After I read Jungle Kitty's brilliant piece of RevengeFic, I couldn't
resist writing the character's revenge for "Terminus."  Thanks to
Stephen for issuing The Challenge and bravo to everyone who responded.

Judith

Disclaimer: This story is intended as satire, one of the most
time-honored forms of "fair use." The author does not intend to
infringe on any copyrights held by Paramount, Viacom or others.


                                                  ON TRIAL

	Areel Shaw rose to give her opening statement. Of
course,they'd retained  the best to represent them.

	I, on the other hand ... I'd never felt more alone than I
did now, sitting all by myself at the defendant's counsel table. *He
who represents himself has a fool for a client,* I repeated the old
adage under my breath, grimly. But I'd had no other choice. I couldn't
afford a lawyer in this century, and my partners had, understandably,
refused to come with me. Even if I'd been able to bring them across
the temporal divide, they weren't licensed to practice in the
Federation courts, let alone versed in the arcane points of 23d
century tort law. 

        As Areel walked to the podium, I glanced around the courtroom.
Some things never change; the plaintiff's table was still next to the jury
box. The box was empty except for media people, of course--I'd waived
my right to a jury since no seven people in this century were going to
find in my favor, not against those two, especially not after they'd
just saved the galaxy from V'Ger. 

            It felt strange to be sitting on the defendant's side of
the courtroom, but I was getting used to it.  

               There they were, sitting together at the plaintiffs'
table, looking as grim and sober as I've ever seen them. They must have 
felt my eyes on them, because they both turned, as one man, to look at 
me. The Human glared at me with open fury, but it was the Vulcan's
reproachful gaze that made me flush with shame and slump down in my
chair. *At least they're together again,* I thought inanely.

              Areel was at the podium, preparing to begin. I'd tried
to get her disqualified from the case, arguing that a lawyer can't serve as
counsel in a case in which she could be called as a witness. She
certainly met the test--she'd been a character in my story, for
heaven's sake! But the judge had settled that by  noting that no party
had her on its witness list. Motion denied.

              "May it please the Court, my name is Areel Shaw and I
represent the plaintiffs in this action for intentional infliction of
emotional distress."

               A hush feel over the courtroom as Areel's clear voice
rose. The room was filled to the rafters, and I could feel hundreds of
angry eyes boring into my back. The spectators all knew what this case
was about--it had been all over the holovids for weeks. Still, they
hung on Areel's every word as she detailed the terrible wrongs I had
committed against her clients,  James T. Kirk and Spock
Xtmprsqzntwlfb. How I, a hapless 20th century amateur fan writer, had
forced these two men--who, by the way, were now full Vulcan
bondmates--to separate when all they wanted was to be together. How I
had kept them apart for two and a half miserable, barren, loveless
years, with an absolutely devastating emotional impact on both of
them.

            It was maudlin, it was sentimental, but it was working, I
could tell by the mood in the courtroom and the expression on the face of
the judge, an intense Andorian woman with exquisite sky-blue skin and
aquiline features. I remembered that Andorians were a race of
passionate creatures and wondered if my chances with her weren't just
as bad as they'd have been with a jury.

             I glanced over at Kirk and Spock as I got up to make my
opening  statement. Kirk glared at me, Spock met my eyes and flinched
visibly.  Kirk reached out, covered Spock's hand with his own and
caressed it gently. I died inside. What I wouldn't have given to see a
scene like that--in another life, another world? 

             I stumbled through my own opening and then the testimony
began.  Areel's case was short and to the point--two expert witnesses
and the admissions that she'd gotten from me in discovery. I suspected
she was planning to call Kirk and Spock as rebuttal witnesses--they
could do that here, apparently, more easily than we could.  

            The first witness, an expert in temporal mechanics,
explained the  whys and wherefores of how the story I had written had 
caused the events that had resulted in the infliction of significant 
emotional distress upon Kirk and Spock. How the private fantasies I'd 
written down to share with friends almost three centuries ago had affected
these two men's lives at a critical juncture in their relationship. 
Areel was taking her through the wretched story page by page, asking
her to recount every twist and turn of the admittedly contrived plot. 

            I was on my feet instantly, objecting to the relevance of
the testimony. Even in this century, bad plotting isn't illegal. But
the judge overruled me, stating that the testimony was relevant to the
issues of intent and foreseeability.

            The second expert, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was
more damaging, and I found it hard to keep my cool. The plaintiffs had
obtained an embarrassing amount of information about me in pre-trial
discovery--psych profiles, Robbiana Dermal-Optic stats, and--even
worse--all my private e-mail correspondence. 

            I blushed and squirmed as the expert witness debunked my
claim that I was "only writing fiction." He explained how, on some
unconscious level, I believed that Kirk and Spock were really "real."
He used  words like "transference" and "introjection," claimed I had a
deep psychic need to create misery and tragedy for Kirk and Spock and
explained how I used it to achieve emotional gratification for myself.
Thank the gods we had stipulated before trial to ignore the, ah, other
kinds of gratification I achieved. He concluded with his opinion that
the emotional distress I'd caused Kirk and Spock was of truly
cataclysmic proportions. I did what I could on cross, but it wasn't
much. 

           After a break I began to present my case, and things began
looking up. Thank heavens that courts still have subpoena power in the
23d century. 

           First I called Leonard H. McCoy, M.D. The thrust of my
defense, obviously, was that Kirk and Spock would have done what they 
did anyway, with or without me--that as real as their pain had been, *I*
hadn't caused it.  

            "You were James Kirk's personal physician and counselor
during the five-year mission, weren't you?" I asked.  

            "Yes," he said warily.

             "And as his personal physician and counselor, you advised
him, didn't you, not to give up his command for his relationship with
Mr. Spock?"

            "I told him it was a decision he should think about very
seriously," McCoy replied grudgingly.

            "You shared with him your professional opinion, based on
his psychometric profiles,  that starship command was a perfect match for
his emotional and psychological needs, didn't you?" I emphasized each
word carefully--I wanted the judge to understand that I'd gotten that
part right, at least. 

            "And you knew, didn't you, that he couldn't command a
starship with Spock as his second-in-command if they were bonded?"

             "Yes, but that wasn't the only solution," he protested
before I cut him off.

             "You believed so strongly that Jim Kirk should not give
up his starship command that you went to Starfleet Command after he
accepted a post in the Admirality, didn't you, and told them this
career move would destroy your friend?"

            "Yes, but I was wrong," he said stubbornly, but I had made
my point.

             An excited hum rose from the spectators as I called my
star witness--a twentieth-century writer and sometime TV producer. I'd
fetched him from early 1980 with a cross-temporal subpoena; I figured
it was better to get him when his memories were fresh. 

              My goal was to get him to admit that since it had been
*his* idea that Kirk and Spock had separated for those two and a half
years between the end of the five-year mission and the V'Ger incident,
I couldn't be held responsible.

             I ran into an immediate objection from Areel, who claimed
his testimony was irrelevant because he had been writing in an alternate
universe in which Kirk and Spock were simply friends, not lovers.
"That goes to the weight, not the admissibility of the evidence,
Counselor," the judge said tersely, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

            I introduced his novel, *Star Trek: The Motion Picture*
(how could a novel be called "The Motion Picture,"? I wondered for the
hundredth time), and excerpts from the old-fashioned video, lingering
over the hand-holding scene in Sickbay. The judge looked impressed. I
could see I was having an impact. 

         Cross and redirect were a pissing match. We went through that
footnote in the novel line by line, Areel trying to get him to say it
meant they had never been lovers, and me trying to get him to say the
opposite. He stumbled around and muttered something about "open
texture," and we finally gave up and called it a draw.

           After I'd closed my case, Areel, as I'd predicted,
announced her two rebuttal witnesses, Spock and Kirk. I was nervous, 
but ready for them.

             Spock went first. Like most Vulcans he's not very good at
talking about his feelings, so Areel took him through an account of
everyday life among the Masters of Gol. I have to hand it to her; it
was a brilliant tactic. I thought I knew something about Vulcan
asceticism, but this was something else. Flagellation,
semi-starvation, dehydration, self-mutilation. In one particularly
gruesome story, Spock told how the Masters had tied him up,
spreadeagled and helpless, on a bed of razor-sharp shards on a peak of
the L'langon Mountains. He remained for days without food and water,
exposed to blistering heat during the day and freezing cold at night.
Le-matyas howled in the background--he estimated the possibility of
being devoured by them to be approximately 35.689%. When he was still
alive in the morning, his fellow-acolytes came and whipped him,
chanting that he required punishment because even the le-matyas had
rejected him as unworthy. *Good grief,* I said to myself,
half-convinced I'd stumbled out of KS and into a P/Q "scene."  

             On cross-examination, I zeroed in on Spock's feelings of
guilt for having curtailed Kirk's freedom. It was a pretty effective tack, 
but I took it just a shade too far. "You would have done anything
rather than force an involuntary bonding on Jim, wouldn't you?" I
asked.

            He paused and considered the question carefully. I should
have known I was in trouble. "I served with Captain Kirk in hundreds
of missions," he replied levelly, "and my practice was always to
present him with accurate data so that he could make a decision based
on all the facts. I believe that the way you had me behave in your
story was an aberration."

            Behind me, I heard the courtroom buzz with surprise. Spock
continued, "I do not know what decision we would have made if we had
considered the information I discovered about the bond between us, but
we should have discussed it, at least. Your story robbed us of that
opportunity." 

           The audience gave a collective gasp of approval, and I knew
it was time to sit down.

            Kirk was next, and if Spock had found it hard to testify
about his own feelings, Kirk certainly didn't.  I tried half-heartedly
to object during his melodramatic account of the pain and emotional
emptiness he had lived through during the last two and half
years--stripped of his ship, abandoned by Spock, cut off from
everything that had made life meaningful to him. I'd hoped to get him
to admit on cross-examination that he'd found some pleasure in the
year he spent with Lori, but he forestalled me by testifying that
every time they made love, he'd imagined it was Spock, and had wound
up miserable and ultimately, impotent.

            I ignored the shocked sounds from the audience and
surreptitiously took a few notes for the benefit of fellow fan
authors. 

             By the time Kirk finished his testimony, the audience was
practically in tears. I was afraid I couldn't touch him on
cross-examination, but I had to try. I hammered away at his refusal to
bond with Spock as long as he could still command a starship. Hadn't
he made that decision freely? 

             "Yes," he said brusquely, fixing me in a steely gaze, but
speaking beyond me to the judge and the audience. "But that was before
I knew that we were already bonded. If I'd known that, I would have
given up my command in an instant." It was his "command" voice, and I
was as helplessly transfixed by it as if I'd been a malingering ensign
on the *Enterprise.* "*Nothing* Starfleet could offer me would have
mattered. I would have given it all up to stay with Spock."

            The audience erupted, cheering. I  felt my well-plotted
cross-examination collapse, washed away by the sheer force of the
man's charisma. I sat down, defeated.

            After that it was downhill all the way. The judge's only
questions to Areel during her closing argument concerned the
appropriate remedy. The plaintiffs had asked for an injunction to
prevent me from writing any more fan fiction about them. The judge had
read the same case law I had, and she seemed to think she did not have
the authority to enjoin activity in the past, which technically, at
least, had already happened. The  application of legal principles to
temporal mechanics was so complicated it made my head spin, but I was
thankful for that small loophole, at least. 

             In the end, we settled. We went into the empty jury room
and hammered out an agreement that gave Kirk and Spock everything they
were legally entitled to without compromising my right to write fan
fiction--I held out for that much.  

            It all came down to damages--surprising how little the law
of remedies had evolved in the last two centuries. I was disconcerted
that they pushed me so hard on the amount. I'd thought money wasn't so
important any more in the 23d century. They assured me it was. 

             "But what about Spock's family," I asked, puzzled,
"Aren't they enormously wealthy? And isn't that enough for you both?"

             "Nonsense," Kirk snapped back. "All Spock's family owns
is a few acres of unoccupied desert, not suitable for cultivation. We
could use the credits." I filed this information away for future
reference. 

              Finally, we reached agreement. I would go back to my own
time and my old job and place a month's salary in a trust account. 
With prudent management and compounding, even allowing for inflation
and the depession during the Eugenics Wars, it would grow to several
billion credits by the time Kirk and Spock were ready to tap into it.
Enough so that they both resign from Starfleet and retire if they
wanted to. 

             As Areel and I signed the agreement I could overhear Kirk
murmuring something to Spock about moving to Argelius. My hearing's
not as sharp as a Vulcan's, but I think he was saying something like, 
"I'd like to spend the next fifty years with no responsibilities
except bringing you to orgasm." Oh my.

           I had to admit, I got off easy. I would have liked to stay
around for a while and tour 23d century Earth and the innermost
planets. But I'd used up all my vacation time and I had to get back to
work so I could put some money in that trust fund. And besides, I had
a couple of sequels I wanted to write. And maybe a story in which Kirk
and Spock retire to Argelius ....

THE END.