's nineteen of them.

Sometimes, he falls right back asleep, wakes up in the morning still hopelessly outnumbered and tries to fake through another day without doing anyone any permanent psychological damage. Sometimes, he wakes Spock up, too, shares this sudden insight that they have nineteen children under the age of twenty. Spock will nod, sagely, say something like; "go back to sleep, one must be awake to parent such an astonishing number of children," or if the kids have been really awful that day; "no more words, none."

Tonight, Kelvin starts to screech just right when he's on the edge of falling back asleep and Jim draws on some reserve of power developed during four-day benders and seven-night-long cramming incidents in his second term at the Academy to get him a bottle and try to cajole him back to sleep when all Kelvin wants to do is scream until his little lungs give out.

Then, he crawls back into bed, whimpering baby tucked up next to him, shakes Spock's shoulder and when Spock opens one bleary, brown eye, he says; "You, you were the one who got me into this you asshole," and falls asleep.

02:44

T'Pala squirms her way out of bed, pulls Spock along with her, and Jim only wakes for long enough to realize he can kind of sprawl as long as he keeps Kelvin tucked against his chin.

02:48

Spock comes back to bed.

Stupid Spock.

Jim'd leave him but he's kind of warm, and if they get divorced he might get left alone with the kids. And then they'd all mutiny.

04:45

What's amazing is that they both managed to sleep that long before Kelvin started gnawing on Spock's ear and Jim had to return him to his crib, and then he was up anyway, and he wanted to go for a run before it got desert-hot and dusty, and every breath started hurting like hell and his legs would feel too heavy by the afternoon.

Jim's going to be fifty in a couple weeks. They don't really talk about it, except the kids are up to something and Spock keeps kissing right behind his right ear and reminding him that Spock suffered the indignities of aging just fine last year, so Jim should just calm down. Only, Spock still looks like he's thirty and Spock was born for this kind of gravity and this kind of air. Whenever they're on Earth, Spock contrives to look damp all the time and then Jim feels guilty about it.

By five, Jim's stumbling into shorts and running shoes, knocking on Amanda's door to try to get her up. She says she wants to start morning runs before she goes to the Academy, but he and Spock have talked about it and neither of them think she's really going to turn down the offer she's got coming from the Vulcan Academy in a few weeks. Still, won't hurt her to move, to wake up before noon even if she's just hiking back to bed right after.

She stumbles out, looking a little confused.

"Run, baby girl?" Jim suggests, and she screws up her face.

"Don' call me that, Dad," she mumbles, but goes back into the room, changes in the dark since Lee's still gotta be sleeping (please, let Lee be still in there, he's not the kind of father who bars windows, but that girl makes him want to). She comes out, holding a brush and an elastic band, looking miserable. Jim gets it. She's the only one of the kid's who got his grandma's curls, and they've always been a bitch for her. He remembers learning how to braid her hair, and Lee's a couple year's later - realizing how much easier it was with the pressed-straight thickness of Vulcan hair than with Amanda's fine ringlets. He realized, too, how much he used to like the hour or so he'd get to spend his daughter and a comb in the morning, their family going on around them. She didn't ask for this, for about ten years. He figures, either way, she's leaving next year and she knows it. Probably wants to be a little girl as long as she can.

"Yeah, c'mon," he says, settles her on the couch and does it, more quickly than he could've imagined at thirty-one. He's got eleven daughters now, and none of them'll listen when he suggests they go bald (Spencer shaved off all his hair two months ago, and has a really lumpy head, but Spock says it'll be damaging if they talk about it too much).

"Couple miles?"

"I'll go easy on you," she says, and smirks, and somehow when she does that she's all Spock, even though Spock'd never lower himself to smirking.

05:49

Jim and Amanda tumble back through the door, into the kitchen, stripping off their shoes, covered in red dust (the wrong color, Spock still says sometimes, looking despondent, and Jim finds the best thing for it is to grab his chin, kiss him once, firm and close-mouthed, like they're already old, like they don't have nineteen kids worth of exactly how much Jim likes Spock under him, and then he'll point Spock's face towards whichever kid is nearest and say "I'm sorry, sweetheart, but we're home anyway." Doesn't make it better, but it doesn't make it worse, either).

The house is already moving around them; Spock's in the kitchen, across the island from them, Kelvin on his hip, the baby still mostly asleep but whining like he's hungry. There's Leo next to him, because Leo'd be up at three in the morning if he and Jim didn't have stern talk once a week about how people who insist on waking their fathers up at ridiculous hours don't get to go see their namesakes in Georgia for a week in August (this is a dirty, dirty lie; the kids love Bones, all of them, but even if they all hated him Jim'd send them out because when they're in Georgia he is alone with his husband and he feels like he's married to Spock, not just fighting a losing battle against a house full of small people who wants to abolish bedtime. Though, by about the Thursday, he and Spock are missing the noise so much they start calling the kids twice a day and playing loud music and punching things, respectively).

"We will have breakfast in an hour," Spock says, dropping a glancing kiss on the crown of Amanda's head as she darts past him.

You have to be competitive to get in the shower in this house. 'Till they were ten kids in, he and Spock had their own, but that got stupid when the kids started to smell, so Jim runs for it, too.

Spock'll hate him for it, but breakfast is an unpleasant experience even when you're not the sticky-sweaty kind of nasty.

05:54

He's been in the shower for two minutes, and he's got shampoo in his hair and his eyes screwed shut when Ben barrels in.

"I hate him," Ben announces, all of his nine years of towering fury. Ben, Jim's pretty sure, was born peeved at something. He has no idea what, but if he ever finds it, he is going to kick it very hard because no one does bitching like Ben, and it'd only been worse when he was pre-verbal.

"Who?"

"Sa-mekh," Ben says, as if this should be obvious. As if he's hated Spock for years. Jim fights not to find it adorable, because yeah, Ben means it now, but he won't in twenty minutes. Still, it's not the kind of thing he should encourage the kids saying, so he tilts his head back and washes the soap out of his hair, opens his eyes and looks at the shadow of his son through the curtain. He loves real-water showers. He loves the Vulcan aristocracy for getting him one, even though they still don't like him very much.

"Why would you say something like that?"

"He changed the timer," Ben tells him, planting his hands on his hips. "I was practicing before school for fifteen minutes because he makes me and he changed the timer and I would've had to do nineteen extra if I did not catch him."

"That doesn't sound like the kind of thing Sa-mekh'd do just to be mean to you," Jim tells him, grabs a towel and wraps it around his waist before he steps out of the shower. "He'd never be mean to you on purpose. Did you talk to him about it?" Ben shakes his head.

"So?"

"Nineteen extra minutes," Ben whines.

"Go."

07:01

"Spock!" Jim cries out, Ben seated next to him, repentantly scooping up oatmeal, baby seat on his other side, with Tamara getting ready to launch her sippy-cup into the ether at any moment. T'Lask is across from Jim, impassively staring at her math homework in that way that means she's so confused that she'd scream if she didn't have every ounce of Spock's stiff-spined Vulcan resolve. Jim can't help her with her math, anymore, at least not without a few minutes of quiet and a calculator. Spock'd probably be able to do it, given a split second of quiet (which would mean hauling her away from breakfast and into Spock's office, where even the worst of the kids know to shut the hell up).

"I am cooking," Spock calls back, even though what he means is that he's pressing buttons on the replicator because he can't really cook, he can only pretend to. And even replicator buttons keep them both fairly busy, school mornings.

"But math," Jim whines, and T'Lask and Storrel both look at him like he's deficient.

"It's only mathematics, Father. I could do it," Storrel says. Jim doesn't really know what this father thing of his is, but he's rolling with it, for the most part. Kids are weird at fourteen. He's done it five times now and he's not the biggest fan of the age. Four is his favorite; four's great.

"Then help your sister out," Jim advises, "no, Tam. You can drink the juice. You can glare at the juice, but you can't launch the juice. Sweetheart, coffee?"

"I was in line first, Daddy!" Leo announces. "Pancakes, Sa-mekh."

Jim hears Spock's determined "No," before he's diving to get Tamara's juice before it thwacks into T'Pala, who is concentrating on her cereal in a way only a toddler could.

07:20

"But the math got done, didn't it?" Jim says. "And why was it getting done this morning anyway? You were watching vids all night with Lee. Coulda done your math then."

"It was the way he did it, Dad."

"What?" He's honestly confused. And doesn't really know why he's dealing with this problem except that T'Lask screaming at Storrel got Kelvin going which got Tamara screaming and pulling hair, so that got him Taven on a rampage through the living room because he had been wronged and could Jim not see that? He figured he'd deal with the root cause then get Taven down from the rafters and into something that could reasonably be worn to kindergarten instead of just underpants (Spock's, somehow) and one sock.

"He took away my stylo and he just did it." Jim would've let anyone who offered do his math homework at thirteen. But he chose to marry Spock and though he can't remember the minute he picked it, he did choose to have a family with Spock, too. He should've seen this coming.

"OK, go get him, we'll talk. Pack your bag and hey - T'Lask, be my girl and help the little girls out, alright?"

07:45

"Why the hell are you still in the house? Out, out, all of you - here, T'San, note - I'm only writing one, just tell them it applies."

Jim doesn't get how they can all get up in time for school and he can still send fourteen kids out the door late (Storrel having left precisely on time, bags packed and fathers kissed goodbye because there was some sort of mix up at the hospital and that's a capability Storrel has, it's what you get for birthing on Earth, according to Spock, who was so suspicious about the whole process that Jim just started hustling them all back to Vulcan a month early after Storrel).

08:15

Tamara's in babyjail - the fenced-in area of the office where you get to go if you're smart enough to crawl and dumb enough to think hurling yourself down the stairs is a great idea. George got sent there last time he suggested skydiving as an excellent hobby that would dissuade him from disobeying direct orders when he thought they were wrong (this, as a last resort, because every time Jim looked over at Spock during that conversation, Spock's eyebrow's started going and Jim cracked up). Kelvin's on the floor, with sparkly baby things to bat at.

And Jim and Spock are looking at the calendar.

The calendar is done on Tuesdays. It lasts a week. Twenty-one different people have their entire schedule mapped out on the calendar. There's color coding (Jim, until he started living with Spock, wasn't aware of twenty-one distinct colors, now he could tell you that T'Pala's the brassy gold but he's the yellow).

The calendar is also the thing that is going to end his marriage.

08:23

"It's a dance recital. Is she even in it? No, no she is not. So I'll drive her there but I'm not staying to watch other people's four year olds stumble around a stage for two hours."

08:34

"Jim, be reasonable."

08:37

"Fuck you and fuck reasonable." Jim kisses Spock on the cheek, in quick repentance. The cheek twitches.

08:42

"Why're you going to the doctor Thursday?"

08:51

The garden is sort of a family project. For a while, when the house was first built, everyone had their own plots. Now it's just - you get pissed enough, you go garden for a while, nobody's going to bug you too much.

So Jim's not really feeling the guilt, for leaving Spock alone in the house. He's pissed at Spock, not the kids, but you don't know that when you're three and Daddy's growling at everything. He's got a baby monitor, he'll go in if Kelvin and Tam go off together.

If, a nasty little voice says, he can be promised he won't have to deal with Spock 'cause Spock's arms'll be too full of wailing baby.

He pulls pretty hard at something he's almost entirely sure is a weed and not Levin's latest science experiment (sixth year science on Vulcan? You get to play with the gene splicers). He's got sweat breaking out on his back and it's gross, but it's better than killing Spock with his bare hands.

10:02

Spock leaves him a glass of water, and looks like he's going to pull back, and then seems to remember that he wasn't born with that much sense.

"It is only a consultation."

"This'll kill you, eventually," Jim says, glaring at what he thinks is Levin's science project, and he's proud of the kid but it's fucking ugly. "And where the hell will I be then?"

Spock beats a hasty retreat, but probably only because there's a crash from the general direction of Tamara, who just hit the age where they all learn to pick the locks of babyjail.

10:30

Jim gives up and drinks the water; it's more than lukewarm by now, but he's passed out here before, and Spock'd kill him for that. Spock's never been afraid of getting left alone and -

Thing is, guys have been able to have kids for fucking ever. Jim's got two great-granddads on one side, they were the second generation or so that could. Only, it doesn't take with some men and it never took with Jim. They tried the implant three times - the third time he nearly died from the rejection and Bones said he wouldn't try anymore.

That was right after T'Lask was born, and Jim had figured, ok, it's fine, five's enough. Five's a lot. Five's great. But Spock hadn't wanted that. He'd begged, as much as Spock ever did. For a few more years - just to see what they'd get. And maybe then, barely thirty-five, Jim'd been too young to think that T'Lask was his last baby.

But Kelvin - they lost a baby between Tamara and T'Pala, four months before the due date. Jim'd been done then. Spock had begged again and Bones had said they could do it; Spock wasn't rejecting the implant and the implant would bear forty, if they got that crazy. So, Jim went with it. And Tamara was fine - Tamara's gorgeous, perfect. She's at that stage where she mostly looks like pudding and she keeps falling so her head's kind of like a really irregular pudding. But she's got Spock's long fingers and she has this thing for grabbing Jim's hand out of nowhere and trailing around with this really solid hold on it for hours.

And Jim had been ready to say OK, that was it. Tamara was great. Eighteen was a shitload of kids. They were done. By the time he got up the guts to say it, Spock was pregnant again. Kelvin was their what - sixth accident? Something like that, there was no point in being perfect with protection, and Jim always forgot and they'd never really not been trying before.

But Kelvin - Kelvin was three months early, spent a month and a half in an incubator, went back in three weeks after that when he got jaundice. Jim'd never - the kids breaks bones. Storrel holds the record, he's got six to his name and Jim's pretty sure if he's still this excited about flying in three years he's going to see combat, and he has nightmares about that. They sprain things and once a year, just like clockwork, everybody gets a cold and Jim spends a week literally siphoning snot out of tiny, tiny noses. And pacifying the rabid Spock, who isn't allowed near anyone small and not sick but who won't be isolated to his bed. So he roams the house like a zombie and Jim plays keep-away with the really little ones.

This year, he had to take Kelvin out to a hotel, spend a few nights there because a fucking cold would've been such a major setback for him then, only one week in adjusted age and - they pretty much let the kids into the bed if they're asking for it, but not if they're OK outside of the bed. If Spock ever figures out that Kelvin asks for it most nights 'cause Jim spent that whole week curled around him then Jim's got hell to pay.

So, the thing is, Kelvin was their last baby. Theoretically, the implant can do forty. Most it's ever been asked to do it thirty-five and that was on some whacked-out colony and nobody knows what happened to those kids when they grew up and - and Jim was fucking done and Spock fucking knew it. Or, they hadn't talked about it, but he's pretty sure his diligence with condoms (and they're fucking impossible to get, but the shot makes his arm swell up and it's once a week) tipped him off.

And he'd still booked an appointment with the baby doctor they got when they couldn't get Bones.

Jim finishes his water and storms inside. He's got half an hour before he has to go get Leo and Taven, and they'll notice if the house is messy, if it looks like he's been out for Spock's blood for a few hours. Spock won't have lunch with them anyway and Jim can get the boys set up with something and go do paperwork, whatever.

He figures the biggest hurdle is going to be holding their hands while all he wants to do is ball his up into fists and hit the walls.

11:47

Spock shows for lunch and it's tense and it's awful, so Taven melts down right at the table because he wanted spaghetti and they gave him klitanta k'forati-mun instead. Leo, being Leo, observes the whole thing with dignity, and solves the problem by just eating Taven's while Jim's chewing him out in the other room. Which means that when Taven stops screaming long enough to get something in his mouth, he gets a sandwich. And falls asleep five minutes later, even though he's about six months out of really napping.

12:29

"It would not be unsafe," Spock says, when they're doing the dishes together, because it's been twenty years and nineteen kids and they've got this rhythm, so they eat together, they do the dishes together, they talk.

"He's still only in the fourth percentile for size," Jim says, firm. "Lung function's below average." He could've told Spock the stats, surfactant levels and weight, but Spock knows them as well as he does, which is to say Jim's got it all tattooed on his eyelids (that and Lee's latest letter home from school, which had been positively vicious for a Vulcan schoolteacher).

But that sends him to check on Kelvin, safe in his crib, clutching this one raggedy blanket that'd been Stoket's, and Stok's only seven, but he'd given it to Kelvin when he was in the hospital because Stoket liked it when he was sick and by the time it'd been back in the house he'd forgotten about it and Kelvin pretty much won't be parted from it. He's a bright kid; Jim was pretty scrawny, too, and he knows about being the smartest when you can't be the strongest.

Still, Kelvin scares the fuck out of him sometimes, and when Jim presses a kiss to his forehead and creeps out of the room he thinks the skin is still too thin, thinks he'll still be able to seen shots of green through his skin where he shouldn't, next time he has to change the kid and he can't, not more than once.

13:13

"I am not pregnant," Spock says, and Jim nods, because hell, he knew that. He's still reading reports from Uhura's latest command, and they're technically perfect just - she's lying about something that happened a few weeks ago, and he wants to know what.

He had known that. They've never lied about things like that, they've never made decisions on their own like that, not since they decided to do this.

It was supposed to be just George, Jim remembers, faintly. Just George, and them, and the ship - their crew, too. It hadn't been - eighteen kids later he can't say it was the best plan, because he can't regret his kids (even if on days like today he wants to find the guy who kissed Spock in the transporter room when he thought they were both going to die and beat him to death before he can do it). But it had been a plan where they felt like they could be themselves.

But there'd been New Vulcan, so barren of kids - one school evacuated, and those were kids over fifteen. And the Ambassador always kind of harping on them to have more. And the attack on the ship, when George was six months old - kid barely got scratched up, but Jim was done with it after that because he could risk his life and he could risk Spock's but he wouldn't risk George's. He didn't have that in him and he'd throw himself out an airlock the second he thought he maybe could. And they'd both had brothers, had loved them in their own ways; the kids still go to Sam's for Christmas every year, try to overrun the old farmhouse while Sam and his wife and two boys kind of cower in the corners. Spock's brother's another story, but that's a story Jim doesn't like to tell, it makes him want to use the phasers that he and Spock are too damaged to throw out and it's hard to want to hit Spock and want to kill people for hurting Spock at the same time.

But wanting boys, wanting another boy, had gotten them to Storrel, and then they hadn't really thought much before they went on, with T'Lask. Hadn't really thought much about it again ever, because they were doing this and they were doing it all the way.

Vulcan still doesn't have many kids, a few families of ten or so, one of six Jim knows of. But it's a culture that's about small families and nobody wanted to change that except the crazies. He and Spock, he guesses, are the crazies.

He realizes, somewhere, that he's not focusing on the reports, that Spock's still looking on him like he wants an answer, that the house is going to start to get full in a couple hours, that they can only be so good at pretending not to be angry at each other.

"We gotta talk," he says, and he feels so stupid saying it, because they don't have a marriage with communication. They have a marriage with meditation and drinking and long, expensive vidcalls to Bones. But they do have to talk and they can both just about manage it when the alternative is the kind of fight that'll send at least a quarter of the kids into therapy.

"I concur," Spock says. And Jim nods again.

Taven wakes up before they can make definite plans, which is either a blessing or a curse.

14:17

Lee's the first one in the door, three minutes before the last period of the day even technically ends, but they're so far past caring if Lee skips just one class that Jim just directs her towards the kitchen to get something to eat and starts setting up for homework.

The thing with Lee is that she throws them for a loop. By the time they got to her they were on their second girl, their third baby. They figured they had this shit down cold. Lee was a colicky baby, a taciturn toddler, the kind of kid that sent Jim out of the house and into the garden a couple times a day when she was well behaved. Lee drives them crazy. She has a fake ID that Jim can't be bothered to take away because she'll just get another one. She drinks, she smokes, she does things neither of them wants to think about, except that they have to.

She's grounded this week, but grounded for Lee is sort of a base state. Jim can't come up with a better punishment, and Spock's been exhausted with Lee since she was seven.

"She'll come around," Jim says, sometimes.

"At least when she is incarcerated we will know where she is," Spock will answer. He loves her, they both do; it's just an uphill battle to get her to let them, and sometimes they're losing.

Grounded means she can't lock herself in her room until after the homework on her PADD is done, and she can't do that without Jim's help because she never goes to school. It gets Spock too angry to do it, and Jim can fake it with textbooks, since she's in remedial everything, this year. Last year, too.

Once, her teacher had suggested transferring her to Earth, seeing if she'd do better with human kids. Jim only didn't hit her because he was restraining Spock. And because sometimes he thinks it'd be a good idea. A couple months with Sam, a couple months with just one of her parents, because Lee's too much to handle as one of nineteen, and that's maybe what the goal is.

"Lee Kirk," Jim says, sharp and reflexive when he sees her leaving the kitchen and turning for her room. "Get your ass in a chair at this table. Now."

He figures he's only got another six months where that's going to go at all, and he wants her to get another year of school out of that.

14:46

"I think your ko-mekh-il was at this summit."

"Don't fucking care."

"Bad words, Lee," this from Taven, who is set up in Jim's lap, coloring and ignoring the fact that Jim's head's about to explode and Lee's about to jam her stylus in his eye and they're not even six pages into a forty page chapter of modern Vulcan diplomatic history.

"I'm never fucking alone, how the hell would you react?" Lee says, launching into an old complaint even though Jim can't figure out how she's been provoked this time.

"Yeah, I've got this whole great house to myself, never have to spend the night with six other people in my bed and all those dinners to myself," Jim says. "Answer question eight, we'll take a break before the little kids get home, yeah?"

"You had a choice," Lee says, though she does have the decency to say it in Klingon. Go Uhura.

15:12

He ropes Lee back in, and thinks how much easier it'd be if he'd done something to make her mad. If he could resent her or apologize or something.

He has to get up, somewhere around where the rest of the kids are getting home from school, grabs Spock's arm and hauls him into the kitchen.

"You're sure she's ours, right?"

"I did spend a night with a rabid sehlat around the time of her conception," Spock says, joking before Jim remembers that they're supposed to be mad at each other.

"Explains it," Jim murmurs, and he's mad enough he doesn't rest his head on Spock's collarbone, just takes Tamara out of his arms. "Music, right?" Spock nods. "Trade you?"

"She is that obstinate today?"

"If you say no I'm calling your father."

"You will need four ka'athyra," Spock reminds him, because Jim always leaves the house with either three or six, but never four. "We will still need to talk."

As if Jim could fucking forget.

15:57

When Jim was a kid, he used to love transporters. There weren't many on Earth, back then, and they were mostly military. They got to use them if they were visiting their mom on base, or for anything to do with the Kelvin. It'd been cool, and it had cut down on the time in a hovercar with his stepdad and Sam, because they'd always fight and Sam'd always end up in a corner, kind of hunched in on himself and looking miserable.

So when they resigned from active duty and they were talking about where they were going to actually live if space wasn't an option, one of the things New Vulcan had had going for it (asides from Spock wanting and the kids maybe needing it, and Sarek being there, and the Ambassador, back then), was that they'd settled a whole planet with the population of Greater Riverside. So there were just a fuckload of transporters.

A transporter, it turns out, is awesome with two kids. It works with up to four. By the time you get to five, it's a little stressful. At eleven, it makes you cry tears of blood.

Jim never really understood Bones until he had to start sending the kids through on their own. Well, in sets of two. But it's still close enough to on their own with no way of checking that they got down safely unless they've all got comms on them, which never happens and doesn't work when you're running late on a planet where running late is basically unheard of, but frowned on in theory.

Four ka'athyra, one mock drum set, Stoket plays the piano because he's a rebel like that, Amanda's been lugging around her guitar for a while like that's suddenly going to get on Spock's approved list of instruments so it comes along because what Spock doesn't know won't hurt him and will get Amanda to babysit for free when Jim and Spock need the time off (by this, Jim means, when they want to have quiet, sort of secretive, sex in the middle of the day without anyone noticing except Amanda, who was around when they used to be able to make out in the kitchen without Storrel and Ben lodging a formal protest or Beth starting to talk about therapy in the ominous tones that only an eleven year old can pull off).

Anyway, with eleven, and only one parent going with them, he sends them through two by two and waits it out, and watches the other ones and considers whether or not it's really safe to leave seven behind with Spock when Lee's in a mood like she is (worse than most days, but she's not going to run away, not today, anyway, and she never really gets that far).

16:04

He always forgets that he trades blowjobs for not having to take the kids to music lessons because T'Pring hates him (OK, kind of understandably, he's a husband-stealing hussy according to her clan histories).

16:13

Also, music lessons are really boring, but there's unbridled fury when he falls asleep during them, and he does feel like kind of a bad parent for doing it.

16:39

Especially because he almost dropped T'Pala when he woke up, this last time.

He knew the drums would kill one of the kids eventually. he always just figured it'd be Spencer who has to share Stoket's room.

17:12

Kids are returned, Spock and Lee aren't really speaking.

Jim used to get taken prisoner fairly often, and on days like today this feels just like it.

Except that when he's taking a minute, head leaned up against the cool metal of the fresh-food fridger and eyes closed, T'Reen comes up and hugs him around the waist.

"Hey, baby," he says, and scoops her up. At six, she's getting heavy and he's getting old, but he doesn't really mind. "What're you looking for?"

"Hugs from you," she says, and winds her hands around his neck. He catches the back of Spock's head - involved in some sort of make-believe with most of the boys in the hallway, blanket around his shoulders like a cape and wonders if she was put up to this. But she's small and she's warm and doesn't know that she's too big to be a dead weight in his arms.

But she's weighing him down, keeping him on the ground here, even if the gravity should be doing that on its own. And his stupid, persistent husband sent her in because he's too mad to hug Jim himself but gets that Jim needs it.

He met, once, this guy with a stick up his ass. That guy wouldn't have been wearing a cape and turning his four-year-old upside down or deputizing six-year-olds to deal with feelings because he didn't know if he could bring himself to. And Jim?

Jim didn't used to like being grounded.

So, OK. Stir-fry for dinner.