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Sarah April, retired Starfleet doctor, could not believe what she had just heard. Less than ten years into retirement, and her husband, Robert April, retired from the Diplomatic Corps, had just told his former colleague, Sarek of Vulcan, that he would consider playing a part in the upcoming peace talks? He hadn’t been feeling well for months. He had obviously thought he was hiding his illness from her quite cleverly, but she had been his wife and his doctor for almost fifty years. No one knew him like she did.
She barely waited for Sarek to take his leave before exploding. “Would you mind telling me, what the bloody ‘ell fire do you think you are doing, even considering this mission? I know you haven’t been feeling one bit like yourself lately and you can’t look in my eyes and tell me otherwise. Did you not hear a single word I said earlier, about going in to see Dr. Warren and getting some answers? Does no one hark to a damn word I say around here? Better for me to save my damn breath to cool my damn porridge because not a damn word out of my damn mouth—“
“Please, Sarah, don’t be angry with me. The thing is, I... I don’t know how to say this modestly, but... I’m the oldest living Diplomat in the service. I know things and remember things I hadn’t been able to pass on down because of the sensitive nature of the information. They really do need me, and as Sarek said, I won’t have to leave home—“
“Oh but you will. If you give the Diplomatic Corps a centimeter they will take a lightyear. The moment one of those young diplomats you set so much store by so much as develops a hangnail, off you’ll go to take their place, and I have seen what the stress of those negotiations does to your body. I hate that the Fleet uses you as some sacrificial lamb, and you’re too gentle and mild to stand up to them. You’re making a rod for your own back and you bloody well know it.”
“It’s my back, eh?”
“Don’t make jokes . I don’t need your jokes right now—“
“I am not joking when I say, this peace initiative with the Klingon Empire is of vital importance to me. This is a cause very close to my heart. No one knows better than you how much this means to me and I believed you’d support me in this. I’m dismayed that you feel like this.”
“Is this peace conference more important than your life ? Is peace closer to your heart than your own family ? Is it worth putting your own health in jeopardy so you can’t be there for the people who love you and need you? All those years in the Fleet you’ve had to put duty before your own well-being. Isn’t it time to retire, for real this time?”
“Are you trying to hurt me, Sarah?” There might have been tears glittering in his eyes but Sarah was too angry to see them.
“I’m trying to keep you from hurting yourself and by default, me. In case you had forgotten, we are married, we are not two separate people anymore, we are part of each other, and what you do affects me.”
“My darling.” Robert reached across the tabletop to gather her hands in his own, only to have her wrench them away from him and wrap her arms tightly around herself as if to hold the pain inside. “No, please don’t touch me—“
“Sarah, please, belay all this and come to me. I have never in my life needed thee more—“
Sarah could not trust herself to meet the naked entreaty in his eyes. He had been struggling to conceal from her how tired and ill he was, and in what desperate need of her comfort and tenderness. If she met his eyes, she would go to him and hold him, and then she would lose her defensive “then you shouldn’t have offered to consider this damn mission feeling the way you do” anger. And she wasn’t ready to let go of that yet. She shook her head at his pleading, heart-hungry arms stretched out for her. “I am vexed with thee! I’m going to go see Mary Anne.”
When Sarah said she was vexed, she meant she was murderous. She struggled to her feet and stormed out as well as a woman with two canes for support can storm anywhere. He waited for her to relent and come back and at least give him a kiss goodbye, but she did not return. With a quiet cry of pain stifled against his knuckles, he put his head down on the table and felt utter desolation break over him in a tidal wave. Perhaps he would take Jim Kirk up on his invitation to visit the new Enterprise...
After a long evening reminiscing with Jim Kirk, Robert felt exhausted and drained. After the sound of the transporter chimes faded into silence, the utter stillness of the empty house struck Robert like chill, fresh wind from the moor. Physically aching with weariness, he slowly walked into the bedroom he shared with his wife. Without undressing or making preparations for sleep… he knew he was too tired for sleep… he lay down on their bed and looked up at the painting on the opposite wall.
It was a print of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, which he had given to Sarah as a welcome home gift when they had first come back to Yorkshire to adjust to life with a disability. The picture depicted a disabled woman who, eschewing aid from wheelchairs, crawled and dragged herself wherever she wanted to go. It might have been a sorrowful picture, but the sheer grit and determination of the prone figure looking up at the distant house filled Sarah with inspiration she desperately needed, and it served as a reminder of how far medicine had come in three hundred years.
Yet in the paintings by Andrew Wyeth he and Sarah loved to visit whenever they were in Maine, the absence of figures was in and of itself a portrait of the person to whom the room in the painting belonged. Her Room was Sarah’s favorite. She said she could tell so much about the artist's wife just from the loving details depicted by the egg tempera. Somehow, although he had always loved the painting, the loneliness it had been painted to depict had always stirred a vague sense of sadness and longing, a distant foreboding, a premonition of what his world would look like if Sarah went on before him. His own favorite was Love in the Afternoon; he and Sarah had so often lain in one another’s arms after lovemaking in the late Yorkshire afternoons, looking out the window over the moors, talking of cabbages and kings, or saying nothing in all the languages they knew.
Tonight, lying alone in their bed, in the quiet room that in her absence was a portrait of her, his memories stirred by the evening of storytelling, he thought back to how he had felt during “the undone years.”
They had spent most of the Klingon/Federation War of ‘57 apart, whilst she served aboard hospital ships desperate for doctors skilled in space medicine and he served in the Diplomatic Corps, feverishly working for peace. In that dark year, not often able to get messages through to each other, knowing the other to be in mortal danger every moment, both of them seeing the horrors of war that would change them forever, both lying alone at night yearning for one another, both soul and flesh, they had resolved that if they both survived, they were going back to quiet teaching posts on Earth and never ever again get themselves into a situation where they could not draw strength from one another’s nearness.
Ten years later, ten years spent in mourning and rebuilding and adjusting to the effects the war had had upon themselves and everyone they knew, they had once again seen war on the horizon and cast that resolution to the winds. But they had been younger then, stronger then.
Robert knew it was the memory of that nightmarish year that had prompted Sarah’s angry outburst, and he understood. If only he could tell her that spending this evening in reminisces had given him an insight into what she had gone through and why she had responded the way she had to his assignment. But he knew her well enough to give her her space until she should be ready to come back to him.
Missing her, he rolled over onto her side of the bed, buried his face in her pillow, inhaling her scent, trying to remember what her body felt like against his, and wept until he had no more strength to weep.
Robert was sitting by a dying peat fire, a cup of tea grown cold at his elbow, a book resting unopened on his knee, and shadows of twilight filling the room when a sudden familiar sound startled him out of his sorrowful reverie.
The tap of canes on the stone floor.
Sarah had returned.
Unable to summon the strength to get up and meet her, not sure what her state of mind was, he simply stayed still and waited for her.
She stood framed in the door of their sitting room. The years had refined her into the essence of all that she was, all she had ever been.
Honor, anger, valor, fire,
A love that life could never tire
Death quench, nor evil stir,
The mighty master gave to her.
That was his Sarah. He often wished that it had been he and not Stevenson who had penned those words.
Her eyes betrayed that she had been crying. He spoke up quickly,
“Please, Sarah, I ask forgiveness for acting like a sodding idiot. I had no right to accept that assignment without discussing it with you first. We promised we’d never do that and I broke that promise. I was wrong and I’m sorry.”
“Never mind all that now, Robert—“ Sarah limped to his side and did what she had not done since she had become disabled. She gingerly lowered herself onto his knee to settle against him and pull his arm around her, her head on his chest, the old way. Her face was hidden from him against the soft wool of his cardigan but he could feel her fragile shoulders shaking under his caressing hands. “You might be a sodding idiot. But you’re my sodding idiot. And my love for you is not made out of the company crockery. It ‘resembles the eternal rocks beneath.’ I ask your forgiveness too. Mary Anne and I have done nothing but talk and I had no right to be so beastly to you. I was just so frightened to lose you—“
“Shhhh. All is forgiven. Might I have a kiss, my True North?”
The nickname was almost as old as their life long friendship. Originally given to her to tease her about her blunt Northern ways, he had come to realize that she was his True North, the one by which he charted every course. The quarrel ended as many others had before this one, with his lips on hers.