![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninety6tears[See Master Post]
They get tired of the roads and stop for a couple weeks at a small rental house in Missouri, practically testing the waters of just settling somewhere. Bones is surprisingly the first to say it out loud, at his most drowsily depressed when they're walking back together from a corner store.
"Tell you what, man...Even if we could be safe anywhere around here." The doctor pauses and swallows as a man passes by jingling something boredly in his pocket. "I don't think I could stand being around these people for too long."
"And treating them?..."
"No, it ain't like that." Bones shakes his head, is quiet for a moment. "There was this surgeon at the hospital where I did my residency. Used to say, 'You have to care about everybody, or it's just a matter of time till you don't care about anybody.'"
"And if he's alive here, you think he'd say the same thing?...Can you really take that much responsibility?"
Bones knows Jim's mockery is more fond than cynical, but still stops at their front door when they get there to quietly retort, "You may not be a captain again, but I'm always gonna be a doctor."
"...I know that." Jim almost looks like he's forgotten that they're going somewhere, that he's holding groceries. That he's supposed to ignore everything he thinks that isn't what to do next.
Bones looks at him like he's sorry about what he's just said. "Jim..."
"We both know I'm never getting that back. It's just." Jim is back in motion holding two bags with one grasp to get the key card out of his pocket. "I don't know what I'd do if you weren't here."
He's through the door then without looking at Bones, and as if the presence of the rest of the house makes that moment suddenly pass, he mutters back to the previous problem.
"You know, maybe it's worse in the cities. We could just...you know, get a place, like..." He shrugs, knows it's kind of a pathetic suggestion. "Out in the country."
"As if that's what you want."
"Well, it's all fucking relative, isn't it?" That doesn't induce the reaction he intended, and in response to the intent look from McCoy, he sighs. "Yeah, you know me better than that."
"I hate to say it, but you might have to learn to sit still for once."
"Oh, nice euphemism," Jim says almost tersely as he tosses the key card onto the rickety kitchen table and dumps down the last grocery sack. He feels a sudden grip at his arm, and Bones is looking straight at him.
"Listen." He's talking quietly, like he doesn't want either of the others to hear. "I've been reading things about how they treat these people...You think I'm just numb about it? But you gotta accept maybe there's nothing we can do. How many times will I have to tell you this?"
Jim turns and snaps open a box of eggs, checking absently if any of them are cracked, closes the lid. Starts putting the food away with a shake of his head after he says, "I can't live here."
They are all listed as missing rather than dead. Jim suspects, but doesn't know, that any news about it is riddled with personal anecdotes from friends and family and this is why he usually bends over backwards to avoid anything beyond the basic facts. They avoid updates about the T.E. as often as they can, but Jim does enough research to know that James Kirk was a triple felon who'd been slipping under the radar of the law until Admiral Pike caught him by the ear one day and pulled him into the academy as an alternative to doing real time. The Terran fleet was blemished with all kinds of criminals who had enough assets to be appropriated into the lowest assistance jobs, but Kirk had blown the roof off of that trend in his quick climb to power, making him both a glamorized underdog to the civilians and not nearly as popular among his peers as Jim himself had come to be.
"Did you look up anything else?" Uhura asks. She's looking through their food storage in the basement while he's hunched over studying a PADD in the pale yellow light.
"No."
She sucked it up and searched a couple days ago, and finally tells him now. "My mother is still in Pemba. I'm taking the trip to meet her tomorrow."
His brow is furrowed distractedly over what he's reading while she finishes cleaning up.
She's back at the bottom of the staircase when he suddenly asks over his shoulder, "Do you need somebody to go with you?"
They are mostly silent during the shuttle rides and the hour's walk through the island to a house he can tell is familiar to her in some ways but not in others, a small but well-built place close to the edge of the quieter parts of town.
At the end of the walkway, Uhura stops. Jim gives her a patient but expectant look, responding to her obvious trepidation with "Yeah, I know. Take your time."
"It's stupid, but just..." She isn't looking at him when she asks, "Would you hold my hand?"
Without replying he just takes it, and she grasps it back a bit tightly. In the middle of all the daylight there's Jim imagining that he's a kid creeping into a haunted house squeezing hands with some other kid, and then this woman comes out of the front door.
She is harmless and kind-looking, her expression gaping in disbelief, and he feels Uhura tense, almost trembling next to him. The mother has her hand over her heart and the air seems to crackle with a life stirring painfully into her. At long last she says, "Nyota?..."
"Mama," she sobs back and then the arms are coming around her. There is a long blur of tears and sentiments that disappear into tight lines of Swahili while Jim cracks a look of momentary relief, standing with his hands in his pockets.
Before he knows it they're in a kitchen drinking tea, and after a lot of explanations the woman is far too happy to realize don't perfectly connect, she looks over at Jim with a smile as if he's an old friend.
"You're Captain Kirk...Aren't you?"
He gives her a gracious half-smile. "I'm no captain anymore, ma'am."
Looking back at her daughter she shakes her head incredulously, face a bit pained. "I never thought I'd see you again...Even before I heard about the accident, I never thought in a hundred years you'd ever leave..."
"I wanted to run, for a long time. We just didn't get the chance till now, and it's not even safe for us to be here, but I wanted to see you, and I'm just. I'm sorry, Mama..." Tears are still welling in Nyota's eyes, misplaced but genuine, seemingly actually morose. Jim feels a strange itch of wanting to clutch her hand again.
Later she shows him her room.
"I thought you wanted to tell her the truth," he mutters, but it's without judgment.
"I did." She shakes her head, overwhelmed. "But all she sees is that her baby girl has come home, and...I don't think that woman who lived here was ever going to come back."
She looks at a beautiful illustration of a map on the wall, brushes a hand over it, a distant bitterness coming into her features.
"Apparently she was eighteen, and some charismatic recruiting officer came into town and met her, and she was just gone the next day and she never came back home again. She didn't comm, she didn't even write. Who does that?"
"I know, it's screwed up. But it wasn't you."
"God," she exclaims quietly, haunted by the childish items speckled about the bedroom. "It's so strange. Most of it's different, but there are little things...I did have this exact doll." She picks up the toy as she notices it, dangling the limbs along her fingers.
He looks at the smile etched on the fabric face, and without warning a fresh and hard pang of something catches into him. When she happens to look up at him she catches it in his eyes. He tries to shrug it off.
"I don't know, it's just...I would've liked to see all this for real. You know, yours. Not this."
Uhura's expression falls a bit. She's about to say something, but the mother's voice in the hall announces that dinner is done, so they move to leave. While they're in the hallway she hooks her pinky against his, briefly, like some silent consolation or thanks or something else he can't comprehend. Before they get to the kitchen she rubs at her own arms in a brief shudder and she remarks only loudly enough for him to hear, "She never kept the house this cold either."
In the middle of the night, Kanoni Uhura's servant comes home. Jim is awake when Nyota sits up in bed and goes motionless in her inscrutable profile, listening to the talking downstairs that isn't quite harsh or an argument but something very cold.
Some blackening out length of time later, she must roll the blanket off of him; he wakes up shivering a little. She is breathing all wrong next to him with the bad rhythms of bad thoughts. He feels kind of helpless, and lonely, just lying next to her while he can practically smell the particular depression that happens in the middle of the night emanating from her, not even certain that it's a nightmare.
He leans in uncertainly, close behind her body without touching her, his hands grappling at the sheets for what to do. He finally whispers, "Hey. Wake up."
He hears a deeper breath go in and out, and her voice comes back just above a whisper, lucid. "I'm awake."
He stills where he's lying behind her, hitched with an uncertainty at the seeming shift of proximity, the fact that he has moved in and said something soft and it's different somehow, knowing that they're both awake. The shape of her shoulders seems to draw up the same bracing, halted contemplation, as for whatever reason he does not move. He just waits.
Down the hall the bathroom light flicks on. They don't move. A minute later the light's back off; a bedroom door shuts with a quiet tap. Her body turns into his like a window blind.
He almost doesn't move in response, the motions mostly steadying himself against her when he feels her under his hands, feels her hand moving down his spine and exploring a pale hip, some other coiling desperate motions too abstract around him in the nearly black dark of the room, and he can't see to understand what he's doing and what she's doing and where he's being moved or doing the moving as all he can think consciously about is trying to slow down the sudden hammering in his chest. And then she reaches down and between them and touches him, and something falls out of him all at once.
It's like his entire body is breaking down into one long sob as they move and sigh and loosen and tighten into the thing that falls, and he moves for her mouth as if to muffle their sounds in the little girl's room. Drunk on the darkness, he pulls her to him with the unthinking love of an animal to its universe, like she is a plane of lovelier dust, she is the only place he is in; warm and bearable and bright in his lungs, her name, her name again.
They're both trembling the entire time, and afterward, quiet. He's trying to figure out whether she's freaking out, when in a papery, two AM sort of voice, she tells him something he won't be able to remember in the morning. Maybe something about it being okay, and it only resounds like a goodbye to something else. Like the answer to that question everyone has lodged into them somewhere, the one they never ever want to be asked.
He wakes up wrapped all over in a cotton quilt, face down on the pillow, and he thinks he's alone until she appears in front of him arranging some clothes on the floor. Already getting down to business when she realizes he's awake, explaining that some of the husband's old clothes were still in a wardrobe, and she thinks they'd fit McCoy better than what he'd scrounged up before.
He's rubbing the back of his wrist across his forehead, conscious of his near-nakedness but not really thinking he should do anything about it. "Oh."
"Oh, and there's some tea for you right there, if you need it to wake up." She stands up to go do something else. When he's up and dressed he realizes they're alone in the house; Kanoni is at work and probably gave the servant somewhere to go, perhaps being extra cautious that nobody figures out her daughter is here.
It doesn't take long for Jim to realize from the pace of Uhura's tidying and collecting that she intends for them to leave before anyone comes back. In regular runaway style, she leaves a note on the fridge. You know I'm no good at goodbyes. Tell no one. Love always, N.
Everything feels very quiet again as they're walking back. They're waiting for their shuttle on a bench at the terminal when Nyota says, in that tone that is always a sweet shock in its sadness, that voice that can break Vulcan hearts, "I'm sorry."
He doesn't need her to clarify what she's talking about. "I'm sorry too," he finally mutters.
As their ride is showing up just then, they're standing, but something makes her linger instead of move. She's looking at him with a soft and sudden worry. Maybe she doesn't want him to think she regrets him coming with her. What she does is go up to him and put a hand on his cheek, tip up to him to land the unexpected kiss on his mouth, short and with her eyes closed, and it feels different out here in the open.
All the way back, because it's the most painless thing to think about, he's already wondering if this is how it's going to be. One elusive kiss after another, each one an apology for the last.
Scotty and McCoy, in the absence of the other two, became restless and had already commed Jim the first day they were gone to let him know they were going to check out this "situation" he was curious about.
When Jim and Nyota appear in the kitchen ready to pass out from all the travel, Bones announces that he thinks they can get a house in North Carolina.
"...Okay," Jim accepts with a cocked brow. "And by that, you mean..."
"Without..." Bones decides to paraphrase, "trouble."
No one calls it anything but Asheville, North Carolina, but everyone knows what's there. Were they to have said anything about their specific destination on the way, they may have only gotten scowls from most, maybe some refusals to do business, but nobody goes for the nearest comm to report somebody for being an abolitionist choosing to live with abolitionists. The prevailing attitude is "Better to have them where we can see them."
Or the somewhat politer "It's their funeral."
Jim will always remember how entering through the city is an uncertain surreal experience, how he sticks his head out the passenger side looking for anything unusual to pop up. The first bold indicator that they have come into very different territory is when they're at a stop and he realizes that a young pair standing by the street, one laughing and the other with a look of chagrin, are definitely not Terran.
"They're free?" Scotty is the first to chime out, but he already knows. One look at them, at people doing nothing in particular, and you just know. It isn't until they're accelerating that Jim notices one of them is carrying some kind of gun.
Those two are the only aliens they see for the several miles across the outskirts which, contrary to the structure of the usual city, seem to become less populated as they drive inwards, closer to a hugged-in somewhat greener rolling pocket of land that hosts a large village. When they approach it, they are met with a long tall barricade reminiscent of old-fashioned army camps. The group is about ready to turn back around when they decide, somewhat reluctantly, to approach a fenced entrance located between a couple high look-out towers.
The car isn't parked in front of the gate for very long before a figure that was leaning in next to it when they came up is getting on a battered-looking but apparently functional ranger-style comm unit, and then walking right up to them. She's thin and tall, and the third alien they've seen. Swiping a pair of eyes under regally arched brows up and down the four sitting in the car before she knocks on the window, she doesn't wait long to start with, "Did anyone call ahead?"
They awkwardly realize she's talking to a human man that just came up by the hood.
"Nope."
"Are you settling here?" she asks them.
It's an odd kind of dichotomous shift then, because "I guess so" sure as hell wouldn't do. McCoy is obviously kind of flustered, and Jim's the one who impatiently hollers, "Yeah." She says something to the man, who shrugs and looks at them with the mildly pleased surprise of someone now given something to do.
They all get out of the car to answer a number of questions. Jim keeps expecting something to give away the strangeness of their situation, but they don't even end up having to give them their (false) last names, at least not yet.
"Do you know anyone living on the inside?"
"No," Jim answers.
"So you have no employment or living space pre-arranged."
"No...Is that gonna be a big problem?"
"We have," she announces pertly after looking at a grid for an almost amusingly short period of time, "a two-bedroom." It's not the beginning of a list. "Housing is a free-for-all, but you will have to do some cleaning up."
Jim shrugs as they all look like they're not sure what to say. "Great."
"Jim, right?" She pulls out some list, reads off flatly, "When was the last time you owned a slave."
He can feel the others tensing, but not in an increment the others would notice.
"About fifteen months ago. Um. I inherited him from my parents when I moved out of their home, and we all owned him where we were living together. He died in an accident."
"Species?"
"...Klingon," he replies.
At some point he feels like the interrogation could have easily been five minutes or could have been five hours, depending on the impression they all gave, and he has no doubt they might have split them up to see if their histories matched up when questioned separately if not for their extremely harmless appearance. He's nervous as hell when she starts asking them about what they're carrying in, then, but when they're honest about the phaser weapons she doesn't come off like it's anything unusual.
She just automatically says, "We only allow one weapon of that classification to a household."
Jim lets out a sigh. "So you're confiscating one."
The man who's been talking less than the Romulan interjects, "It's not like we're just gonna hang it on our wall. We'll put it to good use, probably with the league."
"The league?"
"You'll see," is all the woman replies, and Jim's suddenly aware that it might be kind of a nuisance to grill the people at the front door on every single thing they don't understand, so he makes an effort not to pry into things. He gets into the bags in the back and locates one of the phasers, and the man greets the barely-used model with an appreciative whoop-whistle.
Once the four of them seem to be in the clear of getting their feet through the door, the woman sets herself into a slightly more stern manner and starts listing off. "Okay, first thing's first. Once you're past the wall, you can leave and come back once. Once only. If you wanna leave again? You don't come back.
"There's a communal food supply, first-come-first-serve on quota, and it comes in every couple weeks at the south dock, sometimes only once a month. It's usually not enough to live by, but you can buy food inside. There are jobs, sometimes, depending on what you can do."
Bones shrugs and volunteers, "I'm a doctor."
It's a little jarring how that gets an immediate reaction out of her, and from the man who's been inspecting the phaser and idling around their car, though when they meet eyes they seem to be suppressing something, trying not to get any hopes up.
"What kind of doctor?"
"Well, I'm definitely not a vet," Bones says, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets. "I've got experience treating about half a dozen species."
Of course that's a modesty of how much xenophysiology he's got under his belt, but the Romulan still looks hesitantly amazed.
"You don't already have a doctor?"
"We've got one," the man mutters. "And let's just say we could use some competition in the field. Don't you guys have a physician at the Knot?" The man is turning that question on his partner. She rolls her eyes.
"He's more like a science teacher."
Jim exchanges a look with Nyota, but neither of them asks anything.
"Two more things," the Romulan says. "You need to get your credits changed to our currency. Go to Jason's for that, he's in the little shack with the beer light, you'll see it on the way in. And also, we're giving you a ride. Your car needs to stay up here until we can get somebody to inspect it more closely, which could be a couple days."
That sets a spark into Scotty for the first time in days. "Inspection?" he demands.
"A couple days?" Bones exclaims. Jim doesn't feel good about it either; in fact, he's more uneasy about leaving the car up here than he was about the phaser, but there's clearly nothing for it, and he admits some understanding of the situation when the woman explains that there was an incident with an explosive in an abandoned car about a month ago.
With their few possessions it doesn't take them long to unload the stationwagon. Their ride is in the back of a noisy truck, and as the man (Will, Jim gathered when the Romulan woman called him that at some point, because neither of them ever actually introduced themselves) drives them into the center, the four are too busy taking in the different surroundings to say much of anything to each other. Passing across the border of the barricade feels like folding into a different planet entirely, with long undecorated expanses of land, with all the man-made surfaces riddled with rust and patched-in places and even graffiti. Jim does a double take once they're driving along a gap road through the grass, at the first stretch of wooden fence they see separating the area from the outer land. Snaking lines of paint that dripped a little before drying form a long expanse of words as tall as men across the old wood, and they ring in their red color like a mantra, a reminder:
HELL IS ON THE OTHER SIDE.
They kept saying to themselves they had no reason to think it would be happier "out there," only that it would be better, and they were right. If Jim is completely honest with himself, he was hoping for a bit more of a sense of universal good nature, some enthusiasm and brotherhood over the naked cause of being there, but he didn't let himself expect it. It is not completely joyless and cold, but happiness is a delicate commodity. It tins briefly through a song playing on an old man's half-busted old radio unit, one of many eerily old-fashioned goods to be found in this scrapped-up junkyard version of their continent.
Their house is old and white, located in a sparsely conjoined row of a neighborhood that ropes off from the surprisingly bustling town that teems with bars and other businesses, the type of pseudo-recreational offerings that get set up just to give people somewhere to work. It's early morning when they arrive there, and without the car to help them get much of anything else done, they promptly get to work throwing out the heaps of garbage left behind in the home.
The kitchen is the biggest room in the house that has any sunlight in it, and McCoy hesitantly declares that it's probably where the clinic should be. "...Which means we might not actually use it as a kitchen."
Jim just shrugs and Scotty adds, "Whatever."
There are some furnishings left behind, including a salvageable couch that would be a hefty pain in the ass to move out of the narrow halls anyway. They're still tidying up the little living room space when Bones pauses next to Nyota, sets his hands on his hips and says, "I'm unloading the bags. Where do you want your stuff?"
She takes a second to realize what he's asking, and blinks at him. "I...I thought you and Jim would want to room together—"
"Nyota." Bones repeats, "Where do you want your stuff?"
No one would disagree that it's fair to let her pick; the other three have an unspoken sympathy for the fact that she's the most alone out of all of them, even if it's not by a big margin. Bones is practically a brother to Jim, and Scotty's been friends with both of them pretty much since the return journey after Nero. Jim can practically sense the sequence of Nyota's thoughts as she uncomfortably shrugs at all of them over it. She definitely considers McCoy a friend if not a particularly intimate one, and she and Scotty knew each other well enough to have a couple running jokes between them back during the mission. There are two beds in the house, and all of this considered none of them could really have a problem with any possible arrangement, but still. It should be up to her; they're all willing to give her that.
And after milling it over for a few minutes as if she'd rather just toss a coin, the first and final thing she mutters is, "I've known Jim the longest..."
Bones looks like that isn't what he expected, but also like it makes enough sense. He gives her a touch on the shoulder and moves out of the room.
After the first week, during which it looks like the only useful thing anyone can do yet is help McCoy organize all of the medical supplies they've been carting around ever since they left space, Jim is the first to find a job. He casually announces it the same day he and Bones head back from Jason's with all their money put in for the town's own paper currency, which is worth the annoying heft of three sacks' worth of paper bulk for Scotty's odd fascination with the novelty of actual material cash.
"Where?" Nyota asks, squinting over the soup she's eating at the little kitchen table they've moved into the living room, one thin knee poised up to hold a reading PADD on her lap.
"Trashy little dive called Rosetta's."
"Oh," McCoy acknowledges, "I've seen it."
A look passes over the rest of them like it figures Jim would somehow find work first when the rest of them seem to be ready to give up. He keeps reassuring them they haven't seen the whole town.
And indeed they haven't. Scotty brushes in from walking around one day, calling their attention away from squinting at the smudged labels on a cart of hyposprays when he asks, "Did you know there's a ship for sale uptown?"
It doesn't seem possible. Jim hasn't even considered that the blacklist-opposing town of no-background-checks, almost-no-questions-asked might be a place where they could actually buy a ship. The possibility is all too vague to yield any enthusiasm; it's a topic that passes dully over them, and they only briefly talk about it. None of them bring the subject to the actual question of money, but the thought is there with the heaviness of it being "a ship," not "some ships."
Most people around town are Terrans, sprinkled with the occasional non-Romulan aliens; if the other liberationist humans act differently from the people they encountered on the outside, it's with a refreshing and vaguely youthful type of near-rudeness. Jim already hates his boss (he doesn't mention it to the others), but everyone else seems agreeable enough, if not exactly yielding to his instinct for companionship.
Every once in a while, you see some of the Romulans. Most of the time they're in a tangle running around noisily like partying students, spouting with camaraderie and short-lived fights in equal measure; but the ones you see more than anyone else are the "league," who are almost too much for Bones the first time they see them running around carrying a formidable plethora of firearms (both phaser and a weird mix of probably locally crafted bullet-loaded ones) in their holsters.
"Some of them are just kids," he exclaims.
"You have to remember Vulcanoids look a little young to us," Uhura reminds him, granting, "but yeah, some of them are probably still on the young side of adolescence."
It wouldn't be as jarring if not for the fact that their introduction to the League was the night something like five of them came roaring in playing bad-cop-worse-cop with the assistant manager of the run-down corner store where Nyota wanted to buy some aspirin. They never got a chance to figure out what the manager had done that was so suspicious, but there was a horrifying moment when Jim almost thought they were about to watch her get her head blown open right in front of them, before she choked out some confession, apparently guilty, and they tied her hands together and shoved her off the premises, lifting a few goods from the shop on their way out the door. And the entire time, none of them even looked at the four humans backed into the corner.
Most of the time, they're just regular people, and a fascinating mix of dots on the cultural spectrum at that. A few of them speak fluent Romulan, some of them couldn't even try; they wear their traditional tunics with Terran jeans, order orange soda with their viinerine at the diners, run around playing tag in the streets and insult each other with "Go suck a knuckle, fucker."
Aside from civility, they for the most part don't seem to want anything to do with humans. The divide is strongly sealed by the fact that they all live at a separately fenced-in camp that runs the length of about three quarters of a mile in front of the view of the mountains, the long and constantly guarded front gates beginning somewhere past the lake. On his walk home from work Jim sometimes squints across the distance at the armed figures standing by the entrances and gets a feeling that their eyes are tracking him the entire time. He recognizes the worst of the typically Romulan attitude in their cold separation, but he can also appreciate the equally apparent quiet cunning evident in the very existence of the place, the fact that they take what they're taught in the sweat of the factories and use it to gradually build up their freedom away from a population that doesn't know how to fix its own computers.
They spend more energy muttering a sarcastic "Long live the empress" in reply to a news broadcast than they do on anything more pro-active; all of it is the exact type of shitty, cynical, resigned attitude that gets nothing done. After spending only a short time in the world outside of this beat-up place, where everyone hardly acknowledged the gray areas long enough to shrug them off, Jim absolutely loves it.
It doesn't take long until Jim can't wait any longer, so on his first day off, after coming home from helping to hand out some flyers for the clinic, Jim gets that announcing look in his features and says to everyone, "Let's go get a look at this thing."
The ship is parked in the middle of the local mechanic's scrap yard, where it looks pretty big, but is only the size of an average private trading vessel. It's old, and it looks like the piece of shit you learn to treat with affectionate mockery at every unpredictable malfunction, and Scotty is so immediately taken with the very idea of it that he immediately asks, "How much are you charging for that heap?"
The mechanic's name is Brighton, but he laughs at them far before he gets around to introducing himself.
"Everyone who works for me wants that ship," he explains. "I'm eventually going to auction it, some time next year."
Nyota cocks an eyebrow at the rest of them.
"Well." Jim laughs. "Are you hiring?"
"What can you do?"
"I can do pretty much anything, Scotty here can do it twice as fast," Jim confidently says with a gesture introducing the engineer standing at his side. He looks over at Nyota, but her expression is shy.
She interrupts, "I don't know if I'd be any help...I have a basic grasp of computer systems in large class vessels, but..."
"Well, that's impressive." Brighton shoves his hands in his pockets. "But not really useful."
She lets out a forced scoff, anxiously pacing on her feet.
"I could put anyone to work on repairs, but I don't have time to train, so I really couldn't use any kind of programmer." Brighton jingles something in his pocket and is already heading into the office building; yelling over his shoulder, purely facetious, he adds, "Unless you happened to know Vulcan. I've been trying to translate the goddamn interfacing on this antique cruiser for a couple years now..."
They're both sitting up in bed when she turns her head over to him. "Jim?"
"Hmm."
"...Do you want that ship?"
He gives a resistant sigh.
"You took a second job, so I thought..." He's still quietly cynical. "It could be a long time before he sells it—"
"I've already done the numbers. It's hard to tell yet how much Bones is gonna be making on a regular basis, but...Brighton was willing to be pretty upfront with me about how much his other workers will probably be able to put down." He looks at her frankly in response to her questioning eyes. "Look. We're going to be hungry if we want even a chance."
Her look is surprisingly unwavering. "How hungry?"
"This is ridiculous." He knows what she's trying to do, and feels the need to clarify, "I'm not the captain anymore."
"Since when does that mean you don't get a vote in anything? Do you want it or not?...Jim."
"Yes, I want it. I want it bad. Can you even imagine how different things would be if we had a ship? Out there it's just a free-for-all, nothing about us would be nearly as suspicious, but..." He spreads his arms out to represent how hopeless it still is.
She says, "Well. I'm pretty sure we all want it too." And then she lies down to go to sleep.
He follows soon after; like most nights, they lie down back to back, taking a very long time to get to sleep, pretending not to know the other is awake.
The bedroom arrangement has so far proved to be sort of unintentionally favorable in terms of their styles of grieving. There's something reassuring about the divide between dealing in silence and the occasional rituals of talking it out between Bones and Scotty. Sometimes Jim is present for the dialogue, about what everybody misses, about home, and he can handle being around it, but he only lurks at the edges of it. Like on one evening when they're all squeezed on the porch with the two of them, and Scotty is asking, "What would you do if you were back on the ship, right this second? Like if it was just any normal day, what would you do differently?"
Jim can hear Bones on his right, the loud sighs of his more pensive state. With a sudden certainty he finally says, "I would kiss Christine Chapel, full on the mouth."
And well, that does get a reaction out of Jim.
But Bones gives him kind of a wave, clarifies, "It's not like it was anything more than what it was. It's just that it never had a chance. I don't think I ever even thought about it before we were here. I don't know. You try to make a list of all the things you never got to know about somebody, never did with somebody, that you feel just fine having never bothered with..."
"It's a bloody short list, if you try," Scotty distantly intones.
Next to him in the jammed space on the porch step, Nyota's eyes are cold on the horizon when he sneaks a look, her body huddled in on herself; he senses it as the same tight feeling he tries to push out of his chest. He sifts his left foot a little closer to her, but that's all he does. He gives it a few minutes before he distracts her by asking, "Anything about the market?"
She lets loose a puff of irritation. "Yeah...Rumor has it the next shipment is peanut butter cups."
"Are you kidding me?" Bones demands.
She just shakes her head, and Jim feels soft affection at her misdirected anger. "You don't like peanut butter cups?" he prods.
"I don't like chocolate."
"Seriously?"
The next day the donation shipment is a scant amount of pork, half a dozen packages of boxed pasta per household, and an absurd amount of peanut butter cups. None of them have managed to get in a word with anybody who knows for sure where the food comes from, and it's likely that they get sent anonymously so that sympathizers don't get too deep into trouble. Wherever it's coming from, they try to take it gratefully, Bones scowling at some of the lack of nutritional value but never openly bitching about it.
He gets a multitude of regular patients bustling in and out of the kitchen over the weeks, and the rest take to their jobs with the morale of routine that numbs through the daytime. Figures stir and snap awake in the night throughout the narrow white house, then fall asleep after half-awake comforting mumbles or the simple reassuring awareness of another body next to them. Jim scrubs floors, waits tables, takes apart engine after engine, burns and scuffs his hands and comes home to toss tips into the long box they keep under the couch. They stay put; they stay alive.
One evening Jim walks in from accompanying Bones out to a late house call, and when Bones is headed straight to the shower, Jim abruptly discovers a Romulan in the kitchen. Not a patient needing a doctor, just a woman who is helping herself to the fridge and yelling over her shoulder into the living room, and Jim realizes that Scotty is not rambling off some story to Uhura but to her, and can't help stopping in his tracks and probably giving her a rather stupid look as she shuts the door and notices him with a small jolt.
He clears his throat.
She says, "Hey." And leaves the kitchen.
Nyota appears just behind him with a somewhat sheepish look on her face. She makes a motion for him to come out on the porch.
"Right, so." Bones is explaining a few minutes later, "I'm pretty sure you met her the first time she came over here with a bad flu, cause I remember it was also that day you and Nyota went to get the car..."
"Oh, wait." He's nodding, recalls vaguely that time when Bones was still struggling to compartmentalize his working space into some measure of privacy; Jim had been coming in just to get some water and found a bit of a crowd of two patients, one of whom Scotty had gotten caught up talking to even as Bones kept trying to wrangle him out of the room, but something about the handful of lines of the conversation he'd picked up on sticks out to him now. "She's the one with the fancy little revolver he was asking about?"
"'Did you make it?', 'How could you tell?', 'Oh, just the way you were talkin' about it.' Yadda, yadda..." Bones mockingly quotes this with a roll of his eyes, which means he probably actually found it kind of cute. "I think it had to be about two months before we ever saw her again, I think they ran into each other around town some time after and he invited her over. Anyway, she keeps saying she won't come back. Doesn't trust humans and all that, but then. She keeps coming back."
"And," Jim slowly says, "I'm the only person who hasn't heard about her...just because I haven't happened to be around."
This is when Nyota finally says something, hesitantly. "We just thought...you'd be really concerned or—"
"For Christ sake, you guys are talking like you expect me to tell Scotty he's not allowed to make friends. It really wasn't even something I'd thought might happen, and anyway, it's not up to me. But just to be clear. Yeah, I'm pretty concerned."
Bones lets out a slight understanding laugh.
"They don't seem to follow much of that stuff around here, but our names are in the news..."
"Which Scotty did realize," Nyota interjects. "...In the middle of introducing me. Which is why she thinks my name's Nina."
"Nina?" Jim makes a rueful smile that's identical to McCoy's as he looks and points at the doctor in question, learning a moment later that he is no longer the only one who calls him Bones.
"To my delight," Bones mumbles.
"Well." Jim gets up then to go inside, and heads back to the living area where he pops his head around the door and gives a friendly appraising look at the Romulan woman, looking closer this time. She's a bit on the short side, has a body that looks well-worked, and at the moment a toothy but endearing slight grin at whatever Scotty is rambling on about. When she turns her head towards him, he says, "Hi. I'm Jim."
She laughs at the forwardness, shrugs and says, "I'm Jill."
"Nice to meet you."
She does keep coming. And half of the time it's actually for medical reasons, or at least Bones makes it's about medical reasons as soon as he swipes a tricorder up at her, Jim soon learns in a conversation that starts with him remarking, "I don't really like how she always has to cart the gun in here. Why do they always carry them, anyway, they're stronger than anybody who would wanna mess with them in the streets."
"She isn't."
"What?"
"I guess you wouldn't have read about this, you haven't been reading anything...Some of the Romulan slaves come from these 'clinics'," he spat the word out with ripe disgust, "where they're trying to genetically engineer some of the enslaved races to be more defenseless."
Jim needs a second to process that. No, he needs about five days to process that. And he almost had a good appetite coming home.
"The slang term they use for themselves is 'spays.'" Bones has a dark look in his eyes as he goes on. "These altered types, though, they've got all kinds of problems, these imbalances in their physiology. Her immune system's basically shot. I wouldn't be surprised if she has severe muscle pain all the time, and is just so used to it, you'd never know. And she's got friends like her who hate doctors even more, so I can't imagine..."
"So is she like a test subject or something?" Jim asks quietly. "I mean, wouldn't they try to make that better, before they sell them, cause wouldn't they..." But his voice trails off.
"The clinics are also where you send your slaves if they get sick. They literally come with warranties—Hers comes up anytime the tricorder picks up her neck brand."
"—Fuck me."
"Just like they used to make light bulbs they knew would burn out. You have to keep buying more."
Jim just lets out another low sharp curse, sitting far back in his chair.
He doesn't exactly get along with Jill, even if it's just because she makes him nervous. They constantly have to check themselves to make sure they don't call attention to anything extraordinary that might make her ask too many questions. Jill insists that Nyota's Romulan accent is lousy, even though it isn't, it's just that apparently the most standard dialect back home is mostly extinct here.
She comes over pretty early in the morning sometimes, one time joining a group of them at the kitchen table while Scotty goes to get something out of the car.
Bones is checking the time and asking, "You're not late?"
"I'm working 'setta's today," Jim says without putting down what he's reading.
A smirk of disbelief comes over Jill. "You work at Rosetta's?"
"Yeah. It's not as skeezy as everyone says," he says, interrupting her next comment. "We're supposed to flirt, but that's as far as it goes."
"Yeah, flirt with the customers, and the manager..." Her eyebrow arches high as she shakes her head. "She's ryakna. Most of the league have been looking for an excuse to get her out of here. There's just no way she's around for any good reason. She'll probably take her profit and leave as soon as she runs out of her food stash, and take a good handful of jobs with her."
"She is kind of...soulless." Ignoring the way Nyota and Bones are looking at each other right across him, he shrugs and mutters, "I don't think she ever really hits on her employees, though, it's all just a power trip."
When he looks to the side, there's a look in McCoy's face like Jim's about to get some kind of lecture. He's already resigned himself when Bones asks, "You gonna finish eating that?"
"No. If you don't want it, put it in the fridge."
"I'm saying eat it, smartass."
"Oh, this again," Scotty is sighing as he swiftly takes the seat next to Jill. "Eat up, Jimmy thing."
"As if you haven't been losing weight," Jim mutters.
"You're starting to look like Nina," Jill jokes, and Nyota sends her into some lazy laughter by giving her a halfway-offended look. She amends, "And it doesn't look as good on you."
Bones says, "Why don't you tell him there are starving children at home?"
Another short laugh. "Where are you getting your information? We have more food than anybody."
"Really? You guys don't have a replicator, do you?" Scotty intercedes.
Bones interrupts, "For Christ sake, Jim, eat your fucking breakfast for once."
"I'm full," Jim protests, his voice nearing a real angry volume now.
Nyota's in on it now like she's making up for lost time. "I've seen you put away three of those in one sitting."
He slides the plate pointedly over so that it's offered in front of her; she practically throws it back at him without even looking over.
Jill makes some annoyed exclamation in Romulan. "Would you just eat the damn thing? And yeah, we're very well fed at the Knot. At least compared to you guys."
"Where do you get it all?" Bones is undoubtedly thinking about how they hardly ever see Romulans buying food at the markets.
"Wait, well." Scotty makes a waving motion out the window, realizing it's obvious. "Your back door is the woods."
"I'd thought about hunting before, but we don't really have the right stuff," Jim points out with a shrug.
"Sometimes we hunt, sometimes we set traps..." Jill's mouth cracks up at the edges. "Of course, humans are always pretty good, if we've had to arrest somebody lately."
Everyone has to admit that they look at her all appalled for at least a second, until she gives into a little snort, and Scotty's the first to sheepishly exclaim, "Oh, for—That wasn't even that good."
Everyone is actually laughing; it's the first time in forever Jim can remember really laughing, with a brightly natural ease rather than it feeling somehow frantic and precarious.
As if it feels like a natural conclusion, Jim is reaching for his plate and picking up the very boring excuse for a sandwich involving the bread that Bones ran to the store for last week in one of his monthly carb-deprived rages. "Alright, I'm gonna eat this, because Jill asked so nicely. Fuck the rest of you."
And Jill gives a silly little cheer as he takes a bite.
Later that night there's a seemingly never-ending stream of obscenities heard from the kitchen where Scotty and Jill are crowded on a stretcher in front of the viewscreen. Jim and Nyota get caught up leaning into the doorway watching for a moment until Jim mutters, "Romulan temperaments and video games?..."
He has no idea where Scotty dug up the ancient thing and had it rigged up to the computer before Bones could realize what he was doing, but the wireless function of the handsets is obviously wonky at best, prompting most of the cursing when one of them misses.
"Apparently not the best combination," Nyota agrees with a wry smile.
"You're dead," Jill chants through the cheap clacky noise of the plastic guns. "You're dead, you're dead, you're fucking dead."
A second later Scotty makes an angry grunt, and Bones is heard from the living room yelling, "Don't kick anything in there!" Jill grins and spins the fake gun around her finger in quiet triumph.
Scotty complains, "Ah, fuck off. Show-off...No, wait, I didn't actually mean—"
"No, I actually have to go now." Jill's already up and putting her jacket back on.
"...Oh. Well, when can you—"
"When I feel like it," she says, impatient and noncommittal but giving a softer and more promising smile to him on her way out of the kitchen. "Bye," she says to Jim and Nyota sitting on the counter. They reply with half-distracted nods, Jim's eyes almost automatically straying to the genuine article hanging from her belt, too unthinking an instinct when she's around for him to place if it's really worry.
>The Neighborhood
They get tired of the roads and stop for a couple weeks at a small rental house in Missouri, practically testing the waters of just settling somewhere. Bones is surprisingly the first to say it out loud, at his most drowsily depressed when they're walking back together from a corner store.
"Tell you what, man...Even if we could be safe anywhere around here." The doctor pauses and swallows as a man passes by jingling something boredly in his pocket. "I don't think I could stand being around these people for too long."
"And treating them?..."
"No, it ain't like that." Bones shakes his head, is quiet for a moment. "There was this surgeon at the hospital where I did my residency. Used to say, 'You have to care about everybody, or it's just a matter of time till you don't care about anybody.'"
"And if he's alive here, you think he'd say the same thing?...Can you really take that much responsibility?"
Bones knows Jim's mockery is more fond than cynical, but still stops at their front door when they get there to quietly retort, "You may not be a captain again, but I'm always gonna be a doctor."
"...I know that." Jim almost looks like he's forgotten that they're going somewhere, that he's holding groceries. That he's supposed to ignore everything he thinks that isn't what to do next.
Bones looks at him like he's sorry about what he's just said. "Jim..."
"We both know I'm never getting that back. It's just." Jim is back in motion holding two bags with one grasp to get the key card out of his pocket. "I don't know what I'd do if you weren't here."
He's through the door then without looking at Bones, and as if the presence of the rest of the house makes that moment suddenly pass, he mutters back to the previous problem.
"You know, maybe it's worse in the cities. We could just...you know, get a place, like..." He shrugs, knows it's kind of a pathetic suggestion. "Out in the country."
"As if that's what you want."
"Well, it's all fucking relative, isn't it?" That doesn't induce the reaction he intended, and in response to the intent look from McCoy, he sighs. "Yeah, you know me better than that."
"I hate to say it, but you might have to learn to sit still for once."
"Oh, nice euphemism," Jim says almost tersely as he tosses the key card onto the rickety kitchen table and dumps down the last grocery sack. He feels a sudden grip at his arm, and Bones is looking straight at him.
"Listen." He's talking quietly, like he doesn't want either of the others to hear. "I've been reading things about how they treat these people...You think I'm just numb about it? But you gotta accept maybe there's nothing we can do. How many times will I have to tell you this?"
Jim turns and snaps open a box of eggs, checking absently if any of them are cracked, closes the lid. Starts putting the food away with a shake of his head after he says, "I can't live here."
They are all listed as missing rather than dead. Jim suspects, but doesn't know, that any news about it is riddled with personal anecdotes from friends and family and this is why he usually bends over backwards to avoid anything beyond the basic facts. They avoid updates about the T.E. as often as they can, but Jim does enough research to know that James Kirk was a triple felon who'd been slipping under the radar of the law until Admiral Pike caught him by the ear one day and pulled him into the academy as an alternative to doing real time. The Terran fleet was blemished with all kinds of criminals who had enough assets to be appropriated into the lowest assistance jobs, but Kirk had blown the roof off of that trend in his quick climb to power, making him both a glamorized underdog to the civilians and not nearly as popular among his peers as Jim himself had come to be.
"Did you look up anything else?" Uhura asks. She's looking through their food storage in the basement while he's hunched over studying a PADD in the pale yellow light.
"No."
She sucked it up and searched a couple days ago, and finally tells him now. "My mother is still in Pemba. I'm taking the trip to meet her tomorrow."
His brow is furrowed distractedly over what he's reading while she finishes cleaning up.
She's back at the bottom of the staircase when he suddenly asks over his shoulder, "Do you need somebody to go with you?"
They are mostly silent during the shuttle rides and the hour's walk through the island to a house he can tell is familiar to her in some ways but not in others, a small but well-built place close to the edge of the quieter parts of town.
At the end of the walkway, Uhura stops. Jim gives her a patient but expectant look, responding to her obvious trepidation with "Yeah, I know. Take your time."
"It's stupid, but just..." She isn't looking at him when she asks, "Would you hold my hand?"
Without replying he just takes it, and she grasps it back a bit tightly. In the middle of all the daylight there's Jim imagining that he's a kid creeping into a haunted house squeezing hands with some other kid, and then this woman comes out of the front door.
She is harmless and kind-looking, her expression gaping in disbelief, and he feels Uhura tense, almost trembling next to him. The mother has her hand over her heart and the air seems to crackle with a life stirring painfully into her. At long last she says, "Nyota?..."
"Mama," she sobs back and then the arms are coming around her. There is a long blur of tears and sentiments that disappear into tight lines of Swahili while Jim cracks a look of momentary relief, standing with his hands in his pockets.
Before he knows it they're in a kitchen drinking tea, and after a lot of explanations the woman is far too happy to realize don't perfectly connect, she looks over at Jim with a smile as if he's an old friend.
"You're Captain Kirk...Aren't you?"
He gives her a gracious half-smile. "I'm no captain anymore, ma'am."
Looking back at her daughter she shakes her head incredulously, face a bit pained. "I never thought I'd see you again...Even before I heard about the accident, I never thought in a hundred years you'd ever leave..."
"I wanted to run, for a long time. We just didn't get the chance till now, and it's not even safe for us to be here, but I wanted to see you, and I'm just. I'm sorry, Mama..." Tears are still welling in Nyota's eyes, misplaced but genuine, seemingly actually morose. Jim feels a strange itch of wanting to clutch her hand again.
Later she shows him her room.
"I thought you wanted to tell her the truth," he mutters, but it's without judgment.
"I did." She shakes her head, overwhelmed. "But all she sees is that her baby girl has come home, and...I don't think that woman who lived here was ever going to come back."
She looks at a beautiful illustration of a map on the wall, brushes a hand over it, a distant bitterness coming into her features.
"Apparently she was eighteen, and some charismatic recruiting officer came into town and met her, and she was just gone the next day and she never came back home again. She didn't comm, she didn't even write. Who does that?"
"I know, it's screwed up. But it wasn't you."
"God," she exclaims quietly, haunted by the childish items speckled about the bedroom. "It's so strange. Most of it's different, but there are little things...I did have this exact doll." She picks up the toy as she notices it, dangling the limbs along her fingers.
He looks at the smile etched on the fabric face, and without warning a fresh and hard pang of something catches into him. When she happens to look up at him she catches it in his eyes. He tries to shrug it off.
"I don't know, it's just...I would've liked to see all this for real. You know, yours. Not this."
Uhura's expression falls a bit. She's about to say something, but the mother's voice in the hall announces that dinner is done, so they move to leave. While they're in the hallway she hooks her pinky against his, briefly, like some silent consolation or thanks or something else he can't comprehend. Before they get to the kitchen she rubs at her own arms in a brief shudder and she remarks only loudly enough for him to hear, "She never kept the house this cold either."
In the middle of the night, Kanoni Uhura's servant comes home. Jim is awake when Nyota sits up in bed and goes motionless in her inscrutable profile, listening to the talking downstairs that isn't quite harsh or an argument but something very cold.
Some blackening out length of time later, she must roll the blanket off of him; he wakes up shivering a little. She is breathing all wrong next to him with the bad rhythms of bad thoughts. He feels kind of helpless, and lonely, just lying next to her while he can practically smell the particular depression that happens in the middle of the night emanating from her, not even certain that it's a nightmare.
He leans in uncertainly, close behind her body without touching her, his hands grappling at the sheets for what to do. He finally whispers, "Hey. Wake up."
He hears a deeper breath go in and out, and her voice comes back just above a whisper, lucid. "I'm awake."
He stills where he's lying behind her, hitched with an uncertainty at the seeming shift of proximity, the fact that he has moved in and said something soft and it's different somehow, knowing that they're both awake. The shape of her shoulders seems to draw up the same bracing, halted contemplation, as for whatever reason he does not move. He just waits.
Down the hall the bathroom light flicks on. They don't move. A minute later the light's back off; a bedroom door shuts with a quiet tap. Her body turns into his like a window blind.
He almost doesn't move in response, the motions mostly steadying himself against her when he feels her under his hands, feels her hand moving down his spine and exploring a pale hip, some other coiling desperate motions too abstract around him in the nearly black dark of the room, and he can't see to understand what he's doing and what she's doing and where he's being moved or doing the moving as all he can think consciously about is trying to slow down the sudden hammering in his chest. And then she reaches down and between them and touches him, and something falls out of him all at once.
It's like his entire body is breaking down into one long sob as they move and sigh and loosen and tighten into the thing that falls, and he moves for her mouth as if to muffle their sounds in the little girl's room. Drunk on the darkness, he pulls her to him with the unthinking love of an animal to its universe, like she is a plane of lovelier dust, she is the only place he is in; warm and bearable and bright in his lungs, her name, her name again.
They're both trembling the entire time, and afterward, quiet. He's trying to figure out whether she's freaking out, when in a papery, two AM sort of voice, she tells him something he won't be able to remember in the morning. Maybe something about it being okay, and it only resounds like a goodbye to something else. Like the answer to that question everyone has lodged into them somewhere, the one they never ever want to be asked.
He wakes up wrapped all over in a cotton quilt, face down on the pillow, and he thinks he's alone until she appears in front of him arranging some clothes on the floor. Already getting down to business when she realizes he's awake, explaining that some of the husband's old clothes were still in a wardrobe, and she thinks they'd fit McCoy better than what he'd scrounged up before.
He's rubbing the back of his wrist across his forehead, conscious of his near-nakedness but not really thinking he should do anything about it. "Oh."
"Oh, and there's some tea for you right there, if you need it to wake up." She stands up to go do something else. When he's up and dressed he realizes they're alone in the house; Kanoni is at work and probably gave the servant somewhere to go, perhaps being extra cautious that nobody figures out her daughter is here.
It doesn't take long for Jim to realize from the pace of Uhura's tidying and collecting that she intends for them to leave before anyone comes back. In regular runaway style, she leaves a note on the fridge. You know I'm no good at goodbyes. Tell no one. Love always, N.
Everything feels very quiet again as they're walking back. They're waiting for their shuttle on a bench at the terminal when Nyota says, in that tone that is always a sweet shock in its sadness, that voice that can break Vulcan hearts, "I'm sorry."
He doesn't need her to clarify what she's talking about. "I'm sorry too," he finally mutters.
As their ride is showing up just then, they're standing, but something makes her linger instead of move. She's looking at him with a soft and sudden worry. Maybe she doesn't want him to think she regrets him coming with her. What she does is go up to him and put a hand on his cheek, tip up to him to land the unexpected kiss on his mouth, short and with her eyes closed, and it feels different out here in the open.
All the way back, because it's the most painless thing to think about, he's already wondering if this is how it's going to be. One elusive kiss after another, each one an apology for the last.
Scotty and McCoy, in the absence of the other two, became restless and had already commed Jim the first day they were gone to let him know they were going to check out this "situation" he was curious about.
When Jim and Nyota appear in the kitchen ready to pass out from all the travel, Bones announces that he thinks they can get a house in North Carolina.
"...Okay," Jim accepts with a cocked brow. "And by that, you mean..."
"Without..." Bones decides to paraphrase, "trouble."
30 DAYS.
No one calls it anything but Asheville, North Carolina, but everyone knows what's there. Were they to have said anything about their specific destination on the way, they may have only gotten scowls from most, maybe some refusals to do business, but nobody goes for the nearest comm to report somebody for being an abolitionist choosing to live with abolitionists. The prevailing attitude is "Better to have them where we can see them."
Or the somewhat politer "It's their funeral."
Jim will always remember how entering through the city is an uncertain surreal experience, how he sticks his head out the passenger side looking for anything unusual to pop up. The first bold indicator that they have come into very different territory is when they're at a stop and he realizes that a young pair standing by the street, one laughing and the other with a look of chagrin, are definitely not Terran.
"They're free?" Scotty is the first to chime out, but he already knows. One look at them, at people doing nothing in particular, and you just know. It isn't until they're accelerating that Jim notices one of them is carrying some kind of gun.
Those two are the only aliens they see for the several miles across the outskirts which, contrary to the structure of the usual city, seem to become less populated as they drive inwards, closer to a hugged-in somewhat greener rolling pocket of land that hosts a large village. When they approach it, they are met with a long tall barricade reminiscent of old-fashioned army camps. The group is about ready to turn back around when they decide, somewhat reluctantly, to approach a fenced entrance located between a couple high look-out towers.
The car isn't parked in front of the gate for very long before a figure that was leaning in next to it when they came up is getting on a battered-looking but apparently functional ranger-style comm unit, and then walking right up to them. She's thin and tall, and the third alien they've seen. Swiping a pair of eyes under regally arched brows up and down the four sitting in the car before she knocks on the window, she doesn't wait long to start with, "Did anyone call ahead?"
They awkwardly realize she's talking to a human man that just came up by the hood.
"Nope."
"Are you settling here?" she asks them.
It's an odd kind of dichotomous shift then, because "I guess so" sure as hell wouldn't do. McCoy is obviously kind of flustered, and Jim's the one who impatiently hollers, "Yeah." She says something to the man, who shrugs and looks at them with the mildly pleased surprise of someone now given something to do.
They all get out of the car to answer a number of questions. Jim keeps expecting something to give away the strangeness of their situation, but they don't even end up having to give them their (false) last names, at least not yet.
"Do you know anyone living on the inside?"
"No," Jim answers.
"So you have no employment or living space pre-arranged."
"No...Is that gonna be a big problem?"
"We have," she announces pertly after looking at a grid for an almost amusingly short period of time, "a two-bedroom." It's not the beginning of a list. "Housing is a free-for-all, but you will have to do some cleaning up."
Jim shrugs as they all look like they're not sure what to say. "Great."
"Jim, right?" She pulls out some list, reads off flatly, "When was the last time you owned a slave."
He can feel the others tensing, but not in an increment the others would notice.
"About fifteen months ago. Um. I inherited him from my parents when I moved out of their home, and we all owned him where we were living together. He died in an accident."
"Species?"
"...Klingon," he replies.
At some point he feels like the interrogation could have easily been five minutes or could have been five hours, depending on the impression they all gave, and he has no doubt they might have split them up to see if their histories matched up when questioned separately if not for their extremely harmless appearance. He's nervous as hell when she starts asking them about what they're carrying in, then, but when they're honest about the phaser weapons she doesn't come off like it's anything unusual.
She just automatically says, "We only allow one weapon of that classification to a household."
Jim lets out a sigh. "So you're confiscating one."
The man who's been talking less than the Romulan interjects, "It's not like we're just gonna hang it on our wall. We'll put it to good use, probably with the league."
"The league?"
"You'll see," is all the woman replies, and Jim's suddenly aware that it might be kind of a nuisance to grill the people at the front door on every single thing they don't understand, so he makes an effort not to pry into things. He gets into the bags in the back and locates one of the phasers, and the man greets the barely-used model with an appreciative whoop-whistle.
Once the four of them seem to be in the clear of getting their feet through the door, the woman sets herself into a slightly more stern manner and starts listing off. "Okay, first thing's first. Once you're past the wall, you can leave and come back once. Once only. If you wanna leave again? You don't come back.
"There's a communal food supply, first-come-first-serve on quota, and it comes in every couple weeks at the south dock, sometimes only once a month. It's usually not enough to live by, but you can buy food inside. There are jobs, sometimes, depending on what you can do."
Bones shrugs and volunteers, "I'm a doctor."
It's a little jarring how that gets an immediate reaction out of her, and from the man who's been inspecting the phaser and idling around their car, though when they meet eyes they seem to be suppressing something, trying not to get any hopes up.
"What kind of doctor?"
"Well, I'm definitely not a vet," Bones says, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets. "I've got experience treating about half a dozen species."
Of course that's a modesty of how much xenophysiology he's got under his belt, but the Romulan still looks hesitantly amazed.
"You don't already have a doctor?"
"We've got one," the man mutters. "And let's just say we could use some competition in the field. Don't you guys have a physician at the Knot?" The man is turning that question on his partner. She rolls her eyes.
"He's more like a science teacher."
Jim exchanges a look with Nyota, but neither of them asks anything.
"Two more things," the Romulan says. "You need to get your credits changed to our currency. Go to Jason's for that, he's in the little shack with the beer light, you'll see it on the way in. And also, we're giving you a ride. Your car needs to stay up here until we can get somebody to inspect it more closely, which could be a couple days."
That sets a spark into Scotty for the first time in days. "Inspection?" he demands.
"A couple days?" Bones exclaims. Jim doesn't feel good about it either; in fact, he's more uneasy about leaving the car up here than he was about the phaser, but there's clearly nothing for it, and he admits some understanding of the situation when the woman explains that there was an incident with an explosive in an abandoned car about a month ago.
With their few possessions it doesn't take them long to unload the stationwagon. Their ride is in the back of a noisy truck, and as the man (Will, Jim gathered when the Romulan woman called him that at some point, because neither of them ever actually introduced themselves) drives them into the center, the four are too busy taking in the different surroundings to say much of anything to each other. Passing across the border of the barricade feels like folding into a different planet entirely, with long undecorated expanses of land, with all the man-made surfaces riddled with rust and patched-in places and even graffiti. Jim does a double take once they're driving along a gap road through the grass, at the first stretch of wooden fence they see separating the area from the outer land. Snaking lines of paint that dripped a little before drying form a long expanse of words as tall as men across the old wood, and they ring in their red color like a mantra, a reminder:
HELL IS ON THE OTHER SIDE.
They kept saying to themselves they had no reason to think it would be happier "out there," only that it would be better, and they were right. If Jim is completely honest with himself, he was hoping for a bit more of a sense of universal good nature, some enthusiasm and brotherhood over the naked cause of being there, but he didn't let himself expect it. It is not completely joyless and cold, but happiness is a delicate commodity. It tins briefly through a song playing on an old man's half-busted old radio unit, one of many eerily old-fashioned goods to be found in this scrapped-up junkyard version of their continent.
Their house is old and white, located in a sparsely conjoined row of a neighborhood that ropes off from the surprisingly bustling town that teems with bars and other businesses, the type of pseudo-recreational offerings that get set up just to give people somewhere to work. It's early morning when they arrive there, and without the car to help them get much of anything else done, they promptly get to work throwing out the heaps of garbage left behind in the home.
The kitchen is the biggest room in the house that has any sunlight in it, and McCoy hesitantly declares that it's probably where the clinic should be. "...Which means we might not actually use it as a kitchen."
Jim just shrugs and Scotty adds, "Whatever."
There are some furnishings left behind, including a salvageable couch that would be a hefty pain in the ass to move out of the narrow halls anyway. They're still tidying up the little living room space when Bones pauses next to Nyota, sets his hands on his hips and says, "I'm unloading the bags. Where do you want your stuff?"
She takes a second to realize what he's asking, and blinks at him. "I...I thought you and Jim would want to room together—"
"Nyota." Bones repeats, "Where do you want your stuff?"
No one would disagree that it's fair to let her pick; the other three have an unspoken sympathy for the fact that she's the most alone out of all of them, even if it's not by a big margin. Bones is practically a brother to Jim, and Scotty's been friends with both of them pretty much since the return journey after Nero. Jim can practically sense the sequence of Nyota's thoughts as she uncomfortably shrugs at all of them over it. She definitely considers McCoy a friend if not a particularly intimate one, and she and Scotty knew each other well enough to have a couple running jokes between them back during the mission. There are two beds in the house, and all of this considered none of them could really have a problem with any possible arrangement, but still. It should be up to her; they're all willing to give her that.
And after milling it over for a few minutes as if she'd rather just toss a coin, the first and final thing she mutters is, "I've known Jim the longest..."
Bones looks like that isn't what he expected, but also like it makes enough sense. He gives her a touch on the shoulder and moves out of the room.
After the first week, during which it looks like the only useful thing anyone can do yet is help McCoy organize all of the medical supplies they've been carting around ever since they left space, Jim is the first to find a job. He casually announces it the same day he and Bones head back from Jason's with all their money put in for the town's own paper currency, which is worth the annoying heft of three sacks' worth of paper bulk for Scotty's odd fascination with the novelty of actual material cash.
"Where?" Nyota asks, squinting over the soup she's eating at the little kitchen table they've moved into the living room, one thin knee poised up to hold a reading PADD on her lap.
"Trashy little dive called Rosetta's."
"Oh," McCoy acknowledges, "I've seen it."
A look passes over the rest of them like it figures Jim would somehow find work first when the rest of them seem to be ready to give up. He keeps reassuring them they haven't seen the whole town.
And indeed they haven't. Scotty brushes in from walking around one day, calling their attention away from squinting at the smudged labels on a cart of hyposprays when he asks, "Did you know there's a ship for sale uptown?"
It doesn't seem possible. Jim hasn't even considered that the blacklist-opposing town of no-background-checks, almost-no-questions-asked might be a place where they could actually buy a ship. The possibility is all too vague to yield any enthusiasm; it's a topic that passes dully over them, and they only briefly talk about it. None of them bring the subject to the actual question of money, but the thought is there with the heaviness of it being "a ship," not "some ships."
Most people around town are Terrans, sprinkled with the occasional non-Romulan aliens; if the other liberationist humans act differently from the people they encountered on the outside, it's with a refreshing and vaguely youthful type of near-rudeness. Jim already hates his boss (he doesn't mention it to the others), but everyone else seems agreeable enough, if not exactly yielding to his instinct for companionship.
Every once in a while, you see some of the Romulans. Most of the time they're in a tangle running around noisily like partying students, spouting with camaraderie and short-lived fights in equal measure; but the ones you see more than anyone else are the "league," who are almost too much for Bones the first time they see them running around carrying a formidable plethora of firearms (both phaser and a weird mix of probably locally crafted bullet-loaded ones) in their holsters.
"Some of them are just kids," he exclaims.
"You have to remember Vulcanoids look a little young to us," Uhura reminds him, granting, "but yeah, some of them are probably still on the young side of adolescence."
It wouldn't be as jarring if not for the fact that their introduction to the League was the night something like five of them came roaring in playing bad-cop-worse-cop with the assistant manager of the run-down corner store where Nyota wanted to buy some aspirin. They never got a chance to figure out what the manager had done that was so suspicious, but there was a horrifying moment when Jim almost thought they were about to watch her get her head blown open right in front of them, before she choked out some confession, apparently guilty, and they tied her hands together and shoved her off the premises, lifting a few goods from the shop on their way out the door. And the entire time, none of them even looked at the four humans backed into the corner.
Most of the time, they're just regular people, and a fascinating mix of dots on the cultural spectrum at that. A few of them speak fluent Romulan, some of them couldn't even try; they wear their traditional tunics with Terran jeans, order orange soda with their viinerine at the diners, run around playing tag in the streets and insult each other with "Go suck a knuckle, fucker."
Aside from civility, they for the most part don't seem to want anything to do with humans. The divide is strongly sealed by the fact that they all live at a separately fenced-in camp that runs the length of about three quarters of a mile in front of the view of the mountains, the long and constantly guarded front gates beginning somewhere past the lake. On his walk home from work Jim sometimes squints across the distance at the armed figures standing by the entrances and gets a feeling that their eyes are tracking him the entire time. He recognizes the worst of the typically Romulan attitude in their cold separation, but he can also appreciate the equally apparent quiet cunning evident in the very existence of the place, the fact that they take what they're taught in the sweat of the factories and use it to gradually build up their freedom away from a population that doesn't know how to fix its own computers.
They spend more energy muttering a sarcastic "Long live the empress" in reply to a news broadcast than they do on anything more pro-active; all of it is the exact type of shitty, cynical, resigned attitude that gets nothing done. After spending only a short time in the world outside of this beat-up place, where everyone hardly acknowledged the gray areas long enough to shrug them off, Jim absolutely loves it.
It doesn't take long until Jim can't wait any longer, so on his first day off, after coming home from helping to hand out some flyers for the clinic, Jim gets that announcing look in his features and says to everyone, "Let's go get a look at this thing."
The ship is parked in the middle of the local mechanic's scrap yard, where it looks pretty big, but is only the size of an average private trading vessel. It's old, and it looks like the piece of shit you learn to treat with affectionate mockery at every unpredictable malfunction, and Scotty is so immediately taken with the very idea of it that he immediately asks, "How much are you charging for that heap?"
The mechanic's name is Brighton, but he laughs at them far before he gets around to introducing himself.
"Everyone who works for me wants that ship," he explains. "I'm eventually going to auction it, some time next year."
Nyota cocks an eyebrow at the rest of them.
"Well." Jim laughs. "Are you hiring?"
"What can you do?"
"I can do pretty much anything, Scotty here can do it twice as fast," Jim confidently says with a gesture introducing the engineer standing at his side. He looks over at Nyota, but her expression is shy.
She interrupts, "I don't know if I'd be any help...I have a basic grasp of computer systems in large class vessels, but..."
"Well, that's impressive." Brighton shoves his hands in his pockets. "But not really useful."
She lets out a forced scoff, anxiously pacing on her feet.
"I could put anyone to work on repairs, but I don't have time to train, so I really couldn't use any kind of programmer." Brighton jingles something in his pocket and is already heading into the office building; yelling over his shoulder, purely facetious, he adds, "Unless you happened to know Vulcan. I've been trying to translate the goddamn interfacing on this antique cruiser for a couple years now..."
They're both sitting up in bed when she turns her head over to him. "Jim?"
"Hmm."
"...Do you want that ship?"
He gives a resistant sigh.
"You took a second job, so I thought..." He's still quietly cynical. "It could be a long time before he sells it—"
"I've already done the numbers. It's hard to tell yet how much Bones is gonna be making on a regular basis, but...Brighton was willing to be pretty upfront with me about how much his other workers will probably be able to put down." He looks at her frankly in response to her questioning eyes. "Look. We're going to be hungry if we want even a chance."
Her look is surprisingly unwavering. "How hungry?"
"This is ridiculous." He knows what she's trying to do, and feels the need to clarify, "I'm not the captain anymore."
"Since when does that mean you don't get a vote in anything? Do you want it or not?...Jim."
"Yes, I want it. I want it bad. Can you even imagine how different things would be if we had a ship? Out there it's just a free-for-all, nothing about us would be nearly as suspicious, but..." He spreads his arms out to represent how hopeless it still is.
She says, "Well. I'm pretty sure we all want it too." And then she lies down to go to sleep.
He follows soon after; like most nights, they lie down back to back, taking a very long time to get to sleep, pretending not to know the other is awake.
The bedroom arrangement has so far proved to be sort of unintentionally favorable in terms of their styles of grieving. There's something reassuring about the divide between dealing in silence and the occasional rituals of talking it out between Bones and Scotty. Sometimes Jim is present for the dialogue, about what everybody misses, about home, and he can handle being around it, but he only lurks at the edges of it. Like on one evening when they're all squeezed on the porch with the two of them, and Scotty is asking, "What would you do if you were back on the ship, right this second? Like if it was just any normal day, what would you do differently?"
Jim can hear Bones on his right, the loud sighs of his more pensive state. With a sudden certainty he finally says, "I would kiss Christine Chapel, full on the mouth."
And well, that does get a reaction out of Jim.
But Bones gives him kind of a wave, clarifies, "It's not like it was anything more than what it was. It's just that it never had a chance. I don't think I ever even thought about it before we were here. I don't know. You try to make a list of all the things you never got to know about somebody, never did with somebody, that you feel just fine having never bothered with..."
"It's a bloody short list, if you try," Scotty distantly intones.
Next to him in the jammed space on the porch step, Nyota's eyes are cold on the horizon when he sneaks a look, her body huddled in on herself; he senses it as the same tight feeling he tries to push out of his chest. He sifts his left foot a little closer to her, but that's all he does. He gives it a few minutes before he distracts her by asking, "Anything about the market?"
She lets loose a puff of irritation. "Yeah...Rumor has it the next shipment is peanut butter cups."
"Are you kidding me?" Bones demands.
She just shakes her head, and Jim feels soft affection at her misdirected anger. "You don't like peanut butter cups?" he prods.
"I don't like chocolate."
"Seriously?"
The next day the donation shipment is a scant amount of pork, half a dozen packages of boxed pasta per household, and an absurd amount of peanut butter cups. None of them have managed to get in a word with anybody who knows for sure where the food comes from, and it's likely that they get sent anonymously so that sympathizers don't get too deep into trouble. Wherever it's coming from, they try to take it gratefully, Bones scowling at some of the lack of nutritional value but never openly bitching about it.
He gets a multitude of regular patients bustling in and out of the kitchen over the weeks, and the rest take to their jobs with the morale of routine that numbs through the daytime. Figures stir and snap awake in the night throughout the narrow white house, then fall asleep after half-awake comforting mumbles or the simple reassuring awareness of another body next to them. Jim scrubs floors, waits tables, takes apart engine after engine, burns and scuffs his hands and comes home to toss tips into the long box they keep under the couch. They stay put; they stay alive.
One evening Jim walks in from accompanying Bones out to a late house call, and when Bones is headed straight to the shower, Jim abruptly discovers a Romulan in the kitchen. Not a patient needing a doctor, just a woman who is helping herself to the fridge and yelling over her shoulder into the living room, and Jim realizes that Scotty is not rambling off some story to Uhura but to her, and can't help stopping in his tracks and probably giving her a rather stupid look as she shuts the door and notices him with a small jolt.
He clears his throat.
She says, "Hey." And leaves the kitchen.
Nyota appears just behind him with a somewhat sheepish look on her face. She makes a motion for him to come out on the porch.
"Right, so." Bones is explaining a few minutes later, "I'm pretty sure you met her the first time she came over here with a bad flu, cause I remember it was also that day you and Nyota went to get the car..."
"Oh, wait." He's nodding, recalls vaguely that time when Bones was still struggling to compartmentalize his working space into some measure of privacy; Jim had been coming in just to get some water and found a bit of a crowd of two patients, one of whom Scotty had gotten caught up talking to even as Bones kept trying to wrangle him out of the room, but something about the handful of lines of the conversation he'd picked up on sticks out to him now. "She's the one with the fancy little revolver he was asking about?"
"'Did you make it?', 'How could you tell?', 'Oh, just the way you were talkin' about it.' Yadda, yadda..." Bones mockingly quotes this with a roll of his eyes, which means he probably actually found it kind of cute. "I think it had to be about two months before we ever saw her again, I think they ran into each other around town some time after and he invited her over. Anyway, she keeps saying she won't come back. Doesn't trust humans and all that, but then. She keeps coming back."
"And," Jim slowly says, "I'm the only person who hasn't heard about her...just because I haven't happened to be around."
This is when Nyota finally says something, hesitantly. "We just thought...you'd be really concerned or—"
"For Christ sake, you guys are talking like you expect me to tell Scotty he's not allowed to make friends. It really wasn't even something I'd thought might happen, and anyway, it's not up to me. But just to be clear. Yeah, I'm pretty concerned."
Bones lets out a slight understanding laugh.
"They don't seem to follow much of that stuff around here, but our names are in the news..."
"Which Scotty did realize," Nyota interjects. "...In the middle of introducing me. Which is why she thinks my name's Nina."
"Nina?" Jim makes a rueful smile that's identical to McCoy's as he looks and points at the doctor in question, learning a moment later that he is no longer the only one who calls him Bones.
"To my delight," Bones mumbles.
"Well." Jim gets up then to go inside, and heads back to the living area where he pops his head around the door and gives a friendly appraising look at the Romulan woman, looking closer this time. She's a bit on the short side, has a body that looks well-worked, and at the moment a toothy but endearing slight grin at whatever Scotty is rambling on about. When she turns her head towards him, he says, "Hi. I'm Jim."
She laughs at the forwardness, shrugs and says, "I'm Jill."
"Nice to meet you."
She does keep coming. And half of the time it's actually for medical reasons, or at least Bones makes it's about medical reasons as soon as he swipes a tricorder up at her, Jim soon learns in a conversation that starts with him remarking, "I don't really like how she always has to cart the gun in here. Why do they always carry them, anyway, they're stronger than anybody who would wanna mess with them in the streets."
"She isn't."
"What?"
"I guess you wouldn't have read about this, you haven't been reading anything...Some of the Romulan slaves come from these 'clinics'," he spat the word out with ripe disgust, "where they're trying to genetically engineer some of the enslaved races to be more defenseless."
Jim needs a second to process that. No, he needs about five days to process that. And he almost had a good appetite coming home.
"The slang term they use for themselves is 'spays.'" Bones has a dark look in his eyes as he goes on. "These altered types, though, they've got all kinds of problems, these imbalances in their physiology. Her immune system's basically shot. I wouldn't be surprised if she has severe muscle pain all the time, and is just so used to it, you'd never know. And she's got friends like her who hate doctors even more, so I can't imagine..."
"So is she like a test subject or something?" Jim asks quietly. "I mean, wouldn't they try to make that better, before they sell them, cause wouldn't they..." But his voice trails off.
"The clinics are also where you send your slaves if they get sick. They literally come with warranties—Hers comes up anytime the tricorder picks up her neck brand."
"—Fuck me."
"Just like they used to make light bulbs they knew would burn out. You have to keep buying more."
Jim just lets out another low sharp curse, sitting far back in his chair.
He doesn't exactly get along with Jill, even if it's just because she makes him nervous. They constantly have to check themselves to make sure they don't call attention to anything extraordinary that might make her ask too many questions. Jill insists that Nyota's Romulan accent is lousy, even though it isn't, it's just that apparently the most standard dialect back home is mostly extinct here.
She comes over pretty early in the morning sometimes, one time joining a group of them at the kitchen table while Scotty goes to get something out of the car.
Bones is checking the time and asking, "You're not late?"
"I'm working 'setta's today," Jim says without putting down what he's reading.
A smirk of disbelief comes over Jill. "You work at Rosetta's?"
"Yeah. It's not as skeezy as everyone says," he says, interrupting her next comment. "We're supposed to flirt, but that's as far as it goes."
"Yeah, flirt with the customers, and the manager..." Her eyebrow arches high as she shakes her head. "She's ryakna. Most of the league have been looking for an excuse to get her out of here. There's just no way she's around for any good reason. She'll probably take her profit and leave as soon as she runs out of her food stash, and take a good handful of jobs with her."
"She is kind of...soulless." Ignoring the way Nyota and Bones are looking at each other right across him, he shrugs and mutters, "I don't think she ever really hits on her employees, though, it's all just a power trip."
When he looks to the side, there's a look in McCoy's face like Jim's about to get some kind of lecture. He's already resigned himself when Bones asks, "You gonna finish eating that?"
"No. If you don't want it, put it in the fridge."
"I'm saying eat it, smartass."
"Oh, this again," Scotty is sighing as he swiftly takes the seat next to Jill. "Eat up, Jimmy thing."
"As if you haven't been losing weight," Jim mutters.
"You're starting to look like Nina," Jill jokes, and Nyota sends her into some lazy laughter by giving her a halfway-offended look. She amends, "And it doesn't look as good on you."
Bones says, "Why don't you tell him there are starving children at home?"
Another short laugh. "Where are you getting your information? We have more food than anybody."
"Really? You guys don't have a replicator, do you?" Scotty intercedes.
Bones interrupts, "For Christ sake, Jim, eat your fucking breakfast for once."
"I'm full," Jim protests, his voice nearing a real angry volume now.
Nyota's in on it now like she's making up for lost time. "I've seen you put away three of those in one sitting."
He slides the plate pointedly over so that it's offered in front of her; she practically throws it back at him without even looking over.
Jill makes some annoyed exclamation in Romulan. "Would you just eat the damn thing? And yeah, we're very well fed at the Knot. At least compared to you guys."
"Where do you get it all?" Bones is undoubtedly thinking about how they hardly ever see Romulans buying food at the markets.
"Wait, well." Scotty makes a waving motion out the window, realizing it's obvious. "Your back door is the woods."
"I'd thought about hunting before, but we don't really have the right stuff," Jim points out with a shrug.
"Sometimes we hunt, sometimes we set traps..." Jill's mouth cracks up at the edges. "Of course, humans are always pretty good, if we've had to arrest somebody lately."
Everyone has to admit that they look at her all appalled for at least a second, until she gives into a little snort, and Scotty's the first to sheepishly exclaim, "Oh, for—That wasn't even that good."
Everyone is actually laughing; it's the first time in forever Jim can remember really laughing, with a brightly natural ease rather than it feeling somehow frantic and precarious.
As if it feels like a natural conclusion, Jim is reaching for his plate and picking up the very boring excuse for a sandwich involving the bread that Bones ran to the store for last week in one of his monthly carb-deprived rages. "Alright, I'm gonna eat this, because Jill asked so nicely. Fuck the rest of you."
And Jill gives a silly little cheer as he takes a bite.
Later that night there's a seemingly never-ending stream of obscenities heard from the kitchen where Scotty and Jill are crowded on a stretcher in front of the viewscreen. Jim and Nyota get caught up leaning into the doorway watching for a moment until Jim mutters, "Romulan temperaments and video games?..."
He has no idea where Scotty dug up the ancient thing and had it rigged up to the computer before Bones could realize what he was doing, but the wireless function of the handsets is obviously wonky at best, prompting most of the cursing when one of them misses.
"Apparently not the best combination," Nyota agrees with a wry smile.
"You're dead," Jill chants through the cheap clacky noise of the plastic guns. "You're dead, you're dead, you're fucking dead."
A second later Scotty makes an angry grunt, and Bones is heard from the living room yelling, "Don't kick anything in there!" Jill grins and spins the fake gun around her finger in quiet triumph.
Scotty complains, "Ah, fuck off. Show-off...No, wait, I didn't actually mean—"
"No, I actually have to go now." Jill's already up and putting her jacket back on.
"...Oh. Well, when can you—"
"When I feel like it," she says, impatient and noncommittal but giving a softer and more promising smile to him on her way out of the kitchen. "Bye," she says to Jim and Nyota sitting on the counter. They reply with half-distracted nods, Jim's eyes almost automatically straying to the genuine article hanging from her belt, too unthinking an instinct when she's around for him to place if it's really worry.
>The Neighborhood
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 05:01 am (UTC)i love this line.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-04 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-06 12:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-11 11:49 am (UTC)When you mentioned the ship, the first thing that ran through my mind was 'Yeah they can buy it and become smuggler types like the Serenity crew!' lol.
But yeah, I'm loving this dust-swept, outlaw, gritty little place you've created; it feels, I dunno, like something out of an old west film, where everyone just struggles to make do.
And I'm really liking this Romulan woman, always thought Romulans are awesome (greater than Vulcans, lol), and i's fun seeing them here.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-12 03:21 pm (UTC)I love Romulans too...I only hope they're recognizable as Romulans in this, haha.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-12 08:37 pm (UTC)I'd say you successfully portrayed them. This is what I'd expect of members of a race that not only have been born away from their home planet, but into slavery, which would mean a suppression of their customs and home culture.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-13 01:39 am (UTC)I really like your Cas icon, BTW!
no subject
Date: 2011-05-13 10:30 am (UTC)re: icon; thanks I love it too! Can't remember where I found it, even though I did put the creator's name in its info. meh.