De Profundis

Star Trek TOS Fanfiction
Title:	De Profundis
Author(s):	Connie Faddis
Date(s):	1975
Length:
Genre:	gen
Fandom:	Star Trek: The Original Series
External Links:	Some content is online here. Archive of Our Own.
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De Profundis is a Star Trek: TOS story by Connie Faddis.

It was published in the print zine Contact #1.

This story was discussed and quoted in The Development of the Kirk/Spock Relationship: Its Foundation in Fan-Fiction (1978).

Editor's Note

From the zine:

We were just about to complete this zine, when we received the following story. As we read it with a mixture of 'pain and delight,' we wondered what to do with it. We had planned to use it in our next issue as we felt it might be a bit much in the same copy as 'Eulogy' and we didn't want to present 'Contact' as morbid. And yet, we found it to be such a poignant and powerful vignette, so typical of our theme, that we felt compelled to share it with our readers. Thus we made our decision to include it at this time. Many thanks to Connie and to Carol Frisbie for thinking of us.

Reactions and Reviews

'De Profundis,' ... is 3 1/2 pages of pure emotion dealing with Kirk and Spock's reactions to McCoy's death. Unfortunately, for the zine, it contains a similar story, 'Eulogy.' that tells of Spock's death, but is much inferior. For some reason, they make it seem that the Vulcan went out for a smoke and just never wandered back. The difference is, of course, that Ms. Faddis doesn't just tell the reader about the characters' grief and despair, she shows us. She is some writer! Now if the editors could have only gotten some illos for her for that issue. The ones they did use, to be kind, are only adequate.

I so remember the first time I read this wonderful story. The author has always been my personal fannish Goddess ever since, as she not only wrote wonderfully but published one of the best early fanzines and was an artist and costumer extraordinaire. When Bev got this story in the mail, she called Nancy on the phone to read it to her — and the hurt/comfort was so intimate that she was nearly embarrassed to read the words aloud! It was one of the fi[r]st times they’d seen such beautiful h/c in detail!

And another piece I really liked is "De Profundis" by Connie Faddis. It's a McCoy deathfic, and the only thing that happens in it is Spock and Kirk sharing their grief after McCoy is killed. It's real shame that it's in the same zine as "Eulogy" because when the two fics are put together, the effect is unfortunately reminiscent of those "Doing It Wrong" and "Doing It Right" juxtapositions in writing textbooks. "De Profundis" was presumably written around 1974 like everything else in Contact, at least three years before she wrote Mojave Crossing, and it shows (noticeable wordiness and wobbly POV issues in conveying the images in the first half, though it gets a whole lot better in the second half), but it is about eight times better than most of the other stuff in the zine, so very, very tender, with infinitely more dynamism, depth, and maturity, and no platitudes. It's also only three pages long, so just a snippet, really, quite simple, but with a lot of narrative "reach" or whatever the technical term for far-piercing provocation in very few words is. The title - from the depths - really means something relevant to Kirk's mindstate though, it's not just a cool-sounding title.